The Coward’s Tale

by Vanessa Gebbie

  And they bring him up, this boy. They bring him up into the light just after the body of Mr Thomas Edwards my grandfather. The boy comes out of the cage, held by the shoulders, and out into the light – he staggers and looks round at the crowd as though he has never seen people before – sniffing at the air like an animal.

  There is a man comes forward then, who has been charged with making a list of the men who come up alive. “What is your name?”

  And the boy says nothing, just shakes his head. He is asked more times. “What is your name?” But the boy is looking round as if he is in a place he does not know. And his head is filled with horrors. Not only the collapse of the mountain over Kindly Light, the fire, the afterdamp – but the things that happened before, just before, signs he should have known, listened to. And the words of his own da a few days back only, “I will not have a coward for a son.”

  So the boy stands up as straight as he can in those boots that are still too big – and he says the thing that a man would say. The words that will hang round his neck for a lifetime. With the women listening, the men listening, what children there are listening, the mine man listening, his da’s friends listening, he turns to the name-taker, “My name is Ianto Jenkins. I am a coward.”

  And as if that is not enough, he says for all to hear, “It is my fault.” ’

  Peter Edwards stops and shakes his head. There is not a sound then. Even the traffic in the High Street seems to have stopped. There are no buses. No voices. No dogs to bark. Not even the breeze. Peter pushes the coal into his pocket and looks down at the old beggar Ianto Jenkins there on the steps, looking somewhere past Peter’s shoulder, into the air. And Peter says nothing.

  One of the women listening by the bus stop, and missing her bus twice now, asks, ‘Is that right? Is that how it was?’

  Peter will turn away then, not to look at the face of Ianto Jenkins as the beggar gets up slowly from the step, ‘That is how it was. And they asked why I was here at all, after.’ And he starts down the High Street towards his bench, the chapel porch, but Laddy Merridew calls him back.

  ‘Mr Jenkins?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I don’t care what anyone says. Kindly Light wasn’t your fault.’

  Ianto Jenkins sighs. ‘I am glad of that, Maggot. But in the end, who is to say? Not the men who went down in the cage with me that day . . .’ and he takes a deep breath. His voice is quiet now, and the listeners move closer to catch what he says.

  ‘I can still hear them, as the gates are shutting, Maggot. Geraint Jones and Benjie Lewis talking loudest, both going to be fathers for the first time. Geraint Jones with only a couple of months to go, “Won’t be out for a drink, Saturday, only water . . .” and Benjie Lewis, his first child due a little later – “Saving, we are, Susannah and me . . .” Billy Price laughing, “ ’On’t last long, lads. A couple of sleepless nights and you’ll be back drowning your sorrows with the best . . .” and the newest collier apart from me, Gareth Brightwell, dropping his things on the floor, and William Little bending, handing them back, “Here, not to worry . . .” then the bell sounding and before I know it, there is lightness below me, and dead Mr Ernest Ellis’s boots fall away with the world, and me with them, down and away into the pit. The cage dropping fast and my stomach left up top, the dark closing round us like a fist and the wind flying past my face, the earth breathing out. The cage stopping all sudden, hanging, bouncing, and the voice of Thomas Edwards coming to me loud in the darkness, “Playing with the emergency brakes, don’t you worry,” and we are bobbing up and down in the shaft, wild as anything, everyone holding on to whatever they can and then the final drop fast to pit bottom, the sudden slowing, my stomach left up there again. The gates rattling open, and Eddie Bartholomew who’s getting married at the weekend out first, and the colliers shouting – “Want a loan of the instruction book, Eddie? Want a lesson, Eddie?” And the language getting stronger and Thomas Edwards grinning across at me, “You shut your ears, young Ianto . . .” and another collier, a man called Thaddeus Evans who I don’t know really, saying something about his son carving feathers from wood, but that makes no sense to me. And there’s another father and son, the Harrises, saying nothing at all, all the way down, not even looking at each other, and getting out and going to work in silence. The older man not even putting out a hand when his son trips across the rails. Maybe they had an argument? And I look back on that now, and see what a dreadful thing that was, not to be talking that day.’

