A Place of Meadows and Tall Trees

by Clare Dudman

  He reaches out and draws her close before she can struggle free. ‘If we stand together,’ he says, ‘nothing can defeat us. We don’t need anyone else.’

  He releases her and she frowns and smoothes down her dress as if she is brushing away the impression of him. ‘No, Silas, I need more than that. Two are not enough. A couple can’t survive here on their own.’ She stands upright and regards him. ‘Will you try to fit in? Would you just agree to do that?’

  He nods resignedly.

  ‘Thank you.’ She steps smartly up to him and kisses him hard on the lips. She pats her stomach fondly, then looks around her. ‘Look at the river!’ she says abruptly.

  It is twenty yards in front of them, part of a shimmering silver meander. ‘It is high, this year,’ she says, ‘have you noticed? Much higher than last, I think.’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘I know so. Last year it stopped down there.’ She points. ‘Don’t you remember?’ She points to an area now covered in water. She looks around her. They have had to climb steadily to get onto the levee made by the floods. ‘Look, it’s higher than our land this year... Silas! Look, will you?’ She stamps her foot and he stirs – he had been gazing at her in a reverie, not listening.

  ‘The river, look at the river.’ She points with her arm stretched out. ‘It’s higher here than where you’ve planted the seed.’ He follows her finger and nods thoughtfully. The river is higher. Along its length there are several levees of gravel and sand, left there by floods of high water, and behind this the land where he has just sown the seed is lower and drier.

  ‘You know, if you dug a channel through there, and it would only have to be a narrow gully, the water would spill through. You could water the land as much as you liked and then block it off again.’

  ‘Not sure it’s worth it.’

  ‘It would only be a small channel – I could help.’

  ‘No you can’t!’

  ‘Well, I shall do it unless you say you’ll do it.’

  He looks at her. She has her hands on her hips again, her feet are planted firmly apart and her lips pressed tightly together, her bottom lip protruding. Her determined look – it’s a long time since he’s seen it. He knows it is pointless to try to resist but he offers her a token anyway: ‘Maybe in a few weeks if these seeds show no sign of sprouting.’

  ‘No, now, Silas.’

  ‘But it’s Sunday!’

  ‘All right, tomorrow then.’

  It is decided. Megan grins at her victory.

  The digging is not quite as easy as Megan thinks it is. The ground is either weed-choked or so friable it is difficult to stand and gain purchase. At last he manages to enlarge a small natural opening and work backwards. The water pours in behind him as if it is grateful to be let out of the river. It swirls forcefully at the sides of the gully until they collapse and the channel widens quickly behind him. He feels the water lapping at his feet and he digs more quickly, wondering if he has done the right thing and then worrying that he will be able to close it again. He digs a little deeper and the water seems to gurgle appreciatively, nudging at the soil, urging him onwards. He reaches the edge of his field and looks back. The water is forming small lakes and then tributaries of its own as more and more of it flows onto the land. But it is calmer now; the initial flood has slowed. He breathes out loudly. His feet are wet and most of his legs too, but he is happy. There is a hot breeze and it is quite pleasant to feel the coolness of the water. He clears away the final stretch of gravel and the water gently escapes into the lower ground. It seeps forward without disturbing anything and the soil, which is a rich-looking black and smells strongly of loam, is soon covered in a few inches of water. He finds he can block off the river easily with a few shovels of the dug out soil, and then makes another small channel connecting this higher field to one that is lower to the east. Soon there is a shallow lake of water over all his land. He calls Megan and Myfanwy to see. A stray flamingo comes to look too, makes a swift haughty inspection, and departs. Then Myfanwy calls the younger Jones children, and they come to gawp too, but by then the water has almost gone, sucked away by the thirsty ground. Silas inspects his barrier to the river and ensures it is tight – a little controlled inundation is welcome but he doesn’t want to wake up tomorrow morning to find his cottage surrounded by a lake.

