Ill Will. Michael Stewart
surrounded by heather and gorse, with the blue sky above me, I felt free. I closed my eyes and felt the sun’s rays on my face. The sun felt like you. Like your heat next to my skin. Like your breath on my neck.
When I woke the sun was further on. I felt dozy. Must keep going. I got up and shook the grass from my clothes. I plucked cleavers from my breeches. I stretched my limbs and joined the path by the river once more. I walked through fields of sheep, fields of wheat, fields of beef. Fields of milk, mutton and mare. Over meadow, mire and moor. I climbed over dry-stone walls. And clambered through forest. Eventually I approached another village. I arrived at a packhorse track and walked along it. I passed cottages and barns. Mistals and middens. There was a sign on the road but I couldn’t read it. Although I knew the alphabet, you never completed your tutelage. There was always something in the way with language. We had a more direct connection, Cathy. A pure link. That’s what you said, and I believed you.
It was a small village with two taverns, a butcher’s, a baker’s and a chapel. All clustered around a green where a tethered goat grazed. I went into the first pub and asked for work. I went into the second pub and asked for work, and in every shop. Everywhere I enquired the answer was the same: no work for the likes of you. My limbs ached. My eyes felt as though they were full of sand. I sat on a bench in the graveyard. I was tired and it would be dusk soon. No roof to offer me shelter. I sat and watched two old women tend to a grave. They pulled out weeds and arranged some flowers. They scraped away the lichen from the engraving so that the chiselled letters were fresh once more. They nattered and gabbed. So-and-so has his eye on so-and-so. Will he do right by her or will he use her as his plaything? Looks Spanish. When’s summer going to start proper? Who was that strange fella in church last Sunday? Not seen him before. Not from these parts. Old Mr Hargreaves is dead. Finest weaver in the county. Found him in his own bed. Half-undressed. On and on they nattered, about this and that. By these women was an open grave.
The women noticed that I was watching them. They looked at me suspiciously. They pointed and whispered. But I didn’t care. Let them talk. Let them think and say what they liked. They meant nothing to me. There was no one alive who meant anything to me now. Not even you, Cathy. I was nothing, and no one. I focused instead on the black rectangle to the side of the women. Its blackness falling down into the ground. Where did it go, this blackness? To hell? Perhaps I should climb into this hole. I thought back to Joseph’s fire-and-brimstone catechisms. Was hell really all as bad as he would have it? With sinners in perpetual torment? You showed me a picture in a book, Cathy. A man with horns and a pitchfork and a big grin on his pointy face. He looked more comical than evil. Evil hides behind the door. It lurks in the shadows. As I thought about hell and evil, I saw people congregate. There were men and women gathering around the black rectangle. There were four men carrying a coffin on their shoulders. They were dressed in black and the men and women surrounding the hole were dressed in black. A veiled woman was crying. I could see her face shake beneath the veil and tears fall onto her dress. It was good to watch her cry and watch the rest of them grieve. Let her weep in her widow’s weeds. It was music and food to me.
I thought about her wedding to this corpse who had once been a man. Perhaps in this very church. Everyone done up again, only this time in white and brightly coloured garments, the lavish pretence, the gilded facade. Pretending to marry for love, when really it was for wealth and status. Love didn’t need a marriage chain or a poncey parade. Love baulks at ceremony and licence. They talk about tying the knot but love unties binds. It lets the bird out of the cage. The bird that is freed flies highest. The cage is best remembered enveloped in flames.
You told me you would never get married. That we would always be together. You promised. How easily your words betray you. Marriage is for dull people, we both agreed. And people are dull, except for when they grieve. I watched the priest and the party of mourners, watched the mound of earth at the back writhing with worms, starlings stabbing at the flesh. I watched the men drop the coffin, using ropes to lower it slowly into blackness. More people weeping. Some of them beyond tears. I supped on their misery. Every death is a good death. All flesh is dead meat. I had cried when Mr Earnshaw passed away, but now I wished I hadn’t. I was glad I’d listened to his last breath. Seen him choke. Will he go to hell or to the other place? I hoped he would burn and his blood would boil in the red flames of the inferno. I cursed cures and blessed agues. At last the wooden box was lowered into the ground completely and the ropes thrown in after it. Swallowed up by blackness. How long would the fine oak casket last until the wood splintered and decayed, and all the slimy things ate beneath the grave?
When all of the party had gone back the way they came, with heads bowed and handkerchiefs on display, I stood up and approached the open grave. I stood over the black hole and peered in. The coffin was surrounded by clay, with black soil on top of the box, which the pastor had chucked in. I imagined, in the place of the coffin, you and I, Cathy, lying next to each other. With six feet of earth above our heads. For all eternity. That way you would keep your promise.
I left the churchyard and wandered around the village and the looming moorland until it was fully dark. I was looking for shelter. I came across a farm surrounded by outbuildings. I found an unlocked barn, lifted the latch and swung open the door. Inside there were pigs, nudging and jostling each other. They smelled of their own shit. In the corner, by the swine, was some loose straw. It wasn’t exactly a four-poster bed but I could make my rest out of that, I thought.
I left the barn and wandered some more, not tired enough to lie down on God’s cold earth. I walked down a tree-lined track, back into the village. As I did, I heard music in the distance, a cheerful jig, and, drawn to the noise as a moth is to a lantern, I tried to find its source. I wandered along cobbled roads and muck tracks until I came to a village hall. It was a large barn, painted white, with light pouring from its windows. The music was coming from inside. I walked around the back. There was a small leaded window and I peered in. There were lines of lanterns and a huge fireplace with a roaring fire. There was a long table laid with food and drink. There were people lined up dancing: men and women of all ages. The women wore colourful frocks and bonnets. The men wore smart breeches, bright waistcoats and fancy hats. The hall was decorated with brightly coloured ribbons. There was a fiddle player in a cocked hat, playing a frenetic tune. I watched the group dance and sing and sup flagons of ale. I watched them smile and laugh and talk excitedly. The men held their women in their arms and drew them close to their bodies. I felt sick at the sight of them.
Then I saw a black, repulsive face staring back at me. Half-man, half-monster, just as Hindley said. My reflection in the glass pane. A black shadow of a man with not a friend in the world nor a bed to rest, barred from life’s feast. I wanted the night sky to swallow me up, to be dust. I could never be one of those people in there. My life would never be one of mead and merriment. Condemned to stand outside the party. Not like you, Cathy, with your fancy frocks and fancier friends. With your ribbons and curls and perfumes. I wandered back to the farm, crept into the animal barn, and lay down on the straw with the swine.
That night I dreamed we were on the moor; the heather was blooming, and you were teaching me the names of all the plants of the land: dog rose, gout weed, earth nut, fool’s parsley, goat’s beard, ox-tongue, snake weed. Your words were like a spell. I watched your lips form the sounds. I saw your tongue flit between your perfect teeth. Witches’ butter, bark rag, butcher’s broom, creeping Jenny, mandrake. We looked around at the open moorland, but it had all been hedged and fenced and walled. There were men, hundreds of them, burning the heather, digging ditches, breaking rocks. There were puritans, Baptists, Quakers, inventors, ironmasters, instrument-makers. Our place had been defiled. The flowers of the moor had been trampled on. The newborn leverets butchered. The mottled infant chicks of the peewit had been crushed underfoot. Guts in the mud. You were in the middle of the mob, a heckling throng, staring around. I held my hand out but I couldn’t reach you. You were lost to me.
The next thing I was aware of was someone taking me by the shoulders.
‘What the bloody hell do you think you’re doing?’