  He stops, takes another deep breath. ‘All gone, every one.’

  The silence that follows is broken by the Woodwork Teacher Icarus Evans, arms folded, his voice strong. ‘Thaddeus Evans. Well. Took that old secret down with him, didn’t he?’ And Mrs Prinny Ellis on her way to find where everyone may have gone for there is no queue at all down the cinema and no beggar either, and the technician has packed up and gone home for a quick tea, ‘Ernest Ellis’s boots? Is that Ernie Ellis my grandfather, went of the consumption?’

  The beggar says again, ‘All good men, every one.’ And he turns to go. But Laddy Merridew stops him, ‘No, Mr Jenkins, don’t go. It was not your fault.’

  The beggar sighs and sits down again on the statue’s steps. ‘I don’t know any more, Maggot. All I know is, I am going to work with Thomas Edwards, and he has to bend to walk, and I can just stand upright, but still knock my head now and again. I am walking along in a tunnel. I am afraid, still. I am just a boy in a dark tunnel, and the air is warm. The air is dark, and it is warm, and the smell is rank with coal and piss and the stink of the horses.

  The only lights are those from lamps. The walls glow at me. There is a draught and the light licks over a pile of mud, wet and gleaming. The rocks are alive, and in the walls I do see shapes, like they are in the flames of a good fire at home. I see my house and my mam who is under the ground, hanging a sheet to dry again and smiling, and the wind is blowing her hair over her face so I cannot quite . . . and I say “Mam?” and the word just echoes back at me, over, over. I feel Thomas Edwards move a little closer.

  I hear her voice again, Maggot, then. I do. “The earth speaks, Ianto. If we listen.” ’

  Ianto Jenkins is not looking at Laddy Merridew or the rest, now, but out over the town towards the dark rise of Black Mountain.

  ‘In those tunnels under the mountain, I heard her voice, and I saw the whole town as if from far away, above or below, the houses all through a mist, and the chapel, and the stone bench that would be my home. Everything so small, and the hills so high they were become true mountains. Clouds passing over the sun sending great black shadows over the town. And if I tried to look closely the pictures faded like water fades when the sun warms wet stone. It was dreadful, terrible. Beautiful.

  I saw these hills, all transparent. I saw the rocks living and breathing to a different rhythm, with a heartbeat like our own but sounding deep and slow. I saw the stomach of the mountain moving against the mountain’s heart and ribs, and beneath the mountain’s skin there were rivers of light that glowed under the grass. I heard the groaning of stone on stone as the mountain settled and stretched. And the drip and rush of water. I saw the fall of stone, and fire. I knew air that would not refresh but bring sleep. I saw men burning, smelt their flesh, I felt the crying of their wives, their mothers, their sons, their sons’ sons. I saw it. See?

  I saw it all, before it happened. I knew and I said nothing. Do you understand?’

  And he gets up to go, but Laddy Merridew is catching him by the sleeve, ‘But Mr Jenkins, it was not your fault. It was not . . .’ He turns to the others, ‘Tell him. You tell him.’

  For a moment no one speaks. It is as though they are all waiting for someone else to speak first. And it is Ianto Jenkins himself who does. His voice changes, becomes paler.

  ‘I saw many things, didn’t I? But there was one thing I did not see. I did not see a boy called Ifor Jenkins, my little brother who I called the Maggot, leaving our house after I had come back for the wate
r bottle and woken him, my little brother who put his head out of the bedroom window and asked “Shall we play, Ianto, after?” and I did not answer him as I was grown up now and too busy going to work in dead Mr Ellis’s boots. My little brother who I had told all about Kindly Light – how dark and beautiful it all was – who I laughed at saying he must leave important things to those who were more grown than him. I did not see him putting on the boots we had shared until a few days past, maybe thinking he would need boots where he was going . . . or taking two slices of bread and not even finding any jam. I did not see him putting the bread in his pocket. I did not see him running down our street, and waving to Mrs Pritchard who shook her head at him, “Should be at school, you should . . .” walking down the same streets I had walked not half an hour since, down to the road that runs with the river, down the valley to Kindly Light. I did not see him waiting a while on the road, playing in the bushes, eating his bread, finding a handful of water from the stream, wiping his mouth on his sleeve.

