Folk Page 13

  Every morning, when he stands in his front yard and looks out at the sea, Verlyn Webbe counts his blessings. The first is his wife, Werrity. He is lucky to have kept her, all these years. He is grateful for the shirts and the coats she stitches him, looser in the sleeve now, to lessen the ache in his wing. The feathers have started to turn white. He does not mind that when a feather drifts to the floor of the house, Werrity pinches it up and drops it straight in the fire.

  The next blessing he counts is his son, Marram. Barely a boy any more, his son is learning to dive, slowly lengthening his time underwater, growing his heart, stretching his limbs. His uncles have made a seventh seat in the stern of their boat. Sometimes Verlyn goes with them and watches Marram dive, wriggling like an eel away from the surface. The down at his thumbnail soaks away to nothing in the water. It makes Werrity smile to see her son salty, swaggering.

  The last blessings Verlyn counts are his brothers, all six of them, stronger and braver and bigger of heart than he is. When the seven Webbes and their seven wives gather, Verlyn greets Linnet as if she had always been Linnet Webbe, the gleeful wife of his youngest brother, Drake. Linnet laughs as she leans as if to shake his hand, and instead grasps the feather tips that spring white from his coat sleeve. Then Verlyn clenches the one strong hand that never touched her, and gently pulls his wing away.

  Firwit wakes with his cheek hot against waxy sheepskin and remembers, as he rubs away the itch of it with his gnarled knuckles, that he is alone. His mind is slower now; it creaks in the mornings as his bones do, and it is only the feel of this sheepskin wad beneath his head that reminds him. He has burned the feather pillows, choking on their scorched smoke. In case of fever lurking there, he told himself. He did not believe, and still does not, Ivy Rincepan’s words, the day she helped him clear the sickness from the room.

  ‘Look close,’ Ivy Rincepan said, dangling one of the pillows from her stubby fingers. All Firwit saw was a well-used sack of down, blotched brown. ‘I can know who stuffed this from the jig-jag tacking and all the quills poking through, for want of soaping the inner. One of Guller’s, done himself.’ She tore at a loose corner, and pulled out a fistful of brown and grey down. ‘He’ll put any old flotsam in them. I daresay whatever he sweeps from his own floor. I opened up one I had off him, once, to put into fresh ticking, and found a lark’s head amongst the down. My youngest had been talking in his sleep all winter and that were the reason.’ Ma Rincepan poked about in her fist, sending curling drifts into the air. ‘Here’s one, see?’ She picked out a straight grey quill. ‘A flight feather, that is. Put those in your pillows and even the soundest mind won’t rest. No sleep, not even for the blessed, with that under your ear. Guller knows that sure as anyone. Maybe it’s carelessness, or meanness with his stuffing, but I see malice in it.’

  Firwit did not see malice, for he was too weary to see anything at all at that moment. Then he saw only the tales of the village women, his neighbour Ma Rincepan among them; women who will find magic where there is nothing, and prefer gossip to good sense.

  He is too old now for fancies, for dreaming. He burned the pillows only because he wanted them gone. But turning against his folded sheepskin at night now, for he will not take a new pillow, he dreams his brother, Murnon, over and over.

  A cracked heel bone – a stumble in the sheep field, his first slip in fifty years – was all that kept Murnon in his bed at first. He was rueful. The sheep would keep, he said. But Murnon, his foot nestled in a pile of fleece, could no longer keep his nightly habit of walking out at the deepest hour. He lay awake, a fidgeting, twitching heap against the pillow. He’d never wanted more than a few hours’ rest before the dawn, after he came home from his nightly ramble. But now that he must lie in bed, sleep was stolen from him.

  A sickness only, a strange fever that would pass, Firwit thought, brought on by a split bone. So, he let in the night wind off the hill, hoping the brackeny air would bring Murnon peace. He warmed the hardened honey the beekeeper had brought and sweetened the last of the barley bread his brother had made, but Murnon would not take it. You eat, he said, and rubbed his reddened eyes. In the dark, Murnon whimpered, but when Firwit lit a candle for the comfort of light his brother snuffed it out, as if he knew, even then, it must not be used up.

