A Different Kingdom(2)

But this is beyond his knowledge. The village, the market town, these are to him immense distances away, and beyond them he knows only rumours of America, land of exiles. The farm, the river, and the fields and woods about his home; these are his kingdom.





TWO

EVEN THEN MICHAEL'S grandmother seemed old, older than his grandfather whom she would one day outlive. She was a big woman with large hands and mop of white hair that escaped every clip and band she installed to imprison it. Inclined to stoutness, she called herself 'big-boned', and would glare round when she said it, as if daring anyone to contradict her. Her eyes were a bright blue, the whites of them slowly yellowing with the weight of years, but she kept her own chickens and milked her own goat and darned endless socks with complacent skill. She cooked huge meals effortlessly, bringing in vegetables from the garden with the mud clinging to them and bullying anyone who was near to carry in wood for the big range that shouted with heat at one end of the kitchen, taking up almost the entire wall. Its top plate was never cold and there was always a villainous pot of tea stewing there that would be as dark as clay in the cup and which Michael's grandfather downed daily by the gallon. Coffee was unheard of, and breakfasts were massive affairs of spitting bacon and fried eggs and soda bread. The men—family and hired workers—would congregate in the stoneflagged kitchen and eat mounds of steaming food before turning out to the fields and stables while mist was rising up out of the meadow bottoms and the last star was considering quitting the sky. There were cold mornings, stiff with winter and dark as pitch, when the men took swinging lanterns out with them, electricity not yet having been wired to the byre and the stables. And there were soft summer dawns when the sun would be a ball of molten fire inching its way up a flawless sky and pouring flaxen light over the waking land like a benison.

And if Michael's grandfather, all six feet five inches of him, was lord of the farm and the fields, the labourers and the crops, then his grandmother was mistress of the house, provider of meals and stem guardian of manners. Hands were washed before meals with the strong carbolic soap whose reek would haunt Michael the whole of his life, and boots were scrubbed free of mud. The house and the farm seemed all of a bustle in those days, with people coming and going, boots clumping in the hall, his grandmother calling out in the yard for the men to come for their dinner—or if they were too far away then Michael would be sent scurrying out to the fields where they would be scattered at their jobs, sweat on their faces, scythes or halters or buckets or shovels or sacks or pitchforks in their hands. He remembered evenings like that, haymaking evenings, when there were clouds of midges floating like gauze in the air and a cow's low would carry for miles in the stillness, and he would be plastered with hayseeds and specked with liquid dung from his pelter through the meadows to fetch them in.

'You've shit on your nose,' he would be told calmly. 'What have you been doing, snowballing with it? Go on with you. Get in and scrub, or your gran will have your hide.' And he would not see the grin they threw at his running back.

Michael Fay, with shit on his nose, had been running back like that one day in the middle of a waning summer when he tripped, and fell down, and slipped, and slid, and had his life picked up and thrown around and put down again in a different place. In another world.

HE COULD SMELL the rich earth as he slipped along it, tumbling down a steep incline with his short limbs flailing. He smelled wild garlic and river mud, and when the world had stopped turning he found that he was on the slope leading to the stream at the foot of the bottom meadow, had cartwheeled down twenty feet of steep, hazel-covered bank and had left the sunset-lit evening behind, up in the meadow. Here it was gloomier, with the trees-alder and willow— edging close to the water like animals come to drink, and the twilight already deepening in their shadow. He sat up, dusting himself off with stubby hands. He could feel twigs lodged in his hair and beetling around inside his shirt, and his clothes were green and black with mud and mould. He grimaced, peering at his black palms then at the river hollow, loud with water noise, swamped with an early dusk. He trolled for minnow here often during the long afternoons when his grandmother released him from the swarm of jobs she found for him every day. He knew this river—for to him it was a river, though barely ten feet wide and shallow enough to wade. If he followed it for a few hundred yards upstream he would come to the old bridge; where a seldom-used road crossed it and the heavy masonry was sunk in the water like the wall of a castle, with nothing but black darkness and skipping water rats under its arch.