On the Black Hill

by Bruce Chatwin

  Amos pulled from his pocket a copy of his lease to The Vision. The beer glass had made a wet ring on the table. He wiped it with his sleeve before spreading out the map. His fingernail came to rest on a little pink tongue marked ‘½ acre’.

  ‘There!’ he said. ‘Look!’

  In law, plainly, the patch of scrubland belonged to the Lurkenhope Estate.

  Watkins screwed up his eyes at the maze of lines, letters and numbers. The air whistled through his teeth. His whole frame shook as he scrunched up the map, and chucked it, across the room, into the grate.

  ‘Stop him!’ Amos shouted; but by the time he had rescued the singeing paper, Watkins had bolted through the door. That evening, young Jim, too, was missing.

  Next morning, after foddering, Amos changed into his Sunday suit and called on the Bickertons’ agent. The agent heard him out, resting his jowls on his fists and, occasionally, raising an eyebrow. The integrity of the Estate had been called into question: it was appropriate to act.

  Four men were sent to build a wall between the two farms, and a police constable went to Craig-y-Fedw, warning the Watkinses not to touch a stone of it.

  Every year at The Vision, the week before Christmas was set aside for ‘feathering’ ducks and geese.

  Amos wrung their necks and tied them up, one after the other, by their webs to a beam in the barn. By evening the place was like a snowstorm. Little Rebecca went about sneezing as she stuffed the down into a sack. Lewis singed the carcasses with a taper; and Benjamin showed not a trace of squeamishness when it came to drawing the guts.

  They stored the dressed birds in the dairy, which was said to be rat-proof. Amos lined the waggon with straw, and then sent everyone to bed – to be up at four in time to catch the Birmingham buyers.

  The night was cloudless and the moonlight kept Mary awake. Some time after midnight, she thought she heard an animal in the yard. She tiptoed to the window, and peered out. The larches trailed their black hair over the moon. The figure of a small boy flitted into the shadow of the cowshed. A latch grated. The dogs did not bark.

  ‘So,’ she breathed. ‘The fox.’

  She woke her husband, who put on a coat and caught Jim in the dairy with five geese already in his sack. The carthorses whinnied at the sound of the screaming.

  ‘I hope you didn’t hurt him too much,’ Mary said, as Amos climbed into bed.

  ‘Dirty thieves!’ he said, and rolled over.

  It was starting to snow again, in Rhulen, at dusk on Christmas Eve. Outside the butcher’s in Broad Street, strings of hares, turkeys and pheasants were swinging in the gusts. Snowflakes sparkled on wreaths of holly and ivy; and as the shoppers passed under the glare of the gaslights, a door would fling open, a band of brighter light fall across the pavement, and a cheerful voice call out, ‘And a Merry Christmas to you! Come in for a glass of grog!’

  A children’s choir was singing carols: the snowflakes hissed as they hit their hurricane lamp.

  ‘Look!’ Benjamin nudged his mother. ‘Mrs Watkins!’

  Aggie Watkins was walking down the street, in a hat of black ribbons and a brown plaid shawl. Under her arm she carried a basket of eggs:

  ‘Fresh eggs! Fresh eggs!’

  Mary set down her own basket and walked towards her with a serious smile:

  ‘Aggie, I am sorry about Jim, but——’

  She jerked herself back as a stream of saliva shot from the old woman’s mouth, and landed on the hem of her skirt.

  ‘Fresh eggs! Fresh eggs!’ Aggie’s raucous voice increased in volume. She hobbled round the clock and back again: ‘Fresh eggs! Fresh eggs!’ A man stopped her, but she rolled her eyes glassily at the gaslights: ‘Fresh eggs! Fresh eggs!’ And when the Hereford buyer blocked her path – ‘Come on, Mother Watkins! It’s Christmas! What’ll I give you for the basket?’ – she raised her arm in fury, as if he meant to steal her baby: ‘Fresh eggs! Fresh eggs!’ Then the snow flurries closed around her, and the night.

  ‘Poor thing,’ said Mary. She had climbed into the dog-cart and was spreading a rug over the children. ‘I’m afraid she’s a little touched.’

  16

  THREE YEARS LATER, with a big bruise over her left eye, Mary wrote to her sister in Cheltenham stating her reasons for leaving Amos Jones.

