by Tim Pears
They walked on in the afternoon. They proceeded along a low ridge and when the boy looked up he saw something ahead of them that made him stop. He could not make sense of what lay before him. Rufus too stopped a yard ahead and they each stood and watched whatever it was growing larger, approaching them through the air. Bearing down upon them, flying low and fast along the ridge, straight as arrows. Leo felt his knees weaken. Then understanding rose from his legs to his brain, along with the increasingly loud sound of wings beating. Just as he and Rufus began to duck, the two mute swans rose and flew over them, a yard or two above their heads.
2
They came to a wood. Rufus told Leo that the boy would soon meet his pal. He walked towards a wall of closely growing ash trees and parted branches to let the donkey through. Leo had thought her tired but, revived by her homecoming, she set a brisk pace upon a path that veered between the trees. Rufus followed, Leo behind him. After some minutes they came to a clearing. At its centre was a fire pit. Nearby a log bench, a rustic table. Cooking pans and flagons hung from branches. The encampment was a room whose rustling walls were made of leaves and branches, its ceiling the sky. The trees were of different species. One was of a sort new to Leo. Not its leaves, which he recognised as those of purple beech, but the way its branches grew not approximately perpendicular to the trunk but sweeping out and down to the ground like some grand woman’s dark purple dress.
‘I shall introduce you to my chum,’ the old tramp said. He parted two of the hanging branches. Leo followed him into a dim space around the trunk, to which his eyes soon became accustomed. A mattress lay upon a wooden scaffold two or three feet above the ground. Rufus put his hand upon the smooth trunk of the tree and turning back to the boy said, ‘This here is my pal. He has no name. He gives me shelter and friendship. Never asks nothin in return. He’s always here when I come back from my wanders.’ He stroked the tree and shook his head. Leo could make out letters carved into the bark. ‘Listens to my twattle, never says naught back. Not yet at least.’ Rufus then turned and addressed the tree, peering up into its higher regions. ‘This here young lad’s a goin to rest with us.’ He turned back to Leo. ‘Let’s get us a fire goin,’ he said, and walked back out into the clearing.
*
Just as a kitchen is furnished with cupboards and shelves stocked with implements or produce, so was Rufus’s camp. Glass jars hung by twine made from bramble stems, stripped of their skin and plaited. These jars were filled with walnuts, hazelnuts, wild shallots pickled in spiced vinegar, blackberry jam. Leo tried to identify the contents of each jar but usually failed. Dried mushrooms. Pickled damsons. Dandelion leaves. Plums, greengages. Ledges and niches were cut into parts of trees for storage. The ham of a badger which Rufus had smoked over the fire and cured like that of a pig hung in the canopy of a birch, and he cut slices from it and made a stew. Leo wondered if insects did not help themselves to the hanging meat. Rufus said they probably did but had done him no harm, there were none hereabouts like the mosquitoes of Africa.
Water came from a spring. A brick enclosure had been built around it, with a wooden lid. Rufus lifted the lid and placed a bucket upon a slab of rock, and the bucket slowly filled with cold, clean water.
The boy said he thought that tramps lived upon the road all year. Rufus said that most did, no doubt, but some had an abode of sorts to which they retreated and where they kipped for as long as they could stand it. At such times he was more of a hermit or recluse. Until the urge to light out rose once more. At least so it was for him.
Rufus cut a number of willow sticks and planted them in a circle. He had Leo help him pull the tops of the sticks towards each other and tie them. Then the hermit sat down, clutching his stomach. He told Leo in gasping breaths to continue threading those other, slender lengths around the curved uprights to create a latticework. By the time that Leo had done so, Rufus had recovered from whatever pained him. Over the frame they stretched pieces of canvas and hide. The hermit told Leo this was his guest room, for the boy’s exclusive use.
