A String in the Harp (12 page)

“Not everyone,” Becky contradicted. “We only ever had one car and a black and white television.”

“What about gangsters?” asked Dai eagerly. “Do you have them in Amherst?”

Becky giggled. “Only in movies. That’s Chicago.”

Jen wanted to give her a kick under the table, but hit the table leg by mistake.

“Oh,” said Dai, evidently disappointed.

“And there are lots of cowboys and Indians out west,” continued Becky.

“Becky!” said Jen.

“Well, there are.”

Mr. Evans nodded knowingly. “I’ve seen them on telly. We know about that.” Jen let it go, her sense telling her it was pointless to argue that Becky was exaggerating. “What about Wales?” she changed the subject. “Does it ever snow here in the winter?”

“It snows in Ameryca,” Mr. Evans stated.

“Lots,” Becky agreed.

“Not by yere,” said Dai. “We don’t get snow much yere.”

“North in Snowdonia they do. Blizzards they have. And further east away from the sea,” Aled told Jen. “It won’t be cold enough yere, see.”

“It snows up by Arwell Jones past Bont Goch,” offered Evan.

“Aye, he’s east then, isn’t he?” said Aled impatiently.

“No snow this weather you can be sure,” said Mr. Evans. “River’s way up the
cwm
after last night, and still there’s rain.” He leaned back in his chair and lit a tiny cigar. “Should think Cors Fochno’d be under water this time.”

Mrs. Evans whisked the empty plates off into the sink and put another huge, hot dish on the table, this one full of rice pudding, with a pitcher of thick yellow cream and a stack of brown bowls.

“Gram, it was, saying the last storm this bad was all of six years past when the dam up by the Electric broke and John-the-Hill lost his cow byre. Weren’t you, Gram? Pass cream, Dai, don’t sit like a lump looking at it!”

“Aye, a night that was,” said Mr. Evans remembering. “The Electric just new up there and half swept down the valley it was. Of course, they had no business putting the dam there in first place. I said that then.”

Aled gave his father a scornful look. “We’ve heard that before, Da.”

“And no one to prove me wrong, either,” returned Mr. Evans warmly. “None to say there weren’t something in the hills tried to stop them.”

“And that something John-the-Hill himself! Never wanted the dam there, he didn’t.”

“Weren’t John-the-Hill.”

“What
was
it?” asked Becky intrigued.

“Now, Evan,” warned Mrs. Evans.

“Things as can’t be explained by the likes of him,” indicating
Aled, “things best not talked of too much. There are creatures back there it’s best we have nowt to do with, my little one,” he said gravely.

Aled snorted, Mrs. Evans shot him a quelling look, and he kept his mouth shut.

But, “The Old Ones,” said Rhian.

“If you’re through pudding, Rhian, you can clear table,” said her mother.

This time Jen and Becky helped, and before long were drying dishes, trying to keep up with Rhian who was washing. The little door in the right wall opened into a stone larder, Jen discovered when Mrs. Evans opened it to put the leftover food away.

Evan settled Gram again by the fire where she took up a ball of red yarn and a crochet hook, and the four men stretched themselves in chairs around the hearth. The marmalade cat sprang into Aled’s lap and made itself comfortable, closing its yellow eyes, and he hunched over it, tickling the fur behind its ears.

“Will it rain much more then, Da?” asked Rhian, scowling as she scoured the pudding pot.

“Be steady through till morning, shouldn’t wonder.”

“There’ll be a high tide at Borth tonight,” said Aled.

“The waves were right over the sea wall yesterday,” Rhian told him.

“Aye. Some smashed windows, I’d guess. Sea heaves fair big stones up in storms like this. But wind’s dropped anyway.” Mr. Evans breathed a cloud of blue smoke. “This’ll be a storm like the one flooded the country yere about thousands of years ago.”

“A flood,” said Becky. “Does it happen often?”

Mrs. Evans was putting away the crockery. “Nay, it were thousands of years, if you can believe the story.”

“Like the Electric,” said Aled darkly.

“It’s true enough, the flood,” Mr. Evans said severely.
“Even your scientists have been finding traces of it, see. And if you know where to look, happen you can find bits of the old land when the tide’s right.”

“The flood never went down?” asked Jen in a curious, choking voice.

