by Ted Hughes
In her lopsided bedroom has finished packing her splitting suitcase. Her grandfather, old Mr Smayle, sunk in his pullover and face-folds, has anchored his wits in the television. He does not see her slip out, carrying the suitcase.
She goes up the cinder path of the back-garden, past the rows of greens, the spill of compost. Birds spurt everywhere. Fledgeling thrushes launch and fall struggling into undergrowth. Two crows circle low scolding the black shapes that flounder for balance among the lowest branches.
Clouds crumble, bright as broken igloos. Felicity bends through a worn gap in the thorn and holly hedge.
At a high creeper-fringed window of the rectory
Maud’s face
Dimmed, well back in the room’s darkness,
Watches, as if waiting for just this.
Felicity opens the boot of the Vicar’s old Bentley. She stows her suitcase. She closes the boot-lid, with deliberate care. She returns through the shrubbery and the hedge.
Maud is beside the car.
She opens the boot. She opens the suitcase.
She stares into the suitcase
As into the faked workings of a sum
To which she knows the correct answer.
She hurls the unclosed suitcase toward the shrubbery.
It spins, flinging off its clothes
And falls behind rhododendrons.
Maud embraces herself, as if she were freezing. Her eyes pierce through her shiver as through a focusing lens.
Lumb
Is driving along.
He feels uneasy. He keeps glancing round.
At a high bend, over the river,
Stub-fingered hairy-backed hands come past his shoulders
And wrench the steering wheel from his grip.
The van vaults the bank.
He sees tree-shapes whirl, hearing underwood crash, then
shuts his eyes.
He clenches himself into a ball of resistance.
A toppling darkness, a somersaulting
Of bumps and jabs, as if he rolled down a long stair
A long unending way, and again further, then again
further.
Separate and still after some seconds
He realises he has come to a stop.
He stays coiled, afraid to test his jarred skeleton.
Probably the worst has already happened painlessly.
He opens his eyes.
Seeing only darkness, he stretches his eyelids wide.
He relaxes into stillness. He explores a freedom all round.
He feels wetness. He scrambles to his hands and knees,
Imagining his van is in the river, and now beginning to fill,
But realises he is free and out of the van.
He supposes he has been hurled clear. He supposes this is
river water.
He stares into the darkness, trying to split a glimpse
through his black blindness.
But what he thought was river is other noises.
As his head clears, harsh noises din at his head,
Like an abrupt waking,
He makes out shapes in the darkness, confusion of
movement.
He sees heavy rain glittering the night, he feels it.
He sees he crawls on his hands and knees
In the slurry of a cattleyard
Where bellowing cattle lurch in all directions,
Topheavy bulks blundering unpredictably, like
manoeuvring heavy machinery.
He covers himself from blows
Which are not just rain, which are not kicks and
tramplings of the hooves,
But deliberate, aimed blows.
Sticks are coming down on to his head, neck, shoulders
and arms.
Bewildering fierce human shouts jab him to consciousness.
He stands and tries to run but the thick sludge grips his
feet,
And he falls again, gets up again
Staggering slowly, losing both shoes in the quag.
Shapes of men are hunting him across the yard
Among the plunging beasts
With cudgels, with intent to kill him.
The cattle wallow and skid in the dark,
Their frightened bellowing magnifies them. From a raw,
high lamp
Broad sweeping strokes of rainy light come and go,
wheeling and thrusting.
He shields his head and tries to see his attackers’ faces
Among the colliding masses and tossing silhouettes.
Caught in the flashing diagonals
The faces seem to be all wide-stretched mouth, like
lampreys.
They roar at him, as at driven cattle in a slaughter-house.
Their bodies are deformed by oilskins
And their sticks come down out of darkness.
But now they draw off.
Lumb feels a reprieve, a lightening
Though the cattle continue to mill round and press closer
As if still multiplying out of the earth itself.
They are stripping their throats with terror-clamour
But they leave him his space.
He kneels up under the rain.
He shouts to the men.
He tells them who he is, he asks who they are
And what is happening.
What has he done and what do they want?
His voice struggles small in the grievous uproar of the
animals
Which now surge towards him as if helplessly tilted, with
sprawling legs,
And now as helplessly away from him
Like cattle on a foundering ship among overhanging and
crumbling cliffs of surge.
