Gathering the Water (11 page)

‘I couldn't help overhearing …' I began.

‘Ellis,' one of them said. ‘Arrested in York.'

‘Arrested?'

‘Took all your employers' money and spent it.'

‘He was paid to help me here.'

‘We know he was.'

‘Known him for ten years,' another added, his tone making clear to me their dislike of the man.

‘What do you mean when you say “took”?'

‘What I say. He was paid in advance to do a job. Took the money and threw it all away in York.'

‘Why there?' I said.

‘Perhaps he thought it was far enough away.'

The city was barely forty miles distant.

‘There is a branch of the Board in York. They have several schemes connected with the place.'

‘Bad luck on Ellis, then.' They all laughed at this.

‘Is he in gaol?'

‘Where he'll stay for six months until he's tried.'

‘And in the meantime I am to go on without him.'

‘Better off,' one of the older men said. He spat heavily into the cone of ash.

‘I appreciate you letting me know,' I said.

I asked them their names. Most of the people here shared the same ten or a dozen Christian and surnames. As in all other things, there was no superfluity here, no exotic flowering amid the grasses and reeds. There were Riggs and Cloughs, Lumbs and Cleggs and Scales, all of which might just as likely have been the names of the features
around them; thus were the two – people and place – bred into each other.

I was grateful for having been allowed so easily into their company and conversation. The rule here was to avoid whole sentences where a single word would serve, to avoid as many definite and indefinite articles as possible, and to eschew even words themselves where a grunt or a nod or a shake of the head was sufficient to impart the necessary meaning.

One of them handed me an enamel mug. I took it and drank from it, but what I had taken for water was a raw spirit and I choked at the sudden heat of it. The laughter of the men around me outlasted my coughing. I regained my breath and immediately the mug was refilled and handed back to me. I cannot deny that, though it was of the roughest sort, there was something satisfying about the numbing burn of that spirit, sitting on the cold hillside with only the prospect of another empty day and evening ahead of me.

I had heard it said of the miners that they drank copiously while they worked, and that working in a state of intoxication was the only way they managed to endure the extremes of their labour.

I asked them about the mines. A pipe was lit and handed round, coming to me in turn. They said the mines were played out and that they were excavating thinner and thinner seams. Only three small pits remained in operation. A decade ago there had been four times that number. The sale of the land alone had closed six mines. Some of the men had found work elsewhere; those who remained had taken over the workings from the old landowners. I could not begin to understand how they made them pay;
nor even how they transported their ore to the smelters so far away. I had some idea that this went over the valley head to the west, but I knew no more.

The mug was refilled several times over. I drank my share and we stayed like that for an hour.

When I finally came to stand I affected a greater sobriety than I felt. I had indulged myself in the ease of their company, and I took several deep breaths to clear my head. They themselves seemed little altered by the spirit; even the boys, who had taken their own lesser share, walked and talked without any obvious sign of it.

Our farewells were loud and prolonged.

I woke the next day still suffering from the drink, and I walked into the wind to clear my head. On the open land to the far north the heather was being burned in great swathes, filling the air with sheets of smoke.

I encountered an old woman following the course of the new shore. She came to where her path ran into the water and looked out over the unbroken surface.

‘I wanted to see if the bridge was still there,' she said.

‘Covered over,' I told her. ‘Ten days ago was the last time any part of it showed. The water was at its foundations for a week before that.'

It had been the most substantial of the structures this far up the valley.

I looked around me. It was a rare, bright day, chilled but
with the illusion of warmth. Twelve years ago I had travelled in Greece, and I could not deny that there were similarities between this stony upland and some of the places I had visited then, and I was lost for a moment in my memories of the distant excursion. It had lasted almost three months, after which I was to set out and make my mark on the world.

There was a small but noisy rock-slide on the far side of the river and we both turned to watch as the loosened stones and turf slid into the water.

‘We lived up at the head of the valley,' she said.

‘Up here?' There was neither dwelling nor ruin to show where anyone might once have lived.

It was calm where we stood, but the wind could still be heard high above us. Tatters of cloud swept over the high tops, snagging and tearing where they touched.

Eventually she turned to me and put her hand on my arm.

‘I saw that bridge being built as a child,' she said. ‘My father and his brothers built it in a single day. There was never much water this far up, and many said there was no sense in building it. My mother was loudest of all in her complaints. They gathered the stones from these hills. He said the bridge would help him with his animals.'

‘Then I'm sorry for its loss,' I said.

She went on as though I hadn't spoken. ‘He carved his name, and the names of his wife and seven children in the stones.' She paused briefly. ‘Shall I tell you why my mother was so against it being built? It was because she believed that malign spirits would not cross running water. Our house was on the far side. In her eyes, by building the bridge my father was doing nothing more than building a
causeway for those dark spirits. Everyone else might have thought her stupid, but it was what she believed.'

‘And she instilled that belief in you and her other children?'

‘Don't be ridiculous. We live in the modern age. Look around you, the world is turning faster and faster. But I tell you this,' she went on, ‘there are still those here who will spit three times before crossing the river. Even your dam won't cure them of that. When my father's bridge was built, people, small congregations, Rechabites and Antinomians from over the valley used to come and gather there. It became their pulpit, a place of baptisms, a gallery to stand and watch. If there are ever ghosts to come back and haunt this place, then it will be the joyless spirits of those Rechabites.' Then, pausing, and in a softer voice, she added, ‘My mother washed the corpses of her five dead babies in this river, my brothers and sisters.'

‘Is that why you came today?'

