by Tim Pears
They’d nick a chicken from a farm. The women carried long knives in their skirts, ready to kill a stray goose or lamb. One evening Samson said, ‘I’ve a taste for pork. Will you give me some a your pig juice, Gully?’
The horseman climbed into his vardo and came out with a small bottle he gave to his brother, who put it in his jacket pocket and disappeared into the night.
The next day when the women set off hawking, Samson went with them. He came back with a dead pig on a trolley cart, a large castrated boar, fattening nicely. The boy did not understand.
‘I asked a farmer, Leo, if he’d any dead calves I could take off his hands,’ Samson told him. ‘That I could skin for the hide, to make vellum for banjos. Would you believe it? The farmer said he had a pig must have ate summat poisononous and died overnight, and I was welcome to the whole bloody carcass, for none could eat it now.’
Leo still did not understand. Samson told him that farmers were fools. The boy did not agree but held his tongue. Samson said, ‘I have a taste for pork, Leo. I like my rabbits fried in pork fat. I like mushrooms fried in pork fat with a pinch a salt when you take em out a the pan. And tonight my juval’s goin to fry me some pork chops, are you not, Kinity?’
*
George’s wife Rhoda wore long boots, laced to the knee beneath her ankle-length black dress that had deep embroidered pockets on the outside. She wore a stook around her neck, a brightly coloured square of silk, as did all the women. She was strong and stout. Her black hair was shiny with a pomade made of hedgehog fat and she cleaned her teeth with soot and salt.
One morning Rhoda asked the boy to light her fire, for her hands were full with Keziah and Lewesa, the younger girl, ill. He did so. The act was witnessed and Leo was soon given to understand that this was henceforth to be added to his chores: stoking or relighting each of the six campfires in the morning.
One damp December day he struggled to ignite kindling. Edwin’s wife Arabella was outraged to find her drinking water bucket not yet replenished. She picked it up and tossed its remaining contents, yesterday’s water, over the boy. Her children, Henery’s younger brother Thomas and sister Priscilla, were gleefully amused.
At mealtimes Edwin and Belcher both ate first, before their wives and children. They did not like to be watched. Only after they had wiped their plates clean with bread were the others served. George did not obey this custom. He and Rhoda ate together. She cooked all manner of dishes in her pot. A black pudding made of the blood of a goose. Gypsy cake of flour and dripping, baked in the fire’s ashes. When her man went out to graft she sent him off with onion sandwiches flavoured with brown sugar, vinegar and salt. Leo tried to guess ingredients by smell or taste, and Keziah told him right or wrong. It became a game between them. Rhoda used dandelions to flavour soup. She and her daughters searched for snails on walls and trees and cooked them into a broth, or boiled them and then fried them in herbs. Leo could not believe how tasty these oddities were.
‘My juval here worked in the kitchen of one a the big houses,’ George told him. ‘I was hired by his lordship to fight one of his men on the lawn at a party they held for the Coronation. She saw me and run away with us, is that not so, sweetheart?’
‘Don’t believe a word of it, Leo,’ Rhoda said.
‘She only became a gypsy when she married me. Don’t make my mistake, Leo,’ George advised the boy. ‘Never choose a wife by candlelight.’
Rhoda shook her head in reproof, trying not to smile. She cooked whatever game George brought to her and any vegetables filched from the fields. She used nettles like cabbage or kale. Her sons caught pigeons and she made a pie. Lewesa found watercress in a stream and her mother was overjoyed, for she said it was the perfect tonic for the blood.
One morning George whittled pegs while Leo oiled harness nearby. The big man looked across the clearing at his wife, and sighed. ‘She walked so light, Leo, I thought she was a wind passin over the field.’ He shook his head. ‘She was quick as smoke. She’s the most beautiful gypsy woman I ever saw. I don’t mind. Let other men lust after her. Let them stare themselves blind, Leo, she’s my woman.’
It was not easy to imagine Rhoda years younger and slighter. Once beautiful. She and George already had five children. Usually they all slept together in the bender, but some nights George and his wife climbed into the vardo and Leo heard them above him endeavouring to make one more.