  After four days and nights of wakefulness, Firwit could no longer get sense from Murnon. After six, he barely recognised his brother. His haggard face became a wraith of its original, eyes shrunk deep in hollows dark as bruises. The voice that rasped from his parched mouth spoke in riddles, of stars and night, flight and wings, only halting now and then to beg for a sight of sky.

  Firwit used strips from his own workshop, edge cuttings of sheepskin, to bind the mittens tight on his brother’s hands, for after Murnon had plucked the lashes Firwit feared he’d tatter his very eyelids away. Denied his night walks, his brother’s mind had slipped away so fast that he chewed through the leather whenever Firwit gave in to sleep for an hour or two. Sleep, the gift he could not give his brother.

  A fortnight it is now since Murnon took those chewed strips, hoarded for the purpose, and made one long cord. Plaited neatly, it had been, as if his fingers found calm at the end, as if his mind regained judgement and his wrecked body some unworldly strength. Firwit, waking to a chilly dawn, had taken a blanket to Murnon and stared, senseless, at the empty bed. His brother had not dragged himself far. The cord he’d made still held him, slumped against the ladder to the loft, and it was tough, too tough for Firwit’s pocket knife, so Firwit hacked in panic at the leather and was not ready when the weight of the body dropped hard and threw him against the boards. The criss-cross pattern of the plaited leather stayed in the loose skin of Murnon’s throat. Firwit covered the mark with his own best kerchief for the burying, in pity, in penance.

  It is that moment, the struggle of his knife against the cord and the joined tumble of two old men against wood that hurt only one of them, which tosses Firwit from his sheepskin sleep each night. He bears the terror without the comfort of light, for he wants his share of darkness. It was Murnon made the candles from their own sheep’s tallow, never Firwit. There are two left, pale guardians standing on the mantel, silent on the matter of how they came into being.

  In the midnight black Firwit listens to his own fast breath like the ghost of his brother’s in this room. Then he listens to the parchment in the windloft above his bed, the smooth, creamy skins of Murnon’s sheep splayed in their frames, which shift and jolt against the beams in the night breeze. So unlike the sheep they came from, those thinned skins. They are like row upon row of ships’ sails, catching the breeze through the latticed walls, longing to cut across water in full sun. The gentle clacks of the frames in the rush of air used to call him to a calm day’s work of soaking, scraping, cutting. They sound to him like awkward wingbeats now. Is this what Murnon heard, a roof full of flapping birds above his sleepless head? Was it this, over a pillow stuffed with Guller’s feathers, that made him walk out every night?

  Firwit rubs his knuckles, stiff as untended hinges. When his fingers will bend he pulls on boots, fleece and cap, pushes the door and steps out into the quiet night. Its air is a sweet-salt draught of grass, first sap and seaweed. Bones aching, he lets the slope lead him further up the hillside, treading his path from the night before, the night before that. The sea hushes far below; it must be calm at the shore. The forest whispers back. He is the only restless one, out in the night.

  Before the turn, before sleep left him altogether, Murnon was the night walker. Save the nights of the Great Storm, when trees slid across the hill, there’s hardly been a midnight his brother did not slip out into the dark. He’d be out for hours, watching the sheep, watching what else? Firwit has not dwelt on it till now, now he is taking his turn in the night. He has come to think that this is where his brother left his spirit, in the dark on the hill, for he is sure it was not in his body that last week. The raging, weeping thing that half-resembled Murnon, writhing in its feather
bed, did not know him, and he did not know it.

  He climbs higher with the path, hearing scurries in the undergrowth, until in the moonlight he can see the stone wall of the sheep field above. The smell of their dung comes to him and is a comfort and a worry at once. He only understands these creatures as carcasses, can handle a flayed sheepskin with his eyes shut, but living, breathing in this field, they are Murnon’s domain. Reaching the wall, he scans for the huddle of bodies, imagines them warm in their waxy coats. He would like to grasp those curls, like a human head, like his own before it withered to the whiskered scalp beneath his cap. Murnon’s curls were white as sea foam by the end.

