Birchwood (5 page)

THE MAIN REASON I
was not sent away to a proper school was that we could not afford it. The finances of Birchwood were dwindling at the same rate as the decline of Papa's interest in the farm, which had never been great anyway. I can still see him, with ink-stained fingers and collar agape, his gold tooth glittering, crouched at his desk in the library in a pool of lamplight, scrabbling desperately among a litter of bills, and, a little later, standing in the shadows, where glass clinked furtively on glass, running his fingers through his hair, soothing himself. Of course our genteel slide toward penury was never mentioned, not in my presence, but the silent evidence of it was everywhere around me, in the cracked paint and the missing tiles, the dry rot that ate its way unchecked across the floors and up the stairs, in the games of musical chairs which Mama played, switching them from the front rooms to the back in a circle of increasing degeneracy until the day when, groaning and creaking, they regained their original places and the wheel ceased to turn. A leak, preceded by a burgeoning grey patch of damp, appeared in the schoolroom ceiling. Nockter, after an inspection of the roof, reported that half the slates had come loose and some were gone altogether. It would be repaired within days, Papa promised, he would get a man out from town, but the days became weeks, and I studied to the intricate accompaniment of the plop and splash of rainwater falling into a battery of jamjars ranged around me, and at last Aunt Martha and I were forced to abandon the schoolroom for the library. Then an army of rats laid siege to the kitchen.

The final proof, the clincher, as they say, that the Godkins were going the way of all the gentry, that is down, was the newfound boldness of the peasants. As my people knew, and lucky they did, there is nothing that will keep the Irish in their place like a well-appointed mansion. They may despise and hate you, only put a fine big house with plenty of windows in it up on a hill and bejapers you have them be the balls, stunned into a cringing, cap-touching coma. But beware. It is a fragile thraldom. The first unmended fence will mean the first snigger behind your back outside the chapel yard, an overrun garden will bring them grinning to the gate, and a roof left in visible disrepair will see them poaching your land in daylight, as now they poached ours, contemptuous not only of the law but even of my father's shotgun, which was no mean threat. That summer he took to rising early, long before dawn, to stalk the wood in search of the wolves who were decimating his flock. Often I was woken by his stealthy preparations, the creak of his boots on the stairs, the muffled rattle of cartridges, that abrupt crisp click as he broke the gun over his arm, and in my warm world under the blankets these sounds expressed exactly what I thought to be the control, the heroism and the humour of his venture. The side door closed softly behind him, and the silence reorganised itself to await his return. I imagined him moving through the chill black morning, across the lawn, slipping into the wood so quietly that it hardly noticed him, and then he was no longer what I knew, but was become an element of air and darkness, of leaves, thrilling and strange, an icy grin burning under the still trees.

Sometimes his safaris produced a trophy, and he might appear at first light with a crofter's wild-eyed son by the scruff of the neck and a brace of strangled pheasants over his shoulder, but I never knew him to do anything worse to a poacher than warn hifti that by god if he ever showed his snout near Birchwood again he would get a backside full of buckshot. Such warnings mostly went unheeded, but then I do not really think Papa wanted it otherwise, for the birds were only important to him now as bait for this subtler game. But I remember one morning early I was awakened by a confused clamour in the wood, shouts and challenges and the sudden grim roar of a shotgun, and I scrambled to the window and saw a little old man with bandy legs and a hat pulled down to his ears come crashing out of the trees into the delicately-lit dawn garden. His neat green footprints in the dewy grass traced a wide arc behind him as he galloped across the lawn toward the corner of the house and the fane he must have known was there which struck off around the tip of the wood to the road and escape. In one hand he clutched a dead pheasant, and in the other some other bird, a woodcock perhaps. Those winged things flapping and fluttering at the ends of his outstretched arms made it seem as if he were trying to take wing himself. He was skidding past the fountain when Papa, hastily slipping a cartridge into the gun, stepped through the gap the old boy had broken in the trees. He fired from the hip. A downstairs window shattered, and someone in the house squealed in sleepy terror. The poacher faltered, and glanced over his shoulder. Ahead of him a figure in a dressing gown appeared around the corner of the house and stood crouched in his path, capering excitedly. It was Granda Godkin. I would swear I heard the clatter of bones as the two old codgers crashed together. The woodcock, resuscitated for one splendid moment, flew straight up between them, shedding a spray of feathers in its wake. The poacher bounced off Granda Godkin, stumbled, regained his balance, drew back his arm and smacked him across the side of the head with the pheasant. More feathers, flying blood. Granda tottered, keeled over on his back, and the poacher sprang across his supine body and disappeared, leaving his hat behind him slowly spinning on the grass. Papa, the gun shaking in his hands, came and glared down at his fallen father, and for one wild moment I thought he was going to shoot him, but instead he turned on his heel and stamped toward the house, pausing only, almost absent-mindedly, to release the second barrel of the shotgun into the wood, blasting a ragged hole in the leaves.