“Not all of it did. It were out by Borth where it flooded according to the legend. A land called the Low Hundred, in Welsh
Cantrev y Gwaelod,
it being so flat. The sea just came over the sea wall in a storm like this and the land vanished, see. I’ve heard some say you can hear bells ring under the water out by the river mouth—sixteen towns were lost.”

“What can you still see?” Becky demanded. “Can I see any of it?”

“That you can, if you know the spot. There’s a great piece of the sea wall comes up out of the bay between Borth and Aberystwyth. Goes straight as an arrow from by the cliff, it does.”

“And it is a very good story, Da,” said Aled. “But there are other explanations for that heap of stones.”

“Aye, and I’ve heard them,” declared Mr. Evans, pitching the last scant quarter inch of his cigar into the fire. “You can believe what you like, Aled, lad. And I’ll be believing what I like. You’re not changing my mind.”

Mrs. Evans noticed Jen’s white face. “Enough talk of floods and all, I should think,” she said briskly.

“Time we were back to work,” said Mr. Evans. He got up reluctantly.

“And we should be getting back to Borth, I think,” said Jen, pulling herself together. “It was very nice of you to let us stay, Mrs. Evans.”

“Not a bit,” replied Mrs. Evans warmly. “You’re welcome here when you can come, you both. Does Gram and me a world of good seeing new faces, don’t it, Gram? Here, you Aled, you can walk down the hill with them, just to see them on their way. They won’t be familiar with the track.”

Aled made no protest, just shrugged his narrow shoulders in assent. They waited until Mr. Evans, Dai, and Evan had pulled on their boots and macs in the little porch and gone before they went out.

It was raining just as hard. Jen thought it would go on forever. The sky was swollen and heavy with it.

Aled looked at it and nodded. “Rain till morning easy,” he predicted gloomily.

“Do you lose any sheep when it’s like this?” Jen asked out of politeness.

“Sometimes. They get mired, and some get caught in the
cwm
when the water rises.”

“Why don’t you think it’s true about the flood and the sixteen towns?” asked Becky, matching Aled’s long strides with trouble. He was small, but he walked like Rhian with quick, swinging steps.

“Superstition, that is,” he said scornfully. “There is lots of people believing superstitions around here. They’ll tell you the most wonderful stories, they will, and when you’re asking for proof, it’s then you find they can’t give it. Nothing to show. Long as they believe that stuff they won’t get ahead any. Like the Electric. They think that’s special country up there, magic, and they’d have kept it out. But we’d not have lights at the farm without, see.”

“But what about the walls your father said he could see?” Becky persisted.

“If believing makes them walls.” Aled shook his head. “More likely the sea made them, not men at all. Bloke at the University says they’re natural, and he’s the one can show you proof, not Da.”

They walked on in silence. In what seemed a very short time, they reached the bottom of the hill and the tiny cluster of houses and pub called Tre’r-ddôl. Here Aled left Jen and Becky and, without a backward glance, strode back up the hill toward Llechwedd Melyn. The two girls found shelter from
the rain in the entry of the pub until the bus came and they could climb into its dry, lighted warmth and be carried back to Borth.

T
HE VISIT TO
L
LECHWEDD
M
ELYN
had not been entirely successful. It disturbed Jen more than she liked to admit to think of Mr. Evans’s story about the flooding of the land called the Low Hundred. She sifted it vainly for some word or phrase that would prove he did not really believe it himself, just considered it a good story. And she drew back from making the inevitable connection between that story and Peter’s.

Mr. Evans was a kind of person entirely new to Jen. She found him unsettling. He was an adult who still believed in magic and superstition and in the power of creatures Rhian had called “the Old Ones.” They were things for children, things you outgrew like Santa Claus and fairy tales. Mr. Evans ought to know better—his son Aled certainly did.

And Becky was no help at all, Jen thought crossly. She liked the story of the flood. She said she could see no reason why it couldn’t be true. “After all, look at the Bog, Jen. If the Low Hundred was land like that, it’s no wonder it flooded.”

It was a relief to concentrate instead on Christmas, which was practically on top of them, and Jen plunged into it almost fiercely. There hadn’t really been any Christmas last year, because
Anne Morgan had been killed only two weeks before and they had all been in a state of shock, too numb and unbelieving to celebrate anything.

