Changing Heaven (18 page)

Ann skirts a broken wall, keeping close to its flank in order to avoid a marshy area to her left, carefully stepping from tuft of yellow grass to tuft of yellow grass; mind in the rooms along the Canadian highway, eyes on the Yorkshire ground. She is, therefore, face to face with the man responsible for
the smoke before she has a chance to change direction or to let her shyness compose an acceptable space between them. Acknowledgement is now necessary-unavoidable.

“Here now,” he says automatically, “don’t go that way. I’ve got it going nicely there.”

As he speaks Ann notices a perfect square of fire, the size of a suburban lot, burning behind him, and how his face and hands are blackened by smoke.

“Why,” she asks, surprised at her own inquisitiveness, “are you burning the moor?”

“For better growth later in spring.” He looks at the sky for a moment as he speaks, then at Ann. “They …,” he tips his cap in the direction of a far flock, safely gathered on a distant hillside, “they prefer newer grass. Not that it should matter to them then, or now. Walk over there. It sometimes advances fast … though it will stop, for certain, at the bog.”

Ann notices the bright blue eyes … startling in the midst of the blackened face.

“I’m black as coal pit,” he admits. “From the burning,” he adds, awkward in the face of her scrutiny.

Ann looks back to the escarpment she has been trying to reach. “Can I get there from here?” she asks, pointing.

“Not without ruining your boots in the bog you can’t. And what is it that brings you out here running with the wind? You aren’t hunting grouse, or rabbit, that’s one thing sure.”

“I’m trying to reach Ponden Kirk.”

“What on earth is the purpose in that?”

Ann confesses her fascination with the Brontës and the grass-burner’s eyes glaze slightly. Tourists for him have become, over the years, a form of litter on the moor. They rarely appear, though, in this season.

“It’s research,” Ann says in self-defence, sensing his disapproval, wanting to justify her presence in his territory.

“I myself,” he says, “have spent my time without searching, so could not be persuaded to begin re-searching.” He
pauses for a moment, awaiting her laugh. When it doesn’t come, it is because Ann has missed his humour, not because she has rejected it. Unaware of this, he turns again towards the practical, the native giving advice on the peculiarities of his own geography. “Well, you’ll have trouble searching today,” he comments, wryly. “The top there will still have ice. And you’ve taken the wrong track, that’s the truth. In fact you’ve departed from the track altogether. You should have turned right at Middle Withins – the last farm – and now it will take too long.” He consults his watch. “Dreadful and dark by five-thirty today. Excuse me.” He hastily rakes some of the burned grass back into the flames and, as he turns, Ann sees that the hair on his head, which she had assumed to be dark is, when untouched by smoke, in fact very fair, perhaps even white.

Returning, he regards her with humour. “It wouldn’t do to burn the full moor,” he says, his eyes smiling as he uses her words.

“So you are making better grass for the sheep?” Ann finds herself wanting, for reasons which elude her, to continue the conversation.

“Did I say that?”

“Yes, you said your sheep prefer newer grass.”

“They would like that, they would, that lot.” He jerks his head without averting his eyes from her face, towards the flock. “That lot, as I said, would prefer newer grass. But the truth is they’re not mine. Wall’s down as you can see.” He looks sadly at a pile of dark stones which have tumbled, over the winter, from the jig-saw linking of a drystone construction.

“You’re not a shepherd, then. Just a grass-burner?” This is Ann’s own attempt at humour, and it is greeted with precisely the same absence of laughter.

“It were scandal to be just that,” he announces, annoyed, not at all amused by her question. “I am a moor-edger, a carpenter, and a mill worker, a weaver. And it were real pity that I were not born a scholar like some.” Here he looks
at her with disdain, then turns his head away to supervise the smoke.

After a few moments he looks at her again. “Your holiday cottage,” he says, “I fixed it. The walls and the windows. For all that you have me to thank.”

“I love the cottage,” says Ann, hoping to mollify him, overlooking altogether the fact that he knows where she lives, the location of the door she stepped out of only hours ago. “What is a moor-edger?” she asks.

“I’m an encloser. I push the moor back where it belongs and then I wall it out. So that I can grow something out here-something to eat, or, depending on walls, something for the flocks to eat.”

“How do you have time, working at the mill?”

“There is no more working at mill. Mills closed last year all up and down valley and those that didn’t will soon. So some of mills’ weavers, the fortunate ones, return to the hills where they might have stayed in the first place for all the good it did them to descend into the valleys and attach themselves to machines. Clogs to clogs in three generations.”

The moor-edger is silent, both hands resting on the handle of his rake.

Ann, almost embarrassed, whispers, for want of anything better, the words “dark satanic mills” and the smoke-covered man whispers the words “William Blake,” cutting into her statement almost before she has finished uttering it, startling her, for she has already constructed a persona for him. The simple moor farmer, the mill worker, the uneducated; one with no access to words.

“‘Mock on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau. Mock on, mock on: ’tis all in vain. You throw the sand against the wind, and the wind blows it back again.’“ Now there’s something for you scholars to think about.”

“That’s Blake?” says Ann uncertainly.

“Himself,” sighs the moor-edger with all the resignation of one who spends time trying to reclaim unclaimable land. He looks to the west, whence the wind today is hurtling-carefully
reading the light and the dark, the end of one performance, the beginning of another.

“You’d best return to the cottage now,” he says softly. “Bad weather on the way and early nightfall. Besides,” his eyes smile again, “mist comes down, or snow, and then there’s Heathcliff’s ghost.”

