by Tom Bullough
Mervyn arrived with astonishing speed. In the instant that the yard reappeared he sent both fists into Oliver’s ribcage so that he stumbled, winded, back towards the pond. He followed at a charge, drowning the dogs with a yawl of his own, and while Oliver parried his next with his bicep, the shock of pain that exploded in his elbow made his left arm no better than a shield. With his right he struck out twice, missing with the first but slowing the attack with a blow to his ear that shuddered through the bones to his shoulder. Panting, wheezing, he tried to get the open ground behind him, backing from the sallies through the hoofmarks of the slaughtered sheep—perhaps, in the depths, the hoofmarks of Idris’s horse. Thirty-one years he had been waiting for this moment. As Mervyn came again with the light on his head, his face behind his great, balled hands, Oliver remembered something of his training, his movement, stepped as he would have and replied with a jab to his uncovered cheek and another to the beast-like muscles of his neck.
The man, Oliver realized abruptly, was crying. He held his place in the ruts and the leaves—the wildness roaring, possessing his body—but he missed his chance to swing again, while his neighbour hesitated and then fell back, turning a half-circle, unfurling his fingers to cover his eyes. He limped to the silage and leant against the plastic, his shoulders lurching in his ragged tweed jacket, a prill of blood on the side of his head, which joined and parted with the angles of his skull.
“You win,” he muttered, when he could speak.
Oliver said nothing.
“You win. I in’t got the fight left in me no more.”
He looked old, like an old man. The cracks round his eyebrows seemed so deep-cut that their entire structure might just have collapsed. As the two of them stood, the yard fell once more back into darkness—a single lamp high up at the Welfrey, the animal pyres reflected in the clouds—so Oliver waved in the direction of the sensor, holding his left arm as if in a sling, the whisky beginning to gag in his throat.
“I was sorry about old Idris,” Mervyn continued. He looked at his knuckles. “Good to me, he was, when I was a little lad—afore you come along, like. And the man was my uncle. It was a damn shame. The boss was raw cut up about it, he was. We was all of us cut up about it, down at Cwmpiban.”
“Aye,” said Oliver.
“So.” He lifted his face, which was already tightening with the bruising on his scalp. Their eyes met briefly. “You can buy back your fields. I shall be selling them once I has my compensation. They is no use to me no more. I loved my beasts. They was all as kept me going. The kids is gone these ten year now, and they in’t coming back, and I cannot blame them. It is just me and old Ruth now, and we is neither of us aiming to start over. So, there you are, boy, you got the Funnon, same as you wanted—ready for your restock…Much good may she do you. You and your mother and your dogs.”
—
MARTIN WATCHED FROM his window as Mervyn departed, leaving the fringes of the dazzling light to vanish in the shadows of the lane. Oliver remained among the balding willows, his eyes on the pond, cigarette smoke around his big, bowed head, and when, with the light, he vanished himself, Martin took another sip of his homemade cider and gave a little more wick to the lamp on his desk. S, or Saile: four straight lines to the right of the corner, the name meaning willow—presumably from salix. A, or Ailm: one short notch through the corner itself, the name, perhaps, meaning pine. He knew, of course, that the Ogham on the stone would read much the same as the Latin, but he could hardly pass his findings to his former colleagues without his own interpretation. Besides, with each faint letter he told from his tracing, which lay across the pitted table, one end furling almost to the flagstones, he felt a moment of complete satisfaction—like climbing into a well-aired bed.
The room was warm, sweet-smelling from the levels of steam that lay beneath the stamps on the ceiling. At the Welfrey, whenever possible, Martin tried to live on a traditional diet. In the pot on the chain was a bubbling mash of sliced crab apples and guelder-rose berries, which, his Radnorshire cookbook informed him, would make for a reasonable preserve. His bread he baked weekly in the iron-doored oven. His wimberry tart had been particularly tasty, and his flummery a good deal less revolting than the “sub-gelatinous mass” that the book described.
“SAGRAGNI MAQI CUNOGENI,” he read aloud, and the dog looked up from the rug before the fire.