‘Shite r

When I got downstairs the blood-spattered old man was being deposited on a couch in the drawing room. Mama, half dressed, walked around in circles, speechless and pale. My father gibbered furiously. Aunt Martha cursed him. It was pandemonium. They swabbed the gore on Granda's face and found that most of it was birdblood, though he had the beginnings of a splendid black eye, and the bird, dead and all as it was, had bitten a neat little comma from the rim of his ear. He turned up his eyes until only the whites were visible, or should I say the yellows, and moaned without ceasing. The window which Papa had shot was in splinters, and the wall behind the couch was pockmarked with pellets. He kicked a chair.

‘I know his face, I'll get his name, by god I'll make him hop…’ He stopped. Aunt Martha, bent over her father, had turned her head to glance at Papa with the faintest of smiles. He stared back at her, eyes popping, his mouth still working, and then suddenly he laughed, silently, and his shoulders shook. He crept out of the room. Granda Godkin wailed. He was never to recover from that dawn adventure.

Poachers were one thing, but more sinister by far were those other intruders who began to appear, mysterious wanton creatures glimpsed across the lake, or trailing down the fields toward the beach, a crowd of them, five or six, moving through the wood at dusk. The curious thing is that no one spoke of them, although we all must have seen them, unless I was subject to visions. It was as if their presence were an embarrassment. They might have been ghosts had they not been indifferent to the sombre duties of ghost-hood, for these visitants laughed and chattered, they were almost boisterous, but also, when I think of it, there was a certain distant quality about them, an aloofness, which had nothing to do with either ghostliness or the fact that they were seen only from a distance. They were like people at the far end of a room bent in unheard laughter whose private joke invests them with an impenetrable self-possession. It seemed impossible that they feared god or man, and perhaps it was their lack of fear which frightened us, for indeed we were afraid of them. My father's eyes began to display an edgy rear-regardant look, like that of a man pursued by playful furies, and often Mama would fall abruptly silent in the middle of a sentence and stare through the window toward the murmurous wood.

I think it was Michael and I who saw them first, one gloomy evening down near Cotter's place where we had built a fire. Our uneasy relationship had progressed with painful slowness through silences that were like endurance tests, and brief awkward disclosures which left us embarrassed and weary. I tried to interest him in the fantastical possibilities of the house, but he only smiled his enigmatic smile and moved away from me. Even then, in spite of our shared birthday, he was older than I. He had never learned to live indoors. I often came upon him standing stock still on one foot in the middle of a room, speechless and agonised, staring with that white fury at the shattered bits of an ashtray or a vase at his feet. He was obsessed by fire and water, by hawks and other wild things, and although Aunt Martha had excluded him from our lessons only to humiliate him, for she made a great show of despising her son, he seemed perfectly happy to forgo the joys of learning, and went to work on the farm instead. O but he was no bumpkin, no. He worked at farming, and hunted with Nockter, drank porter in secret, ate with his hands, but behind his rough ways there was something hard and cold and clever. He was playing a part, you see, just like the rest of us, only sometimes he betrayed the icy amusement, the steely anger, the pain, those things which made him a Godkin. I cannot say that I ever liked him, but there was between us a bond which would not be ignored however we tried, and we did try. Hence the silences, the disclosures, the sudden charges we made at each other across the distance that separated us, only to be jerked back by our congenital coldness from the final contact, that squelchy slap a human creature experiences when it surrenders to another.

He had attended school for a while and the religious instruction he had suffered there at the hands of the nuns formed the basis of many of our first conversations. In a house where religion was regarded, like foxhunting, as nothing more than a ritual proof of the indestructibility of our class, my own initiation into the celestial mysteries had been sketchy, to say the least, and I was not prepared for the rigour and savagery of that cult whose implacable paradoxes the good nuns had expounded to Michael. That day down in the crippled wood, while we sat like frogs by the fire with our ears buried in our collars, he told me about hell. It appears that if we follow the dictates of the nature god has given us, our reward will be to fry eternally in a lovingly prepared oven, whereas if we persist in denying the undeniable truth about ourselves we will be allowed to float for all time through an empty blue immensity, the adoration of the lord our only task. A most extraordinary concept, which we found screamingly funny, though we acknowledged the humour of it only by thoughtful sighs and gloomy silences, which is how children laugh at the vagaries of adults.

‘Just think of it,’ he mused, gazing into the singing flames. ‘Roasting. That would be awful. I remember a priest came once to give a mission, for three days, you know, praying and so on. He had a cross in his belt and he kept fiddling with it, I remember that, pulling at it. He said that if we did things to ourselves we'd be put into a special part of hell. I suppose he meant we'd have devils sticking forks in our mickeys. He was funny.’ He paused, and poked at the embers with a charred twig, faintly smiling. ‘Do you know what I did? After school I had to burn the dustbins, out behind the camp.’ He sniggered. ‘I did it into the fire!’

