1993 - In the Place of Fallen Leaves (16 page)

§

I found it difficult waking up in the mornings: I rolled out of bed but sleep still clung to me like a spider’s web, so that I performed my chores before school like a sleepwalker. But I was shaken awake that unfortunate Wednesday when I stumbled over to the chicken coop with a bucket of water and a pan of corn and found them all dead, every last one, the laying hens, the pullets, the bantams and the cockerel too. Only when I looked closer did I see that there were two chickens left alive on their roosts, catatonic from terror, beady eyes staring straight ahead. Mother wrung their necks and ordered me to stay in my room for the rest of the day for leaving the door of the coop open the night before, her hands shaking with anger as she restrained herself from lifting the wooden spoon she was holding.

It was a sure sign that this was a summer unlike any other when birds’ carcasses became a frequent sight, since birds go off to die in secret. Now, though, they appeared on the lawn, in the yard and on the Brown. Even Douglas Westcott, who knew all about animals, had never come across this peculiar catastrophe. He’d hand-reared wild mink by virtue of acquainting them with his voice before their eyes opened; when he went fishing he put maggots in his mouth to warm them and make them wriggle; and when the last Viscount had died it was Douglas who was hired to catch the pigeons who lived on the roof and dye them purple for the period of mourning. But he couldn’t work out what was happening now; he wasn’t even convinced it was a fox had destroyed our chicken brood: he’d noticed how scarce foxes had become, and those that were around were friendly, ‘like they used to be, when there was rabies’, he claimed.

People were beginning to agree that the things going wrong were the fault of the flea-ridden children and the lawless dogs of the hippies who’d arrived back in June, having been forcefully diverted from their original destination, Stonehenge. They arrived in time for the summer solstice, aware of the pagan fire festival we carried out despite the derision of a succession of Rectors, not because anyone actually believed in it but simply because it was exciting. That year, though, no one wanted to have anything to do with a pact with the sun of any sort, so the disappointed hippies had to enact the ritual on their own, drawing a flaming tar-barrel in an old wagon by long ropes. We watched from the Brown and applauded the display for its authenticity, especially the extent to which it imperilled the thatch on the Old Rectory.

The trouble was that the hippies didn’t know the lanes in the village: they nearly ran themselves over going down Broad Lane, and their fun ended when they tried to pull the flaming wagon up Rattle Street. They got it a quarter of the way up and called for all the women to join in, half-way up they yelled for their children, they were heaving and grunting and ascending inch by inch, they got three-quarters of the way up and called with panic in their voices for more help, so we kids on the Brown ran over and put our hands on the ropes and we dragged that wagon which was getting heavier as it burned, not lighter, we dragged it inch by inch until we were within a hair’s breadth of the top of the lane, when all of a sudden everyone knew simultaneously that they had no strength left. We all let go of the ropes at the same instant, they slithered through and burned our fingers, and we could only collapse on the steep tarmac as the wagon rolled away from us, gathering speed down Rattle Street, hurtling downhill to explode in a chaos of splintering wood and hissing steam in the shallow brook.

The hippies decided to stay, parking their small convoy of miraculous wrecks in the lane behind the rectory, and fetching water from the tap in the churchyard that never dried up, even though it wasn’t on the mains and all the streams were disappearing into thin air.

Ian joined a small group of men with mattocks, their blades filed sharp as scythes, to look for brooks whose courses they could divert. Their heavy boots rang on the earth like it was hollow.

“Tis so ‘ard the moles ‘as all suffocated,” old Martin the hedge-layer told me.

“P’raps they’ve just gone down deeper,” I suggested.

“Well, let’s ‘ope the buggers get lost and don’t find their way back,” he spat. A compulsive spitter, his palate dried out by that desiccated summer, old Martin hawked deeper and deeper, until he was finally cured of the habit when he began spitting globules of blood.

