by Owen Sheers
A couple of hours later the four of them were sitting in the sparsely furnished living room next to the kitchen. Ben had lit the fire, more to add a feeling of warmth to the rarely used room than to heat it against the mild spring evening. He’d opened a bottle of his best cider too, to celebrate. From the strain across his broad brow Matthew thought perhaps it might have been wiser to have stayed in the kitchen where they’d eaten supper, rather than invest the evening with even more of a sense of occasion. Not that the meal had passed any more easily. In the face of Evan’s sullen disapproval their wedding clothes felt more provocative than celebratory. Ben had done his best to pilot the talk into calmer waters, but to no avail. Every subject seemed mined with explosive potential. They all knew better than to ask Evan about his tour of duty while Matthew’s own military experience also seemed like dangerous ground. Matthew had, at least, been able to make it clear that unlike his country he’d also fought in the war. But Evan remained suspicious. ‘Wound in the leg was it?’ he’d asked pointedly. Matthew knew what he was implying. A leg wound was the most common self-injury to get you out of the war. ‘Yes,’ he’d replied, allowing more edge to his voice than he’d intended. ‘Shrapnel from a ’75.’
Now, as they all sat in the living room, Matthew watched Evan as Ben and Branwen did their best to talk the night through to some kind of peace. He sat between them, so much smaller than Ben, coiled and tense, his face still fluttering with that wing of tension beneath his skin. His manner was that of an irritable child who might, at any moment, tip the whole room into sudden awkwardness with a barbed comment or a show of irascible disdain. Matthew recognised all of it; he’d seen it many times before in other men returned from the frontline. Suddenly back in the trappings of their past lives they found the people they’d thought they’d loved, the memories of whom had fortified them through the most terrible and terrifying of times, now turned into hateful monsters of ignorance and normality, apparently uncaring and unaware of what had happened to the world and to the human race we’d once called man.
This was why Matthew only felt angry at Evan for Branwen’s sake. For himself he felt nothing but pity for this broken man sitting in the armchair opposite him, still wearing his uniform. Just like that uniform, Matthew knew Evan would also still be wearing the ragged remains of the terrible contradiction in which his country had asked him to cloak himself. The idea that for the last two years the best way he could protect the life he knew was to kill other men. And that now, just a ship’s sail later, those same actions would, in the eyes of that same life and his loved ones within it, be the very worst thing he could do as a human being.
Despite this knowledge of what Evan had undergone it was still hard for Matthew to witness the distress her brother’s words could inflict upon Branwen. ‘Well,’ Evan had said to Matthew at one point, when Ben left the room to open another bottle of cider. ‘Regular knight in shinin’ armour aren’t yew? Even got yer own bloody white charger.’ He’d flicked his chin towards the window and the paddock beyond, where Mullie was still grazing contentedly.
‘Evan!’ Branwen admonished him through tensed teeth, her eyes pricking with tears as they had done several times already that evening. ‘Please!’ Her imploring of him was so desperate, so shot through with genuine pain that it made Matthew’s heart bleed to see Evan turn from his sister in response, a sneer disfiguring his lips. So he’d been hugely grateful when Ben, after one more glass of cider, had slapped his thighs and announced, ‘Well, time for bed I’d say. Time for bed,’ and all of them, except Evan, had stood to say their stilted, disjointed goodnights.
As the newly married couple prepared for bed in Branwen’s bedroom, Evan having been given his own room back, the raised voices of her brothers arguing below reached them, muffled and dull, rising from the kitchen beneath. They were arguing in Welsh but Matthew didn’t ask Branwen to translate. He just held her in bed instead, her head on his chest as she silently wept, one of his hands over her outward ear and the other stroking her hair as he whispered to her gently, ‘shhh now, shhh Bran. It’ll be fine, you’ll see. I promise it will. I promise.’
