The Rye Man (11 page)

To his disappointment he broke into a clearing where the blackened bones of a fire showed that someone else knew this place, but he told himself that it had been a tramp, or travelling person who was long gone and would never return. He pushed his way through brambles which plucked at his jumper, holding his hands high in the air as if wading through water, and made his way to the other side where it broke open revealing the world below. He climbed a tree, the one he was to climb again and again, then made his way along a knotted branch which jutted out into space, sitting astride it and shuffling his way forwards until he reached a point where he could peer through the veil of leaf and see the countryside spread out before him. See, without being seen, the house below while all about him the trees rustled and breathed gently.

A house with a red door and a blue slate roof. A curl of smoke. A yard with a stretch of flapping washing held aloft by an angled wooden pole; a piled store of peat; a stone barn to the side of the house. He saw her too, working a hoe in the vegetable patch with its ridged rows, stooping from time to time to pick out a stone or weed. Her hair was pinned up and sometimes she stopped to push a fallen wisp of hair from her eyes. Her name was Maguire – he had been in McMinn's fruit shop one day when she had placed a box of lettuce on the counter and Mr McMinn had marked the transaction in a ledger he kept under the counter.

Once she stopped for a rest and glanced up at the trees, looked right at him, but he knew she could not see him and it made him feel like a god, as if he had power over her, and
at
the same time his feeling of omnipotence was tinged with guilt, an awareness that he was spying on her. He meant no harm but her world was open to him, drawn into his vision like light into an eye.

It became a game, this journey to the copse, nestling in the sanctuary of the branches and watching the world below. He became familiar with her movements, came to recognise the clothes she wore and grew intimate with the pattern of her work. Always only a game.

As May slipped into June he found himself spending more time in his secret place but he told no one about it, afraid that to share its existence would rob him of its ownership. He made a makeshift hide and stored objects which he surreptitiously borrowed from home. He watched her build a scarecrow and drape it with tattered clothes, watched her move through the repetitive pattern of her life, as she tilled the flinty ground that was greening with new growth. And never any visitors, just once a younger woman on a bicycle who stayed a short while and then was gone.

Only one thing eluded him, one thing for which he found no meaning. At intervals she would walk to the stone barn. Usually she would carry some sort of container, a bowl perhaps, and then return a few minutes later. He could tell by the way she held it then that the bowl was empty. Wooden pallets and sacking blocked the windows and the slated roof was mottled with yellow moss. A bowl of meal perhaps. She always paused before entering and then one day, in the glint of light on metal, he knew that it was to unlock the door with a key. Perhaps she was frightened someone would steal her stock, or maybe it stored something valuable to her, but it was a small thing and it drifted to the back of his mind.

Once his mother mentioned her in a conversation he overheard, only a passing reference that told him little, other than
that
she was a widow whose husband had died in an accident ten years earlier, and she had a grown up daughter living in England. That was all anyone seemed to know. One Saturday he saw her for a second time in the town, scurrying with her busy, anxious gait. She walked right past him, a canvas shopping bag clutched in her hands. He looked into her face and for the first time saw the features which had always been just too far away to grasp. He did not know what age she was but maybe about the same as his own mother, with a small tight mouth and dark brown eyes that seemed to burrow deep into her head. She wore a long green raincoat, belted and buttoned tightly about her, and her shoes were scuffed and splashed with mud. Her hair was pulled back tightly and pinned in a bun and it made her face look pinched and taut. As they passed, he half-expected her to look at him and recognise him, but instead she stared straight ahead. He watched her hurry down the street, never pausing to look in shop windows, separated from everything around her, like a shadow moving across a field.

Now the grass grew tall, fanning in undulations, allowed to grow before being cut for silage, while in the trees leaves thickened and blocked out more light, casting flitting, trembling shadows which darted about him like fish in a rock pool. The sap of summer was in the touch and smell of everything. Soon school would end and bring the possibility of new adventures. And as that day approached he grew more curious about the stone barn and the journeys she made with the bowl. Slops to feed some animal or poultry? But why were they never allowed outside? How could they live in the dark outhouse where only slivers of light would filter through the cracks in the wooden pallets? He thought, too, of the key with which she opened and locked the door. What was it that she was so frightened of people stealing?