  If I had seen him, would I have taken him back home? I don’t know.

  But I did not see him. Did not see him dodging back into the bushes when a teacher from the school came walking to work. I did not see him a while later arriving at the gates of Kindly Light, where a friend of our da’s was standing, “Another young Jenkins sent out to work, is it? Whatever will that dada of yours think of next?” I did not see him wheedling at the man on the gates to let him just come in and see where his big brother worked, that he would be no trouble and do as he was told. I did not see the man on the gate telling him this was no place for a kiddie, and my Maggot stamping his boot, “I am nearly eight!” I did not see the man on the gate call over to another about to take over from the banksman, “Here, a new recruit . . . show him the shaft, just quick, will you?” And the banksman laughing and scratching his head. “Jenkins’s youngest. Well, well.” I might have seen him led past the lamp room, taken quickly to the pit head, shown the cages, the winding house, might have seen him wrinkling his nose at the smell, and I might have heard the banksman going off duty, “Can’t stay here, young’un, dangerous place. Got time to walk down to another shaft then?” and Maggot chattering, half-running behind, questions questions all the way as they walked through Kindly Light all the way to the ventilation shaft, to let Maggot see that, with its high walls round, and maybe it is when I am by the pillars below, and think I hear him laughing, saying my name, “Shall we play after, Ianto?” – maybe I do hear him after all? I do know that when the mountain fell, and there was the explosion, it happened back there. Between the fall and the ventilation shaft. Went up that shaft, they said, ripping the roofs from two buildings up top. And it left the shaft almost untouched – just the blast rushing up and the thing escaping from under the mountain. The roofs taken off, and that was all, apart from two walls crashing down, where the mortar could not hold the big old stones. A wall where a boy had run for safety, frightened by the noise, a little lad with red hair, a boy called Ifor Jenkins, my Maggot, who a moment before was asking his old questions of a banksman who by rights should have been on his way home. A banksman who never went home at all. And the boy, my brother the Maggot, found after, when someone remembered the younger Jenkins boy came visiting. Dead beneath the stones.’

  And then there are questions from all directions, but the beggar does not reply. He is walking slowly away under the streetlights and this time, Laddy lets him go.

  The voices start: ‘Terrible. Terrible to lose a brother like that.’

  ‘A boy himself, that Ianto Jenkins.’

  ‘So, his fault, was it?’

  ‘He said so, himself.’

  ‘But he was just a boy. How could it be his fault?’

  And Laddy Merridew, picking up his gran’s basket, ‘It was not Mr Jenkins’s fault. But he thinks it was. He’s always thought it was.’

  And Peter Edwards, still holding the piece of coal, ‘It all comes down to a forgotten water bottle, and bad luck after for the boy, maybe.’

  ‘Bad luck all right, living in that old porch since I don’t know when . . .’

  ‘And when’s that?’

  ‘But the other things, the birds? The noises?’

  Peter Edwards pushes the coal into his pocket. ‘They were there to be seen and heard by everyone, not just a new lad.’

  Factual Philips nods. ‘Right enough. And there were inspections, and more inspections. Got all the records in the Reference section, not to be taken away. It would have happened anyway.’

  ‘Happened anyway?’

  ‘Divine Intervention, was it, then?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘No it isn’t. Intervention maybe, nothing divine about it.’

  And there is argument and counter-argument as there always is, stopped only by the bus arriving, ready for those who were meaning to go up the hill a while ago. Some of the arguers get on the bus with their bags, their questions, and their talk about it all being old stories, and there’s no logic around these days, not in this town, and that’s a fact.

  The lads propping up the library wall have gone now, and slowly, the rest of the crowd thins, then disappears leaving just the boy, Laddy Merridew, and Peter Edwards. Laddy stands there holding his basket, and Peter sits for a while on the step of the town statue, flicking the little lump of coal over and over in his fingers. Laddy breaks the silence. ‘Please, will you tell Mr Jenkins it was not his fault?’

