‘GET DRESSED, BOY,’ says Gran-Pa, shaking me awake. ‘You’re going for a long walk.’ He stands over me with the lamp while I pull on my trousers and shirt—clothes he won’t wear any more, they’re so stained and frayed. Under his other arm is one of our cheeses, all wrapped in its fancy market-paper.
‘Where am I off to?’ I’m doing up my boots, the leather of which is nailed down to the soles.
‘To find me one of them angels.’
I straighten up and stare.
‘Get on with it!’ he growls. I duck to my boot-tying. ‘You’ll go up the foothills and in at the gorge, and you’ll call one.’
‘Hunh? How?’ I say before thinking.
He stamps his foot nearly on me. ‘How would I know, swivel-head! Have I ever summoned one?’
Over on her bed, my Gran-Nan moans, and Pa doesn’t go on, only breathes a few times as if he would. Then his voice drops to a murmur. ‘You’ll call one. And you’ll give it this cheese. And you’ll bring it back here, for your nan.’
I finish my boots. His face is Like That.
‘Back here to this house,’ I say.
He holds out the cheese.
I take it and stand up. His eyes are a little lower than mine, when I’m in boots and he’s not.
‘Fast as you can,’ he snaps. ‘She won’t last long.’
I look to Nan, the little lump of her in the bed. Her sickness rottens the air. I punch Pa in the shoulder to make him face me. He totters, open-mouthed. ‘And you,’ I say, ‘you leave her right alone ’til I get back. Not a word. Not a touch. Or I’ll axe you, you murderer.’
And I swing away. The full distance to the trees, I expect the axe between my shoulderblades myself.
HE’S AN OLD MAN AND CRANKY, but he’s all I’ve got, so I must put up with him, mustn’t I?
He’s not all, actually. It’s just that Nan, being so small and grey and quiet, seems like a cooking and housekeeping part of him, not really her own self. She used to be her own, when I was a little lad. She was never what you’d call lively, she was never strong or jolly, but she wasn’t so utterly broken by Pa’s treatment that she couldn’t issue me some ration of kindness. It may have been quiet and hidden; it may have been the barest, meanest ration a child could get by on; still I remember it, and if Pa has all my fear and dread, Nan has what little love I bear towards either of them.
Anyway, what’s surprising me now is: he’s never had patience for angels. At their merest mention he’ll get shouty.
‘Don’t talk to me about those things!’ he’ll bellow. ‘What blamed use are they to anyone? What’s worse, they take perfectly good working men and women, and flap their foul wings over them and make them hermits, or wise-women, or prating poets. “Ooh, the eenjels made me do it.” “Ooh, the eenjels told me to drop all my worldly work and stop paying my taxes, and throw my fambly away like you shake a bit of dog-dung off your shoe”—and fly off over the fields like a butterfly, no doubt. And live in the wild, hey, on those bowls of stew,’ he’ll cackle, ‘that nestle under bramble-bushes, and those warm loaves that dangle off the trees—’
‘And they smell! ’ he always finishes, as if that’s the final thing about them that no one can get past. ‘They stink like bad potatoes and death.’ And he spears a chunk of meat with his fork and plugs his ranting mouth with it. As if he isn’t sitting there in his sweaty breeks and jersey, whoofy as a tomcat himself. As if his boots aren’t thrown down at the door, caked in pig-reek.
And Nan nods all righteous: ‘That’s true, too. Foul beasts.’
I smelt angels once, when I was chasing that young sow up the foothills. The sow’s flattened-grass trail had begun to wander; it was forgetting to flee, drawn off by all the wild food smells—that’s always a pig’s undoing. I’d be on it soon.
The angels caught me side-on, like fox-scent catches a hunting-dog and bends its poor brain. Bad potatoes? Hmmm. More like, having mouldy dung forced so far up your nose that it starts tearing out the back of your throat. Death? It was more like—I tell you, I’m cramming a pumpkin into an eggshell, putting that smell in words.
Just as that poor sow did, I went wandering away from my purpose, hunting whiffs of angel-stink through the undergrowth. I was all nose for a while. And it was hard going, without the pig breaking a path for me. Finally, all pulled about and decorated with dead leaves and spider webs, I came to where I could see them ahead, in a clearing. The grass there was well flattened, in some places worn away to shiny earth.
It was like watching two skin tents tangled up together, steaming and rocking. Bit by bit I made sense of them: stretched-leather wings; spine-bumps in two matching curves; glints of horns in their matted brown hair; hindquarters without sex or hole of any kind.
‘They’re always red,’ says Pa, ‘blushing and flushing. It’s not seemly. And their eyes—you look in and there’s no one in there that’s like a normal man—they’re just bright and bright, and empty.’
