by Dai Smith
‘Hay must be gathered and stacked and thatched before the corn harvest,’ Lloyd answered. ‘How are the animals to live in the winter? Tell me that.’
‘All the dead – tenors and basses, praying men and men who cry “Amen”, old and young, big and little – must be housed.’ So sang the preacher in his pulpit manner.
The cobbler moved before he was freed and fell upon the floor, his wooden leg breaking in two.
‘The Big Man’s punishment for discussing the Beybile with you,’ he reproached the preacher. ‘The breath in your body is the smoke of hellfire.’
‘I have not the timber to make Ann a coffin,’ said Lloyd. ‘No; not for stout Ann.’
‘There are many trees,’ said Shacob.
‘Great will be the cost of the coffin.’
‘I’ll sell the cow,’ Shacob began.
‘Hearken! If I make the coffin, you must pay the day after the funeral. You shall not make a debt of it.’
The preacher blessed Lloyd. ‘You are behaving in a most religious spirit. Houses of stonemasons crumble, but the houses of carpenters will be placed in the lofts of the White Palace.’
Husband, stepson and carpenter then passed through the village and the deeply-rutted, cart-wide lane to Shacob’s house, which is in the midst of marshland.
As the three unlatched their clogs at the foot of the stairway, Shacob shouted: ‘Ann, here is Lloyd Carpenter. Are you perished?’
Ann made an answer, whereupon they went up to her. Lloyd drew back the bedclothes and bade the woman straighten her limbs; then he measured her length, her breadth, and her depth. ‘Write you down two inches extra every way for the swellings,’ he commanded Little Ben.
‘We ought to write four,’ said the youth.
‘Clap your head. Have I ever made a coffin too small?’
‘If it only fits,’ said Ben, ‘how can the angel flap his wings when he comes to call Mammo up? Mammo, you need the angel?’
‘Why, iss, Son bach,’ Ann replied. ‘Are you not ashamed, carpenter, to deprive me of the angel?’
‘It is the large cost that is in my think,’ murmured Lloyd.
‘Drat your think! I will not go into a coffin that will smother the angel. Have I not suffered enough?’
‘It will be many shillings more. Maybe ten. Maybe fifteen. O iss, a pound.’
‘Be good,’ said Shacob. ‘It is well to obey the perished.’
For three days Ben and Lloyd laboured, and as the coffin was carried on the shoulders of four men, the haymakers who came to the hedges were amazed at its vastness.
By the side of the bed it was put. ‘For,’ said Lloyd, ‘she will be a heavy corpse and easier to roll down than lift.’
At the end of the year the carpenter said to Ann’s husband:
‘Give me now the coffin money.’
‘On the day after the funeral,’ said Shacob.
‘I will have the petty sessions on you, I will, drop dead and blind. I’ll poison your well. And your cow. And your pigs. Is it my blame that Ann is alive?’
‘It shall be as you pledged. Broken-out preacher heard you.’
‘Tut-tut. He is a bad man. He disputes the Beybile. That is why he was broken out from the capel.’
But Shacob was soon puzzle-headed. Ann fancied to see herself in the coffin, and holding a mirror she tried to enter it, but the breadth of it was too narrow. She made such a great dole that Shacob hurried to discover Lloyd’s iniquity. ‘Little Ben,’ he shouted at the door of the workshop, ‘come forth from the workshop of the sinner. Bring your birdcage and coat and tools. Have a care you bring nothing that is his.’
The youth obeyed and remained like a sentry by his stepfather.
‘There’s glad I am I did not pay you,’ cried Shacob. ‘If I had, the law would find a thief.’
‘Be quiet, robber,’ Lloyd returned.
‘Who made Ann’s coffin too small? Come out, neighbours bach, and listen. Who made Ann’s coffin too small? Who tried to cheat the perished dead?’
Many people came to hear Shacob reviling Lloyd and were very sorry that the carpenter answered in this fashion: ‘Reit. ’Oreit. Little Ben, go you in and find the paper with the figures.’
‘And keep it tightly,’ Shacob counselled his stepson. ‘Nothing new must be put in it. Don’t you be tempted by Lloyd because he was your master. We are honest.’
After Lloyd had measured Ann, and while he was measuring the coffin, Little Ben went under his mother’s bed and wrote anew on another paper and in accordance with the fresh measurements.