One man comes close, his oilskins flash in the downpour.
He hands Lumb a sodden paper, as if it were some
explanation.
Lumb scrutinises it but can make nothing out in the
broken rays,
As it disintegrates in his fingers, weak as a birth
membrane.
Now the murder-shouts are redoubled
And the malice redoubled. The sticks flash their arcs,
The cattle churn a vortex, leaning together
Shouldering, shining masses, bellowing outrage and fear.
It is like a dam bursting, masonry and water-mass
mingled.
Goring at each other, riding each other,
Heads low and heads high, uphooking and shaken horns,
Plungings as over fences, flinging up tails
And stretched out tongues.
Lumb is knocked spinning, recovers and is again knocked
spinning.
He runs with them, among them, as they circle.
He tries to find a hold on their wet, strenuous backs,
To lift himself above their colliding sides, and to be
carried.
Sticks lash at him, across the backs.
Suddenly everything runs looser.
The stampede is flowing to freedom.
He runs half-carried and squashed, and kicked.
Then legs are all round him.
Then he lies under hooves, only hearing the floundering
thunder,
As if he lay under a steadily collapsing building
No longer feeling anything,
From a far light-house of watchfulness, a far height of
separateness
Observing and timing its second after second
Still going on and still going on
Till it stops.
After some time of silence
He draws his limbs to him.
He lies buried in mud,
His face into mud, his mouth full of mud.
Everything has left him, except the rain, ponderous and
cold.
He tries again to remember, through the confusion of
fright,
But it is like trying to strike a match in such rain, and he
gives up.
It is downpour dawn
On a silvery plain of hoof-ploughed mud.
He stands for a while
Feeling the rain, like a close armour of lead, chilling and
hardening.
Not knowing what to do, or where to go now.
He stands spitting out mud, trying to clean his hands,
Letting the hard rain beat his upturned face, letting it
hurt his eyelids.
Now he walks up a slight incline
And finds Evans’s body.
Evans is crushed into the mud, as if a load of steel had
just been lifted off him.
Near him, Walsall the publican,
His limbs twisted into mud, like the empty arms and legs
Of a ploughed-in scarecrow.
So, one by one, the men of his parish,
Faces upward or downward, rag bodies.
And now he recalls the cattle stampede, an ugly glare of
shock with shapes in it.
Beyond that, his mind dissolves.
He looks at the bodies. No explanation occurs to him.
They are all there is to it.
But now he hears a sharp crying. He looks for it, as for a
clue.
Ahead, a hare-like small animal, humped on the mud,
Shivers crying,
With long hare-like screams, under the dawn.
It lets him approach.
It is the head of a woman
Who has been buried alive to the neck.
Lumb bends to the face,
He draws aside the rain-plastered hair.
It is Hagen’s wife, Pauline.
Her staring eyes seem not to register his presence.
He calls to her, he speaks to her softly, as to a patient in
a coma,
But she continues to scream
As if something hidden under the mud
Were biting into her.
Near her, sticking up out of the mud,
The red head of Mrs Dunworth
Moves and cries.
She cries through the draggled tails of her hair.
He wipes mud from her mud-spattered mouth but his
fingers are still too muddy.
He pushes aside her hair, letting the rain beat down her face,
He presses her brow back so that her face tilts to take the
rain
He calls to her sharply. She continues to scream
Ignoring him,
And though his hand presses back her face, her eyes still
watch across the plain of mud
As if the last horror
Were approaching beneath its surface.
Nearby
The small soaked head of Mrs Davies
A cry welling from her lips, hopeless,
As from the lips of a child that cries itself to sleep,
While her wide eyes, like pebbles, stare through her thin
fringe
As if her only life
Were disappearing slowly in the rain-fogged distance.
One by one he finds them.
The women of his parish are congregated here,
Buried alive
Around the rim of a crater
Under the drumming downpour.
And now he sees
In the bottom of the crater
Something moving.
Something squirming in a well of liquid mud,
Almost getting out
Then sliding back in, with horrible reptile slowness.
And now it lifts a head of mud, a face of mud is watching
him.
It is calling to him
Through a moving uncertain hole in the mud face.
It reaches towards him with mud hands
Seeming almost human.
He slides down into the crater,
Thinking this one creature that he can free.
