The Complete Uncle Silas Stories (8 page)

‘Who can't see straight? Eh? Who can't see straight? I'm all right. Where are them pheasants? That's what I wanna know.'

‘Sammy boy,' my Uncle Silas said, ‘in a minute. All in good time. Whoa. Stand still. You see that hovel?'

‘Which one?'

‘That one! There's only one!'

‘You're a liar. There's two.'

‘All right, Sammy. There's two. Now you walk over and behind that hovel and you'll see 'em sittin' on the grass waitin' for you. Two cocks. Eatin' corn. All you gotta do is beat 'em up and I'll have 'em down afore you can wink.'

‘All right,' Sammy said. ‘Only for God's sake take that blamed stag-stalker off. Else they'll be frit at you.'

‘Deer-stalker!' Silas shouted.

Sammy made snake-tracks in the snow. Silas moved after him with dreamy caution. Twilight was deepening with a savage orange light on the horizon beyond the hovel. Suddenly Sammy set up a great shout and the pheasants came over towards my Uncle Silas on fast, dark wings.

Silas took aim, the gun wavering about as though held by a man with St Vitus's dance, and then shot. The kick of the muzzle-loader knocked him instantaneously flat on his back, and the pheasants veered and swooped and screeched away beyond the house and the spinney and were lost to sight.

‘You beat 'em too sharp!' Silas bawled.

‘Too sharp be damned!' Sammy shouted. ‘That blamed stag-stalker frit 'em to death.'

They stood in the snow, holding each other up, and had a slight offended altercation. It was growing darker. They had a drink. After the shot and the screech of pheasants the day was
dead silent. And after the drink they began suddenly to speak in low voices, as though afraid of being heard.

‘Sammy, listen to me. You git over th' other side o' that hedge and go round by Acott's barn and see if you can beat summat up while I git loaded again. There's pheasants run about there like hens. I'll stand under the hedge, so's nobody'll see me. We'll have a couple down in a pop.'

It was almost dark when Sammy climbed the fence, and to Silas, standing under the hedge, the clouds looked like tawny elephants. He stood there for a long time, but nothing happened, and then finally he heard Sammy's voice, in a whisper: ‘Ain't you seen it?'

‘Seen what?'

‘That pheasant. I beat one up as big as a turkey. It walked through.'

‘Walked, by golly? I ain't seen a thing.'

‘Wait a minute. I'll whistle when it's up.'

In a moment Silas heard a faint whistle like the air escaping from the hole in a barrel, but he could see no bird. He waited, and then Sammy called in a whisper: ‘Why don't you shoot?'

‘I ain't seen nothing.'

‘Then take that stag-stalker off and look. He's sittin' on the fence by the hovel. Pip 'im.'

Silas looked. ‘By gum,' he said. ‘By gum, if that ain't the biggest pheasant I ever see.'

‘Shoot man, shoot afore that blamed hat scares it.'

‘Shut up, women's breeches, and let me git aim.'

In the half-darkness Silas took long, slow, unsteady aim at the colossal silhouette of the bird on the fence, and then pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. No sound. And the bird still sat there. In a great sweat of trouble Silas cocked again, took aim, and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. To Silas the world went round. The great elephant clouds swam tipsily. And still that colossal myth of a bird sat on the fence. Then he
cocked a third time and took aim and pulled again. But the gun was dumb.

‘Sammy,' he called. ‘Sammy boy. She's stuck. Quick, Sam boy, Sammy.'

Sammy fell over the fence, and when he got up again they struggled feverishly, in a sweat of despair, to ease the trigger off. But it was no good. It was as though the thing had frozen. And finally Sammy said: ‘It's no use. I'll catch it in me hands. You stop here while I creep up and drop on it. If he gits up and you
can
fire, then fire like blazes.'

Sammy made strange tracks in the snow and finally went behind the hovel, and from that moment my Uncle Silas lost him. All the time he stood trying to ease the gun off, but it was no go.

Then suddenly he looked at the fence and he could see, not one bird, but a brace; two vast shapes huddled like roosting turkeys. He began to stagger towards them, stumbling like a man who had seen a vision. It was a sportsman's nightmare; to see, not thirty yards off, a brace of the biggest, and to have, at the same time, a gun that wouldn't go off.

