Clear Light of Day

by Penelope Wilcock

  “But it doesn’t matter what I believe, I still don’t like the church,” he said, with a sort of stillness of determination that Esme guessed ran very deep.

  “Did we hurt you?” she asked, gently. She hoped her tone sounded ingenuous. It wouldn’t do to let him know she’d had the gossip of several church members about him, but she wanted to know about his wife and what it was the prayer group had done to upset him.

  Jabez looked suddenly very tired. Sharing his soul had become unfamiliar. He felt unsure about this intrusion.

  “That’s fine, you can stop,” he remarked, as he lifted the blade and turned back to the lawnmower again.

  Esme wondered if her question would be left unanswered, but as Jabez knelt to reposition the blade on the mower, he glanced at her narrowly from under the wiry silver eyebrows, saying, “I think you may know a bit more about me than you pretend.”

  That moment was a crossroads for them. Esme had to decide then whether she wanted Jabez to be an acquaintance or a friend, whether she was to be the minister of the chapel to him, or just herself, Esme.

  It is understood that a pastoral relationship is without the quality of truthfulness that a friendship has. The transactions between ministers and their flocks are ritualized; there are expectations and therefore pretenses. This is understood and part of the world of formal relationships undertaken by people in the public eye. But a friend approaches barefoot with needs as unadorned as a beggar’s bowl, or the gift of self like a flower held in the hand.

  She might have stayed as a minister then, evaded his rebuke with a joke, retreated to safe footing—“Oh! Sorry! Didn’t mean to intrude!” Esme knew it was possible to make comments of that sort in just such a tone as to imply the other is prickly, oversensitive; there was no need to admit one’s own dishonesty. She might have taken that course, but in her few years as a minister she had learned to know how rare a thing it is to be offered the chance to be truthful. Reality is always so demanding. Not many attempt its rigors.

  Jabez refitted the blade as she considered this and tightened the nut with his key, afterward slipping it into his pocket.

  “Yes, I do know a bit about you already.” Esme felt ashamed as she said it. “I’ve asked several people about you. I know you were married, and that your wife died; and that something happened there to do with our chapel prayer group. I wanted to find out about it. Just nosy I suppose. It’s none of my business. I’m sorry, Jabez.”

  And as simply as that, they crossed over into friendship—his offer of truthfulness and her shamed acceptance. Esme thought later, what slight moments are the occasions of human transformation.

  Jabez sat down beside the lawnmower and felt in the pocket of his jacket for a tin of tobacco, inside which were also cigarette papers. He rolled a cigarette, carefully, very thin, and patted his pockets to locate the matches with which to light it. Esme sat on the edge of the wooden chair again and waited for what he would say. Recovery time needed, it seemed. He drew on the cigarette.

  “My wife, Maeve,” he said, affecting a hard and matter-of-fact tone, “died of cancer.” He paused, and looked suspiciously at his cigarette, and with good reason, because it had gone out. Esme waited while he relit it. He drew on it, looked at it, and flashed her one quick glance.

  “It was awful. Horrible. She lost her hair, and she had a lot of pain. Her arm swelled and her medicines made her sick—desperately sick—and her belly filled up with fluid, and she smelled bad, and she knew she did, and she got so thin she looked as though her teeth didn’t belong in her face anymore. She wanted to stay here, so I nursed her.”

  He stopped. Esme waited. He drew on the cigarette, relit it because it was out again. Esme waited.

  “And then—we were clutching at straws I think—someone from the chapel,” he did not look at her, but gazed steadfastly ahead at nothing, “asked if a group of them could come to the cottage and pray for Maeve and me. I don’t know what possessed me to agree to it, but—well … perhaps you can imagine. We were short on hope.”

  He stopped speaking for a moment, his face set and still, remembering.

  “So they came. Here, in our cottage, they came. Not Miss Trigg, she isn’t into all that, but a woman that twittered and a woman with a silent enigmatic smile and a man who stood too close when he talked to me and a little bald bloke who was deaf. To pray for Maeve and me. Maybe you know them. I don’t. I haven’t been to chapel for years, and I think a lot of those that worship there now aren’t the old ones but run out from Southarbour to keep it from closing down.

