The Western Wind Page 19

  Golden hook

  I KNOCKED AT Sarah’s door, only to get no answer. I went in and found her sleeping. I crept out and closed the door as tight as it would go.

  ‘John Reve?’ I heard. It was Carter, approaching from the land behind Sarah’s house.

  ‘Herry?’

  He was carrying a spade. He prodded the handle towards the wall. ‘I went in to check on her.’

  ‘How was she?’

  ‘Disturbed, I gave her milk and tried to ease her.’

  ‘And you did, now she’s sleeping.’

  ‘The sleep of the dead.’

  ‘Don’t talk that way.’ I bent to pick up a bucket that was side-on to the ground and put it against the wall, then realised I still had the little skirt-of-Christ in my hand. ‘Earlier she was fighting fit,’ I said. ‘Clear and calm as a bell.’

  ‘Huh,’ said Carter – a laugh, a chide, a refutation, a grunt. I added nothing about the strange nature of her calmness and how it had seemed to come from something fraught. He looked as exhausted as a dog mid-fight. The cut on his face was blood-crusted and the piece of bandage gone. Poor soft young face of his, it had lost hope to worry and flashed a hint of the old man he might become. ‘She hasn’t got her ground ready for sowing,’ he said, and he walked back towards her plot. I went after him. ‘Look at it, the most unlikely bit of ground you ever saw. What’ll grow here?’

  Not much, I had to admit. Two robins were making much of the unearthed worms; that was something. That pleased the old bewintered heart.

  ‘Will Sarah die?’ Carter asked. He’d started digging and didn’t look up from the task.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘She’s decided she wants to.’

  ‘Earlier she said she was better.’

  ‘Earlier’s nothing – earlier’s gone.’

  ‘Well, isn’t that true,’ I said, and squinted at him through the mist of rain. ‘What is it, Herry?’

  He struck the spade into the ground and straightened. ‘She’s going to confess to killing Newman, that’s what. She said so.’

  I laughed. ‘Well.’

  ‘Don’t just stand there and well, John Reve.’

  ‘What then?’ I asked. ‘What then, Herry Carter? Stand here and do what else?’

  We watched one another. Chickens squawked around us hungrily. The air had collected a drizzly mist; everything felt moist and spongy. I understood what he was saying – Sarah’s suffering had come from only God knew where, a rotten and tortured suffering, and in Newman’s mysterious death she’d seen an opportunity to end it. Her own sorry life must have seemed a small sacrifice, burning at the stake no dreadful fear for a body that burnt night and day already. People confessed to all kinds of things when they were desperate, just in case. Better to own up to too many sins than not enough: the greater the punishment on earth, the less time needed in purgatory. That was her calm of earlier – not a calm of peace or ease, but one of scheming. Carter knew that as well as I did. He was staring at me with his hand whitening around the spade handle. Chickens stabbed their beaks at unseen things. I received a brutal peck to the toe.

  ‘Nobody will believe her confession,’ I said.

  ‘They will, if they really want to.’

  ‘Nobody will want to.’

  ‘No?’ He flicked his gaze outwards towards the road. ‘Anybody who’s looking for a murderer might want to.’

  ‘The dean isn’t here for a lynching, Herry. He’s a fair man – he knows as well as any of us that Newman’s drowning was nothing to do with Sarah.’

  ‘I don’t trust him.’

  ‘But you can trust me. Do you think I’d let any harm come to her from the dean?’

  I heard my own voice hang in the air between us, heavy with confidence. I thought: when he next speaks, he won’t call me John or Reve or John Reve, he’ll call me Father – he has that look of needing somebody to believe. The look of somebody climbing a cliff and dangling his unseen foot, in the hope it finds a hold.

  ‘Father – are you sure?’ he said.

  ‘I wouldn’t say it otherwise.’

  He stood, looking towards the house.

  ‘Maybe she’ll recover,’ I said, trying for optimism. ‘The truly sick don’t have the wherewithal for designing their own death. She’s young, besides. Earlier she recited the Litany of the Blessed Virgin without a pause.’

  He tugged the spade from the ground and poised himself to dig.

  ‘That can wait,’ I said, and he looked at me. ‘Go home.’ He nodded and let the spade slide through his palms. No resistance; the boy was finished.