And finally he could bear it no longer. He stopped, took an aim in which the barrel wobbled like a jelly, and then touched the trigger. The gun went off immediately and knocked him flat on his back. It always did that. He expected it, and he was not surprised.

What did surprise him was a sound of moaning. It came from beyond the fence. My Uncle Silas struggled up, rolled across the field like a sailor on the deck of a storm-tossed ship, and found Sammy lying in the ditch, with no hat on, and a fifteen-pound turkey dead on his chest.

‘You've killed me,' Sammy said. ‘You blowed my hat to bits.'

‘Good God, it is a turkey,' Silas said.

‘I'm shot,' Sammy said. ‘You shot my hat off. I'm done.'

‘There was another one. A brace,' Silas said.

‘For God's sake,' Sammy said. ‘The blood's running down my chest. For God's sake, if it's the last thing you do, git me up.'

So Silas picked up the turkey with one hand and got Sammy up with the other, and it turned out, after a time, that it was not blood running down his chest but wine. Then it seemed that Sammy could stand up, then that he could walk about, and finally that it was not he that was shattered at all, but his hat.

‘We gotta find it,' he kept saying, ‘we gotta find it.' And at last they did find it, in the next field, in a patch of kale.

‘By gum, there's some air-holes in it,' Silas said. ‘The old lady'll feel a draught, won't she?'

And the idea was so good and he laughed so much that Sammy wanted to fight him, there and then, in the darkness and the snow.

But two days after New Year's Day he laughed the other side of his face. Sammy's old lady came up then, and gave him a couple of cracks with a copper-stick that he felt for a month.

For it appears, after all, that she
did
wear that hat. But my Uncle Silas, in revenge, would never have it at all that it was on her head.

In a life of ninety-five years, my Uncle Silas found time to try most things, and there was a time when he became a grave-digger.

The churchyard at Solbrook stands a long way outside the village on a little mound of bare land above the river valley.

And there, dressed in a blue shirt and mulatto brown corduroys and a belt that resembled more than anything a length of machine shafting, my Uncle Silas used to dig perhaps a grave a month.

He would work all day there at the blue-brown clay without seeing a soul, with no one for company except crows, the pewits crying over the valley or the robin picking the worms out of the thrown-up earth. Squat, misshapen, wickedly ugly, he looked something like a gargoyle that had dropped off the roof of the little church, something like a brown dwarf who had lived too long after his time and might go on living and digging the graves of others for ever.

He was digging a grave there once on the south side of the churchyard on a sweet, sultry day in May, the grass already long and deep, with strong golden cowslips rising everywhere among the mounds and the gravestones, and bluebells hanging like dark smoke under the creamy waterfalls of hawthorn bloom.

By noon he was fairly well down with the grave, and had fixed his boards to the sides. The spring had been very dry and cold, but now, in the shelter of the grave, in the strong sun, it seemed like midsummer. It was so good that Silas sat in the bottom of the grave and had his dinner, eating his bread and mutton off the thumb, and washing it down with the cold tea he always carried in a beer-bottle. After eating, he began to feel drowsy, and finally he went to sleep there, at the bottom of the
grave, with his wet, ugly mouth drooping open and the beer-bottle in one hand and resting on his knee.

He had been asleep for a quarter of an hour or twenty minutes when he woke up and saw someone standing at the top of the grave, looking down at him. At first he thought it was a woman. Then he saw his mistake. It was a female.

He was too stupefied and surprised to say anything, and the female stood looking down at him, very angry at something, poking holes in the grass with a large umbrella. She was very pale, updrawn and skinny, with a face, as Silas described it, like a turnip lantern with the candle out. She seemed to have size nine boots on and from under her thick black skirt Silas caught a glimpse of an amazing knickerbocker leg, baggy, brown in colour, and about the size of an airship.

He had not time to take another look before she was at him. She waved her umbrella and cawed at him like a crow, attacking him for indolence and irreverence, blasphemy and ignorance.

She wagged her head and stamped one of her feet, and every time she did so the amazing brown bloomer seemed to slip a little farther down her leg, until Silas felt it would slip off altogether. Finally, she demanded, scraggy neck craning down at him, what did he mean by boozing down there, on holy ground, in a place that should be sacred for the dead?

Now at the best of time it was difficult for my Uncle Silas, with ripe, red lips, one eye bloodshot and bleary, and a nose like a crusty strawberry, not to look like a drunken sailor. But there was only one thing that he drank when he was working, and that was cold tea. It was true that it was always cold tea with whisky in it, but the basis remained, more or less, cold tea.

