Night of the Animals

by Bill Broun

  “Yeah twice,” said Drystan.

  “Whatever you do,” said their gran, “and there’s no iffing or offing in this, thee’shot stay hitched by an invisible yoke.” She grabbed Drystan and sat him onto her lap, but he squirmed to get off, pedaling his legs. “Thee, little wildcat, bist sure thee’st listen and bist canny in thar, too. Thee oot hear voices, if thee’st lucky.” She kissed his ear and released him.

  “What?” asked Cuthbert, quite emphatically. “What did you say, Gran?”

  She nodded. “Yes, yes, yes. Sometimes, in Wyre, animals talk.” She tried not to look at Henry, who hated this sort of banter, and often let her know it. To him, it was an embarrassment, a sign of the peasant mentality. And he’d never had “a farthing rushlight worth of help from any Wonderment,” he would say to her.

  “Wike people?” Cuthbert asked. “They talk wike people?”

  “No, not quite.” She glanced at Henry, who was shaking his head at her sullenly. “It . . . rises inside thee.”

  “Oh, it rises all right, does it?” mocked Henry, unable to contain himself. “Why do you fill these boys’ noggins with this—blether?”

  Winefride looked at her daughter with an expression verging on tears.

  At the age of seventy-six, Winefride Wenlock wanted nothing more than to complete a task she felt assigned; like the green drake-flies who hover for a few hours in May on the Severn then drop dead, she felt she possessed just one sparkling last moment of life to finish telling, for the boys’ sakes, a set of tales as old as the river. The Wonderments, as she instructed the boys, were more than a family legacy; they flowed robustly, through the ages, sneaking beneath the Normans’ noses, bursting forth from the clashing lost kingdoms and secret saints of Mercia and Arwystli and the coming of Christ to Britain. At least, that’s what her grandfather had told her as he lay dying in the snowy winter of 1901. And he’d also told her something that nearly trampled her with a sense of duty, so much so that she effectively decided her sweet grandfather must have been a little mad himself: he claimed that she, Winefride Wenlock, was the very last carrier of the Wonderments, “as far as ’e knew.”

  Winefride once related the whole conversation to the boys.

  “‘T’others are all dead,’ said my gran-da. ‘Our’n is the last family. After us, it’s only animals and the saints as have it. And the animals will only speak to th’uns with the Wonderments.’ But I said to him, ‘I canna be. I canna be.’ I was quite panicked, you know? And he said, ‘Thee’ast heard the otters, right? From the forest and the river?’ I said, ‘I dunna know.’ ‘Well, that’s a yes,’ he said. Then he had cleared his throat, and he said, ‘He makes the night wherein all the beasts of the forest do creep, and the lions seek their meat, but he also makes Sun ariseth.’ He was very ill, poor man. Something with his poor kidneys. And he told me this: ‘Look for a grandson. That’s as’ll have the Wonderments. Or ’e won’t.’”

  Cuthbert never recalled his gran, as she grew older, dashing around looking for tricky pixies or talking kingfishers. It wasn’t like that, not at all. The Wonderments were deeper, palpable, more about feeling than sorcery. But she genuinely believed in her forebears’ faith, even if she gave little credence to what her granddaddy had said about her own uniqueness; discounting it enabled her, it seemed, to bear its weight. As she aged, she could better shoulder psychic burdens, including her daughter’s marriage to, as she often put it, “a gowkie* miser born under a threepenny planet.” She felt the conviction of her ancestors as a warm jewel against her own dark skin, a gleam to be preserved for Britain and indeed for the world. The Wonderments chose you.

  Yet it wasn’t automatic. The Wonderments apparently ended if a grandparent didn’t instruct the grandchild in them, and many, said Winefride, had declined to do just that, for they wanted their grandchildren to fit into the modern world.

  Yet somehow, in ugly West Bromich, five decades before the Property Revolts, before the big suicide cults, before the All-Indigent zones, and before King Henry IX, two sweet grandsons in the line were born. Since Winefride’s other grandchildren were girls, and the Wonderments passed from gender to gender and only every other generation, Cuthbert and Drystan represented to her—as one of her serious flaws was a habit of jumping to direst conclusions—the last of the line. But for all England knew or cared, she might be right. Winefride determined soon after Drystan’s birth that she would need to work around his facile mother and abusive father to make sure the boy understood his birthright.