  Father, I’m sorry I let the cart tip this morning; Father, I took the Virgin’s name in vain; I just finished sleeping with a woman not my wife, it isn’t the first time; I spoke with my mouth full; I overslept; I helped chuck Fin Brackley into a ditch of shit; I lobbed a stone at a bird; I’m ashamed you saw me throw up in a bush; I found an egg with two yolks and ate it all for myself; I lost my lucky bent coin; I’ve been unhappy; just today I slept with a man not my husband, it’s the last of many times; I landed a rock on a spider that looked like the devil, did I cause Thomas Newman’s death?; I burped Ave Maria to amuse my boy, did I cause Thomas Newman’s death?; we ate with thirteen at the table, did we cause Thomas Newman’s death?; I dug without sharpening my spade, was I asking for trouble?; I stepped over my child, did I bring bad luck?; I overslept; I underslept; I overslept; did I cause Thomas Newman’s death?; the dean says God’ll suppose we’ve all caused Thomas Newman’s death, unless one person admits to it. Was it me, Father? Did I?

  Fires were lit and Oakham took to supper. The air was one-third water, one-third spirits and one-third smoke, and the smoke was flavoured with chicken and pork. It was a proper stew that evening, what with the cooking meat and the brewing wort and the windless rain. Lungs were steeping. And it was after supper – which I didn’t have – that we all went down to the millpond, as was routine on Shrove Sunday each year, and we toed a rowing boat onto the pond, tethered with a rope.

  Oakham’s men were assessed for size: John Hadlo was half a head too short, Oliver Townshend less short but too stocky, Morris ‘small’ Hall too small in every way and not worth trying, Robert ‘Rotundley’ Tunley too big in every way and not worth trying, John Fisker too hunched at the shoulders to sustain comparison, David Hikson so wiry that his height was irrelevant, and Adam Lewys too drunk to stand upright on solid ground, let alone on the quivering floor of a boat. Robert Guy seemed the best bet, he was subtly fatter than me everywhere on his body, but when I was set back-to-back with him, it was proven that he was also subtly shorter. The notion was born that the match was perfect: he, being our reeve, was surely the equivalent of me, John Reve. And he, needing to equal my weight, was our accountant and used to equalling any two things that came his way.

  He was chosen to a round of cheers, which were muted, since nobody had forgotten that for the last twelve years the man who’d taken this role, the man most like me in build, was Newman. But everybody seemed to do a decent job of pretending that Newman wasn’t dead, only away for the day on business, and so we got on. The boat was pulled parallel to the bank, its prow held firm by Tunley and its stern by Hadlo. Robert Guy removed his shoes and stepped in. I removed mine and stepped in after him, so that we were both standing entirely unsteady in the middle of the boat, all but hugging.

  ‘Take your places,’ growled Tunley, and with no skill we each wobbled to opposite ends of the boat. Robert Guy lurched and grabbed the side and almost capsized us. ‘Sweet shite, what are you, a blind cow?’ Tunley asked. ‘It’s a millpond, not the Atlantic.’ Guy scowled and righted himself. I was more adept, maybe because I did it every year – adept enough, anyway, to stay on my feet and shuffle without dignity to the stern.

  The crowd, which was a good two-thirds of the village, jittered. Usually they heckled and prattled as if at a dog-fight; even though the spiritual dignity of their priest was being tested, it was never really in do
ubt. This year, they weren’t sure. Was it a spectacle or a reckoning? They looked on, concerned, while Robert Guy tried to come to his feet and stay on them. If my end of the boat sank less than that of the other man, it meant I weighed less; and if I weighed less than him – whose build was similar – it confirmed my ongoing priestliness, in weighing more than an angel but less than a man. More fleshly courage than an angel, less fleshly burden than a man. It confirmed my right to take my parish into Lent. And if my end of the boat sank as much as the other man’s, or God forbid more, then I didn’t know what would follow because it had never happened. In twelve years, with Newman at the other end, it’d never happened.

