by Tim Pears
We was lulled. We never considered things could blast apart.
There were life before the accident, and life after. They are two different lives.
I tried not to blame Owen. I tried to look after Josh. I tried to think about the child I were carrying.
I couldn’t get why she were sitting in the front. He were driving her home from her dance class. Why weren’t she in the back? I tried not to blame him. You go numb. You breathe deep, you think, I’ll wait for it to pass over me. Owen did three things. First he were numb too. Then he tried to tough it out. Then he fell apart. I said people don’t change, but Owen did. A bitterness appeared what hadn’t been there before. Both the loss and his part in it. The falling apart that’s not what I blame him for.
It were his right hand he lost, his dominant hand, the one he used to operate a tool, to write his name, to shake hands with.
He hated people staring at the hook. People thought he were cool with it cos Owen were the first to mention it, wave it around, make a joke. That were an act. They didn’t know him like I did. He says to me, ‘I wish we was living after World War One, Mel, when there was loads of blokes had amputations. It were a common sight. No one thought nothing about it.’ A mixture of guilt and rage were in him but he tried to hide it, it were like a toxic cocktail in his gut.
There was two court cases, one after the other, on top of everything else. It’s the last thing you want after what happened, whether you’re in the dock or on the other side, and Owen had to do both.
We’d lost Sara then I had Holly. Owen tried to help, he wanted to do like we’d done it before. But you can’t scoop up a baby with a split hook. Owen couldn’t hardly prepare her bottle, never mind hold her in the bath, or change her nappy. You could see the frustration building in him.
He wanted sex. He needed to be reassured. I couldn’t do it. When he took his hook off, I couldn’t stand to be touched by that stump. He says we have to find new positions, that’s all, we have to adapt. I told him to keep away from me. I didn’t want to hurt him. It were like Sara’s death right there in front of me.
Then the pain in his hand what weren’t there started. He never drank bad till then. It were like someone had given him this magical potion: Owen drank and the pain were drowned, for the hours of oblivion.
He kept pulling his self together, says, ‘I’m all right now, I’ll not let go again.’ He couldn’t help it, you could see the pain and the thirst build up. Like his fingers on the hand that were left was trembling to get round a bottle. He’d slump on the settee, a man whose heart had stopped. Still stagger up in the morning, make his self presentable. But then he’d slip out the back door and be gone on a bender, two or three days at a time, return like a dog, stinking of mud and stale liquor.
I were left to look after the kids. It were like I were watching two people I used to know. We was holding on and hitting out. Shifting apart. I wanted to help him but I couldn’t. What could I do? No one told me. Does anybody know? I were so mardy with Owen, so mean. Never hit no one before. I’m not proud of it, especially what Josh saw, don’t nobody think I am.
Owen tried dope, it only made him feel the pain more keenly. The doctor at the rehabilitation centre prescribed drugs for him. You know about the amitriptyline. They only give him side effects. Don’t give me none. You can’t tell the doctor I’ve not taken this serious. You can’t say I haven’t talked.
Nothing worked for Owen like alcohol. The cheapest booze he could get his hands on, drank till he couldn’t feel.
We kept seeing Liz, she come to stay with us. She couldn’t say nothing to him.
We got used to not having money, but the thing people don’t realise about poverty is that it can always get worse. He got a few months sickness benefit but not disability living allowance – you need to lose a leg for that, he ’d say. He were self-employed. After the accident he couldn’t work. Said he could still use the tools with his hook, but he had no way to get with all his kit to the houses. Refused to drive. I says to him, Go for a job with the council. Parks Department. It weren’t no use. Claimed he couldn’t work for no one else, have some gaffer tell him what to do. Like he weren’t working for them blasted rich folk whose flower beds he tickled and lawns he mowed. There was one or two close by he could walk or bike to, spade strapped to the crossbar. Reckon they liked having a one-armed gardener. Novelty value.
