The View From the Cart (8 page)

But we danced and sang and watched the fire die down as the moon rose high and we watched for whatever messages or signs there might yet be for us at the beginning of that remarkable summer when my daughter began her menses and Edd began the final seasons of his life.

The meaning of Wynn's rune seemed to last for months. First Spenna came, driving two early spring lambs before her. They were scrawny from being weaned too soon, and she explained that their mothers had died and she hadn't the time to trouble with rearing them.

I looked her in the face. ‘Not time to trouble?' I echoed. ‘When they could keep you in meat through the winter and more?'

She looked down at her feet, smiling a little. ‘‘Tis a gift for young Wynn, then. We've been fortunate this spring, with all the lambs alive and fattening well. Take them, will you?'

I can't pretend it was difficult, but I gave her a pot of honey to take back with her. Before she went she gave me some news.

‘Bran's sick, did you know?'

‘No. What ails him?'

‘A cut went bad, and the place is getting bigger.'

‘Where?'

Spenna put a hand on her upper arm. ‘About here. He says it was nothing - a blackthorn scratched him when he was pulling a sheep out of a thicket. He gave it no thought until it started to hurt him. The poultice seemed to draw it at first, but then it got worse. He can scarce move his arm now.'

I pursed my lips. ‘That shouldn't have got so bad. Who's tending him?'

‘That's the thing. Maggy is away to see her girl, in the Zummerlands, so there is none left with the skill to draw the poison. They tried pressing it out, but ‘twas too sore. He knocked them all away.'

‘Sounds bad, Spen. Is that what you're telling me?'

She shrugged. ‘Bad enough, I reckon.'

I told Edd as soon as he came in, and said maybe he should go and see his brother. Cuthie heard me, and came close. ‘No need to go there,' he said. ‘I shall pray for my uncle. That will heal him.'

Edd made the mistake of laughing. ‘So I've a miracle worker for my son, have I?' he said. ‘Too many ideas in that head, boy, is what I say.'

Cuthman whipped round like a snake. ‘‘Tis true, for all that. If I pray for him, then he will live. If I do not, then he'll die. Which will it be?'

Edd narrowed his eyes. ‘Take care, lad. I'll have no such words under this roof. A man dies when his time is right, not for your saying whether or no.'

‘Hush!' I ordered them. ‘What's this talk of dying? Bran has a stiff arm, is all. Maybe he could use some help till it be better.'

Cuthman looked at us both, his lips twisted in a sneer. ‘Then I make no prayers for him. And see what will happen.'

Bran died two weeks after that. Cuthman loudly insisted that his lack of prayers, at our ordering, had been his uncle's death knell. Edd and I glanced uneasily at each other, saying nothing. Forbidding prayers for the sick seemed then a foolish act - though neither of us could recall exactly forbidding Cuthman anything. The sickness in Bran's arm had gone to his neck and chest, turning him black and putrid, stinking so foul that no-one could get close to him. They buried him with his green story-telling gown and cups, plates and other grave goods. Bran had been a figure of some renown, and there was a crowd at his burying. His sons carried him to his resting place, and his wife, Raga, seeming old and shrunken now, wept – though taking care not to come too close to his body.

The family shared his goods, but every one of the sons had his own prosperous holding, and no real need for further stock. They took the cattle and hogs between them, but seemed indifferent about the sheep. Holding our breath, we waited for a decision from Raga. Finally, she told Rannoc to drive the whole flock up to us.

‘Edd has always been an outsider,' she said. ‘But he is a good man, with a hard life. Take him the sheep and may they bring him joy.' Rannoc relayed the message carefully.

Edd so forgot himself as to give a whoop of triumph. ‘Twenty good ewes!' he cried. ‘With lambs besides. It's a fortune, wife!'

Rannoc looked uneasy. The bounty seemed to him, as to us all, to be excessive. But sheep were plentiful throughout the village, and some were being killed before their time, or taken further onto the moors for their grazing.

Cuthman came forward. ‘I shall be the shepherd now,' he announced. His tone left no opening for contradiction. ‘I know what to do.'