I didn’t see eyes that day, and didn’t want to. Even walking here through the angel-less darkness, the power of not-wanting-to-see-eyes makes me swerve and shake my head. The fighting was quite enough. The fighting and the foreign bodies, bodies of not-people, doing who knew what. It was like running from knot-hole to knot-hole in the back wall of Yoman’s barn at the spring musical, spying on the couples in the hay. I’d shriek like I knew what I was seeing, but there’d be an awestruck, silent why inside me along with everyone else, the very middle, real, unpretending part that didn’t understand. I’d never seen anything quite so far outside my ken as these fighting angels—mine, and Pa’s, too, whose lead on worldly matters I’d dumbly followed ever since he and Nan took me in. Followed without thinking.
Those angels started me thinking; their smell was like crushed mint to my brain, breathing open huge new spaces there that I’d not the faintest notion how to fill. They rocked about, twigs and dirt sticking to their sweaty red backs and wings. I couldn’t see how they’d ever end it, this fighting, this sexing, whatever it was, was so locked, the two were so near equal in weight and passion. And Pa’s sow was waiting just around the corner. And Pa was at home totting up the loss to his market-day grog-money. If these beasts broke apart, if they noticed me, if anything changed or developed from this clearing, I’d be lost to the world of slops and chores and earthly breeding forever. I was too sensible a lad to wait, despite the new worlds gathering under my nose. I fought away from the clearing.
When I got back, Pa was too relieved about the sow to notice I was different, and busy ordering me this way and that to strengthen the pen. He’s powerful with words, Pa; in a flash he can make his shoddy building job your fault, and he’ll work you hard to punish you.
I never told Pa I saw them, and I never talked about angels in any way that would make him think I had.
IT’S NOT A DIFFICULT JOURNEY. I’ve hunted in these foothills all my life. I could reach the gorge in pitch-darkness, using the feel of the land underfoot, and this moon is as good as noon-tide sun to me, sliding over the treetops. When I come near the place where I saw the fighters, I can feel my brain beginning to bend again, as it always does when I come by here. Would they be fighting now, straining and rolling in the night? Are they fighting all the time, keeping the earth polished with their sweat?
But there’s the gorge to think of, and there’s this grand cheese to deliver. Furthermore, there’s Nan, isn’t there? I force my wayward head beyond that place.
EVERY SPRING WHEN THE FOREST was budded-up and beautiful, Nan used to take me to a clearing, like the angelclearing, only under a cliff. She’d hold my hand tight as she walked me out of the brush onto the hardened rolled earth. She’d say nothing while we were there; she’d put out the lunch she’d brought for herself, on its opened paper; she’d draw me back into the scrub. One last look behind and we’d leave. When we were back to the path she’d take a deep relieved breath, and start to talk, about anything and everything but what we’d just done.
‘BUT HOW MANY TIMES have you seen them, Pa?’ I asked him, next time the topic of angels came to our table.
‘Enough to know they’re no good. Enough to know that those women as sings to them and makes prayers and pilgrimages is talking through their skirts. There’s nothing holy about those things; they’re not sacred.’ Sacredness itself was a bad taste in his mouth; he spat it out, and holiness, too.
‘So you’ve seen them lots of times, then? When there was that plague of them, you said?’
‘Not here, that wasn’t,’ he was quick to say. ‘That plague was over past the mountains, in junglier land where the weather’s good and sweaty for them. They’d never breed up big in these parts; it’s too cold.’
‘So how’d you see yours?’ I was sure to sound admiring and curious.
‘At a distance,’ he finally admitted. ‘Over the gorge, like eagles. Only, of course, a different shape, and so big.’
‘So a whole flock of them, like gunney-birds?’
‘Nah, just the one.’ He made busy with his food.
‘Oh, but that wasn’t the only time?’ I was all caution, you’d have thought.
‘Well, there was that dead one. All pulled to pieces like any carcass, by scavengers. I tell you, it stank less than the live ones do.’
‘So they have bones like us, and flesh that gunneys can feed on?’
‘Of course they do. What did you think they was made of, sugar and starlight? You been listening to those women, uh? You been off in a corner with your nan, whispering?’ He chewed as he jeered at me. Nan looked into her lap.
‘Course not.’ I hunched down over my plate, as if embarrassed, but really I was all aglow. Why, he’d only seen a corpse and one in the distance. I’d seen two, up close, and fighting! There weren’t many times I could better Pa, but that was one of them. What’s more, he didn’t know to beat me for it.