Did what? I laughed uncertainly, wondering what he could mean. Some happy thought struck him and he laughed again.

‘
I nearly put the fire out’

Then I heard them. They were above us. I heard their low voices, soft laughter, the crunch of dry leaves under their feet, and soon they appeared, flickering through the trees, a fat man and a fatter woman, a tall thin figure in a black coat, two girls and a youth, a small boy. Michael had not taken his eyes from the fire. I tugged at his sleeve, and he turned, unhappily, irritably, and snapped,

‘What do you want?’

I shrugged, obscurely angry at him, and looked up again and watched the crowd climb the hill diagonally and disappear over the ridge into the birch wood. I was not frightened, not exactly, but I felt a mingled excitement and dread, and a sensation of controlled and not unpleasant panic. I turned to Michael again, silently questioning. He glanced at me, away, nonchalant.

‘What's up? Did you see something? The fire's going out.’

I stared at him. Why should he lie?

THEY SEWED UP
Granda Godkin's ear and bathed his black eye back to its former jaundiced shade, but they could do nothing for his maimed brain. Now he shuffled between the poles of his existence, the dining room, the lavatory, his bed, wrapped in a numbed impenetrable lethargy, crouching under imaginary blows. Sometimes he would disappear for hours, to be discovered at last in a shuttered room standing bolt upright with his back pressed to the wall and his stricken wide eyes glowing faintly in the gloom. These periods of catalepsy terrified Mama. In her first year at Birchwood he had thrown, if that is the word, two epileptic fits, and although she had not witnessed them she was convinced that one day he would fling himself down at her feet, snapping and foaming, to expire slowly, with a great clamour of rattling heels and gnashing teeth, while she stood over him helplessly, gazing back horrified into his numbed beseeching eyes. Doc McCabe had once warned her that the old man must never be allowed alcohol. Now she fitted a rusty padlock on the rosewood cabinet in the dining room, and, sure that she had hit on a cure, walked out into the hall and found Granda Godkin teetering on the stairs, knees bent and arms outstretched, his fingers twitching, emitting through clenched teeth a high-pitched birdlike screech, and she was forced to admit finally that his mind was forever frozen in that moment of collision and clatter, feathers and blood, when that furious winged great creature had flung itself upon him in the dawning garden.

He ventured less and less often out of his room, and then took to his bed permanently. I was made to sit with him, I suppose on the principle that an old man should want the youngest carrier of his name and seed near him at the end. I suspect Granda Godkin could have managed without me. These vigils were excruciating. He lay motionless, watching his hands on the counterpane with profound suspicion, as though convinced that
they
had slipped into the bed an immensely patient, crafty assassin who was only waiting for a chance to throttle him. I sat on a hard chair trying to remain absolutely still, for at the slightest movement his lizard eyes flickered venomously at me. The air in the darkened room was viscous, tainted with faint odours, wax and excrement. My indifference toward the old boy turned to hatred. I wondered where his thoughts could possibly be during all those long days of immobility and silence. Old men have their interests, collecting stamps, antique matchboxes, interfering with little girls, but the most I could recall of his life was a wicked grin shuffling down the hall and a face staring vacantly into a fire. He had wasted that wealth of days, scooped out and discarded their hearts, happiest with husks. So much emptiness appalled me, I tried to creep away, those yellow eyes transpierced me.

One morning there was a startling change in his condition. Mama found him sitting up in bed rubbing his hands gleefully, trembling with excitement. God had come to visit him in the night.

‘That's nice,’ said Mama. ‘Did he have anything to say?’

He gave her a crafty sidelong look, became suddenly morose, and changed the subject by petulantly demanding his false teeth. They had been in a little glass there beside the bed. Where were they gone? She tried to outmanoeuvre him.

‘You know, I'm sure Mr Culleton would be very interested to hear about—’

‘Bugger that—where's my teeth?’

She had taken away that dangerous set of weapons while he slept. Now she brought them back. Poor Mama, no tenacity.

‘Where's Joseph?’ he cried, clacking his choppers. ‘I want to talk to Joseph.’

But when my father was found the old man had forgotten what he wanted to say. He lapsed again into silence and staring. By the afternoon he was delirious. An enormous woodlouse, he told us, was lumbering around the room with elephantine tread, blind antennae feeling the fetid air, searching for him. The louse, it seems, was god come a second time. The old man tried to flee from his bed and had to be restrained by force. His withered frame hid unexpected reserves of strength. The vicar and the doctor arrived together, unlikely angels of death. The Reverend Culleton had five minutes alone with the fast-failing sinner and came out of the sickroom looking decidedly shaken. Doc McCabe, hardly less decrepit than his patient, just looked down at the old man and shook his head.