A brown mongrel dog run across the road. Chasing something, he said. No one else saw it, this hound of hell.
I never wanted another man. Never wanted no one else but him. But you don’t know what lonely is till you’re sharing your house with a ghost, disappearing, and when he reappears all you do is fight. Johnny was his friend more than mine, he come round to see Owen. ‘He’s out,’ I says. ‘Don’t know where. You’re welcome to wait. Kettle’s on.’
‘You all right?’ he asks, and it all come out. I never planned it. Don’t think I did. None of it was what I wanted.
Owen had to leave. I thought that might shake him back together. Then it all got legal, and took on a life of its own. I weren’t trying to do nothing but look after Josh and Holly. Probably messed that up too but you tell me what else I should have done.
He were homeless for a while. Moved into a slummy flat in an old high-rise. Refused to discuss a divorce. When he come to pick the children up I could smell the drink on his breath but he were smart. Josh told me his father had one other white shirt and pair of black trousers hung up just like the ones he were wearing. His wardrobe. Josh and Holly stayed the night there once. When they woke up in the morning all their clothes was washed and ironed, folded on the table beside their dad’s.
Physically Owen changed. Filled out. The sugar in the alcohol. His clothes didn’t hang off his wiry frame the way they had. His tough tanned gardener’s face took on another colour, the ruddiness of a drinker, which made him look not old, exactly, but more, I know it’s stupid, wiser. Alcohol give his face that look of wisdom more than suffering. I was the one marked sad, not him, and I weren’t the one driving the car. They say sorrow steals your looks quicker than time itself. Heads no longer turn. But I don’t dwell on me.
The children was always confused after they’d seen him. Josh all silent, moody, rude to Johnny and angry with me like it were my idea for his dad to be broken. I had to put a stop to it, it weren’t good for no one. Everyone agreed. May have been underhand, the way we done it, but I were trying to get things stable.
Owen’s complied with all the court orders. I’ve took care not to embarrass him. I don’t talk to old friends, or tell Liz. Never said nothing to the school. If he’s humiliated it’s not by me.
Even now he phones. Isn’t meant to but he does. Now Johnny’s not around I let him talk. You wouldn’t believe it was that shy, proud man he used to be. Begging me to get back together, to bring the children round, to let him see them. What can I say? I know I can’t say yes. Then he goes all silent. ‘You still there?’ I says. No reply, but you can sense him. Brooding. Sobbing to his self, his hand over the mouthpiece.
Me just as bad at the other end, after I’ve put down the phone.
I don’t see what he’s got left. He’s got nothing, has he? I’m worried sick he might do something bad. Something terrible. It makes me feel sick in my stomach.
Truth is I don’t know if I want him to or not.
Snow
It was one of the last long, cold winters. First the rain, on the edge of frozen, cutting into buildings, clothes, skin. In the high exposed places the wind collected the rain, whirled it around and hurled it, endless frozen arrowheads of water, flying in horizontally. It hit the old man’s face in stabs of pain. It drove into the last of the stone walls criss-crossing the hillside: at night the water, turning to ice, expanded; a section of wall would explode in a distant unheard rumble.
Owen had come out at Christmas. Some man, with young children of his own, had invited his mother, Owen a complication who anyhow had no wish to get to know another
man’s brood. He was fifteen now. ‘I’ll go to the hill,’ he said.
A memorable visit, it was when he learned to swing an axe. Mild days at the end of December Owen hitched a trailer to his grandfather’s tractor and the two of them scoured the locale for fallen trees. For other men it was a summer job, but Gwyn Ithell had his own ideas. The old man chainsawed trunks and thick branches into logs, which Owen piled in the trailer; the boy drove back to the farmstead, emptied the logs into a pile by the woodshed – green wood to one side – returned. His grandfather wore neither goggles nor earmuffs. The angry whine of the power saw assailed him; occasional sharp chips flew at his face, drawing blood, like shaving nicks; clothes, hair, eyebrows became coated in sawdust.
