The Complete Uncle Silas Stories (7 page)

When I arrived on the threshold, Silas was still sitting in the yard. He seemed to be trying to straighten his legs. He kept taking hold first of one leg, then another. One minute they were crossed and he was trying to uncross them. A minute later they were uncrossed and he seemed to be trying to cross them again.

He saw me coming down the steps.

‘Git me up!' he bawled. ‘God A'mighty, me legs are tangled like a lot o' wool. Git me up!'

I got hold of him by the shoulders and was getting him to his feet, he staggering and slithering like a man on skates and swearing wildly all the time, when suddenly there was a bawl of alarm from across the yard and I saw the sow come round the straw-stack.

‘Silas, stop her, stop her!' my grandfather shouted. ‘Head her off, Silas!'

‘Git me up, boy, git me up!'

Somehow I managed to get my Uncle Silas to his feet as the sow came blundering across the yard. There was something pathetic about her. She was like a creature in anguish. She was
snorting and grunting and slobbering with distress and as my Uncle Silas advanced to meet her he spread out his arms, as though in tender readiness to embrace her.

‘Goo' gal, goo' gal,' he kept saying. ‘Come on now, tig, tig. Goo' gal. Whoa now!'

Suddenly she saw him. But it was as though she had not seen him. She simply lifted her head and kept straight on. My Uncle Silas too kept straight on, muttering all the time in his thick tender voice: ‘Goo' gal, come on now, tig, tig, goo' gal. Tig!' and she snorting and slobbering in the gentle anguish of alarm at her predicament.

All at once my Uncle Silas stopped. He held up his arms and began to leap about with a sort of lugubrious excitement, like a man trying to hold up a train. ‘Back, back!' he kept shouting. ‘Back. Tig back! Tig!'

But the sow kept straight on. She seemed if anything to increase her pace. And suddenly my Uncle Silas let out a curious yell of blasphemous astonishment and threw up his hands.

The next moment the sow hit him. She caught him full between the legs and she went on after she had struck him, so that momentarily my Uncle Silas was lifted up. For another moment he seemed to ride on the sow's head, backwards, his squat bow legs flapping like the ears of the sow herself. Then the sow threw him. She gave a sort of nodding toss of the head as a horse does to a fly, my Uncle Silas falling flat on his back in the yard again, his legs waving, his arms clawing wildly at the sow as she stampeded over and past him, her great teats flapping his face and half-smothering his roars of blasphemous rage.

Then something happened. My uncle let out a yell of extreme triumph. The sow stopped. She seemed to stagger, as Silas himself had done, as though her legs were tangled among themselves, and with my Uncle Silas bawling at the top of his voice she gave a sudden sigh and sank on her side.

‘George, boy, I got her, I got her! George, I got her!'

‘Hold her, hold her!'

‘I am holding her! She's atop on me!'

‘Hold her for God's sake. Hold her!'

My grandfather came running across the yard and all the men and half the women out of the house. I ran up too.

My Uncle Silas had his arms round the sow's neck. They were locked in embrace, the sow herself was lying over on his chest, her great belly flattened out softly over one of his legs, her teats distended, as though she were about to give suck to a litter.

‘I'm holding her, George, I'm holding her.' He spoke with alternate triumph and tenderness. ‘Goo' gal, tig, lay still, goo' gal.'

‘You hold her a minute, Silas, while we git her up.'

‘I'm holding her, George boy. I got her all right.' There was a look of perfect beatitude on my Uncle Silas's face as he lay there with the pig in his arms, a look of pure intoxicated content. ‘Goo' gal, tig. I got her, George boy. Tig, tig. Goo' gal!'

‘Now, Silas'—my grandfather and four men bent over the sow, seizing her great carcase, in readiness to upheave her—‘when we lift you let her goo.'

‘I got her, George boy, I got her.'

‘You let her goo when we lift, Silas.'

‘Tig, tig.'

‘Now, Silas, now, let goo. Silas, let goo. Dall it, how can we lift her up if you don't let her goo?'

‘You wanted me to git her and I got her. Thass all right, ain't it?'

‘Yes, Silas, yes. But we can't git her up if you don't let her goo.'

‘She's all right. Let her alone. Good old gal, tig, tig.'

‘Let goo, Silas, let goo!'

Then the men and my grandfather heaved again, but my Uncle Silas's arms were tight round the sow's neck and the sow herself lay half over him with blissful content, immovable.

