The Western Wind Page 13

  One August afternoon the people in my village noticed a darkening and saw that the sun seemed to be in an eclipse, but not an orderly one, no gradual sharp bite taken from it, but a nebulous and sudden one, which other senses soon confirmed wasn’t an eclipse but smoke. Fires are fugitives, as we know – quick and stealthy. By the time it was met with buckets of water, it was far too late for buckets of water. Spades smacked into dry earth in an attempt to dig a trench to break its path. It was far too late for that too, given the time needed to dig a trench in earth that had been slow-fired to brick, and given the wind, which was goading it village-wards. Some said the fire was two hours away at most, some said one, some said best just to run.

  In all of this, I was being born. I was in a furious dark tunnel that wanted only to expel me; I didn’t want to be expelled. My mother had been labouring since sunrise and had bouts of howling with bouts of insentience. Being the house at the end of the village that was closest to the forest, we were in danger, and my mother couldn’t be moved. When she was lifted she shrieked like a pig being skinned and had to be put back down, and when I think of it now, I’m sorry it was me who brought her such squalid pain, since although I couldn’t help being born, couldn’t I have been swifter and less obstinate about it?

  I could describe suspensefully the approach of that fire and the desertion of most who were at my mother’s bed (including my father). They gave their prayers for a speedy birth, and followed them with hasty farewells, in case; my mother was given the sacrament. What could be done? Do you all die trying to save two, or all live and leave the two in God’s hands? There were houses to empty and livestock to round up and lead or carry away; there was a river a mile south of the village which was low enough for a human to cross, but high enough to halt a fire. Off they mostly went and left just my mother, the village midwife who was also my mother’s devoted friend, and my stubborn tiny self, striving backwards against a force that knew only forward.

  I could describe all that suspensefully, but time’s already revealed that I did survive, as did my mother, given the later coming of my sister. We survived by what my mother insisted was a miracle, which is to say that when the fire was close enough that flames, and not only smoke, could be seen in the forest, the wind direction abruptly changed. It doubled back from its easterly course to a westerly one, and returned the fire into a forest that was already charred and had not much left for a flame to feed on. The absconded villagers came back and put all hands to the spade. Through the evening and night a trench was dug, a vigil was kept, the fire retreated and, in the midst of a dirty, bloody sunset, I was born.

  My mother told me that the priest told her that no such miracle had been performed with the wind since the Lord sent in a westerly to banish the plague of locusts. When the priest explained that it was Moses who’d been the instrument of God in this miracle, first spreading his hand to bring the east wind, then spreading it again to bring the west, my mother made associations between the newborn Moses who’d been left in a basket in rushes – which she’d heard about in a sermon on the monumental courage of faith – and her own newborn, and saw me as a Moses refashioned, and surmised I might be an instrument of God.

  I grew up supposing there was only one way of testing the truth of her wildly leaping faith, which was to see if I could, after all, summon that wind again at will. The wind came plenty, but never at will. The ambition died with failure and adolescence, which left me with other ambitions that weren’t as Moses-like. It was only when my mother died (in a fire) that grief led me to want to be what she’d wanted me to be, and I began my training for the clergy, and made it the ultimate standard of my closeness to God that he would, one day and perhaps only once, bring a wind from the west because I asked, and for no further reason.

  That was a private barter that I’d never shared with another soul, for fear, I admit, that he wouldn’t oblige. What thing in me had made me say it that day in front of my parish and the dean? My mother? Fear? A clutching at straws? Who was I to ask? And then, who was I not to ask? Who was I not to ask, when there’d never been a time that Oakham needed its priest more, and its priest needed God more, and the dean needed proof more, that this wasn’t a place God had deserted? Who was I not to ask for my life’s work to be affirmed by the very miracle that had made my life possible?

  And yet in the asking, the chance of not being answered, and a whole parish waiting and wondering: where is it, then, this western wind? This life’s work of yours? Is it coming?

