The View From the Cart Page 7

  ‘Get help, son,’ I whispered.

  Angrily, he shook his head. ‘First I will make things right here,’ he said. ‘My father must be attended to and taken from your bed.’ Breathing deeply, trying to calm the shaking which was racking his whole body, he laid one hand on Edd’s cold body. As if burned, he snatched it away again, whimpering.

  ‘Leave him, it’s all right. Go and fetch someone.’ Speaking was an effort for me, so fearful was I that any exertion would kindle the flames in my back yet again.

  ‘Everyone’s in their beds by this hour,’ he countered. ‘It will wait until the morning. I must do it.’ He spoke as if to himself, gathering courage to handle his father’s body again. He made a grimace of disgust as he realised that the body was soiled in the breeches area.. ‘Ugh, how can you lie beside him that way?’

  ‘Believe me, I have no choice,’ I spat back. ‘I carried him from the barn, when he had the seizure. He died on my back. When we fell onto the bed, neither of us was ever going to get up again, if I had only known it.’

  ‘Hush, Mother!’ He was calming now, and concentrating on the task in hand. ‘I promise you that you’ll be up again. ‘Tis just a strain in your back from the heavy weight you carried.’

  I remembered then that Cuthman had not seen me when I first hurt my back. At least, he had not been old enough to understand. By the time he was running around and taking notice, I was almost well again. Weakly, I just shook my head, and let some tears run into the pillow beneath my head.

  The night passed in a haze of pain. I wet the bed, hardly knowing I was doing it, and said nothing of the cold discomfort to Cuthman. He had carried Edd awkwardly into the side room where we kept spare jars and clothes and other things and laid him on the floor; the room was so small that Edd’s feet came through the doorway into the living space. He set a light burning beside the body, and knelt for an hour praying for his father’s soul. That was when I let my water go into my bedding, unable to disturb the lad at his benisons.

  He discovered my shameful condition in the morning, and cursed himself for a fool. ‘I should have thought of it,’ he accused himself. ‘I shall never let that happen again, Mam.’

  Having found me dry bedding, and brought me bread and milk, and carefully replaced the candle beside his father, he left the hut at a trot, heading for the nearest farmstead, over an hour away.

  I ate my breakfast and once more tried to restore myself to something more human. The pain was duller, but more widespread. I could curl and uncurl my toes with the greatest of effort, but nothing more. I wept again, for all that I had lost in those few minutes of Edd’s seizure. There would be people arriving through the day, as the news was broadcast. Wynn would come flying home. She might even borrow a pony and be here by noon. That eased me a little. My daughter would care for me. She would come home and take charge of the house and the bees and fowls and garden and spinning. She would nurse me and feed me and empty my pot.

  I heard the cart arriving outside, some time after mid-day. Hushed voices conferred outside and then Spenna came in. ‘What news!’ she cried, trying to form a smile of reassurance and hope. ‘What offence did you give to the gods, I wonder, for all this to befall you.’

  ‘The gods torment us for their sport,’ I said, with some bitterness. ‘No need for any offence. Where’s Cuthman? Is he with you? He has been gone so long!’

  ‘He returned to his sheep, saying he had done all he could for you and his Da. He was afraid they would stray beyond his finding if he left them all day.’

  I moaned, long and loud. His sheep! The boy was mad.

  ‘Hush,’ Spenna soothed. ‘He was right. If you lose those sheep, you lose everything. He will bring them close by for tonight, so there’ll be time for the burying in the morning.’

  ‘And Wynn? Is Wynn here yet?’ As we spoke, three men were carrying Edd outside to the barn, where he would be wrapped in winding sheets and prepared for his grave. Spenna watched them, not heeding my question.

  ‘You’ll have to say where you want him laid,’ she said. ‘There’s never been a burying up here till now.’

  ‘Under the sycamore. Not too close - away from the roots. He sat there sometimes, when he wanted a rest. And find his things, to go with him.’

  Spenna drew in a breath, hesitating over something. ‘What?’ I asked her, sensitive and irritable.

