Half-Sick of Shadows (5 page)

‘Mother?’

‘What is it?’

‘If Granny Hazel’s too fat …’

‘If she’s too fat, what?’

‘They could bury her a bit at a time.’

Mother made a noise, and covered her face as if she was going to cry, or laugh, I didn’t know which.

We were quiet … again.

I whispered to Mother, ‘What are they doing?’

‘What needs to be done,’ she whispered back, and, ‘Shhh.’

Having done what needed doing, Father and Gregory washed and dried their hands at the kitchen sink; I heard the pipes gurgling and water running. I heard their Sunday-best boots on the floor tiles. Then they came to the living room with mud and blades of grass still on their boots even though they wiped them on the doormat.

Gregory looked flushed and his hair stuck out all over the place. He looked half mad. Father always looked flushed and half mad.

Father, standing at the door, instructed us to take our places.

I joined the line behind him, behind Edgar, who stood behind Gregory, who stood behind Mother, who stood behind Father. Sophia, a black bow in her blond hair, joined on the end and gripped my coat-tail. Our line would have been from tallest to smallest if Mother had been taller than Gregory, but Gregory and Edgar were both taller than her. Single file, we followed Father out of the living room, down the hall and through the kitchen.

Father and Gregory had removed Granny Hazel in her coffin from the table and put her outside, beside her grave.

Like a train with its six carriages standing on end, we followed the biggest carriage, Father, out the back and across the courtyard to the cemetery. I grew up thinking garden was another word for cemetery, like toilet and privy, potato and spud.

Poor Mother, a gossamer spectre of willowy grace, might have taken to the clouds if a windy gust had caught her off-guard. If a windy gust caught Sophia, I’d hold her down – unless the windy gust caught me too.

Father had conscripted Gregory to assist with the ropes.

Edgar picked his nose.

Cloud cracked above our heads as though God had a parcel to post through. Sun shone in the gap like a fanfare. We trod over mud and
assumed
our positions. I looked over my shoulder at the Manse – dark, bleak, with eyes and a mouth. The cloud-crack closed and the sky became the colour of concrete after rain. The Manse’s shadow expanded, embracing the outhouses and green fields beyond.

I went somewhere else in my mind. I can’t say what dream I took comfort in, or which nightmare I focused upon – perhaps one relating to the words ‘Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me’, because the usage of anything resembling a rod or a staff brought tears and misery, never comfort. Father used a bamboo cane for the correction of his sinful children. When the cane was in another room, off came his belt, which he called the strap. How he relished clenching those yellow teeth and wielding the strap. We were to thank the Lord – and we did, because we knew no other way, even as we whimpered with lash burns on the backs of our legs and buttocks – that He had given us a father well able to keep us pious.

Sophia and I, holding hands, grew goose bumps. They were the same goose bumps we regrew daily. The ghost hand locked in mine had fleshless bone for fingers. Her wrist might snap at a sudden twist. She had arms like twigs, and bath-time shoulders like those on a victim from a ghastly prisoner of war camp like the ones I’d seen in the encyclopedia.

She had a lovely face.

… bloodless though it was, big-eyed, somewhat nervous, a little frightened perhaps, like a vulnerable forest creature wary of sudden noises. And there were plenty of those in the Manse.

Father looked like Isaiah, or Ezekiel, without a beard. He waved his palms Heavenward and shouted at the sky.

‘Oh, loving heavenly Father who hast created us from dust and made us whole, who hast died for our sins and saved us, comfort us this day in thy manifest mercy. Be thou our strength.’

… and on, and on, until his voice was the same as the wind.

The chill should have kept me awake. Instead, I slipped into a doze on my feet as Father read Psalms from the big black King James bible
with
its thys, thees and thous, green pastures, paths of righteousness, valley of the shadow of death where I need fear no evil for the Lord my God is with me, and so on and so forth and on and on some more. The bible’s pages were thumbed off-white at the edges. Its cover was floppy with excessive bending. Father had written an extra testament or two in the margins with his fountain pen.

Father called it the Family Bible. But it was his. He smacked my legs with the strap once for setting it on a shelf face down.