Sagranus. Sagragnus. Again Martin turned to the draughty little window, the dark, empty fields, the few lights buried in the valley, the dimly showing hilltops and the sparks of the animal pyres on Mynydd Epynt. He wondered how different the place would have looked to that eminent warrior as he drank from the ffynnon or praised his new God from the old paved road that led over to Painscastle. Then too there would have been pasture by the Edw; there would have been grazing on Cefn Wylfre and the sinuous back of Llanbedr Hill; there would have been the same yew trees in the rounded llan, and perhaps an ascetic in a rude little cell with, for neighbours, some forebears of Oliver and Mervyn, battling it out over a couple of acres to bolster their miniature kingdoms.
—
DURING THE YEARS that he had been away, Cefin had found himself longing for the seasons almost as much as he had longed for these hills. A month or two of feverish rain was no compensation for days that barely altered in length, a climate which knew only shades of heat. One morning, on his twenty-fourth birthday, he had woken in his flat off Avenida Julius Nyerere to a wind on the roof that sounded so much like the winter winds at the Funnon that he could not bear to open his eyes and see his naked body, and the body of Lizha, stretched, sweat-bright, inside the mosquito net.
With the vacuum cleaner weighing from his hand, he leant towards the slit in the gable wall, holding the sill against the rain that howled up the valley and broke on his face, numbing his ears and filling his mouth until his lips were flapping. There had been gales more violent in Cabo Delgado—to have gone outside in some of them would have been almost suicidal—but nothing so raw, so precise as this.
A few more rungs up the aluminium ladder and Cefin came to the eaves of the barn, where he restored his hat to his close-cropped head and, lifting the nozzle, sucked up all the cobwebs he could reach in a clatter of mortar and bits of shale. As a job, of course, it was completely pointless—the spiders were as likely to be carrying the foot-and-mouth virus as the stone itself—but fifteen pounds an hour with neither rent nor supervision was work indeed, even by the standards of the NGOs. He did not hurry as he cleaned the apex of the roof and climbed back down into the empty hayloft, which could not have seen daylight since the year it was built.
“Oh, what shall I do to be saved,” he read, “from the sorrows that burden my soul?”
“What’s that, love?” asked his grandmother.
“Just something written here, Nana.”
“Oh. Yes.”
Cefin turned to the chin-high wall and the old woman perched on the granary steps, her coat round her ears and her wellies on the pitching he had washed that morning which still shone dully in the light from the door. She was so small, Etty—no more than bone and sinew and cardigans. It was a wonder she had ever given birth to his father. It was a wonder she continued to battle round this farm—her green eyes peering past red-scribbled lids, her jaw a ledge among the creases of her cheeks and her neck.
The rich fumes of tarmac drifted from the yard.
“Are you not cold, Nana?” he asked.
“Not too bad.” She smiled.
“Do you want me to get you a cup of tea?”
“Perhaps in a bit. Tell me a story, how about that?”
“What about?”
“I don’t know. Something you’ve been up to.”
“Do you know?” said Cefin. He shuffled the ladder to the left. “Dad has still not asked me anything since I got back. Not one single thing.”
His grandmother said nothing.
So he told her about visiting the Querimba Islands—how the palm heads rose from the deep blue water
and seemed at first to be suspended in the air, how the tide filled channels through the jungles of the mangroves to beaches carved by outrigger canoes. He described the dhows with their lateen sails, the birds, the fish and the coconut plantations, and how, for all of this plenty, the children were often as naked as babies, with swollen bellies and marimba ribs. He described the music, since she did like her music—the timbila, xitende, jazz and marrabenta—and he stopped only when the paving machine fell silent outside and one of the contractors called them by name.
—
OLIVER THREW HIS full weight forwards and crept away from the wind-stripped sycamores with Idris’s stone forced flat to his side—its foot cutting open the path behind him, like a plough. The three fingers burned on his one good hand. Every movement he made was a bid to navigate some once-dislocated joint, some once-ruptured tendon, some ancient, indefinable ache. Even at this little altitude the rain was half-frozen; it stung his cheeks and narrowed his eyes. Around him the headstones stood dark above the mud of the churchyard. Beneath him, in the yard, the men were watching from their brooms and tampers. The stable was empty. The beast-house was empty. The shed was so clean, so absolutely spotless that he would gladly have eaten his dinner off the floor, and still the government woman with her long, probing fingernails had insisted that he wash it all again.
