Changing Heaven (20 page)

On the night table there are books, two books now: the Brontë poems and the Bible. Two books about weather, too many books about weather, thinks Ann vaguely. Right beside the books is a teacup covered with-violets? forget-me-nots?-which sports a hairline crack as proudly as a fat lady with a brand new incision. “Tell me about your operation,” Ann whispers, sleepily, to the curvaceous china.

The little lamp, also very pretty, with daffodils and a short fringe on its shade, does not now shine, nor should it, with the sun pouring onto it and then reflecting with alarming brilliance from the plastic container adjacent that holds the antibiotics. “Ann Frear!” the small plastic-covered sign announces, “four times daily!” and then, like the author’s name at the end of a famous quotation, the words “Dr. Nussey.” It is not, however, Dr. Nussey who administers the medicine in the mornings and evenings and who asks her if she has swallowed her pills during the day. There is a large man who materializes and disappears, who brings tea in the little plump wounded cup and who, in the beginning, brought the celebrated Dr. Nussey, with his needle
full of sleep. The beast crept out; the dark absorbed Ann; and a man, scrubbed clean, walked into her illness. John Hartley, moor-edger, grass burner, healer of the sick, mender of broken cottages.

Beyond the static drama of the night table and then the large man’s odd appearances, there is nothing. The day is empty, for Ann, of any form of completed thought and she falls asleep again and again from sheer lack of interest in her own listless attempts to piece together shards of fragmented memory. How, she wonders vaguely, did I come to be here lying in a bright upstairs room, exhausted by illness, and presided over at intervals by a gentle man who sets fire to the landscape?

“Will you eat some soup?” he asks, or, “I’ve brought you some of Mrs. Arkel’s cakes, will you eat one?”

He comes and goes, a large, pale, friendly apparition. He is sometimes scrubbed so clean after a day of work that Ann cannot quite believe in his paleness, the fairness of him. The large bones and broad forehead. The huge hands holding a slim, silver spoon or a delicate bone-china teacup.

“Now today you look almost well … three steps back from the grave.” John smiles, his paleness almost dark beside the dazzle of the windows. “Shall I read, then … some of the psalms?”

“You are trying to convert me.”

“No … but you see, the first clear sentence you said after the needle was ‘let’s talk about the weather.’”

Ann does not remember this. “Maybe I’ve changed my mind,” she says.

“Ah, no … not you, now you’ll want it more than ever. I’ll read some of the psalms and let you listen. Then you’ll have your weather – descriptions of weather-but the language telling it will be calm. Weather for those weakened by weather.”

“Do you go to church?”

“Yes, I’m one of fifteen or so in village who attend.” He looks at her to assess her reaction. “The singing,” he
explains, “I like the singing. Also I pay my debts to the over yonder and the hereafter by keeping God’s bride standing.”

Ann is silent.

“God’s bride … the church. I do repairs.”

“I went to church when I was in the country with my grandmother.” Ann remembers a red brick building, her grandmother’s funeral. “It seemed right, there. Old ladies in flowered hats, stained glass, squeaky pews. And yes, the singing. In the city, church was something different. I don’t know …” she trails off, sleepily.

Outside, moor grasses are pushing their way through heavy, melting snow. Several lapwings sail under the swaths of blue. Hills cartwheel close beneath an assault of light and withdraw again into shadow when clouds pass.

Ann relents and John picks up the book. Throughout the late afternoon and early evening the languid diction of the tormented scribe moves like a river from John Hartley’s mouth through Ann’s brain; the lyrical lift of the broad Yorkshire accent caressing gentle syllables. The hills beyond the window darken. Approaching night and receding snow. There is no need for Ann to speak, no need, in fact, for her to listen except in the way that one listens to music, allowing it to wash over the ear and the heart. The references to weather catch her attention, like a dragline hook in underwater weeds, pulling and then letting go. She has no need now for the complexities of content, the snares of meaning. Only his man’s voice, the music of it; the pure sound of the words, empty of narrative. The repetitious references to weather tugging and letting go, tugging and letting go. The gift of speech, the times of sleep.

Awake, psaltery and harp,
I myself will awake early

Evenings later, Ann is downstairs by the fire and John is finishing the last five chapters. Gone are the supplications
and agonies, the bouts of God’s angry weather. Gone are the hailstones and bolts of barbarous lightning. The scribe has been touched by quiet flames, the calm earth. He has forgotten his enemies. He is healed, roaring with pleasure and gratitude. The words are beautiful in John’s mouth, words like
everlasting, upholdeth, sanctuary
.

He giveth snow like wool: He scattereth
  the hoarfrost like ashes;
He casteth forth his ice like morsels, who
  can stand before his cold?
He sendeth out his word and melteth them;
He causeth his wind to blow and the
  waters to flow;
He healeth the broken-hearted and bindeth
  up their wounds
.

At the close of these words John closes the Bible and looks at the floor. “Well … now that’s done,” he says. “Now tha’ll manage.”

“No,” says Ann, straightening suddenly in her chair, sensing his leave-taking. “No … come back tomorrow, please. You could tell me stories. I want to hear you talk about this landscape.”

It has only been dark for an hour or so. Advancing spring and lengthening days.

“I want,” says Ann, “to hear you talk about the sky.”

T
HE SKY IN
west Yorkshire is never still, never relaxed. It is caught, by those who gaze at it, always in the midst of either a subtle or a blatant act of transformation. Just when you think that you have read its messages and understood them perfectly, the wind shifts direction or changes velocity. The sun appears on a hill two miles away, abruptly disappears from there and flings itself, with no warning, into a beck ten feet from where you stand. The surrounding air chills or warms for no apparent reason, taking directions from a sky that can only be described as manic-depressive, or at the very least unpredictable.