  Her own children, along with countless other Worcestershireans and Salopeans,* had been tricked, as she saw it, by Birmingham’s industry. All the Black Country and Birmingham and indeed much of the whole world lived in a state of fatal anomie, alienated from nature, and dependent on “machines,” as she called all technology.

  “We was going after akerns,” she once told Cuthbert, “pounding ’em into flour whilst the hullocks—that’s what we called people like your father—were clammed with hunger.” She whispered the next words: “Your mummy and daddy, they’re rawny-boughs nowadays, as far as it goes. That’s the hard truth. They canna go without their satellites and tellies and Norton bikes,” which was what she called all motorcycles. “But thee and I and Drystan, we can survive off the trees, canna we? We can always go back into the Wyre and up into the Marches and my hills of Clee.”

  And survive Winefride had, with her green gleam. But never prospered. The truth was, even before her birth, the landscapes in and around Wyre had been chopped to bits by mining. “Despert chaps, young and owd,” as she called them, sometimes by the thousands at a time, used to vie to deform the very hilltops of Clee and all the Welsh Marches with nothing but hand tools. “They was bent on steekling the hills,” she said, “as if they hills ’ermselves were fattened little porkets for slaughter.” With the Depression, the mining economy had collapsed. She herself, by love and by poverty, was also in time driven off the Clees, like most of her cousins. Indeed, she would go no farther east than the Wyre—a matter of a few miles—until she was forced, as an old woman, by her own petty, city-loving, money-obsessed son-in-law.

  before the last photo crumbles

  CUTHBERT AND DRYSTAN NOW CROWDED INTO A window, gazing out, elbowing each other.

  “I dunna want to go now,” said Drystan, looking toward the forest. “I corr.”

  Mary Handley, grimacing at Winefride, said, “Now look what you’ve done, Mum. You’ve worried that child to death.”

  “No,” said Drystan. “I’m not afraid of the Wyre, Mum. A’m afraid I’ll never want to come back.”

  Cuthbert said, “Well, I’m only a whittle, whittle, whittle afraid.”

  They gawked at a lone roan goat, grazing in a small pasture across the road. Cuthbert—whose clearest idea of animals was the moggies and birds of Birmingham and Dylan, the daisy-munching hippie rabbit on The Magic Roundabout—had never seen a goat before.

  The animal raised its head nervously, but it kept chewing steadily.

  “She’s the prettiest thing I’ve ever seen! Is she a kind of cow?” Cuthbert asked earnestly.

  “Dunno, really,” said Drystan. From his pocket, he pulled out a thornless haw-tree twig with a few leaves on it, and began twirling it in his hand. He was always picking up sticks he would fiddle with for hours then toss on his dresser.

  “Heard any animals lately?” Winefride suddenly asked the two aunties, as if inquiring about the latest gossip.

  The big aunties nodded jovially in agreement, with occasional fixed love-stares at the two children.

  “Of course—yes, yes, yes,” said Auntie Bettina. “There’s a Welsh toyger in there now, they’re saying.”

  “Suuuuuuuuure,” said Cuthbert’s father, smirking. He kicked his legs out from the sofa rather impertinently. “That’s what these ones need,” glaring at his sons.

  With the proud trip out of Birmingham in his squatty new Hillman Imp, he was almost in as good a mood as he got, but he still seemed like he had, as
his mother-in-law would put it, “a dog in his belly.”

  “Now these boys could use some scaring-up—and discipline. Especially old Cuddy.” Cuthbert didn’t like this nickname. His father grinned, and added, “They could run into a polecat, mind you.”

  The word discipline from his father’s lips didn’t normally play well in small gatherings. It was like a hangman singing the praises of well-toned necks. His mother once told him, “Your dear old dad wouldn’t give away the droppings of his nose on a frosty morning, and if he said he did, he’d be lying about it.”

  “Discipline? Scaring?” said Gran. “Shhhh! You inna understand at all.” She spoke good-naturedly, but there was a flash of a swishing razor in her tolerance.

  “That’s what I said,” said Henry. “These boys respect that—something they learnt from me. I don’t mind giving them a little podge on their bottoms from time to time. Or with my belt.”

  “Stop it, Hank,” said their mother.

