by Tim Pears
Grandpa gave his unintelligible instruction and the dogs took off. Pip bounding over the broken wall, Meg stumbling after.
‘Damn sheep’s going to be camouflaged by the snow,’ Owen suggested.
‘Hear the bugger bleating fore you ever see it, won’t you,’ his grandfather told him. They walked rapidly up one side of the cut in the next cwm, down the other, then further over the hill again, the old man never stopping to think or plan. Ordering Owen to walk thirty yards across from him, commanding the dogs to sniff out some other area. As if there was an obvious way to proceed in such a search, a definitive formula, though Owen could not find its logic.
They came home at dusk. ‘Check them sheep in the barn, would you?’ Grandpa asked Grandma. ‘Should be sixty-five. We can only figure sixty-four.’ Owen went with her. Switched on the electric light, bare bulbs hung on wire strung from one beam to another. Yellow, buttery light. A half-hearted murmur of bleating. His grandmother walked into the pens, where the pregnant ewes milled waist-high. Unable to escape this intruder in their midst, they affected to ignore her. She confirmed the count.
When Owen came to breakfast he found his grandfather at the table, staring into a gloomy corner of the room. The grey and scratched, heavy plastic Ever Ready torch beside his mug of tea.
Grandma dolloped ladlefuls of porridge into the bowl in front of Owen. ‘Been out all night,’ she said to her grandson. ‘I told him, Will there not be enough sleepless nights for you with the lambing?’ She banged the lid back on the pan. ‘You can’t tell him.’
‘Did you find her?’ Owen asked.
The old man gazed at the wall. He shook his head. ‘Not yet,’ he said.
Owen fed the sheep, first those on the hill, the tractor’s great wheels carving through the snow. No more snow had fallen in the night, everything icing up. He broke up the bales of hay and scattered it for the frantic ewes. They seemed less important to him this morning, somehow: mere numberless beasts, while their lost sister was taking on a singular identity, a significance. When he fed those in the barn he counted them yet again. Each recount was more absurd than the one before – they could hardly have kept on getting it wrong – yet each one had a little more of a peculiar kind of hope: that there was something magical in the ewe’s disappearance. Perhaps it wasn’t the sheep that had been misplaced but a number itself, and this number was what he would refind in the counting. Not this time, though. Sixty-four once more.
Owen walked out to look for his grandfather, looking for the sheep. His feet crunched on the frozen snow. Climbing halfway up Corndon, he turned, scanned what he could see of the crooked hills around him. No sign of man or dogs. He raised his gaze. The day was extraordinarily cold and clear: he could see across to Cader Idris, that great throne of its summit. The morning had been still, but as he stood there Owen could feel that change was coming. It was less cold than it had been an hour or two before, and the crystal air was subtly agitated, as if across the visible landscape the giant Cader had woken after a night on the mountain and shaken out his blanket, and the disturbance of air rippled eastward. Owen lowered his gaze and was startled to register russet on white: some twenty, twentyfive yards away a fox was sitting unperturbed, staring coolly back at him with its amber eyes.
At lunch, Grandpa shook his head. ‘Can’t figure it,’ he said, speaking with his mouth full of stew. ‘If it’s trapped, why’s it not bleating?’ He swallowed, contained a burp in his throat. ‘Would someone steal it? Isn’t worth it, see.’ He shrugged. ‘Maybe out there, but the dogs haven’t found her. Maybe dead, but it’s not like sheep go off to die, like. She’d have laid down where she stood. Can’t figure it, can I.’
The puzzle had rattled around his head while walking. He was baffled. ‘I’ll count ’em in the barn again.’
You’re wrong, Owen thought. That’s the only explanation. There never were sixty-five. It was always sixty-four. If you knew them individually, or numbered their ears, or wrote down how many were in each parcel or flock we’d not be trapped in this error, with no way out.
Grandma joined them in the afternoon, and the three of them went up the track past the forestry plantation and came back around the side of Corndon, spread out between the stones and the heather, the dogs scampering across the white crust then sinking, and breasting through soft snow like aquatic mammals, whiskery snouts showing. The old man was limping badly, his face contorting with pain whenever his leg jarred.