§

When drops of blood were found on bread taken from the oven grandmother said it was a sure sign the plague, after a three-hundred-year respite, was going to return before rain ever would, but when a spot appeared on the harvest loaf in the church Granny Sims confused it with the stigmata of the saints and revived her mother’s biannual petition for the incense and holy water of High Church ritual. Her claim that this was God’s reminder that He was omnipotent and could make it rain for believers whenever he wanted to inspired a revival of piety, and that Sunday the church was unusually crowded for early morning communion even though it was a service with no hymns. But the Rector belonged to the coincidental tradition of nonconformist priests stretching back beyond the limits of memory, and that week he made a visit to every house in the village and exhausted himself denouncing superstition, which he would have liked to rid the world of.

“Do you want the church to be empty, then?” one of the newcomers asked him, smiling.

“Yes,” he solemnly replied.

The Rector’s arguments were successful, not through their logic, which was all the more convincing because his days as a theological student were coming back to him, with their evenings of intense, chimerical debate which intoxicated in the small hours over black coffee and cigarettes but had vanished in the morning, leaving behind only throbbing temples; he succeeded not through arguments that only one or two of the newcomers and perhaps Ian could follow, but because of his persistence, refusing to leave the easy chairs by the stoves and drinking tea and smoking until they agreed with him that God’s omnipotence was not incompatible with free will, that whereas predestination was an archaic concept which meant you might as well lie in bed all day because you were guided inexorably by the ultimate destiny of your soul, predetermination allowed you to choose whether to get out of bed on the left or the right side, according to the dictates of your conscience, and continue through the day in similar free fashion, suitable for the freeborn farmers of Devon, and the way God meant it to be.

“Pelagius told us so, after all,” he argued, “and it’s been confirmed by the quantum physicists, as you’ve doubtless heard,” and people furrowed their brows and nodded agreement.

So that by the time of the harvest dance a week later, even though the blood on the loaf had sprouted a bright, flowery fungus, only one or two of Granny Sims’ most loyal cronies still joined with her in agitating among the women for the institution of daily Mass and the recruitment of choirboys from among the idle schoolchildren.

§

Tom had watched Susanna for years, for as long as he could remember. Her family had moved into the very first of the newcomers’ houses built on the slope down from the church, across from us. I was only a toddler then: huge yellow bulldozers, driven by dwarves, transformed the earth from one day to the next, gouging out lunar craters and creating whole new platforms of soil. Mother had to go round our house every evening before tea, cursing the bulldozers and pickup-trucks as she righted lopsided pictures that had trembled askew.

Susanna must have been hardly school age, and Tom still at Primary. Some time between then and when she left Primary herself to go to Newton Abbot, Tom first noticed her, and he began without realizing it to watch out for her. He watched her every morning, surreptitiously through the crowd as they gathered around the telephone box by the Brown, until Fred drove him and the older kids off to meet the school bus. It never occurred to him even then to talk to her. Tom didn’t speak to people.

Later, after Tom had been released from school to spend his life in the fields and Susanna had been given her pony, she appeared to him less often but more distinctly. He would hear the horse’s hooves first, and his body flexed.

His older brother Ian handled animals like the vet did, no more than was necessary, calmly assessing them as he did so. Tom, though, manhandled them. Whether he was setting a fleece-sodden ewe back on her feet or backing a bullock through pens with his shoulder, he did so with all his might, grunting, pitting his own weight against theirs. And he loved the feel of them: the thick matted wool of the sheep, which he grasped in handfuls in order to lift them, and the chunky flanks of the cows, their thick breath smelling of new-mown hay.

Tom would be alerted from his labours by the sound of horses’ hooves, and he’d look up, eyes darting like an owl: he’d watched her cantering through driving rain, he’d watched her flying across snow, he’d watched her splashing through spongy meadows after a storm, her jodhpurs flecked with mud. She was only fifteen but she was mistress of her mount; her authority was absolute, the pony’s obedience unquestioning. Tom had seen her one winter morning leading him back to the stable after a hard ride: he was glistening with sweat that evaporated in the cold air all around him and Susanna was enveloped in the steam that poured, intermittently, from his nostrils.