  The sheep are at the high edge of the field, where the earth is driest, he supposes. Perhaps he can get to know their ways, get to grips with the work his brother did. He skirts the field outside the low stone wall, creeping towards them. His toes are dampening with the dew soaking his boots, the wind rushing louder on the hill, filling his ears with its low chords. He stops when he hears a high, mournful whistle floating in the currents above him. A shape circles against the ghostly cloud, then sweeps down to land on the top wall of the sheep field. Crows will peck the eyes from new lambs, Murnon has told him. But there are no lambs yet, and he knows that whistling song. It is no crow.

  He walks towards the shape. When he raises a hand to pull his cap down tighter against the wind, it rises and swoops close over him, its piping wail threading through his head before it turns and flies off towards the forest. Firwit stares after it. That whistle is the call of a kite. Never has he heard one at night, but when has he listened? He knows from the hunters that kites sleep through the dark. The younger ones even lie down, like people in their beds.

  There are still many hours before dawn will come and the night is chill, as if the moon’s icy eye made cold where it spread its light. The sheep are quiet. Firwit unbends his creaking knees and begins to tramp again, along the ridge of the hill towards the wood. The ground drops down to the trees, where the wind cannot reach to whip at him. He steps between two trunks, into the wood’s held breath, and stands. The quiet is like a blanket about his head. It is darker, the wood is fuzzed grey where moonlight reaches down between branches, and Firwit stalks slowly on his hidden feet, placing palms on trunks, soothed by the scent of bracken as he treads it down.

  From deep in the wood, he hears the long, piping cry. He shakes his head to shake out the sound, but it comes again. He is careless of the brambles that tear at his legs, of the cracks of snapping deadwood as he pushes through the tangle, holding twigs from his eyes with his bent elbow. Moonlight pours into the clearing and he can see, in a wide patch that has been swept clean of leaf mulch, a dark thing, lying like a dropped shawl. He looks around at the still trees. Bending down close, he makes out that the thing is a large bird. It looks dead. He nudges it with a knuckle, then grasps a wing, the feathers seeming to thrust against his palm. He turns it over. It is not whole. There is no mound of chest, or soft belly feathers. Rather, it is the husk of a kite, no bones within, the inside of the skin rough but dry, hardened. Someone has made it, carefully peeled the skin from bird flesh, cleaned it, kept the feathers good. He thinks of Guller, the bird man, for who else would know, or want, to make such a thing? Firwit picks it up by the head and finds twists of wool stuffed inside. It is wool from Murnon’s sheep. He knows by the feel of its waxy warmth, the spring of the curl.

  All the walk home, the world is silent. Firwit carries the kite skin, the wind giving life to its wings even in his grasp. His thoughts drift with the whistle in the woods, the looping calls of kites woven together with his brother’s cries. Murnon, Guller, birds where they should not be; there’s no sense to it, and he feels the place where he keeps his brother in his mind grow dark. He cuts Murnon down from the ladder three, four, five times before he reaches home, where he tucks the bird husk under the rosemary bush in the yard before he opens the door. It does not belong in the house.

  The parchment is silent in the windloft. It will soon be day.

  After dozing through dawn’s rustlings, Firwit wakes as he often does now, to a rap at the door and his name called, loud and cheery. Ivy Rincepan has taken to bringing him milk, and lately adding a loaf or a cake, of a morning. He watches her gaze flit around the smirched room when she sidles in.

  Ivy Rincepan frowns. ‘Don’t you get worn, Firwit,’ she says, as she clatters about. ‘You get back to your habits, that’ll set you right.’ She passes him a cup of milk. ‘Now drink up,’ she says. ‘I got by the dairy early, and March put cream in that for you, and all.’

  He sits up, heavy, in his bed, and watches her. She is fishing now into the cold pot where yesterday he tried to boil the salt out of some cured mutton for supper, as Murnon used to do, but instead turned the meat to shoe leather.

  ‘Three soaks, and change the water,’ she says briskly, the grey strip dripping between her fingers. ‘I’ll take this one for the hound.’

  Firwit’s only skill with food is turning the sheep’s soured milk into cheese, but the season is long over, and he’s none left to trade. Bread and meat were Murnon’s gifts, another thing he will have to learn. As if she sees his thought, Ivy goes on, ‘I’m needing some good raw wool, myself. Enough for a dozen skeins or so, and the same again for Sil, up on the hill. Never puts down her knitting, that one. I know Murnon had a few sacks left to trade.’ She is glancing at the stack of sacks, dry in the hearth corner. ‘Keep you in milk and meat a good while on that. Eggs too, if you want, from the ducks. Better than those nest-robbed nothings Guller used to give your brother – barely a mouthful each one, and beaks sticking between your teeth.’

