Haweswater
Authors: Sarah Hall
Sarah Hall
F
or my family
I’m standing in a place where I once loved.
The rain is falling. The rain is my home.
I think words of longing: a landscape
out to the very edge of what’s possible
.
YEHUDA AMICHAI
The sound of water slipping through the wooden spokes of the cartwheels was like a slow, soft-washing hum. The vehicle breached the surface, parting the liquid as it moved, and leaving behind a temporary wake. From his position on the cart's seat the man could see that he would have to drive through over four feet of water if he wanted to pass back along the village to the high farm track on the slopes of the mountains, which would take him home. There was no other route he could take out of the head of the valley. The new concrete road was cut off by the flood, it was completely inaccessible. He peered through the water, trying to remember if the slope under it was steeper than he predicted, so that the cart would up-end and sink, sucking the horse in with it.
The man was accustomed to driving through rivers and floods in this farm vehicle, he had done so before, many times, in order to reach remote parts of the terrain where his animals needed tending or a landslide had brought down the farm walls. His horse was sure footed, an obedient creature, and the cart was sturdy. He had confidence in his working of both. He shucked the reins and the horse and cart went deeper, out into the swirling water. The shallows fell upwards behind him.
This water had once been only a gentle, tumbling river. The man thought to himself that he had never noticed the constant sush-sushing of wheels cutting liquid then, when he crossed it, as he noticed it now. But now it was an inescapable noise, it had him encircled. He listened to the sound. The rise and fall of the water's tensile voice. Its sound was unusual, a continuance of text in a land of broken fluid, of forced rock. But it was not the sound that was unusual,
thought the man, it was the water itself, because there was something dangerous and slow and final about it. Something eerie and unending.
This was a monumental flood, water of epic proportions. It turned through the wooden spokes relentlessly, and as it did so it became like a music that is accidental, deeply beautiful and made only once. Somatic music that fills in space and time. A corrugated harp of orchestral rivers. Like the long end-verses of a ballad, he thought, when the key voice is joined and overcome by others. And even as the man hated this water, he could not help but find it beautiful. It stood for more than itself and it sang of its presence. But then, he was the kind of man who would have seen a mask of green fire struggling to get free from the throat of a dying bird.
Over the rippling surface of the flood he could see the uppermost skeletons of three ruptured buildings. He knew them to be a church, because he had prayed there, an old inn, where he had taken his draughts of a weekend, and a farm cottage, because he had helped a neighbour to re-hang the iron guttering after the mighty storm of two Septembers ago. In a matter of days or weeks they would be submerged, but for now they rose from the water like pieces of grey bone and he found himself divining in reverse, looking for old land. In the thick sky overhead, a dozen or so gulls were turning heavy, inhibited loops. Two or three were bobbing on the water, far out in the middle of the lake. Their calls raucous and belonging to the coastal air, to stretches of open sea, the birds seemed out of place in the dense, wooded valley.
The man pulled back on the reins and the horse and the music stopped. He called down from his seat on the cart to a sheepdog that was eeling through the liquid a foot from the cart.
â Chase, Chase. Gudgirl, close.
As if words were needed to call the animal, though a whistle, short, short and long, would have articulated his message just the same. Perhaps he had wanted to hear his own voice
right then, for company, above the quiet expanse of water. And looking down to be certain, there was Chase, her slick seal's head slicing the waves, tufted ears held back, and her two bright eyes, one brown and one pale blue, looking up at her master, so that the thin moons of the white part of her eyes appeared to be cupping each iris. It made the dog look soulful. Gudog. Though it could have been the man's own soulfulness which he saw reflected in the eyes of his loyal companion. It was in everything now.
It began to rain, a fat slapping rain that ringed in the water and leapt up out of it. The air became blue with its speed. Rain hissed like soft glass coming from the sky. A cough of distant thunder in the throat of hills to the north-east. The man reached in his pocket, pulled out a flat cloth cap and put it on over his straw hair. He resumed his course, past the sinking walls of the valley's sloped fields. And there again was the soft-washing music. Water sang below and above him now. He was surrounded, held within it. The wood of the cart spotted and soon turned dark, as if sweating from labour, and its old, oily wooden scent was released easily into the dampness. The rancid, buttery fragrance of wool grease crept from the corners of the cart where some fleece had collected, it lifted and found its way up to the man's nose. Rain camouflaged the stains on the cart's wooden planks, the blood, the fluid and discharge, made during the births and deaths of many animals.