  In another week there will be just four months to go. But today he has to go to the village, and the shortest route is along the river. This errand is something he has put off for as long as possible again, reluctant to face Jacob or Edwyn – but now there are things that he needs, and he is hoping that he will be lucky and Selwyn or Caradoc or one of the other men will be in charge. It is such a beautiful day he has decided to walk alongside his horse and cart to give the animal a rest. There is a cool breeze providing some relief against the heat of the early sun and even the Chubut is looking desolately beautiful. He looks around him indolently. He will take his time – he has little else to do. The sky is reflecting in the river and it is bluer than he has ever seen it before. Beyond it the ground is so dried out it is a bright yellow. He admires the intense colours. He will tell Megan about it when he returns. He clears a slight mound. He sniffs at the dry sweet air. The breeze is unusually slight. In front of the blue river the soil will be a rich brown. Brown, blue, yellow: the colours of the Patagonian desert.

  He stops. Not brown but green. Bright green, as if the blue river and the yellow ground beyond have been mixed together on a palette. As he comes closer he notices something stranger still: this green is changing with the wind – darker then lighter. Yellow-green and then moss-green. A haze: sap-green, leaf-green, new-growth-green.

  Silas had divided his plots into rectangles and has brushed in the seed in turn – one direction for one patch and then another for the next. It is like a patchwork of fragments of the same cloth with different naps – the weft of one against the warp of another.

  He starts to run then stops. Stands, and then looks again. The ground is covered in small green shoots, rough row after rough row.

  He looks again. He calls, once: his voice high with excitement: ‘Megan, come and see this!’

  Then Megan is turning with her basket of clothes; trying to run and then giving up; trotting – in his old boots because her own are too tight; then slowing to a quick walk with her arm around her bump. Her mouth is wide, anxious. No, not anxious, amazed and happy. ‘Silas! Oh, Silas.’

  They grip hands and half turn; dance.

  ‘Oh. Oh. Look.’

  They squeeze themselves together. In between them is the small bump and a feeble kick. Silas grins: a warble in the stomach.

  He kneels in the mud to inspect the shoots. They are healthier than last year, stronger-looking, greener and not so straggly. Last year they seemed to grow too quickly, as if they were searching for something they couldn’t find.

  He reaches out and puts his arm around her again. She is trembling. ‘I thought something dreadful had happened,’ she says, ‘I thought that maybe the seedlings had all been washed away.’

  He draws her close. ‘No, my love, they’re strong, very strong – quite different from last time. Maybe that was all that was wrong – it wasn’t too much sun, but not enough water.’

  She clutches him to her. ‘Everything is going to be all right, Silas, I know it. The new Wales! This is the start. Edwyn Lloyd was right all along.’

  Just now he is too happy to argue.

  Forty-three

  Word travels fast. Within two weeks the whole of Rawson has come out to Silas’ farm to look at his fields. The crop is continuing to grow strongly, whereas elsewhere the wheat is wilting like last year.

  ‘It needs more water,’ Silas says. It is obvious now – why didn’t they see it before? In a couple of weeks he has become Rawson’s expert, and is revelling in his new authority. He visits the other farms passing judgement and giving advice on where to dig channels – as if he has spent years in the field refining his expertise.
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br />   Megan is inside the house resting. Her feet and hands are swollen and Mary Jones has instructed her to sit with her legs up whenever she can. She has also released Miriam from her duties in the Jones household so that she can be, according to Miriam, ‘an unpaid skivvy’ to Megan instead. She does not come graciously. Sometimes Silas eavesdrops on the conversation.

  ‘Miriam, are you busy?’ calls Megan.

  ‘Yes, I am.’

  ‘Well, if you aren’t would you mind gathering more gorse for the stove?’

  ‘In a minute, Myfanwy and I are drawing a dog.’

  ‘Well, I suppose that’s much more important then.’

  Silas grins and then walks noisily in through the door. Miriam’s chair immediately scrapes back.