“Olly!” called his mother.
“Dad…” called his son.
Through the smoke and steam he saw a blue-green car join the vehicles by the pit for the run-off.
“Olly, for God’s sake, will you put that thing down?”
Oliver wished with all of his being that Cefin had not come back—not into this—with his easy new confidence, Naomi in his face and the endless tales of his adventures, which fell upon him like the pummelling hail. He rallied his strength and advanced again, but even at his mother’s pace the two of them continued to approach. His son shoved his boot like a chock beneath the stone and, with groans and gasps, picked up the foot so its angle rose and came level with the slope. Oliver’s feet were slipping; his shoulder felt as if it would at any moment be torn from its socket; and now, on top of everything else, he could not allow the stone to drop. It was the same with the farm. Not that the boy would ever make a farmer—he had known that since Cefin was thirteen years old—but without him here he might have lived with the shame of it. He could have let the whole place go to hell.
“Man up, lad,” he growled. “When I was your age I could hoist this bastard over my head!”
“And you did and all, I doubt,” said Cefin, through his teeth, “and look at the bloody state of you!”
“You’ll be getting no sympathy from me,” said Etty. “Neither of you. I’m telling you now.”
There was just one slot between the flagstones on the top of the tump that looked wide enough to receive the stone. It was a few inches short of where the altar had stood, among rain-flattened leaves and foot-worn memorials: that one from 1788, that one from forty years before. Stepping over the old foundations, Oliver arrived in the absent church and made his way along the pale line of the aisle. Setting down his end, clenching his hands, Cefin hurried to put his shoulder by his own. It baffled Oliver how this mimmockin boy could have done so much and travelled so far when he, with all of his strength and scale, had only so much as seen the sea twice, and that as a glint through the trees round a motorway. The ice was running down Cefin’s glasses. His waterproofs fell from his spindling limbs. He muttered and grimaced, but he held his corner while his grandmother hovered in her dribbling anorak and watched the two of them shove the foot of the stone across the flagstones, into the hole, pause a moment to gather themselves and then, by increments, push it upright.
—
“IS SHE ALL right?” asked Ada, when Cefin reappeared.
“Cold.” He shrugged. “She’ll be all right once she’s had a lie down.”
“They’re…work clothes,” she explained. She plucked at a cable of her roll-neck sweater. “I got away early. I heard you were back. Thought I’d come and say hello.”
“You look very smart.”
“You look like you’ve been on bloody hunger strike.”
“Honest to God,” said Cefin, and dropped into a chair. “There was one time, a month or two back, when I thought I’d imagined supermarkets. I just thought, no. There’s a Tesco near my mam’s house, you know, so I went in there the other day, just to check. Hell, it was like a palace! I don’t know I’ve ever seen anything so amazing.”
“They’re after staff in the Spar in Builth. I just saw the advert.”
“Well…Perhaps not that amazing.”
The grandfather clock read half past four, but already it was the edge of night. Flicking on the light, Ada crossed the flagstones in her thick woollen tights to rise a slice of bread for the scraggy old raven whistling and picking at her earring. She watched Cefin dab at his bleeding fingers, wincing as he used the antiseptic. His sun-bleached T-shirt hung from his chest, a dark vee tapering from his colourful necklace. He had given up on his thinning hair and shorn his head back down to the scalp, which was no less brown than his face. He worked with weary, preoccupied movements, his blue eyes pinched behind crooked glasses.
“So,” she said, “they’ve got you cleaning the barn, then, have they?”
“Cleaning bloody everything.” He looked up briefly. “Everyone’s gone mad round here. This one contractor, he told me I was to hoover the granary. I told him I didn’t think the wiring was up to it, and anyway we’ve only got a broom, so off he goes and the next thing I know the whole barn’s rewired and he’s waving a brand-new vacuum cleaner under my nose. A nice one too. One of them ones with a face.”
