The Woman who Loved an Octopus and other Saint's Tales (15 page)

One day, she is asked to supply a saint's statue for a new church they're building in her home village. The priest wants a Martyred Tydfil with pink cheeks and golden hair and a lot of arrows sticking out of her.

But Mistress Morfudd makes a different statue: a short woman with dark hair and a smile on her lips.

She walks across the mountains and puts it up in the church herself; she tells people that she is making a pilgrimage. The new church is built of stone: much grander than my little hut ever was. Morfudd hesitates for a moment before crossing its threshold; then she enters slowly and puts the statue down. She looks around herself, uncertain.

‘I don't know if you're still here. I wanted to thank you.'

I give her a kiss on the ear for an answer, and she smiles and kisses the statue back.

For a time I live in my new church, inside Morfudd's statue. I listen to people's wishes and prayers and help where I can. Girls tell me about their troubles and ask for painless monthly bleedings, deliverance from an unwanted marriage, happiness in love. Some seek mercy from a mother who torments them with beatings or a father who uses them as he would a wife.

A new priest comes to the village, and soon my ears are full of stories from children who cry while they tell me of his wandering hands and the cruel pinchings he gives them in parts of their bodies he calls dirty and sinful.

I take myself off into the forest to ask the help of some of the creatures there. I feel a great weight lifting as I am back on the hillside, in the changing light made by the patterns of wandering clouds, in the sighing winds and the gold and brown and green of leaves and branches. When I return to the village, I am not alone. I bring with me a plague of wood lice to infest the priest's house, woodpeckers to drum on his walls and shutters during the day and owls to keep him awake at night.

Every time he goes out, I walk beside him and shout, ‘Confess your sins!' in his ear, until I feel like a
gwdihw
myself.

Before the old moon has quite changed into the new, the priest has left.

The wood lice, owls and woodpeckers go back to the forest and the hills, and I decide to go with them. I have seen enough of my own kind.

* * *

I share the bodies of birds for many generations. The feel of the wind through my wing feathers is so like the breeze in my leaves when I was a tree; but oh, the ecstasy of flying; the exhilaration of tussles won against the wind; of plummeting down, down, down like a stone with the air screaming in my ears, only to open my wings at the last moment and to sail upwards again, up and up and up until all the world is sky and cloud, cold air and gusting wind and the earth far, far below.

I do not think that I will want to go back to the world of my own kind, not yet, not for a long time, perhaps not ever again. But one day, they start coming into my forest on the hillside.

First it is groups of women and children, collecting bundles of wood. Then it is men with axes and saws. They start cutting down the trees.

From the valley below, columns of smoke rise, clouds of burning sparks explode. They are burning my trees.

In the place of the hamlet now stands a town. There is a forest of buildings made of stone. The earth has been studded with stones and covered with ashes and filth, animal dung and human shit. The smell of smoke is everywhere. There is a neverending thudding and screeching and the roar of human voices, day and night. My ears hurt. I have never seen so many people in one place. Even Morfudd's market town across the hills was not as large as this.

After a time, my ears attune themselves to the constant noise. I begin to pick out individual voices. There are many people who speak a language I don't understand. Others speak my language, but with accents I have never heard before.

I look for my church and finally find it. It is still in its old place, but it is now hemmed in by houses on every side, and it has changed yet again. It has become a dark, solemn building. I go inside. Morfudd's statue is gone.

But I suppose it is still my church.

I listen to the prayers of the people who come in. Many girls speak of homesickness for the fields and hills they have left behind in order to come to this grey, stinking place.

I sit by them and whisper stories in their ears of life as a tree, as a bird, as an ant, as a fish in a stream, as a bear in the forest. I talk of the currents of wind and water, of brown soil teeming with creatures. I tell them what it feels like to move as a many-legged wood louse, as a teetering spider, as a slick, slithering earthworm. They listen, and when they leave their backs seem straighter, their faces a little less pale.

Most of them are servants, like my Morfudd before she became Mistress Morfudd the woodcarver. They have come to work in this grey place with its shroud of smoke because they were looking for work, for money, for food. I follow them when they leave my church. I watch as they work: one lifts heavy sheets out of tubs of steaming water, another serves pints of ale, a third has sex with men down dark alleys. They sew clothes, cook meals, break up lumps of stone with heavy hammers, pick pockets, run errands for a mistress.

The barmaid is Siân. Elizabeth is a widow, a seamstress who takes in laundry. When there is no work and no food for her children, she walks the streets for a week, for a month, until times get better. Mary works in one of the mines that burrow deep underground to bring up stone that burns with a fierce heat. Gwen and Bess are servants in the house of a magistrate who sometimes uses the services of Jennie the whore. His wife knows, and takes her shame and anger out on Bess and Gwen.