  “Anyway, they said could they lay hands on her for healing, and she wanted it so I said yes. I didn’t want to raise Maeve’s hopes but, you know, her eyes that had been so dull and enduring suddenly looked alive again. I felt angry and helpless because I knew it would be no good. But I went along with it. I helped her into a chair in the middle of the room, and the four of them jostled around her into a group with their eight hands plastered on her thin, wasted shoulders and her poor bald head. A bit excessive. And they started to pray. D’you know the kind of thing? Do they still do it? ‘Lord, send your Spirit, Lord, to heal and bless her, Lord; make her free from pain, Lord, blah, blah, blah.’”

  He drew on his cigarette. It was out. He didn’t bother to relight it, but let his hand come down to rest on his knee. He glanced at Esme, but only for a moment.

  “I remember it sinking in with such appalling clarity that Maeve was going to die. I hadn’t really faced it till then, till I heard their church-speak full of unreality and realized what reality held for us. I was standing by the table, an onlooker, trying to get under control the grief that was suddenly going crazy inside me. I was trying to put it on one side to deal with later, when the deaf man must have found his moment to get a prayer in edgeways because he startled me by booming out like a foghorn, I mean really in capital letters, ‘OH LORD, WE PRAY FOR MAUVE!’ And it was at that moment that I lost it all. To that extent I suppose he prayed with power, because his prayer certainly had an effect on me. ‘Mauve!’ Inside me it all muddled together; all at once something laughed and something wept and something died. Apart from her funeral and sitting eavesdropping in the porch some Sundays, I never go near chapel nor church. Well, to be fair I hadn’t anyway, not for years.”

  A brief, wry grin twisted his face. “You’d have been proud of me though. I made them a cup of tea before they went. And I gave them a biscuit.”

  The desolation of this story moved in the center of Esme’s soul. She felt the sharpness of its anguish and was at a loss what to say.

  After a moment, “What did Maeve think of the prayer?” she asked. “Did she find it helpful?”

  Jabez nodded slowly. “She did. She did, but she died.”

  He looked thoughtfully at the lifeless remains of his cigarette in his hand and flicked it back over his shoulder in the direction of the orchard grass that grew down to meet the flags of the yard.

  “Esme, I don’t like the church. I don’t like its hypocrisy, and its need to be right and to control everybody. It works by fear and manipulation and doublespeak and to be honest I got no time for it at all. Now if you’ll excuse me—” he got up and lifted the lawnmower into the back of his truck and fetched a can to decant the used oil for recycling; “—I must take this mower down the road to Mr. Griffiths before the afternoon’s over. It was nice to see you.”

  There was a definite dismissal in his tone that went beyond the requirements of the afternoon’s tasks. Esme stood up and straightened her skirt. She looked at him, but he didn’t meet her gaze.

  “Am I a part of all that, then?” she asked. “The church?”

  His eyes flickered, and he stood looking down at the metal can in his hand, slowly screwing down the cap.

  “Well, yes,” he said, quietly. “I guess you are.”

  Esme felt a sharp pain of disappoint
ment: The moment of honesty that brought intimacy between them seemed to have been lost, and the clarity between them had slipped away, leaving them back as they were, little more than strangers.

  “But it’s still okay to come here?” Leave it, Esme, a voice inside her warned. But somehow she couldn’t leave it; she had to be sure.

  He sighed, impatiently.

  “I run a business here,” he said, adding with a quick glance around his yard and an involuntary laugh, “if I may be permitted to dignify it by calling it that. Anyone can call in anytime. You asked to see how bikes are maintained. That’s all right. Apparently you’re interested in lawnmowers, too. As far as it goes, that’s all fine. But—look—I’m not a mission field. Can we be clear on that?”

  Esme felt her color rise. He was denying the pure truth that had shone between them, and she felt belittled and shut out by the way he spoke.

  “Most certainly,” she shot back defensively. “You make yourself perfectly clear. I won’t hold you up any longer.”

  She left very swiftly, without looking back.