  ‘That ground is not consecrated,’ she murmured. ‘Priest won’t like it.’

  ‘Priest can lump it then. It’s consecrated by Edd and his passion for it. I would never get to visit him if they took him down to the church for burying. God can watch over him just as well up here - better, I shouldn’t wonder.’

  ‘We shaln’t be telling the priest then? Do it quietly, just on our own?’

  I nodded. Edd’s burying was for me and my children. We had lived in our own private way, and Edd’s dying should be treated the same. We would dig a good deep grave, and send him off with his grave goods and our blessings.

  Edd’s things amounted to a few carved animals, some earthenware beads he had made, and wore sometimes on a string, and a fine bone comb he had always prized. ‘He’ll need to keep those curls in order, even in the underworld,’ I said, with a sniff.

  Spenna bustled in and out, helping the men, lighting the fire which was dead and cold as Edd, fetching my pot and boiling some leeks and carrots for a scratch supper.

  ‘Where’s Wynn?’ I finally remembered to ask again. Spenna kept her back to me, and said nothing. Alarm raged through me, as the pain had done the day before. ‘Spenna? Where is she? Why is she not here?’

  ‘She’s away from the village,’ was the reply.

  ‘Away? Where?’

  ‘She went on a trip up to the coast, with Rannoc. You know – Bran’s youngest.’

  ‘With Rannoc? But she doesn’t like Rannoc. He’s Cuthman’s friend, not hers.’

  ‘He’s hers now, seems like. They’ve been keeping company ever since she came to stay with me. I thought she’d told you. They’re likely to marry. But he wants to live close to the sea, and has a fancy to become a maker of boats. They’re gone to see if they can find a little place to live somewhere. She’s artful at the potting now, and can do that while he’s venturing onto the water.’

  I closed my eyes and lay without moving. Then I said, ‘She must be brought back. I must have her here with me.’

  ‘Too late, my dear. A month ago, you may have convinced her. Now her head is full of the new life she’s to have. You surely knew, when she came to me, that she’d never be willing to stop out here in this lonely place any more?’

  ‘But - it’s her duty...’ I tailed off. Hadn’t I left my own mother, with barely a backward glance, to follow my man and his dreams? Cuthman would say that my selfish act had been repaid now, in its turn.

  ‘And who’s to go searching for her? She might be gone a month or more, roaming the seashore. She’s been restless since that trip to the white clay pit, just looking for any chance to be off again.’ Spenna was kind but emphatic. I sensed that she was trying to defend my daughter against my wishes for her future.

  I wept again, from eyes already sore from too many tears. ‘Then what will become of me?’ I whined. ‘Without Wynn, I’ll fade and die.’

  ‘Your back can recover again, as it did before.’ She was brisk now. ‘And then you had the two babies to see to.’

  ‘While now I have a dead husband and a son who thinks only of his sheep.’ Self-pity and bitterness made me shrill. On the last words, Cuthman came into the hut. His face was white, with violet shadows under his eyes.

  Chapter Seven

  The burying of Edd was dreadful. The ground was hard to dig after a long dry spell, and I was distracted by grief and the rage of Wynn’s absence. She should have been there, and I could not understand how I had lost both her and my man at the same time.

  We laid him out, with a scattering of herbs, picked from the dry clusters hanging from the roof of the hut. I had
no shroud for him. Spenna offered to go home and find something from her own poor cloths. I would not permit her.

  ‘We have to wrap him,’ she protested. I looked at the unyielding thing that had been my husband. He was not quite straight, despite our efforts. He wore little more than a sheepskin tunic over a linen undershirt. ‘He will do like that,’ I decided. ‘We can cover his face.’ I crawled to a corner of the hut and sorted through the collection of things belonging to Edd. I drew out a plaited leather belt that I had made for him when we were first married. ‘He can take this,’ I said. ‘He was fond of it.’

  ‘Nothing more?’ Spenna sounded wistful. The old priest of our girlhood had made much of the sinfulness of furnishing a grave with goods, which the village people had found distressing. It was common to slip a favoured carving or trinket into a grave without the priest observing it.

