The View From the Cart (2 page)

Wynn trotted in and saw me, clapping her congratulation. I paused and reached out an arm to her, to draw her close for a quick embrace. She had made no complaint at the loss of the games we had played together, the solemn walks we had taken over the moors, up to the day before the baby had been born. Under her gaze, I struggled back to the bed, arranging myself against the backboard, reaching for my loom. The new babe needed clouts, and Wynn was growing so fast her smock scarcely covered her buttocks.

Spenna returned at last, her youngest tied on her back and another little thing holding her skirts, and scrutinised me carefully. Her black hair fell across her face, whipped by the March winds, her cheeks red and chapped. Having questioned me, she sighed deeply. ‘You be on the mend,' she pronounced. ‘But it'll take some work from you. It's all stiffness now, from lying still so long. Your legs have forgot how to move.'

I bowed my head before her shrewd gaze and shuffled my feet. If I could simply have stood up and run outside, I would gladly have done so. But slow work, little by little, stretching sore limbs, testing the frail parts of my back, brought me no joy to contemplate.

‘I'll try,' I said. Then I turned to my baby. ‘See how big he is!' I boasted. ‘He don't care that I have no use in my legs.'

‘He will, if you make no progress,' she warned me. She looked out of the open door at Wynn, squatting in the mud, shaping pies with cold little hands. ‘And so will she. It isn't right for you to be leaving her to herself so much — or for her to be doing your work. She'll hate you for it later, see if she don't.'

‘Wynn will never hate me,' I said. ‘She understands how it is.' I needed no telling that I was cheating my little daughter, and Spenna, with her yowling scrapping brood was not the one to speak of it, wise as she may have been. Anyone who could give birth year after year and lose not a single one to accident or sickness undoubtedly possessed special powers; I would never deny that. But all our lives, she had told me more about myself than I wished to hear and I had developed a way of answering her that told her to be silent.

Easter began, as it always seems to, with steady drenching rain. God's tears for his lost son, said Edd, until I reminded him that the lost Son lived again. ‘Tears for his pain on the Cross, then,' Edd maintained. I let him have the last word for once. Church doctrine was not something I liked to argue on, then or afterwards.

The fowls had been laying well for a few weeks, so we had painted eggs, red from the powdery sandstone and a deep yellow from a vein of clay in the riverbank. When the rain eased off, Wynn took three and rolled them around in the barnyard, laughing and chirping with an unaccustomed delight. They had been hard-baked, and wouldn't break, no matter what she did with them. One of the young dogs joined her game, until he crunched an egg hard enough to shatter it. Edd beat him with a leather strap, to show him that eggs were not for his taking.

I was able to squat with fair comfort by that time. The baby balanced beside me, leaning against my arm, and watched his sister. He'd begun to coo and gurgle, showing merriment and other passions. Edd came to us, and squatted square on, face to face. ‘‘Tis a cuthie little tacker,' he remarked.

‘Cuthie?' I looked down at the child, as yet unnamed. The word seemed to fit him, as he gazed so wisely up at his sire. A word for someone especially knowing, quick-witted, possessing a full understanding. ‘A little Cuthman, is he?'

It was not a name we'd heard before, and yet it came easily to our lips.

We decided to have him blessed by the priest in the brief quiet between the final days of the corn harvest and the killing of a sheep and a hog, gathering of apples, and the many other preparations for winter. The matter demanded much debate and trouble, before it was settled. A heavy boy Cuthie was by then, bouncing on his father's arm, squealing with excitement at the antics of the dogs or the birds. My damaged back, much easier though it was by then, would not allow me to walk as far as the church. I was part sorry, part uncaring. I had sore girlhood memories of the dreary Sabbaths spent listening to the priest in the Church of St Brigid in the village; being pinched and sneered at by the other girls for my restlessness and my tendency to piss myself if not allowed outside for hours. But my little son had to be blessed and his soul promised to God, and the priest would note any failure in our obligation.