She nodded. ‘And perhaps if the world had not been turning quite so quickly then I might have beaten it by those ten days and made my farewells properly.'

There was by then no limit to the losses to be endured, loss upon loss, and loss within loss, all of them as tangible now as a blighted crop rising from the desecrated land in which it had so long ago been sown and then forgotten.

I noticed how she held her hands, how she clasped the fingers of one in the palm of the other, and then deftly reversed the position. She saw me looking at this and immediately dropped her arms to her sides. A minute later, she was at this agitated clasping and squeezing again.

I asked her if there was no way she might calm herself.

For the first time in many weeks she had come to my lodgings. Martha had suffered a seizure the previous evening, and now, at dawn, the doctor had come, along with a woman to sit with her, and the two of them had sent Mary Latimer out of the house with instructions not to return for several hours.

I gave her a warm drink and built up my poor fire, pulling our two chairs closer to it.

Slowly, her anxiety subsided and she sat breathing deeply, as though she were coming to her senses upon waking.

‘I'm pleased you came here,' I told her.

‘I could think of nowhere else to go,' she said bluntly, then, catching my eye, added, ‘Have I offended you?'

‘Not at all.' I sipped at my drink and scalded my lips.

A fine, cold rain blew across the hills outside.

She put down her own cup and held her hands to the rising fire. ‘I could have gone back to the dam, I suppose,' she said.

‘Oh? Why there?'

‘No reason,' she said. ‘It seems to have become a focus for everything else that happens here, that's all.'

‘I see.'

She looked slowly around the room. Her hands were again agitated in her lap. ‘Fretting', they would call it here.

‘Do they know what causes Martha's seizures?'

‘They are common enough to most forms of madness, I believe,' she said. She remained distracted; other thoughts filled her head.

I took a deep breath. ‘What would you have done if she had died? Or if the authorities had refused to release her into your care?' I said.

She smiled at my boldness. Her hands fell still and she pulled straight the material of her skirt.

‘Would I have been grateful and relieved that the decision was no longer mine to make, its consequences no longer mine to bear alone, do you mean?'

I nodded.

‘Had she died, I know I should not have let her be buried there. But if they had refused to release her to me,
then I do not know. What do
you
imagine, Mr Weightman – would I have fought them, do you think? Or is that only what you might
want
to think of me?' She bowed her head. ‘When she knows me and talks to me, when we share something together, something of what we were, then I am able to convince myself that what I did was for the best. But when, like last night, she raves at me and lashes out at me as though I were her vilest enemy, then I cannot convince myself that I would even want to know her as the most distant of my acquaintances. They tell me she is out of her mind at such times, but the things she recollects to throw at me, the things she says about me, about my treatment of her – I am less convinced than all those experts profess to be that the mad woman and the sane woman are as far apart as they insist.'

‘Surely, there must be some common ground between the two states.'

‘You sound like one of them.'

I sipped again at my drink.

‘You say it, and because you believe it to be a reasonable and, in your eyes, valid explanation, you feel justified in having said it. But you are not there when all this happens. You stand on your clifftop and watch a storm far out at sea. There is a luxury in these explanations, in this easy knowing, that some of us are not afforded.'

I acceded to this in silence for several seconds. Then I said, ‘But surely you must know that I am a man for whom not even the most violent of maelstroms holds any fears.'

She laughed. ‘I heard. They are already saying you stirred up the water with your own feet and that you knew all about the phenomenon before you were called to tame it.'
I exaggerated my dismay at this dismissal of my bravery.

‘What was the cause of it, do you imagine?' she said.

‘Whatever it was, it was not what they would have wished it to be,' I said.

‘A sea monster would have suited them best,' she said.

‘I doubt any monster worth seeing would have possessed the courage to swim this far from the sea. In Halifax, the river is one day yellow, the next day purple, depending on what dyestuff they are using that day.'

‘It would still have been something other than a dam and a reservoir,' she said.

‘Is that why they were all so keen for me to wade out and investigate?' I said.

‘You acquitted yourself well.'

‘Only because I don't believe in monsters.'

‘She was talking again yesterday, Martha, before her seizure, of the ark that someone somewhere might be building to save us all. We indulged each other in our speculation, and right up until the moment her eyes turned in her head and she fell from her chair, she was considering how such a thing might succeed. We decided eventually that however commodious and watertight a vessel might be constructed, there would be nowhere for it to go, nowhere for it to land and release its men and animals to begin anew.'

‘So, the extent of my flood continues to disappoint,' I said. ‘Do you believe all this excited imagining had anything to do with what happened afterwards?'

‘I doubt it. She said I would not be allowed on board the ark because I was too old and too ugly and that no one would want me to bear their children. She, on the other
hand, would be the most desirable woman there. She said every man in the valley would be competing for her. She rose to show off her figure, delineating point by point all this crowd of eager suitors might find attractive about her. I imagine she sought to embarrass me in some small and private way, but though I pretended to be shocked by what she said, I was, in truth, encouraged by it. She spoke as she had spoken as an excited girl with her life and her prospects still ahead of her. There was nothing truly salacious in what she said – just as there was nothing then, all those years ago – and she, too, revelled in her daring.'

‘A pity then that the day did not have some calmer conclusion,' I said.

‘A pity the water runs circles round you,' she said.

We sat together in silence for several minutes afterwards. The fire grew warmer, and the wind blew harder against the windows, adding to our illusion of warmth.

‘Do they gather on the dam solely to condemn it?' I asked her.

‘Whatever brings them to it, it's a hard thing to ignore. Did you imagine one or other of them might one day, and secretly, tell you that they admired it, that they saw in it what you see?'