Devil's Day Read online

  ‘John, I don’t mind,’ he said.

  ‘They would have done,’ I said. ‘Especially Barbara.’

  ‘I take it she were happy?’ he said.

  ‘What do you think?’

  He laughed humourlessly. ‘At least you’ll have plenty of help,’ he said.

  ‘We’ll have plenty of interference,’ I said. ‘Here we’d get help.’

  ‘I think you’ll be hard pressed to tell the difference, to be honest,’ he said. ‘Laurel and Angela will be over here every moment of the day whenever you come to visit.’

  ‘I meant if we lived here, Dadda,’ I said.

  Picking up the other boot, he glanced at me.

  ‘Are you making some tea?’ he said and started scrubbing at the sole.

  While I waited for the kettle to boil, I sat at the table and looked at what Dadda had drawn in the map book. He’d got as far as outlining the Endlands and traced each of the farmhouses. Under ‘Pentecost’, his was the only name listed now. On its own it looked defenceless. Easily rubbed away.

  He’d cut the conversation off before it had started, but if Kat and I were to move here, it wouldn’t be simply for our sake and the baby’s, but for his too. Not out of pity. Pity was about as useful in the Endlands as jealousy. I just didn’t want to see him struggling. There was too much for one person to do. Drawing the map had thrown up several new jobs already.

  It was obvious why he’d come to a stop with the pencil. He couldn’t go any further without checking the extent of the fire damage in Sullom Wood. It had become one of those things in the valley that needed to be measured, just like the ash coppice and the culverts on the Moss, and the path high up above the Beasleys’ farm—a bad weather route that had allowed folk to get along the valley before there was a tarmac road. Years of erosion had broken the track so that it surfaced and disappeared as if it were stitching that had been pulled loose and the whole line had been fragmented for so long that each section had acquired a different name. Above Sullom Wood it was known as the High Walk, and when it passed above the Beasleys’ farm as Sow’s Head. Beyond that it was simply the Corpse Road and ran on for miles into the moorland.

  To call it a road at all is something of a misnomer. At best it’s nothing more than a mowing through the heather—a coffin’s width was the concession granted by the Ashetons in the document displayed at Brownlee Hall—prone to becoming overgrown or buried in snow. But it had once been well used, the Gaffer said, given that St Michael’s was vulnerable to flooding no matter what barricades they set up to hold back the river. When the water broke through and swamped the graveyard, the newly dead would have to be carried over to the other side of the moors to the village of Abbeystead in Wyresdale, where the church had been built on a hill and the waiting soil was dry. It was a journey of almost six miles and would have been arduous enough on the flat, but the navigation of steep inclines and stretches of deep black peat sometimes led to the coffin being dropped down a ravine and splintering open and the body rolling out limp as a puppet. Or it might fall into a bog and, being irretrievable, left to sink, with a cobbling of rocks on the nearest patch of dry ground as a tombstone.

  If they were unfortunate enough to ever have to use the Corpse Road, folk tended to set off in the early morning so that they could get to Wyresdale and back in a day. Sometimes they did, but sometimes the weather would come down so suddenly and with such force that they would have to leave the coffin and come back for it.

  ‘Is that true?’ I said. I didn’t like the idea that someone would be left all alone on the moors, even if they were dead.

  The Gaffer crossed his heart as he always did whenever I asked him that question.

  ‘Aye, it’s true,’ he said. ‘They’d find a bit of shelter for the box under a peat-hagg and cover it over with heather and build a little cairn so that they knew where to find it when they came looking. I must have told you about Stanley Clifton, Johnny lad.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘He were only little, about your age. Got his head crushed in a loom,’ said the Gaffer, and demonstrated what had happened by pulling the sides of his face in opposite directions and making a cracking noise in the back of his mouth.

  ‘It were when they had the floods the year after the Blizzard,’ he said. ‘You’ve seen the photographs, haven’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  They hung on the wall of the Croppers’ Arms next to the grubby still-lifes of fruit and spaniels. Sun-faded black and white images of the lane in water deep enough for a rowing boat, while the headstones in the graveyard looked as if they were floating like marker buoys.

