Somewhere Over England (47 page)

He came in then, his moustache ice-encrusted, his hat thick and white. He knocked it against the doorpost, kicking his boots off and then coming to her, taking her hands in his, breathing on them, rubbing until the feeling burned in her fingers and in her heart because he had touched her. After so long he had touched her.

That night they lay together though passion did not rise. He dreamt and cried and called but there was no bourbon and so he did not breathe sourness into her face.

As dawn settled into the day they used a pick to cleave an
earth closet behind the cabin and ate oatmeal cooked on the stove. His hands were shaking and his face was pale but they took the saws and the sled and worked on the pines one hundred yards beyond the cabin. They chose one that was long and straight and nicked one side of the trunk, then sawed the other, one on either end, pulling and pushing, hearing the teeth driving and tearing, feeling the snow drop around them and on them from the tree’s branches. When the saw stuck they eased in a wedge. Her breath was cold in her chest and her back ached and so did his, but they didn’t speak, just worked.

The tree fell where he had intended it should and then they lopped the branches; neatly, efficiently, while the dog ran around, yapping and barking and chasing his tail. Helen laughed but Ed did not.

He tramped back to the cabin and she could see his breath billowing in great gasps as he brought the chains and the ropes. Together they pushed the chains through the packed snow beneath the tree, wetting their sleeves but not noticing. Round and round they wound it and now Helen went back for the horse, into the warmth of the dark stable, harnessing her, easing her out into the dazzling white silence of the day, hearing the crunch of the snow packing beneath her hoof. She steadied her up as Ed hitched the rope to the harness and then they led her as she dragged the tree to the skidway, plodding down the slope, leaving great sliced marks in their wake. Down they inched to the flatness of the ledge and the saw bench where they released the tree, slipping off the chains, sawing it into sections, heaving them on to the bench, then sawing again. One two, one two, one two, while the horse waited for the hour it took and the sawdust mounted, the logs too.

Then back up to the stable and another tree and so each day they worked and the logs grew and Helen slept with the smell of pine in her clothes and her skin and her hair and it was the same smell as the pines in Heine’s forest so long ago.

Each day too they checked the bawling cattle which drifted on the lower slopes amongst a whirling mass of whiteness, searching for buried sage. As mornings turned to afternoons they carted hay from the barn behind the cabin, carrying it between them to the hay sled, tossing it with pitchforks towards the cattle before returning to the saw which became hot to the touch as they pulled backwards and forwards.

Christmas came and went but they did not stop and each night Helen looked down into the valley, seeing the lights where Chris slept and woke and played, and missed her son and longed for him, but Ed would have been lost if they had not come. She could not have allowed that to happen as it had happened to Heine. And so she worked and watched and hoped, but the days went by and the dreams continued and no contact was made between this man and herself.

In January the sun was bright on the last day of the first week and they tossed out to the cattle hay which they had harvested in the valley, in the long hot summer and Helen talked as she always did; this time of the harvest in East Anglia. He looked at her and she saw him smile and he replied in a voice ragged and unused.

‘I love this kind of a day,’ he said. ‘Nothing bad can ever happen when there’s this feeling in the air.’

He told her then of the winter when the cattle had eaten the willows by the creek and died of starvation, lying in dark heaps, like mole-hills on an English lawn and she hardly dared to breathe as, slowly, he came alive.

‘We brought in hay and saved them but it damn near broke us,’ he said, wiping the breath which had frozen to ice on his scarf.

That night he did not dream but held her and in the morning he touched her face and kissed her.

As they worked that day he told her of the square dances they had held in the town with his pop calling, ‘Now swing your corners, twirl your partners and mosey on down.’ And then his mom had dished up the punch.

‘They were good days,’ he said. ‘Good clean days.’

The next week, as they slid a long tree down the slope he slipped and gashed his knee and the blood was vivid against the snow. The cut was deep and clean, Helen saw, as she cut the trouser from his leg in the warmth of the cabin.

