Stone Cradle (21 page)

The ghosts of dead children are the worst sort, of course, the most evil, that is, for they are the ones who went wrongly, before their time. They are the ones who haunt the living with the most fierceness. I would walk through a whole field of adult demons in the dark before I crossed the path of one ghost-child in broad daylight.

I knew that if Mehitable died she would haunt us, and it would not be nice.

‘Lijah,’ I said, ‘I’ve been thinking.’

‘Aye,’ he said, still staring at his roll-up, not bothering to relight it.

‘Let’s settle for a bit,’ I said. ‘For the children’s sake. They’ve schooling to catch up on. They’ve missed a good few years what with one thing and another. And Billy’s never really been strong enough for all this. Let’s go to that village, the one where the old mush offered you that dyke work. The boys could do some too.’

Lijah was quiet. ‘Well you weren’t too keen on house-dwelling, as I remember,’ he replied eventually.

There wasn’t much I could say to that. ‘Rose would be pleased,’ I said, after a while.

‘Sutton,’ he said. ‘It was called Sutton. I wasn’t keen on that mush, he was only paying by the chain. It was handy for Ely, though.’

Daniel approached us, over the clearing. He was holding an enamelled dish in his hands. ‘Ida Scamp brewed us a basin for Billy,’ he said, as he came near. There was a cloth over it, to keep the vapours in. I tossed my head to indicate he should take it straight in, before it lost its goodness. He bent into the tent.

Lijah and I were silent while Daniel was in there, just smoking and waiting for him to come back out.

He emerged, after a while. Lijah and I both looked at him. His face was downcast, which meant she was no better.

‘Take that dish back,’ I said.

Mehitable is going to die, I thought. She is going to die and haunt us for all eternity.

You do not get to keep a person when they are a ghost. You only get to keep what was bad of them, what you and they resent. A ghost is not made up of nice memories – it is made up of all the
horrible things that have happened to a person, all the things you want to forget.

I had not thought of it in years, but as Elijah and I squatted on the grass outside that tent where Mehitable lay trying to die, the story of the Ghost Pig came into my mind.

It happened not far from a village called Kennyhill, on Mildenhall Fen, east of Ely. As a result, I will never go east of Ely again in all my born puff.

I say Mildenhall but actually the place we was stopped near was more on Burnt Fen.

Burnt Fen was an evil place. It looked like it sounded. The black peat earth was hard work and of course it was our men hired to dig it. They said after dark you got spirits coming out of the earth and it wasn’t safe to walk abroad, although my Dadus said that was a load of foolishness. There were gases in the earth that came out when you did the digging.

Maybe that accounts for how the Ghost Pig appeared to us that one black night. We were all pretty spooked, even before then. It’s when you’re spooked that the Evil Ones know they can come and get you. There is something in your mind that lets them in.

There were fifty or so of its in that camp. It was before the time of the big camp which we joined later – it was only Smiths and I was so little that I can hardly remember it, so I think I was probably only just big enough to join in the work with the other children. All us children, and some of the mothers, was employed at stone picking on this big estate, the same one that the men were digging peat for. Stone picking was filthy work, and poorly paid. We only did it when there was no other work to be had. We would form a line across the bottom of a fallow field, first thing in the morning when the cold still shuddered our bones. As the grey light of dawn revealed the black earth to us, we would move forward, taking care not to break the line, either bending or on our
hands and knees. The soil had to be looked at and felt through, so’s we could pick out any stones and the field could be dug over without breaking the ploughs or harrows. Any stones we found, we dropped into the cloth bags we had tied round our necks.

It was horrible work, especially when it had been wet. We would move so slowly – you wouldn’t believe how long it would take to get across a field. It had to be done with great care for the landowner’s man came and inspected the field afterwards and if he bent and picked up so much as a pebble we would none of us get paid until we’d done the field again. I remember pushing my hands into the muddy earth and hating the way it blackened my fingernails. To get them clean again, you had to soak them in frozen stream water until you thought you’d scream with pain. I can remember how it was a relief when you filled the bag round your neck with stones because although it hurt your neck, at least it was an excuse to stand up and walk back to the edge of the field to empty your bag, and that was lovely for your back. You couldn’t take too long about it, mind, as the whole line had to stop until you got back to your place. I can remember most is how my knees used to go bright red with the cold. Later, they would crack, and my Dei would have to rub oil in them.