  Three

  Jabez moved about his kitchen slowly and stiffly in the half light of the dawn. It was just after half-past five, and he felt weary still. He hadn’t slept well. He had added some dry kindling to the dying remains of yesterday’s fire in the Rayburn’s firebox, seen it crackle and blaze up nicely, pushed some chunkier bits on top, filled the kettle, and set it on the hottest place of the stove’s hot plate. He turned his back on it and leaned against the dishtowel rail on the front of the stove, glad of the warmth as he listened to the water begin to stir. He leaned forward and reached for his tobacco tin on the kitchen table, and he rolled a cigarette as he waited for the kettle to heat up. The radio muttered quietly in its corner. He fumbled in his pocket for matches, and lit the cigarette. He looked at the end of it glowing ruby in the cold, uncertain light of the morning; and he thought it beautiful, that small red glow.

  After awhile, as he heard the first sounds of the water heating increase to something more determined, he pushed away from his resting place. By the yard door he struggled his feet into his Wellington boots, and went out of the kitchen across the yard for the faded plastic bucket he mixed the hen food in. The tabby cat appeared at his side, winding itself sinuously around his ankles, and he bent for a moment to scratch its ears affectionately. The weather had changed, the sunshine had gone, and today’s northeasterly wind carried a cold, thin rain. In the small wooden shed where, in with various gardening implements and a bale of straw for his nest boxes, Jabez kept the hen food, he scooped some meal into the bucket from the tin mug inside the paper sack and refolded the top with the absentminded methodical precision of habit. He carried the bucket back to the kitchen, the cat running at his heels, and added half the heated water from the kettle to the meal, set the kettle back on the hot plate, and took the bucket to the sink, stirring in the water and some scraps left from last night’s supper with a spoon that lay on the draining board. Then he carried the steaming mixture out into the yard, shivering in the slanting drizzle borne on the unrelenting wind, up through the orchard to the chicken house, where his brown hens, shut in securely against the visits of the fox, were still fast asleep, but willing to wake up for their breakfast. He propped the hen house door back and scraped their meal into the aged and dented aluminum bowl that lay on the grass there, watched them tumble out of their house in haste to find their food, checked the laying boxes—not expecting and not finding any eggs so early in the day—and turned back down to the yard, where he could hear the kettle beginning to whistle in the kitchen.

  He left the bucket in the shed, kicked off his boots at the kitchen door, grateful to step out of the wind, and went in to make his tea, strong and dark, the way he liked it. He sniffed at the milk he found in the fridge and paused reflectively. Sniffed again, and after a moment’s hesitation, resigned himself to pouring some into the stained and chipped mug he had rescued from its fellows on the draining board. He poured some into the cat’s saucer on the floor near the sink. Opening the door of the Rayburn, he added a split log to the fire, closed it up again, and adjusted down the draught.

  Then tea in one hand, cigarette in the other, Jabez moved in that quiet way of his from the kitchen into his living room, making for the refuge of his fireside chair. Nothing in the grate but last night’s ashes, still faintly astir. He put down his tea on the hearth. Sitting on the edge of the chair, leaning forward, his left hand rested on his knee and held the glowing cigarette while he took up the poker in his right hand, riddled the ashes through. He straightened up with a sigh, then sat for a moment with the poker dangling inert in his hand, his face as grey and hopeless as the ashes on the hearth, just still and letting his mind wander, until a cough shook him and he grimaced, recalled to the present moment, laid the poker down, and went patient on his hands and knees to lay kindling, roll the pages of the free local newspaper into firelighters, set a match to begin what was, for him, always a clinging to hope, warmth, life, and home; a fire to sit by, gaze into, brood upon.

  There came a moment between kneeling to contemplate the yellow-orange flames beginning to devour the twists of paper, and rising awkwardly back into his chair, when something sharp and painful slid obliquely along Jabez Ferrall’s soul; a simple blade of acknowledgment—so abysmally lonely. But he turned from it before it became self-pity, to the last half-inch of his cigarette and to the comfort of tea still hot.

  In his sixth year as a widower and the sixty-ninth year of his life, Jabez kept that economy of movement, inner stillness, of those who prefer to disturb the deep barren ache of living only as much as must be.

