Ghostheart (6 page)

We sat to our meal in a gloomy circle around Boson. Even the Slevins seemed somewhat damped. Outside the yard, the Dead Lamps bluthered about the moaney like that owl had around our hearth, and sometimes they whispered and even engaged in scuffles. The Dead are mostly a quiet mob. My brother was plainly bothering everybody, even the Dead themselves. This notion uplifted me and I gave my mother a small smile.

I may as well been a spit of turf.

From that night on Moo brooded by the red glow of the fire and was unmoved by either softness or sharpness. At first Gilpin clung to her barnacle-like and screeched until he was purple and choking. After this he stood before her trembling and shouted at her to
Get Up
. He tried to swipe the moaney-fae off her and he told her, ‘Don’t talk to them, talk to meee!’

At last he tottered outside by himself.

He ate rindy cheese and uncooked meal and whatever else he found in the stores; he slept in with me or out with the cow. I tried to look to him but Pa and me had to stack as many ricks as we could before the rain.

All Quirks are born knowing,
No turf, No living
.

My mother’s voice had faded on the night of the wake, had been fading since Boson turned up in the skybog, and now she stopped talking altogether.

I asked her what she thought she was at.

I said she was not the only one who missed my brother.

I told her she was a bad mother. It was all bootless.

My mother was a mute.

THE DAY AFTER THE WAKE my parents weren’t hungry. Boson still lay-out and the house was filled with a devilish stink of brimstone. They kept to opposite corners of the snug with the fire smouldering between them. In his corner, Pa cuddled the jug like a newborn and jumped every time Moo shifted in her corner. Now and then he almost said something, but right at the point of it he always backed off.

He was frighted of her.

Moo was white-faced now. She looked to be just about bleached, the heart-ague weathering into her like salt into driftwood. All the blazy whiteness of her face made her eyes pool in her head like dew-gems. Apart from her Dead-duties, for two days she’d sat wrapped in fogs with her slow breath the liveliest part of her.

With one rag less gumption my parents would both fold up and slide to the earth. We needed the market but they didn’t think of such things as food anymore. Outside the sun filled up the sky. Even shady parts were flushed and when I went down into the heat-wavy plots it was like having a thick pottage poured right into my head. The crops drooped under grey-leaf and meal-bug. That morning I’d found Gilpin picking the bugs off and eating them like they were currants. That inclined me to determination. I went back into the snug.

‘Pa!’ I said, poking him.

‘Yes, Birdie.’ He looked up at me with his moony-eyes and whistled like it might be comical. It wasn’t.

‘When will we bury him?’ I asked.

He took a long, sucking swig on the jug. ‘When your mother shrouds him,’ he said. He made a stab at the song of the curlew but his lips wouldn’t pucker and he just spat instead.

I looked at my mother. It didn’t seem very likely that she would ever move again.

‘Moo!’ I said, sharp-like. She just sat hangdog.

‘Moo!’ I said, louder. You could’ve drawn blood with my voice. Once it would have had her banging on at me about talking to others like you’d be talked to yourself.

Nothing.

It was no good. She was stone, and Pa was soused.

I set myself to work then, starting with the cow. She couldn’t wait to be settled, while Boson could. Leaving milk in the churn and Gilpin with a dipper, I fetched the baskets Mrs Slevin had brought that were filled with Dead-cloths. She’d probably blessed them at her wicked old altar.

‘More than likely she’s just
soaked
them in devilishness, Mother,’ I said ringingly.

Moo didn’t stir.

Not even a sigh.

So alone I spread the Dead-cloths, and I shrouded my brother. I started at his feet that were just grey lumps at the end of his paling legs. Wrapping the clean, sweet-smelling cloth up and up the log of his body, lifting and turning him as I needed — in spite of the grumblings inside him that looked to be working up to some type of skin-bust. I tried not to look. I tried not to know.

I wrapped up and up, binding his scabbed shanks and his knees gravelled to the bone. I wrapped up his white thighs bruised with old bruises, yellowing, and new black ones, too. I looked away while I wrapped up his hips and so forth. His belly had bladdered-up from the gases, but after a struggle I got it wrapped down tidy. At last he lay swaddled like a sleeping newborn with only his head free. I touched his hair.