  ‘I will indeed. Tomorrow, now.’

  ‘And will you tell him he is not a coward?’

  ‘I will. Mind you, I can’t stop him thinking that.’

  ‘We can try though,’ and Laddy wanders away towards Ebenezer.

  Peter looks up at the Kindly Light statue, the shadows of its face deeper in the streetlights. He thinks of a father who beat a boy for not knowing his letters, and a boy who grew thinking all written words were bad and stories too. He leans back and holds up the lump of coal. When he does, and when the flicker of the streetlight catches the fingers that have just been playing with the coal and were black as anything, he sees they are now as white as a lady’s, clean as those of a scrubbed child.

  And others, those ordinary men whose stories were told by the beggar over and over, who have often wondered why and whose business was it of his anyway . . . as they go off home they may walk a little slower for the thoughts in their heads weigh them down – and they may not go to bed straight away for they have more thinking to do when they get there. And Sarah Price, Eunice Harris, Edith Little and Nancy Philips will just have to go up first and warm the beds.

  There is not just thinking to do but remembering as well. The remembering of snips of conversation from years back, from when the ordinary men were boys, or from further back, stories recounted by parents and aunts and uncles over cups of tea and plates of lardy cake while the boys listened. All leading somehow back to one September day a long time ago, and an accident down a pit. Words a man will forget when he grows, but which the boy inside never does:

  ‘Only when I see his body will I know he is gone . . .’

  ‘My da is a postman, yours is a thief . . .’

  ‘Now that’s how to deal with loss – walk right across a country in a straight line . . .’

  Or a challenge set and never completed: ‘Make me a feather from wood that behaves in the air like a real feather – only then are you a real carpenter.’

  And more. Some will make plans to go and see the beggar Ianto Jenkins tomorrow, to tell him how things are now. And others will not, believing the beggar may know how things are, anyway.

  At Ebenezer Chapel

  Ianto Passchendaele Jenkins walked slowly down to the chapel porch last night and went straight to his bench. He did nothing for a while, just watched the late cinema queue, and no one asked him any questions. He did not see the boy Laddy Merridew hanging back in the doorway of the Savings Bank waiting to see if he was all right, relaxing when he saw Ianto find a sandwich tucked into his kit bag. Watching
and waiting for Ianto to start eating, but he did not. The beggar sat there, the still-wrapped sandwich forgotten in his hand, staring at nothing.

  Laddy Merridew came up the steps in the end and sat on the stone bench next to the beggar. He did not say much, for there was nothing much to say, but he took the sandwich from Ianto’s hand and put it back in the kit bag.

  ‘Mr Jenkins, can I say something?’

  ‘You just did, Maggot.’

  ‘I am sorry about your brother, the real Maggot.’

  The beggar just nodded.

  ‘And Mr Edwards says it was not your fault. He is coming down to tell you, tomorrow. Mr Philips said he has records in the library, about inspections and things like that. It was not your fault.’

  Ianto Jenkins looked up then, but said nothing.

  The last of the cinema queue disappeared into the cinema for the last showing, and some minutes later a few latecomers arrived, ‘Missed the opening, mun. No point . . .’

  ‘Oh well.’

  The latecomers brightened, went to come up into the porch, ‘Old Ianto Jenkins’ll give us a story . . .’ but the boy stopped them. ‘Not just now.’

  And much later, when the film was done, and everyone had gone, when Mrs Prinny Ellis had put the padlock on the cinema doors and gone, herself, ‘Another day tomorrow . . .’ the boy left the beggar sitting in the chapel porch, alone.

  Ianto Passchendaele Jenkins looked round at his home. At the walls of the porch, square grey stones piled exactly, glued with mortar made from more stones, ground small. At the beams where pigeons roost. At the slates hanging on their nails. At the great grey doors of the chapel, one wedged ajar. At the bench that served him as bed, as chair, as table, closet, platform and pulpit. At his kit bag pushed beneath the bench, packed and ready to move on out every day for as long as he could remember. At the chipped white china mug holding the dregs of his last coffee, finished before he went up the High Street earlier this evening to find Peter Edwards.