3
The next morning, after they had eaten reheated stew and drunk camomile tea, Rufus gathered a set of clothes, as old as those he wore day and night but washed, which constituted what he called his summer attire. He hung these from branches. With a stick Rufus mixed the hot ashes in the fire with the thick sediment of cold ashes beneath, then removed his clothes. He was a solid man, with a great barrel chest and belly, heavy thighs, a thick stub of a knob. He kneeled beside the fire and with a long-handled spoon ladled warm ash from the pit and rubbed it into his skin. The ash stuck fast. When he was done he was covered from neck to ankles in grey dust and his face too for good measure, ash adhering to the badger fat. He rose and stood, a ghostly figure.
‘Come,’ the old man said. He pulled on his boots. ‘I shall wash off this fat and these ashes.’ He walked out of the clearing. Leo followed him. The donkey followed after. They walked through the trees then out of the wood and across three fields. The sun shone upon them. The boy was sure they would be seen. What would a witness make of such a sight? Rufus was like a man who has seen the Lord, and repents in dust and ashes. Pursued by his one young acolyte.
Or perhaps those who lived nearby knew the old hermit and accepted his eccentricity.
They came to a pond. It was home to lilies and ferns and, though greenish from a distance, up close Leo could see through the water for it was fed by an audible spring and a similar amount must drain away. There were no beasts grazing, to raise the mud with their hooves. Leo tested the temperature with his finger. The water was icy. Rufus walked slowly into the pond. He appeared impervious to the cold. He neither gasped nor shivered but proceeded with the dead calm of a sleepwalker. By the time he reached the middle, the water was up to his waist. There he promptly sat down, closing his mouth, for the water came up to his nose. Then he shut his eyes and leaned forward, and it was as if some sly invisible hand ducked Rufus’s head underwater.
The old man rubbed and worked the ash first from his hair and face and beard then, standing up, the rest of his body. At some point he began making odd noises, grunts and hoots. The donkey watched, impassive, like one who has seen all this before. Soon Rufus came up out of the pond, his hairy skin pink and clean, and set off back to the wood at a fast pace, shivering. Leo trotted to keep up with him.
‘Us’ll c-c-catch c-c-carp in there,’ Rufus said, teeth chattering.
Back in the clearing Leo got the fire blazing and the old man, once the water was dried off his skin, pulled the garments from where they hung and put them on. His trembling subsided. Leo made more tea. He handed Rufus his mug, and it struck him, now that it was absent, how strong, and unpleasant, the rancid stink of the badger fat had been.
4
Sugar, Rufus obtained from sycamore trees. He showed Leo how. ‘The tree needs to be the right age,’ he said. There were some at the edge of the wood. ‘Forty or fifty year old.’ He chose one and made an incision in the bark, and placed a jar below the cut which he tied in place with twine around the trunk and to a higher branch. Leo watched a colourless sap squeeze its way out of the tree. They attached half a dozen jars to other trees likewise. Then they sat and waited for the jars to fill. Leo asked if the trees did not suffer from the injuries that Rufus inflicted. Either these sycamores or indeed those in his camp that he cut for shelves and so forth.
The hermit said that he did not believe that trees feel pain as men do. It was a good question, he said, and he was glad Leo had asked it, for it showed that he and the boy shared a kinship of the mind. He himself had contemplated the nature of both. Men and trees. He said no more but gazed out from the wood and out across the quiet field before them. Occasionally he muttered something, but only to himself.
Leo waited for Rufus to expand upon the subject but he did not. So eventually the boy asked whether Rufus had reached conclusions of any kind.
The old man gazed out a little longer, then he turned to the boy, his eyes wide and pi
ercing. ‘I believe,’ he said, ‘there is bits missin from the Bible. Whether to keep them hidden from the likes of us or because they were not found by those who compiled it, I cannot say.’ He nodded as for emphasis, or as a sign to the boy to pay attention. ‘In the beginnin God created the heavens and the earth, as I expect you knows.’
Leo nodded.
‘The spirit of God moved over the face a the waters. A mist rose up from the earth and watered the whole face of the ground. Plants growed and I believe trees was the most important of them. To keep watch, you see, on those to come.’
‘Sentinels,’ said the boy. ‘I believe horses was given the same role.’
‘Is that right?’ Rufus asked.