  She did not make excuses. Nor did she ask for sympathy. She simply asked for shelter till she found herself a job. Yet, as she wrote, her tears made blotches on the notepaper, and she told herself that her marriage had not been doomed; that it could have worked; that they had both been in love and loved each other still; and that all of their troubles had begun with the fire.

  Around eleven o’clock on the night of the 2nd of October 1911, Amos had put away his carving chisels and was watching his wife sew the final stitches of a sampler, when Lewis ran downstairs shouting, ‘Fire! There’s a fire!’

  Parting the curtains, they saw a red glow above the line of the cowshed roof. At the same moment, a column of sparks and flame shot upwards into the darkness.

  ‘It’s the ricks,’ said Amos, and rushed outside.

  He had two ricks on a patch of level ground between the buildings and the orchard.

  The wind blew from the east and fanned the blaze. Wisps of burning hay flew up into the smokecloud, and fell. Frightened by the glare and the crackle, the animals panicked. The bull bellowed; horses stomped in their stalls; and the pigeons, pink in the flamelight, flew round and round in erratic circles.

  Mary worked the pump-handle; and the twins carried the slopping pails to their father who was up a ladder, desperately trying to douse the thatch of the second rick. But the burning hay fell thicker and thicker, and that rick, too, was soon a crucible of flame.

  The fire was seen for miles, and by the time Dai Morgan came up with his farm-servant, the sides of both ricks had caved in.

  ‘Get out of my sight,’ Amos snarled. He also shook off Mary as she tried to take his arm.

  At dawn, a pall of grey smoke hung over the buildings, and Amos was nowhere to be seen. Stifled by the fumes, she called out fearfully, ‘Amos? Amos? Answer me! Where are you?’-and found him, black in the face and beaten, slumped in the muck, against the pigsty wall.

  ‘Do come inside,’ she said. ‘You must sleep now. There’s nothing you can do.’ He gritted his teeth and said, ‘I’ll kill him.’

  Obviously, he believed it was arson. Obviously, he believed that Watkins was the arsonist. But Mr Hudson, the constable in charge of the case, was a bland, pink-faced fellow, who did not like interfering in a neighbour’s quarrel. He suggested that the hay had been damp.

  ‘Delayed combustion, most likely,’ he said, doffing his cap and cocking his leg over his bicycle.

  ‘I’ll give him delayed combustion!’ Amos reeled indoors, tramping mud over the kitchen floor. A teacup whizzed past Mary’s head, smashed a pane of the china-cabinet and she knew that there were bad times on the way.

  His hair fell out in handfuls. His cheeks became streaked with livid veins; and the blue eyes, once friendly, sank in their sockets and peered, as if down a tunnel, at a hostile world outside.

  He never washed and seldom shaved – though that, in itself, was a relief; for when he whetted his razor, a look of such viciousness passed over his face that Mary held her breath and backed towards the door.

  In bed, he used her roughly. To stifle her groans, he rammed his hand over her mouth. The boys, in their room along the landing, could hear her struggles and clung to one another.

  He beat them for the smallest misdemeanour. He even beat them for speaking in a classy accent. They learned to rephrase their thoughts in the dialect of Radnorshire.

  He only seemed to care, now, for his daughter – a wilful, mean-eyed child whose idea of fun was to pull the legs off daddy-long-legs. She had a head of flaming hair that licked downwards. He would dandle her on his knee and croon, ‘You’re the one as loves me. Ain’t ye? Ain’t ye?’ And Rebecca, who sensed Mary’s lack of affection, would glare at h
er mother and brothers as if they were tribal enemies.

  Little by little, the war with The Rock flourished into a ritual of raid and counter-raid: to call in the law was beneath the dignity of either belligerent. Nor was there any premeditated pattern; but a flayed lamb here, a dead calf there, or a gander dangling from a tree – all served as reminders that the feud continued.

  Mary had long grown used to her husband’s rages that came and went with the seasons. She even welcomed them, like thunder, because after the thunder, their old love had the habit of returning.

  In other years, they had an unspoken pact: that the storm would pass by Easter. All through Holy Week she would watch him struggling with his demons. On Holy Saturday, they would go out walking in the woods and come back with a basket of primroses and violets to make a floral cross for the altar of Lurkenhope Church.

  After supper, she would spread the flowers on the table, and, setting aside the violets for the letters INRI, she would thread the stems of the primroses into a frame of copper wire. He would be standing behind her, caressing the nape of her neck. Then, with the final letter finished, he would lift her in his arms and carry her to bed.

