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At the fragmentary, windlagged chatter of boys' voices __one high and woodsweet, one
with a concave irontown yodel, the third slightly older with shardy edges__
a large
crow at some sordid business on the roadcrown lumbers into the raw December air, a
black rag weighted with flight. It strides the air slowly, skirting hundreds of miles of
grey-under-low grey sky. They come gradually into view, shouts and whoops becoming a boy...two...three boys, rounding a bend in the narrow lane which threads the contiguities of uncharted fields. Their clothes are inadequate; town clothes; thin trousers and flimsy windcheaters, nylon socks and scuffed casual shoes coming unstitched at the heel. In spite of this the boys seem healthy and unconcerned. Nothing under the whole ponderous ceiling of sky appears to be moving, except the boys. They are a phenomenon; a cheeky disturbance in a dormant landscape. The wind could be said to move but it is too pervasive and steady, an ache wearing into every fissure of the shrunken trees which here and there stand fixed beneath the sky. The occasional desiccated leaf may fret unnaturally on its stem, or a dry stalk of vergegrass tremble tensely from exposure, but otherwise there is a buried stillness to the afternoon. The boys, conversely, are made of movement. They shiver and jig, turn hunched-up backs to the wind's dispirit, then turn again, their feet skipping and scraping as they score immaculate goals with the chunky mud droppings of tractors. See, now, how every line and volume of their bodies is receiving and responding, whether it is a thought they have chanced upon or some old, draggled feather lying on the road. Or __moving closer in__ see how expressions fleet over their faces as they bicker and gossip, chant snatches of songs in tuneless yell, or rake each other with exaggerated laughter. See, even, how their fine, pellucid skin, where the wind's bloodless lips mouth hurtingly against it, burns with the intensity of pure reaction and____ "Listen!" As though their activity has pricked the land into partial life, the boys hear an answering sound. It is a tractor approaching along the lane like a hedgehidden factory of possibilities. With one mind they run to discover it, but once in sight of it they slow and wait, shyly savouring the vision as it grinds over the intervening yards. They have stopped __as ever__ by a five-bar gate, once white but now weathered to a greensoaked, blistered grey and held shut by a fraying loop of twine. The gate is on the left, as it always is no matter how the [obsessive] wind veers and backs. By the good luck that attends all young things, the tractor is to turn in at this gate and so disengages to a nervous standstill, its engine clattering throatily, dumpily, vibrating the oily temperatures that hover above it. It is huge, with a great, peremptory heart of noise crouched amid sinews of quivering iron. The entranced boys feel a longing to serve such power, as they might throw twigs on a fire or feed handfuls of grass to a grazing bull. "We'll help you." "Can we?" "Giv’ us a ride." "Shall we open the gate?" "Go on, please!" They clamour to be heard over the tractor, the wind flattening their words and storing them away like monochrome stamps. The Farman', in thick, dirty jacket and torn wellies, seated on the cold shovel of a driving seat, is indisposed. "Gerraway ya li’l boggers!" he says, sore-eyed, muttering closely about his mouth, but then adds, gruffly, "oorp’n it then." The boys cheer and ’ray with excitement. One of them scoots the gate open, sailing over deep, flooded ruts till its lame arc jars against a large, half-sunken stone. Another runs to seat himself with a backward jump on the open trailer that bumps roughplanked along behind the tractor __earning for his dare a blackspat scowl. The third gazes uncertainly on a cold, rudimentary world of puddled clay and, as the enormous tyres wallow and tilt and then churn forward, squeezing visceral slabs of mud through horny treads, he can't help but imagine being milled himself into just such an icy pug. The closing of the gate against the incurious corridor of the lane exiles them all to a dreary, sodden tundra; a low arena where distant cows stand out the long hours, heads bowed to the ground by the weight of the sky. To the right, inside the old gate, stands a galvanised water trough, its surface skinned over with a scum of blackened leafsludge. Beyond that, in a peninsular corner of the field, is a long, straw-covered clamp of mangolds like a cairn of severed farmheads. It is to this that the Farman’ has driven the tractor and where he now unhitches the trailer. Hatred of his lot fills the narrow shoulders of his jacket as he wrestles, rawknuckled, with piggish pins of frozen iron, straining and grunting and oathing-off in his stubbled brogue, oblivious to the three boys. None of the people in the field notice that some of the distant cows have raised their heads to query an unusual disruption of routine. The boys themselves are rather daunted, the energy of their enthusiasm having propelled them into a broad lake of slidden shitstep which sucks at their tattered shoes and injects its frigid, pestilential wetness into the texture of their socks. They're unequipped to cope with the intractable crudity of winter mud, but they persevere, feeling their way over to the clamp with awkward stretchstrides, determined to take part in the pioneer work of agriculture. They form a silent group to watch the Farman’ who is kicking a wooden crate under the trailer's drawbar to prop it level. They are full of admiration for his strength and roughness, eager for his approval. "What shall we do?" Asks one. "Do?" "To help." The Farman' makes no answer while he pulls himself up onto the seat of the tractor, but once there, perched above its shaking, elephantine haunches, he turns back to them with a sardonic air. "Few reely wannu 'elp," he yells over the phlegmy hammering of the engine, "you can load that up wi' them ol' mangles." With that he steps off the clutch and the tractor lurches away, gathering speed towards