The Western Wind Page 17

  I raised the lute, a dead wooden thing, soundless, replaced it on the altar step. I was aware of his Pietà over there on the altar, lavish with colour; he presumably thought that had something godly in it too. God in the paintbrush, a hog’s-hair God. By now he’d stopped pacing; he stood with his arms crossed.

  ‘I respect you, John, your holy authority. Of course I do. But maybe you take your authority too far and imagine we can’t have any holiness for ourselves.’

  ‘That’s unjust. I help only with the things you can’t do.’

  He looked down at me. ‘And what can’t I do? If I sleep with the lady of the manor, do I need you to undress her for me?’

  At which I looked abruptly away. ‘No, but you need me to forgive you.’

  ‘That’s just where you’re wrong, John, because I can put my case to God and he can forgive me or not, and he can punish me or not. I’m not sure he needs you to arbitrate.’

  Newman now spread his arms just as I had.

  ‘And do you?’ I said. ‘Sleep with the lady of the manor?’

  He smiled at me, ‘Well, if I do, it’s not your business.’

  ‘You play your lute afterwards and God forgives you?’

  He grinned. To think God would trouble himself with sheep-gut strings. To think a sheep’s innards could do what a priest has trained for years to do, has sworn his body and soul to, has surrendered his man’s body for, and has denied himself in service of doing. As if God’s ear were cocked evermore in the direction of Newman’s lute – no, as if God leapt into the lute itself.

  ‘Have it your way,’ I said to Newman, and I took the lute from the step, jumped to my feet, went into the confession box and placed it on my back-breaking little faldstool. I came out to find Newman leaning against the east pillar. ‘There,’ I said, I suppose childishly. ‘If the lute’s such a reliable minister of God, let it take confession.’

  Newman had smiled and said, ‘I wonder how long it would take anyone to notice.’ Not unkindly; he was never unkind.

  As I sat there now, with the smell of Cecily Townshend lingering – lavendery cow muck and fusty midden – I thought it wouldn’t do to be angry with a dead man, especially when your hands were full of the dead man’s money.

  Newman could be provocative; we were like that together – he provoking, me half-enjoying the challenge of it. But it wasn’t only provocation that time, I could see that now. I now knew that when he brought up Cecily Townshend that day he was half-confessing to a sin for which he asked no forgiveness. He’d undressed her many times, and then played his lute to God by way of making right; and maybe he believed God had obliged him.

  I pressed the side of my head against the wall of the booth a little harder than was comfortable, and saw myself then as I was when ordained, prostrate in front of the altar. The bishop’s hands on me; my bones had shivered. You are in persona Christi, he said. You speak through him to the Lord. It was as if I’d been called to the edge of a precipice and gone over. Not a leap of faith, because you don’t leap but fall, and the fall is terrible, but God gives us no other way. Not pictures, not music. No shortcuts. I’d tried to explain this to Newman: you don’t go upwards through air to find the Lord, trilling like a bluebird; you go down, through the pit of yourself. But he’d never taken heed of what he didn’t want to hear.

  It was then that I heard something crash, or more rightly thud and smash. A thick whump of man contacting ground. I ran out of the booth to the porch where Herry Carter had slipped from a ladder and ended splayed below, with a neat gash in front of his ear, and the slate responsible scattered into some fifty different varieties of triangle around his bleeding head.

  On the Devil’s Meddling with the Fickle Element of Music

  ‘ONCE THERE WAS a fisherman who sat on a boat that bobbed on a sea, a shimmering sea filled with fish of equally shimmering scales that glinted green, purple, blue and pink at the end of the sharpest hook. Each day the fisherman threw his hook down at the end of the line, secured the line to the boat, and played his harp; that was his way of fishing – to play the harp so sweetly that fish came willingly to his hook.

  ‘At the end of the day he took home nets that were bulging to a family that was well fed and fully expectant of never going hungry. He sold his fish cheaply to the villages all around, and they never went hungry, either. All was well. Of course, when all is well, all is soon not to be well and, indeed, so it was.