‘Carpenter,’ he said shyly, ‘you are wrong. Study the figures. I cannot work for a scampist master.’
‘Why do I want a useless coffin?’ Ann shrieked. ‘A mess I would be in if I perished now. And what would be said if I reached the Palace in a patched coffin? Ach-y-fi!’
That night Little Ben, who was unable to sleep for his mother’s plight, stole into Lloyd’s workshop and brought away screws and nails and a few planks of timber, and with these he enlarged the coffin.
In the ten years that followed, the trouble between Lloyd and Shacob brewed into bitter hatred; it attracted one to the other, when they fought as fiercely as poachers fight for the possession of a ferret. Shacob died, and there was peace for a little while, but in the after-season Lloyd did not subdue his rage. ‘Shacob is gone,’ he whined. ‘Cobbler Wooden Leg is gone and Broken-out Preacher. The next will be Ann. Oh, there will be a champion riot if I don’t get my money.’ His spoken and unspoken prayer was that the Big Man would allow him to live longer than Ann. Every summer evening he watched the weather signs, and if they foretold heat, he said joyfully to himself: ‘Like a poof she’ll go off tomorrow.’
As Ann fattened so Ben enlarged the coffin with iron staples and leathern hinges. This he did many times. The fame of his skill became a byword, and folk brought to him clocks, sewing-machines, and whatsoever that wanted much cunning to be set in proper order.
He had married, and his four children were a delight to Ann, who often tumbled into her coffin and closing her eyes said to them: ‘Like this Grand-mammo will go to the Palace.’ The children pranced about with glee, and by and by they played hide and seek in it.
On a day when Ben said: ‘If I stretch the box any more your perished corpse will fall through the bottom, Mammo; even now it will have to be well roped before you are lifted,’ before sunset a horrible thing happened: three children hid in the coffin and the fourth swooped down upon them, and the sides of it fell apart.
Ben viewed what had been done. ‘It won’t repair,’ he told his tearful mother. ‘I’ll make you another, Mammo fach.’
He laughed as he separated the pieces, for those that belonged to Lloyd he was returning to Lloyd.
THE DARK WORLD
Rhys Davies
‘Where can we go tonight?’ Jim asked. Once again it was raining. The rows of houses in the valley bed were huddled in cold grey mist. Beyond them the mountains prowled unseen. The iron street lamps spurted feeble jets of light. There were three weeks to go before Christmas. They stood in a chapel doorway and idly talked, their feet splashed by the rain.
Thomas said: ‘There’s someone dead up in Calfaria Terrace.’
‘Shall we go to see him?’ Jim suggested immediately.
They had not seen any corpses for some weeks. One evening they had seen five, and so for a while the visits had lost their interest. When on these expeditions they would search through the endless rows of houses for windows covered with white sheets, the sign that death was within, and when a house was found thus, they would knock at the door and respectfully ask if they might see the dead. Only once they were denied, and this had been at a villa, not a common house. Everywhere else they had been taken to the parlour or bedroom where the corpse lay, sometimes in a coffin, and allowed a few seconds’ stare. Sometimes the woman of the house, or maybe a daughter, would whisper: ‘You knew him, did you?’ Or, if the deceased was a child: ‘You were in the same sch
ool?’ They would nod gravely. Often they had walked three or four miles through the valley searching out these dramatic houses. It was Jim who always knocked at the door and said, his cap in his hand: ‘We’ve come to pay our respects, mum.’
At the house in Calfaria Terrace they were two in a crowd. The dead had been dead only a day and neighbours were also paying their respects, as was the custom: there was quite a procession to the upstairs room. The corpse was only a very old man, and his family seemed quite cheerful about it. Thomas heard the woman of the house whisper busily on the landing to a neighbour in a shawl: ‘That black blouse you had on the line, Jinny, it’ll be a help. The ’surance won’t cover the fun’ral, and you know Emlyn lost four days in the pit last week. Still, gone he is now, and there’ll be room for a lodger.’ And, entreatingly: ‘You’ll breadcrumb the ham for me, Jinny…? I ’ont forget you when you’re in trouble of your own.’ The dead old man lay under a patchwork quilt. His face was set in an expression of mild surprise. Thomas noticed dried soapsuds in his ear. Four more people came into the bedroom and the two boys were almost hustled out. No one had taken any particular notice of them. Downstairs they asked a skinny, cruel-looking young woman for a glass of water and to their pleased astonishment she gave them each a glass of small beer.
