The Inheritance of Solomon Farthing

by Mary Paulson-Ellis

  ‘It doesn’t belong to you either, does it, Jackdaw? But your pal can come and get it if he wants.’

  Jackdaw didn’t reply. The men all stopped what they were doing, looked towards Promise. The A4 boy huddled naked in his barrel, the water grey now, silted with pubic hair, dead lice floating on the surface.

  ‘Come on, Promise,’ Ralph laughed. ‘We’ve seen it all before.’

  Promise shook his head, shivering as the already tepid water cooled even more.

  ‘Well, if you don’t want to get out,’ said Ralph, ‘you can do some more swimming.’

  He reached a hand to the A4 boy’s fair scalp and pushed him under. Promise scrabbled blind, water slopping over the top of the barrel, before, at last, he rose again, gasping for air. But Ralph was waiting.

  ‘In you go again.’

  Pressing his hand to Promise’s head once more, holding him down as he struggled in the water, spluttering and choking, Bertie Fortune restraining a half-naked Jackdaw as Ralph laughed.

  ‘What’s going on?’

  James Hawes came into the barn from the grain store, a fresh towel for Promise folded on his arm. Ralph removed his hand and Promise rose from the barrel, coughing and hacking, fair hair plastered dark with the dirty water, thin body shivering and shivering as he hunched in the filthy soup.

  ‘Diving practice,’ said Ralph.

  Flint laughed. Promise and Jackdaw stayed silent, the other men too. Hawes frowned. Ralph stepped away from the barrel as the temporary sergeant came close, offered Promise a hand. The A4 boy looked scared for a moment, before he took hold of Hawes’s thick fingers, held on tight as he stepped over the high lip of the barrel and onto the barn’s cold floor.

  Hawes draped the towel around Promise’s shoulders, stood in front of the boy.

  ‘Something I can help you with, sir?’ he said.

  ‘No, thanks,’ said Ralph, giving the little silver cap badge a twirl before sliding it back into his pocket. ‘Unless you want to give us a hand slaying the rest of the chickens, Hawes. Two still to go, if anyone’s up for it, Promise to lead.’

  The freckles on Hawes’s neck were suddenly raw in the falling light as he slid his eyes towards the A4 boy, then away. All the men saw it, that look in their temporary sergeant’s eyes as he dipped his head, turned towards the darkest corner of the barn. Fear. Or something like it. The inability to quell the panic in his heart.

  Up on the hill, afternoon mist pressing down, Godfrey and Alec found what the dog had discovered hidden in amongst the brambles on the far side of the ring of trees. Alec grabbed the dog, pulling it away as Godfrey parted the undergrowth to see. There amongst the dead grass and leaves piled high lay the remains of a creature, scattered amongst the decay. A rabbit pegged to the earth by an old trap, wire all rusted and black, a mess of blood and fur.

  Godfrey could see at once what had happened. The rabbit had gnawed its leg off. Through the fur. Through the meat. Through the sinew and the bone. Not much of it left now but a foot abandoned in the grass, a self-inflicted wound. Like Beach, Godfrey thought, the sudden burn of bile in his throat. Like all the other men. He pressed the sleeve of his greatcoat to his mouth. But Alec was already crouching close enough to touch the thing.

  ‘Good luck,’ he said, eyes shining in the late afternoon light, as though they would all be safe now.

  Godfrey looked at Alec then, hair bright amongst the brambles, small dog panting at his feet. Was it wrong, he thought, to consider it love? To admit that he was a little in love with all his men. Beach with his flat grey eyes. Hawes the ex-meat-man with his fear of blood. And now this new boy, not even old enough to wield a gun. Godfrey couldn’t pretend to make sense of it, after all the things he had seen, after everything that had been done. But he did understand one thing: whatever happened next, these men had become all he lived for now.

  He stared out beyond the trees to the horizon, felt Ralph’s two dice in his pocket, understood suddenly how his second must feel when he itched to throw. Not once. Not twice. But again and again until it came up with the right result. Godfrey would never have allowed it, even one month ago, even two weeks, a gamble on which might come first: court martial for refusing to carry out a direct order; or the ending of the war. But what harm could it do now, he thought. One last roll of the dice as Fortune had suggested. Winner takes all.