a second gate on the other side of the field, kicking up clods of weighty mud. The distant cows follow its vehement progress with a uniform turn of their heads. The tractor diminishes, its sound thinning to a clarified stutter, and silence seeps back to cover the field’s cold, inhospitable groundplan. Alone with them once more, the wind nudges the boys' hair across their foreheads as they gaze after the tractor, trying to decide as a gang. The job lacks glamour and there'll be no-one to encourage them, but they feel committed __entrusted, even. Then, too, their association, never sundered since they first arrived at the school, is being brought to an end by seismic shifts in the way the world is ordered, so anything that they can share... Against that, such a cheerless, spuddish-smelling mudsite! "Might as well, eh?" says the oldest one finally. "Won't take long." The decision made, they launch themselves at the work with a hectic will. The clamp is already open, with a number of mangolds lying loose, and this at first makes the work seem easy. The boys become shot-putters and rugby players, grenade throwers and aerial bombers. They heave and lob and roll the stonehard roots into the long, mute tumbrel that they've been challenged to fill, their voices rising as fine wires towards the dank mutability of the winter sky. The drab wind carries the husks and peaks of their high-spirited crowing to the cows standing in herd at the field’s far end. Thickboned heads itch with curiosity. It’s not very long, though, before all the loose mangolds have been loaded and those which are undisturbed __closely packed, nailed with jagged spikes of straw, cemented with frosted mud__ are much more difficult to move. One boy conceives the idea of climbing up onto the clamp and jumping heavily at its excavated edge. He does succeed in dislodging a couple but on his second attempt he slips, sliding helplessly down the steep lumpy slope to land sitting with a gasp on the wet ground. His friends slue with derisive laughter; laughter redoubled when they catch sight of the dark mudstamps on the seat of his trousers. After that they kick more cautiously, lower down, the earlier victim plucking awkwardly at his wet trousers the while, but all of them discomforted by muddy knees and wet socks, by hurting, wind-drilled ears and fingers tipped with biting mercury. The cows, attracted by activity not dissimilar to the bringing of food, fore-step with several sinking hoof. Although the boys are managing to shift the mangolds in ones and twos, production has slowed. It slows still further when they realise that with all their effort and accident the floor of the trailer is not even half covered. They are disheartened, experiencing for perhaps the first time the scope and quality of adult betrayal, so much deeper and more unfeeling than their own rapid inconstancies. The last boy to lift a mangold doesn’t even bother to put it in the trailer. He just drops it again at which, as though on cue, they all clamber wordlessly to the top of the clamp __where at least it’s dry__ to think again. Slow, stolid, a herd wide, a drove deep: the grave momentum of moving cows. Sitting and crouching on the mound of roots in a field of dismal acres on a cold December afternoon, the boys’ talk is subdued. They have tried to relieve their sense of failure by aiming straw arrows at one another's heads, by having a long-gobbing contest, by trying to push each other off the top; now they are still. What can it be that keeps them where they are? This triad of boys, all limb and heart with halos of earnestness flickering about their heads __are they seen from above? ...spiky haircrowns and flaming eartips? Or on a level with... huffing their young breath into caves of frozen fingers? Or from below, maybe; fallen socks and mudscuffed shoes. The wind blows above them, round them, and below them; a constant grey presence which also, like old discarded polythene, saddles the boned barrelbacks of the quietly nearing cows. Such a breach in the structure of existence is unprecedented. Things change, of course, and terms come to an end __always previously with an irrepressible sense of relief. But now there are to be new schools; new terms of unimaginable duration in unimaginable conditions. Having been delivered into Futurity they see that there is also now the Past, on which they have never before bestowed a moment’s thought. These three are even more dependent on each others’ company than normal because they have had to stay on an extra term, their other friends and compeers having already dispersed in the high heat of summer. Some of these former friends they now discuss in short, shivering sentences, awarding merit, delivering verdicts, and illustrating these with anecdotes which they rudely correct for one another. It is an honours list based on memorability; deeds of daring and high humour, or the possession of a special talent. The effort to remember, usually only called upon in life-stifling class, does not feel like a natural activity but they make it now, in somewhat sombre and sporadic bursts. The realisation that they are imprisoned by cows bursts suddenly and simultaneously within all of them, drying up the springs of their thought and binding their breath. After a heart-hammering silence, one boy, voicing the prayer of them all, says, "They're only cows, Cows won't hurt you." But such an orchestrated fait-accompli has unnerved them and some of the herd are heifers, the more inquisitive ones, which the boys think might be bulls. The boys are worried; they are completely trapped, having impassable hedge on two sides behind them and a great tonnage of horned animals pressing forward in solid siege before. "Chuck something at them," suggests one. "You chuck something!" A piece of mangold lands in the mud under a heifer’s nose, causing her to skeer heavily to one side and creating a small lift of alarm among her neighbours which, in turn, is caught and magnified by the boys' imagination into a stampede of terrible bullrage. "Watch out!" They clutch at one another as they try to keep their footing on the lumpy mound but