  But that year – the year of ‘the fire’ – he did not go out walking. He did not eat his supper. And when, anxiously, she laid out the primroses, he attacked them, beating them as if they were flies, and crashing them to a greenish pulp.

  She gave a strangled cry and ran out into the night.

  That was the summer when the hay rotted and the sheep went unshorn.

  Amos prevented Mary from seeing the few friends she had. He hit her for putting a second pinch of tea in the pot. He forbade her to set foot in the Albion Drapery, in case she squandered money on embroidery silks. And when news came of the Reverend Tuke’s death – from pneumonia, after falling in a salmon-pool – he stopped her sending flowers to the funeral.

  ‘He was my friend,’ she said.

  ‘He was a heathen,’ he said.

  ‘I shall leave you,’ she said, but had nowhere else to go – and her other friend, Sam, was dying.

  All spring, he had complained of ‘gatherings’ down his left side, and was too weak to move from his garret. He lay under the greasy quilt, gaping at the cobwebs, or drifting off to sleep. Once when Benjamin came up with his food on a tray, he said:

  ‘I’d like my cup. Be a good lad! Run over to Rosgoch and get her to give you the cup.’

  By June, the pain of living was more than he could bear. He suffered for Mary and, in a lucid interval, tried to reason with his son.

  ‘Mind your own business,’ said Amos. ‘You stupid old fool!’

  One market day, when they were alone in the house, Sam persuaded his daughter-in-law to pay a call on Aggie Watkins:

  ‘Tell her goodbye from me! She’s a good old girl. A nice tidy person as never meant no harm.’

  Mary slipped on a pair of galoshes and squelched her way across the boggy pasture. The wind moved over the field. The grassheads flashed like shoals of minnows, and there were purple orchids and heads of red sorrel. A pair of plovers flew off, screaming, and the mother alighted by some reeds and stretched her ‘broken’ wing. Mary said a silent prayer as she untied the gate into Craig-y-Fedw.

  The dogs howled and Aggie Watkins came to the door. Her face registered no emotion, and no expression. Bending forward, she unleashed a black mongrel tied up beside the water-butt.

  ‘Git,’ she said.

  The dog crouched and bared its gums but, when Mary turned for the gate, it bounded forward and sank its teeth into her hand.

  Amos saw the bandage and guessed the cause. He shrugged and said, ‘Serves you right!’

  By Sunday the wound had turned septic. On Monday she complained of a swollen gland in her armpit. Grudgingly, he offered to drive her to the evening surgery – along with little Rebecca, who had a sore throat.

  The twins came back from school to find their father greasing the hubs of the trap. Mary, pale but smiling, was sitting in the kitchen with her arm in a sling.

  ‘We’ve been waiting for you,’ she said. ‘Don’t worry. Do your homework and keep an eye on Grandpa.’

  By sunset, the twins were speechless with grief, and Old Sam had been two hours dead.

  At five in the afternoon, the boys were scribbling their sums at the kitchen table when a creak on the landing made them stop. Their grandfather was groping his way down the stairs.

  ‘Sshh!’ said Benjamin, tugging his brother by the sleeve.

  ‘He should be in bed,’ Lewis said.

  ‘Sshh!’ he repeated, and dragged him into the back kitchen. The old man hobbled across the kitchen and went outside. There was a high windy sky, and the mares’-tails seemed to dance with the larches. He was wearing his wedding-best – a frock coat and trousers, and shiny patent leather pumps. A red handkerchief, knotted round his neck, made him young again – and he carried the fiddle and bow.

  The twins peeped round the curtains.

  ‘He’s got to go back to bed,’ Lewis whispered.

  ‘Quiet!’ hissed Benjamin. ‘He’s going to play.’

  A harsh croak burst from the ancient instrument. But the second note was sweeter, and the successive notes were sweeter still. His head was up. His chin stuck truculently out over the sound-box; and his feet shuffled over the flagstones in perfect time.

  Then he coughed and the music stopped. One tread at a time, he heaved himself up the stairs. He coughed again, and again, and after that there was silence.

  The boys found him stretched out on the quilt with his hands folded over the fiddle. His face, drained of colour, wore a look of amused condescension. A bumble-bee, trapped inside the window, was buzzing and bouncing against the pane.