  1971

  Hawes

  Hawes had found God. Not gradually. Or by persuasion. Or by regular visits to his parish church. But like in the Old Testament. A revelation. A fiery conversion. From this mortal life to the next.

  A young man still when it happened, more than forty years before, one minute Hawes had been walking along the sea front at Hastings, the next he had been up to his waist in the waves. The grey churn of the English Channel had swilled and frothed around him, far behind faint shouts of warning like the short cries of a seagull floating on the air. Far in front the line of the horizon. And beyond that the terrible lair of France.

  The sea had been freezing, water in every orifice, that great heave and swell. Hawes remembered gulping and thrashing, going under, as though he might never rise again. Then coming up for air, in a rush, like two A4 boys rising from a barrel. Before dipping down again. Washing. And washing. And washing again, in an attempt to get himself clean. They’d had to drag him out in the end, lay him on the pebbles that shucked back and forth around him, rattling like a dead man’s final call. Above him the sky had been grey like Beach’s eyes the night before the bombs came down.

  When he’d found himself on dry ground once more, Hawes had made straight for the nearest church to sit amongst the pews, water pooling on the flags beneath his feet as once mud had pooled around the bones he’d volunteered to pull from the mire. The church had been quiet, like that moment before dawn when everything is waiting. He’d slid a hymn book from the wooden ledge in front of him, a prayer falling out:

  Our Father who art in heaven . . .

  Printed on a card about the size of the ones they used to carry in the pockets of their tunics:

  I have been admitted into hospital

  I am sick

  I have received your parcel.

  Like the one the captain had been left with in the end. Hawes remembered the constant tremor in his fingers as he bent to pick the prayer card from the floor, the thick clod in his throat as though he had swallowed a lump of clay. What was it the chaplain had said about absolution as Hawes and the other volunteers dug and dug and dug again once the war was done, men falling into putrid pieces in their hands?

  . . . Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us . . .

  Hawes had known then what he must do, where he must go. But life took its time, that was what Hawes had discovered. And so did he. Until there was no time left.

  1971 and James Hawes finally arrived in the Athens of the North on a morning light with spring. He was old now, just like his captain, hadn’t been home since that baptism in Hastings all those years before. He had abandoned everything long ago to wander the byways and the highways with his orange box and his placard, till he was nothing but a rag-and-bone man himself. When he needed money he would stop in a town square, or a high street, pull all kinds of everything from his jacket – razor blades or chamois leathers, reels of pink thread – calling to his customers about what they could get if they just took the leap. They would stand for up to an hour sometimes waiting to see what might come next, a cheap gold chain or a discourse on the Fall. He had a way about him of compelling attention, as though he had experienced everything they were too afraid to try for themselves.

  At nights, in summer, he slept in dry ditches or beneath great trees, watching the world turn above him. In winter he would find the corner of a barn where he could roll himself in a blanket and dream of chickens in a shed. Whenever he could, he slept beneath the pews of a church, or under the lychgate where they used to shelter the coffins until the clergyman arrived. Hawes knew that he smelled like
those who had lain there before him. Decaying. Damp to his bones. But there was also the soft scent of beeswax, those notes of old pine. He kept his feet dry and didn’t plan for tomorrow. What was the point of worrying about the next day, when the next day might never come.

  When he arrived, Hawes found Edinburgh was full of its own beauty, grey buildings warm in the sun, flags and spires flying as though in a perpetual dance. Hawes had been to Scotland before, when the second war was barely over. But it had been cold at night and sometimes the people even colder, depending on where one went. Or perhaps it had been that old disease which had stopped him doing then what he had come for now. Fear, rising through his body at the thought of what he must say.

  But age was pressing on Hawes now, a new decade come round again, the year already pulsing with argument and disorder, division in the air. He could feel time flowing away from him like sand through the hourglass, the stone he had carried in his mouth for all these years too large for him to swallow any more.