  It was, he reflected, as he drew on the last of the cigarette and flicked the butt of it into the flames, a luxury really to light two fires, especially now that spring had arrived. Still, the stove had to be kept in to keep the house dry and warm and in readiness for cooking meals and heating dishwater. And this fire to sit by was a small and temporary delight; just for a moment, the space it took to sit awhile and drink a cup of tea before the day began. Primitive, really, he thought; not much advance on the Stone Age or whenever in human history they had lit fires to keep away the wild beasts and the evil spirits. For here he sat, keeping his own demons at bay with the comfort of a fire’s light; setting something bright and living between himself and the shades mocking his inadequacy and his entrenched, habitual gnawing of grief. Well, loneliness. Nothing to assuage it. No help for it. But firelight is something of consolation, essentially alive.

  As he drank his tea, folding his hands around the mug and sitting forward in his chair toward the fire’s warmth, Jabez reflected on his conversation with Esme yesterday. The memory embarrassed him. How had he come to give so much of himself away? He regretted his bitterness and his frank contempt of what after all was her way of life, the context for most of what she did. “I shouldn’t have said those things,” he murmured, ashamed. He felt the stirring inside him of the bad stuff—the self-reproach and uncertainty, the sense of inadequacy and weakness. What are you supposed to do with it, all that stuff? Where is it supposed to go?

  After Maeve had died, he had just kept himself to himself, managed it all as best he could, the tearing, eviscerating misery of grief. Now he had grown a flimsy carapace over the first rawness but hadn’t gotten further than that really. It sufficed for the day-to-day, but when, as yesterday, he came to talk about any of it, the despair came back as fresh as ever, uncontainable. And what are you supposed to do with it?

  Jabez sat a moment longer, his face drawn into haggard lines of weary bewilderment. Then, irritated at himself, he shrugged, inspected the quantity of tea left in the mug, knocked back the dregs of it, and got to his feet to begin the day. There was work to be done.

  The day did not improve but continued in fitful showers and keen, persistent wind.

  Through the morning Esme finished off her Easter sermo
n and worked through a pile of correspondence. She had one more Holy Week house communion to do, at Gladys Taylor’s almshouse out at Wiles Green. Facing her sickness with dignity, Gladys never complained, and greeted Esme on her visits with warmth and kindness; but Esme saw the pinch of fear underlying the set of Gladys’s features and heard the resolve of courage that had entered her voice. She called when she could with cartons of high-calorie, complete-nutrient drinks and magazines, and today for Holy Week, the bread and wine of communion.

  She stopped briefly at Brockhyrst Priory on her way there and bought a bag of six currant buns and a loaf of bread, mindful of the closed shops in the coming public holiday. She took in a bun for Gladys—who would not eat it, she suspected, but might like to be thought of, and maybe would manage a taste. She was shocked by the deterioration of Gladys’s health; a new frailty, and blue shadows circling her eyes—“Let me call the doctor,” she said, but Gladys, surprisingly stubborn, refused to disturb her doctor until normal office hours resumed on Tuesday.

  When she came away from the house, Esme sat in her car for several minutes feeling upset and adjusting to the evident reality that Gladys would be with them very little longer.

  As she drove back through the village, she went more slowly, and stopped eventually, outside the Old Police House. I can’t go back again, she thought; that’s three days running. I mustn’t—I can’t … and she slowly took the keys out of the ignition, took the bag of currant buns from the seat beside her, and got out of the car.

  As she followed the muddy path around the cottage, early weeds heavy with rain wetting the legs of her jeans, Esme became aware she was treading very cautiously—silently, actually. In one hand she carried the bag from the baker’s: a peace offering.

  She came into the yard. The shed door stood open. Esme stole closer and stood uncertainly in the doorway. Inside, Jabez was crouched over his zinc bath in the middle of the shed, running an inner tube slowly through his hands under the water, checking for a puncture. He did not look around. Apparently he hadn’t heard her. His hair was tied back, but she couldn’t see his face; still his movements were as always calm, methodical. He didn’t look cross. She stood in the doorway, watching him.