  ‘Perhaps this,’ I said sadly, holding out a small clay doll that Wynn had made when she was little and given to her father as a gift.

  ‘Why not?’ she eyed me curiously, doubtless wondering at my hesitation.

  ‘It would mind me of Wynn if I kept it for myself,’ I admitted.

  Spenna shrugged and left me to the deciding. ‘It should not go with him,’ I resolved after some moments. ‘The priest would call us heathens for it.’

  The priest arrived, summoned by one of Spenna’s children, and ordained that there was no real need for a shroud or a box. He and Cuthman muttered together, and chose the spot for the grave. In the village there was a burial ground close by the church, where the bodies of churchmen and chieftains were buried in splendour, and the villagers in plain style. I made clear my resistance to any idea of burying Edd there, when Cuthman spoke of it. ‘He created this farmstead,’ I said, with all firmness, ‘and this is where he should remain.’

  The priest sprinkled holy water on the spot they chose, and said his prayers over it, and then beckoned Cuthman to begin the digging. While that was under way, the man who was almost a stranger to me came into the hut and kneeled over Edd, holding his cross before him, and throwing me an occasional sheeplike look, which was intended to convey sympathy, I assume.

  Six or seven people straggled up from the village as the day wore on and Cuthman’s hole was finished. The wind was blowing bitterly from the east and the sharp crisp tang of winter was upon us. The leaves on the trees had started their turning, in the past few days and the sun was setting earlier each day.

  I hadn’t anticipated the utter horror of seeing the earth fall onto my lifelong mate as Cuthman shovelled it in. Edd lay in the dark cold hole, passive and uncaring, but still Edd for all that. Would he stay there, year after year, just twenty or thirty paces from the hut? Even though we intended to pile stones on top, would that be enough to persuade him to lie easy in the ground?

  I stood painfully, supported by Spenna, while the priest said his prayers, and Cuthman intoned ‘Amen’ over and over. It was a poor, sour little rite of farewell for a good man who had always done his best. I wept with pain and self-pity and despair.

  The priest promised me that Edd’s soul was gone to the Saviour, greeted with love, existing forever in peace and eternal bliss. God would heed our prayers for the soul’s journey across the great River and send his minions to welcome the newcomer in Heaven. I knew it must be true, but felt little ease for the knowledge. Edd might be surrounded by loving angels, but I was left here in the cold, with my crippled back and lost daughter. I nodded my thanks, and let the priest depart. Cuthman and Spenna piled the granite rocks on top of poor Edd, and I tried to wipe out the picture in my mind of the soil thumping down on top of him.

  Cuthman came to me later, when it was dark and the fire was struggling to warm the hut.

  ‘Mam?’ he whispered. ‘Forgive me.’ His face was pale and drawn, and there was a strong look of his father on him. A gentleness came over me.

  ‘Why, Cuthie? What have you to be forgiven for?’

  ‘Tis my doing. All of it. I was angry and ill-wished my Da, and you. Seems like I was mazed, out there with sheep all day. Mainly, it suits me. But just for a bit, I hated it, and made curses. Like a game, to fill the time.’

  ‘You told Wynn that you pray,’ I said, not caring very much for what he was telling me.

  ‘There’s good prayers and bad’ns,’ he replied. Crouching before the fire, beside the stool I had sunk onto an hour before, he wrung his thin hands together. A coldness flooded through me. Was it possible that my Cuthman had done this? Could my lad be a demon after all, as I had long ago suspected, a wicked creature who should be stoned or burned? Had he used his craft to destroy his own family? A sour taste filled my mouth, until I had to turn my head and spit onto the floor.

  ‘I can make amends,’ he continued in the same dull tone. ‘My whole life, from henceforth will be an atonement. I knew I was doing wrong, turning from the path of Christ, though only for two days. I made evil marks in the ground, and did evil things. I killed my own father.’

