The Western Wind Read online

  At the table I plucked it roughly. The room was scattered with feathers and smelt of thin blood. Its skin puckered sore and ugly. Then I rolled my sleeves and went in for the viscera. I cut it into pieces, and though I tried to find the natural contours of its parts, I wasn’t a butcher and I hacked and tore across muscles. In the end I had a slick pink pile of flesh that had no resemblance to a goose, but which seemed to throb with injured life like something hit by a speeding cart. The bones, gristle and viscera went in a bucket for burying later. I swilled the table down with water left in the washing bowl and mopped up the watery blood with rags.

  I started the fire from the one guarded candle I kept burning inside the door, which I lit before bed, replaced at Matins in the blackness of midnight, then again at Lauds, then at Prime. We weren’t short of candles in Oakham, no: women spent their evenings basting rope in sheep-fat and cutting it into lengths, they could do it with one hand and cook or spin or darn or dandle with the other. They claimed that they could baste while coupling, and that their husbands didn’t notice. Candles were stacked high in the vestry, and more in the porch, hoarded as donations and offerings for the safe traverse of the soul past death. If the church caught fire, there’d be so much tallow it would burn for days.

  You want too much, the goose said, as I lifted a skewer to it. I showed it the fire, which had taken smokily at first, then unfolded well into flames. You want, you want, you want. You want candles, then you complain: too many candles. I hushed it by pushing a skewered piece of it into the flame. Had I complained? I’d only said that we have a lot of candles. Hoarded, you said. And I realised this voice of the goose was that of Townshend, since it was Townshend’s goose, raised and fed on his attitudes. Townshend wanted too little; he’d helped not at all with the building of the bridge, would rather we all lived stooped and poor. He feared the colours and scents of wealth. I ate the morsel of goose. I’d no idea which bit of its body it was from, but it was oily and sapid and rich.

  Then I cooked it two pieces at a time on the skewer, so it could say nothing more. I ate as I cooked, as much as I could, and fried pieces in both the skillet and cooking pot to speed the task. The vacant happiness of eating filled me; the meat was tastier than any lifetime of bread. One mouthful of it scythed a whole field of summer wheat to stalk and husk. There was no choice but to open the door a narrow crack, and then a larger crack, for want of air to carry away the smoke from the fire and spitting fat. I cared that someone would see, but cared more that smoke would make me cough, and coughing would keep that soft flesh from my mouth.

  Yes, the people of this parish are hoarders, I found myself arguing to nobody, in defence of nothing but an imagined reproach. Do they want their loose change to go into a pot to build a bridge or a road, or start an industry that would make them tenfold richer? Or to make the church itself more sturdy and magnificent a vessel in which to reach heaven? No, none of these; they want to spend their money on candles, and they want to get to heaven by filling the church with trinkets and offerings as a finch brings grubs for its brood – so that while we have insufficient windows and too few carvings, we have more lights, I suspect, than the whole world combined, and buds and nuts and beetles, so that a visitor to our church might think the wind has blown the forest floor in and left it at the altars. And I wonder at times if that ship, our church, will sink under its own weight before it can sail us anywhere. I would rather it floated than sank; is this me wanting too much?

  Carracks of sugar sail into ports only thirty miles away, square-rigged and fearless ploughs of the sea. And Newman saw silver dripping from seams – dripping, as water from a sluice. The new cathedral at York has its Great East Window that tells the story of mankind, beginning to end, foresees our apocalypse even while it’s triumphant with sunrise. We have a ruined bridge and a church full of holy clutter. Do I want too much?

  I feared the goose wasn’t listening. Even with the door open, the room filled with smoke and my eyes swelled and reddened and my stomach began to ache as though I’d swallowed a rock that was stuck at the lower end of my ribs. A few pieces more, and then I should stop, a few pieces. The villagers might eat some last flesh on the Tuesday if they had any left, but my fast began this Monday night. There could be no goose in this house after that; any I didn’t eat would be wasted, and a sign of disregard for the abundant grace of God. I couldn’t bear to not have it. So I speared one piece after another onto the skewer and shielded my eyes. Wouldn’t you have done the same, even if it seems greedy in the telling? Then I cooked more to pile into muslin, thinking I might offer it to Carter. Cecily Townshend wouldn’t mind, or know. That fleeting appetite I’d woken with had lasted me well, everything after that was pleasure and greed, and that too was finally gone.