They dropped down to the lane between their hill and Roundton, snow packed down by tractors, the road surface a slab of ice now, a frozen river, the snowplough not yet reached the back roads out here. Grandpa asked at Woodgate Farm; Brithdir. A sheep could escape not through intention but by accident, lose its orientation instantly, skittle along bleating in any old direction. Then it would attach itself to any flock it came across. Such had been known. But the folk the old man consulted had noticed nothing.
‘Wolves come back, is it?’ Morgan said, his mouth, barely half-filled with teeth, cracking open in a sly grin. ‘Heard tell of a panther other side of Stiperstones. Come a-roaming, is it?’
Grandpa walked down to The Graig lips tight with anger at being mocked by his neighbour. The trio clambered up through the steep wood where the badger sett had been. When they emerged from the shelter of the trees back into open pasture the wind surprised them, and new snow falling too, tiny hard flakes of it swirling around like grains of salt on a shaken planet.
They fanned out to move up the vale to the abandoned cottage, losing sight of each other intermittently in the mounting blizzard, calling, their voices thrown deceptively around. Back on the track below the plantation the old man told his wife to go home, by way of Lan Fawr, then took Owen to the disused quarry, with its mini slag heaps of granite and lunar indentations and depressions in the ground. All this they’d covered before.
Owen gave up looking for any dumb ewe. The boy was shivering and miserable, shrinking inside his inadequate clothing, intent upon his own survival as the snow drifted against the banks. He kept close to his grandfather, and even the dogs did likewise now. The old man was so tired he fell asleep as he walked; stumbled awake. It was almost dark when they got back to the cottage.
Owen’s grandfather was in bed before the other two that night. ‘Let this be an end to it,’ Grandma said. But in the morning he told Owen to take his grandmother and the dogs, it was time to bring the rest of the sheep in. Yes, Owen thought. It was time yesterday, should have done it then.
Grandma tried to halt her husband, laid her hand on his arm as he reached the door. He took her hand by the wrist and firmly lifted it away. ‘I’ll not lose this one, see,’ he told her. ‘I’m their shepherd, aren’t I?’
No snow was falling but the sky was grey with threat looming. There were two separate flocks needed bringing in. The first came down the track entire, fast, from sheltered pasture, but the other was in a south-west-facing field that looked like the blizzard, with planning and intention, had gyred and swirled and funnelled snow here, piling it in great drifts against the bank on one side. The sheep had huddled against the bank as if it would give them shelter even as the snow mounted upon them. Owen looked upon the scene, and the creatures’ stupidity dismayed him. It was neither intelligence nor habit that saved them, he was sure, but luck: there was an overhang to a good stretch of the bank, and the wind-blown snow had sculpted a cave into which the animals pressed, their body heat in such proximity keeping them alive. Owen and his grandmother dug an exit tunnel with shovels and sent Meg in: she snapped around their legs; one after another the ewes barged noisily into the open.
Grandma walked in front, the dogs brought the flock downhill, Owen idled the tractor along behind. He tried to work out why his grandfather was devoting so much time and attention to one lost ewe. The old man seemed to have taken it as a challenge out of all proportion to the value of the animal. A challenge thrown down by what, or whom? Did he know it was his last winter here?
It seem
ed to Owen that in his grandfather’s opinion human beings were no different to any other living thing. Ate, like other animals, what grew from the earth. Like stunted trees the wind had shaped the old man. He was weathered by the sun and the rain and hemmed in by limitations: heard less than his dogs, smelled a fraction of what badgers did, saw less than a buzzard overhead.
We pass through the world, the boy thought, how much of it teems around us, outside our senses, beyond us?
They steered the last ewes into barn, sheds, pens. The sky was clearing, the threat of further snow or hail today dissipating. The dogs sat panting by the back porch, steam rising from their wet hair. ‘Look,’ said Grandma. ‘Here he is, by God.’