  The Cliftons had been walking for an hour when the cloud descended and the rain came in a solid sheet. There was nothing they could do but leave their Stanley and head back to Underclough.

  ‘When they went up the next day,’ said the Gaffer, lighting his fag, ‘the coffin were empty.’

  ‘Empty?’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘Where was Stanley, then?’

  ‘The Owd Feller had taken him, hadn’t he?’

  ‘Taken him where?’ I said.

  ‘Nobody knows,’ said the Gaffer. ‘They never found him.’

  ‘Are you sure that’s true?’ I said.

  ‘Don’t you believe he’s up there, the Devil?’ he said, and went to the peg by the door where his coat was hanging, the good herringbone number that he wore when he went to the pub. He felt around in the inside pocket and brought out a tobacco tin and handed it to me. The lettering was scuffed and dented, the lid held on with a rubber band.

  ‘Go on, Johnny lad,’ he said, sitting down and tapping the stem of ash into his tea cup. ‘Open it.’

  ‘I shouldn’t smoke,’ I said.

  ‘There’s no baccy in it, you daft sod,’ said the Gaffer. ‘Get it open.’

  Inside there was a layer of tissue paper spotted with grease and mildew.

  ‘I found it when I were your age, Johnny lad,’ he said.

  ‘What is it?’ I said.

  ‘Look for yourself.’

  Under the paper was a small black hand the size of a baby’s, curled in on itself like a burned spider.

  ‘It’s tiny,’ I said.

  But there was something else about it that I couldn’t see at first.

  ‘Count the fingers, Johnny lad,’ said the Gaffer.

  I did.

  There were six.

  ∾

  While we waited for Kat to come out of the house, Dadda went up on to the fellside with a ball of twine and his pocket knife.

  ‘Can’t it wait?’ I called from the Land-Rover. He waved me off and Fly followed him, sensing that he didn’t have the appetite to chastise her today.

  He hadn’t slept much and while Kat had kept me awake as she fought with the bedsheets I’d heard him coming and going across the yard, checking on the ram, sawing something in the workshed, loosening a stubborn bit of machinery with a hammer and sending the offending part clanging on to the floor. And now, in the light of day, he’d noticed a broken railing that needed to be lashed back into place.

  I watched him climbing through the chicken patch, the birds scattering as Fly sent them into gobbling half-flights, and thought that I saw him struggling a little with the gradient. Old age would come to Dadda sooner or later. How could it not? He still managed to carry things I couldn’t have even lifted and he could walk pretty considerable distances, but the time would come when it wouldn’t take much to knock the wind out of his sails: a twisted ankle or a persistent spell of pleurisy and it would fall to others to look after the farm. The Dyers and the Beasleys would do what they could, of course, but they had their own places to run, and Angela, Laurel and Bill were all getting older too.

  Past the chickens’ scrubland, Dadda reached for one of the fences to pull himself up. Not that it helped him much: nothing on the steep slope at the back of the farm was true. Gates and hurdles had been hand-built to follow the lumps and ditches and were always leaning
one way or the other with the wind. Gales hit the fells here with great force and the stunted oak trees had been bent to the shapes of blusters and eddies. The last set of palings, where Dadda had stopped to cut the twine, gave on to wet, rocky terraces, where a few rowan trees grew, geisha white. Beyond that, there was only heather, ridge and cloud, where a pair of buzzards were winding up to the loft of the sky.

  Kat stared up at them as she crossed the yard in her black coat and then folded her arms against the cold. She got into the LandRover, picking dog hairs off her tights and flipped down the sun visor to finish her make-up.

  ‘There was no need for me to rush, was there?’ she said, watching Dadda. ‘What’s he doing? He’ll cover himself in mud.’

  ‘Do you want to try and persuade him down?’ I said.

  ‘What was he up to in the night?’ she said.

  ‘You heard him too, did you?’

  ‘Don’t say anything,’ she said, picking through her bag. ‘But that’s what had me awake for hours.’

  ‘He’s just keeping himself busy,’ I said.