Gradually
he grew bored with his game, frustrated with a life where nothing happened, and he knew he would soon desert it. Then, one Saturday afternoon when he had fled the visit of aunts, he saw her come out of the red-painted door, her canvas bag in her hand and wearing her belted raincoat. He knew she was going into town.

He watched her hurrying down the laneway on to the road, her pinned-up hair bobbing above the top of the cut hedgerow, and on impulse he was down the tree and walking across the field, the seeded heads of grass lapping round his waist. He hesitated for a second at the fence, then climbed over it, the wooden post trembling for a second under his weight then vibrating slightly as feelings of guilt rustled inside him. No one would know. Just one look at everything to see it clearly, cleanly, like the final focus of a lens, and then he would be gone forever. No harm to anyone, just the final satisfying of a curiosity and then forgotten. His hand on the whitewashed walls of the house, baked warm by the sun, his shadow moving in front of him like a ghost.

He came to the window but could not bring himself to do anything but glance guiltily out of the corner of his eye and move on, almost as if to stop and stare would be to intrude too deeply. He glanced at his fingers whitened with dust like chalk and as he faltered across the front of the house he carried an image of a brown interior like a sepia photograph. A mirror on the far wall, a crackling square of frizzling light. Into the yard and saw for the first time the lopped branches of the trees piled on top of each other, one of them stretched across a cutting block, an axe buried in the rotting bark, the yellowed end of the branch broken off like a snapped pencil. The heaped mound of peat, two sheets on a clothes line, a wooden pole with a V cut in its end holding them up like a mast and sail. As he looked towards the barn a sudden thwack
of
a sheet made him jump and quickened an impulse to escape back to the safety of the trees. He stared up at where the trees stood tall in the rising wind. What if she was there, watching him now just as he had watched her? A shiver passed through his body like the wind in the field of grass.

In front was the red barn door, wooden pallets and sacking nailed to the window frames. Purple-headed weeds sprouted from crevices along the base of the wall. He looked about him once more to check that he was alone and then tried the door but it was locked as he already knew it would be, and its solid frame resisted all of his half-hearted efforts to push it open. Moving to the windows he put his eyes to the gaps between the slats of wood and peered into the gloom. Almost at once he pulled his head back as if he had been punched, the smell unlike anything he had ever known. Living on a farm had taught him about smells, but this one was different. It was not the uncovered slurry pit, the rotting carcass of a sheep hidden in reeds by the stream, the stored mound of turnip to be used as winter feed.

He pinched his nose and looked again and that was when he heard it – the low, almost inaudible whimpering, but mixed with it was another sound, the strangled, guttural breathing of some animal he could not recognise. He pushed his face closer to a knotted gap in the slats and thought he glimpsed the shuffling shape of some shadowy creature. The noise grew louder, more insistent, and he suddenly felt that it sensed his presence, the way a dog knows when some stranger has encroached on its territory. The sounds were not fierce, but almost pleading; not falling or rising beyond the whimper but a low, steady, plaintive sob which held him with its strangeness and for which, despite his frantic searching, he could find no reference in his memory. A little louder now, maybe closer, and with it a flurry of smell, infused with some festering sore.

He
pulled back his head to breathe clearer air and as he did so the sacking trembled behind the pallet. He wanted to turn and run, run and hide in the heart of the trees, but the creature was calling to him now, a wordless pleading, breaking on itself and now rising again in a fragmented and desperate rhythm of need. The sacking moved an inch from the wall leaving a narrow margin of darkness, and then just above the sill and from behind a tiny half-moon-shaped knot in the wooden band of pallet, he saw it moving towards him. His heart banged in his chest and he stepped back, frightened that somehow it might seek to drag him into the blackness of the barn, but it rested on the stone sill, thin, shorter than his own, ingrained with dirt, the long ragged nail speckled with white and brittle-looking like the shell of an egg. The whimpering had stopped and there was only the rustling, shuddering breathing behind the sacking which trembled now like a veil. And then he stepped forward and slid his own finger along the sill until the two tips touched.