  Eat it. You must. Each last sinew, vein and slake of skin. Eat its feathers, if your gullet allows it. Goose yourself into a purged sleep, Ghostly Father, primus inter pares, Father John Reve, you who’s Higher-than-the-Angels, you, God’s faithful servant. Chew through the devil with your angel teeth; go on, eat your way to God.

  I skewered and cooked the rest of the goose in the spitting flame. Eat it, Newman said. It’s your punishment, your sacrifice; eat its flesh as if you’re eating up sin. Eat it all, crunch its bones, chew its skin. You’re eating the sins of your parish: Kemp’s sickened mind, Tunley’s lasciviousness, David Hikson’s weaselliness, Carter’s mis-confession, Oliver Townshend’s foolishness, Oakham’s woollessness, the river’s bridgelessness, the church’s windowlessness, Sarah’s sinful disease. And you, Father, you, John Reve, your sin that’s greater than all of those: letting a man die in your parish without taking from him a last confession. Eat the poor man out of purgatory and into heaven, where he’d be, if not for you. Eat the goose, and maybe with it you can annul your guilt.

  What happened after that, I can’t say precisely. The day had been long and strange, that’s all I knew. I wasn’t a man for strangeness; I liked a life that was plain and sensible, where those dark things that live at our edges stay at our edges. But the dark things come. Some of them don’t even seem dark at the time, but lit with perilous joy. I began to think – as I forced the goose into my mouth – of Piers Kemp’s imaginary woman. I thought of what he’d said about her body of milk and honey, with long, round thighs, a deep cavern. Well, this is what you get when you fill yourself with flesh; you become flesh. Little else but hungry, wanting flesh. Your airy soul itself becomes a carnal lump of meat and gristle.

  But when I banished the thought of Kemp’s pig-woman, another shape loomed behind it, far more real. It was that of a woman I’d known, a married woman long ago, and in my thoughts I was entangled with her as in the moment of love itself; I saw a concoction of limbs that my mind tried to solve, puzzle-like, and couldn’t. How that calf came to be under that knee and this hand came to grip that ankle. I saw her hair splay out across a floor of leaves, fresh and green at first and then, by the end of our season together, mulched and rotted. I saw her teasing, loving lips, the ridges of her upper back teeth, the hollow behind her ankle bone, anger flickering like sunlight in the cold blue ring of her eye. I was a boy in all respects when I knew her. How had I lost her? How had I ever allowed myself to have her?

  ‘Forgive me,’ I said aloud, because it was Piers Kemp’s lewd fantasy that had brought her back to me after so long. That was precisely how the devil crept in – through our animal weakness and our perversity, not through tales of love, not through real tales at all, but through fantasy and magic and talk of unnatural things. Those are the things that bring on our lust. A woman with long, round thighs and the head of a pig! While my swallowing rejected the thought, so that I was close to running to the door and emptying my stomach of it, my head itself filled with blood and devilry, and a longing for the married woman, who might be dead now, for all I knew.

  My room had darkened with smoke. The goose was shrunk to an exhausted handful. Eat it, Newman said, and his presence was so real that each time I turned to find him not there I scowled, perplexed at the place I thought he was. I chewed with listless despair. The smoke swirled, and the pile of uncooked goose quivered with rebuke, and seemed not to shrink, regardless of how much I chewed and how determinedly I swallowed against rising bile an
d stirrings of sickness.

  When it was finished I dipped my forehead into goose-slick hands and smelt myself, the woody, smoky, filthy, sweet human smell of any man or woman, and I did now go to the door, open it into the darkness, run to the back of the house where the goose had been that morning and retch; an abundant offering to the soaked ground. With a spade I shovelled mud on top of it. I wiped my mouth with one sleeve, my eyes with the other. ‘Well then,’ I said to Newman when back indoors, ‘is that what you want?’ and knelt by the fire to pray.