  By eight o’clock that morning I was more stuffed with food than I’d been for months or years, though a third of the goose still remained in its pile of glistening pink. I washed my hands outside and splashed my face. No rumour of wind yet. In the village at this time of year we had only one way of telling the weather: if you can see the ridge, you know it’s going to rain; if you can’t, it’s already raining. I could see the ridge, the sun glowing low across its slumbering spine. But the promise of the day was already half-broken. Clouds were fattening, some from the north, some from the east.

  Golden hook

  FOR WHAT WAS left of the morning, while the villagers were at their jobs, I saw to my garden. Where nothing grew I turned over the soil to work in manure, and I tried to drain water away from those things that did still grow – some colewort, beets, turnips, parsnips, smallage, leeks, rosemary, radish. You’ll have to grow gills, I told them. They hadn’t a lot to say back. Oh for the days of sweet peas and vetch and beans and plums and gourds and peaches. Figs!

  I knocked the wattle fence deeper into the ground, else rabbits would be in there, and deer, sheep, cows, anything with a stomach. Robert Tunley, no doubt. Rotundley, as some privately called him. I made five shallow waterlogged trenches and scattered in broad beans. A little late – plant them on the first day of February’s new moon, they said, which was a week before. Still, what did the beans know, they couldn’t see the moon. All this cloud – nobody could see the moon. I covered them with soil that wouldn’t be coaxed anywhere near a crumble, in spite of trying. Ten o’clock had come by the time I’d finished.

  Out on the road, a patch of sun raced away the moment my foot met it, and the clouds had come down weighty. You could almost see the spirits aloft in these sudden shifts between light and gloom. They were marauding minutely between light shafts. Churning the air up into rain to make more river to curse bridge and crush hope.

  People passed on their way home from their plots, weary for lunch, with some weak sun glinting off the edge of their newly sharpened spades, and a sparkling rain beginning to tap at their coats and at the headscarves they were hurriedly tying. The weasel-faced hustler David Hikson, our seedy brewer, but today dragging a mangled harrow; ploughman and piper Morris Hall and his wife Joan; young Sal Prye; little Mippy; labourer John Hadlo and his sweet boy Tom; Marion and Jane Tunley, daughters of Robert, who spun, fulled, sowed, gleaned, made hay, kept house, tended animals; three of the barn boys, John Mersh, Ralf Drake, Mickey Brackley; Piers Kemp, miller, on his way back from Townshend’s; Adam Lewys, also ploughman, not with his pregnant wife. I nodded at them without speaking, and only some of them nodded back. Morris Hall grinned to show how unmurderous he was. The dean’s skulking and house-searching were beginning to unnerve them; all of you are suspects, the dean’s twitching lip said. If they thought I suspected them they were wrong, but I couldn’t stop to speak and maybe that made me look vexed. The truth was, I was more worried by my own gluttonous secret than theirs. I was stuffed to the seams with goose, my cassock greasy and my smell betraying.

  I followed the road towards New Cross. Here, our short stretch of cobbles, and on it the broken axle from the cart that had tipped the day before, which John Hadlo and Paul Brackl
ey were preparing to carry away. Though the dogs and the rain had dealt with the six churns of milk that had spilt, the water between the cobbles still ran greyish. Then the far sound of girls’ voices in song. The whiff of fire smoke and fresh ploughed earth, the cawing of hens, the snuffling of breath from bodies that had overwintered and grown wet and soft like wood. The yews clumped on the boundary of the churchyard were purple-barked and busy with hawfinches.