‘It didn’t seem as though he was dead at all,’ Jim said, as if cheated. ‘Let’s look for more. In November there’s a lot of them. They get bronchitis and consumption.’
‘It was like a wedding,’ Thomas said. Again they stood in a doorway and looked with vacant boredom through the black curtains of rain sweeping the valley.
‘My mother had a new baby last night,’ Jim suddenly blurted out, frowning. But when Thomas asked what kind it was, Jim said he didn’t know yet. But he knew that there were nine of them now, beside his father and mother and two lodgers. He did not complain. But of late he had been expressing an ambition to go to sea when he left school, instead of going to the colliery.
Jim, in the evenings, was often pushed out of home by his mother, a bitter, black-browed woman who was never without a noisy baby. Jim’s father was Irish; a collier of drunken reputation in the place, and the whole family was common as a clump of dock. Thomas’ mother sometimes made one or two surprised remarks at his association with Jim. They shared a double desk in school. Occasionally Thomas expressed disgust at Jim’s unwashed condition.
Again they set out down the streets, keeping a sharp lookout for white sheets in the windows. After a while they found a house so arrayed, yellow blobs of candlelight like sunflowers shining through the white of the parlour. Jim knocked and respectfully made his request to a big creaking woman in black. But she said gently: ‘Too late you are. The coffin was screwed down after tea today. Funeral is tomorrow. The wreaths you would like to see?’
Jim hesitated, looking back enquiringly over his shoulder at Thomas. Without speaking, both rejected this invitation, and with mumbled thanks they backed away. ‘No luck tonight,’ Jim muttered.
‘There was the small beer,’ Thomas reminded him. A wind had jumped down from the mountains and, as they scurried on, it unhooked a faulty door of a street lamp and blew out the wispy light. When they had reached the bottom of the vale the night was black and rough and moaning, the rain stinging hot on cheeks and hands like whips. Here was a jumbled mass of swarthy and bedraggled dwellings, huddled like a stagnant meeting of bats. A spaniel, dragging her swollen belly, whined out to them from under a bony bush. She sounded lost and confused and exhausted with the burden that weighted her to earth. In the dark alleyways they found a white sheet. A winter silence was here, the black houses were glossy in the rain. No one was about.
‘Let’s go back,’ whispered Thomas. ‘It’s wet and late.’
‘There’s one here,’ Jim protested. ‘After coming all this way!’ And he tapped at the door, which had no knocker.
The door was opened and in a shaft of lamplight stood a man’s shape, behind him a warm fire-coloured interior, for the door opened on to the living room. Jim made his polite request, and the man silently stood aside. They walked into the glow.
But the taste of death was in the house, true and raw. A very bent old woman in a black cardigan, clasped at her stringy throat with a geranium brooch, sat nodding before the fire. Thomas was staring at the man, who had cried out:
‘It’s Thomas!’ He sat down heavily on a chair: ‘Oh, Thomas!’ he said in a wounded voice. His stricken face was though he were struggling to repudiate a new pain. A tall handsome man, known to Thomas as Elias, his face had the grey, tough pallor of the underground worker.
The boy stood silent in the shock of the recognition and the suspicion prowling about his mind. He could not speak; he dare not ask. Then fearfully the man said:
‘You’ve come to see Gwen, have you! All this way. Only yesterday I was wondering if your mother had heard. You’ve come to see her!’
‘Yes,’ Thomas muttered, his head bent. Jim stood waiting, shifting his feet. The old woman kept on nodding her head. Her son said to her loudly, his voice sounding out in suffering, not having conquered this new reminder of the past years. ‘Mam, this is Thomas, Mrs Morgan’s boy. You remember? That Gwen was fond of.’
The old woman dreadfully began to weep. Her face, crumpled and brown as a dead rose, winced and shook out slow, difficult tears. ‘Me it ought to have been,’ she said with a thin obsession. ‘No sense in it, no sense at all.’
Thomas glanced secretly at Elias, to see if his emotion had abated. Three years ago he used to carry notes from Elias to Gwen, who had been the servant at home. It seemed to him that Elias and Gwen were always quarrelling. Elias used to stand for hours on the street corner until he came past, hurry up to him and say hoarsely: ‘Thomas, please will you take this to Gwen.’ In the kitchen at home, Gwen would always toss her head on the receipt of a note, and sometimes she indignantly threw them on the fire without reading them… But Gwen used to be nice. She always kept back for him, after her evening out, some of Elias’ chocolates. Once or twice she had obtained permission to take him to the music hall and gloriously he had sat between her and Elias, watching the marvellous conjurors and the women in tights who heaved their bejewelled bosoms as they sang funny songs. But Elias, he had felt, had not welcomed those intrusions. After a long time, Gwen had married him. But before she left to do this, she had wept every day for a week, her strong kind face wet and gloomy. His mother had given her a handsome parlour clock and Gwen had tearfully said she would never wind it as it would last longer if unused. Then gradually she had disappeared, gone into her new married life down the other end of the valley.
Elias looked older, older and thinner. Thomas kept his gaze away from him as much as possible. He felt shy at being drawn into the intimacy of all this grief. The old woman kept on quavering. At last Elias said, quietly now: ‘You will come upstairs to see her, Thomas. And your friend.’ He opened a door at the staircase and, tall and gaunt, waited for them to pass. Thomas walked past him unwillingly, his stomach gone cold. He did not want to go upstairs. But he thought that Elias would take a refusal hardly. Jim, silent and impassive, followed with politely quiet steps.
In a small, small bedroom with a low ceiling, two candles were burning. A bunch of snowy chrysanthemums stood on a table beside a pink covered bed. Elias had preceded them and now he lifted a starched white square of cloth from off the head and shoulders of the dead.
She was lying tucked in the bed as if quietly asleep. The bedroom was so small there was nowhere else to look. Thomas looked, and started with a terrified surprise. The sheets were folded back, low under Gwen’s chest, and cradled in her arms was a pale waxen doll swathed in white. A doll! His amazement passed into terror. He could not move, and the scalp of his head contracted as though an icy wind passed over it. Surely that wasn’t a baby, that pale stiff thing Gwen was nursing against her quiet breast! Elias was speaking in a hoarse whisper, and while he spoke he stroked a fold of the bedclothes with a grey hand.
/> ‘Very hard it was, Thomas, Gwen going like this. The two of them, I was in the pit, and they sent for me. But she had gone before I was here, though old Watkins let me come in his car… I didn’t see her, Thomas, and she asked for me—’ His voice broke, and Thomas in his anguish of terror, saw him drop beside the bed and bury his face in the bed.
It was too much. Thomas wanted to get away; he wanted to run, away from the close narrow room, from the man shuddering beside the bed, from the figure in the bed that had been the warm Gwen, from the strange creature in her arms that looked as though it had never been warm. The terror became a nightmare menace coming nearer… Unconsciously he jerked his way out to the landing. Jim followed; he looked oppressed.
‘Let’s clear off,’ he whispered nervously.
They went downstairs. The old woman was brewing tea, and in the labour seemed to forget her grief. ‘You will have a cup,’ she enquired, ‘and a piece of nice cake?’
At this Jim was not unwilling to stay, but Thomas agonisedly plucked his sleeve. Elias’ heavy step could be heard on the stairs. Then he came in, quiet and remote-looking. He laid his hand on Thomas’ shoulder for a second.
‘Do you remember when we used to go to the Empire, Thomas? You and Gwen used to like that Chinaman that made a white pigeon come out of an empty box.’
But Thomas saw that he was not the same Elias, who, though he would wait long hours for the indifferent Gwen like a faithful dog, had been a strutting young man with a determined eye. He was changed now, his shoulders were slackened. She had defeated him after all. Thomas sipped half a cup of tea, but did not touch the cake. He scarcely spoke. Elias kept on reminding him of various happy incidents in the past. That picnic in the mountains, when Elias had scaled the face of a quarry to fetch a blue flower Gwen had fancied. ‘Didn’t she dare me to get it!’ he added, with a strange chuckle in his throat. ‘And then she gave it to you!’ He sat brooding for a while, his face turned away. Then, to Thomas’ renewed terror, he began to weep again, quietly.