  He wound his way through the closes and passageways of the elegant city, asking here and there. It wasn’t hard to find the place that he required. Pawnbrokers used to be ten a penny when he first went on the road, three gold balls hanging from every street corner. Not anymore. He found it in a narrow street off the Mile, down a close. He peered through the metal grating over the window of Godfrey Farthing’s shop, watching for a moment as two young men laughed together over some odd bits and bobs, one dark, one fair. The boys reminded Hawes of Jackdaw and Promise, the way their bodies bent towards each other even when they didn’t touch.

  The bell rang as he made his way inside.

  Ding

  Ding

  Ding.

  It was the darker boy who looked up first, adorned like some sort of peacock, beads and leather strung around his wrists and his neck. Hawes smiled when he saw the young man’s attire. This boy was a product of the new generation, shirt unbuttoned at the collar, everything flapping about cuffs and waist. Whereas Hawes was wearing his blue suit with the dark lining, neat lapels and three buttons fastened. The suit was old now, but he had made sure to get it cleaned.

  ‘How old are you, son?’ he asked as he came to stand on the opposite side of the baize counter.

  ‘What?’ The darker boy frowned. ‘Twenty-one.’

  Twenty-one. Not much younger than Hawes had once been hugging this boy’s grandfather to him at the bottom of a trench, blood in his eye. Nothing left of either of them now but skin and hollow bones. Like one of those new-fangled ha’pennies someone had given him only the other day, ’71 and light as a pigeon’s feather when you tossed it in the air.

  ‘What’s your name, son?’ he asked.

  ‘Solomon.’

  Solomon Farthing. Hawes smiled then, a mouth full of gaps and teeth worn to stumps. What kind of man would the boy become, he thought, with a name like that? Someone who would end with wisdom or riches? Or neither. Or both. Hawes laid the tips of his fingers along the edge of the baize counter, nails embedded with the grime of long years spent digging in the earth.

  ‘I’m here to see your grandfather,’ he said.

  His captain lying in the back room, awaiting absolution. Or maybe that was what James Hawes had come for himself.

  ‘He’s not well,’ said the boy his eyes huge suddenly, dark, like the copper pennies that were now obsolete.

  ‘That’s why I came,’ said Hawes. ‘To see him at the end.’

  Through the back of the pawnshop, in a single room with a crucifix hanging on the wall, Godfrey Farthing breathed in and breathed out as though he had a child’s rattle in his throat. The room was dim, lit by a low-wattage bulb. It smelled of iodine and that familiar scent of a man only a few steps from death.

  Hawes lifted a plain wooden chair from behind the door and positioned it next to his captain’s bed. Godfrey Farthing’s eyes were closed, sunk into his face as though he was nothing but a skull already. Just like the ones Hawes had dug from the fields of France in ’19, everyone else gone home to drink tea at a kitchen table instead of outside in a yard. Left volunteers like him to give the dead the graves they deserved. Digging and digging and digging again till they found whatever remained. No blood this time, but everything else. Teeth scattered in an oily pool. A clavicle dug into the ground like a spade. How resilient the human body was, Hawes had thought as he pulled those boys from the ground one small piece after another, scraping for their dog tags and their pocket books, anything to identify who they had once been. And how frail, with its capacity for smash and fracture, one bullet to the skull and everything gone forever. Hawes never could wash it away after – the ever-present stink of putrefaction. Only twenty-three and his whole life already beholden to the past.

  Hawes placed his hand on Godfrey Farthing’s hand now, felt all its angles and planes.

  ‘Not too many of us left, old man.’

  Fortune gone.

  Jackdaw.

  And all the rest.

  He pressed his finger to the old man’s skin, left an indent.

  ‘Remember the chickens.’

  Godfrey Farthing’s eyes opened suddenly, two black points burning through Hawes’s seven layers of skin. Inside Hawes a great swell rose, like the sea that time at Hastings, the stone in his throat suddenly huge, as though he might not be able to get the words out just when it mattered the most. His heart began to beat like a rabbit caught in a sack as he gripped the old man’s hand tight. Then he crouched close, began to whisper in his captain’s ear.

