Saint Christopher and the Gravedigger

by Catherine Cookson

  ‘Let me get the doctor.’

  ‘I don’t want the doctor. I don’t feel ill, lass.’ Now John turned from Florrie and addressed his mother, looking her full in the face as he did so. ‘Do I look ill, Mother?’

  It was some seconds before Gran answered. She stared hard at her son then moving her jaw bone rapidly back and forward she exclaimed truthfully, ‘I don’t know what you look like and that’s the truth.’

  As Gran sat down there came the sound of running feet up the back path and the next minute Frankie was in the room. He stopped just within the doorway and brought out on a gasp, ‘They said…’

  ‘Well, no matter what they said,’ put in John quickly. ‘I’m neither dead, daft nor drunk. I’ve been hit with a cricket ball and in spite of what it looks like, I haven’t got a headache and I don’t feel bad. Now is there anything else you would like to know?’

  His mouth hanging, Frankie stared at his father. Florrie was standing behind John and she went into her signalling act, and whether it was in obedience to the signal or he was too surprised to make any comment, he let his father pass him and go out of the room, and not until there came the sound of the bedroom door banging overhead did he speak. Then he asked in an awed whisper, ‘Are you going to get the doctor, Mam?’

  Florrie, going to the table and sitting down and looking at Gran, said, ‘I don’t know what to do. I’ve never seen him like this before. Have you, Gran?’

  ‘No,’ said Gran truthfully.

  Frankie came and stood close to his mother and, still in an undertone, he said, ‘They’re on about it round the green, Mam. I hadn’t been to the match; I was at Norton’s garage looking at the cycles when Tim Brown came by on his bike and said Dad had been hit, and when I was passing the green they were standing in groups laughing their heads off. Uncle Brod was one of them and he was roaring because some fella was saying that Dad had asked the Member of Parliament what he was going to do about St Christopher.’ Frankie’s voice dropped to a whisper, ‘They were repeating the same things what he said to me last night. Mam… do you think he’s going… ?’

  ‘No, he’s not and don’t say such a thing.’ Florrie was on her feet. ‘Just because he said something that other people hadn’t thought about doesn’t mean he’s going off his head and don’t you dare suggest any such thing, Frankie Gascoigne.’ Florrie’s voice was rising and Frankie turned away muttering, ‘All right, Mam, don’t you start going for me an’ all.’

  As Florrie bounced towards the stove to put the kettle on, Gran looked towards her and exclaimed, ‘Well, he may or he may not be going off his head, but there’s one thing I do know and I know for sure, he’s not himself, not if I know him, he’s not… But what did I tell you this mornin’? Something’s gonna happen, I said, didn’t I? And I’ll tell you something more now… This is only the start, mark my words.’

  Frankie, after giving his grannie one long, baffled look, went to the mantel and rested his head against it. ‘Coo…’ he said.

  When John went upstairs, he had no intention of lying down. He did not feel very sleepy, far from it, he felt… boiled up. Boiled up against everybody in general but against his mother and Broderick McNally in particular. It was a shame to waste two houses between the two of them he thought… Laid out… he was far from being laid out and he would let them see this an’ all.

  He sat down on the edge of the bed to take off his shoes, then, getting up and walking in his stockinged feet towards the dressing table, he surveyed for the first time the lump on his forehead and was made to comment to himself, ‘By gum, but it is a size an’ all… no mistake.’

  He touched it and felt no pain. That was odd. He had had bashes on his head before today and they had all, he remembered, been painful; but this bump had not even given him a slight headache. He was beginning to be puzzled by this and he asked himself what he felt like, but he did not give himself the answer until he was sitting on the bed again, and then with the palms of his hands cupping his knees and his eyes staring down at the floor, he nodded as he remarked inwardly, ‘I feel fine, never better, I feel…’

  He couldn’t for the moment explain exactly how he felt. There was a lightness about his head that hadn’t been there this morning and a sort of brightness and airiness over the whole of his body. He knew that he was thinking more swiftly than was usual and, moreover, his thoughts were more… gettable. He hadn’t to grope at his mind for an explanation. It was there. This feeling undoubtedly was the cause of him going off at both McNally and his mother. He wondered if it would stay or would it subside with the lump. Slowly, he lay back on the bed and rested his head on his joined hands, and he discovered that he liked feeling this way—alive and alert, and ready on the uptake. He had always envied people who were ready on the uptake.

  At what point he fell asleep he didn’t know but when he felt Florrie’s hand on his shoulder and her voice saying gently, ‘John, John, are you all right?’ he opened his eyes slowly and looked at her and then he did a strange thing for he said, ‘Yes, I’m all right, Florrie.’

  This simple answer proved to Florrie once and for all that her John wasn’t all right. His usual response if she should waken him would be a grunt; and if she said ‘Time to get up, John’, his reply was invariably ‘Um… right’, and sometimes it was just the ‘Um’. Not that this terseness meant anything—she knew her John—but the smile that now lit up his face took her back to the early years of their marriage when even then such a smile was a rare thing. She was more upset by the smile than if he had sat up abruptly and sworn at her.