  I tidied away after the goose, doused the fire with two cups of water, kept a light by the door and put myself to bed. The village was silent around me. The bed was soft and warmer now my sister had gone, since I’d taken the mattress from the bed in her room and added it to mine, and taken her boards too so that mine stood higher from the ground. It was sumptuous by my own standards. But I couldn’t sleep. The quiet innocence of the village scorned the tumult of my thoughts, of my deeds. Smoke got into bed with me. The cooking pot hung in the middle of the room. I kept thinking it was my father.

  I got up, put on my shoes and went outside without a light. Rain bounced livid on the road; I almost tripped over a handcart on the roadside, almost stumbled into a sorry fence – such was the bombardment of the rain that it took my wherewithal. But I didn’t need to see the village to know it; the surface of the millpond dented and black, and under it eels and pickerels that had stopped thrashing in nets; the rain trickling perpetually off the still wheel of the mill, and the cows’ deep dreaming breath, and Sarah’s oil-crossed forehead, and Carter’s wound weeping into his pillow, and the dean drinking his wine wakefully by the fire, the reeve Robert Guy placid in sleep with all the untraversable distance of an accountant, and little Sal Prye splayed amid shirked covers, and that unborn child in Joanna Lewys’s womb anxious for the world, and everyone with a belly full of bacon collops lying fearful of Lent.

  Sometimes a man will look at a sack of earth and think it’s too much for him to carry. And each person in this village had to be carried into Lent. I felt then the whole weight of Oakham on my shoulders, as if God had picked the village up and laid it there.

  I hurried across the road towards the church and, as I did, something sleek and black ran past me southwards. I turned to see what it was and saw only broken flickers of black between the bars of rain, which were soon lost to the night. A were-creature, I thought, barely remembering that I had no time for those superstitions; or else a phantom, though a muscular one – for there’d been a glisten of haunches as it passed.

  Then I ran. Places you know can seem like foreign lands when your mind’s lost itself to the dark. I was a streak of startled white. The short path from the lychgate to the church door took me through Indian forests where satyrs lived, through gangrenous swamps of biting fish, and herds of claw-headed one-footed beasts hefting across dry plains beyond the safe shrines of Jerusalem. The welcoming last slope became the baked deserts of Incognita, roamed by headless people. Will-o’-the wisps were bold enough to swarm my hands as they found the latch. It was only when I was inside that peace came back to my heart. The walls were cold and calm to my palms. A few lights were lit along the south wall.

  I brought the stool from the little dark box into the nave, poured some ale and lit a taper. Then I sat on the stool with the ale and the taper in the middle of the nave and gazed. I didn’t have it in me to pray. I set the taper on the floor in a holder and passed my forefinger back and forth through its flame. So much is given up. So much. When those hands are laid, both at once, on your head and no word or chant or prayer is spoken, and the power of priesthood is given to you, you think the gift has been gentle, since so gently bestowed, and little do you know what thunder has been passed into you. What violence.

  For evermore your blood will run fast, trying to do your duty by God. You’re a man trying to do an angel’s work. In time, you carry each and every soul in your parish across the breach, from death to the next world, like St Christopher carrying the child Jesus across the river. Well, I can carry most, but how do you carry a man like Newman? When a man like that asks you to help him, what sort of help can you offer that’ll do any good? Thomas Newman helped every human he crossed paths with. The Townshends, Carter, little Mippy, Sarah, every man and woman he rented good cheap land to; me. He helped me. He gave more than four pounds to that bridge, a year’s wage for most. For that I gave him a plenary pardon that should have helped him bypass purgatory altogether. Yet it didn’t, so what help am I? What power after all?

  I closed the church door and latched it firmly. I thought of the horse that had fallen the day before – slipped on the cobbles, they said, but what if she’d seen something, been spooked after all? Mares had a way, with their placid sliding gaze, of seeing into the spirit world. I took the iron box, with the deeds folded inside, from the vestry and held it to my front. The church wasn’t a shelter but a darkness inside a bigger darkness, and wherever I went in it, I felt there was too much between my head and its roof. I was suspicious of all emptiness.