  Our Father who art in heaven . . .

  A young man again retching into dirty straw.

  . . . Give us this day our daily bread . . .

  A chicken without a head running past him to the grain store.

  And forgive us our trespasses . . .

  Six bullets dribbled into his hand.

  As we forgive those who trespass against us . . .

  A boy’s eyes shining bright amongst the grey.

  Hawes sat with his captain for more than an hour whispering his confession, counting them out and counting them in again. Jackdaw. Flint. Walker and Promise. Not forgetting the new recruit, Alec. And Ralph, the second lieutenant, of course. It was like the counting of the young men’s bones once the whole thing was over, excavated from the mud one fibula at a time.

  The rattle was quieter in Godfrey Farthing’s throat when Hawes finally stopped. He let go his captain’s hand and placed it beneath the cover, slid an old prayer card from his pocket and laid it on the bedside cabinet, its edges soft now with all the time that had passed. He watched his captain as the seconds between each breath grew long. Then he took something else from inside his jacket, fingers tap tapping on its red woven cover for a moment, before he placed it beside the card. Hawes pulled his captain’s sheet neat one final time, crossed himself and turned towards the door. The boy, Solomon, was watching from the entrance, fear beating in his young heart, no doubt, as it used to beat inside Hawes. Hawes opened his mouth to speak.

  ‘He’ll be away soon now, son. Best you sit with him.’

  Found that his throat was clear.

  Out front, one each side of the counter, Hawes faced the other young man while through the back Solomon Farthing said goodbye to the only family he had ever really known.

  ‘What’s your name, son?’

  ‘Andrew.’

  ‘Like the fisherman.’

  ‘What?’

  So godless these boys. Didn’t know their Bible, or any of the other stuff a man needed when he was faced with a gun. The boy was wearing a long coat made of heavy wool, brass buttons sewn with thread that had once been pink. Hawes smiled. He recognized where the coat had come from, even if this young man did not.

  ‘Do you have any memorabilia I can look at?’ he asked. ‘War stuff.’

  ‘War stuff?’

  ‘Medals and that.’

  Andrew shook his head. Hawes smiled again.

  ‘Try under the counter.’

  What he was
after was always under the counter. The boy crouched to look, appeared again holding a box covered in a thick skein of dust. He lifted the lid for Hawes to see and the old man dipped his hands in amongst those familiar things. Cap badges and bullet casings. A couple of old postcards with messages stitched in silk thread, once vibrant, now dull. Then the medals, stripes on the ribbons faded long since, just like the shine on the brass. There were quite a few medals, stretching back over several wars. Hawes dug through them like he once dug in the mire, until he found three together at the bottom of the box, laid them on the counter for Andrew to see.

  ‘Pip, Squeak and Wilfred,’ he said, pointing to each in turn.

  A Star. A War medal. One for Victory, too.

  ‘Sorry?’ Andrew frowned.

  ‘That’s what we called them, son,’ said Hawes. ‘After the cartoon in the Mirror. A dog. A penguin. A rabbit. And Their Luvly Adventures.’

  Then he laughed.

  ‘I like this one.’

  Andrew touched the Victory medal with its angel of the huge wings. Though Hawes suspected that the boy liked it most because of the rainbow ribbon on which it was hung. Both of the young men were the sort to like colourful things, that was what Hawes could tell.

  ‘That one was named for the rabbit, son,’ he said. ‘The star’s the dog.’

  Hawes had a sudden memory of a small dog lying on a blanket in the corner of a barn, eyes like tiny mirrors. Wondered what had become of him.

  ‘Are you looking for anything in particular?’ Andrew asked.

  Hawes sifted through the box again, one small metal disc sliding over another.

  ‘Nothing in particular,’ he replied.

  But he knew it should be there, a silver cross with small crowns on the four tips, north, south, east, and west. But there was nothing like that here. When he looked up again Andrew was holding the Victory medal to his chest as though to see how it fared against his coat, before he placed it on the counter next to the rest. Hawes stopped with his searching, pointed to the medals laid on the baize.

  ‘How much?’ he said. ‘For these three.’