Kit's Wilderness (2 page)

S
oon afterward he came to me again. It was in school this time. I was in the corridor below the art room. Some of his drawings were displayed there. They were dark things, black things: silhouettes of children on a gray field; black slow river; black tilting houses; black scratches of birds in a sullen sky. He imagined the old life in the pit below, and he drew the hunched bodies of boys and men in the tunnels, the squat pit ponies, all black on black except for tiny chinks of white given by candles or hooded lamps.

“Good, eh?” he said.

I nodded. “Brilliant.”

He showed me how the children in his pictures stooped and grimaced, how their bodies were twisted and stunted by the demands of the pit.

“Poor sods,” he said. “Our ancestors was like that, Kit. Stunted life, pain, then death. You ever think that?”

“Yeah.”

“Ha. I’ll bet. Don’t know we’re born these days, Kit. A hundred years ago that’d’ve been us down there, John Askew and Kit Watson, crawling on their bellies in the darkness down below. Where the walls collapse and the gas explodes and there’s bodies lying in the blocked-off shafts.”

A teacher walked by, Miss Bush. “Good morning, Christopher,” she said.

“Good morning, Miss.”

She stared at me. “Hurry to your lesson now.”

“Yes, Miss.”

“You as well, John Askew.”

Askew glowered. His face flushed. “Burning Bush,” he muttered as she walked away. “Don’t take no notice of that old cow.”

I moved away from him.

“Seen your story,” he said.

“Eh?”

“Your story. The one they put up on the wall.”

“Oh.”

It was an old tale, one my grandfather had told me.

“Good one,” he said. “Brilliant.”

“Thanks.”

He held my arm as I tried to move away.

“Your stories is like my drawings, Kit. They take you back deep into the dark and show it lives within us still.” He lifted my face, made me stare into his eyes. “You understand?” he said.

I tried to look away. My hands trembled and my flesh crawled, but I felt myself being drawn to him.

“You do,” he said. “You see it, don’t you? You’re starting to see that you and me is just the same. It’s like we’ve been together for a long long time.” He smiled as I pulled away. “You seen the monument?” he said.

“Eh?”

“Eh? Eh? The monument, Kit. Get your grandpa to take you. Then you’ll start to see more.

“We’re getting together after school,” he said as I turned away. “Bobby Carr, a few more. You’ll see them outside the gates. If you’re interested.”

I shrugged.

“It’s just a game,” he said. “A bit of fun. Outside the gates, if you’re interested.” He pressed a finger to his lips. “Keep it quiet, though. Tell none of them in here.”

I didn’t go that time, but in the end it was as if I couldn’t help myself.

W
e came to Stoneygate because Grandma died and Grandpa was left alone. We bought the house at Stoneygate’s edge, one of a long line that faced the wilderness and the river. Grandpa moved into the room next to mine. He had a single trunk of clothes and souvenirs. He put his old pit helmet and his polished pitman’s lamp on the shelf above his bed. He hung a photograph of himself and Grandma on the wall. The photograph was fading and there were hundreds of tiny cracks on its surface. It showed them on their wedding day at St. Thomas’ church. He wore a smart black suit and a white flower in his buttonhole. Grandma held a massive white bouquet before her long white dress. They smiled and smiled. Just beyond them you could see the graves, then Stoneygate, then the hills and the distant misty moors.

At first Grandpa was gloomy, watery-eyed and silent. He hardly seemed to know me. I heard Mum whispering that Grandma’s death would mean the death of him as well. At night he used to sigh and whisper in his room as I dropped off to sleep next door. I dreamed that Grandma was with him again, just beyond the thin wall beside my bed, that she had come to comfort him as he died. I heard her voice, soothing him. I dreamed that his sighs were his final breaths. I trembled with fear that I would be the one to hear him die.

But he didn’t die. He started to smile again, and tell his tales and sing his ancient pit songs in his hoarse cracked voice:

“When I was young and in me pri-ime,

Eh, aye, I could hew . . .”

He took me walking and showed me that the evidence of the pit was everywhere—depressions in the gardens, jagged cracks in the roadways and in the house walls. Lampposts and telegraph poles were twisted and skewed. Fragments of coal darkened the soil. He told me how things had been in his day: the huge black slag heap beside the river, the great wheels and winding gear, the hundreds of men disappearing every morning and every night into the earth. He showed me where the entrances to the shafts had been, told me about the dizzying drop in the cage to the tunnels far below. He pointed up to the hills past Stoneygate, told me they were filled with shafts, potholes, ancient drift mines.

