The Land Endures (The Apple Tree Saga Book 4) Page 4

  ‘Horrible dirty things!’ she cried. ‘Mummy! Make them go away!’

  Gwen removed them as best she could and rubbed the child’s skin with lemon-scented oil, but the thrips came on her just the same, and Emma, gradually growing calm, would sit on the garden-seat by the hour, unable to think of anything but the tiny insects that plagued her skin.

  ‘No,’ she would say, again and again. ‘No. No. I tell you no.’ And at each vehement syllable, one smaller finger would descend to rub out another of the tiny, creeping, hateful things that had dared to settle on her person. ‘No. No. I tell you no.’

  Often when Gwen had finished in the house and the dairy, she would join the men in the harvest-field. They were cutting a crop of dredge-corn now: oats and barley, winter sown; the best crop of the harvest so far. There were no delays in this weather. Long before the last sheaves were stooked, the waggons were lumbering to and fro, and a new stack was rising in the stackyard. Gwen helped to set up the stooks and then took a fork to help with the pitching. Stephen worked at the next waggon. He gave her a smile but said nothing. There were few words wasted by the harvesters toiling in the heat that year.

  Gwen was wearing a printed frock, the pattern of which, in the course of that summer, had faded from a rich dark blue to a pale and ghostly shade of grey. On her head she wore a straw hat with a curving brim down over her eyes, and on her feet an old pair of sandals without any straps.

  Stephen was aware of her constantly, without directly looking at her. They were so close in their intimacy, and knew each other in such a way, that whenever she took a sheaf on her fork and raised it aloft to the man on the load, it was like a movement of his own body. Knowing her lissomeness as he did; the grip of her hands and the curve of her arms; the shape of her shoulders, breasts, and thighs: he felt her movements in himself and knew that she in turn felt his. He knew when she turned to fork a sheaf; knew when she lifted it overhead; and knew how, at the very last, she danced a little on her toes, reaching up as high as she could to deliver the sheaf to the man on the load.

  She, as a girl on her father’s farm, had been bred to this work. It was in her bones. He would never have the knack of it so well as she, digging into the sheaf just so, raising the fork and turning it, all in one motion, scarcely seen, yet so exactly right each time that the sheaf could be taken from the curve of the prongs without danger, without delay. He liked to see her out in the fields. It was another bond between them, that they worked together, side by side.

  And yet he was anxious about her too. He felt that she asked too much of herself; went beyond her woman’s strength. Today, for instance, as the load grew higher in the waggon, he wished she would stop and take a rest. With every layer of sheaves on the load, she had to reach higher and higher still, and he sensed the tremulous weariness in every movement of her arms. He could see the strain of it in her face, shaded though it was by her broad-brimmed hat, and could hear the shortness of her breath.

  ‘Don’t overdo it, will you?’ he said. ‘It’s most unwise, in this heat. I think it’s time you went back to the house.’

  ‘But I’ve only just come out,’ she said. ‘Would you shut me indoors again?’

  Gwen could be obstinate when she chose.

  Mrs Bessemer came to the farm only in the mornings nowadays. She could only work two hours a day. The prolonged hot weather was making her ill.

  ‘What about us?’ said Agnes Mayle. ‘Ent we supposed to feel the heat?’

  But Mrs Bessemer’s illness was perfectly genuine. The heat reduced her in a terrible way, and sometimes she fell to the floor in a faint, eyes wide open and face pale as death. She stayed at home in the afternoons, and Gwen and Agnes managed alone.

  ‘Shall I get another woman in?’ Stephen asked.

  ‘Good gracious no!’ Gwen exclaimed. ‘Surely this weather will break some time?’

  ‘Sometimes I wonder,’ Stephen stud.

  The heat was a burden on them all. Even the children, when they came home from school, sought whatever shade could be found and sat engaged in quiet games. The heat was a strain even on them.

  And everywhere it was the same. The earth and everything that lived craved rain, but no rain came. The grass in the leys was so pale and dry that grassland and stubble looked alike. Even in the meadows the grass was brown. There was no greenness anywhere. The fruits of the earth were withering; the tiny apples fell from the trees; and the brown crinkled leaves were everywhere, crackling dead and dry underfoot.