nothing happens and in the end the two species can only stare at each other: the boys conscious of the absurdity of their predicament but a little afraid to go down among so many large animals; the cows, placidly awaiting their next hefty impulse, gazing many- eyed at the boys, the warmed cowsteam of their outbreath congealing round wide, messy nostrils. The days being so short, and this one so overcast, there is the quality of lateness in the air, a pre-dusk wash of emptiness that seems unchanging, as though the earth had slowed to a stop like an undriven wheel. The few sounds made __the cows' docile snorting, the suck and pat of cloven step, the swish of mired tails__ all lack somehow the vitality to spread much beyond their making. The wind is not energy so much as continuation; a featureless null that insinuates itself between the body and its warmth; a sullen pressure which, above the field, above the entire surrounding maze of vacant hedges, prostrate fields and undistinguished lanes, nags the low, laden clouds into a turbid restiveness. After some time, the boys have come to accept the cows as incidental company and have turned their attention elsewhere. They have found while handling broken mangolds that they have a primitive, rooty sweetness, so one is numbfingeredly cutting gritty slices for his friends with a penknife __a cheap, tinny affair with pearlplastic sides and a loose blade that was a present from his father. Crouched there, with bodies tensed against the cold, nibbling at the mudrimed chunks, they seem to be feeding on the sluggishly granulating lymph of the whole dying landscape. Often, and innocently, in sleepy dormitories at night and by day in every corner of the school’s old wood and glass divisions, they had boasted, shyly or brashly, about who they would be when they were grown up, never believing that such a time would come. But now that time was moving purposefully towards them and what could they do? It’s not that they didn’t know perfectly well that the world is a calamitous place. They had all had them: new uncles, new places you had to think of as home, a new touch. But these they could warn each other about. No-one came back from being older, you couldn’t even go back to help yourself. It is with some care, some cautious trust, then, that on a cold afternoon in the gradually draining light, they help each other to imagine guises, pragmatic but dignified, in which they might navigate the coming time. They keep each other within the bounds of what’s acknowledged to be real with ridicule and rough logic but reward true confidence with a serving of silent respect. Should they be what their custodians want them to be, or tell them they’re good for? Would they have to have a lot of fights, and would they win any? Why did people get married? The boys are so engrossed in this that they are not aware of how the herd of cows which stood in such deliberate bulk, re-chewing the finished year, has quietly dematerialised and then formed again, remotely and much less distinctly, over by the far gate; nor how, while that was going on, the sun, indiscernible all day, showed briefly as no more than a dull red inflammation within a tangle of uninhabited hedge, the lower thicketry of which is now exuding darkness. And this must all be because wind loves its own voice, its power, just as the mind is entranced by its own proliferative subtlety. It presses closely against obstacles, possessions, to try to perceive itself, like a miser. But what really is it? Is it individual, or common process? Created or accidental? On the other side of the field a man has appeared to take the waiting cows to be milked. He's calling to them; a lone, lilting yip that sags across the spaceless air. But why should he have to call, with the cows already grouped around the gate? Perhaps he actually makes no sound at all and what is heard are the insubstantial strings of his being waving like weeds in water as they scan the empty pasture. It is difficult, anyway, to make him out. He seems to be no more than a greater density of the thickening air, hovering about the cows till the last one has manoeuvred out through the gate and vanished. He also seems not to notice the boys, even when they stand up and wave. The man has gone, leaving a fog of forsakenness to sink onto the freezing, slushy field. The stone twilight of graves takes to the air. "He couldn't see us," observes one of the boys, and the romance of invisibility turns cold in the face of its actuality. They turn up minimal collars and clasp their knees, or sit with chillbitten hands tucked tightly under their arms, watching the bled edges of the field approach them as darkness. The old gate delays longest in their vision, fatigued and spectral, and beyond it the pale scar of the lane dissolving in arctic shadow. And all the time the windfactor hugs them in its punishing persistence, seeming to blow ever more strongly through deepening gaps of nothingness. One of the three had said less than the others when they'd been trying the weight of the unknown, not from any kind of reserve but because of the feeling that even his own constructions had not answered. Now, in the cold, closing gloom, with his friends' faces hardly to be seen __when, in fact, he supplies them with being more from memory than direct evidence, for that is little more now than the occasional resigned rustle and faint, packed outlines__ he finds the elements which he can twist into a cable strong enough to be a bridge. "When I'm grown up," he says, starting loudly but quickly dropping back to an abashed murmur, as though afraid to challenge the darkness, "I’m going to be rich __really rich! Then I'll come back and buy everything here, all of it, even the roads, and I'll keep it just like it is. Then anyone who's my friend can come and live here and never have to leave." Now it is utter night. If there is light, it shines not here. Here there is only the suffocating weight of darkness and the blind, unresting wind, blowing as if by memory over the rigid contours of a silent mound. |
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© B. R. Mitchell 1998 |