‘I have heard it,’ Leo told him.
Rufus murmured his interest, then continued as before. ‘The Lord God formed man of dust, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life.’ The old hermit shook his head, as if in regret. Perhaps that God had created man too soon.
‘When Adam and Eve ate the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, and lost their innocence, and knew good and evil, what did God say?’ Rufus looked again at the boy with his startled, startling eyes. ‘Do you remember?’
Leo thought that he should recall from church or school what God had said, but he could not. The hermit’s piercing gaze did not help.
‘God said, “Behold, the man has become like one of us.”’ Rufus shook his head again but this time he was smiling through his curly, ragged beard. ‘We became like gods, you see,’ he said. ‘But do us live like gods? No. We live like trees. Come, boy, let us see if them jars is fillin.’
The sycamore sap they poured into a pan back at the camp and boiled on the fire until the bulk of it evaporated, leaving a sweet residue of syrup. ‘Birch is less sweet and might be better for you,’ Rufus said. ‘They say it’s good for the bladder. But I prefers sycamore myself.’
5
It took Rufus little time each day to take care of his fundamental needs. He lived off what he had hanging from the branches of his outdoor abode. He assured Leo that there were many days in the year, most of them in autumn, when he was obliged to slog, foraging and conserving food for the following seasons. Rufus said that if Leo were still here then he would show the boy the site of every apple and damson tree, wild plum or bullace, greengage, walnut, hazel. But still, the boy wondered why his father and brothers and all he knew in his childhood laboured so intensively. The old hermit preferred to while away the hours wandering in the vicinity of his wood, pausing, watching. Talking to himself. He gave the impression of a man waiting for something, of whose imminent arrival only he was aware.
Rufus smoked a pipe into whose bowl he pressed not tobacco but a concoction of his own made from dried herbs and weeds. Coltsfoot, sage, marshmallow leaf, moistened with diluted sycamore syrup. He added other herbs as he came across them, mint or lavender or suchlike. Leo considered the smell of the smoke more pleasant than that of tobacco. Rufus agreed with this opinion and offered the boy his pipe. Leo took in a lungful of smoke and coughed it out. He thought that he would puke.
‘Oh, aye,’ Rufus said. ‘It do take some gettin used to. Good for the lungs, though.’
Leo told the hermit that he would like to learn how to live off the land, how to glean the hidden harvest, but that he would have to leave soon. He had business to attend to in Penzance, seeking his mother’s family. Rufus said that, of course, the boy was free to leave at any time. Leo nodded. ‘I do not know what I will find there,’ he said. ‘There may be naught.’ Rufus told him he could stay for as long as he wanted. He should consider the bender his own.
*
One afternoon they observed a falcon gliding high above a field. It disappeared into the white sky then reappeared. It might have been putting on a display just for the two of them. Then they saw it come sliding out of the clouds, falling, all the way to the ground. It took off again with something in its claws. A twitching, quivering ribbon or coil of something. ‘Is that a viper?’ Rufus asked. ‘My eyesight ain’t so good as once twas.’ They watched the falcon rise, the snake thrashing in the air, till both vanished far above them.
6
When they went back to the pond with rudimentary fishing tackle, they spent a day waiting for the carp to bite, contemplating the surface of the water. In the afternoon Rufus said abruptly that he would sleep and the boy should not bother him. He curled up and lay on his side. Leo could see that Rufus was not sleeping, for though his eyes were closed his face was contorted with pain. He held his gut as he had before. The boy said nothing. After a while the hermit sat up and said how well he felt, a good kip, that was all he needed, and took up his rod. They caught one carp each, and back at the camp grilled them and ate them with blackberry jam.
*
Rufus had a catapult and taught the boy to use it. It was little different, the hermit said, from the slingshot with which David smote the giant Goliath. Leo proved adept and hit the triangular targets Rufus constructed from twigs and set on branches. He soon came to know the feel – the weight and shape and heft – of pebbles suitable for the purpose, and collected them like large coins in his pocket. He noticed that when the old man pulled the string back from the forked stick and held it taut, his big hands trembled.