‘Silas, you must let goo! Now then! Silas! Why the 'Anover don't you let goo! Let goo, Silas, let goo!'

‘Thass all right, George boy, thass——'

At that moment my grandmother came up. She was a small, tart, wiry woman, like a bird; her words were like swift pecks at Silas.

‘Silas, get up. Get up! Silas, I will not have it. Get up!'

‘He won't let goo,' my grandfather said. ‘Every time we try to pull the sow off him he won't let goo.'

‘Oh, won't he?'

She suddenly seized hold of Silas by the head, just under the neck. From that moment my Uncle Silas lost some of his gaiety and content.

‘Tillie, what y'doing on? Let us alone. Tillie, me old——'

‘If we can't pull the sow off him we'll pull him off the sow. Get hold of him.'

‘It's all right, Tillie. I got her; lemme goo bed with her. I wanna goo bed with her. I wanna——'

‘I'd be ashamed of myself, Silas. Stand up!'

Suddenly my grandmother heaved him by the neck and the men heaved too. The sow gave a grunt and a struggle as my Uncle Silas was heaved from beneath her, and in another moment both he and the sow were jerked to their feet, her great teats swinging free and the back buttons of my Uncle Silas's trousers bursting off at the same time like crackers.

‘My God, that's done it. Hold 'em up, Silas!'

My Uncle Silas gave a single wild stagger, his trousers falling down, concertina-fashion, before the men caught him and lifted him up and carried him off into the house, his legs wind-milling, his wicked devilish voice bawling all over the farmyard above the voices of the shrieking ladies:

‘Let 'em
all
come!'

It was the last I saw of him that night. In the morning, when I came downstairs, the guests had gone, my grandfather was in the fields, and there was no one about except my grandmother, who sat in the chair by the kitchen window, sewing the buttons on the back of a pair of tweed breeches.

‘Your breakfast's just in the oven,' she said.

For ten minutes I went on eating and she went on sewing, neither of us speaking. Then she bit off her cotton and laid the breeches on a chair.

‘When you've finished your breakfast you might take them up to him,' she said. ‘Put them down outside the door.'

After breakfast I took the breeches upstairs. I knocked at my Uncle Silas's door, but no one answered. Then I knocked again, but nothing happened, and finally I opened the door a crack and looked in.

‘Your breeches,' I said.

My Uncle Silas lay submerged by the bed-clothes. I could
see nothing of him but his mouse-coloured hair and a single bleary bloodshot eye which squinted over the coverlet at me.

‘Eh?'

‘Your breeches.'

‘Um.'

After that one utterance he was silent. It was, indeed, all I ever heard him say of his behaviour with the sow, except once, when I reminded him of it over a glass of wine. And then he said:

‘What sow? When was that?'

‘You remember,' I said. And I told him about it again, laughing as I spoke, telling him how he had caught the sow and held her down and then how the buttons of his breeches had snapped off as we strained to release him.

‘You must have been some buttons short that night,' I said. ‘Don't you remember?'

He sat silent for a minute, his glass empty in his hand, his lips wet and shining with wine, looking at me with the blandest cocking of his bloodshot eye in an innocent effort of recollection.

At last he shook his head. ‘No,' he said. ‘There's some things you can't remember.' His hand was on the bottle. ‘Mouthful o' wine?'

My Uncle Silas had a small rough paddock with a bramble cowshed at one corner, with two or three acres behind it for corn and potatoes, and one Boxing Day he said to Sammy Twiggle:

‘Sammy, Sam boy, there's a couple of pheasants as big as turkeys roost in that ash again my hovel. Come up a New Year's Eve and we'll git the gun. Make a party on it.'

Sammy was a retired house-painter, and he stood about six feet, with arms as long as a monkey's and a face like a laying hen. His nose was bulbous.

My Uncle Silas was no beauty either, with one eye bloodshot and his way of looking cock-eyed and satanic at the same time. But he could see all right, and so could Sammy. From the tops of ladders, they would say, you got a funny view of the world.

So Sammy came stooping in at Silas's door, like a beery giraffe, about one o'clock on the afternoon of the New Year's Eve, and Silas said: ‘Sit down, Sammy, and let's have a wet afore we start. Mouthful o' wine? Tot o' cowslip?'

He filled two tumblers with wine, and then, as they were drinking, he looked hard at Sammy, in wonder. ‘What the Hanover's that on top o' your head, Sammy?' he said.

‘That?' Sammy said. ‘That? That's a shootin' hat.' It was a big, loose green felt with a fancy feather in it.

‘Shootin' hat? Looks more like a pair o' the old lady's ham-bags dyed green. Shootin' hat. Where'd you git it?'

‘You gotta wear a proper hat for shootin',' Sammy said. ‘Any fool knows that. This hat belonged to Lord William. It's a real shootin' hat.'

‘Is it?' Silas said. ‘Well, I'll lay y'a a brace o' pheasants to a trousers button it ain't. So there. And I'll tell you what it is.
It's a fishin' hat. The pheasants'll think you're a blamed old turkey or summat. A proper shootin' hat's a deer-stalker. Looks like Noah's ark on your head, only upside down. I'll show you. I got one.'

So Silas went upstairs and came down with a check deerstalker on his head, and Sammy nearly had a fit.

‘That? That's a pike-fishin' hat,' he said. ‘You undo the flaps and you can sit then all day and your ears don't git cold.'

‘Sammy,' Silas said, ‘a gent was killed in this hat. Shot at. Mistook for a pigeon. That'll show you whether it's a shootin' hat or not. Look,' he said. ‘You see them two little holes this side? Well, that's where the bullets went in. And you see them two little holes that side? That's where they came out. Drop more wine?'

Silas filled up the tumblers and Sammy, defeated, drank.

‘You got the gun loaded?' he said.

‘I bin loading it all morning,' Silas said.

The gun was a muzzleloader, about fifty years old, and it was the reason for Sammy and my Uncle Silas coming together. The gun had once belonged to Sammy and my Uncle Silas had bought it from him for fifteen shillings and a young pig on one condition. And the condition was that Sammy should come and shoot with it once a year.

It was a very good gun, except for one thing. There were times when it would not go off. The trigger would jam and nothing on earth would move it. Finally, just as you had given it up as a bad job, it suddenly went off and blew the roof out or killed a cow or something. Otherwise a fine gun.

Silas always loaded it with powder and shot and old newspapers and rusty nails and old rats' nests and hairpins and dried mice and brace-buttons, and, in fact, almost anything lying about, and when it did go off it made a considerable impression.

‘Yes, I got him loaded,' Silas said. ‘But we can sit a minute. They don't begin to roost until about three o'clock. And, by
gosh! Sammy, they're as fat as butter. They're as big as turkeys. I been laying corn down for 'em for over a fortnight. You could catch 'em wi' your hands.'

‘Cocks?' Sammy said.

‘Cocks. And I tell y' they're as big as turkeys.'

After that they sat still, Silas filling and refilling the glasses, for a long time. It was a cold afternoon, with a light piebald fall of snow on the fields and the air dead still and frozen.

By the time they were on the fourth bottle it was three o'clock, and Sammy said: ‘If we don't git started, we shan't see whether they're cocks or hens or bushel baskets.'

‘Sammy,' Silas said, ‘them pheasants are so tame you could catch 'em in mousetraps. It'll be kids' play. What's wrong wi' sittin' here? Ain't we all right? Another mouthful o' wine?'

So they sat for another half-hour, and the feeling of twilight, snow-wild, was already growing strong when finally Silas got up and staggered into the kitchen for the gun and the powder-horn and the ramrod and the bag of rusty nails and brace-buttons and odd sweepings up for the reload. ‘You carry the bag and the shot, Sammy,' he said. ‘I'll carry the gun. And put your hat on straight.'

Very offended, Sammy staggered up, with his hat cocked on the back of his head looking like a cross between a bishop's mitre and a pair of horse's ear-bags. ‘Hat's as straight as I am,' he bawled. ‘Look at that blamed stag-stalker o' yourn. Terrible.'

‘Deer-stalker!' Silas shouted. ‘Not stag-stalker. Anyway, it's better'n wearing the old woman's trousers. Pipe down. And let's git on.'

‘Shame to leave that drop in the bottle,' Sammy said, ‘ain't it?'

‘It is, Sammy, it is. Put it in your pocket. Take it with us.'

So Sammy put the wine bottle in his poacher's pocket, and, carrying gun and bags and bottle, they staggered down the garden and over the fence and across the field. In the light snow
their tracks made a kind of crazy chain, linking up and staggering away, so that Silas bawled at last: ‘What's the use o' me walking straight if you don't? Pull your hat out your eyes, man. How d'ye expect to see straight?'