He was a good man, that priest, who called himself Brendan, as did many others. He replaced the sour fellow we'd had in my childhood days, and was a great improvement. There was a holiness to him, a glow about him which made him pleasing to be with. His talk was all of love and heaven and forgiveness of sins. He marked the festivals with conviction, and visited the sick and dying with a willing sympathy.

When he first heard of my difficulties, he had come to the hut and offered to give me some healing, some weeks after Edd had given me the mistletoe, and I already felt I was mending. As Spenna had done, he laid warm gentle hands on the place, and invoked his great and powerful God to help him heal me. This time, I remained utterly still afterwards, before testing the effects with caution. It was undoubtedly a little better for his ministrations. Day by day, after that, I could manage more movement, with less pain.

‘We should never have come so far from the village, if we had known this would happen,' Edd said, as he watched me one day. ‘I wonder now that we were so foolish.'

‘Hush!' I flashed back. ‘Never say that. We made our life as we wanted it. Who else can say that, amongst those dunderheads down there?'

He took my hand. ‘We were right then, to do as we did?'

‘We were,' I laid my fingers on his rough cheek, where the beard was wispy. He and I were still at that time in a kind of amazement at our good fortune in having each other. We had been solitary and strange as children, both of us, and had only slowly drawn together, as we grew to maturity. One harvest time, we had somehow fallen into conversation over our bread and cider, and I shall never forget that day.

Edd had been staring up at the high moors, looming purple above us, the tors standing out like sleeping beasts. ‘I should like to live up there,' he said, talking as much to himself as to me.

‘I should, too,' I said boldly. ‘I should like to spend my days seeing none of these people, hearing none of their noise. I should like my own goats and sheep around me, with dogs and fowl and —

‘You mock me,' he said severely. Then he sighed. I knew that mockery was his daily fare. A boy with a number of brothers and a powerful father, he stood out like a pigeon amongst a crowd of glossy crows. They pecked at him like crows, too, never letting him rest and dream his own dreams.

‘I do not,' I denied. ‘It is the same for me as it is for you.'

He looked more closely at me then. We were neither of us handsome, our skin scratched from the corn stalks, and hair the dull brown that came after the first bright gold of babyhood. Some in the village had the wiry black hair of the people from further west, but mostly we were red-cheeked and mud-haired. Edd saw something in me and I in him. We looked deep into each other's eyes — his a green-grey, the colour of lichen. When I told him that was their hue, a little while later, he said mine were like the moorland rivers, shining and brown with flecks of green where the weeds grew under the water.

And so it was that we discovered our own special way to be together and to enjoy each other. I had never dreamed that two people could want the same things, the way we did. We played with words, spurring each other to find images to make our ordinary lives more vivid. We were not clever like Edd's brother Bran, who could remember more stories than all the other villagers together. We had no great feeling for music or dancing, and were neither of us fond of the sour-faced priest who dominated us before Brendan came, a man who claimed to have power over the fate of our souls.

There was no objection to our marriage, when the time came. Many said it was the hand of God at work, bringing two such like creatures together. There was greater complaint when we made it known that we would live high on the moors, and make our lives there, in solitude and hard work.

My mother, weak and with few months left to her, accused me of heartlessness. I was her last child, and owed her the duty of my help and care. I agreed, finally, to stay with her through that winter, which was only good sense, in any case. Edd and I would need to wait for spring before building our hut and marking out our land and scratching a living amongst the tors.

The day after we buried my mother, we had the priest marry us, then we took up our bundles, and the few creatures we could call our own, and set off to our new home. We walked for three days, circling and debating, before we found the spot.

‘No, my dear,' I chided again. ‘We did not make any mistake at all.'

There was no escaping the limits imposed by my weak back. Walking was still an ordeal for me. I could take steps only when bent forward, one hand pressing hard on the central place where the damage had occurred, the other holding the ash wood prop that Edd had sought out with great care, and shaped so it fitted my hand. It left me shuddering from the effort, feebleness overtaking me, as if I had stumbled and staggered the length and breadth of the moors. The pain rippled outwards, down to my knees and up to my breast. But it was better than being a perpetual cripple and I had a firm hope that one day I would be my old self.

