The stranger returns and pulls up a stool, and joins them by the fire.
“Are you lost?” The man shakes his head and assures his host that as a rambler he is very familiar with the region.
“It’s just the weather that places us at your mercy. That said, we’re both grateful.”
The stranger looks now at the silent boy and smiles.
“Is the boy hungry? I have only a little food, some dry bread and milk, but whatever I have I’m disposed to share.”
The man laughs now, as though keen to draw attention away from the boy.
“Thank you, you’re too kind, but we won’t intrude upon you any more than we’ve already done. This unpleasantness will soon be over, and we’ll be on our way.”
“I see.”
“It’s been a troublesome evening for both man and beast.”
The stranger listens to his guest’s cautiously expressed sentiments, but he finds it difficult to give credence to anything that falls from the lips of this anxious man. He starts to wonder if he ought to offer the child a bed for the night, but he senses that the man would be loath to allow his charge to fall under the dominion of another without some kind of struggle.
As the storm finally begins to abate, the man glances impatiently in the direction of the window, intent now to end this charade. There is a difference between shelter and hospitality, and the stranger has offered both, but the man has been content to take only the former. He stands.
“Thank you, but it sounds like it’s starting to blow itself out, and so we should be on our way.”
The stranger also stands, but he says nothing. The boy seems reluctant to relinquish his seat, and he looks directly at the wizened old stranger, who now finds himself trying to banish from his mind the full significance of the boy’s panic-stricken demeanour.
“The child is welcome to stay.”
* * *
The man and boy stop to rest at the summit of a hill from whose vantage point they can discern a brick farmhouse in the valley below. A lamp burns in each one of the downstairs windows, and the man imagines a family sitting cosily by a warm fire. High on the hill, however, the surging blasts can occasionally still bear the weight of a man, but the frenzy is weakening by the minute, and so there will be no need for them to enter this valley and again seek refuge. They have survived the worst of the upheaval, and the man knows full well that their odyssey across the inhospitable moors will soon be at an end. He seizes the exhausted boy’s hand in his own and focuses his attention on the ghostly blackness before them. Let’s go now. As they move off, the boy feels the man squeezing his hand ever tighter. Let go of me. The rain has stopped, and the clouds are clearing, and above them it is now possible to see a constellation of silver stars in the night sky. We’re going home. And then the man repeats himself. The boy looks into the man’s face, and again he asks him to please take him to his mother. Home. Quick, come along, let’s go. Between sky and earth the boy skids and loses his footing, and the man stoops and picks him up. For heaven’s sake, one foot in front of the other. The boy stares now at the man in whose company he has suffered this long ordeal, and he can feel his eyes filling with tears. Please don’t hurt me. Come along now. There’s a good lad. We’re nearly home.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Caryl Phillips is the author of numerous works of fiction and nonfiction, including Dancing in the Dark, Crossing the River, and Color Me English.
His novel A Distant Shore won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and his other awards include a Lannan Foundation Literary Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and Britain’s oldest literary award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and lives in New York. Sign up for email updates here.