‘In the Fortress the blood froze before it spouted,’ he said, as he sat on the chair and looked into the open stove. ‘Except in the cockpit where it was warm, and then it flowed like Joe’s all over him, all over me.’

Helen laid the scissors quietly on the table, taking the cotton
wool, bathing the cut gently, listening as he told her again of the blood and of the guilt.

‘The bloody, bloody guilt and the cross stuck so goddamn crooked in the rubble,’ he said, looking at her as she took his hand. ‘Help me, Helen. I’m going kind of mad. I can’t get it out of my head.’

She came to him, holding his head against her breast. ‘I’m here. I’m always here. You did the job you had to do. What else could you have done?’ She was stroking his hair, wiping the tears from his cheeks, feeling them soaking through her blouse. And then he pulled away, jerking his finger at the lint on the table.

‘Come on then, Helen. For Christ’s sake, we’ve got work to do.’

He wouldn’t look at her again, wouldn’t listen to her voice and so she knelt and dressed his knee, sewing up his trousers again, knowing he would go out again into the cold because his face had closed. He would not talk any more of the darkness today, but perhaps tomorrow? Oh God, she hoped it would be tomorrow and that the darkness would escape for good.

It did not. Instead he talked of the tadpoles he had scooped into his hands in the pools of the creek when he was barely six and the summers were long and hot. The water had run through his fingers and dripped back into the pool and it had been so cool and so clear.

He talked of the igloo he and Pop had built, hacking out February snow which had frozen so hard it was ice. How white and cold it had been to build but so warm inside, and silent.

All day they sawed but then the dog barked and called and they found a cow by the barn toiling with a breech birth. They moved her into the barn. Ed heaved and pulled until the calf slipped into the straw, slippery but warm and alive and then he turned to her, his face gleaming with sweat.

‘I would like a child, Helen, a daughter that looks like you.’

She stood still as the cow nuzzled the calf and Ed rubbed it with straw, and they shared the cry of the newly born.

He came to her then and they walked back to the cabin, to the bed, and he held her but did not love her, not then, but that night he held her and stroked her.

‘I love you, I love you,’ he said, his mouth finding hers and every touch of his body against hers was tender and all that
night he loved her and then he talked of the raids, the bombs, the people, and again the next night and the next. Each day the lines grew less and the trembling left his hands and Helen knew the taste of happiness again.

In February the cold was at its most intense, deep and bitter, and now they sat before the stove, talking and listening, and she told him of the cupboard and her own fears, her own guilts. He told her of his first loves, his first kisses. They checked the cattle in short bursts, pinching their own cheeks to make sure that there was no frost-bite. She drank coffee, her hands around the tin mug as he took the hay sled to the cattle by the lower pasture, hearing the wind whipping round the cabin. It grew worse as the day got older and then she blocked out the draughts with old sheets, newspaper, anything, and the smell of beet came back to her; over the miles, over the years.

He came back as the afternoon ended and she rubbed his hands and feet, listening as he told her of the horses he had broken, how he had worked them gently until they understood, how he had been tossed and hurt but had come back again, gripping with his knees, never shouting, never hitting, as his father had shown him. She learned of the hill horses who were not mongrel mustangs but pastured and forgotten ranch horses who had grown stronger from their wildness. And these were his first love. They looked gentle and kind but were too proud for a saddle, too proud for a man.

‘Until they understood that you weren’t about to own them, just use their greatness,’ he said, his face ruddy from the stove, his voice gentle as it should always be. Each night they lay in bed, loose limbed and free from the shadows.

‘For now, free from the shadows,’ Helen whispered against his skin while he slept. But would it last? She looked round the one-roomed cabin in the yellow warmth of the kerosene lamp, smelling its scent, hearing the breathing of the dog. Snow had built up at the windows and the wind was blowing drifts whichever way they looked but in here was warmth and love. For now there was love which reached out and held them both. She looked at the rawhide boxes which held two more weeks’ provisions.