“Henry.”
“Yeah, except this one’s pink. Hetty, it’s called. I suppose he figured Nana would prefer it.”
“She’s so pleased you’re back.” Ada lowered her voice.
Cefin took a long, slow breath.
“And your dad is…I’ve come by to see them once in a while, you know. You’re all they bloody talked about. He missed you. He did. Even if he might have a funny way of showing it.”
“Yeah,” he said. “He has that.”
The machines in the yard were dying with the light. Through the hush of the rain and the popping of the kettle Ada could hear the contractors talking, abusing the weather, discussing plans for the coming weekend. She dropped the teabags into the cups and, when she looked, Cefin was leaning beside her on the Rayburn, lighting a butt that smelt like a joint, which he drew on twice and then passed. He was not tall, Cefin, not like Oliver—only a few inches taller than herself. His face was patterned with the shadows of his glasses and the shadow that parted his forehead. As he fiddled with his lighter and she smoked herself, she felt an urge to embrace him, which caught her so suddenly that she flinched and Maureen flapped on her shoulder.
“Are you lot all right, are you?” he asked.
“Pretty…pretty middling, to be honest with you, Cefin. It’s hard enough on us all just now. You cannot move anything. You cannot sell anything. I do try to get back here on the weekends but, you know, we’ve got Philip, and Dad, and Mam. I don’t know…I suppose I feel I’ve got to do something.”
“What, though? That’s the thing.”
Glancing sideways—and it was worse still now that Ada had removed her tall-heeled boots—the first thing Cefin saw was the bloom of her breasts in that improbable sweater, which exposed every curve of her slight, soft belly and the swelling tops of her hips. He looked away quickly to the fading window in its splintering frame, and blew a storm across his pale brown tea. There were letters and newspapers piled on the sideboard. There were cobwebs drooping in the half-lit corners. One of the taps was dripping steadily; it had almost filled the washing-up bowl. He had expected this sort of thing, of course. His grandmother was nearly eighty years old. He had known that the animals were going to be dead, and had heard his father’s voice on the phone, and the reality was no more b
earable for that. Thank God, he thought, that Ada was here. Even in this extraordinary outfit, with her office smell and expensive hair, she did make him feel like he was sane, after all. Had they been in Africa he might just have said so, but here he could never have been so direct, and besides there were boots on the flagstones in the hall, so instead he gave her a nudge with his elbow and leant to let Maureen hop between their shoulders.
Cefin only glanced at his father as he hobbled through the door and stopped at the table—blocking the light in its conical shade like a piece of the night come inside. It was terrible to see him like this. It must have been days since he had last dyed his hair; a half-inch of grey shone all over his head. His breath was a croak in the depths of his throat. Never in his life had Cefin known him not at least try to impress a young woman—even Ada should have had him preening—and he had not so much as removed his coat, which dribbled from the hem and the cuffs held tight to his belly.
Oliver took his glasses from a pocket of his jacket and sat them painfully over his nose. He steadied himself on the back of a chair, then turned towards the larder door.
“Well, boy,” he said, finally. He stood looking down at his mother’s map, its obsolete place names and forest of flags. “Are you going to tell me about all this or not?”
OLIVER DID NOT see the owl return. He looked at the oak tree only as its bare twigs trembled and a few small birds escaped into the sunlight: a siskin, a couple of piefinches. He peered through his new pair of gold-framed sunglasses at the box he had strapped beneath the snow-capped branch, but the owl was keeping her presence to herself so he turned back to Cefin, who was standing beside him, still watching for movement, his fertilizer bags tucked under his arm. They continued to climb through the tracks of animals: the racks of sheep, the arrows of a pheasant, the four, symmetrical toes of a fox. Near the fence for the Far Top Field a mesh of paths revealed every rabbit burrow and daytime squat on the fringes of Turley Wood. He was not such a sly one, the old rabbit. Not like the hare, which Oliver had observed over the years, scouting his territory at a cautious lope before, abruptly, he launched himself sideways—reaching his door in a series of explosions that might have been quite unrelated.