The cart was a quarter full of hay, a poor load even in the wet summer of that year, but it was all that was left to take from this place beyond the water, soon to be out of reach. So he would not come back here again. The farm which he took his load from had once been his own, managed and worked by his family, and even though the rents had been paid to the estate, he had still felt a sense of right, of possession. After the flood these would cease to exist in this valley for the man, in all but memory. He didn't want the hay, it wasn't essential to his new farm and it was spoiling quickly in the rain, but he
took it like a man takes bread to eat, absently and without thought because his stomach demands it. It was simply that time of year. The cycle of the land had come back around to ripeness, sweetening the long grass, then starching it. He could have stopped the cart and pulled some tarpaulin over it but he did not. He had told his wife that this was the reason for his return to the old farm, yet, being the woman she was, she had known it to be a lie, the gentlest deceit.
The man's face and his hair melted into each other and both were the colour of red straw. Children could have landed safely in this face from a high jump off a barn rafter. He was broad set and heavy with muscle, and his tweed jacket was worn on the shoulders where his full form stretched the fabric thin. His boots were old and the laces had been replaced many times. His hands were raw over the leather reins, their nails dwarfed inside wide, swollen fingers. He was not unlike many of the other farmers of the district in appearance.
Then there was the matter of his heart. Inside his old heart a new one was growing and pushing to get out, and inside that one another one, and another, all pushing to get out. So many hearts. And that was how grief worked inside the man. Filling his chest cavity so full of hearts that it almost became sore to touch on the outside and he stooped over with the weight. So much of his life was gone. More than his home and his fields, more than the valley which contained his familiars.
Behind him was the end of his village; in front of him a swelling lake of colourless water. The cart struggled against the fluid pressure, uncertain currents jostling for a place in the filling basin, the horse now rearing up, shoulder-deep. He tightened the reins, clicking his tongue. One wheel was no longer secure on the valley floor. The cart pitched, righted itself again as it caught a solid piece of land. A slight whinny from the horse, but it moved on.
He did not look back over his worn shoulder to the place he had just left. There was a better image, an older vision, that he preferred. The grey-black cottage that had once housed his
family and which he had just departed was now an imperfect ring of rubble and slate. It was a quarter of its original height, perhaps less. There was no longer a name carved on a piece of slate by the door, no children inside the cottage laughing or jumping in the corners like trapped frogs. There was no roof to speak of, only a thin web of cloud that stretched a useless tent between the shallow walls. Whelter Farm had ceased to exist on the raised land to the west side of the valley, and water was half-way up the garden, snaking at the foundations.
But underneath, the cellar was undamaged, save for a sheen of lime dust which covered the floor and a fast-dripping gable wall. On this last visit, the man had not spent long in the bowels of his old habitation. He simply removed a tatty book from his inside jacket pocket, brushed a rough palm over its cover. The man with the face of red straw put the book inside an old wooden tool box in the cellar's alcove and locked it and left. He did not say a prayer, he had become unsure of God for the second time in his life. He left the book in the cellar where he used to keep his meat cold and hang his bacon for smoking, and hang his beef until it turned black and the juices collected in its centre. Then he went up the dusty stairs and out of the front door which was now formed in part by the sky.
He walked back along the path by the side of his house, his feet scuffling and crunching on the stone debris. A piece of wire coiled round the toe of his boot but he kept on walking, with the wire scraping on the ground, and eventually it released its grasp and came loose. There were pieces of timber in the wreckage, beams from the ceiling of the house or perhaps an oak window sill. The enormous blue rock, incorporated into the corner of the dwelling rather than moved when Whelter Farm was built in 1538, was buried with rubble.
As the man approached her, Chase whined and sat up, tucking her head. She did not like her master's gait, recognizing it for despondency. But he stroked his knuckles along her sleek nose as he passed by and she settled. At the foot of the
new lake he paused and then threw the key to the tool box into the water. Then the man left in his cart, which was pulled by his only horse, the scruffy, leggy mare named Spider by the man's son, named so because of the thin buckling legs which at birth had been almost unable to support the foal's own weight. He made his departure through an unmarked exit of water, with his Gudog swimming by his side. He would not return. The water would see to it.
But the book would remain behind, locked in the safe box, preserved somehow, even as the mud slid in through the cellar door, then the water, which by then was fuller and colder and the colour of indigo ink. Though the blue-blond hair that the man had found caught on his jacket button three days earlier, that he placed between the last pages of his book, did not stay. It disintegrated into dust long before water robbed the house of air, because human hair always does disintegrate when it is removed from a human head.