The Wanderers

by Tim Pears

  *

  Deep in the night Vance prodded him awake. ‘Come on then, boy. If you’s here you may’s well make yourself useful.’

  The barn was full dark beyond the radius of the light from the lamp on the shelf. Vance told Leo to light another. He did so and followed the old man a few paces, to the pen they brought a ewe to when she was ready. Away from the stove the temperature fell.

  ‘Look at this one,’ Vance Brewer said. ‘Not hardly a year old yet. Her first lamb.’

  As they watched, the ewe lay down and bleated. ‘See how er’s strainin there,’ the shepherd said. The ewe stood up and ran around the pen, then lay down again. ‘Er waters broke a while back but there be nothin showin. I be mortal afeared for er.’ He shook his head. ‘She can’t lamb, see? She needs our help. Your small hands might be better an mine. Go wash em with the disinfectant in that bucket.’

  Leo asked why labour should be so problematic that animals needed human midwives just as women did.

  ‘It is a good question,’ Vance said. ‘One I intend to bring up with the Good Lord when I meet im.’ He frowned. ‘That is, if He’s in when I gets there.’

  The ewe lay down and the old man sat against her and held her hind legs and lubricated her passage with green oils. He told Leo to slide his hand inside the ewe and find the forelegs of the lamb. The boy did so, and felt around with the trembling fingers of his right hand. It was warm inside the ewe, a pleasant sensation in the cold night, but he had no idea what he was doing.

  ‘I think I have them, Mister Brewer,’ he said.

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Wait,’ Leo said. He probed the fleshy shapes in the ewe’s womb and tried to make sense of what was there, attempting to conjure a picture of what his fingers found, but he could not. ‘They’s all t-t-tangled up in there,’ he said.

  The old man cursed. ‘They?’ he said. ‘Twins?’

  Leo found it hard to speak. ‘I don’t know,’ he whispered.

  Vance Brewer told him to take his hand out of the ewe. Leo did so. ‘Help me lift her,’ the shepherd said.

  They took her by one hind leg each and with a great effort heaved the ewe, heavy with lambs, up in the air.

  ‘Shake her,’ Vance gasped. They tried their best. Then they laid her down again. She bleated weakly. Vance said that he hoped the lambs had slid back inside her from the cervix, and might disentangle themselves. He kneeled down beside her and Leo inserted his hand and his arm once more. He found two small, slimy but hard shapes.

  ‘I’ve got the hooves for sure!’

  ‘Keep calm,’ Vance told him. ‘Now each time her strains, you pull em.’

  ‘How will I know when she does?’

  ‘You’ll feel it,’ the old shepherd said. ‘Don’t fret. You’re doin fine, boy.’

  A few moments later Leo felt something tighten around his wrist, and he pulled the lamb’s feet. When the pressure ceased he waited, still holding the tiny feet. Vance Brewer waited. The ewe also waited, for she did not command the contractions within her. They came again. Soon the boy had the first lamb’s feet clear.

  ‘Do you want to finish it off now, Mister Brewer?’ he said.

  ‘You’m be doin good,’ the shepherd said. ‘Carry on. Only those is the hindlegs. Tis a breech birth.’

  The lamb emerged by degrees. Vance told the boy he could let go now. The lamb inched out of the ewe, its back legs and half its body, then all of sudden the whole of it slithered out with a squelching sound. Vance held the lamb upside down and rubbed his hand hard down its sides to remove fluid from its lungs. Then he wiped the birthing sac or membrane away from the lamb’s mouth and laid it on the straw and it took its first breath. The mother licked the rest of the membrane off and ate it. The lamb soon began to try to stand. It tottered, legs buckling at the knees. The sight was comical and beautiful at the same time. Leo watched it, chuckling, but Vance told him not to get distracted, they were only half-done.

  The second lamb came out of its own accord, in the correct configuration. The forelegs and head emerged slowly, then the rest. So it was born. The ewe treated it as she had the first.

  The shepherd instructed Leo to guide the ewe into a small hurdled pen. Vance Brewer carried the lambs, one in each hand. The ewe continued to lick her lambs dry of the covering of yellow slime upon their white curly coats. Then she ate the afterbirth. Leo grimaced and said that he had not needed to witness that. Vance said he reckoned it must have something her body required.