  ‘He’ll wear himself out if he doesn’t take some time to grieve properly, though, John,’ said Kat, drawing the tip of her kohl pencil across her eyelid.

  ‘He is grieving properly,’ I said.

  He was grieving as folk in the Endlands had always grieved, by turning his thoughts to the farm and the valley and the welfare of the animals. The land didn’t care if his father had died. It wouldn’t wait for him to stop crying. What had to be done was much more important than what had to be felt.

  ‘He just needs to slow down a bit,’ said Kat.

  ‘Well, perhaps he will, now that we’re here,’ I said, although I knew fine well that he wasn’t going to hand anything over to us. Not when, as far as he was concerned, we’d be going back to Suffolk after Gathering. Whatever he delegated he’d only have to pick up again when we left. Trying to finish a job that someone else has started is always difficult; so much so that invariably they have to be started again. And he wouldn’t have time for that when the weather began to deteriorate.

  Once Devil’s Day and Gathering were done, the place would descend into that brief season of sludge and mould between autumn and winter. There would be days of mists, days of gales, filthy days that failed to lighten. The legions of fungi would turn to pulp in the Wood and the birds would stop singing. And then all memories of summer days would seem suspect.

  In fact, they already did, and when Dadda turned on to the lane and we set off towards the village, the Briar was as high as I’d seen it for some time. It easily outpaced us, rushing between the rocks and thistles in a tea-brown torrent as the previous day’s rain came down off the moors. The concrete slabs of the Beasleys’ bridge were several inches under water, and at Sour Bend the swell had cut away significant chunks of the bank, exposing the tree roots as thick, misshapen bones. When we came closer to Sullom Wood, the noise dissipated as the river veered away from the road and wound off to lose itself in the oak and beech and find the Greenhollow.

  It seemed the right name for the place I’d discovered the afternoon Lennie Sturzaker split my eyebrow and I’d lost myself in the trees. Up until then, I’d always tended to avoid Sullom Wood, mostly because to get there from the farm I had to cross the field where Jim Beasley kept his horses. They were twitchy, temperamental things, especially Jim’s favourite—the old wall-eyed stallion that stood alone on the far side of the meadow, exiled for his strangeness. I’d never liked horses much anyway. At the Lancashire Show I’d seen a man kicked by the mare he was leading around the parade ring and the memory of him trying to keep his eye inside its shattered socket had haunted me ever since.

  Water troubled me too. I could swim quite well, and I’d happily play in the river further upstream, building dams or skimming stones or wading out to the little island of mud and marsh-marigold and claiming it for queen and country. But even though the water rarely lapped past my knees, if I stumbled over it didn’t take long for the river to become aware of me, to sniff out my kicking and thrashing and lay on its many hands. In Sullom Wood, the Gaffer told me, the cutting was deep and narrow and the current much faster than it was on the floodplains.

  But, like all the Gaffer’s stories, the dangers were invitations as much as they were warnings. Go and see for yourself. You find out.

  It was my valley as much as his. It would be my business to know everything about it one day. There was no profit in ignorance, and nothing had been kept from me when I was a child. I’d seen ewes bloated like balloons from the gas of the rotting, unborn lambs inside them. I’d watched the vet peel back the lips of the ram with orf to look at the bleeding, pustular scabs. I’d seen vaginal prolapses, coccidiosis, gangrenous mastitis. And more than once, we’d found a ewe crippled by a tumble in the heather and eaten alive by flystrike. These were just things that happened. They would happen again. There was no use in being frightened by the Endlands or anything in it: not old belligerent horses, not the river.

  It was a thought I clung to as I thrashed through Sullom Wood, and realised I’d found the place the Gaffer had told me about. I heard the water well before I came to it. The cool of the spray moistened the trunks and rainbowed in the air. And then, almost catching me out, the woodland dropped away into a natural ha-ha of willow and silver birch, where the light under the nave of trees was green and dusty, like the skin of a pear.