A few paces away from him, Ann stops and shouts a question back across the wind. “You push the moor back?” It is as if she doesn’t quite believe him; as if he is inventing his own activities.

“Yes,” he calls across a sea of moving grass, “either that or it advances into the reclaimed land.” The wind lifts his hair. “There’s no stopping it, the moor.”

Ann begins the return journey to the cottage. Ponden Kirk, forgotten for the time being, grows smaller and smaller just above her left shoulder. Above her right the weather advances like a stealthy, murderous army. By the time she reaches the enclosed lane it has begun to snow. The wind becomes muscular, aggressive; its hands flat against Ann’s back.
Moor-edger
, she thinks. The term has an oddly horticultural flavour, suggesting flower gardens, weedless and raked gravel paths; seems unsuited to the smoky man whose musical speech and clear eyes are staying with Ann as she walks. That and his easy humour, what she was able to understand of it. She laughs a little as she remembers one or two of his statements. The sheep weren’t his. “That lot …,” he called them.

Behind the walls the white animals are bleating, calling each other into a firmly packed cumulous formation, grouped to meet the storm.

In unity there is strength.

I think that I shall never keep
, muses Ann, while the wind parts her hair into two equal portions at the back of her head,
a thing as stupid as a sheep
.

From the other side of the wall the adult animals demand safety, shelter. The lambs are quiet. Their panic has subsided in the face of focused fear.

“I
N ALL THESE
love affairs the loved one becomes the prison of the lover, Arianna.”

“You mean the prisoner?”

“No … no, I mean the prison, the dungeon. The loved one starts to acquire architectural properties; so much so that the bars the prisoner looks through could easily be the loved one’s ribcage and the lover knocking like a heart trying to break free. Each is held captive in a cage of the other’s bones. Each claims to be the heart. Each denies being the prison. And the terrifying truth is that the heart and the cage need each other for survival. Without the blood there is no bone. Without the rib there is no heart. I wrote a lot of poems about dungeons; the great dark inner caves of the loved one where the lover exists chained to the wall, powerless.”

“I told him that he was free.”

“But he wasn’t free and neither were you. You were each imprisoned in the dungeon of the other.”

“I couldn’t leave him.”

“He couldn’t leave you.”

Two lapwings dropped from the sky, flying in a synchronized trance. They sliced the phantoms in half at waist level and disappeared behind the adjacent hill. Emily scanned the sky for more birds, and then continued, “My brother looked for prisons, I think. Some people do, you know. He searched for prisons, hoping that they would break his spirit: that wonderful, hilarious, awkward spirit that I loved so well. It wasn’t so much that he was trying, all the time, to break his heart, as he was trying to imprison himself and to break his spirit. The married woman he supposedly loved had little to do with it really. She had to have the knowledge
of her cage of bone so that he could lock himself inside it. After that she could go where she wanted, do as she pleased, because he trapped himself inside a prison of her, where he was busily breaking his spirit.”

“Did I break Jeremy’s spirit?”

“No … yes … not on purpose.”

“And your brother – was his spirit broken? Did he succeed?”

“Ah, yes. He succeeded absolutely … brilliantly. ‘Tell me about this married woman,’ I would say to him, and, you know, each time I asked him, his reply was different … no … not his reply, exactly, it was the same in tone. Each time I asked him,
she
was different. And as he became more and more ill,
she
became, to my mind, more and more interesting.

“The first time he told me about her she was a saint … a paragon of virtue, clothed in modest grays and browns, her eyes cast down, her hands folded on her lap. But it was as if he were aware that this was not a suitable prison for someone as wonderful and terrible as he, and so he drank and brooded and raved and came up with something better.

“The next time he described her, her hair had changed from brown to black; her dress was satin, peach-coloured, I think. She had a band of black velvet wrapped around her throat. She was tall-she had been small before – and she had abandoned the needlework and charitable acts that he claimed had previously occupied her time. Now she played some kind of musical instrument, something foreign and exotic – a mandolin, if I remember correctly – and on this musical instrument she played nothing but songs of lamentation and farewell.”

“Jeremy did not sing songs,” said Arianna/Polly. “There wasn’t much music between us.”

“Just before he died, Branwell described his married woman one last time. By now he had not seen her or communicated with her for over a year. ‘I am dying for the
love of a woman whom I find impossible to interpret,’ he said. ‘Have I told you about her?’

“I said that he hadn’t, because I knew that, by now, she would have altered drastically. And she had. Now she was silent and motionless and reaching for him only with her eyes, which he said were just like his eyes. Her hair, which was red now, hung loose. She was brooding, resigned, dying for love of a man whom she found impossible to interpret. She drank and took opium and wrote long, desperate, undeliverable messages. She had shut everyone else out of herself.

“Branwell’s true spirit-breaker, his perfect prison. An exact reproduction of himself one week before he died.”

F
ROM THE COTTAGE
windows, Ann has a view of hills criss-crossed by drystone walls, the buildings of a few dark farms with names such as Slack Edge and Old Snap, Ponden Mill-now a craft shop and tea room-and, at the bottom of the valley, the Old Silent Inn. Behind the cottage, like two large parallel snakes on either side of the road, winds the village of Stanbury: a series of attached weavers’ cottages now converted into modern dwellings, one school, a small church, and two pubs. Above all this, the brown stain of the moor spills over the wide, gentle hills, which hold firm under vast, changeable skies.