  “Give the forest its due respect, but I dunna think there’s any toygers anymore,” said Winefride, which is what people on the Welsh Marches used to call polecats. She looked upward for a moment, as though reviewing a long-memorized taxonomy. “But there’s other things, just as special as polecats. You know, we used to have lions in England and plenty o’ wild cats. Tis’ true. Back in the days of the barrows and stone tombs, when ‘did those feet in ancient time,’ as they say. You ’ad lions then, by jings. You know what I’m on about. You know, Hank.”

  “Never,” said their father. “I do not know. That’s all rubbish. Drink your tea, Mum.” His smile was gone.

  “Show some respect,” said Cuthbert’s mother.

  “Humph,” said Winefride. “It’s all right.”

  Cuthbert’s mum said to her husband, sighing with fatigue, “Aren’t you capable of humoring them a bit, Hank? Can’t you be decent?”

  Auntie Bettina, the sharper of the two aunts, tried to change the subject. She shared most women’s remarkably unswerving and politely furtive disdain for her nephew, and she felt sorry for Winefride, a Clee girl who had been dragged off to West Brom by a sore bore of a son-in-law. Winefride wasn’t blood, but she felt far more a kindred spirit than Henry.

  “You said you brought that camera of yours, Henry?”

  Henry frowned at the woman with a harsh, instinctual alarm, and he almost ducked down in his seat. He held a flinty-eyed posture of defensiveness for a moment, as if preparing for some vast wave of other people’s messy joys to wash him away.

  “Yeah?” he said, with a porcine grunt so routine for him, he actually felt it as sociable noise.

  “Henry!” his wife scolded. He sat up a bit, looking around with a simpering smile. His wife had a way of snapping him out of his lugubriousness.

  “Sorry,” he said. “Yeah, you wouldn’t believe the cost of film these days. Mr. Wilson’s ‘pound in the pocket’ is a right laugh.”

  “Henry, you’ll be happy to take some piccies, won’t you?”

  “Oh, ar, of course. A’right.”

  After a few minutes, and much lecturing about the virtues of American manufacturing, their father produced his old Kodak Brownie 127, a small camera made of Bakelite, which Henry Handley swore by. He could coax unforgettable images in full color from it. There were three subjects—Cuthbert and Drystan or almost anyone posed in front of his or a neighbor’s car; local construction projects; or mute swans at the park. The man loved white swans.

  “Roight, yow scallywags—against the wall,” he ordered. Cuthbert and Drystan jumped up and stood shoulder to shoulder, refusing to smile, folding their little scapulas against the dark wall like stunted bone wings. Cuthbert was actually shaking with fear; all too often, any kind of boisterousness on his father’s part, especially with a lager or two, ended up with Drystan being hit, again and again, with a belt, and then him.

  Drystan began spinning his hawthorn twig like a green propeller in his hand. He stuck it in his mouth, made a silly face, then a serious one.

  “Smile!” their father commanded. Finally, Cuthbert started snickering, then Drystan laughed, and the magnesium flashbulb exploded.

  In the white-hot actinic light, Drystan’s face glowed with a robust, dark merriment. He looked different. The usual childlike fragility braced by his high cheekbones had receded. His russet-brown eyes looked smaller, harder. There was that green-leaved twig jauntily in his teeth. One could just make out something new—the forceful gaze of a man, emerging from the boy—angry, bold, honorable, and all things his father wasn’t.

  For years, Cuthbert kept the resulting photograph, carrying it everywhere, a stiff, white-framed square of color emulsion paper, his silver-halide talisman against oblivion. He took it onto the brownfields and doss houses and alleyways of England, until eventually, after thousands and thousands of warm orbs of Flōt, he could hardly work out why it was so important. It was the last photograph of Drystan in the universe, but when it disintegrated, soaked with urine in his pocket, he didn’t even know it.

  the prophecy of an animal lord

  IN THE COUNTRYSIDE, IN THE ERA BETWEEN THE great world wars, and nearly a century before the death of King William, the depredations of King Harry9, and the coming of a new king, the soul of England did begin to waver. Long before the zoophobia and existential threats of Heaven’s Gate, the languages of animals seldom were heard, and even among the few Britons left who still prayed to the “owd green saints,” as Winefride Wenlock called them, almost no one knew enough to resist the gathering silence.