‘Have you a larkin yourself somewhere, Leo?’ George asked him one evening.
‘Leave him, George,’ Rhoda said. ‘He’s too young for all that nonsense.’
‘One day some girl’ll stir his loins, and it might a happened already.’
‘Will you leave him, I said, the poor boy. Ignore him, Leo, he’s a big fat puddin with a brain no bigger than his mouth.’
George laughed, and so did their children within earshot.
There was a girl, but Leo would not speak of her. Not to these folk, nor any other. One day he would see her again, he did not know when.
*
Of all the women in the camp Arabella treated Leo most harshly. She expressed the belief that a gentile would bring them bad luck. Others told her they did not know of such a prohibition and she said they should not blame her when he did so, that was all she had to say. The boy lit her fire and refilled her water buckets and stacked her wood before anyone else’s, but she discovered errors. The water was not clear. If wood was too young, she beat him with it. Her daughter Priscilla enjoyed such chastisement and though a year younger than Leo administered it herself. She whipped him with a switch of hazel. He resisted the temptation to take it off her and withdrew, but she pursued him round the encampment. No one came to his aid. He tried to steer clear of her. She tripped him up or came up behind him and pushed him over. Leo did not respond. Priscilla explained to him that there was plenty more where that came from, and offered to sort him out whenever he so wished.
Priscilla’s brother Thomas was a further year younger. One evening as Leo walked past their family, Thomas leaped to his feet claiming loudly that the gentile had passed between him and the fire. ‘I’ll call you out for that, you bastard,’ Thomas said in his childish voice, removing his jacket. Then he took off his shirt. He was a small, thin boy but he’d been taught by his father Edwin to fight since the day he could stand, and he put up his fists. ‘Come on then,’ he said, ‘we’ll do it here and now.’
Leo was mystified. There were many strictures in the gypsies’ daily life but none told him what they were. Here was another rule he had broken. He looked to Edwin in hope of a reprieve but was only told that he’d best put them up himself.
Leo wrapped his arms about his head, with his fists up by his ears and elbows out in front of his face. He could see between his arms the bare-chested child coming for him and closed his eyes. Thomas’s small fists pummelled him, first about his head and then the body. Leo did not know what to do. If he fought back and hurt the child he feared the consequences. More likely the child would hurt him anyway for though Leo’s father was a fighter of sorts he had never trained his son to emulate him. Nor had Leo wished to.
The blows he now received to his midriff decided for him. He doubled over and the child Thomas rained blows to either side of Leo’s head until he went down. Thomas stood above him and said in his thin unbroken voice, ‘Let that be a lesson to you, gentile. Mess with me again, you’ll get more a the same.’
4
So the gypsies and their unindentured servant travelled in the autumn of that year, 1912, and on through the winter into the next. They journeyed south, along the Teign valley, then headed west and up around the edge of Dartmoor. One day Henery and other lads came back from hunting with their dogs and said there were troops out on manoeuvres on the moor. Rhoda took the girls of the tribe, laden with all the sweets and fruit they could find, and followed the army. When the soldiers fell out for a rest the girls sold them what they had. Henery told Leo it was called troop-hawking and never failed.
Tha
t was also the day deemed sufficiently distant from childbirth that Augusta posed no danger, and she and Henery were married. Kinity baked a loaf of bread. She gave it to Samson, who told the assembled company that bread was God’s food. It kept away evil spirits. He broke the loaf open. Kinity took hold of each lover’s thumb from their right hand and made a small incision in them with a sharp blade. She held them over the bread and their blood dripped onto the loaf. They ate the bread where the other’s blood had mingled with their own and so were married. They were invited to kiss, which they had not done before. Though as Leo overheard Edwin tell his brother Belcher, they had done a good deal more.
