Haweswater (5 page)

In these early hours she learns skills without knowing that it is an education of one form. The way to hold down a ewe for clipping, with the upper body a brace and one leg an anchor, the strong arm free. She will pry open the mouth of an orphaned lamb, hold its tongue down with a finger and thumb to introduce milk through a fake teat. The point on the side of a head to place the rifle barrel, exact inches from an eye, where the bullet will meet with least resistance. She will not ask if it is the same for humans. Already she understands limits.

One morning she watches her father kill a lame cow. It is still upright in the field, but one hind hoof is rotten. It will not move and cannot be saved, must be destroyed before it destroys the herd, her father says. It sways and lets out an occasional quiet bellow. The decision is made quickly and, without remorse, her father leaves for Whelter Farm to get some cartridges and the gun. For a time she is left alone with the animal. During the wait she prays that the cow will somehow recover and move from the middle of the field where it is stuck. Even two rotten steps to the left might mean it could be saved, so that she could take her father by his cuff and say, See, see, it is still capable. Salvation. Her mother would say the word, the place, is reserved for humans, for they alone can be redeemed through God. Not the animals who have not been blessed under His Mercy. What, then, of this beast without choice or hope of mercy? Only a bullet in the brain to stop its energy and the eventual spread of its bones across the soil. And the land will borrow back that which was lent, as always. She tries not to notice the creature’s gentle, living eyes, but keeps a blind company for it in these last minutes. She can see her father coming back down the lane, shotgun cracked open over his arm. He is inserting cartridge cases, looking down. And at the back of her mind she knows better than to hope for the impossible. She knows she won’t beg her father not to shoot it. He would not mind her pleas, but certainly he would tell her to leave because of them. As her position as guardian it is vital that she stays, a witness to the events entire. And she does not want to disappoint him, he has no son. She wonders if she will cover her ears when he raises the gun. Her father’s boots on the gravel track are louder, and she thinks, thinks hard about the motionless cow, and salvation falling away, perhaps never existing at all.

He bends down to her, the gun like a broken branch in his arm. It’s such a strange and foreign object, half natural, half abhorrently man-made, cast metal. Later, she will be proficient in its handling, able to clean and load it. Later still, and
her aim will be better than her father’s. Crows will tumble out of the branches as she fires.

– Right? Right, lass. Gudgirl. Yer mam wants yer in. But stop here if y’like. S’up to thee.

The girl nods, barely a nod. Her father walks to the middle of the field. The cow is falling before she hears the shot.

There is a smooth white scar on her forehead. It is shaped like a raised star to the right on the plateau of bone. A little too far out across the skin for a piece of loose hair to pass over it as she leans forward and so it usually remains visible. On her body there are several such masculine scars, she has spent too much time with the daily, impersonal violence of livestock and has laboured with heavy equipment too many times in poor light to come away unscathed. Her knees have been lacerated against a lifted plough and there are fingers which do not grow straight, but crook towards her palm like the bent bars of a cage. A broken rib from a frisky goat, its slight indentation in her stomach. Perpetually bruised or missing nails. Swollen ankles. These are accidents of minor proportions, unexceptional in the farming community. Even to her they are normal and acceptable. She does not consider herself unlucky or particularly broken in comparison with the rest of the valley’s female population, nor is she possessed of damages out of proportion with other women of the area. As she grows, her father will gradually wean her out of farm work and instead a brother will help to move the full herd. She will begin tutoring more often at the school, write the occasional commentary for the
Cumberland and Westmorland Herald
under an assumed name, and avoid early marriage, much to the chagrin of her mother. The welts and old scars will heal and diminish, shifting position on her body as she grows.

But the star is the deepest of the collection. It sits against her head as a reminder that her life has included the sporadic
brutality of her family’s trade. It is the clearest mark perhaps, the key, a touchstone by which her father always finds his way back to her. He holds high regard for the scar, a reverence, the way a man might invest powerful emotion in a small icon or that ruptured portion of the past captured in a single object which he has inherited from a dear relation.

She was eight years old and Samuel had already begun to suspect that there were things at work in his daughter a man should be wary of. At times, if he concentrated hard, he thought he could hear a low growl coming from her, emitted from a non-specific region of her chest, like the sound of snow about to move off a mountain in large pieces. As if she was tempered wrong. Her ways were not in keeping with her youth or her sex. She was seldom frightened as a small child will be during a new experience and she had developed a disturbing habit of staring at things, staring clear into them, so that her eyes never dropped during chastisement or argument. Her mother noticed this too, felt her face being eaten by the look as she chided her daughter for the carelessness with which she brought filth into the house. Often she bit her lip and clenched a hand at her side as if preparing to slap the stare away, though Ella had never laid an ill hand to her child. The pair butted heads like two rams on a narrow bridge as they met in conversation. Janet would not swallow God like her daily liver oil. She wanted to be shown His evidence, as if He were worms in the ground that would come up through loose soil seeking solid during the rain. She wanted her proof, a telescope to locate Him in the darkness. Ella warned her against false idols which she would find in such looking, and against straying too far, against fearlessness. An uneasy tension grew between them, as if they were both in themselves too charged, too magnetic to be in a room together. As if their forces would push against each other like invisible gravity from separate
poles and damage the delicate balance of the known world. So their time together took the form of brief intervals, both understanding this to be the only way.