It was the next week that the calf drowned, down by the great pine where in the summer the mountain stream turned and
followed the boulder path. They were laughing, holding the horse by its harness as the sky rose, clear blue above them when they heard its mother’s bellows across by the stream.

They ran then, across the skidway’s packed solid snow, slipping, falling, rising, then plunging through the drifts up to their knees and out again until they reached the snow path the calf had taken.

He was gone when they reached the broken ice, and there was just jagged blackness scythed out of the frosted ice where he had jumped and broken, then died. They followed the stream down but never found him and Ed remembered that he had left the barn door open. There was no laughter again, no loving, just the dreams and the calling of the cow, night after night after night as he slipped relentlessly from her grasp.

On the first of March they came back down through the forest because there was no point in staying any longer. She steered the horse through the lower pastures, seeing the road from the ranch to the town stretching away like a dirty ribbon. It had been cleared by ploughs and the snow heaped like swollen waves on either side.

She drew up the horse before they reached the ranch, holding his hand and kissing it where the mitt ended and his sleeve began, smelling his skin.

‘I love you,’ she said. ‘But I am not enough. You need something else. You need absolution and I don’t know how I can give it to you.’

He kissed her lips and looked towards the house where his parents waited. He loved her so much but she was right and he despaired, because how could anyone here give him that?

Chris hugged his mother and then Ed, knowing his new father was not better. He could tell it from the tension in their bodies, their faces which were drawn and tired. He stood as they pulled off their clothes and hung them in the laundry. He stood as they sat and drank coffee and talked of the cattle, the calf, the logs but not of themselves. He stood as Mrs McDonald told Ed and Helen of Chris and the coach and in his mother’s face he saw despair and anguish.

She took him into the lounge, holding his hand, listening as he told her that he had to do it, and he couldn’t understand why she ran to her bedroom and wept until the next morning;
not eating, not speaking, but howling as a dog would do when there was nothing but horror all around. She didn’t see the rose wallpaper, the new curtains. She didn’t think of the bulbs she had planted, the rose bushes she had buried because the darkness of the cupboard was in her and outside her.

It was then that Chris took her up the letter which had come in February. It was from Germany, from his father’s father and he read it to her, loudly above her tears, shouting it into her face.

Hanover
December 1946

My dearest Helen,

It is with such relief that we receive your letter and forgive my language. I do not use English since you left but now I must begin again to practise and I shall.

We have not received others of your letters and thought that war had taken you also, as well as Heine.

Yes, we survive. Oma is thin but lives. That is all we can do, is it not? There is hunger here and nothing, not even a bird sings but we deserve nothing more.

It is glad news that you have another man you love. Perhaps it is a time for new beginnings.

I cannot ask you to come to see us because our shame is too great, such terrible things have been discovered. Did we know? No, but perhaps we guessed and did not wish to know? But I wish you peace, my dear. Peace for you and your husband and your child.

With loving thoughts from your father.
Wilhelm Weber

Helen stayed in her room all day, holding the letter, listening to the sounds of the farm, seeing the sun reflected off the snow lightening the room, and then she rose, sitting on the bed,
feeling old now, hearing again the news of her son and his hatred, his confusion. She grieved for his lost youth. She heard again the screams of her husband and the years which had gone from his life and which perhaps would never be regained and then she read the letter again.

Helen drove into town that sunless day, down the sanded and salted road, between high drifts where no shadows carved and cut. She rang Claus from the old hotel lobby, talking in a low voice, listening as he agreed. She drove back then and into the yard, through the kitchen, past Ed and Chris who looked at her, but she did not stop.

She walked up the stairs, going into Chris’s room, throwing open his cupboard, heaping clothes on to the bed, hauling out the case they had brought with them from England, because Chris was going home. She folded the clothes, knowing that now her son and husband were at the door, watching, but still she said nothing. She put in his baseball mitt, his ball and then looked at Chris.