  ‘What’s the time?’ He was stretching his arms above his head as she gazed at him in bewilderment.

  ‘Nine o’clock,’ she said.

  His mouth stopped in the middle of a yawn and with his arms still upraised he said, ‘Nine o’clock! Have I been asleep since this afternoon?’

  She nodded but said nothing as she watched him swing his legs jauntily off the bed.

  ‘Well, I can’t remember ever doing that afore… and you know something, I’m hungry… starving.’

  ‘Your supper’s ready.’ Florrie spoke quietly and, as she turned to go, he reached out and grabbed her arm and, pulling her to face him, he said, ‘What’s troubling you?’

  As she looked at him, Florrie could not prevent the tremor that came into her voice. ‘You are, John. What’s wrong? It happened afore you got this knock on your head.’ She looked at the lump where it jutted from his forehead, dark and sore-looking. ‘There was something wrong with you last night, John.’

  ‘Wrong with me?’ he asked in surprise. ‘Last night? What was wrong with me last night?’

  She dropped her eyes as she said, ‘Well, going on at Frankie like that and about this St Christopher.’

  ‘Oh, St Christopher.’ For a moment he had forgotten about St Christopher and now that he was reminded of him again he thought, ‘Aye that’s still got to be looked into.’ But he said to Florrie, ‘Just because I bring up a subject that should be looked into you think there is something wrong with me. That’s daft, clean daft.’

  ‘But, John, you never talk, not to the others you don’t. You used to, to me a bit when we were on our own, but of late years you’ve stopped even doing that. And then to burst out like you did last night, and then today outside the hall to turn on Broderick like a wild man; and then your mother. It isn’t you. You’ve got me worried, John.’

  ‘Huh.’ The laughter was even in his eyes as he took her by the shoulders and gave her a little shake. ‘Because I start talking I’ve got you worried. Well, I hope I give you nothing more than that to worry about, lass. Come on, let’s have that supper.’

  Instead of this attitude of John’s putting Florrie at her ease, it did just the opposite. She didn’t know this reasonable, plausible being, this being who smiled at her when he talked. There was as much difference between this man and the John she knew as between a man in his sober senses and the same man mortal drunk. They were the same, yet not the same.


  When, on entering the kitchen, John saw, already sitting at the table, Arthur and Frankie beside Gran and Linda, he exclaimed aloud, ‘Well, well! Nine o’clock on a Saturday night and we’re all at home.’

  That John should show surprise was quite in order for it was a most unusual thing to see the two boys in before eleven at the earliest on a Saturday night; but there they were and not saying a word because his greeting had dumbfounded them. It was, Arthur commented to himself, as Gran had just a moment before said: the ball had certainly gone to his dad’s head.

  In spite of having heard of the reception Gran had received when commiserating with his father—commiserating was the word used when Gran was telling her tale—Arthur felt that it was expected of him to enquire how he was feeling now, so when John was seated in his place he looked towards him and asked, ‘How you feeling, Dad?’

  ‘I’m feeling very well, Arthur.’

  The answer had been neither a brief ‘All right’ or an explosive ‘Now don’t start that again’ but a reply that was both pleasant in voice and context. ‘I’m feeling all right, Arthur.’ It just didn’t fit in—so thought the entire family in their varying ways.

  ‘What was the result of the match?’ John was looking towards Frankie, but Frankie at this moment had his eyes cast downwards to his plate and, not expecting a direct question from his father, he did not naturally reply.

  ‘I’m asking you a question.’

  ‘What, me, Dad?’ Frankie’s head bounced up.

  ‘Well, I’m looking at you, lad. It could be that I’m as bats as you are all thinking I am and that I’m really talking to McNally next door.’

  Arthur, suddenly seeing the funny side of the situation, choked on his food and Frankie, giving a self-conscious titter, said, ‘We… we lost. They declared at two nine seven.’

  At this moment Linda, lifting her gaze from her plate, said to her mother, ‘Will you take off the ham, Mam? I just want salad.’

  As Florrie complied with her daughter’s wishes, John looked at Linda and remarked, ‘It’s a very nice piece of ham. Your mother always boils a nice piece of ham.’

  ‘God in heaven.’ All eyes lifted from John to Gran, but Gran’s eyes were raised ceilingward, and she exclaimed mournfully, ‘The world’s coming to an end, I know it… Even praising the bacon.’

  John, leaning towards his mother, his expression now serious but not grim, was about to retort to her quip, when his attention was caught by someone moving about in the back garden. From his position in relation to the window, the intruder was in a line with his shoulder, which meant that he must be standing dead in the middle of his potatoes. This fact brought John, almost in a jump, to his feet and he rushed towards the sink and, bending over it, peered out of the window. The light was beginning to fade and the garden was bathed in a pinkish afterglow that softened all its outlines and gave to the whole a matt effect, and there, in the middle of it, dead in the middle of it, in fact, as he had surmised, right in the centre of his potato patch, was McNally. He was taking large cautious steps; and for why? Because he was dressed up in a long white sheet with a broom shank in his hand. And he was making for the side of the house.

  ‘By damned, he’ll not get away with that.’ All John’s suave serenity had vanished as if it had been stripped off him by lightning. ‘Get off there, you silly swine.’