  I picked up the stool eventually and, with the deeds still to my chest, shoved my way into the little dark box. A small darkness was better than a big one. I sat and leant back against the wall with the taper by my feet, and pushed the deeds under the faldstool; a small fortress for them, guarded by my feet Tomorrow was Shrove Tuesday, carnival, carne levare: farewell to the flesh. So much more confession to take, a sermon to give, the dean to answer to. Endless, thankless job, this one of serving God. I needed to sleep, but I couldn’t. What if I were to hear a knock on the screen during the night, or a rustle of the curtain, or a shifting on the cushion?

  My hands looked like a skeleton’s on my lap, as if I’d met my dead self. What had I come to, spending a night in the booth? The roosting, cowering priest. What had that black thing been, running past? Really a were-creature? The devil? Most likely a dog, but so undoglike in its low, mendacious charge. I thought of my sister in her new life in Endall’s house, of Sarah. In my fraught and head-pained state I thought dimly: the wind! I realised that the reason the church door had come open was because a gust of wind had come in – the rain had stopped and the wind had gusted. I’d closed and latched the door because of that wind and not even noticed why. A wind! Yet when I stood and listened, I heard it was coming not from the west, but at the east window, which rattled a little – the faintest ecstatic quiver of its panes. I’d go and stand in it, just to be sure – stand out there in the churchyard and feel it move my skirts.

  I rocked forward to stand, but found myself too afraid to leave the safety of the booth. Never mind the direction for now, a wind is a wind, and a wind from the east can become one from the west easier than no wind at all. Feet tucked in under me, I made a pillow of my hand. My eyes closed. A whispered moan in the trees. I thought of Carter, the gash on his head, his intention to go down to the river first thing to see about that tree. I was too tired for night prayers or a thoughtful request. Tomorrow, I asked, please give us a better day. Thank you, Lord, I added. Thank you.

  And I slept.

  Day 2

  The previous day, Shrove (also Quinquagesima or, in Oakham burr, King Can’t Guess It’s Us, or Guessing King, or more simply Guessing) Sunday

  Farewell to the flesh

  THE HYSTERICAL CRY of a horse woke me, and at the same time a banging at the door, so that it seemed to me the two things were the same, or connected; in my sleepy state I thought at first it was the horse banging to come in. I rushed up.

  ‘Reve,’ was all I got when I unlatched the door, and an amused look from the dean at the sight of me in my night tunic. It was still dark outside, with the grain of dawn. ‘If I may?’

  He spread his hands to part the space between me and the doorframe. There he stood, inside my room, kicking at the cold fire. Something had happened; there were voices down the road towards Old Cross, and when I went out, John Hadlo was running past, saying that a milk cart had come down. Milk all
over the road. He was off to tell Townshend. The horse was down too and needed freeing.

  I went back indoors to see the dean still standing where he’d been, a dark shape in darkness, watching the door.

  ‘A bit of light might not go amiss,’ he said.

  ‘A milk cart’s down,’ I said. ‘I’m going to go and help out. You light as many candles as you want. Please.’

  ‘No, stay here.’

  I could tell by the dean’s eager let’s-get-started shuffling that he’d come to search my house. I could barely see him, but I could feel his keenness in the same way you could feel the open eyes of someone lying next to you in the dark.

  ‘You know how it is,’ he said. ‘If I look around someone’s house with them there as a witness, I can’t be accused of stealing anything.’

  ‘I have nothing worth taking.’

  ‘So they all say.’

  We stared at one another. I tried to see something friendly in his bearing, but there was nothing in that respect. All the light we had was from the one candle that I’d lit at dawn prayers and had burnt on for those two hours since. From it I lit six more, put five in sconces around the room and gave the other to him.

  ‘A bit of warmth wouldn’t go amiss, either,’ he muttered. Then, ‘I’m searching everyone’s house, you understand I can’t make yours an exception.’

  ‘Why should you? You can search with my blessing.’

  I waited for the brotherliness I’d seen in him the day before; it soon occurred to me I might be waiting some time. His peevish little light made short journeys here, there, one corner, the other. Up (to find what?). Down (what could I be hiding at knee-level that he hadn’t already tripped over?).