It was the screams that woke them. After they’d heard the front door slam shut, bringing an end to the voices rising from below, Matthew and Branwen had lain very still, listening to the silence of the night. Eventually, as this silence eased them back to themselves, they’d begun to make love, quietly and gently, as if the distress of the evening could all too easily be woken again. Afterwards, still lying in each other’s arms, they’d fallen into a deep, exhausted sleep. So they hadn’t heard Evan return from his long night’s walk across the mountain to a front room in the village which served as the nearest pub. And they hadn’t heard him emerge from his room a few minutes later either, or the sound of his drunken stumbling as he weaved his way down the corridor, his service bayonet clenched in his hand, to arrive outside their bedroom door, sweating and breathing heavily as he stood there swaying in the dark, battling with the conflicting voices in his head. It was only when he finally, slowly, turned from their door and made his way down the spiral staircase, through the kitchen and out into the paddock, that the sleeping couple were eventually woken.
Mullie’s screams were inhuman and yet all too human; high, piercing whinnies of pain, fear and confusion. At first, when Matthew started awake at the sound of them, bolting upright in the bed, he thought he was back on the landing beaches of Sicily. Branwen was quicker to understand what was happening. Grabbing her husband’s arm, she woke with her brother’s name already on her lips, ‘Evan!’
Fumbling in the darkness, Matthew pulled on his trousers and searched for matches to light an oil lamp. ‘Leave it!’ Branwen cried at him urgently as another of Mullie’s screams tore through the night, echoing against the high rocks of the mountains.
A full moon was shining brightly in a cloudless sky so when Matthew burst from the farm’s front door he discovered, as much as he wished he hadn’t, that he could see all too clearly what Evan was doing. Ben was already there, standing dumbstruck in his nightshirt, his hair wild with fitful sleep, unable to believe the sight before them in the paddock.
Mullie had fallen to his knees but was still struggling to rise, one foreleg pawing the ground as he tried to lift himself from under the relentless slashes and stabs of Evan’s bayonet. Evan had already sliced away the horse’s lips, eyelids and ears. He’d also hacked at the base of his tail. Still woven with hazel, it hung from his rump by a few shreds of flesh and hide. His flanks, shoulder and stomach were slashed with deep cuts, gulping with blood, dark in the moonlight.
Matthew only got a few steps beyond the porch before he was stopped dead by the scene. The next thing he knew he was dropping to the floor himself, bent double as he retched on the bile suddenly choking his throat. Matthew’s reaction galvanised Ben out of his stunned astonishment. Taking a deep intake of breath to fuel a cry as sudden and terrifying as thunder, he bellowed his brother’s name into the night, ‘Evan!’ before sprinting through the paddock’s open gate and into the field to knock Evan flying with one sweep of his massive arm. Looking up, Matthew thought Ben had killed him. Evan lay sprawled in the grass, one of his legs folded awkwardly underneath his hip. But far from killing him, the blow seemed to wake Evan. Lifting himself on one elbow he looked towards his older brother, who was now crouching beside Mullie, cradling the horse’s mutilated head in his lap. Matthew was too far away to see Evan’s face, previously set in a rigor mortis of violence, fall and collapse, as if the bones inside were melting. He only heard his strangled scream as, like a leaf in a fire, he curled up into himself, crying out the same words again and again through a storm of wracking sobs. They were Welsh words, and it was only several days later that Branwen could bring herself to translate for Matthew what Evan been saying. ‘I could smell him!’ Evan shouted into the night. ‘I could smell him! On the bed! The sheets! I could smell him!’
The sound of Branwen coming through the porch forced Matthew to his f
eet just in time to catch her at the door and violently push her back into the house. ‘Don’t!’ he found himself shouting at her. ‘Don’t look! Don’t Bran, don’t!’ But she didn’t have to. She already knew what Evan had done and the confirmation she heard in her husband’s panicked voice sent her crumpling to her knees in defeat. The next sound the two of them heard, crouched together on the flagstones of the kitchen floor, was the single crack of Ben’s rifle as he stood over Mullie to put the horse out of his misery. If only, Matthew would find himself thinking many months later, our own miseries could be dispatched so easily. But they can’t. This is what Matthew would learn from that awful night onwards, this was the lesson of which he would be a student for the rest of his life. They can’t.