  Each lamb, once on its feet, sought its mother’s teats, and sucked the warm curds of colostrum from her udder.

  7

  On a Sunday in the middle of March Leo groomed the white horse in the yard. His winter coat came away on the brush. As he shed it, sparrows swooped by and took up hairs in their beaks and flew away. Wilf told him that last year he had seen crows on Cobby the farm carthorse’s back, taking his hair and making him bleed.

  Wilf once more accompanied Leo on his Sunday rides. The colt was full-grown and strong and the two lads rode him together. They took the gun to bag a pigeon or any other prey. The first time Wilf raised the gun and shot it while still mounted, the horse bucked in alarm and threw the boys off and cantered away. Wilf sat upon the hard ground holding his painful elbow and laughing heartily. Leo told him he was a fool, a man of shocking ignorance, not to be trusted with horses. He said he felt sorry for Cobby. Wilf said that Cobby gave as good as he got and that Leo need not feel sorry for the old jibber. Leo shook his head and walked after the colt.

  The next week they rode to the River Fowey, for Wilf said he had a yearning for fish. Grilled fish or fish soup, he didn’t mind. Leo presumed he would have a rod and line but he had neither, only the gun. They rode along steep and winding lanes then into a wood. The air cooled. All the trees looked young and slender; their trunks and branches were covered with a skin of dark green moss. Thick slabs of granite lay strewn amongst them and were clothed likewise. A leat like those the boy had seen on Dartmoor flowed through the wood. Stones from its unkempt walls had fallen into the water.

  When they reached the river Wilf slid off the horse from behind Leo and said he would find a good spot, they should follow him. He walked along the river. Yet he studied not the water, but the trees. He came to a lone willow. Four branches grew more or less vertical. A fifth grew horizontal, a finger pointing to the far bank. ‘This’ll do,’ he said. Leo watched him crawl out on the branch above the river. There Wilf lay on his stomach, leaning from the neck out to the right side, with his left arm around the branch holding the barrel of the shotgun, the stock against his right shoulder. The sight struck Leo as foolishly precarious. He believed explosives were used to stun fish, and Amos Tucker had once told him of the whaling ships of North America, whose men harpooned those ocean-going leviathans, but he had never heard of any sane man shooting fish with a gun. Perhaps the Pepperells had adopted Wilf from Bodmin Asylum.

  Leo staked the colt to graze and took out his knife and found an ash tree growing by a stand of sallow and elder and cut a thin stick. He ripped off the leaves, then fumbled in his jacket pockets and found the thin strip of wire he had remembered to store there. He tied the wire to the narrow end of the stick, embedding it in a notch behind where he had removed a twig. Next he made a noose out of the wire. It slipped back and forth with ease.

  Leo looked up at Wilf, lying still on the branch with his gun pointing vertically down at the surface of the water. He appeared to be taking careful aim at his own reflection, like a cat that attacks itself in a window.

  The boy crept to the river’s edge where the water was clear and flowed over brown mud. He lay down and moved the stick out over the water and lowered the wire. It touched the bottom and a cloud of mud rose, and slowly fell. There he lay. Time passed. The morning was warm and he knew he’d fallen asleep when he woke with pins and needles in his arm and the stick slipped down to rest on the floor of the river. He raised it back. He looked up and saw Wilf lying as before. He too slept and w
ould at any moment fall from the branch. Leo was tempted to watch for it would be a crime to miss such a comical spectacle. But when he glanced down he saw that a trout was drifting straight towards the noose. He could see its jaws moving. He held his breath. The trout eased unerringly forward. Its head, its gills . . .

  ‘The hell with this waste a fuckin time!’ he heard Wilf yell. Leo glanced up momentarily, long enough to see his friend now sitting on the log, the gun across his lap, shaking the stiffness out of his arms.

  Leo said nothing but looked back into the water. The trout had moved into the noose past its first fin. An inch or two further then Leo would flip the fish up and land it. It pleased him greatly that Wilf could see what was happening, and what was about to occur.

  The gun went off and made Leo jump. The ash stick fell out of his hand, the trout swam away and was gone. He looked up. Wilf sat on the branch holding the shotgun in both hands, the gun pointing upwards. His expression was one of unrepentant fury.

  *

  They walked along the river, Leo leading the horse. ‘I can’t rightly believe it,’ he said. ‘You’d rather have no fish than let me be the one to catch it.’ He shook his head. ‘I cannot believe it.’