  There was Townshend up at the manor, a distant figure strutting around among his churns and pails like a man who’d lost something. His cows were tethered in a row along the fence of the pastureland, a paddock watered by hand in dry weather, drained by hand in wet, zealously surveyed from the manor rooms. The sweet song came from his milking girls who sang at their stools to make the milk flow thicker and faster – or so Townshend had heard. Next he’d be making them sing to the grass by moonlight, bare-chested; and if it would help his woeful cheese empire, maybe he should.

  I had two chunks of bread and three apples. One chunk of bread for John Fisker just past New Cross, who was down with a gash in the leg from the harrow; the other to Sarah, whose suffering was both less and more – no unseemly bone-baring gash through a calf muscle, but this burning from inside, and a growing madness. I’d had five apples, I’d eaten one. The last was at home. Three were in my hand. How was I to divide three apples by two? If I cut one in half, both halves would only go brown, and both brown halves would speak less of apple and more of lack of apple. Not such a loving God, they’d think, if this is all he can do. I should have brought all four and not saved one for myself; four doesn’t force the dilemma of three when divided by two, four is equally abundant, or else equally mean. I held the apples at my side uselessly, all three in one hand. I stood without movement under the strain of the decision, my eyes going this way and that: Fisker, Sarah, Fisker.

  When I reached Fisker’s door, which came first, I found myself knocking and leaving the bread and only one apple. When I reached Sarah’s door thirty yards down and knocked, and left the bread and two apples, and walked away before I’d have to see her wasted, grateful figure, I was glad at my decision. An apple in February is a treat, and an aid to thriving. I’d go again later, I thought, and bring her a blanket from the pile in the vestry.

  I called, ‘Hello?’ and nothing called back. Yet something or someone had moved in the church when I walked in, I was sure I’d seen a shadow fall across the chancel. I thought it must have been the churchwarden, Janet Grant, daughter of Mary, because she’d been that morning – the church was unlocked and the candles and incense lit. So I called again, ‘Janet?’ and I stood for a while for the church to prove itself empty. It was bright with morning. Awash with sudden sun, painted and lovely and shadowless. I smelt the sweetness of Newman’s soap, and almost muttered, Tom? Then remembered the dean; he must have been through.

  I hung the three rosaries on the nail and went into the little dark box; I waited for confession; I gave my prayer: ‘Thank you, Lord, for the bewildering spectacle of days that fall like water from a mill, one day after another, one beginning where the other vanishes. For the eternity of this.’

  ‘I’ve succumbed to envy, Father.’

  ‘Of what, or whom?’

  ‘Of you.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because you’ll always have enough to eat. You’ll be the last person to starve in this parish.’

  Why did she say this? I turned my head away from the grille because my breath and skin and cassock smelt pungently of goose-meat. I waited for her to say something else – I saw you filling your mouth with a goose, Father; explain that. But she said nothing.

  ‘I wouldn’t readily let my parish starve,’ I said, and it wasn’t a lie. ‘I have never. And if you did starve, I would too – I’m only a man myself.’

  ‘Well, if you are, then you surely will,’ she said. ‘Without Tom Newman, what do you think is going to happen to us all? Half this village has been renting his land for ten years, always good land, and if we’re late paying he gives us time, and if crops do badly he lowers the rent. Do you know how many good landlords there are in the world? None, now that Newman’s gone.’

  I knew her brusque and raspy voice – Agnes Prye, grandmother to young Sal, a widow who lived a stretch out of Oakham on the east edge of the parish, where Newman had a belt of grazing land and a dozen or so acres of tenanted arable in plots marked out neatly by doles. She was barn-ish in her build, hair the colour of cold ash, a firm face eased by a small, sweet nose.

  ‘It’s true he was a good man,’ I said.

  A rich man, too, who was two days dead – at some point soon the question would arise about his property and land. It would dawn on some of his tenants to take an opportunistic view: with their landlord dead and no known relatives in sight, wasn’t the land, by proxy, theirs, at least until somebody said otherwise? His cows, his sheep, his goats and pigs, his horses and his hens were property of the parish, in some opinions at least. A few were likely eyeing up his house, which was small but – as the dean was finding – no less comfortable than the manor, and had a chimney, and a mattress of duck down.

