On the Black Hill
Page 26
The morning of the 15th of November was bright and freezing hard. There was an inch of ice on the drinking-troughs. On the far side of the valley, twenty bullocks were waiting for their fodder.
After breakfast, Theo helped Lewis hitch the link-box to the International Harvester, and forked some hay-bales on to it. The tractor was slow to start. Lewis was wearing a blue knitted muffler. Another chill had gone to his inner ear, and he had complained of feeling giddy. Theo waved as the tractor lurched down the yard. Then he went indoors and chatted to Benjamin in the back-kitchen.
Benjamin had rolled up his shirtsleeves and was scouring egg-yolk from the plates. In the stone sink, rings of bacon fat had floated to the surface. He was very excited about Kevin’s baby boy.
‘Aye,’ he smiled. ‘Him be a perky little fellow.’
He squeezed out the dish-mop and dried his hands. A surge of pain shot through his chest. He fell to the floor.
‘It be Lewis,’ he croaked, as Theo helped him to a chair.
Theo rushed outside and looked across the valley at the frost-covered field. The oaks made long blue shadows in the slanting sunlight. Fieldfares were calling from the root crops. A pair of duck flew down the brook, and a vapour trail bisected the sky. He could not hear the noise of the tractor.
He could see the hay strewn over the field; but the bullocks had scattered, although one or two were beginning to edge back, in the direction of the hay.
He saw a muddy streak running vertically downhill along the line of the hedge. Below it was something red and black. It was the tractor lying on its side.
Benjamin had come out through the porch, hatless and shaking. ‘Wait there!’ said Theo, quietly, and ran.
Benjamin followed, limping down the path to the dingle. The tractor had slipped out of gear, and rolled. He heard Theo running on ahead. He heard the splash of water and, through the trees, he heard the seagulls shrieking.
The leaves had fallen from the birches along the brook. Points of frost sparkled on the purple twigs. The grass was stiff, and the water moved easily over the flat brown stones. He stood on the bank, unable to move.
Theo was walking towards him, slowly through the shining birch-trunks. ‘You shouldn’t see him,’ he said. Then he folded his arms around the old man’s shoulders, and held him.
50
BY THE GATE into Maesyfelin graveyard there is an old yew-tree whose writhing roots have set the paving slabs askew. Rows of headstones flank the path, some carved with classical lettering, some with gothic, and all of them furred with lichen. The stone is soft, and on those that face the prevailing westerlies, the letters have almost worn away. Soon, no one will read the names of the dead and the tombs themselves will crumble into the soil.
By contrast, the more recent tombs have been cut from stone as hard as the stones of the Pharaohs. Their surfaces are polished by machine. The flowers placed upon them are plastic, and their surrounds are not of gravel, but green glass chips. The newest tomb is a block of shiny black granite, one half with an inscription, the other left blank.
Now and then, a tourist who happens to stray behind the Chapel will see, seated on the edge of the slab, an old hill farmer, in corduroys and gaiters, gazing at his reflection while the clouds pass by above.
Benjamin was so confused and helpless after the accident that he could hardly even button his shirt-front. For fear of upsetting him further, he was forbidden to go near the cemetery, and when Kevin moved his wife and baby into The Vision, he would stare straight through them as if they were strangers.
Last May, Eileen began to whisper that the uncle was ‘going ga-ga’ and that the proper place for him was the old people’s home.
He had watched her sell the furniture piece by piece.
She sold the piano to pay for a washing machine, the four-poster for a new bedroom suite. She redecorated the kitchen in yellow, shoved the family photos into the attic, and replaced them with a picture of Princess Anne on a show-jumper. Most of Mary’s linen went to a bring-and-buy sale. The Staffordshire spaniels vanished, then the grandfather clock; and the old iron range lay rusting in the farmyard among the docks and nettles.
One day last August, Benjamin walked from the house and, when he failed to return at nightfall, Kevin had to organize a search.
It was a warm night. They found him next morning, sitting on the tomb and calmly picking his teeth with a grass-stem.
Since then, Maesyfelin has become Benjamin’s second home – perhaps his only home. He seems to be quite happy as long as he can spend an hour in the graveyard each day. Some afternoons, Nancy Bickerton sends her car to fetch him over for tea.
Theo has traded his South African passport for a British one, has sold his meadow, and gone off to India where he hopes to climb in the Himalayas.
No decision has been reached about The Rock: so Meg lives on there, alone.
Rosie Fffield, too, continues to live in her cottage. Because she is crippled with arthritis, her rooms have become very squalid, but when the District Health Officer suggested she move to an almshouse, she snapped, ‘You’ll have to drag me by the feet.’
For her eighty-second birthday her son gave her a pair of ex-Army binoculars and, at weekends, she likes to watch the hang-gliding off the summit of Bickerton’s Knob – ‘helicoptering’ as she calls it – a stream of tiny pin-men, airborne on coloured wings, swooping, soaring in the upthrust, and then spiralling like ash-keys to the ground.
Already this year she has witnessed a fatal accident.
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Published by Vintage 1998
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Copyright © Bruce Chatwin 1982
The right of Bruce Chatwin to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988
First published in Great Britain in 1982 by Jonathan Cape
The author and publisher are grateful to Faber and Faber for permission to print lines from Ezra Pound’s version of ‘Exile’s Letter’, from Selected Poems 1908–1959, 1975
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ISBN 9780099769712