  Robert Guy teetered to his feet; we couldn’t have picked a less water-going man than this rigid accountant. He stood scarecrow-like with his arms spread. It didn’t seem to me that there’d be much between us; I was glad I’d gone without dinner and wished I’d gone without breakfast. The boat rocked and steadied, and Tunley gave another grunt: ‘Hands off!’ At which he and John Hadlo let loose their grip of stern and prow and left us to our fates. Oakham’s eyes were on the stern. Did it rise? Did Robert Guy at the prow sink? I turned my eyes up to the line of great oaks, which were each a universe of life, jackdaws swinging on the branches, woodpeckers in and out of the boles, finches pecking at the bark. Nests. So many nests.

  I didn’t feel the boat tip at my end; I didn’t feel that small, unweighted moment. I tried to know the lightness of the heavens in my limbs instead of bone and flesh, and I had that feeling again, that beyond the ridge was the sea, an intrepid vastness; that if I stood on tiptoes I could see the topmost masts of ships tacking their paths. I didn’t look at Robert Guy, and couldn’t – for the sake of balance – look at the crowd. My knees didn’t feel strong, my stance didn’t seem steady, and the boat bobbed evenly, or so I thought. I drew in breath. Did that help? Or maybe I should give breath out? Did breath lighten or make heavy? Somebody in the crowd began to clap, and then the rest broke into a guarded and staggered cheer and Tunley cried, ‘Prow down! Stern up! Amen!’

  The boat was pulled to the bank; Robert Guy tripped from it longingly onto dry ground and I stepped without pride or honour, for if the boat had tipped, I’d never felt it. Still, Tunley’s cry of success remained the last clear sound on the air. There was relieved murmuring but no celebration, and the crowd dispersed – it wasn’t a cause for celebration that your priest was proven at least a little holier than your accountant, any more than it was a cause for celebration that you woke up each day with both feet still on the ends of your legs. It was as it should be. It was only if a foot was missing that the day became memorable.

  I walked back to the church on my own, my heart shuffling itself like a pack of cards. When Newman had been at the other end of the boat, he’d look me in the eye, and I him, and after the weighing he’d grin and pat me on the shoulders, and we’d walk back to the church together. That’s when he’d come to confess this, that or the other. On the third or fourth year he confessed that he always took time to load some fist-sized rocks into the wide, rough hem of his surcoat when he was at the prow. No need to, he’d said, it just adds to the spectacle. I knew there was no need to. So I forgave him his little theatre and let him do it the next year and the next.

  The best part of half an hour elapsed while the light went from the dull of day to the dull of dusk, and the grain of the wall came apart and dissolved into shadow. Nobody came to confess. There was a pardon on offer and they didn’t come. They’d flurried in before, Father Father Father – but now? Were they tired? Perhaps my end of the boat hadn’t tipped up at all and they knew it, and no longer put their faith in me. I sat on my hands to keep them warm, though my face was hot. What would it be to lose their faith and trust? What would I be? Anything at all? If not their Holy Father, their golden hook, then what? Nothing, or even less. Then I realised that it was raining hard, and that the rain was sluicing from the sky, effortless and relentless, and that this was surely the cause of everyone’s absence, this rain. Not my performance on the boat. Then a deep muffled thunder unfurled, and I looked up to wait for lightning. I don’t know if it was boredom, or the strangeness of the day, or the hammering of the rain, or the low, long companionship of the thunder that rolled around the sky like a horse’s whicker, but I was filled with a sudden longing. I sat forward with my elbows on my spread knees and the pads of my fingers drumming together without sound. My heartbeat accompanied. I clasped my hands together.

  When I wasn’t much more than a boy I met a woman. I’ve told nobody else about her. She was a married woman and was older than me; it wasn’t only a husband she had, but children too – I never asked how many. Some of them might have been almost as old as me. I was already in training for God’s work when I met her, and when I fell into the deepest, most sudden infatuation, as if into a hole, I looked up at God with the blood coursing through my loins and challenged him: how much, Lord, do you deserve me? How much do you want me? Is it worth your while to rescue me from her?

  The infatuation lasted a summer, and it ended with the first frost. She ended it; I’d have gone on all winter and into the next spring. I lived then a few miles from Southampton where I was born, and our parish was big, about three hundred, and the woman and I didn’t know each other. She lived in a coastal village, not like mine. Mine was four miles inland, all we had of the sea was a salty mouthful of it when the wind blew up and north-west.