I hated that work, as you can probably tell. We hated the work, and the landowner hated us. I’m not sure what sort of farmer he was as he wasn’t a regular sort with crops and cows. We couldn’t rightly work out what he grow’d. He was a wealthy man, that much was certain, and it seemed a bit like he was playing at being a farmer as his house was not a low farmhouse but a tall thing with fancy drapings at the windows, and he was always dressed up to the nines himself and riding fine mares, not proper farm horses.

He had a pig, and the pig was his pride and joy. My Dadus was one of the men picked to go and get our wages as he had a way of dealing with
gorjers
. He said this landowner had been quite
pleasant one day and taken them outside and shown us his prize sow in a spotless pen. There were ribbons pinned to the gate of the fen. She had won lots of prizes, apparently. She was huge.

But relations between us and the landowner went bad not long after that. The men finished their digging after a week or so and they asked if they could be put on to helping with the stone picking. The quicker all our jobs were finished, the quicker we could move on and get other work. Well, the landowner refused. Women and children got paid less, of course, and it was cheaper for him to have us finish the job than let the men help. This meant we had the choice of stopping on Burnt Fen with the men not getting paid for anything, or moving on and losing what little us children would earn.

After news of this got back, there was some discussion of whether the men sent to talk to the landowner had handled it right. One of the men had the bright idea of sending a couple of children up to the big house, to explain the problem politely. The smallest, sweetest boys were chosen, and dressed up nice, and were sent off with smiles as they looked like little angels.

The landowner set his dogs on them. One of them got bit.

I have never seen such dark looks as there were on the men that night, and the darkest of all was on the face of the man who’d had the idea in the first place.

Well, I don’t know all the details, of course, but I suppose what happened was that some of the men decided that the boys being bit on purpose could not go unanswered. So they planned to
drav
the
bawlo
– to poison his prize pig.

Now, there were several reasons why you might poison a pig, which was a serious business and not done often. Mostly it was done not to kill it or anything, but to make it poorly so that it could be bought cheap. Or sometimes it was done so that others could go along and fix it up and get in a farmer’s good books. It could only be done by people who knew what they were doing,
mind, as the weight of the pig was important when working out what to give it.

A couple of days after the deed was done, some of our men went along to the farm on some pretext or other. They was hoping that the landowner would complain to them how his pig was poorly. Then they would fix the pig up, and we would get right back in the landowner’s good books and, as a result, get what was right out of him. So four of our men went off: Caleb Smith and his brother Absalom and two of Caleb’s sons.

Maybe they was clumsy in the way they enquired after the pig’s health. Anyroad, the landowner didn’t beat about the bush. He marched them straight out to the sty. The pig was lying stone dead on its side. Whoever had given it the
drav
had overestimated just how big that sow was, and killed it.

When the landowner had shown them his dead pig, he took a whistle out of his pocket and blew on it. At that, a whole load of
gorjer
men ran out from a barn holding sticks. They beat our men black and blue, beat them into the ground. Caleb Smith came back with a lump on his head the size of a hen’s egg and his brother Absalom had his jaw broken. One of the
gorjers
had jumped on his face when he was on the ground. He never spoke proper after that and his food had to be mushed up with a fork. His mouth never worked proper again.

Well, when the men got back from the beating, the women wept and howled, and begged them to leave that place, which they had always said was an evil place and they would now put the say out around our People just how evil it was so none of Us would ever come and dig the landowner’s black earth again. But the men had their pride, of course, and did not want to leave without hurting the farmer back. Some were all for going and torching the farmer’s barns but he would be expecting that, my Dadus said, and there would be nothing but another beating in it.

Then Caleb said, he had heard one of the men who beat on
them say how the pig was good for nothing and would have to be buried by the duck pond and they were lucky they weren’t made to do it with their own bare hands. This set the men thinking. The least we could do, one of them said, was to have that pig. The
gor
jers
wouldn’t dare use it for anything, not with poison in it. But we knew precisely what it had had and we could still make use of it all right. The least we could do was dig up that pig and roast it fair when the wind would carry the smell of it across the fields to the landowner’s house, and he would know we were feasting on his prize animal. We hadn’t had any meat inside us for a good long while, that winter, so this revenge would be killing two birds with one stone, as they say. It was a right clever plan.