  ‘Twas my idea to go fishin, boy,’ Wilf told him.

  They walked in silence for a time. Then Wilf said, ‘But twas funny, the way you jumped when the fuckin gun went off.’

  ‘Make you laugh, that, did it?’

  ‘Looked like you was imitatin the jump of a salmon for me. “This is how they leap, Wilf.”’

  Leo looked at Wilf and saw him grinning in the way he did, on rare occasions. It was a smile that was the grin of a little boy and a demon both at once.

  ‘I spose you think the sight a yourself pointing the gun at the water was a fine one, do you?’

  Wilf shrugged. ‘I doubt it,’ he said.

  ‘So do I,’ Leo said.

  ‘Bleddy hell,’ Wilf said. ‘If you got nothin good to say, you miserable sod, at least it sounds like your fuckin voice is finally broken.’

  Leo led the colt. Wilf walked beside him. He nodded and said, ‘You ever raced that horse?’

  ‘Yes,’ Leo said.

  In the distance smoke rose from a bonfire.

  The stockboy took another drag of his cigarette. It looked like inhaling the smoke enabled him to formulate his next thought. ‘Is he as fast as he looks?’ he asked.

  Leo nodded. ‘He is.’

  *

  They mounted the colt and rode him at walking pace. Leo said that as the weather grew warmer he thought he would like to go out on a Saturday and camp out overnight. Perhaps Wilf would like to accompany him on such a venture? Wilf said it sounded like a good idea. Leo said that he had begun to think on the future. When he left the farm, he planned to buy a saddle for the horse.

  ‘I should warn you,’ Wilf said, ‘he don’t plan to pay you.’

  The boy asked Wilf what he meant. The lad explained how the farmer took boys on then towards the end of the farming year, once the harvest was gathered, did things such as to cause them to leave early. What things? Leo asked. Arduous work, Wilf said. Even more horrible food. Other cruelties.

  Leo shook his head. ‘He won’t do it to me.’

  ‘No,’ Wilf said. ‘He likes you.’

  ‘He do.’

  ‘He liked the others too.’

  ‘What about you, then?’ Leo said. ‘Why has he not done the same to you? How much do you get paid?’

  ‘I gets paid in kind,’ Wilf said. ‘Clothes is ordered. The rabbits keep me in tobacco.’

  ‘Your master treats you rough,’ Leo said.

  Wilf grinned. ‘He’s tight as a duck’s arse. And that there is watertight.’

  ‘You should leave,’ Leo told him.

  ‘Where would I go? The grubber?’ He looked frightened at the prospect, but then he grinned again. ‘When we do have meat he carves it so thin it tastes of the knife.’

  ‘I wouldn’t mind a slice a thin meat,’ Leo said.

  ‘Last year he took two old cows to market. He wouldn’t let the missis milk em, so’s their udders was full, poor beasts. I said to him, “You must think people is stupid.” He said, “They is.” And I suppose he must a been right, for he come back without them cows.’

  They rode on for a while, then Leo felt Wilf’s hands on his shoulders. ‘I could leave,’ he said. ‘If you was leavin.’

  ‘You could get a horse a your own,’ Leo said. ‘We could ride together.’ He tried to turn around.

  ‘Whoa,’ Wilf said. ‘You’ll pitch us both off, boy.’

  Leo looked ahead. ‘I never ad a friend like you,’ he said. He was glad that Wilf could not see his face now. Otherwise, he did not think he would have said it.

  ‘Me neither,’ Wilf told him.

  Leo felt the older lad’s arms fold around his belly. They rode on back to the farm.

  8

  One morning towards the end of March the boy noticed the old lag Vance Brewer and Wilf look towards him as they spoke quietly together. A quiver of alarm ran through his innards. Some time later when he had forgotten this moment of foreboding and they were picking up stones from the field behind the house, prior to ploughing, Wilf suddenly grabbed him in a headlock. He felt another take his hands behind his back and bind them together and hold him. Wilf let go of his head and walked to a shed. He came back with something cupped in his hands held before him like some precious gift. Leo struggled desperately. Vance had hold of his arms. Leo thought he might be able to twist loose and run fast enough away from him even with two hands tied behind his back. But Wilf would surely catch him in seconds. Even if first he had to hand over what he held to the old boy or even put it back in the shed.