  ‘One winter day the devil rowed in on his own boat and anchored it out of sight around an outcropping of rock, and he made a hissing sound that was as airy and sweet as the strumming of the harp – at least to fish, who have (through no fault of their own) limited discernment in these things. Knowing no better, the fish swam to the devil’s hook instead. Perplexed by his unattended hook, the fisherman tried different music on his harp, but none made a difference. For days and weeks the devil took up his place by the rocks, unseen by the fisherman whose nets were carried home half-full, a quarter-full, near-empty, empty, until the fisherman and his family and the villagers around were rake-thin and ravenous.

  ‘All might have been lost for the fisherman, whose weakness would soon stop him staying a boat day-long in winter waters and taking the burden of the cold. His heart had been lost too; why would the fish stop coming to his bait unless they’d died (they hadn’t, he could see them beneath) or unless the Lord was punishing him, and if the Lord was punishing him, why? All might have been lost, were it not for a bright day on the boat, and the sun catching something glinting in its bow – a hook. A gold hook, to put at the end of his line. And behold, when he fished with that hook, the fish left the devil and came back.

  ‘Which of you know what this story is about? Philip? (About the devil being a gluttonous bastard, Father.) But think it through – Morris Hall, who is the fisherman? (Is he old Clere, down at Bourne, who used to sell fish here and died of an ulcerous leg? Or is he one of the disciples?) No, no, the fisherman is you, each of you. You see how the music of the devil can creep in? But with the gold hook – which is the worker of God, which is your priest, which in this case is me – the distinction is plain and the devil’s left hissing to himself.

  ‘Why am I telling you this in a sermon when there’s so much else to tell? Well, I know that Thomas Newman, rest his soul, has been advising some of you about the airiness of music and how, being airy, it resonates with the air inside the ear and also with the airy human spirit and, in being so nimble as to do both, can reach between our small puny bodies and the greater heavens. I know he’s told you music can channel cosmic influences, to use his phrase (which none of us, in our hearts, understand). And he’s played to you several times on his lute so as to demonstrate how you might be plucked up to heaven in the rapture of its sound. I know that, now Newman’s been taken from us suddenly, you might feel the impulse to honour his memory and become bound to those notions.

  ‘But I have here a treatise that pours caution on this optimism: On the Devil’s Meddling with the Fickle Element of Music. Though music can be fair and free and like the breath of God, it’s also the most double-dealing of mediums: fickle, close to spirit vapour, capable of being intervened on mid-flight by the devil and used for his means. Between the sweet sequence of notes from your pipe is a pause roomy enough for devil antics, roomy enough even if hardly a pause at all, since he’s a foe who can shift to the smallest shape.

  ‘I want to explain to you, my parish, that in spite of music’s loveliness, it’s susceptible to hell; its very loveliness is its susceptibility. In this, I am your golden hook; I am the one who can attract God’s truth, so that those truths can nourish you. The devil can come to you through music, but it can never come to you through me. Enjoy your music, but don’t be misled into believing it is a channel to the Lord, since nothing and nobody but the workers of God are a channel to him.

  ‘Some of you believe that you’ll hear from Newman in the other world by way of his lute, that it will somehow break through the air and come
to you as a sign of his passing through purgatory. Give up listening. If you hear his lute, how will you know it came from him, and not from the devil? I, on the other hand will know, since if the music falls on my ears it must come from God – this is where my ears are more useful than yours. If that happens, I’ll tell you, and we can rejoice in knowing the soul is on its way to heaven and leaves a delicate trail of sound, like the effervescence of a shooting star.’

  Up to which point the dean, standing at the back of the church, had looked pleased. He’d have liked the chastening tone of the sermon, he’d be rejoicing that I’d for once lectured them on the merits of knowing their own ignorance. The part about the shooting star he’d have liked less, and found it a bad way to end a sermon – too whimsical and glad. You can’t lecture them about the perils of airiness and then end with a notion of the stars, he’d be thinking.