It quickly became plain that Cuthman had to be our shepherd, whether he wanted to or not. The new ewes required daylong attention at first, as they tried to return to their former home, and the lusher forage of the valley. They hurt their feet on our granite outcrops, and one day wandered as far as Cranmere Pool, which was well away from our usual grazing.

So it was that Cuthman had to watch them. At daybreak, before they began to wake and move away, he would be there, waiting to guide them to a fair patch of ground and keep them under his gaze. Slowly they would drift further and further from the hut, until at midday he would begin to herd them homewards again, little by little, the sheep eating as they went the fine thin grass between the tussocks of heather and drinking from the countless springs and streamlets which ran down any slope. With luck, by dusk they would settle down at a point not too far from home, ready to begin all over again the next day.

‘What do you do all day?' Wynn enquired, gazing at him curiously.

‘I pray,' he said.

Wynn laughed. ‘What? All day long? What do you pray for, little brother?'

‘For a sight of the Saviour. For courage, goodness, wisdom.'

I interposed, before his sister could mock him again. ‘Cuthman, where do you get these ideas? Who do you speak to of such things? Do angels come to you, out on the moors, or merely strolling monks?' Too late, I realised I must sound as scornful as Wynn had done, and tried to put an arm round him to counter such an impression. He ducked away from me.

‘The ideas are nothing remarkable, Mam. Everyone wishes to become better than he is. I pray to become a good shepherd, with strong sheep and plentiful lambs.'

‘That's very fine of you. But a sight of the Saviour? That strikes me as a lot to ask for.'

He shrugged. ‘Perhaps.'

As he grew, the lad seemed forever hungry. I remembered my mother complaining that she could scarcely keep food enough in the house for my brothers' needs, as they grew from boys to men. Cuthman would wrap up a whole loaf and whatever meat he could find, with apples or plums in their season, and take it with him in a stout sack, slung over his shoulder. By the time he returned, the sack would be empty and his belly demanding a large supper. ‘We shall have to slaughter one of those lambs of yours before its time if this goes on,' grumbled Edd, who had seen our food stocks dwindling. Cuthman nodded.

‘Plenty of lambs,' he said, shortly. One of the orphans which Spenna had given us was a ram, fortunately not yet castrated when he came to us, and intact still at the time we gained the flock from Bran. Cuthman gave that animal special attention from the first, until he grew into a fine sire for all the future season's lambs.

I had heard other women comment on the strangeness of the time when their children turn to full grown people. Over those two or three summers, with Cuthman's flock flourishing and Edd somehow crumbling away, the old pattern shifted into something quite different. Wynn played a part in this, by leaving us for days on end to stay with Spenna in the village. She worked with the potter, learning her art and the mysteries of firing the different types of clay. She went on a cart down to the southern edge of the moor, where a special clay could be had, and came home full of the sights she had seen and the people she had met. It was her first time away from the village and she gained a new understanding of how wide the world was and how much there was to discover. She stayed a few nights with us, describing every detail of her journey. Cuthman listened avidly, questioning her on the roads and whether she had passed any churches or hermitages.

But we adapted to the changes, and life continued. I tended my bees and fowls and spinning and weaving. I grew vegetables in a plot behind the hut, and gathered fruit and berries. Edd milked the home cow, and continued to grow an acre or two of corn. The hogs did poorly, often breaking out of their paddock and running off to live as their wild brothers did in the forests to the north of us. Since Bran had died, something went out of Edd. It had frightened him that a life could be so brief. We could both feel the shadow of death in the hut, but we never spoke of it. We made much of the blessing of the sheep, and the happy life that Wynn was forming for herself.

When it came, it came swiftly. Edd had cut his meagre crop of corn, and was threshing it in our little barn, when I heard him cry out. When I found him, he had his hand to his head, his face crumpled with agony. I looked foolishly for blood or a wound of some kind. But the wound was too deep for me to see. As I watched helplessly, he fell over onto his side, and scrabbled horribly with his left arm and leg, trying to right himself again. I ran then to lift him, to save him from such awful indignity.

Somehow I got him to lie straight and still. His face was strange, one side of it all loose and sagging. When he tried to speak, his mouth wouldn't work and formless sounds emerged like thick cream glugging from a narrow-topped flagon. When I asked him whether he was in pain, he gazed at me uncomprehending.

