The Book of Fires. Jane Borodale

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СКАЧАТЬ the house I see that my mother has unstrung the pig, and struggled it on to the bench. It is heavy on its side, and judders with fat when William rocks the plank to show me. ‘Mother’s cross. She’s shouting,’ he whispers at me plaintively. I touch his upturned face and wink at him to stay in the kitchen and guard the pig from dogs and rats. My mother is pouring the hot kettle over a board. She doesn’t look up from her cloud of steam.

      ‘Did she spare the skillet then, nor mind us asking?’ she says. A strong smell of scalding wood fills the room.

      ‘Why did you not wait for the men to move the pig, Mother?’ I say. I wish she would look at me. How I wish I could beg her to glance up now and notice me, to see how things are wrong. Standing there I count to four inside my head.

      ‘Oh, I must get on, Agnes,’ she says, slamming the kettle back on the black hook over the fire. The hook shakes with the weight. ‘The skillet!’ She holds out her hand. ‘Your father’ll not be back before midday if I know him.’ Her voice is flat and tense. ‘No, Hester!’ she shouts abruptly. ‘Put that down!’ And I reach out hastily and take a bowl away from the baby before she breaks it on the floor.

      My mother sits down then and rubs her sleeve over her forehead, and I see that her face is long and grey and tired, which makes the disquiet twist about inside me like a worm. How would she get by, were I not here to help her in the house? But of course from the back room the noise of Lil working the loom comes regularly hissing and clacking like a mechanical breath.

      ‘Where is Father?’ I ask.

      ‘Where do you think, Ag?’ she says shortly.

      Hester begins to crawl to me, gurgling with effort, her baby’s gown dragging at her knees through the dirt as she crosses the floor that wants sweeping. I wait again for my mother to ask me why my errand took so long, but she does not, and so I blink and turn away. Perhaps the fire needs to be stoked; I bend over the hearth, pushing the logs closer together to coax at the heat. I wish that colour wouldn’t rush so readily into my cheeks. I begin to talk up cheerfully about Mrs Mellin’s skillet.

      ‘She did mind, the old witch, but I promised her a bit of meat after the curing was done,’ I explain lightly. It is my first lie of such proportions, and it comes away from my tongue with an ease that I don’t much like. The tended flames gather and spark brightly from the wood.

      When my uncle arrives with his boots crunching on the path, and the butchering itself begins, I go straight to the trestle to cut up the onions and I turn my back. I find the smell of the pig is too strong this year for me to stomach. The blood is too red, the skin is too much like my own. I have to swallow over and over to go on with the cooking.

      My uncle is good with the butcher’s knife. Not like my father, who has not the patience. When I was smaller I liked to watch him cut up the carcass. There was a kind of miracle to the ease with which he separated the sides from each other, as though this was the way that nature had intended after all, it being so neat. I liked how the meat shrank away behind the cut of the knife as he worked, as if he had only to touch the meat in the right places to make it part of its own accord. Not the bones, though, all splintery rasping and sawing with blades to break them apart. Nor the fibrous caul that is beaded with fat round the stomach where the belly is flatter, he had to tug and rip at that to take it away to put into the larding pot. There should be six pints of lard to render and boil and strain from this pig, and some left to beat into flour to make fleed cakes.

      ‘Oh, the fat smells good!’ William is excited and jumps about, holding the spoon. When he skims off the scum as it rises his little mouth is opened up with concentration.

      The whole pig’s head boils whitely in a deep pot at the edge of the fire. I always set the pot so that the snout faces inward to the flames, as though it were warming itself and cannot see what we are doing to the rest of the body. I keep it covered to the ears so that it cannot even hear what we are saying, until it falls softly apart in its own juices. When it is done and taken away from the heat and cool enough to touch, William will sit and pick the head bone clean. He has a way with being careful, although he does not skin the tongue himself.

      I am thinking, thinking.

      At first in Mrs Mellin’s kitchen the thoughts had flung themselves from side to side in my head, like water does in the pail on the walk from the well. I’d paced about. My heart had beat so fiercely that I was afraid for it and pressed my fingers at my chest bone. All the time the coins were winking brightly at me, a yellow pile upon the wooden table. I had hardly dared to touch the coins again, although my fingers left the place over my heart from time to time and hovered near.

      Are they a sign from God? I’d thought.

       Shall I leave them untouched? Are they a check upon my honesty? Are they a gift from providence? Are they tainted by death? Do they belong to God now? How much is a burial? Is gold the devil’s property? What is the punishment for stealing from a corpse?

      The hens were fighting outside in her yard.

      I’d scooped grain from a bushel sack and stepped outside. It was somehow surprising that the same sun was still shining. I took a breath. The leaves on the beech trees and the birch were vivid and they caught at the light, making many shades of yellow against the blue sky. Two finches swayed on thistle-heads, plucking out seeds. The air was fresh and clean, a cold, scouring kind of air, making the world seem washed and bright. It could be hard to conceal a secret in such an atmosphere of clarity, I’d reasoned.

      I flung handfuls of grain and they drummed the ground firmly, as heavy rain does when it strikes baked earth at the start of a summer downpour. The hens strutted and flustered. It was extravagant to give good wheat to the birds but Mrs Mellin would not be needing flour where she had gone.

      I almost laughed at how the world had changed so sharply.

      The yellow coins had made my head feel light and free, quite a separate feeling from my bigger quandary.

      Only six of Mrs Mellin’s hens were left. A fox had taken the rest in October when the ground was hard with the second frost, creeping low out of the edge of the wood like a living shape of fear. The chickens that were spared the slaughter sat in the lower branches of the ash tree for two days until hunger drove them down again to scratch at the earth as if nothing had happened.

      I brushed my palms together to get rid of the wheaty dust and the feel of Mrs Mellin’s dead skin against my own. I took a breath. How cold and clear it was. Outside in the yard the world felt calm and ordinary. I counted some beats of my heart, eighteen, nineteen, thankful that no one could hear it.

      And I realised that if I were gone from here, nothing would change. Any space I left in the world would fill in quickly, as earth closes in when you pull beets up from the ground.

      I will take my disgrace elsewhere, I’d thought. I must run from here, until my shame is over or changed.

      Quickly I’d gone inside and bound the top of the sack of grain closed to keep out rats. I took up most of the coins and gathered them flatly into a coarse piece of cloth. I put one to my lips as I did so, I could not help but touch my tongue to it, and bite. It was cold and hard. The metallic taste was almost like blood, and a ball of my white breath puffed out into the cold air of the room. I folded the cloth tightly and tucked it between my stays and my skin. When I breathed in, I could feel the lump of the coins pressing my rib cage. My ears strained for any sound of footsteps on the path, glancing again and again through the dirty glass of the window facing the lane. I replaced the china jar on the mantelshelf neatly with the chipped part facing the wall. СКАЧАТЬ