  Firwit is grateful for the kindness. He nods and Ivy opens up a sack and begins pulling out handfuls of waxy curls, filling her basket. As it reaches brimful, Firwit again reaches the edge of his knowledge, which used to match so neatly with Murnon’s that neither took any notice of where one stopped knowing and the other started. How much wool is a good trade, he cannot guess. How many eggs, how much meat, is a brimming basket worth?

  Ivy closes up the sack and, rubbing her hands on her skirts, peers into the empty grate. ‘And May the fiddle-master’s after more of your fine parchment, now she’s took to writing down her tunes. You’ll have some ready for her soon, will you?’

  Firwit is still clutching the cup of milk, not drinking though he is thirsty. He is thinking of the bird husk in the yard, the kite whistling in the forest. Ivy is staring at him, hands on hips. ‘Must keep body and soul together, Firwit,’ she says, stern as to a child, ‘and the best way to keep whole is to keep at your work.’ She nods up at the windloft, from where the faint tap of the parchment frames echoes.

  As she bends to poke at the dead ashes, a feather slips from between the ceiling planks and drifts down to stroke Ivy’s neck. She shrieks and bats blindly at it, but when she sees it is not a spider, or a moth wagging frantic wings, she is solemn.

  ‘What’s one like this doing here?’ she asks Firwit. The feather is as long as her forearm, striped red. He can’t answer. He works at keeping birds from the windloft, hooking down nests that sometimes sprout in the rafters. ‘Not one as belongs in a house. You mark this, Firwit. The only man likely to have feathers like this about him is Guller, and you know where I believe he stands in all of this.’

  Firwit’s neck is hot against the sheepskin wad. Old ma’s tales, he reminds himself, but the feather has irked him. It looks to be a kite’s. He left the bird husk in the yard.

  He climbs the ladder to the windloft when she has gone. The wind flicks the parchment skins in their frames, those taut white sails, and he walks between the rows, letting the breeze that has dried them cool the sweat on his neck. The wind is soft today through the loft’s open sides, the lattice of beams there casting stripes of shadow across the skins. They are sleek, unblemished, every one scalded and scraped in the good calm of work that Firwit used to find so easily. He crouches in the shady space between the frames and picks up a long fea
ther, reddish brown. Another lies in the next row, turning in the draught. He looks up for nests, even though he knows Ivy Rincepan was right. These are no eave-birds. The long whistle of the kite on the hill, and its reply caught in the deep net of the forest, echoes in his head.

  It is Murnon’s flock that gave the hides, Murnon’s skill with a knife that split them, so cleanly, that each hide yielded two faultless sheets. At the loft’s far end is the last skin, the one he’s yet to work at. When it is finished, there will be nothing to do but take up Murnon’s knife and begin learning how to slaughter, how to bleed, and finally, how to flay. Murnon’s blade is long, heavy, petering to a fine point. Firwit picks up his own blade, a dull crescent moon; feels the sweep and arch of the scraping work in his shoulder. He tests the curved metal edge with his thumb. He has done half of everything for more than forty years.

  He puts the blade back up on its hook and carries the two feathers down from the windloft and out into the yard. He cannot remember which of them, himself or Murnon, hammered down the stones that shine now in the places they’ve trodden most. He scans the lane below and then ducks to look beneath the rosemary bush. The bird skin has gone. Carried away by a fox, of course, or one of the village dogs. But it is Ivy Rincepan’s warning he cannot shake from his mind as he lies back down on his bed. He’s not spoken to Guller for many years. It was Murnon did any trades they might need with him. Firwit, ever hearing the man’s shrill laugh in the ale room or on the lane, would turn away. There was something in Guller’s childlike face, some darkness behind it, that he could not abide.

  Firwit sleeps, deep and dreamless against his sheepskin, until dusk. Later, when the bats begin to sweep the insects from the gloom, he sets off again, up the hill, letting the wind fill his ears.