  ‘I’ll just go and get some, then,’ she says, making a face at Myfanwy, and rushes through the door.

  ‘I’m going too,’ says Myfanwy and hurries after her. Silas has heard Miriam explaining to Myfanwy that her own sister is just a baby and not much good as a conversationalist, so she has adopted Myfanwy as her favourite sister instead. So far she has taught the child to skip, knit a long tube of wool though a cotton reel with four nails hammered into it, write several names from the bible and draw the various animals they see in their excursions to the village. She also tells her long stories about the angels she has seen in the clouds and on the sides of mountains, and sometimes in the light above peoples’ heads.

  ‘It’s their soul escaping, see. The angels take care of it – they either put it back or they take it up to heaven.’

  Like Megan she also believes in the Tylwyth Teg, but whereas Megan’s fairies are malign, and held responsible for every pail of milk that turns sour and every plate or cup that is cracked or chipped, Miriam’s fairies are helpful, leading her to find buttons she has lost and warning her of potential disasters that lie ahead.

  Although self-confident, she is young for her seventeen years and handsome rather than pretty or beautiful. She seems like a drawn-out version of her snub-nosed mother; but whereas Mary is dextrous, Miriam has an awkwardness that is not improving with her years. She is intelligent, however, and a proficient reader and writer and Jacob has already proposed that she should join him at the school he has started. Silas suspects that the man is sweet on her, as until recently he made a point of stopping at the Jones house to speak to her whenever he came out to visit Megan. Silas was amused to see that she was either not interested or unaware of his attentions. Often she would choose the moment of his arrival to ride away on the horse she had persuaded her father to buy for her, or would hide herself away reading one of the books Jacob had left for her the week before.

  These visits had become much less frequent recently of course; since their latest altercation over Edwyn, Silas has only seen Jacob from a distance, and he has taken to visiting Rawson on a Thursday when Selwyn was in charge of the store and Jacob was nowhere in sight.

  But Jacob’s tentative courtship, if indeed that is what it is, has recently been curtailed altogether. One Thursday in December Silas had arrived in Rawson to learn that another ship had arrived with supplies and almost immediately had departed again for Buenos Aires carrying Jacob as an additional passenger.

  ‘There was a berth spare, I’ve heard. Next we knew he’d gone,’ Selwyn says. He looks awkward, as though he’s given something away by accident. ‘Suppose Caradoc or Edwyn should have told you, not me.’

  Silas waits for him to continue. No one had even thought to tell Megan. She will be hurt and upset. Everything seems to upset her at the moment.

  ‘According to the Meistr, Dr Rawson liked Jacob.’ He sniffs. ‘Didn’t notice that myself.’

  Neither had Silas – as far as he could remember the two hadn’t exchanged a single word.

  ‘Said the settlement needed a representative there, his right-hand man.’ Selwyn smirks at his words and then looks around to check that no one is in earshot: ‘I reckon he just wanted him out of the way. Since you and him had that tiff the Meistr’s found things a little awkward, I reckon. Been saying things about social harmony, and maybe he thinks this is the best way to get it.’

  Megan is lying on the day bed Silas has made for her so she can see Myfanwy and Miriam work and play together. Her feet are so swollen now that it hurts every time she walks. Her fingers are swollen too – so much that she cannot knit or even shell eggs. ‘I am like one of those whales,’ she moans. ‘A useless whale landed on the beach.’

  She still has a couple of months to go and Silas can’t see how she could get much larger. Across her stomach is a network of red and blue weals where her flesh has torn beneath.

  She fans herself with a paper Myfanwy has folded for her and decorated with flowers and birds, and for a few minutes after he has told her about Jacob she is silent.

  ‘He slipped away,’ he tells her, ‘like a thief in the night.’

  ‘Silas!’ she says, ‘he’s my brother! A man of the cloth too. You shouldn’t say that.’

