Black Sheep (5 page)

Ted came and sat in the bedroom sometimes when he returned from school, less sure now that his father was going to die.

And he did not. By autumn he was recovered enough to start a tallying job at the pithead, though it was half-time and less money. He saw the men cram into the lifts and vanish down the shaft, counted them back, ticked them on and ticked them off, and was ill-tempered and morose, though knowing well enough that luck had been with him. Then, at the end of November, Arthur broke his arm badly, trapping himself between a pit pony and the coal face. He would be useless for a whole year, they said, if not for good.

Evie grew thinner than ever and worried to her wits' end. She chivvied Ted and called Reuben a ‘great bladder of wind' and stopped him from reading from the black Bible in anything but the lowest murmur.

Most of the houses in Mount of Zeal were full to the rafters with people and the most crowded were crowded with children, but this house was crowded with adults. Ted was growing too fast, taking up more of the available space and air, John Howker and Arthur were at home most of the time and Reuben never left it. Evie struggled and for the most part lost the struggle. Rose felt crushed by the weight of men.

Her mother got up before light seeped into the sky above Paradise, and shook Rose. There were only two pairs of boots, two bait tins, two sets of work clothes to be got ready now, but cleaning and supplying food seemed to double and treble.

‘I can only make a loaf go so far,' Evie said. They had to keep the back door closed and locked or the gale swept cold rain into the kitchen. ‘You can black the range now, Rose, while there's a sliver of room, but get Ted up before you start.'

Ted slept alternately with Clive and Arthur. Clive would be back at the end of his shift and take over Ted's place in the bed.

‘Get up.' Rose pulled the covers off in one quick move to make Ted shiver. ‘Where's Arthur?'

Ted shrugged, diving for his clothes in the icy room. Rose noticed the extra length of her brother's limbs.

‘Hurry up, will you?'

But Ted took the same time as ever.

Rose stood at the top of the stairs. The house was quiet except for the sharp spits of rain on the windows. She waited, not wanting to begin the blacking. Ted dived past her to the scullery and the cold tap.

‘Where's Arthur?' Evie said, lifting the porridge off. ‘Get the bowls, Rose girl.'

‘He wasn't in the bed.'

‘Well, he's not here. Ted, you scrub your neck. He's either upstairs or down.'

But he was not.

The search parties of men went out after the two days and nights during which there was neither sight nor sound of Arthur. They beat the bounds of the village, scouring every corner from Lower to Paradise, and in the end, order was given to evacuate the pit, its shafts and workings, and all the above-ground buildings. He was not found, living or dead. The police put out a description and there was frantic talk of divers and of dredging, but in the end that talk and any other died away, leaving only an echo of ‘when Arthur Howker vanished'.

From the age of three Ted had kept his ‘findings' – small stones, a mouse skeleton, a red leaf, a forked pin or a bent coin. His father had given him an old tobacco tin and he had stored it away under a loose floorboard, which he prised open with neat fingers. By chance, he found nothing worth keeping for many months after Arthur's disappearance, but then he came upon a smooth pale flat stone with a hole through the centre, on the path leading to Middle Terrace.

When he dug out his tobacco tin later, he found Arthur's penknife inside it, wrapped in a bit of worn shirt cloth.

He held the knife very carefully, as if weighing it, and then turned it over and over in the palm of his hand. The last time he had opened the tobacco tin, his brother had still been here, using the knife to chip away at this and probe into that, and as a tool to help him with mending a lamp or a door handle.

He had not been drowned or fallen into a pit then, he had left his knife for Ted and gone away of his own accord – though how or where who knew, or ever would?

Ted sat on the upstairs window ledge and turned a question over in his mind as he had turned the knife in his hand. Should he tell or not? If he started to use the knife someone would notice before he took his next breath. But he had longed and longed to have it, begged Arthur to lend it just for a minute. Arthur never would. But now he had given it to him, no doubt at all.