  There were exceptions to the dying hush of the animals, even in Winefride’s lifetime, “hidden as plain as your chops,” as she’d say, most from the “golden age” of English animal stories. Countless British parents read Peter Rabbit to their children, she liked to claim, never grasping that the sad-eyed, dark-haired Beatrix Potter, whom Winefride had seen admiringly in one of the illustrateds, had spent much of her childhood and early adulthood speaking, secretly, to animals.

  “Oh, ’tis as true as I stonds ’er! You know how little Benjamin Bunny gathered those onions to take down into his mum’s bury?” Winefride had asked Cuthbert and Drystan earlier that morning as they sat squeezed into the backseat of the Imp on the trip west from Birmingham. “And all about his and Peter’s escape from that gallus cat? Well, Mrs. Potter had summut in her ’yud besides nits and lice to wroit all that, with these good animals acting the very moral of animals that talk —oh, Mrs. Potter knew to the tongue of rabbits and hares, be sure—probably learnt from that old Belgian buck rabbit they say she had at her house.

  “Thee canna write like that about hares without lashions of the Wonderments in thee,” she said.

  But she said she didn’t see much evidence of Wonderments anymore, not since the Great War.

  “If I had the strength to clomber over to a library more often, I’d probably find I don’t know what I’m mithering on about,” she told Drystan and Cuthbert. The cold eyes of their mother, who sat up front, appeared in the rearview mirror. They could see her shaking her head, before turning to stare out her window with an almost predatory disinterest. Winefride continued, “But still, it’s sorely hushed these days with the animals—hardly a naise!”

  The notion of a great calm among animals before the arrival of a terrible messiah became a deeply felt, if eccentric, eschatology in Cuthbert’s and Drystan’s young psyches. Winefride would proffer the idea anytime a neighborhood spaniel stopped barking or a nightingale suddenly abandoned its song.

  “My grandfather used to say that when the animals go quate, it means Jack in the Green’s right ’round the corner,” she once said. “Better look out! ’Tis true as christened apples on St. Swithin’s Day.”

  “Jack in the Green?” Drystan quipped. “That some kind of pudding or bread or summut, and you put those ’oly apples on it?”

  Their gran had laughed. “No, no. Jack’s the same Jack as Jack’s Alive. The Green Man. The Lush One. Robin Goodfellow. Puck. The Christ of Otter
s.”

  “Otters? I don’t like otters. I like tigers. Can’t we have tigers?” asked Drystan.

  “Or dragons?” asked Cuthbert.

  “No, no,” their grandmother had said. “The otter—he’s the one we’ve got in England, and others have theirs.”

  The Christ of Otters was that peculiar face with ivy in its nostrils and a halo of grapevines, staring from forgotten corners of British churches, from corbels and column capitals, grave slabs and misericords, with an expression of furious fecundity. According to the legends of the Wonderments, as Cuthbert’s gran described them, the Christ of Otters was to return one day to England, in the flesh, after a Great Hush in which the nation struggled then endured a deceptive ascendancy. And a risen St. Cuthbert would usher the way.

  “’A comes after we’ve been down on our duffs for a while,” she’d once explained. “And there will be a star in the sky—in the east. Look for it, boys.”

  The Christ of Otters’ arrival would mark the precise moment of the nadir of humankind on earth, and the beginning of the slow return of a new equilibrium.

  “Now don’t get me wrong,” she once told Cuthbert. “I go churching for Jesus Christ our Savior, son of Joseph, son of Heli, Matthat, Levi, et cetera and whatnot.” But she went on to say how those Wonderments “told your owd gran and those before for all time” that God had made a special promise to the animals of Albion.

  “’E’d given ’em souls, ’a did,” she said. “And it was down to all the good things they done for all of us, especially out here in the Marches. And they would get their own saint—an animal Lord.”

  Souls for their service to England. That was the covenant between humans and Great Britain’s animals, passed down in the Wonderments, as Cuthbert came to understand them. Such inspired animals of the covenant ought never be caged, or looked down upon. “They’ve their own yuds,” his gran always said. They possessed animal motives and animal values; they had a few special saints across the British Isles, their own green shoots off their own Tree of Jesse—St. Aristobulus, St. Columba, and St. Cuthbert; they had their own Cains and Judases. The animals of Britannia did not look for the resurrection of the dead; they sought to live with dignity and purpose in their ensouled eminence. So declared the Wonderments.