“Look at the earth and you think it’s solid,” he said. “But look deeper and you’ll see it’s riddled with tunnels. A warren. A labyrinth.”

As we wandered, I used to keep on asking him: How deep did you go? How dark was it? What was it like to go down there, day after day, week after week, year after year? Why weren’t you terrified, Grandpa?

He used to smile.

“It was very deep, Kit. Very dark. And every of us was scared of it. As a lad I’d wake up trembling, knowing that as a Watson born in Stoneygate I’d soon be following my ancestors into the pit.”

He used to draw me close to him, touch my cheek, run his fingers through my hair.

“But there was more than just the fear, Kit. We were also driven to it. We understood our fate. There was the strangest joy in dropping down together into the darkness that we feared. And most of all there was the joy of coming out again together into the lovely world. Bright spring mornings, brilliant sunshine, birdsong, walking together through the lovely hawthorn lanes toward our homes.

Grandpa used to swing his arms and sing out loud and turn his face toward the sun. He used to grip my shoulders and smile and smile and I felt his body trembling with the love he held for me.

“This is our world,” he used to say. “Aye, there’s more than enough of darkness in it. But over everything there’s all this joy, Kit. There’s all this lovely lovely light.”

One Saturday morning I woke early and heard him singing. I went to his room.

“Grandpa,” I said. “What’s the monument?”

He laughed.

“Aye,” he said. “That’s another thing on my list to show you.”

And we crept out of the silent house and he took me to St. Thomas’ graveyard. A pretty place: old stone church, old trees, leaning headstones.

“Through here,” he said.

We followed the narrow pathway between the graves. We came to a larger grave, a high narrow pyramid. It was a monument to the Stoneygate pit disaster. It happened in 1821. A hundred and seventeen were killed. The stone was worn by rain and wind and age, but the long list of names remained. Nine-year-olds, ten-year-olds, eleven-year-olds, twelve-year-olds. The sun poured down through the ancient trees on us, dappling the stone, the earth and us with the shadows of trembling leaves.

“Imagine it, eh?” he said.

I reached up and ran my finger across the names. I caught my breath. Right at the top was the name I knew.

“John Askew,”
I said.
“Aged thirteen.”

“Aye. There’s lots of names you know on this old list, son.” He smiled. “You ready?”

“Eh?”

“Watch.”

He took my hand, gently drew my finger to the foot of the stone. The names there were becoming unreadable, worn away by trickling water and rising damp. Bright green moss grew over the letters.

He scraped away the moss with his fingernails. I read the final name, caught my breath again, felt the thudding of my heart.

“Aye, Kit.”

He smiled. “A great-great-great-great-uncle? Yours was always one of the family names.”

I traced it with my finger:
Christopher Watson, aged thirteen.

He put his arm around me. “Don’t let it trouble you, Kit. It’s long ago.”

I picked more moss away from the base of the stone.

Neither can they die any more, for they are equal unto the angels.

Grandpa smiled.

“All it shows is how you’re in your rightful place now: back at home in Stoneygate.”

He looked into my eyes.

“Okay?” he whispered.

I gazed back into his dark and tender eyes. “Okay,” I said.

I stared at our two names. John Askew, Christopher Watson, with the long list of the dead between us, joining us. I kept turning as Grandpa led me away, until the mark of my name had blended once again with moss and stone.

“Used to get a laugh here long ago,” he said. “Used to come at night as kids. Used to dance in a ring around the monument and chant the ‘Our Father,’ backward. Used to say we’d see the faces of those old pit kids blooming in the dark.” He giggled. “Bloody terrifying. Used to belt home laughing and screaming, scared half to death. Kids’ games, eh? What they like?”

He put his arm around me as we walked home.

“It’s great that you’ve come here,” he said. “I’ve wanted this, wanted to show you where you’ve come from, where we’ve all come from.” He patted my shoulder. “Don’t let it trouble you. The world’s so different now.

He pointed out across the wilderness.

“We used to say we saw the ancient pit kids playing down there by the river. They’d come out from the dark. The ones they hadn’t been able to get out from the blocked tunnels. The ones that hadn’t been properly buried.”

“And did you?”