Waiting for John in the evening, Ann stands by the window and looks out at emptiness and stars, the sky showing, briefly, her jewels in the dark. The snow is gone, except on the very tops of the swells, for it has been raining, constantly but unevenly, for the past few days, and the moor has become one dark, motionless, almost imperceptible sea. Now it is cold, clear: black with stars and a moon. And wind.

“We’re cursed and blessed by the wind here,” John has said to her.

She waits for him, waits to hear the sound of his boots on the path that leads from the village to her cottage door. Her new friend. This giant who, with huge ministering hands, has pulled her back so gently from the abyss, who has taken on, so effortlessly, the responsibility of her weaknesses.

“How did you find me?”

“I came looking … it were sort of research. And you with pneumonia!” He throws his hands into the air in
astonishment. “I just came looking to see how you’d weathered the storm.”

Ann imagines him during the day in his carpentry shop, or in the village chapel; places she has never been. But she does not try to visualize him working on the moor where they found each other – not with his face disguised and blackened and his body ringed by fire. She associates him with the light that warms, not the flame that burns. The bright comfort of the upstairs room, his paleness and shock of white hair. In her imagination his shoulder is always touched by sunlight, softened by the dust on a nearby window pane. And the sword of light is, in this picture, celebratory, ceremonial: nature making John one of her knights. Or even God, that weather-maker, placing a handful of light near his neck.

He has walked into her life and has brought with him no tension, no discomfort. Her muscles relax in his presence, her mind untwists, pretence evaporates. Sometimes he is just a voice and Ann can barely perceive him where he sits in the opposite armchair near the fire: his white hair tinged with orange, the wonderful rhythms of his speech washing over the furniture of the house.

“It were good,” he says, “when I were a lad growing up out on t’moor edge. When I came into t’village I couldn’t settle; I still can’t settle because of the congestion.”

Ann laughs. The population of the village hovers somewhere around three hundred.

“I’m happy for the farm,” he continues, “though some lads go mad living out on moor. Mad from loneliness.”

Ann loves the word “lad,” the way it sounds near the fire. There can be nothing wicked about a man who uses the word “lad,” nothing unnatural. The clarity of such a man is astonishing; as if these simple words he uses are a microscope directed at his heart and placed there for the purpose of total revelation. He speaks and she comprehends and the world around her becomes rich with light.
He is like large windows in a house; as generous with his distribution of sun and moon and stars as the upstairs room: the place of her recovery.

Ann remembers that once, before she became ill, she had returned from the village in the evening to find that she had left the cottage lights ablaze. The upstairs room glowed like a giant’s lantern, flinging light into the dark sea of moor around it, scattering it over drystone and gravel, moor-grass and mud. Ann was forced, at that moment, to look past the image of Arthur’s face that she carried constantly in front of her, forced to admire the upstairs room. Its curtains open, its contents revealed, and all the cold surroundings bathed in its light.

“I have these stories from my father,” John is saying now. “He would say them in the evening after the walk up from the mill and after our tea. The farm growing heather and he working in mill, as I did myself not too much later.”

Ann wants the stories. “Tell me the stories,” she says.

“One at a time,” he announces.

“One at a time,” she agrees.

“And the first will be a story about the earth. I’ll not speak about the sky until last so that you’ll continue to allow me to return.”

Ann laughs. She settles back into her chair. She listens.

“If you would content yourself with strolling in the valley below instead of seeking wind and illness on the moors above, you would have already seen the spot. And you would have wondered and perhaps you might have asked. John, you might have said in that sad, slow way of yours, John, I’ve seen a grave in the valley with its own little wall. And there’s no church nearby nor any other headstones. John, you might have said, tell me about that.

“And so I shall, though you haven’t asked, for your not asking is born of innocence and not lack of interest.

“And I should turn out the lights, for my father, who told these stories, was right economic, as he had to be. ‘We can talk in t’dark as well as in t’leet,’ he’d say, having finished the milking of the five cows, he and I, by the light of one candle. We hadn’t the gas in yet at the farm though there were a huge gasometer at mill-Grief Mill-where he worked and where I used to work, down there in the same valley that I’m speaking of. Though now it’s just black walls and rust and ruin.”

John rises and reaches for the lamp. The room is suddenly clothed in a rust colour thrown from the coal fire, as if it had undergone the same ruin as the described mill. Oblivious to the altered atmosphere, John settles again in the chair whose slipcover flowers have changed into dark, floating, organic shapes.

“Across there is Oldfield village and there you can see his house.” John gestures towards the solid wall of the cottage’s windowless back. “It stands just there,” he points, a seer staring through walls. “His name were Jack Green and he spent part of his life fabricating forests.”

“Here?” asks Ann. “What happened to them?”

“Not here,” replies John. “And what
would
happen to them I wonder, this being one hundred and fifty year ago? I imagine they would grow higher, if they grew at all, which is unlikely in this climate. A short forest, in that time, if it were growing at all, would certainly grow to be a tall forest. And now I’ll tell my story-the one I heard as a child. ‘Wilt tha’ tell of t’owd black stone?’ I’d ask and after that there would be no more questions.” Here John looks meaningfully at Ann but in the dimness of the room she does not read his gaze.

“I thought it was about forests.”

“Now I’ll tell t’story,” John repeats. He looks towards the fire and begins: