A Place of Meadows and Tall Trees
Page 23
Myfanwy’s face is a miniature of her mother’s. She holds up her arms to be picked up, first by Silas, then by Jacob.
Megan quickly kisses him. ‘I’ve missed you,’ she says, curtly, ‘don’t you dare go again.’
They are using the caves in the cliffs for shelter, and even though it is cold and wet, at least it is out of most of the wind and the rain. Some of the women and children have slept there while others have sheltered as best they can in crude huts, assembled from what remains from two years before.
Soon they are once more sitting by the fire on the beach roasting pieces of meat. It is already dusk. Annie Williams’ baby grumbles in her arms and as she rocks him back to sleep she looks at the Denby. ‘When are the other ships coming?’ she asks, ‘because we won’t all fit on that.’
The mumbling of voices stops. Everyone looks expectantly at Edwyn.
‘There will be no other ships,’ Caradoc says, ‘we’re going to stay in Chubut. It is decided.’
Silas hangs his head. There is a short shocked silence.
‘You have spoken for all of us?’ Mary asks incredulously, ‘what gives you the right to do that?’
‘All the representatives were in agreement,’ Caradoc says coldly.
‘All of them?’
When he nods, she turns open-mouthed to Silas and says quietly, ‘And you too, Silas? I thought we could depend on you.’
Silas shakes his head. He can’t speak. He can’t explain. He looks at Edwyn with narrowed eyes and the man merely nods back.
‘Of course you can go somewhere else if you choose,’ Edwyn tells Mary, ‘anywhere you like.’
Mary looks at him and snorts.
‘But I’m afraid you will not get any help from the Argentine government if you do,’ he adds.
For a few minutes the colonists are silent.
‘But we’ve slaughtered our animals!’ John says suddenly.
The man rarely speaks in public and it is startling to hear his voice. It is as if it wakes the people around him, and several of them start shouting out complaints.
‘And set light to our houses!’
‘And traipsed miles over the desert with the children.’
‘And how are we going to get back there again, anyway?’ Joseph Jones blurts out.
Edwyn blinks. Silas notices that the man’s fingertips are trembling. He turns to Selwyn. ‘Is all this true?’
Selwyn nods and Annie slips her arm around his shoulder. ‘It wasn’t his idea,’ she says, ‘everyone decided together.’
Edwyn sighs and shuts his eyes. He brings his fingertips together and rests his chin on his forefingers, and his head sways slightly. ‘There is a solution,’ he murmurs. ‘All is not lost.’
They wait a few moments but the Meistr says nothing else.
‘I’m sure the Chiquichan will lend us a few horses, if we ask them,’ says Caradoc quickly.
‘Yes, I’m sure they will, if we can find a way of sending word.’
But Edwyn doesn’t seem to be listening. His eyes are shut and he is sitting motionlessly by the fire. The people around him start to murmur, but Jacob holds up his hands to quieten them.
‘But we can’t go back to Chubut now,’ Mary says, taking no notice. ‘I can’t understand how this has happened. We were all agreed to go and start again in Santa Fe.’
‘We’ve been tricked,’ Silas says, looking at Edwyn. He speaks as though someone has him by the throat.
Everyone is silent, looking slowly from Silas to Edwyn and back again.
‘We could have gone to Santa Fe, we could have gone anywhere we like, but somehow this man has stopped it.’
Everyone waits, but Edwyn doesn’t stir. His eyes are still shut; his body still immobile, but underneath his beard his mouth is beginning to move. There are small flashes of white as his teeth shine through. Then, suddenly, he opens his eyes and rises to his feet. He goes to stand where the fire lights his face and smiles at them all.
‘My most beloved brothers and sisters, how very grateful I am to you. How you have greeted me so warmly! I have to confess I was a little apprehensive after all that had happened, but when I saw you all… when I saw that your spirit wasn’t broken, despite everything… how very glad it made me feel – that I knew you all. That you were my people. How very proud! My people, I would tell Dr Rawson, again and again. I know them. They will not give up. They work hard. They have faith. They are stubborn and are not afraid of a little adversity.
‘Ah, my valiant friends, I can do nothing more than admire you all. The way you have learnt from the Indians! The way you have co-operated. It is unheard of. Unique.’
Everyone is quiet now. Several are smiling almost as broadly. Silas sinks back onto his heels and groans. The man has so many tricks.
‘It has been hard everywhere, a strange unusual time of drought and everyone has been suffering – but Dr Rawson says that none have coped as well as the Welsh. He was talking of sending someone down to Patagonia to learn from you. You can’t give up now. Today is the twenty-eighth of July 1867, brodyr a chwiorydd. Two years to the day since we landed here. As Dr Rawson remarked, it takes a special people to make a desert bloom. And the Welsh are those people!’
‘Amen, brodyr!’
Several people cheer.
‘Are we going to do it? Are we going to work together and show the Argentines what we can do?’
‘Yes!’ Several of the men are standing now, clapping and cheering. Silas looks at Megan, and even she is smiling. Silas shifts on his haunches, and goes to stand, but a hand clamps down on his shoulder. Mary. She shakes her head at him. ‘Not now,’ she mouths.
Silas looks around him. The only eyes that meet his own are Selwyn’s, Mary’s and Megan’s. His wife’s smile slides from her mouth then she reaches out, tries to touch him on the arm, but he walks away up the beach. All lies. He wraps his jacket around him and shivers in the wind. The wind – it is needling his eyes with dust and sucking away moisture from his throat. He swallows but the hurt in his throat will not go. That man has destroyed everything. He reaches one of the dilapidated sheds and beats at the walls with both fists. He cannot stay here. He will take Megan and Myfanwy and whoever else who wants to come with him and walk across the desert up to Patagones if he has to, and if no one will leave with him he will go on his own.
‘Dadda?’ A small hand reaches into his own. She has run after him. He reaches down and picks her up and sobs into the soft cushion of her hair.
Forty-one
The houses are remarkably intact; the roofs destroyed of course, but the walls and even some of the furniture still untouched. The colonists immediately start to work on them; the wind sweeping through, helping them get rid of the smell of ashes. When the Indians had realised that the fort was empty they tried to continue what the colonists had started – re-lighting roofs that had become extinguished, and throwing on more fuel where they could in an attempt to make the houses uninhabitable. The Galenses had turned out to be welcome neighbours; the Cristianos, however, were not. But then the rain had come and put out everything.
Silas’ own house had required just some repair and then some cleaning. They had swept it out, and made more crude furniture from driftwood on the beach. Then he had repaired the stove and mended the doors and windows using timber from the old wreck in the river. Within a few weeks it was better than it had been.
Even though it is November and the middle of spring, Silas and the two older Jones boys have decided to go out looking for game. They are still waiting for the promised supplies from Buenos Aires and the stocks of food are low. Everyone is a little hungry and foraging for anything they can find. The guanaco and rhea have migrated inland to the breeding grounds of the west and the Indians, of course, have followed them. There is little left near the coast but a few of the smaller mammals and birds. It is hard work catching anything but every day he, Joseph and Ieuan manage to catch some small animal to eat. The rest of the colonists are busy clearing and tur
ning over their ground, but Silas doesn’t bother. He hunts to feed his family now but he is doing nothing to prepare for the future. Just five months left now and they will go to Santa Fe.
The sun becomes hotter as the summer approaches – a burning smouldering light with no clouds to filter it. He remembers last year, how he’d worked so hard with the hand plough, how he’d laboured with Megan pulling up weeds from the fertile-looking stretch of land near the river, how he’d sown seed and the land had been green with seedlings, and how at first they’d grown and everyone had been happy – and then they had all withered and died. No, he decides, there is no point labouring again if they will be gone from here in a few months. The thought of leaving lightens his step. He watches the rest of the colonists at work by the river, bending, pulling, and then bending again. Every back aches. Each pair of hands is rubbed raw. For nothing, he thinks, nothing at all.
Silas walks to the edge of his plot and looks at it; like all the other plots it consists of a dry dead-looking part and a more fertile-looking portion beside the river. If seed comes back from Buenos Aires he will plant it, but he will waste no time preparing the ground near the river. Instead he will plant the seed in the ground that is clear already because nothing grows there – the earth is pale and cracked with long deep fissures. This, at least, will be easy to dig. He tests the earth with his spade – it is soft and easily worked. He looks at the patch and considers it – yes, this will do. It will not be much effort but at least no one will be able to say he hasn’t tried at all.
Forty-two
Megan sniffs him cautiously, and then steps aside. Sometimes he smells too strongly of the pigs or the sheep or the dung of cattle.
‘I’m sorry,’ she says, ‘I’ve not been feeling well – that is, I’ve been feeling sick.’ She looks at him meaningfully and pats her stomach.
He dives towards her but she backs away, laughing. ‘Later,’ she mouths.
Beside them Myfanwy is practising her letters using chalk on the table. She looks up at him and smiles and Silas pats her on the head.
‘She would improve with some paper,’ Megan says.
He nods. At last their long-awaited supplies have come, and together with the food, seed and agricultural equipment he has heard there are a few less essential things like paper and ink and books for the children.
‘Jacob’s talking about starting a proper school.’
Silas had snorted. ‘It’s too early for that.’
‘No Silas, it’s important. Just because…’ She stops and finds something to pick up from the floor. Just because you can’t read, that’s what she meant to say, but she won’t. She straightens up and smoothes out an ache in her back and looks at him. ‘The children need to learn to read. Books, paper, pens, and pencils – they make things feel less desperate. Anyway, Jacob says everything’s waiting for you.’
Silas had been putting off going to the warehouse for days.
‘Get it over with, man,’ Mary had told him. ‘You’ve got to do it sometime. Take the cart.’
‘Two sacks each, that’s how it works out,’ Edwyn says.
Silas takes his without comment.
‘We will have a harvest this time, Silas, this seed is superior, by all accounts.’
He nods and lifts a sack onto his shoulder. He will bide his time. Only five months before they leave – less than one hundred and fifty days.
‘If we all work together, we will succeed, don’t you agree?’
Edwyn holds Silas’ second sack against his body and waits for him to reply.
Silas sighs. ‘No, I am not agreed. We both know what will happen. The seed will be sown and then it will die and then we will leave. All of us. This stupidity will stop and we will start again – somewhere green, with grass and trees and cows that I have seen with my own eyes.’
‘It will grow, Silas. It is important that you believe that. Only if you believe in success will you succeed.’ Edwyn tries to fix him with his eyes but Silas looks determinedly away.
‘Are you going to give me that grain, or aren’t you?’
‘Why will you not give the man a chance?’ asks Jacob plaintively, striding beside him as Silas determinedly leads his horse and cart out of the village. ‘He has done so much for us all. We should all be grateful, all of us.’
‘I can never be grateful to that cheat, that liar – you, of all people should be able to understand that. Richard and Gwyneth would still be with us, if it wasn’t for him – and his lies.’
‘You can’t know that, Silas.’
Silas stops. The man is always so earnest and righteous.
‘We should try to love one another. Turn the other cheek.’
Silas grips the horse’s reins so tightly the horse is beginning to strain away. ‘I can’t.’
‘You can, Silas, pray, ask for forgiveness.’
He turns so that Jacob can see his face. The minister makes a couple of backward steps, his eyes blinking.
‘Me – ask for forgiveness?’ Silas’ voice cracks. ‘What about him?’
‘Edwyn doesn’t need to.’
Silas lets go of the reins. ‘Go away from me, Jacob,’ he says carefully, keeping his voice steady. His hands curl into fists, and rise slightly in front of him.
Jacob blinks more rapidly and takes another step away. ‘I’m just saying you should examine your conscience, Silas. It is not good for your soul to hate a man as much as you do.’
‘GO AWAY FROM ME!’ He makes a single lunge forwards, his fist an extension of his words and Jacob’s teeth clink together like small pieces of china.
Silas stops and looks at his hands. It’s as if they don’t belong to him. As he watches they fall back down to his sides.
Jacob feels his mouth. ‘You hit me!’ he says incredulously, looking at the blood on his hand. Then his round astonished eyes travel up to Silas’ face and for a few seconds stay there while a small, satisfied smile tugs at his lips and a dribble of blood appears. ‘You hit me!’ he says again, wondering, and then scurries away towards the fort.
Silas washes his hand in the river and tells no one. After a day of deliberately forcing the scene from his mind, he finds he can convince himself it has never happened at all. There was no blood. Jacob’s teeth didn’t rattle. On Sunday he makes his usual excuse that, like many of the colonists, he feels his clothing is too scruffy and unsuitable for chapel. It is weeks since he has been.
‘I shouldn’t think the Lord minds how you are dressed, as long as you praise him,’ Megan says, as she lowers herself into the cart with Myfanwy. She is heavier now and the cart sinks beneath her. ‘They miss your voice.’
‘But not the rest of me, then.’
‘Silas!’ But he notices that she doesn’t deny it.
He is out in the field sowing the seed when she returns. At first he doesn’t see her. He has made a brush from a few branches of thorn and has attached this to the horse. Now he is coaxing the horse up and down the field to brush the loose earth over the seed. It is easy this way because the soil is dry and friable. Too dry, too friable – it is just like last year – if there is any growth it will be short-lived.
He stops at the head of the field nearest the cottage. Megan is on her own, Myfanwy off with Miriam and the three younger Jones children, and for a few seconds he catches her just standing, gazing over the fields at nothing, short strands of hair playing in the wind. Her face is still, but he can tell she is angry: her fingers straddle her hips, and her chin thrusts upwards. Then she sees him, and turns to face him.
It is hot, late spring, and she is wearing a thin blouse, her best Sunday one, newly made from some pale material that came with the last supplies. She waits before he is almost beside her before she speaks.
‘Is it true?’ she asks.
‘Is what true?’
‘That you punched my brother?’
‘It was hardly that.’
For a while she glares at him. ‘Are you going to tell me what happened? Or am I ju
st going to have to rely on what they say?’
After he has told her, she looks distractedly around her. Her hands clench and unclench. Say something, he thinks. Anything. She walks a few feet away from him and kneels down to inspect the soil while he stands exactly where she’s left him: stiffening, waiting.
‘Why are you planting the grain here?’ she says at last. She keeps her head down so he can’t see her face. Her voice is strained, tight, as if she is struggling to keep it under control.
He wants to run to her, shake her, make her tell him he’s right and they’re wrong. But all he does is swallow. ‘Because it’s easier,’ he says. ‘It is all going to die anyway; there’s no point looking for work.’
‘But the soil by the river looks more fertile.’ One careful word and then the next. Ignoring all that he’d said before, as if it means nothing.
‘I don’t care!’ His voice comes out too loud, too close to a wail.
She makes a couple of steps towards him and grabs his hand. Her eyes are glistening; too wet. ‘Oh Silas, please try and make it up with them. We’ve got to live here. You’ve got to get on with them. I want to be included.’
Silas snorts.
‘I can’t bear it, Silas!’
He turns away from her and strides across the field that the horse has just brushed, making large deep footprints in the soil.
‘Silas, stop!’ She is coming after him. Her smaller boot prints are beside his, two for each of his one. She catches his hand. He looks sideways at her. The slight bulge beneath her skirt is lifting her hem a few inches above the ground. The thought of this new life calms him and makes him triumphant. His child. There is nothing more precious. Maybe he should feel pity, perhaps try to forgive – just a little – but he can’t; every time he tries he discovers new lies, new deceits. Richard. He closes his eyes. If he forgave Edwyn he would betray his son, his daughter. Thoughts creep in on their own. It’s as if they’re falling into a void: the boy’s head arched back on his pillow gasping for breath, one wheeze and then another; an old man’s lungs in a young boy’s chest. He opens his eyes and looks at Megan. Her eyes are searching for his now: anxious, slightly beseeching. ‘Please try,’ she says.