It was as soft as when he lived.

The back of my throat filled with an aching clot.

I swallowed it.

The last cloths went on easy enough. He looked untroubled by all the fuss. The cloths went over the scar on his neck where I’d hooked him instead of the salmon that time at the Blackwater, up and over his split lobe where Mungo had bit him snapping for a bee and then licked and licked at the wound in sorryness until he looked to lick the ear right off — and at the last the cloths went over the rough-razored skull he’d brought back from his stay among the Little Brothers.

At last it was done and I went out to the plots. If we didn’t do something before winter the planting ground would just sink back to moaney again and be no good to anybody. I couldn’t find the hoe so I started up pulling at the weeds, feverish-like, by hand. I was sick of putting out my hand to a tool and finding it gone.

Since early summer our house-hoard had been going missing, tool by tool. First an old pail and dipper, but after that some good rope and even a few pots and piggins went missing. Later, we lost our biggest, best blade.

I dug my fingers into the clay harder than I really needed to; the pain felt good somehow, cleaner and simpler than anything else.

I had one row cleared and was just gathering the seed into my shift, when the hedge-warblers came greedy to the furrows all around me. They were like feathered rats.

‘Bloody birds!’ I shouted and waved my arms at them. Foolish in my fury, I threw the seed right at them.

They looked at me, and ate it.

‘Go away!’ I shouted again. I ran at them. ‘Get off!’ I said. ‘Get off!
Off!
’

They rose in little clouds all the way down the row as I passed and then they just resettled like I was less than a passing gust. I watched our good seed disappearing down their tiny wolfish gullets. They filled the air with contented peeps and my gorge rose into my throat. Even the birds wouldn’t listen to me.

‘Stop it!’ I commanded. ‘Stop it!
Stop it! Stop it!
’

I flailed up and down the rows pelting their thieving bodies and loathing their very beaks and feathers. Then I sat heavily in the dirt and the world span around me somewhat. I scraped together a handful of gravel from the furrows.

‘
Stop it
,’ said a voice, somewhere close. I didn’t even look up. I didn’t care who it was. I threw a handful of gravel at the seed-thieves. They were so small but their bellies held so much, while poor Gilpin was eating bugs. I threw the other.

‘
Stop it
,’ the voice said again, clearer.

‘What?’ Just about ready to have somebody’s face off, I looked up but there was nobody in the greens, nobody behind me, nobody in the alder.

‘Hello?’ I said.

For a moment there was nothing in the plot but humming heat and picking birds and then, ‘
Hello
,’ it said, testing-like. I turned about in the empty yard and slowly I waxed clammy; there was nobody there. Nobody anywhere. Only me. And Mungo lying in the dust under the shadow of the stone-wall.

‘
Let the birds be
,’ said the voice. I stepped backward and away.

‘All right then,’ I said into the air, respectful, and then slow as sermons I stepped back until I felt the wall hot behind me. Then I turned and looked into the sky like I was thinking about weather.

Pa had told me you mustn’t let Them know you’re frighted of Them. He said that goosey skin were doors to Them; they just lift the little traps and slip in.

‘Come on, Mungo,’ I called and tried to walk careless-like back to the snug, with his warm body pressed to my side. He plainly hadn’t heard anything. He just loped gentle alongside, gazing soft-eyed up at me. As if to ask what we were going to do next. As if to tell me he would go where I went. As if to say I was somebody special.

I didn’t tell my parents. There didn’t seem to be any point.

After I shrouded him, we buried my brother in the soft ground up at Redcliff. There was just us four, with Pa hauling the Dead-rick alone. If things had been different there’d have been a line of folk, all black-clad and mournful, winding out from all the crofts and towns to bury him. But things were as they were, and we weren’t to bury Boson in the graveyard but to do with him as most would only do with a dog. Carrick’s graveyard is crammed with a picksome sort of dead folk and Scully Slevin says that if an oddling was buried next to them, they’d most likely climb right out of their graves and stalk away with what was left of their noses stuck up in the air.