In the end, Ted slipped it into his trouser pocket and kept it there, carrying it about for a whole day, never letting it see the light, but often touching it. Its touch made him feel safe. And then he put it back in the tobacco tin and the tin under the floorboard, and banged the floorboard down hard with his shoe so that he would never be able to get at it again. In that way, he felt that he could keep his brother at home and all to himself.

CHARLIE MINNS HAD
gone after half the girls in Mount of Zeal before he settled on Rose and by then each was relieved to have found the other. Most of Rose's friends were married now, or at least spoken for, and Charlie Minns cut a poor figure among the strong swarthy pitmen. He was still thin, and though the flare of spots on his face and neck had subsided, it had left pocks and craters, and his teeth were crooked and browner than ever. Because he was from a manager's family, they got a decent house on Middle Terrace straight away. Rose was relieved it was not among the half-dozen down beside the pithead, which were cut off from the rest of the village, socially as well as in terms of position, and because they never got the sun, the rain rolled down the hills straight into them, and the film of coal dust was twice as thick on every surface. She saw the house they had been given with relief, not wanting to be separated from her own family by much more than the marriage itself had divided them.

She took the embroidered pillowcases and tablecloth out of the trunk, and had most of the sheets from Alice's old linen cupboard, which Evie had kept for her. There was money for other things from Charlie's family, though the idea that they were as rich as anyone in the world was wrong and based on simple envy and resentment, as Rose found.

The house in Lower seemed empty to Evie after Arthur's disappearance and Rose's marriage, and Jimmy's wedding only a year later too. She sat by the fire in the evenings wondering how she had coped, listening to Reuben wheeze out the readings from the black Bible, and had only John and Clive to sort out to and from the pit. But then came the summer when Ted was fourteen and left school.

‘What else would you do?' his father had asked, with good reason, when he protested that he was not going down the pit. ‘There's no other work.'

‘Then I'll move away and find something.'

Evie had started to cry and gone on crying half the evening and into the night, so that nobody could ignore the distress of it, nothing more was said and Ted was hired at the coal mine, starting on the first of September.

It was the hottest summer anyone had known. Doors and windows stood open day and night without a stir of air getting into the houses. Even the smallest children stayed out playing on the terraces and on the steps until midnight and a baby died of heatstroke. Layers of coal dust lay heavy over the village, and by the middle of August, there was talk of water being rationed if people were not sparing with it. Down the mine was far hotter than up above, so that the men came from their shifts drained of all energy and walked up the slope weary as driven cattle, to bath in cold water, eat, and then sit outside beside the young ones, smoking and drinking tea, too tired for conversation. Even Reuben left his chair at the back of the room and sat on a broken-down wicker one from morning to night, whispering from the Bible to any passer-by. His voice was hoarse all the time and he had a raking cough.

The Lord trieth the righteous: but the wicked and him that loveth violence his soul hateth
.

‘Too many years of spouting aloud,' Evie said without sympathy. ‘Poor Alice. How it must have been for her I never thought.'

Ted's friends had left school and were almost all waiting for their first day at the pit, but he felt too restless and unsettled either to hang about with them or to stay in the house. He would climb up the paths to Paradise and sit on a stone outcrop looking over the countryside in the shimmering heat, then one afternoon went further on. He had not been up to the farms since he had come with Arthur once or twice when he was a young boy, and once or twice with John, after they had been to see his grandparents. But that had only been a half-mile or so up the steep track, never to the peak and beyond.

It was towards the end of a Friday afternoon, when everyone gasped for air and the sky was sulphurous, that Ted walked up the track towards Zeal Farm and then on, following the path that wound round to the west before it straightened and climbed steeply up to the peak. When he was a boy he had thought it as high as a mountain. Now, with drops of sweat running down the sides of his face as he reached the top, he realised that, after all, it was just a hill. He looked back and saw the dry grass and the roof of Zeal Farm. Looking ahead he saw that the land dropped away and then climbed to another peak, dropped away and climbed, and that there were hills as far as he could see, disappearing into the belly of the sullen sky. Sheep were scattered about the hillsides as if someone had thrown them in the air and let them fall anyhow, but their cries did not reach far, without a breath of wind to carry them. The village and the pit were not visible but the fine veil of black like a swarm of bees in the sky showed where they lay.