Then he was gone, running through the long grass using his hands like a swimmer to speed his path, along the river bank, running until the hot stabbing pain in his side forced him to stop. But still he walked, both hands on his hips like handles on a jug, his breathing coming in deep retches. Stooping down, he splashed his face with water, dipping his hand into the reflection of clouds, then started to run again. And when the pain pierced his side the memory of the sounds twisting round his head spurred him on and would not let him stop.

He found his father in the lower fields cutting hedges, the lane smudged with black, thorned clippings, but his breathless story bewildered him and he had to repeat it again and again. He did not tell his father everything, but when it looked as though he would turn again to his hedge cutting, he pulled
his
father's arm with an urgency and a familiarity that startled them both. He knew his father did not understand, thought it was only some child who had accidentally got locked in, but he did not care if only his father would come and set him free. He clambered up behind him on the tractor and the noise of the engine prevented any further conversation, but he could sense his father's feeling of exasperation in the stiffness of his posture and the roughness of his gear changes.

His father knew without needing directions where the house was and as the tractor trundled slowly up the lane leading to it he tightened his hand on his father's broad shoulder. Impatiently, he watched him knock at the door of the house then walk towards the barn. His father kept asking him if he was sure, as if not totally convinced that he had not made up the whole thing, or that it was not part of some childish game, and for a terrible moment he began to doubt his own memory. But as they came closer to the locked door and the blocked-out windows he remembered the touch of the finger and knew that it was real.

His father tried to open the door, his large hands rattling the lock, then put his head to it and listened, both palms pressed against the wood above his head. He called out but there was only silence and when he turned round there was irritation on his face, an expression that said his suspicions had been realised. Before, it would have been a look which would have silenced him, driven him to shelter, but now he grew desperate and begged his father to listen again, showing him the gap in the wood where the finger had appeared. His father ran his hand along the sill dismissively and as he did so they both heard the soft whimper from inside. He clattered the pallets with his fists and called out again and again, asking if there was someone there but the only response was the rising whimper.

His
father's face had changed now, as if finally it had come awake, and he sent him running across the yard to fetch the axe with a voice driven by urgency. He had to twist and jerk it with both hands before he freed it from the wood, and as he ran he almost tripped, his knee banging against the blunt edge of the axe-head. In his father's face he saw the uncertainty which had replaced his familiar calm self-confidence and as he took the axe he hesitated, holding it in his hands as if feeling for its balance while he tried to decide what to do.

With a sharp jerk of his hand he motioned him to one side and the axe was swinging towards the door in a great slicing arc. The noise of the cracking, splintering wood was terrible to him as if something secret, almost delicate, was being broken in front of him and he closed his eyes as the axe rose and fell again and again. As it clattered to the ground he opened his eyes to see his father holding on to the wall with one hand and kicking in the lacerated door until it flapped inwards, vibrating in the sudden surge of silence like a plucked chord.

Without moving they both stared at the fan of light which squirmed across the barn, lighting up the soiled whorls of straw, the smear of shit, the scraps and husks of food strewn across the stinking floor, felt the hot, fetid stench hit their senses. His father rubbed the back of his hand across his mouth, told him to stay where he was, then dipping his head to clear the lintel, entered the barn.

He watched his father hesitate, then step out of the fantail of light and disappear into the shadows, heard him say, ‘God in heaven,' repeating it two or three times, but softer each time, and then he was talking too softly to hear the words but it sounded like the way he would speak to some frightened animal which might bolt at any second. The whimpering had
grown
louder again and it was accompanied now by strangled hawking noises.