  ‘You know what I think?’ Mrs Bessemer said. ‘I reckon it’s the end of the world.’

  ‘Don’t talk daft!’ Agnes said.

  But Gwen, as she went about the farm, observing the suffering of the animals, sometimes shared Mrs Bessemer’s fears. The earth was dying in the heat. Only a miracle, she felt, could ever bring it to life again.

  In Huntlip church, as in churches throughout the country, prayers were offered up for rain. But still no rain came. The sky pressed closer upon the earth, and the beasts of the field were borne down, panting open-mouthed in the heat.

  It was a day in mid-July, and Gwen was all alone in the house. Agnes had finished her day’s work and had left early, to take some milk to Nate Hopson, still laid up with his leg in plaster. Stephen was with the other men, cutting thirty acres of wheat on the far side of Woody Holl.

  Gwen went out into the garden to fill a basket with lettuces, radishes, and spring onions, ready for the children’s tea. There was thunder in the air. The sky was yellow and deep mauve, mottled like an angry bruise. She was on her way back to the house when she heard the faint sound of a sheep bleating, and noted it as an unusual thing, for the sheep had been quiet all through the drought. Perhaps, today, the storm would break.

  The air was so close she could scarcely breathe. She set her basket on the step and went across to the stable yard, to look in over the door of the shed, where an in-calf heifer lay in the straw, somewhat sickly and near her time. Having seen that the heifer was all right she stood for a moment, listening, and heard the sheep bleating again. The sound was remote, indistinct, but there was a querulous note in it, and a certain persistence that worried her.

  She went through the gate into the Home Field and walked slowly across the stubble. She was wearing her sandals, without any straps, and the stubble scratched her naked feet. The sandals were soon full of dust and seeds and the needle-sharp barbs from the oat-flights that worked their way painfully into the skin. She stopped for a moment to empty them, then went on across the slope.

  The sheep was no longer crying now. Gwen stood listening, but there was no sound. She put up her hand to shade her eyes and gazed out over the empty fields. The stubble lands were bleached and bare. Between the stalks, on the snuff-dry earth, the pimpernels were open wide. She was thinking of turning back towards home when the sheep began bleating again, and this time she heard in the drawn-out cry the unmistakable note of distress. She walked across the next two fields and down to the meadows in the dip, and so came to the dried-up pond with its incomplete fence and its circle of trees, and its waggon-wheel sticking out of the mud.

  The flock was in the meadow called Gicks, and a ewe had gone down the bank of the pond for the sake of the coolness of the mud at the bottom. She had probably lain there, cool, for some time, and now, when she wanted to come out, her hindquarters were stuck in the mud. She was heaving about in it, clumsily, and her efforts had gouged out a deep rounded pit, in which the last of the moisture gathered, making a loud sucking noise as her haunches scrabbled and sank back.

  The mud at the outer edge of the pond was dry, and had opened in fissures six inches wide. Gwen climbed over the wire netting and picked her way down towards the ewe. When she had gone five or six yards, the mud grew soft and covered her feet above the ankles. She trod carefully, slock-slock, and held her skirts above her knees.

  When the ewe saw her coming, it made another frantic heave, trying to hump itself out of the pit. But it only sank back again a
s before. Gwen now let go of her skirts and they hung trailing in the mud. She leant forward, facing the ewe, and seized it at either side of its neck, gripping wool and flesh together. But when she leant backwards, using all her strength, the ewe began to turn away, heaving sideways instead of forwards, and Gwen was pulled to her knees in the mud.

  ‘Stupid animal!’ she said. ‘Can’t you see I’m trying to help?’

  She let go of the ewe and flung out her arms to keep her balance, struggling onto her feet in the mud and trying to climb onto firmer ground. But the ewe, on finding itself released, scrabbled about sideways and backwards, and Gwen was suddenly sucked down, into the centre of the pit. The mud yielded under her and in an instant was up to her waist, closing between herself and the ewe but dragging them both down together.