We made a pitiful progress along the Waterward and I could almost see stretched-out behind us the whole blood-line of shamed and sorrowful Quirks. My mother led the way, followed by Pa and the shrouded body knocking about on the rick, and then me carrying Gilpin. Mungo walked last. That was all of my brother’s procession. Pa and Moo were dark shapes against the grey sky. The wheels clacked, the axles creaked, we turned Saltward.

The rains had come heavy the night before, softening the ground for my brother’s planting. All the buckets were filled and the plots had become dubs, and the dubs become shining pools, and the pools become streams. Now the sky was dull and a misting rain was all that remained.

All along the Saltward the blowholes and drenches sprayed rainbows. Close to the seacliff we dug his grave and laid him down in the oozy clay. Shovelled over, he was just a mound of dirt and when we put the sod back you’d hardly know he was there. We lined up over the mound but there didn’t seem anything to say.

I was breaking up like new-dug clods. I was lopsided without him. My loneliness flapped around me like some oversized garment. Without Boson there was only the chores, and the turf, and these brooding parents.

I crouched down by him.

I laid myself down in the dirt.

‘What will we do about Pa?’ I whispered into the earth.

‘
What can we do
?’ said the voice from the plots.

A frost fell on my skin and my belly turned over.

‘
He’s frighted of her,’
it said. I sidled a look, but my parents hadn’t heard anything. They were still faraway inside themselves.

I wondered if other folk ever had voices plaguing at them from places other than the mouths of people.

‘Shut up,’ I said, testy, and Mungo shot me a surprised face.

‘Well, he is
,’ the voice said, and it was inside my head.

Now I had a voice inside me that wasn’t mine. I had a bad feeling about it.

Maybe this was how it started for my brother.

‘Who are you?’ I whispered and Mungo grumbled beside me.

‘Well, more to the point, who are
you?’ it said clearly.

It might be some sort of haunting or body-theft, I thought, though I’d never heard of the Dead-ones moving into a body that was already tenanted. I would’ve thought that Boson was a more likely shell for such things, and his body was going begging. What had I done to deserve this?

‘Who are you?’ I thought again, hard into my head. I wasn’t going to let any old voice utter at me from inside my very own head without trying to find out who it was, or what it was up to.

‘
I’m nobody
,’ said the inside-voice. ‘
You’re the one
.’

‘The one what?’

‘
You’re the one who can still do things,
’ it said.

I waited for more but that was all it had to say, for the time being.

I closed my eyes. What could I do?

On that first night, the night I found him in the boghole, Moo said she didn’t think Boson would be welcome anywhere but on an old Dead-isle. After the things he’d said and done in his short life, she said he’d probably be for some purgatory of beaks and claws in his death. She said God was a loving god but the first thing you had to know was not to ask questions. She said God gave you things and He took them away again and she said, like any loving pa, he was always right.

She must’ve meant heavenly pas, not those who were right here. Ours wasn’t always right even when we’d all been together and happy. Now we were blasted anyhow in the sorrow about Boson, he didn’t seem to be right about anything at all.

Poor Pa. He’d gone from the grave to stand alone at the cliff-edge, and I went and stood by him. His body rocked in salty gusts off the sea. He just staggered under the wallops, a few steps back and a few steps forth each time, and any of them could have tipped him off the cliff. I took his hand in both of mine, and pulled him back from the edge.

We watched the whale-mam out in the channel as she fluked and spouted and circled the island.

‘Pa?’ I said. He didn’t stir. ‘What are we going to do?’ He shrugged and petted my head like I was some strange cat.

I shook him off.

‘
Pa!
What will we do about Moo?’ His eyes flicked to my mother and I saw he’d settled in himself there was nothing to be done.

‘Well, then, what are we going to do about the thieving?’ I thought to needle him with notions of property and rightfulness and so forth, but he only sighed.

‘Fermion,’ he said. ‘Missing things only need finding.’ It was what he always said when something was lost.

Moo says to look with your eyes and not your mouth.

‘
Your mother’s right,
’ said the inside-voice.

THE DAY AFTER THE BURYING me and Pa went back up the cut. He said the ground would soon be too wet and cold to work. We needed to lay up as much turf as we could before winter. Not just for us, he said. There were old ones such as Lily Fell depending on us. We took our sheep-bags so we could sleep out.