When the blessing was at last decided on, we debated ways of conveying me to the church. Even if we'd had a pony or donkey, I was unsure whether I could safely balance on its back. A donkey-drawn cart would have bumped over the rough moorland beyond endurance. In any case, such luxuries were far beyond our means. Edd even suggested he carry me on his back.

‘Oh, yes,' I sneered, ‘and who will carry the babe?' Edd fell silent then, and we talked no more that day.

The next morning my mood was dark. The child must be blessed for the sake of his soul. The holy water, drawn from St Bride's well, would wash him clean. The church stood on a sacred spot, where once a great oak had grown. My mother's mother recalled to me, in my childish years, the day the tree had been taken down, for fear it would fall on the church in its old age. Before the winter, the child must be protected from the damnation which would befall him if he were to die unshriven.

There was another reason why it seemed urgent for him to be taken into God's Family. Cuthman had brought injury and suffering to his mother, as he was being born. He had an ill omen upon him from that. There were days when I could scarcely abide him near me, for thinking of what he had done to me. These days had not grown fewer with time or with the easing of my pain. At first, the sweet newness of the babe had overcome my resentment, but as he grew so blithe and assured I came close to turning against him. I would do him no harm, and no-one knew that such black moods came on me now and then. I could not tell Edd that our son must be cleansed of the demon I glimpsed in him. Not then, at any rate.

And yet we still could see no way for me to be present at the baptism.

‘Go without me,' I said, pretending to a greater bitterness than I truly felt. ‘It seems I am never again to leave this place.' I turned my face away from Edd's indecision. The way was steep to the church, with a ford across the river Ock and a stretch of bog to traverse. ‘Unless there be a miracle,' I muttered to myself. If this great God so badly wanted Cuthman to join his flock, might he not ensure in his own way that the child's mother be present?

Edd dressed the child, in a bleached embroidered linen gown which had been my mother's. We had carefully laid it at the back of the hut in a dry press. Wynn had worn it for her baptism. I fingered it for a moment, as it hung over my man's arm. It shamed me that I could not witness the holy ritual, but when I forced myself to stand and walk to the doorway, I could scarcely lift my feet from the ground. Shuffling through a bog, splashing into the icy river water, falling over the rocks on the cruel hill up to the church - all were unthinkable. I dashed away the tears and chivvied Edd into departing. He gave Wynn one hand, and Cuthman perched on his arm. I had not the heart to keep Wynn with me, although I felt terribly alone when they had gone.

And constantly, throughout the day, I glanced out, scanning the sky and the distant moors, waiting for something to happen which would transport me to the church. An angel, surely, would come to carry me? Once, the dogs all barked from the barn and I held my breath, sure that this at last was the miracle. Mutinous thoughts flitted through my mind — if we had been devoting the child to Morgana, or the great Mother, there would not be this shutting out of the one who had given birth to him. Faeries would come in swarms and waft me to the sacred forest grove where my son would be promised to Wicca and the earth spirits. Whispering to myself, I remembered the hints and secrets that women passed amongst themselves over their spinning, secrets which had to be kept away from the priest and the menfolk who embraced the Christian God so obediently.

The hut was untidy with loose straw. The corn had been threshed and the chaff and straw drifted everywhere. Although the Lammas festival was over and the corn dollies made, I took it into my head to make another, as a pastime. Carelessly, I gathered some good stalks, though none had the ears on them as they do for the real thing and they were mostly broken and short. This would be something different, then. With no real intent I stacked them, weaving others in and out to fix the uprights in place. It became a little wall, like the wattle hurdles we made for controlling the sheep. My fingers worked faster, some magic directing them, some greater magic holding the tiny sticks together. I made two more woven walls in the same way and stood them up, forming a miniature open-fronted hut. Scratching round for further straw, I quickly found the materials for a roof.