  Suddenly she became afraid. There was a wellspring beneath her feet; she could hear it bubbling and could feel its surge; but surely the bottom of the pond could not be so deep as to suck her down? She gave a little scornful laugh. With her arms outstretched, she tried to move. Her feet trod the softness down below, seeking firmness; expecting it.

  There was no firmness. Only liquid mud. And she was sinking all the time. She reached up to the willow trees; she reached out to the broken wheel; but branches and wheel were too far away. Only the ewe was close to her, unmoving now, supine in the mud. Gwen again took hold of it and tried to lift it out of the pit. If with her help it could clamber out, its momentum in turn would help her. But her strength was nothing. The animal’s weight was mountainous. And the weight of the thick black viscous mud was pressing on her, squeezing her flesh, numbing her body from the waist down.

  Her only chance was help from elsewhere. The essential thing was to keep calm. She opened her mouth and gave a loud cry. She put all her strength into her voice, and the cry travelled out across the fields, a long-drawn hallooo of desperate appeal.

  But who was to hear her when she called? Agnes had gone to Rayner’s Lane. The children were not yet home from school. Stephen and the men were harvesting in a field on the other side of the farm. There was no one to hear her when she called but the flock grazing in the meadow nearby, and the ewe beside her in the mud.

  Her cry was a shock to the terrified ewe. It reared itself up in the mud beside her and began a violent scrabbling. Its two front feet came down on her, and the sharp cloven hooves scrabbled madly, cutting her face and tearing her frock, marking her flesh in several bright weals from her throat and shoulders down to her breasts. When she sought to protect herself, her hands and arms met the scrabbling hooves and were lacerated most dreadfully. And now, when she cried aloud for help, the cry was full of pain and fear.

  ‘Surely not!’ she said, sobbing. ‘Surely I’m not going to die like this? Please, God, make somebody hear!’

  Panic got her by the throat. She cried out for help again and again, but nobody heard her, nobody came. And the ewe, with its marbled yellow eyes, its black nostrils streaming mucus, its heavy body against hers, was bearing her downwards all the time. It was leaning on her. It was taking her strength. Whenever she uttered her cry for help, it reared up and trampled her. When she was silent, it was still. But even then, very gradually, she was sinking lower into the pit.

  In the heat the mud had a terrible stench. The ewe also stank, because of its fear. Gwen, breathing with painfulness, thought of it as the smell of death. Why had she tried to help the ewe instead of going to fetch the shepherd? What would Stephen say to her? And, thinking of Stephen, she began to cry, turning her face away from the ewe and yielding, exhausted, to the pull of the mud.

  Then her fighting spirit revived. She tried yet again to struggle free. Her mind was clarified, sharpened by fear. She knew she was struggling for her life.

  The children came home to an empty house. They sought out their father in the harvest field. He was surprised that Gwen was nowhere to be found, but he thought she would very soon turn up. He told them to get their own tea and to bring something up to the field for him.

  While he ate, with the other men, the three older children set up some sheaves, and Emma sat in the shade of the hedge, plaiting a bracelet of cornstalks. They stayed with him until six o’clock and then, when three of the men went down to see to the evening milking, he sent the children back to the house. If their mother was not yet back, Joanna was to put Emma to bed, and when she and the others had done their school prep they were to go to bed themselves.

  Stephen and the men worked until dusk. Most of the men then went straight home, but two of them returned with him, leading the horses, Boxer and Beau, with one loaded waggon which they put in the barn.

  The house was in darkness, upstairs and down. Plainly Gwen had still not come home. Stephen could not understand it at all, and he was more than a little annoyed, for the in-calf heifer, placed in Gwen’s care, was lowing distressfully from the shed.

  ‘Where the devil’s my wife, I wonder? I shall have to see into this!’

  At that moment Henry Goodshaw came into the yard, having been the rounds of his flock in the meadows. He stood for a while deep in thought, and his look and manner were very strange. He asked to speak to Stephen alone. He had found Gwen’s body in the mud of the pond. The ewe, by its bleating, had drawn him there. The ewe had trampled her to death.