And yet Jennie and Siân, Sara and Mary, Elizabeth and even Gwen come to my church to listen to my stories of life in the forest, yes, but also to give thanks to God for having led them to this town. Life here is hard, but life at home was impossible. There is food here. Money. Freedom. At home, they might have starved. They would not have found a husband, or would have been married against their will. So they left. Some ran away. Here, there is a chance of seeing the world. Adventure. Riches even! says Jennie and they laugh.

I am envious of the lives of those girls. I ran away from home, once, when I was still alive.

I have been dead for so long.

They have left my church, all except for Sara, the pickpocket. She is very young, not yet fifteen, and has nowhere to live. She has come a long way, and sometimes she still looks over her shoulder to make sure that nobody is following her. She has run away from the stick in her mother's hand. She has not been here long enough for all the scars on her body to fade from the colour of blood to that of skin. She lives on the streets, living off what she can steal. At night, she tells herself stories to keep the ghosts away.

‘I am a ghost,' I tell her. I pass my hand through the air above her back, I am afraid to touch her even with my ghostly hand. I wish I could perform a miracle for her.

In a lake in my forest I met a fish once who had known a salmon, so I tell Sara the tale of the salmon's wanderings across the big, bottomless sea, right over the edge of the world and through the ocean that we think is the night sky. The salmon said that what look like stars to us are really the twinkling scales of fish in the water.

Sara listens. When I have finished my tale she looks up. She looks right into my eyes. She can hear me. She can see me.

She raises her hand and puts it on my arm. I can feel it. She can touch me. Her hand is so warm.

We sit there in a pew in my church, and look at each other.

Bibliography

This list is by no means exhaustive. The books on it are good places to start for finding out more about the saints of
Wales, about the times some of them lived in, and about the workings of legend, myth and history:

Baring-Gould, Rev Sabine,
The Lives of the British Saints
, Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, London, 1907

Beddoe, Deirdre,
Welsh Convict Women
, Stewart Williams Publishers, Barry, 1979

Brouten, Bernadette,
Love between Women, Early Christian responses to female homoeroticism
, University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1996

Doble, G.H. (ed Simon Evans),
Lives of the Welsh Saints
, University of
Wales Press, Cardiff, 1984

Rees, Rev. W. J.,
Lives of the Cambro British Saints
, Society for the Publication of Ancient Welsh Manuscripts, Abergavenny, 1853

Rees, Rice, B.D.,
An Essay on the Welsh Saints or the Primitive Christians
, London, 1836.

Spencer, Ray,
A Guide to the Saints of Wales and the West Country
, Llanerch Press, Felinfach, 1901

Warner, Marina,
From the Beast to the Blonde
, Vintage, London, 1995

Ellen Galford's novel
The Fires of Bride
first gave me the idea to write this collection of stories.

Cofen
was inspired by Alifa Rifaat's short story ‘My World of the Unknown' (in
Distant View of a Minaret
, Heinemann, London, 1987)

Acknowledgements

Elke, Britta, Jane and Rachel for listening.

Magnetic North Writers' Group for feedback, support, challenges and suggestions.

Chris, who believed in me.

Lesley, Meena, Alexa, Donna, Frank, Sandra, Sue, Rosy and Vanina for encouragement and friendship.

All at Seren, for giving me a chance; and Penny Thomas in particular, for being a great editor to work with.

About the Author

Imogen Rhia Herrad is a freelance writer and broadcaster. Born and brought up in Germany, she has also lived in Wales (where she learnt Welsh) and in Argentina, and currently divides her time between London and Berlin.

Her short stories and articles have been published in magazines and anthologies in Wales, Canada and the United States.

Imogen won third prize in the London Writers' Competition for her children's story
The Wind's Bride
. Her short story
The Accident
was shortlisted in the Quality Women's Fiction 10th Anniversary Competition and longlisted for the Raymond Carver Short Story Awards.

The Woman who Loved an Octopus and other Saints' Tales
is her first collection.

Seren is the book imprint of Poe
try Wales Press Ltd 57 Nolton Street, Bridgend, Wales CF31 3AE

www.seren-books.com

© Imogen Rhia Herrad, 2007

ISBN 978-1-78172-131-5

The right of Imogen Rhia Herrad to be identified as the author of his work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

A CIP record for this title is available from the British Library.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted at any time or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the copyright holder.

Cover illustration and design: Andy Dark

The publisher works with the financial assistance of the Welsh Books Council.