‘What's wrong with him?’
Papa whispered. The whole business of this dying had come smack in the middle of a delicate and complex land deal.

‘Poor Simon,’ the Doc sighed. ‘Dear me, it seems like only yesterday…’

‘Yes yes, but what's
wrong
with him?’

Tor god's sake man, it's a wonder he's alive at all! He's as strong as a horse, must be.’ Papa looked down doubtfully at the ancient foetus in the bed. McCabe suddenly cackled. ‘It wouldn't surprise me if he lived another couple of years!’

Papa slowly closed his eyes.

‘Christ,’ he muttered, and walked away.

Granny Godkin refused to acknowledge that her sometime husband was on the way out. Perhaps she did not want to be reminded of her own approaching extinction, or maybe she was just not interested in the old man's going. I favour the latter. She sat by the fire in the drawing room all day and greeted Aunt Martha's bulletins from the sickroom with a deaf smile.

‘What's that you say, my dear…?’

I was summoned to the bedside in the evening. Granda Godkin wished to say goodbye to me. For a long time he said nothing. The others, at my back, began to fidget. He gazed through me, into his private pale blue eternity, and it was as if he were already dead, a mere memory, he was so thin and faded. At last his eyes came back and focused on me. He took me for my father, and said very clearly,

‘Joe, you'll never be anything but a waster!’

That was his farewell. I knew that those attendant silences behind me expected something of me, but what it was I did not know. I tried to take his hand but he would not let me lift it, and turned his face to the wall, so I caught hold of one of his brown-paper fingers and shook it solemnly and then made my escape. Did I mourn him? I suppose I did, in my way. But I felt, as I have felt at every death, that something intangible had slipped through my fingers before I discovered its nature. All deaths are scandalously mistimed. People do not live long enough. They come and go, briefly, shadows dwindling toward an empty blue noon.

One memory, hardly worth mentioning, but here it is, for lack of something finer. He taught me to ride a bicycle. In spring it was, of course, an April evening, sunlight, wind in the trees, the crocuses sprouting. A dog followed us, a miserable creature with a swollen belly and moist eyes. Granda Godkin loathed animals, he picked fights with them. That evening he would stop suddenly, turn, stamp his foot, growl. The tyke stopped too, looked at him attentively, one ear quivering, and set off after us again. The old man held the back of the saddle and trotted beside me, wheezing and gasping, roaring encouragement. I sat perched on this impossibly spindly, wobbling contraption with my heart in my mouth, pedalling furiously and getting nowhere until Granda, with one last tremendous shove, let go his hold and sent me sailing on alone. The handlebars trembled, the front wheel hit a stone, I squealed in fright, and then I felt a kind
of click
, I cannot describe it, and the bike was suddenly transformed into a fine and delicate instrument as light as air. The taut spokes sang. I flew! That gentle rising against the evening air, that smooth flow onwards into the blue, it is as near as earthbound creatures ever come to flying. It did not last long, I jumped down awkwardly, landed on my crotch on the crossbar, and the back wheel ran over my foot. I turned and looked back at Granda Godkin, shuffling behind me. He was speaking. Congratulations, surely?

‘I'm after twisting me hip!’ he cried.

He lived until late in the night, when I was awakened not by a sound but by something in the silence going awry. There was someone in the corridor. I peeped out. A shimmering pale figure descended the stairs swiftly and disappeared from view. The front door opened, I heard it, and felt the faint night air. A gleam of light fell across the landing and was immediately extinguished. The air bore traces of a woody perfume which at first I could not identify, I think because it was so familiar. There was a soft rustling sound followed by a gasp, and another figure appeared and crawled on hands and knees to the head of the stairs. He slithered down the first few steps, paused, and with a tiny cry plunged on down into the darkness. I was turning back into my room when I heard, far below, a bark like that of an animal in pain, and when I looked out from my window I saw him again, scuttling like a maimed crab across the lawn into the wood where a bird was singing, such beauty, such passion, a nightingale perhaps, although I do not think there are nightingales in this part of the world. Was it near dawn then? I went back to bed. Cigar smoke, yes, yes, wearily, sleepily, I admitted it.

They found him early in th& morning in the birch wood, curled like a stillborn infant in the grass. His ruined mouth was open, caked with black blood, and it was not until they were moving him that they discovered, in the tree beside which he lay, his false teeth sunk to the gums like vicious twin pink parasites in the bark. Aunt Martha came to my room to break the news to me. All I could do was sit on the side of the bed, speechless and numb, with my socks in my hand, and stare at her shimmering white nightgown, admitting to myself what I already knew, that I had not been dreaming. Exasperated by my dullness, she caught my shoulders and shook me until my jaws rattled.

‘Do you never cry
!’

Not yet.