When the pile by the shed was a pyramid the height of a man they progressed to the second half of the operation. For an afternoon hour in the last of the pale sun the old man swung the axe. Owen lay the chunks of wood on top of one another in the shed, as instructed; his grandfather demanding the wedges were laid neatly.
‘I’m a dry-wood-waller,’ Owen whispered to himself. As much as he could he studied his grandfather. The old man took a second to appraise each log as he placed it on the great wooden block, judging its knot and grain. When he swung the axe he did it slowly, with little seeming effort: he gripped the end of the handle with his right hand, with his left grasped the shaft up by the axe head and lifted it up and over his shoulder. Then he offered the axe head gently up into the air, as it rose letting his left hand slide down the shaft until it met his right hand at the end of the handle. The axe head was now directly above his grandfather’s head, the shaft vertical, and for a fraction of a second it seemed to hover there, gathering latent energy, before beginning its easy descent.
What was hard to see was how fast the axe head fell, the sharpened edge of five pounds of forged steel slamming into the log along a line of grain, such was the functional, perfunctory grace of the action. Most often the log was split with one blow. Sometimes it took more, depending upon the species of tree.
When Grandma called Grandpa in to take a telephone call from a dealer, Owen tried the axe himself. It took all his strength to lift and wield, and by the time it fell onto the log there was barely enough momentum in the swing to make a mark. He became quickly furious, throwing himself into the action, but there was no improvement in its effect. He knew he was fighting against the axe and what he had to do was to collaborate with the tool, to work with it.
So Owen experimented, feeling his way into each part of the choreography – the legs-apart stance, the lift of the axe, the fall. His grandfather could not be still on the phone: he always gripped the receiver as if by its throat, like an animal he mistrusted, and spoke so tersely that whoever was on the other end must put their receiver down wondering what it was they’d done to old man Ithell that so angered him. But he remained in the cottage.
Grandma peered into the dark, as if trying to see that sound: of wood cracking. ‘Leave him,’ the old man said. The light had gone by the time Owen came inside. The boy was beaming.
The next afternoon Owen split the logs, his grandfather content to let him, to be the one to pick up the chunks and fill the shed. Owen had the knack, rode the paradox – did he generate or harness this effortless power? – and now he got to know the different kinds of wood. Ash split clean and easy. Beech past a certain age was obdurate. Oak, too, was tough: you had to choose the right grain to attack, and then be patient, confident of your choice – make little impression with the first two or three blows, have to work the axe head back out of the log each time and reset it on the block, yet feel the log break apart under the fourth.
The old man rolled a cigarette. ‘You should have seen the elm I got after the disease,’ he said. ‘Went over and took it from the Powis Castle estates over there. Tough? You couldn’t bloody split it with an axe.’ He coughed and spat a gob of phlegm. ‘Had to saw the damn logs, into cubes.’
Green wood they stacked against the outside wall of the shed, on its sheltered side, under the eave, for use in two or three years’ time. Laid down like wine. When the pyramid was gone, Owen saw his grandfather’s satisfaction. ‘See us through,’ he said. Fuel for the Rayburn and the sitting-room fireplace, to last the winter. Owen returned to Welshpool.
After the rain, the air froze, the earth solidified, and still the wind blew, finding gaps around windows, doors, through the thick stone walls of the cottage. Owen’s grandparents saw each other’s breaths condense as soon as they went up the stairs.
The old man’s left hip was hurting. He expressed no gratitude to the surgeon who’d performed the first operation, replacing his right hip. ‘Don’t work as good as the old one,’ was all he said; did not appreciate the pain gone. And now the other one.
It was Grandma who rang Welshpool, before the February half-term. ‘He could do with some help,’ she told her daughter-in-law. ‘He’ll not ask for it himself.’