  But with the rest he seemed pleased, which I could tell by the fact that he stood at the back of the church while I lifted the host, and cast his eyes contentedly down while everybody else raised theirs up to see. Janet Grant stood behind me holding aloft a square of black cloth, so that the host shone ever more whitely against it. Eyes downcast, the dean would have been able to see two hundred strained arches bringing a hundred pairs of feet onto a thousand toes, so as to catch a glimpse of that host. Then he’d have been able to see the devoted kissing of the pax bread that Janet Grant passed around, and been able to hear the quiet while I called for prayers for the Pope, the bishops, the clergy – our dean especially! – the kings, lords and commons, those everywhere in the country in need, and those in need in our own good parish, the Tunley household who’d supplied this Sunday’s holy bread, the pregnant, the sick and the dead, in particular Joanna Lewys, Sarah Spenser and – we say it with grief and disbelief – Thomas Newman.

  The dean, chin pertly raised, must have been satisfied with the devotion he saw, because at the end he left with the Townshends and not a word to me, and the sated look a man or woman gets after a meal that was cheap and imperfect, but filled a hole. Herry Carter left with his wife and a piece of bloodied linen pressed to his cheek. He looked flushed and excited and slightly wavering on his feet, and he met Jane Tunley’s concern with such a buoyant light in his eye and such a blush to his cheeks that she looked at him in admiration, as if she wondered whether a falling slate to the head might do her a world of good too.

  The church emptied noisily. The bread-giving Tunleys, Morris and Joan Hall, James Russe the butcher with his wife and child, Bodger Philip and his crew, John and Tom Hadlo with little Mippy, Sarah Spenser, all five of the Otleys, all six of the Brackleys, all nine of the Smiths, the reeve Robert Guy, the lonely miller Piers Kemp. I stood at the pulpit watching, rubbing my thumbs against the downy pages of the priest’s manual.

  I wished for them not to go. Hither-thither they went anyway like a flock of geese, I thought, then wished it hadn’t been a goose that came to mind, since then I had to bear awkward thoughts of Mrs Townshend. A flock of any other creature would have done.

  Resurrection

  THEY ALL WENT, but a few would turn and come back. Circle the churchyard, utter a quick prayer at a grave, wait for me to be seated in the booth, then return with their rosaries and a ‘Confiteor’ at the end of their tongues.

  One was Gil Otley, whose unmistakable jaw at the grille boasted a patch of hair in the poorly formed shape of a heart. It was so advanced upon by new stubble that I might not have known it was a heart, if his wife hadn’t confessed to it earlier.

  ‘There’s been a miracle,’ he said, once he’d given his Creed. He was a short, brawny, rough man, the kind who looks worrisome in dark shadows. He had a way with bulls and oxen (which must have wagered he was one of them) and he was Oakham’s best and sturdiest ploughman, a hard worker, and misunderstood as miserable because he was never wasteful with his words.

  ‘A miracle?’

  ‘My dead son’s teeth, in the earth.’

  ‘What earth?’

  ‘I was ploughing up by East Woods and up came a pouch of teeth belonging to my dead boy.’

  ‘East Woods,’ I said, ‘by the Bruton boundary?’ and he made a sound along the lines of ‘Euhh’, which seemed to me to mean: what other East Woods are there?

  ‘You’re certain they were your boy’s?’ I asked.

  ‘My wife has a habit of keeping those first fallen teeth from our small ones’ mouths, and putting them bloody in a wool pouch for luck. When the boy died I carried his pouch around with me all places, til I didn’t. Til I lost it.’

  ‘Then you ploughed it up by chance.’

  ‘Three years on – brute chance.’

  ‘They’re intact?’

  ‘A pearl, each.’

  ‘A miracle,’ I said.

  ‘Ep,’ he said. Then: ‘I don’t come to confess, just to ask you to pass on my thanks to the Lord Almighty for giving me a bit of my boy back.’

  ‘That’ll be a great mercy for you and your wife, to have that back.’

  ‘Yeddup,’ is what he replied. I didn’t know what it meant, but it sounded like he was chivvying a sheep. I wondered whether anyone would tell him about his wife’s shaving prank. She was always a prankster, Ann Otley, ribald and ruddy and given to jibes about her husband’s lack of romance – not that anyone could have begrudged her husband the same complaint. That heart, so close to his eye and never seen by it, seemed a tender, innocent thing. Besides which, his beard would be back in a day or two and the heart would be taken into the forest of it and disappear, and he’d never need to know any better.