‘Never put the bible face down! That’s Satanism. Never ever put it face down. I won’t say it again.’ His bible occupied the kitchen table, the hearth, his chair in the living room when he got up to stretch his legs and potter a while as fathers do. The bible seemed to follow Father around, always one step behind him – or one step ahead. He would approach his chair, lift the bible off the cushion and sit down to read with it open at the correct page, all in such a fluid motion, without pauses of any length, you would think the bible an extra and perfectly functioning body part.

The cessation of Father’s voice, and the scrape of casket on planks, roused me and gripped my attention. I returned from the place in my head where I had been, and noticed that Sophia had slipped her hand out of mine. She had left my side. Where had she gone?

A moment of panic! Me, looking around!

Mother gave me a reproachful look. I stiffened and stopped looking around. Her disapproval shamed me. When mother scolded us, we deserved it. ‘Don’t speak ill of the dead,’ she said – often – if a snigger slipped out, or an unkind utterance concerning a deceased grandparent (never within Father’s earshot, of course).

I watched Father and Gregory about the business of burial out of respect for Mother’s wishes rather than respect for my dead grandmother. How could I respect her? I knew nothing about the old woman other than that she once produced Father. Granny Hazel used to sit by the fire with a face like curdled milk. Awake or asleep, the only difference was whether her eyeballs were on show. Worst of all,
she
always smelled of hours-old pee that saturated the bed sheets, soaked into the mattress, and penetrated the cushion on her fireside chair.

Gregory took his position on one side of the casket. Father took his on the other and said a silent prayer. Gregory had the longer side of the ropes that ran under what remained of Granny Hazel, now snug and sealed in her box. Father signalled with a nod. Gregory took his end of the ropes across the grave – Oops! Watch your step; it’s slippery – and pulled them as though in a tug-of-war. The coffin moved towards the hole. Father steered from the other side. Together, they wrestled Granny Hazel into the grave.

His task complete, brushing his hands, Gregory returned to Mother’s side breathing heavily. Breathless too, from effort and emotion, and glistening with sweat, Father took his place at the head of the grave, wiped his nose with a sleeve, and gestured with both hands for us to bow our heads for yet more prayer. I did. Then I looked up, to my right where the crumbling outhouses were.

Sophia appeared to be poking something with a stick.

Father’s prayer would go on and on and turn into a sermon.

No one would miss me.

I found I had slipped away from the graveside before I had time to realize that doing so counted as more than an error of judgement – a sin. Like a thief stealing someone else’s time, I tiptoed to my sister’s side, my other half, my second skin. We shared a heart. Sophia was indeed poking something with a stick: the big, black dog. Dead.

Out of Father’s earshot, wind blowing her voice across Hollow Heath, she sang, ‘I fell in to a burning ring of fi-re. I went down, down, down …’ She stopped singing and glanced at me, then turned her attention back to the animal. ‘And it burned, burned, burned …’

‘Stop singing. Father will hear you!’ I whispered loudly.

She stopped. If one thing in the universe made us stop whatever we were doing, it was Father knowing we were doing it.

‘You’re supposed to be watching Granny Hazel getting buried.’

‘So are you,’ she argued.

‘I came to see what you’re doing.’ Since she ignored me, I asked, ‘What are you doing?’

‘I found the dog, and it’s dead.’

‘It isn’t ours,’ I said, needlessly. ‘We have chickens.’

Father must have shut them in the coop until after the burial.

‘Can we keep it?’

‘What for? If you throw the stick, it won’t fetch.’

More a baton than a stick … ‘What did it come off?’ I asked, keeping my voice quieter than the prayer in the background.

Sophia shrugged.

The stick looked new. Was it a table leg? All the table and chair legs in the Manse were age-worn. It must have arrived here from outside. Small enough for Sophia’s little fist, big enough to beat something with, a greater mystery than the dog. One leg of a table can’t walk. Neither can two, three or four, but it must have got there – wherever Sophia picked it up – somehow. The dog had legs, so its presence posed no mystery. Then I felt highly pleased with myself because I realized the dog could have carried the stick in its mouth from wherever it came from to here, walked around for a couple of days looking for its master, the bearded stranger, then died – probably from exhaustion after carrying the stick so far.

‘Why are you smiling?’ Sophia asked.

‘Nothing,’ I replied, stopping smiling.