  I regarded him with rising horror. A picture came to me of the lonely shepherd boy, his head filled with dark ideas, despite his wholehearted faith in Jesus. I realised that his malicious deeds must have centred upon his private parts, and the solitary experiments which all youngsters indulge in. Indeed, for a moment I envisaged him using a sheep in these experiments, prompted, perhaps, by the tupping season, a moon or two before. Dimly, I understood how it might have been. A burning shame, perhaps imagining how his father would have punished him if he’d been witness to the deeds. Then a resentment against the fate which sent him up to live alone on the moors, month after month, which he would lay at the feet of his parents, who still held the power over his life that they always had. Rebellion might grow from the shame and bitterness. From there a small step to weaving murderous spells, out on the windy uplands with time so heavy and slow. Cuthman had known he had powers beyond the ordinary. How natural, then, that he should test them to the limit.

  A long silence hung over us. Cuthman looked to me to break it. I could think of nothing to say. More bile filled my mouth, but I swallowed it again. I was going to have to learn to contain more bitterness and pain than I could have dreamed of, only two days before.

  I spoke, finally. ‘We must find Wynn,’ I said. ‘We’re helpless without her.’ It seemed, even to me, a forlorn avoidance of the matter to hand.

  ‘No!’ Cuthman burst out. ‘Leave her to make her own life, away from us. We are damned now, corrupt. I warn you, Mam, we will never see Wynn again. She will marry and live happily. I will make sure of that.’

  ‘Then what?’ I sighed, flattened by his certainty.

  ‘I will atone. I will do it all. God will hear me, and forgive me, if I do penance enough.’

  ‘And will my back mend again?’ I said, more sharply than I might. ‘Or have your curses crippled me for life this time? When did this power to ill-wish first come to you, my son? Did you curse me all those years ago, on the day you were born? Or was it another, laying on me the curse of a wicked son who would ruin everything I had?’

  Cuthman looked at me, full of pain and pity and self-disgust. Then he swung round and left the hut. I made no attempt to call him back, despite the darkening sky and the fear of what he might do.

  Spenna came back the next day and stayed with me for two nights, deserting her own duties at home, and doing everything she could to reassure me that my life was not over, and that Cuthman would certainly return with his head full of plans for the future. As before, when my back prevented me from walking, I discovered ways in which I could help myself. Although it brought me terrible agony, I insisted on Spenna dragging me into a sitting posture, against the same old board I had used many years before. Then I could use my hands with some dexterity. But it was different this time. There were no children or man to feed, no clothes to make or mend. Spenna baked bread and stewed some pork, which provided us with all the food we needed. The important work was all outside. Edd’s half-finished threshing was on the barn fl
oor, as he left it, the rats making merry amongst the grain. The fowls had not been penned up on the day Edd died, and several of them had disappeared, snatched by foxes or badgers. Three survivors perched nervously on low branches, afraid to come down again. Spenna found another squashed between the hut and a stack of firewood, half its feathers pulled out, but still alive. Others crept about the yard, muttering to themselves the story of their terror.

  Finally, my son returned to me. There was blood on his tunic and on his chin. He seemed bewildered at my cry of alarm. When he understood its cause, he smiled unpleasantly. ‘I killed a hare and ate it,’ he said. My heart stopped.

  ‘Raw?’ I croaked. ‘A hare?’ An animal that had been sacred aeons before the crucified Christ had thrust himself into the world. An animal that could only be caught by the swiftest hound, and then never eaten by humans.

  He nodded. ‘I was too hungry to worry about cooking it,’ he said. His carelessness was both infuriating and reassuring. I made a great effort to let the matter drop from my thoughts. When he had washed his face and fetched his other tunic, he seemed more like his old self. ‘How fares your back, Mam?’ he asked me, with real concern. I tried to give a brave reply, but he seemed cast down by it just the same.

  Spenna slipped home when she had made sure that Cuthman was going to stay with me. She said little, but took my hand and pressed it hard. We both knew that my fate was fixed, and there was nothing she could do to avert it. I thanked her, with tears on my face.

  Cuthman ate the pork and a loaf of bread, and went out to the barn for some ale from the barrel there. He brought me a ripe red apple when he came in again. I ate it, remembering the apple that Edd had brought me the day of Cuthman’s birth. The memory made me weep.