  She travelled, though, on a mule, selling seaweed – nets full of dulse, which was good fried with butter, or else rinsed and mixed with hay for animals. Eelgrass for fertilising fields, or for drying and stuffing pillows, mattresses, roofs. Bladderwrack for curing goitres and headaches. I went to her for that reason, to get bladderwrack for my sister’s headaches, and she sold me some and told me when she’d be back. When I went again, she gave me the seaweed without charge, and told me when she’d be back. When I went again, she led me to the birch wood near the village.

  She came to our village twice a week, and she always made sure that she reached us at the very start of the day or the very end, and she’d take me to the wood where nobody went outside of daylight because birch was considered thick with spirits. The first time she took me I had no idea what she wanted, I was a boy who’d not long since lost his mother, and to strangers’ eyes she might have been my mother. ‘This way,’ she said, just as my mother might have, and I walked by the side of her mule, watching the movement of the holy black cross that ran over its shoulders and down its back.

  Over the weeks we became intrepid with each other; if it was she who led at first, it was me by the end. She taught me how to please her. They’d said that women were ravenous and empty and tempted men into oblivion. I found her hungry, yes, and her eyes were beautifully wicked at times, and she treated me like her mule, as her mule looked on. But she wasn’t empty, she was full inside and soft beyond any softness otherwise on earth, and I made it my task to find the emptiness if it was really there, and to be taken close to oblivion to see if God would save me from it, to see if he wanted me more than I wanted her.

  I began to imagine her as Eve, naked as she was under trees and lying in soil and leaf at first shrill and green and later gold and mottled and dying, and the ground damp and mushroomy. I let her tempt me all she could and I would succumb, and ask for more, and succumb again, and do as she asked. I was waiting for God to tell me to stop and come to him. I began to think that he was encouraging me to search every space in her, either to show that I’d find nothing true or everlasting there, or else to let me have my pleasure while I could. I thought that the mule was his servant, come to watch and send a sign. The clusters of primroses that broke out on the spot we used were his approval, his will that we should know beauty. Then the forget-me-nots and Virgin’s Tears and wild strawberries, our thrilling, ever-changing bed.

  She did what she pleased with me, the game was her own and the rules of her making and breaking – the traps, the taunts, the temptations
, and the grateful ecstasy of fulfilment. Her stench was of salt and fish and tar, and her hands were long and slim and coarse. She gave me bruises where her fingers had gripped, and she might leave me lying on the ground, dazed, without a word of affection, not even a goodbye. But in moments she was less Satan’s bait and more the gentlest of mothers, she would give strawberries to my mouth and sing to me and cup my cheek in her palm, and I’d imagine her with her children and be more inflamed than ever, and force her shoulders back to the ground and open her legs. Now come for me, I would say to God – now, at my very lowest, pluck me out, punish me, show me you want me. I would glance up at the mule, and the mule would hang its head heavily on the end of its neck and gaze liquidly, and do nothing.

  There was one time only when I went to her, instead of her coming to me. She couldn’t do her round of villages because one of her children was unwell. So I walked the four miles to her village to meet her before daybreak and we took a path down to the shore, in a cove where the fishermen weren’t, shielded by a rock. We might only have been there half an hour, but in that time ships passed to and from the port, ships so large that I could see them from the corner of my eye even as her body absorbed me; I could feel them passing, these great wooden cities. Life. Extraordinary life – the flesh, the world, the wind, the flags, the unending glory of the woman sent to test me, how she opened all around me, how the world appeared to me at her edges.

  That was the end of August. When she came to me during September she was milder and less voracious, without explanation. She laid herself down more obligingly and lifted her skirts, as if it was for my pleasure and not hers. She took less from me, no longer buried her hand in my curls and pulled my head back to run her tongue up my neck, and no longer left me bruised. I took what she offered, and then took what she didn’t, and I was made frenzied by her sudden inertness and drove myself at her; sometimes I was anxious that I’d finished her, and had to kiss her and ask a hundred times, Are you alright? Are you well? She was kind, docile and remote. For the first time I believed that she could be a wife.