Changing Heaven (23 page)

“But Jack Green, and all those things he felt and all the times he was alone in forests pretending to be the wind, how could you know that? You could never prove it.”

“I know the truth of the idea of it and have no wish to prove it otherwise. And you, listening the way you did, knew the truth of the idea of it as well. And I know,” he adds quietly, “that you will tell that story to someone else some day and that’s how the truth gets passed on.”

The wind groans in the chimney and forces a tattoo of sleet against the window’s dark panes.

“I call this story ‘Footpath to Fire.’”

“Did your father call it that?”

“No, he did not, for this story is my own. And you’re the first I’ve told it to except for myself. I tell you because you are an
oftcumdun.”

“Pardon?”

“One who comes from far away.”

“So that’s what the small Heathcliff was, and she … Emily … never even explained where he came from. And then later he was a revenant.”

Now John looks confused.

“Revenant…:” Ann explains, “one who returns after a long absence or, like Catherine, for half of the book a ghost, a spirit, one who returns from the dead. But, enough of that, tell me the story.”

“Two hundred years ago these hills were inhabited by hand-loom weavers. In the summers, when the rows of the windows were left open, the air filled with the sound of banging shuttles. And no one had clocks. Weavers rose at dawn and retired at dusk; in between they wove a highway of cloth and tended the sheep who provided the wool. Once a month they set forth on the old pack-horse track in order to take their wares to the Piece Hall in Halifax. All in all, it were happy time. Nobody had to murder anything in order to survive, the water in valley was pure and chose its own direction, followed its own inclinations like. Spirits lived there. The Pennine people were strong from long bouts of walking over moors, from breathing fresh air, and from good work that involved a transformation process that they themselves controlled: from lamb to spindle to loom.

“Then, men from the south came and put factories in the valley where cloth was made speedily on steam-powered looms and sent out into the world on steam-powered locomotives. And all the hand-loom weavers whose cottages had been absorbing the light of the hills for years had to
come down from chambers – their upstairs rooms – close their oak doors, leave the high clear places, and descend into the dark souls of the cotton and woollen mills in the valley. At first it were just the men who’d go but then, as the pay was so little and all their independence gone, the other family members as well. Sometimes the women, but in particular the older children, the ones over eight years old.

“The lad I’m speaking of was one of these-began working in the mill at fourteen – following every morning the footpath down to Grief Mill that other children had made a hundred years before. Children that were now sleeping in the chapel graveyard. People these days have thoughts about this and they call it child abuse. But he were a happy lad, knowing nothing else but clogs on a footpath with his mates or his father, the haze of the sleepy afternoon schoolroom and the high roar of the machines all morning-except Sundays which were spent over yonder at Scar Top Sunday school, and evenings with his mother and father where they stayed on the little hilltop farm.

“Once they were inside a mill these people of the hills could speak no more; their voices being lost in the noise of the looms. And yet the conversations continued, for lip-reading flourished. Think of it: silent gossip, voiceless invitations to religious meetings, the telling of folktales and current events, the words to hymns and popular songs all passing like minnows through that sea of noise.

“There were a peculiar soft look to the air around the workers in these mills, as the dust from the sizing filled every shaft of light from all the windows. And it fell down on everything in the room, this dust; on the floor, on the heads of the workers, and on the looms themselves-their steel framework. That were the lad’s blackboard. He could write words of Greek there and rub them off, wait a few moments for the constant clay rain to cover the iron, and begin again. For he were learning the classics, but not in
school. There in the mill where his mind was set free by the drone of the machines.

“There’s something to be said, I suppose, for clouded vision and ears filled with wind. Working in one of those mills could be like standing on a seashore immersed in blinding spray, if you look at it from that point of view.”

Or the highway in a snowstorm
, thinks Ann, remembering.