  ‘I only said “like a thief”,’ he says.

  ‘Well, he’ll be back soon I expect. He’ll want to see his new niece or nephew.’

  But he isn’t.

  The January sun shines. ‘It is relentless,’ Megan says miserably, ‘I can’t get cool.’ But outside the wheat is growing strongly. When it shows signs of wilting he reopens the channel and allows the fields to flood again, and the plants swiftly recover.

  ‘It’s an inspiration!’ Edwyn says. ‘Silas’ field shows us what we all can do!’

  Silas looks down. He will not change his mind. It is still the Meistr underneath, he reminds himself, still the same snake.

  ‘How wide do you think the channels should be? Better ask Silas!’ The Meistr slaps him on the back. ‘Here’s your expert!’

  The Meistr grins as if he wants a grin back. When he doesn’t get one, he laughs. ‘Too modest! That’s what he is, brawd! Too modest to say.’

  Forty-four

  Yeluc

  In the summer the rou go inland close to the mountains and we follow. It is a beautiful place with trees, lush grass and many streams and ponds. There are bright birds flashing through trees and fish glinting in pools. The rou have their young there and it is a busy time for us. The soft pelt of an unborn rou is a prized thing but rarely taken.

  But as the mountains are fertile they are also cold and soon the rou sniff the air and smell the winter coming. Then they begin to drift back towards the sea.

  These days Seannu and her sisters grumble. ‘Why can we not just stay here?’ they ask. So I tell them about the cold. About the spirits that live there, how they are malicious things that drink the blood of women and crack the bones of men and soon they are rolling up the skins of the toldo and stamping on the fires more determinedly than I am.

  Are we going to see Si-las? they ask, but I shake my head. Patagones, I tell them, and wait for their howls of disappointment.

  Forty-five

  Silas goes out to the field early each morning looking for signs that the crop might be ripening. That, at least, is looking promising. Each stalk is straight and each ear full.

  New families have arrived from the United States and Selwyn is busy introducing them to the ways of the colony. They are wealthy, young and vigorous and have inspired everyone with their scientific modern methods. They are used to farming on a large scale, and have a certain amount of swagger to them, but they are friendly and happy to share what they know and own.

  They have told him it is most important to harvest just before the wheat bursts into flower.

  The weather turns, the air becomes colder and Silas lies in bed beside the sleeping Megan and thinks about the baby ripening alongside the wheat. Sometimes he imagines the grains are like miniature babies growing plumper inside their casing. Then he imagines the baby ripening too, growing fingers and toes, hair and fingernails, and its belly becoming round and its legs kicking. He thinks of it like the frogspawn he once saw and the way the tadpoles became f
rogs, one set of limbs and then another and then the tail shortening. A gust blows at the window making the rhea gut rattle and beside him Megan squirms and moans. ‘What is it?’ he asks, grabbing her arm. ‘Is it time?’

  She doesn’t reply.

  ‘Answer me, gwraig!’

  He struggles out of bed then fumbles with a tinderbox. When he can eventually see her face it is grimacing with pain.

  ‘Do you want someone?’

  She nods, and then gasps again. She swings her legs over the side of the bed and tries to stand then cries out as her feet touch the floor.

  ‘I’m getting Mary.’

  Her nightclothes have risen up above her knees and trickling down her legs is something that is not quite red enough to be blood.

  ‘Quickly, Silas, quickly.’

  Myfanwy is at the door looking in. He takes her by the hand and leads her into the kitchen. ‘Stay here, understand?’

  The child nods.

  ‘Just for five minutes while I fetch Mary.’

  The birth is almost silent: there is just a single cry and then a subdued mewl.

  Mary opens the bedroom door just for a few seconds to tell Silas that the baby is very weak, and Megan is weeping that the child is going to die. An hour later she sends out Miriam to him to tell him to fetch the minister so they can at least baptise the child. The girl looks pale and frightened, her hands trembling by her sides.