  Things fled as I slithered down through the dry mud. Birds dissolved into the undergrowth and the eel that lay curled up like a question mark just under the surface of the water shivered away in a ring of ripples. Nothing wanted to stay, not the damselflies or the dippers, or the kingfisher that unearthed itself from the dark, rooty banks on the other side and skimmed away with the current, burning a blue stripe into the air.

  Kingfishers were thieves, the Gaffer told me. They’d stolen those pretty little coats and were always on the run. Catch a kingfisher and the reward would be gold or immortality or something even better. Whatever the prize, I followed them downstream, stumbling through the loose rubble of stones at the edge and making the strange clocking echoes that sound in places of rock and running water.

  For a few moments they gathered, bobbing, on a low branch before they fled again, out over a waterfall where the whole of the river’s width slipped from a shelf of blackened rock and tumbled ten feet or more in an endless crash. I had no doubt that what the Gaffer had told me was true. If I fell in here or I jumped, then no trace of John Pentecost would ever rise to the surface again.

  I made a list of things that floated:

  Spinning jennies.

  Leaves and twigs.

  Desiccated wasps.

  The water-boatmen that delicately dimpled the membrane of the little, cut-off pool by the banks.

  But a boy, even one of skin and bones, no. Bones that might well be shattered if there were rocks just under the surface. Of course, if I’d really wanted to know what was beneath the water, I could have easily sounded the depth with one of the long branches that had come off the trees, but I was frightened that I’d find it was deep enough and then there would be no excuse but cowardice.

  ∾

  When we arrived at the church, Bill was already there waiting for us with Wesley Burkitt and his son.

  The Burkitts had been burying the dead of this wild corner of Lancashire for the best part of a century and Mythamwood, the village where they had their parlour (an unsettling bit of nomenclature that always made me think of séances or spiders and flies), had become synonymous with all things bleak and final. Elderly folk on their last legs were said to be halfway to Mythamwood, and it was where the Sturzakers threatened to send us if we grassed them up.

  ‘Mr Pentecost,’ said Burkitt, shaking Dadda’s hand. ‘My condolences once again.’

  He was a tall, thin man, almost ideally pasty for his profession, with a rasping voice as though a speck of gravedust was permanently troubling his throat. In a Dickens novel, I always thought, he
would have been called Tallow or Gritby. Sagacious, politic and thorough.

  His son, who would make the fourth pall-bearer, seeing that Jeff was away, nodded from the back of the open hearse with a finely honed expression of understanding and discretion. I know your business here today. It is of the darkest matter. I shan’t ask you to speak of it.

  ‘And it’s young Mr Pentecost, isn’t it?’ said Burkitt, shaking my hand now and bowing to Kat. ‘My sympathies.’

  Keeping my hand sandwiched in his, thinking me green enough to need his advice, he stepped closer to impart one of the secrets that he’d learned through a lifetime of dealing with the dead.

  ‘I have to say, once the funeral’s over,’ he said, ‘it does get easier to come to terms with your loss.’

  It seemed that he was waiting for agreement before he’d let go.

  ‘I’m sure you’re right,’ I said and he closed his eyes and patted me on the shoulder.

  It’s a strange expression—to come to terms with death. As if there are concessions to be bargained for and won. But death takes all.

  From the church, Laurel appeared with the priest sent by the diocese to conduct the funeral. The last incumbent of St Michael’s had retired years before I’d even started at the primary school and no one had replaced him. They wouldn’t waste the money, not for the sake of a few old dears like Laurel. If she wanted to take the body and blood, she had to drive to town.

  The priest smiled and offered his hand to Dadda and then me, thankful, it seemed, to be able to excuse himself from Mrs Dyer and the conversation about her Jeff and the rescued sinner she’d heard speaking at the town hall.

  ‘There are already quite a few folk inside,’ he said. ‘I think most of the village has come.’

  ‘Aye, well, they would,’ said Bill, his hands in his pockets. Funerals in Underclough were always well attended. Anything to spike the flatline of boredom.

  Betty Ward and her husband, Clive, came up the lane and smiled at us as Angela arrived with Liz and Grace in Jim’s old Hilux. It was as worn-out as Dadda’s Land-Rover and the engine switched off in a kind of death-rattle.