The first light of the following morning seemed to have knowledge of what had happened in its absence. Clouds had filled the sky and the sun shone through them, weak and pale across the mountains, to fall over the same woollen blanket that had covered the ravens, now draped over the disfigured head, neck and shoulders of Mullie’s corpse in the paddock. At supper the day before Matthew had thought that maybe they should postpone their journey to London by another day until Evan was more settled with the idea of their marriage. But now, after what he’d witnessed last night, he was resolved. All forgiveness or understanding for Evan had bled from him as quickly as the blood had gulped from those slashes along Mullie’s flanks. He and Branwen would leave as soon as they could. They would ride Ben’s cart into town and take the ravens back to London where, having completed his task, Matthew would resign from the PWE and take Branwen back to his home in Ireland.
Branwen, still in a state of shock, listened dumbly to her husband as he firmly laid down what they should do, nodding weakly at his most definite intentions. She didn’t care anymore; she just wanted someone else to guide her, to tell her where to go, so shattered was her sense of herself, her family and her world.
Ben was harnessing his horse to the cart when Matthew emerged from the farmhouse carrying his own leather case and Branwen’s larger trunk of belongings. Evan was still asleep. Matthew wanted to leave before he woke as he didn’t know what he might do should he see him again.
Ben had already apologised a hundred times for Evan. This really, he’d urged Matthew to understand, was not his brother. The man who’d done that to the horse, this was someone else, a stranger the war had regurgitated back to them. Someone who wore the face and body of Evan, but no more. Beyond these apologies there’d been little else to say so the two men stuck to the details of the travel arrangements, Ben’s decision to stay and bury Mullie and look after Evan, and his advice to Matthew about where to leave the cart so he might pick it up later from town. Now though, as Matthew turned back towards the house, having left their luggage beside the cart, Ben did have something else to say to him.
‘Matthew,’ he said, stopping him with a hand on his shoulder. ‘It’s not much of a dowry I know, but I want you to have this.’
Matthew turned round to see Ben holding out a pocket watch in his other hand. The silver casement dangled from a fine link chain wrapped round the big man’s fingers.
‘It was our grandfather’s,’ Ben continued as he lowered the watch into Matthew’s palm, letting the chain coil down beside it. Matthew looked down at the watch and, pressing the tiny latch, opened the casement to reveal a gold and ivory face inside. It was beautifully made. He could feel the steady tick of its mechanism, faint but certain against his hand, like the heart of a caught songbird. There was something engraved in italics on the inside of the casement lid. Y Crochan.
‘The moniker of the watchmaker,’ Ben said, following Matthew’s eyes. ‘The Cauldron. Only put his mark on his very best pieces, an’ not many of ’em left now.’
‘Thank you,’ Matthew said gravely, closing the casement and slipping the watch into his pocket.
‘Well,’ Ben sighed, looking over to where Mullie lay in the paddock. ‘Nothin’ in the face of it really. But I wanted to give you somethin’ at least.’
Matthew felt a welling of love for this giant of a man he’d only known for three weeks. ‘You’ve given me your sister Ben,’ he said laying a hand on his arm. ‘She’ll always be enough.’
Ben turned back to look at Matthew again. ‘I hope so,’ he said. ‘I hope so. But Matthew?’ he continued. ‘Do one thing for me will you? That book I gave you. Take it, an’ read it too. It was written a long time ago now, I know, but underneath, well, the stories are the same.’ He took a step closer to his new brother-in-law. ‘We keep telling them, like, in different ways, but they’re still the same. An’ I reckon they’ll go on being so ’til we learn from ’em.’
Matthew nodded and patted Ben’s arm, thinking that when Evan cut up the horse he must have sliced his older brother to the bone too. What Ben had seen last night had obviously unsettled him greatly, and left him grasping for old stories as some kind of anchor. ‘We’d best be going,’ Matthew said turning back for the house. ‘I’ll get the birds, and tell Bran.’