He stretches his foot towards the drowning creature of
mud
In the sink at the centre.
Hands grip his ankle, he feels the weight.
The hands climb his leg.
He draws the mud being up, a human shape
That embraces him as he embraces it.
And now he looks up for some way out
Under the torn falling sky.
The rain striking across the mud face washes it.
It is a woman’s face,
A face as if sewn together from several faces.
A baboon beauty face,
A crudely stitched patchwork of faces,
But the eyes slide,
Alive and electrical, like liquid liquorice behind the
stitched lids,
Lumb moves to climb, to half-crawl
And feels her embrace tighten.
He holds her more securely
And with his free hand tries to dig a hook-hold in the clay
wall.
Her embrace tightens stronger
As if a powerful spring trap bit into his resistance.
He braces to free himself.
Her stitch-face grins into his face and his spine cracks.
Suddenly he is afraid.
He turns all his strength on to her, straining to burst her
grip.
With the heels of his hands he pushes at her face.
She only clamps tighter, as if she were drowning,
As if she were already unconscious, as if now her body
alone were fighting to save itself.
And his shouts of rage
Bring to the rim of the crater
Silhouetted against the dawn raincloud
Men in oilskins.
Lumb and the clinging woman are hauled out.
They are carried, still knotted together.
As they go, Lumb fights to keep his lung-space.
Her grip is cutting into his body like wires.
In a flurry of oilskins
He is held down on straw.
Already paralysed, he can no longer move even his face,
As if under stony anaesthetic.
He swoons into and out of unconsciousness,
Vaguely renewing his effort to see what is being done to
him.
Dancing lights and shapes interfere with his sight.
Men are kneeling over him.
A swell of pain, building from his throat and piling
downwards
Lifts him suddenly out of himself.
Somehow he has emerged and is standing over himself.
He sees himself being delivered of the woman from the
pit,
The baboon woman,
Flood-sudden, like the disembowelling of a cow
She gushes from between his legs, a hot splendour
In a glistening of oils,
In a radiance like phosphorous he sees her crawl and
tremble.
But already hands grip his head,
And the clamp of tightness, which has not shifted,
Is a calf-clamp on his body.
He can hear her whole body bellowing.
His own body is being twisted and he hears her scream
out.
He feels bones give. He feels himself slide.
He fights in hot liquid.
He imagines he has been torn in two at the waist and this
is his own blood everywhere.
He sees struggle of bodies.
Men are fighting to hold her down, they cannot.
He crawls,
He frees his hands and face of blood-clotted roping tissues.
He sees light.
He sees her face undeformed and perfect.
Blinded again with liquid, but free
He flounders – away, anywhere further away,
On his hands and knees.
And he is crawling out of the river
Glossed as a
n exhausted otter, and trailing
A mane of water.
He flops among wild garlic, and lies, shivering,
Vomiting water.
At last, pulling himself up by a sapling,
He sees his van, sitting out in a meadow,
Beside the river, under full sunlight.
Figures of men stand waiting round it.
Dazed and dazzled, with trembling legs he walks towards
them.
But already there is nobody.
Only starlings, seething and glittering among the
buttercups.
With a sudden râle they go up, in a drumming silent
escape.
His van sits empty, the doors wide open, as if parked for
a picnic.
Garten
Has cycled eight miles to the city.
He goes into a chemist’s.
Spectacled, heron-crested, Tetley
Splays excitedly
Large glossy prints of badgers in den-mouths
With firefly eyes, among wood-anemones.
Garten is his informer
For the night life and underground activity
Of the woods
And all the secretive operations of birds
Which it is his infatuation
To photograph. Garten is his guide.
The urgency of the return favour
Which Garten now requires
Alarms Tetley, a little.
Can a roll of film be so consequential?
Curiosity blinks through him. His afternoon
Is readjusted.
Lumb
Strips in his room. Resumes
Personal possession of his body
Like a boxer after his fight.
Maud hands him a towel, she pours coffee,
Stokes bigger the log fire, which is already too big.
Positions the high-backed chair, thronelike, in the middle
of the room, fronting the flames.
Lays out fresh clothes on the low bed
Below the window
Which is also a door on to the furnace of the bright world
The chill bustle
Of the blossom-rocking afternoon
The gusty lights of purplish silver, brightenings, sudden