Owen looked up and saw his grandfather limping awkwardly across the near pasture towards them. Beside him was a sheep, tied around the neck with a length or two of orange baler twine. He wasn’t tugging the creature along but walking at its pace, as if it were a bemused old aunt who’d lost her bearings and wandered and was being brought home.
‘I’ll get her some food,’ Grandma said.
The three of them watched the ewe eat with a steady greed as sheep always do, their hunger patient, endless.
‘Well?’ Grandma said. ‘Will you tell us, Gwyn Ithell, or will we have to squeeze it from your tongue?’
Owen’s grandfather smiled, set to rolling himself a cigarette. ‘Found her in the far corner of the copse,’ he said, nodding eastward. ‘Must have passed within yards of her a dozen times, boy. She took a step into the wood and there’s a hollow, where a tree root was or some such. Must have lost her footing and rolled over into the hollow, the perfect shape it was to hold her. Lying there on her back, all we’d have seen would have been her four thin legs. Wouldn’t bleat on her back, see.’ He took a long drag of smoke, held it, exhaled. ‘Undergrowth kept snow off. Lucky nothing come and killed her.’
Owen saw his grandmother put her hand on his grandfather’s. ‘You found her, you stubborn Welshman,’ she said. ‘You did it.’
‘Aye,’ he said. Owen looked at his grandfather’s face. Pleased, the old man looked almost boyish. Vindicated. Freed of something, Owen thought, some weight of obligation. ‘I did, didn’t I?’ Grandpa said.
www.fatherforum.co.uk/casestudies
Statement by Owen I, Birmingham.
April 2002
Statement refers to marriage and children.
Myself, respondent, 41 years old. Up until 1998 had been with now estranged wife for ten years.
Solicitor said to keep a record, see. Had enough of courts, I had, but hardly begun.
In my mind we had a successful marriage and a happy family life. Believe that if it had not been for the accident we would all be together.
Dog flew across the road in front of us. Put my foot on the brake. We struck. The car spun.
Wife blamed me. She had the right.
Wife. In my mind, cross my heart. Last week I saw a flock of plump, raucous starlings, in the middle of them was one bird of a different species. Lovely yellow wagtail. First saw Mel when she came into a pub I’d gone to. She was with a bunch of her girlfriends. Could hardly take my eyes off her.
Her mates a kind of guard around her. That’s what it looked like. Went back every night for months, and I never did like pubs. She was there twice. I wasn’t one for talking, see. Didn’t want to scare her off. Sit there thinking of things to say. Witty comments. Comical observations. Sometimes could hardly keep from chuckling to myself in the corner.
Never see a way to get her on her own. Choosing a record on the jukebox. Mechanism gripped the 45, levered it around, placed it on the turntable. A hiss as the needle struck vinyl, a hiss that said, Hush! Listen! The air in the room prickled like skin with expectation. Into the atmosphere, electrifying sound waves, the tangled thrill of ‘Layla’. Eric Clapton and Duane Allman’s incredible guitars.
‘Good choice,’ said this voice beside me. Turned and there she was.
Not that she’d noticed me, hid in the corner. She was just friendly. Talk to anyone, Mel.
Wasn’t used to company, was I? Used to being on my own, doing what I wanted. No one would ever let me down, see. Had everything I needed, then Mel walked in and I knew I’d been living half a life. Empty man, I was, with a heart the size of a pea rattling around in my chest. She gave me her hand in marriage.
We had a daughter, S, and then the boy. Heart swelled inside me. My wife was six months pregnant. She got on with my mother, preparing to ask if we should invite Ma to the city, I was. You think you’re ready for anything, invincible, like. You think you’re blessed.
H born in 1996, three months after accident. I’d lost my hand. We should have helped each other but we did not. Nativity play at school, Josh in reception class. Wouldn’t take a speaking role, who could blame him? Teacher had a friend ran an animal sanctuary, Joseph brought Mary into the playground on a real donkey. A cold Christmas evening, parents shivering. They got to the stable, Josh had volunteered to lead the animal to the back. The donkey following this tiny figure drew a spontaneous round of applause, it did. Josh glanced across to see if we were proud of him. I couldn’t clap my son.
