Fire Child
David H W Grubb
Chapter One
“I do come out of light. I come out of fire. I have burning words and see the tigers race. There is no calm but storm and to tell my tale I must inhabit your space and be a fire child. So that I will exist. So that I will enter again. So that I may settle my space. So that you will see my flames. I do come out of light to set you on fire so that your words will burn. I shall invade your days and ways and unite you in terror. You will see me in the sun and the new moon and the tides of light will overtake you. You will hear me in bursts of bells and in the playground fights and your secrets will burn you.”
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He did not have dreams. The dreams did not have him. He was so tired by seven each evening at all seasons that bread and cheese were all he wanted and the television thing fizzed into an abstraction. In the room where he slept with the dog since his wife had died the big bed was like a galleon of gently rocking peace but of all the dreams he had he remembered nothing when he went for a slash at three a.m. and nothing when the dog woke him at six o’ clock, winter when the light was stiff and summer when the light sang songs. He had no idea of dreams when he and the dog entered the yard and two hours later made a breakfast and the radio said what it wanted to say and the challenge of the day loomed. He had no dreams although the flutter of his wife was sometimes there; when the sheets needed changing, when a letter came from America, when the telephone voice babbled about things he could not gather, when Christmas came and then daffodils and then Mothering Sunday and then Easter. And the gate to her garden was closed, closed, closed. He had no dreams in the late snow and the streaming yard and the pig noise and the five cows and the death of a goat and a fox attack and the bugger mud and the stuff the postman delivered and the forms to fill in and the letters from estate agents telling him about his wealth. There were no dreams that he recalled as he sorted out a shirt and tie for the one service he attended every year, the time of reassurance and lifting light.
Snowdrops, aconites, daffodils, bluebells; they were here in their own good time and soon the vicar’s sister would take the beautiful arum lilies out from the conservatory and place them in the church to dance in silence to tunes only the angels heard. Tunes that inhabited cliff tops when nobody was there. Tunes that sometimes settled in the woods above the harbour. Tunes that might be there in his wife’s room.
When he went in there, every Sunday afternoon, the dog just outside the door, there were no words he could use so he sat in the silence and let in the memories to comfort and a smile sometimes changed his face.
Most of the memories had become more like stories that he wanted to hear again. Such a long time. Before the boys had left for America. Before some of the fields had fallen into the sea. Before he downsized the herd and sold one of the barns to a developer. Before the eight weeks of snow and caravan fire and the time his wife took to her bed and still the police asking questions. In the eight week snow the only visitor they had was the vicar, on horseback, checking to see what they needed. Even he didn’t come in. They had a sort of conversation, the vicar at the top lane and the farmer in the yard where he had thrown ashes from the fire onto the ice sheets.
That was the year they let the dog in at night. He remembered placing food for birds on the stone wall and keeping the cattle in for so long and the rooks quieter than they had ever been before and he often thought of the deaths of birds each night. Snow that changed the world; tremendous and continuing silence across the valley and the sea like a dead whale. Where did the gulls go and the silence of the church bell and the postman calling before the line went down to say he couldn’t get through and were there letters from America and would the feed last?
And now it is Holy Week again and the memories drift in his head and each day he says to himself he must enter the abandoned orchard and drive out the ruins and make good. He must give it back the life and if he has the energy plant new trees. “Just put a rainbow in your head,” is what his wife would have said when he needed to forgive, forget, make amends, move on.
And he hoped for an Easter card from America, even two. Greetings from the boys who had run away, who had told him the farm was dead, who never phoned now, who would not return now that their mother was dead. He remembered their scalding criticism and arrogance; telling him to sell the farm, to get off the land, to move into the town, to get a life. A life? What meaning did that have when the place was his life; the wide sky and the glimpse of the sea and the season songs and the people he had known since he was knee-high.
This is where he had brought her to, after the wedding up north, a place of strangers and the farm something she knew nothing about and even feared. The animals seemed to own the place; their noises and constant feeding and the way the trees in the fields had been there so long and what the wind could do. There were miracles too; the birth of pigs and lambs and the day she found one rat leading another out of the barn using a bit of straw in its mouth; the second rat was blind. There were also terrors; the young pigs who had got into the rhubarb shitting themselves to death, Matt White who drove his tractor over the cliff top when he was more drunk than usual, the mad girl who ran across the top field naked, the day she entered the smaller barn to find Peter looking down on her from his noose.
Then two boys to look after and the hours in the farmhouse; chained to chores, the boys getting nowhere at school and escaping to their father’s fields, chasing the dust of the place, chickens to pluck and rabbits to skin and sometimes a crab or lobster to prepare.
The only place of calm and being herself and time to reflect was the small garden where the sun saw her and the plants responded and she could write a letter to her parents for birthdays and festivals.
The boys, growing up, became more and more like their father and so quickly they entered a world of earth and stubborn strength and relentless intuition; a world of machinery and fixing things and slate and stone and wire and bill hooks and scythes and ladders all marching to the seasons; a world of lost crops and early starts and ruptured gutters and rain like chains and a gun for fun and a gun for rabbits and rooks; the stench of nettles in their shirts. Later girls and perhaps other men’s women, some fights, some incidents with bikes and then cars; times when they came home drunk and lay in and their father went out into the yard alone and only told the dog what he thought of it. Then the arguments about pay and hours and hitting out with words and accusations and sometimes the boys going off together for days and the awkward return until they had no more to offer and said they would leave. “The farm is dead. The fields are falling into the sea. Sell up and get a life before mother gets too ill. Do us all a favour and sell. You don’t even go off in the caravan any more. You haven’t had a break in years. What sort of a life is it anyway?”
Messages came from America. There were birthday cards and photographs of grandchildren and phone calls and talk of visits. Over the years they came less often and the words were not the same; they were about a new life and the farm was never mentioned. New ways, new things, new looks; the old put away. When their mother died the boys came over for a few days and after the funeral they spent most of the time in the town. There was nothing to say. They didn’t even look around the farm and they had quite forgotten their mother’s garden.
Published by Turner Maxwell Books
ISBN 978-0-9561884-8-9
Copyright © David H W Grubb 2009
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