She was able to ride her pony almost anywhere with impunity. I don’t suppose she was ever aware of how strange that was. The farmers who would normally have bellowed without a second thought at anyone else were curiously spellbound by the sight of this carefree maiden, her long blonde hair billowing behind her as she cantered across their land, and they would watch her scattering sheep or making holes in hedges that she’d unsuccessfully tried to clear, and let her go by with no more than a friendly wave.

Ever since May, though, Tom had seen her differently from before, her form now indistinct through heat haze, an incomplete mirage. His imagination had to define her, to fill in what he could no longer see, and he found her more mesmerizing, and more distant from him, than ever.

§

Although nobody could really believe it was possible, the air was getting drier. The old bell in the church made its strange boom when no one had touched it, and Daddy said he was being bitten by the door handles. It must have been around then that grandmother told me her electric theory of memory. She said it was just one of the mysteries of life that electricity had clarified for her, when she realized that memory wasn’t stored in some hidden corner of the skull; grandmother saw in all its simplicity the truth that events don’t evaporate as soon as they’re over but simply change form, existing in magnetic fields in the air. The brain acts as a receiver, tuning in to memories.

“That’s what dreams are,” she told me, “when we’re asleep we mixes up our own and other people’s experiences by mistake.”

“What about Daddy?” I asked.

“The cider rusted up ‘is receiver, poor love. His memories is scattered on the wind.”

Barn-Dancing

T
hat summer Geraldine Honeywill was pregnant and she ate so many carrots she turned orange. Mother eventually let Daddy go out without his heavy jacket, and he was soon as brown as the rest of us, and almost as dark as the first black people ever to stay in the village, a Barbadian family who rented the diplomat’s house next door, in order to enjoy an English autumn. Their son showed the village boys how to play cricket properly, and so for the first time the football was put away at the height of summer. But although he taught them the techniques of spin and off-cut, and how to appeal with conviction, what couldn’t be taught was how to be slow and quick at the same time, with the languid bones of a cat.

The older women in the village, when they passed the Brown, were reminded of the dusky babies born in neighbouring villages during the Second World War, when American troops were temporarily stationed in Exeter, who were taken round and shown off by proud grandparents. Only the father of this Barbadian family was unhappy. A judge in Barbados, he never forgot the face of someone he’d sentenced, and on only his second day in the village he recognized Douglas Westcott, whom he’d once confined to a night in the cells in Bridgetown for drunk and disorderly conduct and threatening behaviour with intent to commit violence to a person’s person in a public place. He spent the remainder of their stay inside, sheltering from the English climate that he’d dreamed of for forty-eight years but which now turned out to be so disappointingly like his own, and from the imagined revenge of Douglas Westcott. He didn’t even come out later on during the virus of indifference when Douglas smiled, and he certainly wasn’t going to risk a possible scene at the barn dance. He let his magnificent wife and young son and daughter go but he stayed at home, the only other person in the village apart from grandmother, who refused Ian’s offer to drive her the short distance.

“I’ve seen enough dancing for one life,” she decided. “Midsummer madness ‘tis. Makes me dizzy at my age.”

At the harvest festival dance that forlorn summer men forgot their predicament for the evening, and like every other year people’s mothers danced with other people’s fathers in Joseph Howard’s barn, though there was no hay to play in, and they had to make do with holding each other’s hands as they staggered home. It was to be the evening that Tom plucked up the courage to approach Susanna Simmons. He watched all evening, as he’d watched for years, with a lump in his throat that felt like a mixture of sadness and danger.

Grandmother stated categorically that the dances were no good no more, not since the last of the church musicians, with their scraping fiddles and their wheezy harmonium, but no one really believed her. The band, which included the Chagford piano tuner on accordion, still attended by one or two persistent mosquitoes, was led by a short, toothless man who called out the same steps that had been entirely forgotten from the year before and the year before that. Daddy found himself on an equal footing with everyone else, though he took it for granted and so did they. The only people who knew the steps were Miss Branham and Miss Tuck, who took the men’s parts with us girls for the first few dances, while the men stood sullenly around the walls of the barn and the band gradually whipped up a whirlpool of fiddles and skirts and sweat and cider.