  As if she knew my thoughts, she said, ‘None of us know which relative from afar will turn up and claim his land, and there’s nothing worse than a distant relative. They never mean well.’

  The last time I saw Agnes Prye, except at Mass, had been about two weeks before, with Newman, when they’d brought his horses to be shod. Newman had hired her to manage the three mares that grazed the paddock behind his house, probably in exchange for some land – but maybe not. Maybe he paid her, he was shrewd like that. If you paid someone, they had money. If they had money, they could rent more land, and who would they rent it from? A man like Townshend who never paid a penny, or the man who gave them the money in the first place?

  ‘Envy is the saddest of sins,’ I said, ‘the one God would most like men to conquer.’ I laid my hands on my thighs and turned my face towards her, though she might not have known. ‘Laziness is a man wasting time, greed is him wasting food or money, anger is him wasting his peace. But envy – envy is him wasting his fellow man. Wasting the solace of other men.’

  She breathed with an old rhythm that had worn a track across her heart. I could hear the tired progress of it.

  ‘Why did God give us one another?’ I said. ‘Why did he make us love and need one another? Why do animals huddle together in the field, when the field is big enough for them to stand alone?’

  ‘Life is lonely enough, Father, that’s why.’

  ‘And so we’re given each other for company on earth before we reach God in heaven. To envy your fellow man anything is to waste his love, to forget what a comfort he is to you.’

  Then she said tentatively, ‘But you aren’t a fellow man. You are – the Ghostly Father, him between us and the Lord. The golden hook, didn’t you say? The golden hook that the fisherman must use to catch the fish. Well, lucky you, to catch all the fish. Do you know what it is to be ignored by our God? No, because you’ve his ear constant at your mouth.’

  ‘And you’ve my ear at your mouth.’

  ‘But the Lord grants the final mercy, doesn’t he? I envy you because whatever you do, he’ll listen and forgive and protect you from hell. Whatever you do, even the most dire of all things, your neck will never have to get familiar with a noose.’

  I wanted to ask her, What is it I do? What dire things? I saw her vividly then in the street, some months before when the sun beat hot, with a horse’s tether in her chapped fist, thick strong calves emerging from the russet tunic, her hair hidden by a wimple as though to declare she remained married, though her husband was dead. She was waiting with an expression that didn’t dare be anything but blank and unknowing. The horse was dozing in the sun, resting lax-lipped on her chest.

  ‘I am primus inter pares,’ I told her, ‘chief parishioner. Parishioner, you see, which makes me one of you.’

  ‘Our Ghostly Father, higher than the angels.’


  ‘And also one of you.’

  ‘But you’ll never go hungry.’

  ‘I’ve often been hungry.’

  ‘And you will never be punished.’

  ‘I’m punished like all the rest.’

  She shifted on the cushion; kneeling wasn’t comfortable for those with stiff joints and wide legs made for work. ‘What shall I do, Father?’

  ‘Declare what you’re grateful for, every day for seven days declare it to an image of Mary and, when you don’t have an image of Mary to hand, declare it, if only to the air.’

  I remembered how she’d looked fixedly downwards at nothing that hot day, with the warmth of the sun on her. Was she thinking, The angels are above me, I must not look up? Perhaps she, tied to the earth by filth and horse flank and low hope, didn’t wish to hear that her priest was similiarly tied, didn’t want to be cured of her envy of him, didn’t even care if he did dire things – only wanted his holy neck to be safe so that it could be capable one day of saving hers.

  ‘May God give you a good day,’ I said at length, and she seemed to jump, as though she’d forgotten I was there.

  ‘And you, Father, a good day.’

  Cheesechurn

  FATHER, I SLEPT all day, I cut a hole in a wall to spy on a woman, I shovelled some of my no-good-clay onto my neighbour’s plot, I stole the last spoonful of honey instead of offering it to my husband, I ate the lucky egg, I cursed my father, I swore, I snored, I farted, I doubted.