Whatever could be salvaged of the holiday, Aunt Beth and Uncle Ted had valiantly pieced together for the children, especially Becky. David was beyond reach. He had shut himself off from them all like someone in a dream. He was unwilling or unable to respond, unconscious of all that went on around him. It had been a nightmare time of Santa Clauses and Christmas cards, and notes of sympathy and flowers. People had tried so hard to help, but they didn’t seem to understand that there was nothing they could do.

A great aching hole had been gouged in the family that no one could fill, and, like a vacuum, it sucked them all into a void. There were presents, a few very good friends, snow on the ground, the College carol service. Jen could still feel the horror that had overcome her at seeing her father cry during that carol service. It had frozen her, made her unable to think or to move. She had not soon forgiven him for it because she couldn’t bring herself to reach out and say or do something that would comfort him.
He
should have been comforting her.

And Becky and Peter? Jen didn’t know what they felt. She was struggling too hard with her own feelings to be aware of theirs.

Looking back on that Christmas, Jen discovered little of it was clear. It had become a disordered muddle of isolated moments, the sight of the family car hideously flattened, the heavy, waxen lilies in the chapel, shaking hands endlessly and listening to people say “I’m so sorry . . .” Bewilderment, hurt. But it was odd that the details were not all sharp in her mind.

The hole where Anne had been was still there, its edges a little less jagged now, but Christmas had to be Christmas again for the rest of them. Jen was determined and there was a great deal to be done first.

“You’re making lists just like Aunt Beth,” Becky observed
across a pile of breakfast dishes the day after Llechwedd Melyn. “I thought she was the only one of us who did it.”

David lifted his head from the essay he was marking. “So she always has been. Must be a latent family characteristic passed obliquely through the females.”

“Go ahead and make fun,” Jen retorted. “You don’t realize how much there is to do!”

“Does it all have to be done?” inquired Peter.

“Not if you don’t mind going without Christmas dinner and presents and all the rest,” said Jen tartly.

Peter shrugged and didn’t answer. He was uncomfortable with Jen. She thought he still harbored a grudge for the night of the storm, but it wasn’t so much that. He hated to think of all he had blurted out that night; he hadn’t done it well at all.

“What about a Christmas tree?” Becky demanded. “Is that on your lists?”

“Mmm. But I don’t know where we get one in Borth. Or do we have to go to Aberystwyth? And how do we get it back then?”

“In the bus, of course,” said David. “Half-fare for trees.”

Becky laughed. “That’s silly! Mrs. Davies told me they sell them behind the chapel. They’ve started already so we can go any time.” She looked around hopefully.

David groaned. “I suppose we have to go through with all of that!” he teased. “Well, I can’t do it now—I’m too far behind with these. I’ll give you the money, though, if the three of you want to go buy one.”

“We might as well go today,” said Jen.

Peter said, “I don’t care.”

“No good,” declared Becky. “We all have to go, even Dad.”

For a minute David looked as if he was going to refuse. It was family tradition that everyone helped to pick the Christmas tree, which meant several hours of hopping up and down on frostbitten feet in snowy lots arguing over the choice.

“All right,” said David at last, watching Becky’s face. “I’ll come back from town at noon and we can go after lunch. You’ll be sorry, though. You’d do it much faster without an extra opinion!”

***

It hadn’t rained at all since the storm and the roads were dry. Beyond the River Dovey the hills reappeared, mottled with sun patches and distance, looking like a painted backdrop. Borth was crowded with cars and bicycles up and down the street and people jamming the sidewalks. Two boys and a man were doing a brisk business in Christmas trees on the asphalt infant schoolyard behind the Wesleyan Chapel.

“But they’ve all got roots!” exclaimed Becky. “I’ve never seen ones like that!”

“Very sensible,” said David. “You can plant them afterward instead of throwing them out covered with tinsel. Much nicer, don’t you think? Look, what about that one?”

“Too easy!” Jen laughed. “We have to look at them all first.”

Around the enclosure they went, examining and pointing and arguing with each other. Even Peter joined in. Every tree had an untidy, earth-covered ball of roots under it.

“We can’t possibly have that one, it’s got a huge hole in the other side!”