Ted thought that he would like to come here, lie down and sleep on the grass. On a cloudless night there might be less of a pall from the pit obscuring the moon and stars in the sky.

Twice since the date for starting at the pit had been fixed, he had spoken up about not wanting to go, but if they had listened, John and Evie Howker had not replied, and everything raced on towards his first day, like a train without brakes.

Rather than wait for a cloudless night, he lay down on the ground now, at the side of the track. The dry grass pricked through his shirt, and when he looked up, he saw that the sky was milky in the heat. No one much came up this far from the village because they felt unsafe in the wideness, without the usual bounds of houses and hill, and because they did not know what to do here or altogether trust it.

‘Now then.'

A man stood over him, rough-faced and with his boots so close Ted could see the cracks and creases in the old leather. He sat up. But the man only stood looking down at him with a mild expression. ‘Hot.'

Ted nodded.

‘Job for them to get a drop of juice out of this.' He nodded his head to four or five sheep clumped together.

‘Are they yours?'

‘They are.' He nodded again, to where the land dipped down below a cleave in the hill. ‘Crow's Farm. You know it?'

‘No.'

‘Thought you wouldn't. All right then.' He whistled and a sheepdog sprang up as if out of the ground itself and ran low to his side.

Ted watched them go. The heat haze shimmered round and then absorbed them before they had reached the dip.

That night he lay with the window wide open, the coal dust lining his nostrils. People coughed through the darkness. He got up at five and went out before the men were changing shifts. The terraces were empty, heat still coming off the house walls. One or two lights were on.

It was cooler as he climbed up the slope. Winding sheets of mist swaddled the sheep and rested in the hollow. Ted breathed easily and the soft mist damped his skin.

The sheepdog barked its warning of him while he was a hundred yards away and he saw it scurrying to and fro inside the gate to the farmyard. Smoke coiled out of the chimney.

‘You again.' It was not a question.

Ted reached him and the farmer opened the gate a few inches to let him in. The dog nosed him then lay down.

‘My name's Ted Howker.'

‘William Barnes.' He did not offer his hand.

Then Ted asked a question he had not prepared, or so much as sensed was within him to be asked. He heard it spoken as if by another, and was startled.

‘Would you have any work?'

Plates clattered briefly inside the kitchen but the farmer was silent, looking at him steadily. Ted looked back.

‘What sort of work might that be?'

‘Farm work.'

‘You've done that?'

‘No.'

‘No.'

After a minute, Ted turned away, feeling ashamed.

‘Say your name again?'

‘Ted Howker.'

‘All right, Ted Howker, come here tomorrow. I can use a hand with the ewes. Don't know about permanent.'

He did not go back home for hours, but wandered about the hills and on, further than he had ever been in his life, fretting about whether to tell them at home. He found a stream which had a last dribble of brackish water in the bottom and wet his hands and face though he dared not risk drinking from it. The heat had congealed like oil. When he came near a sheep he looked at it carefully, though the animal always ambled a few yards further off, eyeing him. He did not know which were the ewes.

But he knew that whatever the work among them was like and whether he had any aptitude for it, everything about it would be better than being crammed against twenty other men in a cage and sent grinding down the shaft to the hot black tunnels. Until earlier that year he had never given it much thought, simply because the reality of it had seemed further away than his present span of years. His days and his attention were filled with the life of home and school and of the terraces and with the routine of days. And then time speeded up, he was fourteen and the pit was waiting for him.

He reached home to mayhem and his mother in hysterical tears.

‘I never thought. I never thought.'