Silas let the female lecture him for almost five minutes, and then he raised his panama hat and said, ‘Good afternoon, ma'am. Ain't the cowslips out nice?'

‘Not content with desecrating holy ground,' she said, ‘you're intoxicated, too!'

‘No, ma'am,' he said, ‘I wish I was.'

‘Beer!' she said. ‘Couldn't you leave the beer alone in here, of all places?'

Silas held up the beer-bottle. ‘Ma'am,' he said, ‘what's in here wouldn't harm a fly. It wouldn't harm you.'

‘It is responsible for the ruin of thousands of homes all over England!' she said.

‘Cold tea,' Silas said.

Giving a little sort of snort she stamped her foot and the bloomer-leg jerked down a little lower. ‘Cold tea!'

‘Yes, ma'am. Cold tea.' Silas unscrewed the bottle and held it up to her. ‘Go on, ma'am, try it. Try it if you don't believe me.'

‘Thank you. Not out of that bottle.'

‘All right. I got a cup,' Silas said. He looked in his dinner basket and found an enamel cup. He filled it with tea and held it up to her. ‘Go on, ma'am, try it. Try it. It won't hurt you.'

‘Well!' she said, and she reached down for the cup. She took it and touched her thin bony lips to it. ‘Well, it's certainly some sort of tea.'

‘Just ordinary tea, ma'am,' Silas said. ‘Made this morning. You ain't drinking it. Take a good drink.'

She took a real drink then, washing it round her mouth.

‘Refreshin', ain't it?' Silas said.

‘Yes,' she said, ‘it's very refreshing.'

‘Drink it up,' he said. ‘Have a drop more. I bet you've walked a tidy step?'

‘Yes,' she said, ‘I'm afraid I have. All the way from Bedford. Rather farther than I thought. I'm not so young as I used to be.'

‘Pah!' Silas said. ‘Young? You look twenty.' He took his coat and spread it on the new earth above the grave. ‘Sit down and rest yourself, ma'am. Sit down and look at the cowslips.'

Rather to his surprise, she sat down. She took another drink of the tea and said, ‘I think I'll unpin my hat.' She took off her hat and held it in her lap.

‘Young?' Silas said. ‘Ma'am, you're just a chicken. Wait till you're as old as me and then you can begin to talk. I can remember the Crimea!'

‘Indeed?' she said. ‘You must have had a full and varied life.'

‘Yes, ma'am.'

She smiled thinly, for the first time. ‘I am sorry I spoke as I did. It upset me to think of anyone drinking in this place.'

‘That's all right, ma'am,' Silas said. ‘That's all right. I ain't touched a drop for years. Used to, ma'am. Bin a regular sinner.'

Old Silas reached up to her with the bottle and said, ‘Have some more, ma'am,' and she held down the cup and filled it up again. ‘Thank you,' she said. She looked quite pleasant now, softened by the tea and the smell of cowslips and the sun on her bare head. The bloomer-leg had disappeared and somehow she stopped looking like a female and became a woman.

‘But you've reformed now?' she said.

‘Yes, ma'am,' Silas said, with a slight shake of his head, as though he were a man in genuine sorrow. ‘Yes, ma'am. I've reformed.'

‘It was a long fight?'

‘A long fight, ma'am? I should say it was, ma'am. A devil of a long fight.' He raised his panama hat a little. ‘Beg pardon, ma'am. That's another thing I'm fighting against. The language.'

‘And the drink,' she said, ‘how far back does that go?'

‘Well, ma'am,' Silas said, settling back in the grave, where he had been sitting all that time, ‘I was born in the hungry forties. Bad times, ma'am, very bad times. We was fed on barley pap, ma'am, if you ever heard talk of barley pap. And the water was bad, too, ma'am. Very bad. Outbreaks of smallpox and typhoid and all that. So we had beer, ma'am. Everybody had beer. The babies had beer. So you see, ma'am,' Silas said, ‘I've been fighting against it for eighty years and more. All my puff.'

‘And now you've conquered it?'

‘Yes, ma'am,' said my Uncle Silas, who had drunk more in eighty years than would keep a water-mill turning, ‘I've conquered it.' He held up the beer-bottle. ‘Nothing but cold tea. You'll have some more cold tea, ma'am, won't you?'