“We said we did. Sometimes I almost believed we did. I squinted, saw them there at dusk, on misty days, days when the sun glared and the earth shimmered, days when the things you see seem to shift and change . . .” He laughed. “Who knows, Kit? We were young. You start to believe anything when you’re young. And it was all so long ago.”

That night, I stared out from my window across the wilderness, watched for skinny children playing. I narrowed my eyes, squinted, saw nothing but a dark thickset form walking above the river, a black dog at its heels. John Askew, aged thirteen, watched by Christopher Watson, aged thirteen.

I
t was Grandpa who showed me Askew’s place. We wandered one day toward the fringes of Stoneygate, where the houses petered out and the hills started. Skylarks flew up from the turf before us, gulls flew in with the mist from the sea. There were lanes that followed the tracks of abandoned coal lines, fields and paddocks that rose toward distant dark and misty moors. Ruined stone walls, ruined cottages with weeds growing through gaping windows. All around were ancient hawthorn hedges, red berries burning brightly among the dark green tiny leaves.

“Went nesting here as a lad,” Grandpa said. “Shinned up to the nests, popped the egg into my mouth, clambered down to my mates. Cut pinholes in them, blew the insides out, rested them in neat rows in boxes of sand. Not a thing that’s done these days. Against the law. But then it was what all lads did. And there were rules: Don’t leave any less than two, don’t destroy the nest. Rules that let the bird families survive, generation after generation.”

Grandpa cast his eyes across the steepening landscape, pointed to where the disappeared pits once were.

“Now it’s proper countryside again,” he said. “A great place for you to live and grow. Great place for young life to flourish.”

And he closed his eyes and smiled and listened to the larks, dark tiny specks that belted out their songs from high up in the sky.

The Askews lived in the final street, a potholed cul-de-sac of old pit cottages before the hills started. Most of the cottages were boarded up. Close by were a shuttered Coop Store and a tumbledown pub, The Fox.

Grandpa pointed into the cul-de-sac. A skinny dog roamed there, its tail curled up between its legs.

“That’s the one,” he said. “In the corner there. Where your mate lives.”

Curtains were closed at the windows. There was an upturned pram in the beaten garden, an empty rabbit hutch. We stood for a moment. We saw the curtains tugged aside a few inches, a woman’s face peeping out. Nothing but the dog moved. There was sudden music from another of the houses, a heavy pounding beat, then a woman’s bitter scream, and silence again. The woman at Askew’s window stared. She stood in front of the curtain, holding a baby in her arms, watching us.

“The mother,” said Grandpa, and we turned away.

We met the father as we passed The Fox. He stumbled out, cupped a cigarette to his mouth and tried to light it. He muttered and cursed, leaned against the pub wall, flashed his eyes at us. His face was red and strained.

Grandpa nodded at him. “Askew,” he said in greeting.

The man stared at us, blinked, refocused. “It’s you,” he said. “Watson.”

“Aye,” said Grandpa. “And this is my lad. My son’s lad, Christopher.”

The man glared at me, spat down onto the broken pavement.

“Christopher Watson, eh?” he said. He wiped his lips with his sleeve. He coughed and cursed. “So what am I to do, eh? Kiss his bloody precious feet, eh?” He stuck his head forward. “Eh?” he said. “Eh?” Then laughed and coughed and cursed again.

Grandpa drew me on, back toward home, back toward the wilderness, where we passed through the children playing and came upon Askew himself. Jax was at his side. He sat on a rock above the river with his sketch pad on his knees. His hand moved quickly across the paper. He turned and saw us there, and his face darkened. I raised my hand, but he ignored me and quickly turned toward his work again. The dog Jax watched us and growled.

“A guided tour of the Askews,” said Grandpa as we walked back home. He laughed. “They’re like the Watsons. True Stoneygate folk. Generation after generation of them, stretching back into the deep dark past. And aye, they’ve always been a queer crew, but when you needed a mate, they was always there.”

Later that evening, he knocked on my door. “Thought I had this somewhere,” he said. He showed me a little pit pony carved from coal. “Lovely, eh?” he said.

I held it in my palm. It was black and smooth as glass, worn by time, but you saw how real it was, how sharp its detail had been.

“Carved by that lad’s grandpa,” he said. “Many years ago.”

“Askew’s an artist as well,” I said.

I showed him the drawing that Askew had done of me.

“That’s how it goes,” he said. “Things passing down generation to generation.”