  ‘Don’t cry, my darlings!’ Mary stretched her good arm around them as they blubbed out the news. ‘Please don’t cry. He had to die some time. And it was a wonderful way to die.’

  Amos spared no expense on the funeral and ordered a brass-bound coffin from Lloyd’s of Presteigne.

  The hearse was drawn by a pair of glistening black horses and, on all four corners of the roof, there were black urns full of yellow roses. The mourners walked behind, picking their steps through the puddles and cart-ruts. Mary wore a collar of jet droplets that she had inherited from an aunt.

  Mr Earnshaw had sent a wreath of arums to lay on the lid of the coffin. But when the pall-bearers set it down in the chancel, there were mounds of other wreaths to heap around it.

  Most of these were sent by people who were strangers to Mary, but who certainly knew Old Sam. She hardly recognized a soul. She looked round the church, wondering who, in Heaven’s name, were all those old biddies snivelling into their handkerchiefs. Surely, she thought, he can’t have had that many flames?

  Amos stood Rebecca on the pew so she could see what was going on.

  ‘“Death be not proud …”’ The new vicar began his address; and though the words were beautiful, though the vicar’s voice was resonant and pleasant, Mary’s mind kept wandering to the two boys sitting beside her.

  How tall they’d grown! They’ll soon have to shave, she thought. But how thin and tired they were! How tiring it was to come home from school, and then be put to work on the farm! And how awkward they looked in those threadbare suits! If only she had money, she’d buy them nice new suits! And boots! It was so unfair to make them go about in boots two sizes too small! Unfair, too, not to let them go again to the seaside! They’d been so well and happy last summer. And there now, Benjamin coughing again! She must knit him another muffler for the winter, but where would she get the wool?

  ‘“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust …”’ The clods thumped on to the coffin-lid. She handed the sexton a sovereign and walked away with Amos to the lych-gate, where they stood and bade farewell to the mourners.

  ‘Thank you for coming,’ she said. ‘Thank you … No. He died quite peacefully … It was a mercy … Yes, Mrs Williams, the Lord be praised! No. We shan’t be coming this year.
So much to do …’ – nodding, sighing, smiling, and shaking hands with all these kind commiserating people, one after the other till her fingers ached.

  And afterwards, at home, when she had taken out her hatpins and her hat lay like a slug on the kitchen table, she turned to Amos with a look of heartfelt longing, but he turned his back and sneered, ‘I suppose you never had a father of your own.’

  17

  THAT OCTOBER, A new visitor made his appearance at The Vision.

  Mr Owen Gomer Davies was a Congregational Minister who had recently removed from Bala to Rhulen and had taken charge of the Chapel at Maesyfelin. He lived with his sister, at Number 3, Jubilee Terrace, and had a bird-bath in his garden, and a yucca.

  He was a bulky man, with unpleasantly white skin, a roll of fat round his collar, and facial features set in the form of a Greek cross. His sharp mouth grew even sharper if he happened to smile. His handshake was frigid, and he had a melodious singing voice.

  One of his first acts, on coming into the county, had been to quarrel with Tom Watkins over the price of a coffin. That alone was enough to recommend him to Amos – though to Mary he was a grotesque.

  His views on the Bible were childlike. The doctrine of Transubstantiation was far too abstruse for his literal mind; and from the sanctimonious gesture with which he dropped a saccharin tablet into his teacup, she suspected him of a weakness for sticky cakes.

  One teatime, he solemnly set his fists on the table and announced that Hell was ‘hotter than Egylypt or Jamaico!’ – and Mary, who had hardly smiled all week, had to cover her face with a napkin.

  She provoked him by wearing an uncommon amount of jewellery. ‘Ah!’ he said. ‘The sin of Jezebel!’

  He made a point of wincing whenever she opened her mouth, as if her English accent alone condemned her to Eternal Damnation. He seemed intent on weaning away her husband – and Amos was easily led.

  The feud with Watkins had preyed on his mind. He had called on God for guidance. Here, at last, a man of God was willing to take his side. He read, with furious concentration, the mounds of pamphlets that the preacher deposited on the tea-table. He left the Church of England, and took the twins away from school. He made Benjamin sleep apart from his brother, in the hay-loft; and when he caught the boy sneaking up the ladder with the ship-in-the-bottle, he confiscated it.