  As he bawled through the window, Florrie, standing at his side now, cried, ‘What is it? What’s the matter?’

  John, flinging himself round from the sink and striding towards the back door, shouted at her, ‘See for yourself—McNally trying to take a rise out of me. Dressed up in a sheet. By God, I’d know him atween the sheets however he tries to hide himself.’

  ‘Dad, Dad, wait a minute.’ Arthur caught hold of his arm.

  ‘Leave be!’

  ‘Look, Dad, keep your temper. He likes it when you lose your temper. You’d get one over on him if you’d laugh at him.’

  John, pulling himself from Arthur’s grasp, said, ‘I’ll laugh at him. I’ve stood enough of him for years. It’s about time he saw who he’s up against.’

  Except for Gran, who was standing calmly within the frame of the back porch, the whole family was now on the garden path, but not one of them could see a sign of Broderick anywhere.

  ‘He’s run indoors like a scalded cat,’ John cried, and made his way on the side path towards the fence. Leaning over it, he shouted in the direction of McNally’s back door, ‘If you want to play games, McNally, I’ll play with you any time you like. Just name it.’

  ‘John, for God’s sake, come inside; you’ll have the street out.’ Florrie was hanging onto his arm now and Arthur coaxed, ‘Dad, look, there’s nobody here, perhaps you imagined…’

  John turned to Arthur with a ferocity that brought at least one member of the family some satisfaction, for Frankie grinned when his father bellowed at Arthur, ‘Now don’t you start on the imagination stunt. Don’t tell me I’m seeing things. I saw McNally in the garden with a sheet on him and a broom shank in his hand, so don’t you…’

  ‘Is anything the matter?’ It was Katie standing on her doorstep with her son, Pat, behind her.

  ‘Get McNally to come out here. I want him.’

  Pat, stepping before his mother, asked in a voice that held the same laughing quality prominent in his father’s, ‘Is anything wrong, Uncle?’

  ‘You tell your father to come out here.’

  ‘But me dad’s not in—he’s down at the club.’

  ‘Don’t stand there lying to me. He’s had time to get the sheet off himself now. Tell him to come out here.’

  ‘It’s the God’s truth he’s tellin’ you, John,’ said Katie. ‘Brod’s been down at the club these two hours and more.’

  ‘He might have been at the club but he’s back here somewhere. He sneaked through this garden just a minute ago dressed up in a sheet.’

  ‘In the name of God,’ exclaimed Katie. ‘And what would he be in a sheet for, and him neither dead nor in bed?’

  ‘He was in a sheet,’ exclaimed John slowly and definitely, ‘because he was trying to take a rise out of me. All because I asked a question of the Member the day concerning this St Christopher business. So he gets himself dressed up like the figure on the medals with the intention of taking a rise out of me and giving himself a helluva laugh.’

  ‘In the name of God,’ said Katie again. ‘You’re not yourself.’

  ‘John, John, I beg you, come away indoors will you?’ Florrie now was in tears and Frankie, taking her arm and trying to pull her from his father’s side, whispered, ‘Leave him be. Come inside and he’ll come out of it.’

  ‘You come out with another crack like that and you won’t live long enough to come out of it.’

  Once started on the hapless Frankie, it was evident he was going to continue, but Frankie was saved for the moment by Katie’s remark of, ‘It’s the clout on the head that’s done it. I’d go to me bed, John; it’ll likely be days afore you’re right again.’

  John turned round and faced Katie. He looked at her steadily for a moment across the garden, then he closed his eyes before lowering his head and turning away. But as he neared the porch and Gran, he raised his head again and gave her a look that said, ‘You open your mouth and I’ll gallop plumb down your throat.’

  On reaching the kitchen again, John went straight to the chair that he had left a few minutes earlier, and sitting down he waited until the family were all once more in the room. Then, placing his outspread hand with a plomp on the table, he swept them all with his eyes before saying, ‘I was sitting here, wasn’t I?’

  No one spoke.

  ‘I was sitting here and I happened to look out of the window.’ He indicated the window. ‘And there I saw McNally—don’t tell me I don’t know McNally—and he was creeping this way, planting his big feet atween me tatie rows. He had loped over the railings thinking to make his way down to the kitchen door here without being seen. But I spoilt h
is little game.’

  ‘John, come on up to bed.’

  ‘I am not going to bed, Florrie.’ Each word carried emphasis. ‘And what, may I ask, are you cryin’ for?’

  Before Florrie could clear her throat to answer, Gran’s voice came from the back door saying, ‘You’re sure ’twas McNally you saw?’

  ‘Are you trying to get me goat, Mother?’

  ‘No, I’m not trying to get your goat or anything of the sort. Why should I when McNally has already done it? But McNally, as you say, has big feet, and if he was stepping in atween the taties there’s bound to be evidence of it for the ground’s soft after last night’s rain, but there’s not as much as a fly’s footprint on the soil. And what’s more you banked them up this mornin’ and they’re still banked up, grain on top of grain.’

  John rose slowly to his feet and the look he gave his mother should have shrivelled her up.

  ‘Go and look for yourself.’