*
When the weather was bad the Orchards stayed wherever they found themselves and emerged from their tents only for the barest necessities. They as good as hibernated in their benders. When the weather improved they came out and put in the hard graft hawking and moved on to another valley in their peregrination around the county of Devon. Leo lost all sense of the calendar. One day it occurred to him that Christmas might have come and gone. The gypsies ignored the date. They made no mention of months, or of days. The boy felt as if the calendar and the clock, the normal measurement of time, even time itself as he had been taught to understand it, had been left behind. It still existed, elsewhere, but he had joined the gypsies in their waggons as they moved into a parallel time of no past or future but only an ever on-rolling now.
*
Leo spent whatever time he could with the old horseman. He saw that Gully Orchard was known to certain grooms and carters, and traded his good horses for their lesser ones, taking the difference in value in cash. In this way his troop became one with a variety of equine defects. In Chagford he acquired a carthorse that had the staggers. The farmer shook his head as Gully led the horse away, perhaps amazed to have outdone a gypsy. Back at the encampment Gully told Leo to give the horse no food or drink for twelve hours. He invited the boy to enter his vardo and watch him mix and roll six cricket-sized balls of liquorice powder, ground ginger and castor oil. Leo inhaled the musty sharp smell of herbs, and a more aromatic odour of oils, with which the very wood of the waggon seemed to be infused. The following morning they fed the mare one of the balls. Gully told the boy to repeat the dose three times a day, with nothing else to eat, but plenty of warm water on hand at all times. The horse recovered.
Leo had never heard his father speak of gypsy horsemen. ‘Do you want to know the secret, Leo?’ the old man asked. ‘It’s not the medicine. Yes, I’ll bleed em or purge em. But the medicine don’t cure a horse. It’s me givin it encourages the beast in the healin of itself. Do you see?’
Gully spent hours with the horses at their pasture, clicking his teeth or whistling softly to them. He moved slowly so as not to frighten them. Though he was old now, Leo suspected he had always moved at that speed around his animals.
*
One afternoon Belcher sickened and took to the bed in his vardo. There was no apparent cause for his condition but it appeared grave. His wife Betsey lit the stove in the waggon and sat beside her man, who lay with his eyes closed and a frown of pain or perplexity upon his face. Rhoda took him medicines of her own devising made from herbs. He sipped a little.
In the night Leo was woken periodically by cries from the direction of Belcher’s waggon, whether from the man or his wife he was not sure. In the morning the sick man was no better. Leo asked George if they would fetch a doctor from the town.
‘A crocus can’t help him,’ the big man said. ‘Old Allace Penfold put a grudge on him. Them Penfolds is always after us Orchards.’
The boy did not know of whom the big man spoke. Neither could he understand why if this were so she would have picked on Belcher and not his father, the chief, Samson. Or indeed George himself.
George nodded. ‘Aye, she no doubt did. A curse is no different to a germ, Leo. Some people it infects, some it don’t.’
As the day wore on members of the family gathered around Belcher’s vardo. They did not speak more than a few words but leaned against the wheels or sat upon the damp ground, whittling a stick or smoking or gazing at no particular object, like those desert monks who sat in contemplation of the fragility of life.
In the afternoon Betsey’s sisters and sisters-in-law helped her down out of the waggon and accompanied her to her bender. Edwin went to find a priest. Henery was sent to order an oak coffin from the local carpenter. Little was said. No one spoke aloud the name of the deceased. The women washed the dead body and dressed him in fresh trousers and a clean white linen shirt. They pulled his old dancing boots onto his stiffening feet.
That evening the adults fasted. Children ate their meal in silence. Dogs did not bark. Leo lay down on his blanket beneath George’s vardo in a camp unnaturally silent.
On the morning following George went with Henery, the horse and trolley, to fetch the coffin. They carried the dead man’s body out of the waggon and placed it in the coffin on the trolley. Samson put a sovereign in one of his dead son’s trouser pockets. ‘Buy yourself somethin to eat,’ he said. ‘Wet your whistle on the way there, boy.’
George and Edwin sifted through the waggon with the help of their wives, removing things that belonged to Betsey or had been acquired during their marriage and would be useful to her and their children. They removed also certain possessions of the dead man and placed these beside him in the coffin. An extra suit of clothes, a handkerchief, the hammer he used for splitting stone. His favourite knife they put on his right-hand side. The coffin was left open. Members of the family placed tokens such as a flower or a leaf upon him. Leo watched the gypsy children climb up on the trolley to peer down upon their father or uncle.