If you smile at nothing, people think you’re daft, Father liked to say when he felt like a joke. This was as humorous as he got: a hint of sarcasm and a touch of insult. He had a smile like Lot’s as he watched his wife turning into a pillar of salt.

Sophia bared the dog’s fangs with the stick. ‘Shall I ask Father if we can bury it with Granny Hazel? She likes dogs.’

‘Animals and humans have separate graves, silly.’ Immediately, I wanted to bite my tongue. Knowing I had hurt her feelings, I apologized. ‘Sorry. You aren’t silly; it slipped out.’

‘That’s all right,’ she said, although I could tell it wasn’t. For a while, we stood in silence.

The dog, a formidable beast if alive, had started going grey. Hair continues to grow after death; I knew that much from an overheard snip on the radio, but I had no idea whether it continued turning grey. Sophia lifted one of the dog’s rear legs with the stick until her strength could lift it no more and the leg fell off the stick’s end. It was a boy dog.

‘Why?’ she asked.

‘Why what?’

‘Why do animals and humans have separate graves?’

‘Everybody knows that.’ The hardest thing for a brother to do, in response to his sister’s question, is admit ignorance.

‘Why then?’

Unable to provide the correct answer, I could at least offer what seemed to me – given the little I knew – a rational possibility. I had no idea of how any sentence I began might conclude.

‘It’s because when you die you go to Hell, and …’

‘Or you go to Heaven if you love Jesus hard enough.’

‘And if a Hell animal gets buried with a Heaven human, it’ll end up in the wrong place. Or it might be the other way round: if a Heaven human gets buried with a Hell dog. And if the Hell …’ dog goes to Heaven? The argument became woolly in my head, and I petered out.

The dog wore a collar with a metal disc attached. I knew dogs’ names were on metal discs because Farmer Barry’s dog had one and its name was Fart. I couldn’t pronounce the black dog’s name at first. Neither could Sophia. We said Tenny, Tenny, Tennyson.

‘Funny name for a dog,’ I said, as Sophia and I stood up in case it came alive and bit us.

‘I thought its name was Rabbit,’ I said, while Sophia mightily tenderized the dog’s flank with a rhythm and shoulder action like the ones with which she flattened braising steak for Father’s
Sunday
dinner (the rest of us usually got a pork sausage each).

Rain spat from Heaven like God firing darts to remind everyone of his omni-everything. God was like that: always drawing attention to Himself by parting Red Seas, and getting Himself crucified. I resented God’s always having to be the centre of attention. I resented His big, preachy voice.

The rain pleased me. It meant Father would cut the service short and we could go inside and warm our backsides at the fire.

Granny Hazel’s burial service ended sooner than I expected.

When I glanced back at the cemetery, I saw Father striding towards us with a face more thunderous than the weather. He must have taken off in pursuit of us immediately after saying amen. My heart either missed a beat or hiccuped and beat an extra one. Mother, Gregory and Edgar were following him. He looked over a shoulder and pointed them at the Manse. They veered towards it, as one, physically redirected by the force of his will.

Father descended like an axe to chop off our heads. My entire life – what there had been of it – passed before me. The encyclopedia flashed across my mind’s eye, open at B for Boris the Hermit.

And then Father had stopped striding. He stood before us twelve feet tall, like Goliath. If I’d had a sling I’d have dropped it.

I’d expected Father to order me and Sophia indoors. I thought he would have barked a command that we were to wait in his study. I thought he would have changed out of his damp clothes, returned, then bent us over his desk and tanned our bare backsides with the strap. But something happened there, outside, beside the dead dog. Wet-faced with the rain, Father glared down at me as though I were a poo Tennyson had done on the living-room rug. At times like that – and there were many – I stiffened in expectation of an openhanded blow to my face. To my relief, he deemed me unworthy of his anger.

Instead of hitting me – or giving me a good shake at least – Father got down on one knee in front of Sophia. If she had possessed a
sword
she could have knighted him – the stick might have done. His nearness sent her half a step closer to me, as close as she could get without standing on my feet. With his hands on her shoulders, Father drew her a whole step back, closer to him. Then a bit closer still. So close to his face, I would have started blubbering, but Sophia was stone.