I couldn't leave him on the barn floor. It was cold out, and he would take a chill on top of whatever else had happened to him. Carefully, I propped him onto the leg which seemed to have some strength in it, and supported him on the worst journey of my life. It took us an hour to cross the few yards to the hut. I tried it all ways, and finished up with Edd dragging behind me, his arms over my shoulders, my back bent over, taking all his weight. He seemed not to understand what was happening, and made no effort to help me. When we got into the hut, and I let him slump onto our bed, he was dead.

I was not much better. Only in the final minutes had I become aware of the strain on my own feeble frame. The urgent need to get him into the hut seemed stupid to me, once I understood that I had been carrying a dead man. I could have left him for Cuthman and it would not have mattered. But I had set the flames in my back racing again, as severely as they had when the damage was first done, a dozen or more years ago. I collapsed beside my husband, both fists digging into the place where I was hurting. The pain left me breathless, weeping and terrified.

All I could do was wait for Cuthman to come home. Dusk was setting in earlier, for which I was thankful, and I watched the sky slowly darken as I lay beside my dead husband. Time and again I shifted, trying to convince my back to stop hurting, to believe that this time it was a simple strain, which would ease with a few hours' rest. Each time, the agony seemed worse. Whatever it was that had broken or torn when Cuthman was born seemed to have sundered completely now. I could not lift my legs, nor even move my feet. By the time Cuthman appeared, I was convinced that I would never walk again.

The hut was in darkness, no rushes burning to show the boy his way home, no supper cooking for him. He knew something was amiss before he reached the open door. ‘Mam!' he called.

‘Here, Cuthie,' I moaned, trying to warn him that something terrible was awaiting. ‘Quickly.'

He was at my side, looking from me to his father in the gloom, before running to strike a light. He dropped the tinder twice before he got a spark, and carried the lamp across the hut to look at us again.

‘He's dead, son,' I said. ‘And my back has failed again. I can't walk. You must fetch help.'

Utter horror filled his face. He put both hands to his head and gripped fistsful of curls in a frenzy. ‘No!' he screamed. ‘Oh, God in Heaven, Holy Jesus, please no.' For a short while, he was mad, running to the door and crashing his fists against the lintel. Then he came back to me, his eyes red and wild.

‘Get help, son,' I whispered.

Angrily, he shook his head. ‘First I will make things right here,' he said. ‘My father must be attended to and taken from your bed.' Breathing deeply, trying to calm the shaking which was racking his whole body, he laid one hand on Edd's cold body. As if burned, he snatched it away again, whimpering.

‘Leave him, it's all right. Go and fetch someone.' Speaking was an effort for me, so fearful was I that any exertion would kindle the flames in my back yet again.

‘Everyone's in their beds by this hour,' he countered. ‘It will wait until the morning. I must do it.' He spoke as if to himself, gathering courage to handle his father's body again. He made a grimace of disgust as he realised that the body was soiled in the breeches area.. ‘Ugh, how can you lie beside him that way?'

‘Believe me, I have no choice,' I spat back. ‘I carried him from the barn, when he had the seizure. He died on my back. When we fell onto the bed, neither of us was ever going to get up again, if I had only known it.'

‘Hush, Mother!' He was calming now, and concentrating on the task in hand. ‘I promise you that you'll be up again. ‘Tis just a strain in your back from the heavy weight you carried.'

I remembered then that Cuthman had not seen me when I first hurt my back. At least, he had not been old enough to understand. By the time he was running around and taking notice, I was almost well again. Weakly, I just shook my head, and let some tears run into the pillow beneath my head.

The night passed in a haze of pain. I wet the bed, hardly knowing I was doing it, and said nothing of the cold discomfort to Cuthman. He had carried Edd awkwardly into the side room where we kept spare jars and clothes and other things and laid him on the floor; the room was so small that Edd's feet came through the doorway into the living space. He set a light burning beside the body, and knelt for an hour praying for his father's soul. That was when I let my water go into my bedding, unable to disturb the lad at his benisons.