In the afternoon, under a light drizzle, Gully harnessed Belcher’s draught horse to the waggon and led it into a nearby field, accompanied by the men and boys of the family. Leo followed. Gully cut some hairs from the horse’s mane. He put these in his pocket. He unharnessed the horse. Then he took a rifle from the waggon where he’d hidden it and pointed the barrel at the horse’s forehead and pulled the trigger. The powerful horse’s four knees buckled and he collapsed.
George and Edwin climbed inside the vardo and set inflammable material alight and came out again. Samson said in a loud voice, ‘Look, all you people, the countryside weeps. The hedges, the trees, the stones. All is weeping for the death of a good man. His woman there is weeping sorrow. My son is dead. My God, look down upon me.’
Then the flames began to rush and crackle and soon to roar as they caught the wood of the waggon. The harness was thrown inside. The men and boys stood and watched. When the roof of the waggon fell in, the men lifted the dead horse with strenuous difficulty and awkwardly added him to the pyre.
In the evening the adults still fasted and were quiet. Gully sat alone, weaving a plait from the hair he’d cut from the carthorse, weeping silently to himself, whether for the horse or for his nephew Leo could not tell. When it was done the old man rose and went over to the trolley and laid the plaited horse hair in the coffin. Then he lifted the lid up off the trolley and slid it over the coffin and nailed it shut.
Early in the morning Samson and Gully, and George and Edwin, took the trolley to bury the coffin in the local graveyard. The women followed behind, consoling Betsey, who cried unrestrainedly in a manner indicative less of grief than of insanity. As soon as they returned the women cooked, and all ate a hearty breakfast. None spoke of their deceased relative but much was said of where they would go next, and who they hoped to see. Then the gypsies packed up their belongings and pulled out of the clearing.
5
As they approached Okehampton in March of the year 1913, Leo asked Gully what he planned to do there. The old man said that he would sell some horses and maybe buy one or two. He would watch George in the fighting booth. And he would see some races. Leo asked him about these races – were they a part of this Okehampton Spring Fair?
Gully laughed and said no. These races were run with other gypsy fami
lies, who would meet up some days after the fair was over. Some came up from Cornwall, others down from the north of the county. There were two kinds of race. ‘Horses trottin, one leg after the other.’ Gully put his hand out shaped like a claw and twiddled the fingers. ‘One, two, three, four. Pullin a sulky – a two-wheeled cart. It’s an odd way a racin to my mind, Leo. Trottin’s a slow gait but the horse is trained to do it awful quick. It’s unnatural if you ask me, but there’s many swear by it. They go mad for it in America, there’s money to be made with a good trotter there, dollars aplenty. And I’ve heard tell that on the island of Iceland the ponies strut about like that all the time.’
Leo asked Gully what the other kind of race was. The old man said there was a single competition, a series of heats between each family’s nominated horse. With a final between the two fastest. ‘Which is when the big money will go down.’
Leo looked around. He studied Gully’s ponies, unable to decide which one was qualified for such a competition.
Gully shook his head. ‘I wouldn’t put tuppence on one a my horses,’ he said. ‘The Hicks are bringin a fine horse. They’re a family that’s a part of our tribe.’
‘Do they bring the rider?’
‘No, the deal is we provide the rider. We’re the Orchards. The obligation is on us.’ Gully stopped speaking. He raised his head and studied the sky. Perhaps searching for signs of impending weather. The boy wondered if the conversation was over, but then the old man said, ‘It’s Henery. He’s not a bad rider, Leo, he’s the best we’ve got . . . only between you and me, he’s no good. He’s good but he’s fearful.’ Gully explained that Henery possessed a modicum of dread. He could not rid himself of it. ‘You can see it in his eyes. He’s got a decent seat but he can’t trust a beast with his life. You have to. He’ll ride but he’d rather not, do you see what I’m sayin?’