The day Owen arrived the temperature seemed to fluctuate: he could not, with the use of his human senses, tell whether it was rising or falling, it seemed to be doing both, somehow. Up on the hill it was cold to Owen’s bones but the sun warmed what it reached, weakly. Then the ground felt soft, the frozen earth apparently attempting to thaw, except that his nose and ears stung, the air prickly and brittle.
What happened the next day did so in silence: snow fell thickly from daybreak to sunset. They watched it from indoors. The following morning Owen rose early and went out with the dogs. The sky was blue, the land white, the snow hard, encrusted. He walked across it, around the shoulder of the hill, and the snow was like a powder shaken over the ground to reveal the footprints of those who’d crossed it, all the animals who did not hibernate but persevered through the cold. The dogs scurried this way and that, noses to the ground, and Owen could see what they had always been able to smell. A badger had come up from below, a hare sprung across the field, a fox come skulking after what it could scavenge. He found spots of blood. A rabbit, perhaps.
It struck Owen that he’d heard foxes in the night. Incorporated the sounds into his dreams. Whether or not he’d ever actually woken it was impossible now to say. Up the hill had come a fox dog’s bark, dry and staccato, and the yowling of a vixen, their hot rut a part of this cold season.
Owen drove the tractor across the snow to feed the sheep sugar beet, sheep nuts, hay. Their clamour in time of hunger was overwhelming: a hundred ewes, Owen thought, mimicking chainsaws. By this time of year they’d been brought down off the tops, to the less exposed pastures around the cottage. In addition his grandfather had been cutting back his liabilities: subletting the furthest fields to a young farmer at White Grit, reducing the count to a couple of hundred ewes. ‘Not enough to make money,’ as he said. Their time on the hill was running down. Owen’s grandmother had put in train the move to an almshouse bungalow down in the valley, though she knew her husband wanted no part of the arrangement; preferred all talk of it to take place out of earshot.
The skies were dark, purple-black, but it was just too cold to snow again. A low sun forced its way between the heavy clouds, which loped sullenly on over the hills.
‘One missing,’ the old man said. ‘Count them for me, boy.’ He’d never sought Owen’s second opinion before. The boy confirmed the number: sixty-four.
‘We’ll take these ones in,’ Grandpa decided. ‘Then you can come back to look for it.’
With the help of the dogs they drove the ewes, heavily pregnant now, into the large barn. It was almost time to scan them, see how many each carried, prepare to sort them into lambing groups.
Owen walked back around the flank of the hill to where the small flock had been, the first of the fields between the badger copse and Malt House Farm, and followed the perimeter of the field for places the ewe could have escaped. One section of wall had lost its upper stones; a stretch of fence had sagged a little. Shreds of wool had snagged along it, no doubt where sheep had scratched themselves. She could have clambere
d over. Would hunger drive a single ewe to separate herself from her flock? Owen wasn’t sure. Perhaps pregnancy made them erratic, or more daring. Owen traipsed haphazardly, in approximate, ever-widening circles beyond the field, his attention wandering.
He heard a piercing whistle overhead and looked up. A pair of buzzards, wheeling in the blue sky. The beak and claws, their calm killer’s eyes alert to any prey that might emerge from hiding: rabbits, rodents, robbed of cover, snow a bare white betrayal. The sound the birds made seemed one of glee.
The whine of the tractor grinding up the track to the other flocks brought Owen’s attention back to the search. ‘Where are you, sheep?’ he yelled.
Owen returned to the cottage for lunch, admitted the failure of his mission. He assumed the incident was over, a loss to be absorbed. When they’d eaten, to his surprise his grandfather said, ‘I’ll join you.’
The old man began by recounting the ewes in the barn: sixty-four still. Then he whistled the dogs to him, and they trekked back to the emptied field. Meg was limping, Owen noted, as if in imitation of her master. Getting on now herself. Pip would be the last of the mothers and daughters of their line to work these hills with Gwyn Ithell, would end her days in domestic tedium, twitching in her sleep, dreaming of the wild running up above.