  ‘You’ve heard a muzzlin the sparrow?’ Wilf asked him.

  ‘He probably thought it had gone out with they old parish apprentices,’ Vance said. ‘Well, it ain’t gone out here, boy.’

  Wilf held his cupped hands out towards Leo and opened them, enough for the boy to see the grey bird trembling there in its dark cage of fingers.

  ‘You know what you ave to do?’ Wilf asked.

  Leo neither nodded nor shook his head, but stared up at the older lad. It occurred to him to yell for help, that such might come from the farmhouse. But then the door opened and Cyrus and Juliana Pepperell came out and walked across the yard towards them. They stood some yards away, spectators come for the performance.

  ‘We got im, gaffer,’ Wilf said.

  ‘I can see that,’ said Cyrus Pepperell.

  Vance Brewer kept hold of one arm but let go of the other and stepped around the side of Leo. ‘I ad to do this,’ he told the boy, grinning. ‘For Cyrus’s dad. So did this lad Wilf, three, four year ago, and many another in between.’

  ‘Tis a tradition,’ Cyrus said. ‘What you might call an initiation, boy. Others let em go but we don’t. Not this one.’

  ‘I ain’t sure as he knows what to do,’ Wilf said. ‘He won’t say.’

  ‘He knows,’ said Juliana. ‘They all know.’

  ‘Will you explain to him?’ Wilf asked.

  Cyrus nodded. ‘The lad here will place the wing a the bird in your mouth,’ he told Leo. ‘You has to draw the wing and then the body a the bird in, and bite off its head. If you do that, you stay on. If you don’t, you still stay on, but with one difference. I shall sell the horse.’

  ‘Do you understand?’ Vance Brewer asked. His red eyes were inflamed with excitement.

  Leo nodded. Wilf opened his fingers and took hold of the sparrow. He pulled the tip of a wing out and raised the bird and fed the wing into Leo’s mouth, which he reluctantly opened for this purpose. Then he clamped it with his teeth, and Wilf let go. Immediately the bird flapped its other wing, trying to escape. Using his teeth and his lips, Leo drew the wing of the bird deeper into his mouth. It felt unpleasant on his tongue, whether taste or texture, so he folded his tongue to the back of his mouth, for he could not afford to retch. The bird meanwhile
pecked at his cheeks and his nose in its frantic attempts to get away. Leo closed his eyes. He had to use his tongue. It was his most significant tool or weapon against the unfortunate bird. He had to gobble it up as fast as he could, using tongue and teeth and lips all together. It pecked at him and thrashed against his face. He pulled the wing into his mouth, bit by negligible bit, dimly aware of new sound, the clamour of people close around him, yelling. He kept his eyes closed. The sparrow pecked his face. He did not wish to kill it but he must, he had to, he could not lose that horse. It was all he had, the only thing and everything. He pulled the whole body of the bird into his mouth, its head too, its other wing, and he did not vomit.

  But now the sparrow was struggling inside him, in the constricted space and the darkness of his mouth. He tried to feel with his tongue the shape of the bird, where the parts of it were, but he could not do so. All was confusion. Stabbing pinpricks of pain, fluttering wings, scrabbling claws. The sparrow’s tiny beating heart. When he felt it at the back of his mouth he sensed his throat pulsate and the need to retch. He must not let his mouth open. He tasted something odd and it occurred to him that the terrified bird had shat upon his tongue. He kept his eyes closed. He should not have drawn the animal entire into his mouth. He had to let its body out without allowing the head free. No. The other way round.

  Leo sought the bird’s beak with his tongue. He let his lips open, a little, then his teeth, and pushed the head of the bird towards the opening. The bird struck out for the light, the air. Leo closed his teeth around its neck and bit them hard together. The sparrow was too small, its neck a string of ligament and gristle. No matter how tightly he clamped the two rows of his teeth together there were gaps. Perhaps he could extinguish the life of the bird, but not pull off its head, and that would be enough.

  All awareness was in his mouth, and face. Suddenly Leo became aware of somewhere else, another part of him. Behind. His hands. Undone. He lifted them and took hold of the head of the sparrow, and with a great shaking of his own head and roar through his teeth he pulled it away from the rest of its body. Then Leo opened his mouth and puked the body of the bird out. He dropped the tiny head.