Stone Cradle (20 page)

‘Excuse me, but you must tell me. What has my son done? Is it money? Does he owe you money?’

One of the others replied. ‘He does not, missus. It’s a deal worse than that.’

Worse
? ‘Why have you come looking for him, then?’

The third, the one who had not spoken yet, answered me. He had a piping voice and dry, gingery hair, like my daughter-in-law’s. ‘He beat up our father. He punched him good and hard, even though he did nothing to him. He set upon him outside The Bleeding Heart. There’s witnesses.’

‘I am sorry, gentlemen,’ I said firmly. ‘But you must be mistaken. My son would do many things but he would never set upon an old man, never in his life. Why, that would be a wicked thing.’ I knew for a fact my Lijah had never had a fight with any man but was his equal.

They could see my opinion was not feigned and I reckon that must have softened them a little, for they glanced at each other.

‘Is your son Elijah Smith, the
gipsy
what deals in horses at Gas Lane?’ said the second.

‘Aye, he is, but he’s not capable of …’

‘Well, I tell you he is‚’ insisted Bert, angry again. ‘There were three or four folks witnessed it It was one of his own friends pulled him off.’

‘What happened?’

The one with the piping voice said, ‘Our Dad was drinking in The Bleeding Heart. He’s an old fella and doesn’t have his shop any more. Anyway, he gets chatting to the
gipsy
. The next thing, the
gipsy
flew at him and dragged him outside and started hitting him.’

I could not believe this story. What could an old man have said that was so insulting to Lijah?

‘He must’ve been provoked.’

‘He was not, missus. The others followed them out and broke it up. I asked Fred what happened, and Fred said he’d asked the
gipsy
what was up, and the
gipsy
pointed at my father lying on the ground and said, his name, that’s what’s up.’

‘What is his name?’

‘George Rawson. He’s our father.’

The name meant nothing to me. I was bewildered. All I could think about was how I could stop these three men from tracking down my Lijah and beating him to a pulp. They must’ve been to Gas Lane already, so that meant he wasn’t there. With any luck, he would have taken himself off somewhere for a few days.

‘Gentlemen,’ I said, ‘I am most distressed to hear this story. I promise you, when my son reappears, I will send him to you at once with his explanation.’

‘I bet!’ Bert spat viciously onto the pavement.

The second one pulled at his jacket. ‘Come on, Herbert, there’s no point in being bad to the missus. It wasn’t her beat up Dad.’

As Bert was pulled away by his brothers, he called back over his shoulder to me, ‘You make sure your son knows I’m looking for him, missus. Rawson’s my name an’ all …’ He jabbed a finger at his brothers, each in turn. ‘… and his, and his. You make sure he knows!’

We had been talking quietly enough up ’til then, but at that shout, one or two folk came to their doorsteps to see what was going on. Another black mark against us.

It was four days before I had any sign of Lijah. I knew he would go to Gas Lane sooner or later, to make sure the horse was all right. I had been feeding Kit myself and walking him round the yard so’s he didn’t get stale. I left my mark in chalk on the stable wall and drew a picture of a box and a line through it, so’s he knew not to come home.

When I went back the next day, Lijah’s mark was beside mine.

Two days later, when I went, Lijah himself emerged from behind a straw bale. He looked terrible – a week’s stubble on his cheek, his face grey. I’d never seen him look so bad.

‘Have you been eating?’ I asked him.

He shook his head. ‘Nor drinking, neither,’ he said grimly.

‘Well that’s one good thing,’ I huffed, and went to tend to Kit.

Lijah sat down and watched me. ‘So, they’ve been to the house, then?’ he said, philosophically.

‘Aye,’ I rubbed Kit down ferociously. ‘This horse needs some proper exercise.’

‘Does Rose know?’

‘She does not, but she’s frantic wondering where on earth you are.’

‘I didn’t mean to hurt the old fella that bad. I just wanted to learn him, that’s all.’

I stopped rubbing down Kit. ‘How bad did you hurt him, Lijah?’

‘Bad enough. He’ll be all right.’

‘His sons seem to think it was bad enough, and there’s three of them and they’re big fellas.’

‘I know. I know them. I seen them in there.’

‘If you was going to have a fight, then why did you pick a family like that, for heaven’s sake?’ He did not answer me. I turned to face him. ‘Them sort of
gorjers
, they don’t fight clean, you should know that by now. You can’t box one of them fair and square like another
Romani
chal
. They don’t work like that.’

He had closed his eyes and leaned back against the stable wall. ‘I know that, Dei, don’t go on …’

‘Then what were you thinking of?’

‘It was men’s business, Dei.’

‘Don’t give me that. It’s my business now you’ve brought those men to our house. They stepped inside, Lijah. They came over the threshold, into our home. If any man had offered me that insult on the Fens, my Adolphus would have dealt with him fast enough.’