  Chapter Three

  The silence that settled over the farm was something that had to be broken down. The men would stop talking when he came by, and would listen to him, when he gave his orders, with a kind of considerate gentleness that was almost more than he could bear. They would answer him in quiet voices, doing their best to be natural, but failing because of what they knew; because the knowledge filled their minds.

  One day he came upon three of them in the field of barley at Long End. They were trying the grain in the palms of their hands, rubbing it till it broke from the husks. They had been talking until he came. Now they were silent, avoiding his glance. The field was not far from Copsey Pond.

  ‘Well?’ he said. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I think we should cut,’ Tupper said.

  ‘Then for God’s sake get started!’ Stephen said. ‘Why stand about wasting time?’

  Nobody blamed him for lashing out. They felt they deserved it, the three of them, because their lives were still intact, and their womenfolk were safe at home. They put themselves in Stephen’s place. ‘If that was me ‒’ Bob Tupper said. He had no need to say more.

  They knew they ought to talk to him, but there was danger in every remark, and they wanted to spare him their clumsiness. And Stephen himself was unable to talk. The silence, though a burden, was refuge too. He could give his orders on the farm; conduct his business on market day; speak to Agnes about the children, and speak to the children when need be. But each of these was a separate task, and he came to each task with his mind prepared. Whenever one overlapped another, he felt as though he would go to pieces. How did men manage, who lost their wives? He could face only one thing at one time. When he gave himself up to the farm, and the children came to him with their worries, he felt he could hardly bear to look at them. And when, at certain allotted times, he gave himself up to his children completely, the work of the farm did not exist.

  Only Agnes Mayle, taking charge of household affairs, had the courage to mention his dead wife’s name.

  ‘Mrs Wayman used to pay us on Fridays,’ she said, when Stephen mentioned the matter of wages; and always, whatever queries arose, she answered in the same forthright way: ‘Mrs Wayman dealt with the eggs,’ or ‘Mrs Wayman’s poultry book is up on that shelf, behind the clock.’

  He got through those early days somehow: the nightmare of breaking the news to the children; the coroner’s inquest; the burial; the reporters calling at the house; the sympathy and the good advice. ‘You must think of your children,’ the vicar said, and Stephen angrily turned away. ‘I don’t need you,’ he said in his mind, ‘to tell me what I have to do.’

  He got his children through those
days: saw them off to school in the morning; made sure he was always there to meet them when they came home in the afternoon; set time aside to talk to them, and tried to wrap them round in love.

  But soon the holidays would begin, and the prospect filled him with secret dread. He took the three older ones aside and told himself they were almost grown up: Chris thirteen; Joanna twelve; Jamesy eleven in two months’ time.

  ‘I’m worried about little Emma,’ he said. ‘She’s only five and she’s young for her age. Now that the holidays are nearly here, I want you to take great care of her, and see that she’s never left alone. Will you promise me you’ll look after her?’

  Solemnly they gave their word, but when the three of them were alone, they looked at each other helplessly, eyes questioning, doubtful, afraid.

  ‘What are we supposed to do?’ Chris said. ‘Dad doesn’t tell us what to do!’

  Looking out through the kitchen window, they could see little Emma in the garden, following Agnes as she hung out the clothes, handing her the pegs from the raffia bag.

  ‘Emma’s all right,’ muttered Chris. ‘She’s too young to understand.’

  A new stack, at the edge of the stackyard, was leaning dangerously to one side. Poles were needed to shore it up. Morton George was given the job and Bob Tupper said to him, ‘See that you do the thing properly! ‒ This time!’ George did the job and the stack was shored up safely enough. He went to Stephen, alone in the byre.

  ‘I reckon you’d better give me my cards.’

  ‘Why now, suddenly?’

  ‘It’s all these remarks!’ George said. ‘It’s the way the others look at me. D’you think I don’t know you hold me to blame?’

  Stephen could never bring himself to look at George. He hated to see him about the farm. But the burden of blame could not be carried by this one man alone. It was too much for any man.

  ‘You were at the inquest,’ he said. ‘You heard what the coroner had to say.’