Ben watched Matthew walk away before returning to buckle the straps of the harness, hoping he’d both said enough, and yet not too much.
Although visions of what Evan had done haunted Branwen nightly, within a few days of leaving the farm the cascade of new experiences began to dull the terrible vividness of the events of her wedding night. First there had been the train through the flat English plains to London, packed with American GIs. Then the capital itself, in all its ravaged beauty; St Paul’s, the Houses of Parliament and of course the Tower itself where she and Matthew saw their raven chicks safely deposited with the Ravenmaster. There were glimpses of her new husband’s past life too; the smoky pub where he’d drunk on the way back from work, his landlady, insisting on seeing her wedding ring before allowing her entry to the dingy lodgings. But then, before she knew it, she was heading west again, as far as her first sighting of the sea. As they’d waited for their ferry Matthew had laughed at her, unable as she was to tear her eyes away from the waves belly-flopping to the shore, the spumes of white water and the gulls peeling away from the cliffs above the beaches. And then, on the other side of that great sullen, swaying body of water, there was another country altogether, another train journey and at its end, another farm with Matthew’s family, telegraphed in advance, waiting nervously to meet them.
Those first days in Ireland were confusing for Branwen. All at once she was seeing and learning more about her husband’s past, but also new facets of his present character too. Matthew had been as nervous as she about his long-postponed return, and over those early days he’d seemed to swing wildly between a great pride in his new wife and an exaggerated, irritable concern over her well-being. She soon realised that she was, in some part, a kind of a peace offering between Matthew and his family. In the face of this beautiful young bride his father had made grudging concessions of appeasement towards his son who had, at least, returned from Britain with something of use. These appeasing gestures were helped along further when, less than a month after their arrival, the D-Day invasions happened. The stories that began filtering out of Europe in their wake couldn’t help but cast Matthew’s impetuous actions four years earlier in a more understanding light. But all wasn’t healed between Matthew and his family. The simple fact that he’d left at all could still pull the air taut between them, while his wounded leg remained the physical reminder Matthew feared it would. Every time he rose to limp awkwardly across the room or down the lane towards the fields, he had to suffer either his father’s scowl or, worse, his mother’s pitiful tears for her maimed son. Both branded him inside with a scalding burn of suppressed anger and regret.
Despite these residual tensions, Matthew’s father tried his best to focus on his son’s present return rather than his past departure. It was agreed that Matthew and Branwen should take over a small cottage on the edge of the family farm. The cottage had lain empty for several years now, but Matthew’s father had already begun repairing the roof and cutting
back the overgrown garden. He gave them the surrounding few acres too and, if Matthew managed these well, then they’d talk further about him taking on more of the land in the future. His father was getting older now and his sisters were already married off so, provided he put his shoulder to the wheel, his father told him, as if he hadn’t done a day’s work for the last four years, then nothing stood in his way of inheriting the whole farm one day.
To begin with it looked hopeful. Branwen threw herself into making the cottage a home, while Matthew used his army pension to buy new equipment and tools. Both of them relished finally being alone in their own house and there were some weeks, when the sun shone and Matthew’s father left them to their own devices, that they were truly happy. Their days took on a shared rhythm and each became the other’s anchor, the gravitational body around which their hours orbited. At these times Matthew wanted to be nowhere else other than coming home from the fields, aching with a day’s good work, to his beautiful wife singing softly to welcome him home at the gate of their autumnal cottage. For Branwen’s part, although she missed Ben and the farm in the hills, she was invigorated by this challenge of a new country, family and home. She wrote to Ben, and to Evan too who, under his brother’s careful eye, seemed to be beginning to find the parts of himself he’d lost overseas. From day to day, though, Branwen tried not to think of Wales too much, determined as she was to focus her love upon Matthew and the distress that return to his own home was clearly causing him.
