‘I know.’
‘Droving the flock with that great stick of his. Great hazel stick he’d near poke your eye out with.’
Thomas Walters smiled, without his eyes. He was the spit of his father. But his father had decent eyes, saving the drink swilling around in them. Neglect, as I reckon, made the son Thomas Walters was. The man that stood there, smiling.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘you won’t be needing so much pork then.’
‘I know what you’re about, shepherd. You’ll go get chilblains sitting where you oughtn’t. He had no right to assume.’
Anne looked at him as one claps up a dog that’s growling out on the steal.
The question is, was I the deer or the keeper?
I chuckled to myself at the thought, and both looked fit to hang me.
Well, I wasn’t staying. Gabby had gone and that was a fact. He might never have returned. I stood up and wiped my mouth and lifted the pork onto my shoulder.
‘Thank’ee for the ale,’ I said. ‘These are mean times. Maybe we’ll have a bit more sharing out of things now the church is whitewashed and the King in his coffin. Though I’ll miss the dancing myself. Keeps a man warm.’
Thomas Walters nodded the smallest nod I have ever seen. Anne bit her lip fit to bleed. Some said she was growing to be a witch. Well, since Maud had gone head first into the chalk by the north yew they had to have someone to blame all on.
At the door I said:
‘With them rings from Ireland he’ll set hisself up alright, and that’s a fact.’
‘Rings?’ said Thomas Walters, sharpish.
I knew that would hook him. I turned to look at the yard. The thatch was touching the cows’ backs off the shelter, it was that sagged.
‘That’s what he counted his love with. Pillaging. He shook the General’s hand. We all took him for dead. And all the time he were thinking of us waiting, and how he’d afford new thatch for the shelter, and the barn. But he’ll set hisself up alright, I shouldn’t wonder.’
I left then as one leaves a night on the downs full of its silence, that is pushing something terrible at your back which you don’t turn round to for fear of seeing it.
I heard steps behind me and I was halfway across the yard.
It was Anne. She was panting. The cows followed her, nudging. She held herself tight and looked up at me, fierce but frighted.
‘What rings?’ she said.
Thomas Walters was in the door, in the shadows.
I shrugged as a man does when he is at the fair and offered a low price.
‘What rings?’ she said, real fierce.
The poor cows were nudging her but she was stone, like.
‘I’d say he brought them back for you and the farm. He’ll be a sad man but it’s no one’s doing. He was a boy. He fought for the kingdom of God on earth, and shook General Cromwell’s hand. He’ll set hisself up.’
‘He had nothing,’ she said.
‘Maybe,’ I said.
‘Nothing. And he never did. He was never good for anything but what he went and done. He left me,’ she said, and she was shivering.
‘He did,’ I said. I made to move but she held my arm like a jaw round a bone.
‘Nothing,’ she said, between her teeth, that were half of them gone already, and she only thirty or so.
She was nevertheless a handsome woman.
I thought of telling Ruth but I didn’t. She would only grumble that it was none of my business and there would be trouble. So I watched her go to sleep that night after prayers without talking, as we sometimes did, both staring at the thatch above our beds and wondering in between the words how we would fare when the other went under and there was only the rats rustling, not a body you had touched. We never talked that night and I didn’t tell her.
Then the lambing started and I were sleeping out, but I thought of Gabby all through the lambing. He had left a silence where I heard my own whispering, that was many things going round and round in my head. I took up a Bible and heard the parson’s words as I read because I couldn’t read the letters, but always the whispering came on the wind and the taste of bitterness like the smoke that would blow sometimes out of the coomb across my scarp. And I shook my head but the whispering grew louder. I thought I might be going mad like half the old shepherds went up there all on their own.
I thought of how he had shook hands with General Cromwell in all the smoke and all the women and children of Drogheda spilled like empty sacks that Gabby had helped empty. And I saw Ruth among them, I don’t know why. She had her legs wide open like the times we made a babby or like a ewe ready for a ram. And there was General Cromwell shaking hands with Gabby and both smiling while Thomas Walters clacked his teeth together next to them and turned round and saw me looking on my damp log, and shot me.
These were dreams but I was awake. I shook my head free of them and took to making dolls out of straw but always they had their legs wide open and they smiled like General Cromwell or Thomas Walters. And sometimes as I was lifting out a lamb I thought of Anne with my hand inside her which was really Ruth and the ewe kicking out its legs as the lamb came out in a slither, all new.
It was on account of guilt, I reckoned, and one day in April I went to the church and left the boy with the flock and the church was empty. It still smelt of whitewash where all the old paintings had been covered over by the soldiers and the parson looking on nodding all the time, though he cried that night as I remember. I must say that I could remember all the paintings and when I looked at the white walls they were there anyway, particularly Noah and the funny old sheep that were clambering up in a pair to the only ship I had ever seen, rocking on those little blue waves that was the beginnings of the Flood, I suppose.
I stood in the middle of the church and looked round slowly at the walls and saw all the paintings from Creation to Judgement Day, and in my mind heard the parson’s words, and the rim on my hat was fair crumpled up I was that nervous of talking with God in His house.
But I knelt and the stone was cold and I thought of Gabby with my coat on him, shivering, I don’t know why. And I told God of my thoughts and fears and that if I was going mad to spare me with a quick dying. And I asked God if He could whitewash all my thoughts like the soldiers had covered over the old paintings that I had known as a boy and a man. But thoughts were not on walls but ran like deer and the smell of whitewash mocked me.
The church whispered back my mumblings, and I was afraid lest someone might hear, and looked all about me. But it was deathly empty. I wished idolatrously for the statues and pictures still to be there, and the coloured glass they had broken through with poles and stones and their guns.
All in one day, with the parson and some of the village cheering in the graveyard. But my thoughts would not be smashed and covered so easy. They were deer running through the forest, and I prayed hard that God might save me.
For I never thought of Gabby as leaving that farm. In all my thoughts I could not see him crossing the yard and knocking the noses of the cattle and striding up the hill with his rings sewn into his pocket, jingling. To set hisself up. I could not see that, however hard I furrowed my brows and bit my lip and sat silent with the bells and the wind all round me out on the scarp. And even in the empty church with its whitewash smell like old rivers I could not see him leaving the farm.
And when I saw him there it was only through the parlour door with me shaky on a broken wheel and his arm shining with buttons in its red cloth. And the cloth would always run with blood as the arms did on that field after the business at Newberry when to walk across it was to lift clouds of flies from the arms.
And there was Anne and Thomas Walters in the shadows, and Anne’s crumbling teeth round my arm like a dog’s that is mad, that was really her hand.