He jumped to his feet. ‘That was what I
was
doing! Give me credit for once, will you, Dei? You bloody women never give me any credit, do you?’

I was facing him. ‘Are you going to tell me or not?’

He sat down again. ‘Only if.’

‘What?’

‘Swear you won’t never tell Rose.’

Well, that was easy enough. There were a whole lot of things I was never going to tell her anyway so I didn’t see how one more made a difference either way.

‘Course I won’t.’

‘Swear.’

‘I swear it now get on and tell me, will you?’

Lijah looked at the floor and mumbled. ‘He paid for the church bells to be rung.’

‘Who did?’

‘Rose’s dad. Her real dad. Old Man Rawson. He told me. He boasted about it. He boasted about how her mother was, well,
little
tart
, was the words he used, if you must know. And how he’d paid for the church bells to be rung when Rose and I was wed. When he knew who I was, that’s what he said.’

I stared at him.

‘I’d been nodding to this old fella in the pub for upwards of a year. Never knew’d who he was ’til the other night. Then we got chatting and he worked out who I was, and off he went. It was like he was boasting about how he’d bought us our wedding, as if he was some rich fella and we were nothing and he could buy us any
time he liked. He never gave nothing to Rose in her whole life, not even his name. He’d had a few, like, must’ve done. And he laughed like he thought I should be laughing too and called her mother a good little tart and asked if her daughter had taken after her and that’s when I hit him.’

I sat down next to him. What was I going to do with my son?

I still had straw in my hands from wiping down Kit. I let it fall. ‘We’ve got to leave, you know,’ I said, brushing some small strands from my sleeve. ‘As soon as they get wind of you back in Paradise Street, they’ll be back. I know their sort. They don’t give up.’

‘I know that, Dei.’

I gestured towards Kit the Second. ‘How much do you think you’ll get for that horse?’

He rubbed his chin. ‘Not sure. I won’t be able to sell it round here. I might on the other side of the city. It’s not a bad horse.’

‘Well, you’d better do it tonight. Leave word for me here tomorrow. I’ll start working out what we can take with us.’

I stood. I felt better, now there was stuff to do. It was always the same, moving on. Whatever reason you had to do it for, there was a rightness about it, so whatever sadness you felt there was a goodness inside too.

‘What about Rose?’ he said.

‘I’ve told her they were debt collectors,’ I said. ‘We’re that behind with the rent. She’s had enough. She’ll go.’

I leaned against Kit the Second and put the palm of my hand on his nose, by way of saying goodbye.

W
e stopped on Stourbridge Common for the whole of that winter, but as soon as the weather got good enough the following spring, we took off on our own with a cart and a bender tent. Lijah scraped together the wherewithal for a grinding barrow and him and me would go round a village while Rose went door-to-door with the children. Lijah sharpened knives and I dukkered or sold stuff out of a basket. I liked doing that, flattering the housewives while we stood together on the doorstep and watched Lijah at work. I liked seeing the sparks fly off the knives as he worked at them and hearing the
shk-shk
sound of the blade against the spinning-stone. Each sound meant a few more pennies. Each turn of that stone took us a few more inches away from going hungry.

People weren’t always bad to us, neither. In one village, we met a vicar on the High Street who crossed the road to speak to us. I am always wary of vicars, with good reason, you might say, but this one had spotted me and said he was having a Meat Tea for Old Folks that afternoon and would I like to go along?

Well, it was a right laugh. I ate ’til I was stuffed. Then we sat back, all us Old Folks, and the vicar showed us Lanternslides of Foreign Parts. As I left, he blessed me, and gave me a packet of tea, which he pressed into my hands with many kind words about how
Members
of
Your
Race
, as he put it, were always welcome in his church. I decided I quite liked vicars, after that. I began to see the point of them.

The children grew. Daniel was a fine boy – Bartholomew a mischief. Mehitable … she stayed a singular child.

She was my only granddaughter, at that time, so I made sure to teach her a little of what I knew. I taught her how to curtsey so her calliper showed and she looked brave for trying. I taught her how to hold a lady’s palm and trace the lines on it with the very tip of her finger. ‘You must touch a lady softer than she’s ever been touched before,’ I said to her. ‘You must hold the hand firmly, but touch softly. That way, a person feels protected, cared for, coaxed. You must never hurry it, my chicken. Hold a person’s hand properly and they’ll pay you the going rate, whatever you claim to see lying ahead of them. For a moment, they have been concentrated on – and that’s what they are paying you for. They are paying you for being curious about them.’

I never met a happy
gorjer
who believed in all that nonsense.