That morning, of Samuel’s remembering, Janet had wanted to come to move the cows as she usually did, but she was running a slight fever. Measles was spreading through the children of the adjoining Shap and Bampton valleys and her mother was worried it had now reached Mardale. Ella was acquainted with fevers of many varieties and the ones heralding trouble came with characteristics gently different from those of a simple head cold. A slight discolouration in the sweat along the temples, the eyes labouring between focus and vacancy. Influenza and child-killers made subtle alterations within the body’s subtext of massive heat. But the girl was up and dressed at five o’clock and would not hear of going back to bed and riding the fever out in comfort. She would not be talked into sickness. She would not be nursed. In truth, it may have been only exasperation over her daughter’s stubbornness that allowed her mother to let her go. Git out of mi sight then, lass, she said, turning from the bold gaze of the small fevered face. And the maternal anger was stored away for a later time.

It was more than just a blustery autumnal morning, her father remembers, because the wind in the leaves of the great sycamores by Measand Hall was threatening sombre repercussions in the brown darkness. There were invisible ills going on, he knew it. Slates being loosened. Fencing being rocked out of its foundation. The roses newly planted in front of the cottage must have been coming away from their crutches. He could hear foliage creaking and bending, the land of the valley itself was distressed.

Samuel held a lantern, which was flickering and threatening to blow out and would probably not last for the duration of the task. So he set it back in the shed, extinguished. Without the distraction of light, the surrounding murk became accessible to the eye. His daughter came out of the farmhouse
towards him. She had on a pair of boys’ breeches, which suited better the work of these early mornings. She was dressed warmly, but as he laid a hand on her head he found her hair was damp with sweat along her brow and she may have been shivering. He asked her again, would she go inside? No. She would not.

With the absence of a lantern, navigation of the path down to the paddock would be a question of relied-upon familiarity and concentrated vision. The daylight that morning was faltering, the clouds were racing across the sky. They set off down the lane. Samuel had with him a rope, wound in coils over his shoulder. Heavy wind in the valley often sent cattle and horses wild, they would take off in whatever direction the gusting force propelled them, filled with a frantic spirit. If this was the case, they would need to be bound round the neck and calmed, kept close. His daughter was walking next to him, her pace quickening as she was blown a little forward from time to time.

Samuel noticed the moving form first, a shape that was out of accord with the surrounding scenery, had movement unrelated to the wind. Then he recognized the density of withers, the curve of horn. A bullock had loosened itself from a nearby field by trampling down an old section of wall. Samuel saw it coming up the path towards them, bucking up its hind legs and cutting the rough air with its head. He gave his daughter a savage push to the side.

– Quick, lass, git up that tree.

The animal picked up its trot as it saw them, it shook its head and snorted. Janet had reached the rowan tree and climbed half-way up it within seconds, moving like a startled cat. She called for her father to join her, but he was standing his ground, removing the rope from his shoulder. He quickly fashioned a noose at the end of it. The bullock continued forward and, as it did so, Samuel tried to skirt it and come at it from the side, where there would be no horns, no hind legs to wrestle with. But the animal was twisting to face him, its
thick-packed muscle shifting under the skin. There was no chance of getting the rope around its neck head-on. After almost a full circle the bullock had him trapped against the rowan. It butted him twice, the horns finding his left forearm. From the low branches of the tree, his daughter saw the blood starting there, dark red through his torn shirt, snaking down his fingers. Samuel had his right hand on a horn and he was trying to pull the large animal down. His left arm hung at his side, dripping and fractured.

He tries to remember the next part of the dreamlike sequence accurately, but there is an unreal quality which is hard to clarify.

It was only a moment later that he heard the cry, a throaty half-growl, half-hiss, and then there was a flash of yellow down from the branches of the tree, on to the neck of the bullock and off, bringing enough weight against the animal for its head to drop with the shock of it. He quickly slipped the rope over the neck of the dazed beast, looped it around the tree. After a few tugs against its bindings the bullock became subdued. For a moment Samuel thought that it had been a lynx which had leapt from the tree. A rare and fantastic creature. Only the corner of his eye had caught it and the morning light was stormy at best. Until he turned and saw the cub of his daughter lying on the ground, with torn breeches and a deep puncture in her head which was beginning to spill.

By the time father and daughter had reached the Shap surgery in the Hindmarshes’ old Morris, their wounds had nearly stopped bleeding, but the puncture, unlike the gash on the arm, had been too obscure a shape to stitch closed. And Dr Saul Frith had been more concerned with the girl’s apparently fully developed measles than with the damage done to her head. He was less interested in tales of bravery than he was concerned with a potentially lethal epidemic, he told them.