But he’d known what Brookes had meant. He had the medal in his jacket pocket. He didn’t know any more clearly now, if he’d known at al , why he’d brought it al this way. It wasn’t Tom’s medal. It went with one of the names on the memorial outside—or you might say with two of them. But his hand went, as Brookes spoke, to the smal , round solidity against his chest.
Then Brookes had stopped talking and there was a hymn and a prayer or two, and then this whole part of it was over and it was time for the thing that was the most important thing for Jack, that was real y why he was here. He had to go forward now with the five men whose hands he’d shaken and be their leader, even while they, in a sense, would al carry him. Just as they would al carry Tom. He would have to walk with Ireton on the other side and Tom between, facing the congregation now, facing the whole lot of them, but it would be al right if he didn’t smile, it would be al right if he didn’t look anyone in the eye. This wasn’t a bloody wedding. It would be al right if he didn’t show anything in his face, which came quite natural y to him anyway. He would have to be both like and not like one of those six soldiers yesterday. He should have shaken their hands too.
He would have to walk, a finite number of paces though he would never count them, with his cheek against the coffin, his shoulder against the coffin, these parts of him closer to Tom than they would ever be again, feeling, sharing Tom’s weight.
And so it was. They emerged through the porch into the painful brightness of the November morning. Behind them the congregation began to file out and fol ow, but it was as though, Jack thought, the church might have turned into a great grey empty-bel ied plane. For the first time now, since he was looking straight towards it, Jack couldn’t avoid seeing the same exact line of hil s, across the val ey—
Dartmoor in the far distance—that could be seen from Jebb Farm.
It wasn’t difficult, as a physical task, it wasn’t so difficult.
Ireton was a big man too. He felt the whole thing might be on a backward tilt, and that would be tough on the two at the back. But then the downward slope in the churchyard corrected that. And it wasn’t heavy. Though Tom had been a big man, like his brother. Was it because of the distribution of the load among six? Or because—? What was inside? He knew how his mother had died, he knew how his father had died. His brother’s death was a mystery.
He suddenly wanted, needed to feel the weight of his brother. It seemed that, with his cheek and one palm pressed against the wood, he was urging Tom to let him feel his weight.
It was a matter of perhaps twenty steps now, a steadily diminishing number of steps. Jack could see the opening of the grave before him, see, close by, but didn’t want to look and so see the names, the gravestones of his parents, and, yes, he felt sure at last that he could feel, inside, through the wood, through his cheek, through his hand, on these last steps, the shifting, swaying, appreciative weight of his brother. He would be al right now, he felt sure, so long as this weight was on his shoulder. He wanted it to be there for ever. And with each last pace he said now, inside, “I rocked you, Tom. I rocked you.”
28
MICHAEL LUXTON DIED INSTANTLY. The double cartridge-load of shot that passed through the roof of his mouth, then through the back of his head, smashing and impel ing outwards everything in between, might as wel have been, at that absence of range, a single solid bul et. It continued to pass, along with fragments of bark, skul and brain, some significant distance into the oak tree against which he’d been leaning. It could be said that the tree felt nothing. The tree never flinched and no more registered Michael’s death than Michael did himself. For an oak tree that big and thick and old, to have a parcel of compacted shot and other matter embedded not even deep in its flesh was of no importance. Trees endure worse mutilation.
But the hole, some three feet or more up the trunk, remained, its aperture reduced but defined as the bark grew a ring-like scar around it. It was there when Jack, with five others, lowered his brother’s coffin into its grave. It’s there now. The surrounding stain on the bark remained too, despite that sluicing down on the day itself by PC Ireton.
Unlike the stains on the ground, which soon disappeared, it weathered gradual y and came to look like some indeterminate daub of the kind sometimes seen near the base of trees, or like some fungal blemish associated with that odd puncture in the trunk. What was it there for? Had someone once tried to hammer something, for some strange agricultural purpose, into the wood?
Of course, Jack knew how it had got there, and a few other involved parties would have been able to explain, very exactly, its cause. But to any outsider or newcomer to Jebb Farm—and there would be newcomers—the hole would have been a puzzle, if not a very detaining one.
ONE PERSON WHO CERTAINLY KNEW how the hole was made was El ie. She and Jack stood one warm July day under the tree—it was the summer after Michael’s death—
and Jack watched El ie put her finger into the hole. He didn’t stop her. He’d done it himself, though not at first. It had taken a long time, in fact, before he’d felt able to and even then he’d felt that he shouldn’t. But it was a hole that, al other considerations apart, begged to have a finger put in it, even two. An ignorant outsider, who might not have been especial y bothered by the mystery of the hole, would have found it hard to resist putting a finger in it. By the time Jack returned to Marleston to bury his brother, quite a few fingers, young and old, had been idly poked into that hole.
But El ie’s putting her finger in it—without, as it were, even asking Jack’s permission—marked a decisive moment in the history of Jebb Farm. Her own father had died even more recently. It was an act of impudent penetration that had to do with the absence of more than one parental constraint. It was as though El ie were saying,
“Look, I can do this now. We can do this now. Look, I haven’t been struck down. The tree hasn’t fal en on us. We can do anything we like now.”
And so they could. They were standing there, for a start, just the two of them, by their own choosing in Barton Field.
Despite the geography of their long relationship, this was something they had never done before. With a poke of her finger El ie was endorsing the obvious and tangible truth that Jack, even after eight months, couldn’t quite bring himself to accept or believe: that the tree was his, al his, everything around them, for what it was worth, was al his.
Or, as El ie might have put it, “Ours.” The tree didn’t mind a bit.
And the fact was that this simple yet outrageous act of El ie’s—she al owed her finger to probe and twist a bit—
rather excited Jack. It aroused him. El ie was wearing a dress, a flower-print dress, something he hadn’t so often seen, and he could tel that before she’d driven over (“Something to tel you, Jacko,” she’d said on the phone) she’d taken some trouble to look her best.
In any case, Jack would have said that she was simply blooming. Nearly twenty-eight, but blooming. Something he would be able to confirm to himself a little later in the Big Bedroom—another first—when that dress would be draped over the back of a chair. El ie was another summer older and her dad had recently died, but she was a better-looking woman than she’d been a year ago. She didn’t look like a farmer’s daughter (and she wasn’t, in the sense that she no longer had a father). She looked like some wide-eyed visitor to his lordly estate. That even seemed to be her knowing, teasing game. “Show me around, give me a tour.