“Now and then,” continues John, “the owner of the mill, Thomas Grief the Third, would stroll up and down the long aisles between the weavers, inspecting not so much the cloth as the diligence of those making it. He would be an odd sight, would Grief: a tall, thin man, darkly dressed, and emerging from a shaft of dusty sunlight. He would be becoming clearer and clearer as he approached, until every detail of him were looming and breathing over the poor weaver-the way the teacher does in school. It were enough to make a lad lose his place and enough to distract a lad from learning the classics. But our lad-out on some windy sea with Odysseus-didn’t even notice that his master were in the vicinity. Just kept on writing and erasing those words in Greek until he felt a hand on his shoulder.

“He jumped then and his heart beat harder than all the shuttles around him and he began to mouth desperate excuses and apologies into the noisy air. Thomas Grief, however, had never learned lip-reading and so he heard none of this. He picked the lad up like a kitten by the scruff of the neck and carried him, nearly choking, into his frosted glass office at the other end of the mill.

“The lad had never been in mill owner’s office before and as he rubbed his neck he looked around and were right dazzled. The mahogany desk! The brass plaques! The polished porcelain knobs and handles on any number of drawers and cupboards! And most of all the paper, the great beautiful piles of paper which were situated to the left of a silver-topped glass inkwell. But even as he looked covetously at this, he was paying attention to the mill owner
who was pacing angrily up and down on the carpet of coloured geometry problems that covered his floor. Mostly the lad were astonished by the man’s height and by his long, long face, how his eyes and brows seemed to slide down the immense length of his face and then be pulled back up again by some kind of extraordinary inner effort. The trouble with this lad was that he would always be doing at least two things at once: working the loom and learning Greek; fearing Grief’s retribution
and
examining eyebrows and carpets and facial tics. Perhaps it came from his father who would never stop moor edging though he worked, dawn till dusk, in the valley.

“‘How did you know those words?’ the mill owner demanded, his active face pushed up against the boy’s.

“‘Please, sir,’ he said, ‘I have a book.’

“‘Yes, I understand that must be so. But where did you acquire this book?’ The volume, which lay beside the boy on the bench, had been confiscated by Grief at the same moment that the owner of the mill had lifted the boy into the air.

“‘It’s my father’s, sir, and he lets me have it.’

“Thomas Grief the Third stood with the book in his hand and, now and then, he opened it up and closed it again with a snap, without reading. ‘Go back to your loom,’ he said to the boy and as he said this his facial features flew into action and then reorganized themselves again. He did not give the lad his book.

“The next day the lad was miserable at his loom, for, as I’ve said, he was always wanting to be doing two things at once and, apart from the Bible, that were the only book his father had. He could remember quite a lot of it, however, having taught himself the letters and the words from the glossary at the back and so could run through some of it – the part with the Cyclops for instance – in his mind as he worked. But with the book not there nothing moved him to learn new Greek words and so by the end of the day the sizing lay, an undisturbed blanket a quarter of an inch
thick, on the metal frame of his loom. He were right dispirited, cast down like, not by the loss of the story, for he still had the first part of that – the part he’d been able to decipher-in his memory, but by the loss of the beautiful and frightening words that told the story, the words that leapt out at him from the puzzle of the dead language.

“It were two or three weeks later when Thomas Grief the Third once again appeared, coming into focus out of the fog of sizing dust, and this time the lad saw him and bent his head down to his task so that the mill owner would not perceive that his eyes were filled with hatred for the man who had stolen his book. Then all of a sudden he felt his collar tighten in a familiar way as Grief pulled him to his feet and dragged him, more gently this time it’s true, towards the office.

“There, a magnificent sight awaited the lad: seven books piled high on Thomas Griefs desk, and his own among them. ‘These are for you,’ said the mill owner, ‘and during tea I’ll teach you if you like. But you mustn’t read or write while you work the loom, or there’ll be an accident.’ And then his eyes and nose and mouth visited one another as I’ve said before and flew apart again.”

John pauses here and the wind rattles every door in the cottage. It bangs its fists up and down the chimney. Ann shifts uncomfortably in her chair.

“Is that all?” she asks. “Is that the end of this story?”