After dark they walked across the pale cloudy land to a different wood. Rufus said that pheasants roosted there, on low branches. They crept through the undergrowth. Rufus touched Leo’s arm. The boy looked up. He could see the birds, their formless shape against the grey sky. The old man took aim at one and sent the pebble swishing through the air. It missed the bird by so wide a margin as not even to disturb it. Rufus passed the catapult to Leo. With his first shot the boy struck the bird. It tottered, and fell slowly from the branch, then plummeted to the ground. He carried the floppy carcass by its claws back to their clearing. The old man hung it up and on the day following showed the boy how to paunch and pluck it. They made a stew and ate it. Leo said that he had eaten chicken and this tasted similar. Rufus said this was because they were hungry and had only hung the young bird overnight. An older pheasant hung for longer would taste much stronger, but the boy said that as far as he was concerned it tasted vitty just the way it was.
Rufus explained that the taste of an animal depended in part upon what it in its turn had eaten. A gamekeeper had kindly if unknowingly fattened the pheasant for them. The best rabbits came from a coombe where wild thyme grew, he would take the boy there. Leo asked what badgers ate. Rufus said that their diet was as varied as any animal he knew of. He himself had seen them consume grass, blackberries, wasps, snails, earthworms, mice and fallen apples. He thought a brock a fine animal and snared but one a year, for its meat and its fat. For which crime he believed it possible that his illness was punishment.
The old hermit seemed to have little adherence to a pattern of wakefulness in the hours of daylight, and slumber in those of night. There seemed to him little difference between the two. He wandered off at night muttering, though without a word of explanation to his guest, and made up the sleep he needed the following day.
One night Leo was woken by loud desperate yells. Some angry. Others terrified. Wide awake he crawled from his bender and stood outside the weeping beech.
Rufus shouted, ‘Leave it! Run! Run!’
There was a pause, then another man pleaded, ‘No, please don’t. Mercy. Mercy.’
Leo stood in the dark, listening. He understood there was no other man, only Rufus, now whining.
In the morning Rufus told Leo that he had suffered one of his nightmares. ‘I would not believe you could sleep through it but ye did,’ he said. ‘Noisy as it was.’
‘Aye,’ Leo said. ‘I heard naught, Rufus.’
7
Some days Rufus did not emerge from his quarters beneath the weeping beech. Leo called to him. Rufus called weakly back that he needed no food, only a little more sleep, and would get up in a while. Leo pottered about with the donkey, went for short wanders, came back t
o see how Rufus was. It was time for him to go but he could not leave the old man.
One morning Rufus was up before Leo. He declared that as it must be about the middle of July it was time to pay his rent. Leo was taken aback for he had assumed the tramp when in residence did so incognito. The idea of a formal agreement was intriguing. He followed Rufus through the wood and up out of the valley until after a mile or so they came to a large farmhouse. Behind the house was a yard where Rufus accosted a man and demanded ladders, rope, shovel, bucket, brushes, the usual. Once these were gathered the old hermit hoisted the heavy wooden extension ladder over his shoulder and bore it away. Leo managed awkwardly to pick up all the other implements and followed. He watched Rufus carrying the ladder, and it occurred to him that when the Lord bore the Cross towards Golgotha, perhaps there was a lad like himself who carried the hammer and nails and suchlike utensils.
They walked further from the big house. Rufus said that water had been piped to it since 1894. They came to a group of six cottages, arranged in attached pairs on three sides of a square. The fourth, open side had three strips of allotment or vegetable garden. The well was in the middle of the yard shared by all the houses. Equidistant from each back door and kitchen, for the use of home and garden both. It was very beautiful in its simplicity.
The well was perhaps four feet in diameter. The summer had been dry and the surface of the water was a long way down. Rufus drew some water in the bucket that was there already and invited the boy to drink some. The morning was warm but the water was deliciously cool.
They removed this bucket and rope and lowered the ladders into the well, extending them as they did so. When it came to rest the uppermost rung was just below the top of the well. ‘A perfect fit,’ said Leo.