So, a night or two later, a group went over to the duck pond carrying spades. The pond was a little away from the farm itself and so they hoped would not be guarded, and it wasn’t. They searched until they found some freshly turned earth. It was a large patch, a few feet away from the pond. My Dadus was in that group, and I heard him tell Dei when they got back later, that they was just raising their spades, when one of them said he saw the earth move a bit, rise and fall. They were doing the digging by moonlight, of course, so nobody could be sure of anything, but they stopped and had a discussion about whether the pig could still be alive in there. My Dadus said it was just the gases in the earth. But the fella who had seen the rise and fall said no, it wasn’t a quick movement, like gas escaping, it was more like something breathing in there. Caleb Smith’s eldest son what had been beaten was there with them, and he swore that there was no way the pig was still alive. He had seen it in its pen and it was dead as dead could be.

The more they stood there talking about it, the more they was getting a bit spooked. Then they heard a dog barking in the distance and wondered if maybe it was the landowner come to investigate – and that was a good enough excuse to leave it for the time being.

My Dadus was not in the next night’s party on account of having stumbled on the way back and hurt his ankle. So Jabez Smith, Absalom’s son, went in his place.

The next night it was black as black but windy so they reckoned that the clouds would clear from the moon by the time they got there. They crept to the same place and found … a big hole in the ground. They stood around it for a little while, shaking their heads in bafflement. That pig had been in the ground not the night before, they were sure of it. They had a bit of an argument about whether it was the same place but they were sure it was.

Then, one of them said, a cold feeling came over them all, all of them at once, a feeling of such overwhelming badness that they began to shiver. They all looked around in the dark – and then one of them saw it, a few feet away … It was white, just like it had been in life. It’s eyes were glowing red. It was breathing through its nostrils and staring at them. It came towards them, just floating over the hole, and they turned and fled.

There was no more argument about whether we stayed in that place after that. The camp was packed up and ready to go before sunrise.

Looking back, now I am grow’d, I do not know if I fully believe this story. For maybe someone else had got there before them and dug up the pig – it was a valuable pig after all. Perhaps some
gorjer
neighbour who had helped the farmer bury it had decided to go back later and have it for himself. But the men swore they saw the ghost of the pig coming at them, after his revenge for having been poisoned.

Word got about, as it does, and after that, the Ghost Pig became the thing that mothers frightened their children with, across the whole of the Fens. I remember my own mother, when I got lost one day and didn’t come back until after dark, taking me by the arm and leading me to the copse nearby. She was shaking with anger, she was that relieved I was back.

‘Do you know what’s in there?’ she said, pointing into the still, dark trees, at the blackness in between. ‘Do you know what walks round here?’ I shook my head.
‘The
Ghost
Pig!’
she exclaimed. ‘And he
eats
children like you what get lost in the woods. Do you understand?’

Maybe it was just a story to make us behave, but my father believed it. He would go quiet when he talked about it.

Looking back now, I think I know what the Ghost Pig was – it wasn’t the pig itself, not really. It was evil in the landowner and his friends. It was all the
gorjer
evil in all the
gorjer
world that got together and stamped on Absalom Smith’s face when he was beaten and lying on the ground. That was what got the men so spooked. It was the bad things that are waiting for a person when all they are trying to do is a live a life – and it was the badness of having poisoned the pig in the first place. It was sort of like the realness of life that lies in wait for you and jumps out. That is why it was so frightening, for all of us. When you are a Traveller, you are never allowed to forget that whatever you have might be taken away from you at any minute. And all you have to do is one wrong thing – and I’m not saying we never did no wrong things – one wrong thing, and you get punished and punished far worser than the thing you did. That’s what it’s like being one of us. And the Ghost Pig is always out there, to remind you, in the dark or even in the daytime. Everybody has their own Ghost Pig, in my opinion. It follows you, even when you’re not thinking about it. It never goes away.