“I wish it were.”

“But it isn’t.”

“No.” Silence. More wind. “About this time there were problems in the mill, though the lad knew little about them, travelling around the world as he most often was in his mind with Odysseus. Silent, mouthed words, however, were moving across the floor, through the bright river of threads, concerning the founding of a union which would force the owners to pay fair wages and give the weavers a better life. Much of this talk must have gone on during tea, while Grief and the boy decoded Euripides or Homer.
Whatever the case, the lad were amazed to see his father enter the frosted glass office one day with several of his mates and a list of demands in his right hand.

“It’s a funny thing about politics-how even if you don’t go looking for them they will always come looking for you. The lad had heard his father and the men speaking of the union in angry voices in the kitchen, but he hadn’t believed that their talk would move beyond the realm of ideas. But now, when he and his father milked the cows, he could tell by the light of the one candle they used that the older man were angry. At night he went to sleep with the words ‘Our demands have not been met!’ bursting through walls of his room, interrupting his dreams of ancient Greece.

“You can’t, perhaps, imagine what a fire in the valley looks like at night from above. No, it wouldn’t be likely that you can imagine that … so I’ll tell you. It looks, at first, festive-the way that sparks fly into the air-like the Queen’s birthday until you see that it’s all the wrong colours, dark oranges and reds. Then it looks like an inferno of Dante’s, but man-made because, of course, this particular fire were burning architecture the square lines of which were especially obvious battling with the more unpredictable shape of the flames until, as you might expect, the fire won. The lad could see all this from his chamber window and the whole time he would be thinking how his books were gone. He could see in his mind’s eye each of their pages slowly glowing beside the flaming mahogany and bubbling molten brass. He could imagine Thomas Grief watching his mill burn from the big house on the opposite hill. And he could imagine his own father’s hand lighting the fire.

“No one ever asked how Grief Mill burned. The workers never got their union, at least not then, so the only result of the conflagration were that blackened ruin, now covered with vines, and a longer walk, a different path to the mill at Lumbfoot. The lad never saw Thomas Grief again, as he left the district soon after the fire. And so, at the age of
fourteen, he gave up the study of Greek. His father never asked about the whereabouts of the first book, perhaps because he suspected the truth about it. Life at the little moor-edge farm continued as usual.

“Except that book were gone, and the others as well, so that the lad had to keep the memory of the stories and the wonderful language that told them in his mind or else, he knew, the books would be forever erased from his life.

“But memory has a way of playing with things-perhaps you’ve noticed that yourself-and as time went by the lad began telling himself stories that were not quite like the original. And since he often told himself the stories at night before he went to sleep, his dreams crept into them and, as time went by, some of his own memories. And because he lived here, on the moors, it were impossible-you’ll like this-to keep the weather out of the stories. He had learned, with the help of Thomas Grief the Third, all the Greek names for the winds, amazed at the language that knew and expressed the differences that make up the turbulent ocean of air.

“Eventually, the stories were all his. A bit borrowed, true, from the Greek and a bit from the Bible, which were now his only reading material, a bit from his father, a bit from his mother. Very little from the afternoon classroom. More, much more from the silently mouthed rumours of the mill, his memories of Thomas Grief, and the persistent surrounding weather that nudged its way into his mental narrations whether he wanted it to or not.

“That were how he became the local story-teller and it made him right popular too-a good person to sit beside in the pub, entertaining like. But only he himself knew the agony of it, the loneliness: telling the stories, often ones of lies, betrayals, injustices, and broken hearts, over and over to himself in the dark until they came to be just right. And always the far chambers of his brain were holding on to whispers of a dead language that he had once learned but had now forgotten. Then there were the glimpsed images
of a man’s face; one that could disintegrate, then reassemble itself before your very eyes. That and one memory he could not erase: the fire in the valley reflecting from the windows of workers’ cottages where he believed the ghosts of the hand-loom weavers must have puzzled over what it was that had suddenly turned their upstairs rooms orange.”