And what lay ahead for us? Well, it has never been my way to look towards the future. That sort of thinking is brooding. Brooding leads to badness. When you have a cooking pot to fill, then you have to be doing, not thinking. So, if you had said to me at that time, where do you think you all might be in a couple of years hence? I would’ve shrugged. Same way I shrugged when Lijah and I was harguing one day and he said, you’ve got to realise such and such, Dei, it’s the twentieth century now, you know. I can’t say as I’d noticed that the century we had slipped into was a great deal different from the last.

What I am trying to say is, I didn’t know whether or not we was
going to carry on living on the road – we were at that time, and that was it. But I did know that it was hard and that after a while I was not altogether happy about it. At first, it had been good to be back where we belonged. But after while, I found myself thinking sometimes that a solid ceiling above you is quite pleasant when the rain is that sharp rain like pointy needles.

In truth, it was just like always. I wasn’t at all sure where I belonged.

It’s horrible, that feeling, the knowing-you-are-different. That knowledge – that there is a wrongness or a badness or a not-fitting-in-ness that is inside and around you the whole time. In Paradise Street, it was easy. I was an outsider because I was one of the People, a Romany woman and proud of it. But now I was back among others of my kind and it turned out it was not so simple at all. There was still something not quite right with me – something lost, or taken.
You
can
be
pushed
in
the
mud
any
time
,
you
know
. That little voice spoke to me, all too often. It had never gone away.

I think I knew, as a result, that this being back on the road was not a permanent thing, that it was only a matter of time.

We joined back up with the Smiths and the Coopers come the wintertimes. You can’t really manage on your own when the weather is bad, not when you have Young ’Uns. You need to be with others who can help you through the dark and cold and wetness of it. We all came off the road in a big group, from November through to March. There wasn’t much work in the district, though.

That year, it was just after the first frosts and the parsnips were in and there was a misunderstanding with the landowner and he told us we had to
ife
by the end of the week. Well, that would have been all right but it had been raining solid for a month and we weren’t ready for it. The landowner wouldn’t listen to reason,
though, and sent the gavvers in – so off we all set with things not stowed properly and it pouring with rain and our cart going, humpitty-humpitty down the rutted lane on account of one of the wheels being askew
.

We had only got a mile down the road when Lijah pulled up and said we had better all walk otherwise we might lose an axle. Then him and Rose had words about the children having to walk in the rain. I must admit, they did look like a trio of poor mites as they stood there, all sorry and wet while their mother and father shouted at each other and the rain pelted down.

Mehitable had grown into a tall, lanky girl, still skinny as anything and still with a calliper and a bad limp, still the unluckiest mite of all. She’d had a cold that week – she was prone to them on account of her weak chest, and was constantly sniffing and blowing into her hanky. The nose was going bright red with it, and the skin round it cracking. When Lijah and Rose had finished hollering at each other, the boys went over and helped their father with the cart, so Mehitable was left standing on her own beneath the tree with the water dripping on her from above, and she did look like the most miserable little sparrow.

When the men had finished their men-jobs with the wheel, I said to Lijah, ‘Let Billy ride up with you. She’s poorly. The boys can push and I’ll lead the horse.’

He looked at Mehitable, with her shoulders all hunched up and said, ‘Rose can lead the horse. You stay on that side and shout if we veer off that verge.’ Then he helped Mehitable up onto the cart.

We set off again, slowly. The other carts and the
vardos
had gone on ahead. They had long since disappeared round the bend but we knew where they were headed.

If we didn’t catch up soon, someone would head back to find us and I did find myself thinking that if it was the Coopers I might
get offered a lift in their
vardo. I’m getting a bit old for this traipsing in the rain
, I thought to myself, a bit grumpy like. I’ve been doing it since I was a
biti
chai
and I’m ready to sit down in front of a fire and not have to spend the evening cleaning mud off everything I own.

Thinking of all the times I’d walked down a lane in the rain, it came to me: the time just after Lijah was born, when we set off in bad weather, just like this, and my mother got taken from us and killed. I have always done my best not to think of that time. But the rain came down – and it came to me how my mother and I had sheltered beneath a tree, like Mehitable had done just then, and how the farmer had come by and spat at us for no reason. And a feeling of dread and gloom came over me and I found myself raising my face and looking around to make sure we were all together and no one was coming after us. There was Lijah, on the cart, huddled down with a blanket over his head to keep the worst of the wet off, the reins drawn tightly in. Mehitable was sat on the edge of the cart sideways, facing out with her legs dangling over – Lijah said he wanted her on that side for balance. She was holding on with just one hand as the other was clutching her shawl round her head. The hand she was holding on with was white with the cold, the knuckles raw
.

Rose was at the front, leading the horse and stumbling in the mud. At the back, the two boys were one at each corner, ready to push when needed. Daniel was a big, strong lad, by then. Barty was only a little thing but wiry like my Lijah. Above us, the sky was gathered tight and grey, the clouds all packed in. The rain pelted and the branches of the trees bent and shook above us. The brown mud gave beneath my feet with each step I took. It was as if time had slowed right down, as if we had been making our way down this wretched, sodden lane for all eternity.