  ‘A right miracle,’ he said.

  ‘A miracle,’ I said again, though I suspected it was more fluke than miracle; a fluke was for improbable happenings, a miracle for impossible ones. But how flashingly bright that miracle would sit in the midst of this day – the teeth of a dead child brought back to the mournful hands of the father.

  ‘It might be that you didn’t as such find those teeth,’ I ventured, ‘but that the Lord made it so that they were never lost.’

  ‘They were good and lost for three years.’

  ‘Yet the Lord can reverse time if he wants to, and in your case he could have reeled it back to the time before they were lost.’

  ‘Can he?’

  ‘In the scriptures, Hezekiah was sick, about to die. God promised to give him fifteen more years of life as a reward for a lifetime of perfect worship. To show Hezekiah he was sincere, God moved the sun backwards ten degrees on the sundial. To say: Hezekiah, I’m here, your God, don’t doubt me. I can turn the very sun back on its course.’

  ‘Is that what he did with my boy’s teeth? Un-lost them?’

  ‘He could have.’

  ‘Can’t see why he’d bother.’

  ‘To show you: though you’ve lost a child and have reason to doubt me, I’m here, your God, and your son is well in heaven and whole-hearted.’

  When an ox is deciding whether it’s prepared to pull the plough, its thought takes over the whole field and steers the clouds. Its thought has such simple magnitude. Gil Otley’s deliberation filled the church in a similar way.

  He said at last, ‘Might have brought the whole boy back, not just the teeth.’

  ‘But we all have to go sometime,’ I replied, ‘and God can’t bring us all back. It was your boy’s time, his calling to heaven was strong and urgent.’

  A deep, rough breath in and out. ‘Well, if the Lord turned back time, how am I not three years younger?’

  ‘When he moved the sun backwards on Hezekiah’s sundial, the sun didn’t move back everywhere, only there. When Balaam’s donkey spoke, not all donkeys learnt to speak. Miracles are precise. The Lord can reverse one portion of time and leave the rest of time as it is. I am the Lord of all mankind; is anything too hard for me?’

  ‘Not so much hard as pointless, getting a donkey to speak.’

  But Otley conceded a sigh; even a pointless miracle was a miracle.

  The afternoon light
on the stone was flat and grey. Sometimes I could look at it so long the grain of the stone separated out into pebbles and rocks on a beach seen from extraordinarily high above. Itself a miracle; the miracle of distance. A small thing is a big thing seen from afar, a big thing is a small thing seen up close. The miracle of the changing size of fixed and rigid things.

  Otley had been coming to his feet. Once he was standing he added, in a thick voice that fell heavy from a height, ‘Please pass on my extra thanks to the Lord then, for the strangeness of the miracle. I don’t always approve of his ways and reasons, but at least he has ways and reasons, which is more than can be said for most.’

  Oh, we all have reasons, I thought. Only that they’re not always good ones. I reached down to Cecily Townshend’s money, which was pressed against my foot, took out the coin that felt smallest – a shilling – and passed it to him through the grille.

  ‘For you and your family – buy some meat before Lent.’

  Some scrubbed, scarred, weather-beaten fingers took the coin. ‘Glory be,’ he muttered.

  Sarah’s face came to the grille. ‘I wasn’t sure if you were in there, Father.’

  I turned so as not to meet her eye.

  ‘You were so silent, I thought you’d gone.’

  Gone where? I wondered. Seeped like a draught out of the window?

  ‘I need to ask forgiveness for disturbing you and Thomas Newman in the church on Friday night. I came in feeling very unwell.’

  ‘If you couldn’t come here for help, where could you – ’

  ‘I interrupted the last conversation you had with him.’

  ‘You interrupted a conversation I was having with him, it was any old conversation. It only later turned out to be the last.’

  ‘Father, that seems an odd logic.’