Found it hard to cope, I admit it. Fell away. Then the pain came. This mirror box helped for a while.
Wife unable to help me, she had enough to deal with. I try to understand it. Could not bear to be with me, could she? I’m trying to explain. Out of our depth and we still are.
Doctor offered me anti-depressants, practically forced them on me. Wasn’t me it was this world that needed changing, see. Went to the woods to drink, into the bushes of Sutton Park. Not the kind to seek succour on the streets, with comrades of the bottle. Wished to be alone. In my stupor I saw things. Creatures of the night would come and sniff me as I lay. Foxes, stoats, wild cats in the middle of Birmingham, passed through my dreams.
Wife comes from broken home. Her mother divorced three times, died, stepfathers disappeared. Her natural father and sister live in Canada. Split families are what she knows.
In May 1997 wife told me she was seeing another man – a ‘friend’ of ours – who gave her more support than I did. She told me to leave the family home. I refused.
Tried to discuss our marriage on several occasions. Wife said time for talk was over, see. Don’t know what I said when intoxicated. Discussion ended with blows. Had to be given stitches to a head wound on one occasion.
My wife petitioned for divorce on grounds of unreasonable behaviour. I contested it. She went to court in October 1998 and was granted an ouster order. I was ordered not to remove anything or take anything with me. Homeless, really. Granted access to my children (voluntary agreement made in magistrates court) every Saturday. But subsequently wife, encouraged by the ‘friend’, refused to let me see them.
Advised to apply for contact. Wife’s solicitor used every delaying tactic. By the time welfare officer became involved, children’s routine had been established, deemed in their ‘best interests’ to be disrupted as little as possible. I requested children’s wishes be listened to but judge refused, like, saying they were too young. Contact set at one Sunday per month.
Favoured, we thought we were, that was the problem. Blessed. We were punished. Not by the God of Mary and Jesus, the Lamb of God, who took away the sins of the world.
Who blessed the poor in spirit, the meek, the peacemakers.
But the other one, the older God I sensed, as a boy, still lurking in the shadows of the church. The vengeful God of the Old Testament who looked down on mankind from high up on his hill of judgement, ready to smite any man foolish enough to think he had it made.
This God swung an axe in his hand, smote our child, split our world in two.
Found a flat. Children came on day visits. Held myself together, see. H was a sweetheart, her visits were holidays. J more moody. I was the one who’d been kicked out but he resented my leaving.
Access difficult. Wife claimed contact left children upset, better for them to make new fam
ily with ‘stepfather’, now living in my house. Sometimes I agreed to this, did not visit, then regret. Wife also drew in professionals such as Child Guidance Service, not to help children but to be professional witnesses to their anxiety.
I applied to the court to have right of access imposed. Two court welfare officers assigned, neither dealt with case for six months.
Mel let me take Josh camping once, big site in Sutton Coldfield. Got a bloke to drop us off there, came back to pick us up. Cadged a tent, sleeping bags, a gas stove. We did everything together, nice and slow. I let Josh watch and copy me, all in his own good time. My one hand, his two. Pegging the tent, blowing up the mattress. Frying bangers in the morning. There was fishing there, and birds. He used my telescope, mostly to look at insects.
When I dropped him back on Sunday afternoon, Josh said, ‘Can we do that again, Dad?’
Said, ‘Of course we will.’
More than two years ago now.
One Sunday, wife would not allow me to see children, saw H through window of family home crying. Forced my way into house, didn’t I? ‘Stepfather’, Johnny, was there. Only tried to get past him, see. He knocked me out, but ‘self-defence’ as I had delivered ‘initial blow’. A hook’s no good for scrapping. Whoever heard of a one-handed fighter? Janice – wife’s friend – witness. Did wife set it up? Cannot believe she did. Following day received an ex-parte not to assault/molest/ interfere with petitioner or children or friend, with power of arrest attached. Ordered to keep off estate. Judge being satisfied I had caused actual bodily harm and likely to do so again.