Then, time became even slower
.

I saw it all happen, just before it happened. A picture came into
my head, but I was so slow in my thoughts I was powerless to do anything about it.

We was trudging. The wheel beside me was turning slowly, with an ancient, creaky sound. The rain came down. All was slippery
.
Folk
slip
,
go
under
, I thought, and shook my head to push the thought away: the lane, the rain – the sight of two gavvers banging on the side of our
vardo
as I came back from the stream and the hollow feeling inside as I ran towards them, baby Lijah clutched on my chest. There was an almighty cracking sound from the other side of the cart and Rose’s head whipped round. Lijah looked that way too, then leaned to one side. The boys at the back called out.

‘Dadus!’ cried Bartholomew.

‘It’s going, Dad!’ shouted Daniel.

‘Push!’ bellowed Lijah back at them, over his shoulder, and cracked the whip over the horse. Rose shouted something else, above their shouts, her hand up. I was looking toward her and only saw sideways – Mehitable’s arm, wheeling up in the air. Then she tumbled, just dropping down from the cart, like a blackbird swooping for something on the ground. The cart lurched forward. There was a cry in my throat that could not find release. Instead, it came from Mehitable, as if my fear found voice in her, as the wheel of the cart pushed her down into the mud.

Then, too late, came the panic, the busyness of trying to do something. Lijah jumped down from the cart. Rose ran around from the front, pushing Lijah out of her way to get to her daughter. I was nearest and there first, already calm enough to think, the ground was soft and gave, that will have saved her.

She had struck her head as well, somehow, but it can’t have been that bad as she was screaming fit to burst, and Rose was beside her, holding her on her lap and screaming too. They were both of them covered in mud. And I heard myself saying, babbling, ‘It was my fault. It was my fault, Lijah.’ And he
gave me a glance as if to say,
last
thing
we
need
right
now
is
you
going
daft
.

He sent Daniel off to run ahead and find the others. Barty helped us lift Mehitable out of the mud and onto the verge, in the shelter of a bush. And we all wept and the rain came down and I was on my knees in the mud with my hand pressed against my chest thinking,
but it was my fault. I made it happen by thinking of my Dei and the rain and the tread-wheel. Bad things follow me.

As if she had not had enough pain already. As if she hadn’t already had her fill. I think that is how come Mehitable wanted to leave us. She knew how unfair it was that such an accident should happen to her, of all people. She couldn’t take any more.

The Cooper lads came back with Daniel and we got Mehitable onto a cart. Rose and Daniel went with her into the next town, where they found her a doctor. They brought her back later that day, one foot a huge ball of bandage. It was broken in different places, Rose said, but the leg was saved by the calliper. It was that iron thing what had tormented her all her life, what stopped the rest of the leg from being mashed. She had a poultice on her forehead, too, but the doctor had said the head wasn’t serious.

But then, when she was laid up, a fever set in, and we all of us knew how serious that was. We couldn’t find any infection in the foot and we burned leaves in a dish but still the fever worsened. It all came back to me, as horribly clear as if it was the day before – it was just the same; taking Dei to Huntingdon Common when we got her out of the House of Correction; her pain and fever; her slipping away, just slipping from me like something I had been clumsy and dropped out of sheer carelessness.

I started preparing in my mind for losing my only granddaughter.

We stayed in the clearing for a fortnight. There was the Coopers with us, and some Kentish Scamps they were related to who stayed behind as well and were right good to us, taking charge of the mending of our cart.

We had been there three nights and Mehitable’s fever was at its height. Lijah and I were sat outside the bender tent, smoking. Rose was inside with Mehitable.

Lijah and I had not spoken much since the accident.

After a moment or two, he said quietly, ‘Why did you say it was your fault, Dei, when Billy fell off the cart?’

How can you explain that sort of thing to a son when he is grow’d? Grow’d he may be, but he’s still your boy and you want to protect him from realness.

‘I saw it about to happen,’ I said. ‘I had a bad feeling and got a picture in my head. I should’ve shouted.’

He looked at the cigarette he was smoking, one of his own rolled-up things with a few shreds of ’baccy and lot of dried leaves. ‘It weren’t your fault, Dei,’ he said, with a long sigh. ‘It were mine. I was too busy looking at the other side and thinking about how it was going down. That’s how come I made the horse go forward.’ Of course, it was all our stupid faults for letting her sit on the edge of the cart in the first place.

Ghosts
, I thought. I felt the ghost of my own Dei, broke on the tread-wheel. I felt it as strongly as if she was squatting on the damp grass beside us. I knew she’d long forgiven me for my part in her death – but she didn’t want to let go, neither. She was lonely.
You can’t have Mehitable
, I whispered to her, in my heart.
Not yet. We’ve need of her
.