CHILDREN LIKE ME OFTEN RUN AWAY to the angels—children who have it worse than me, whose grandparents beat them every day, instead of just at low times, or starve them so badly they think they can manage better on fog-berries and starch-root. In the days after I saw the angels, I was in a real turmoil of understanding those children. I could see myself going back while the pig-trail was still there, while the scrub was still broken through to the fighting ground; in my mind I walked up there—then and later—whenever anything happened at the house, whenever any change or accident or turn of the wind put Pa in a bad frame of mind, even after the trail would’ve been all grown over.
But I wouldn’t leave Nan by herself with angry Pa. And I couldn’t take her, could I?—she wouldn’t go. If I even asked, she’d come over all funked. She might hate Pa worse even than I do, but he’s chewed her away so badly, there’s not enough left of her even to flee.
Anyway, what happens to those children? No one knows whether it’s good or bad. You never hear, do you, of even so much as their bones being found. Maybe they do get to go somewhere, somewhere better, somewhere they can’t find by themselves, but only with angels assisting.
Or maybe the angels eat them whole.
THE FIRST PEAKS TOWER OVER ME, and the scrub is turning into fern-trees and mosses. The ground squeezes out water at every step. The air’s cold and damp on my face, and smells of stone and water, not of greenery any more. We rarely come as far as this in our hunting.
IT’S CHANGED EVERYTHING, Nan being sick. She grows smaller and greyer-looking every time I glance at her. I’m scared to glance nowadays; my eyes and my worry might themselves suck the life out of her, the little that’s left.
Of course, it’s made Pa angrier. I can cook some of Nan’s foods, but not like she can; I can keep the house in a sort of a way, but I’ll always leave a broom where it can be tripped on, or let a mat get rain-soaked and ruined, or something else worth roaring at. At least when Pa’s roaring at me he’s not roaring at Nan, asking where’s this and where’s that, and how you boil a spud, and why all her type of work has to be done in such a fiddling complicated way, and just …wearing the woman away with his cataract of a voice, until she’s bare more than a shadow in the bed, until she can speak nothing like words any more. Up to a day ago, she’d take a tiny sip of food from me, if he were outside the house and not likely to barge in and start raging, and if I talked her up to it. I’d tell her it were me that needed her, not to worry about Pa, just to get a bit weller for her poor grandson that she brought up from a baby. Not to leave me alone with the old bastard.
FOG POURS ACROSS THE MOON, wraps me in cold. The gorge opens up, and now there’s the never-ending noise and pother of the fresh-born river, where before was a crackless wall of silence.
The path turns into a steep, slippery ledge along the gorge wall, hardly wider than my foot in some places. The river bashes at the cliff’s feet below—hard enough, you’d think, to shake me off my perch.
‘So I’m here,’ I pant, hand-over-handing, foot-over-footing along the wall, trying not to think how the weight of the cheese tucked in my shirt might drag me down to a pounding in the river. ‘Whereabouts do the blamed things live? Where’s their cave or crag?’
There’ll be that wider space ahead, where Nan and Pa and I went that summer, in the days when Pa let Nan walk places instead of hiding her in the house. I remember it as being far, far up the gorge, a terrifying long way in, but now I round a shoulder of rock and there it is, a shallow sloping platform where the three of us might all stand if we pressed close, an angel would never fit there alongside. With my back to the rock, I try to breathe, in the thunder of the falls, in the water-smoke churning across my face, running cold into my neck. At high summer, the falls were a narrow skein, lacquering the rocks, and Pa dived into a blue-green pool that was lined with rounded stones. Fish and fish-hunting birds darted there. Now, there’s only noise and wind and black wetness, with the moon sharpening out of it and blurring back away.
‘Angels!’ I cry. All this water damps my voice; I might be shouting in the hayshed. ‘Angels, come down! Someone needs you!’
Are they asleep, that they need to be woken? Are they near or far? How long and loud do I need shout?
‘It’s my nan! Come down and fix her! I have this cheese!’ I continue, and so on. The falls roar. The mist catches my throat, presses my face. I feel like a mad person, bellowing alone in the night.
I feel so mad, in fact, that after some time I stop, my faith lost that anything can hear me, let alone follow my words. It’s just another twist of Pa’s temper, that he thought this could work, that angels would come ’cause he ordered them, and is used to his will being done. It’s so cold here, and I’m soaked to the bone, and Nan is probably dead by now, without me there to comfort her at her last. And maybe that’s why Pa sent me away, just to be cruel to her, cruel to us both, and make me miss her leaving.
I’m crouched in a ball when the thing plummets out of the mist, clattering. I shriek and spring open, banging my head on the rock. The smell hits me like a fistful of filthy hot sand.
‘Mortal child,’ says the angel. It’s a reddish shadow in the mist, very tall, with a tremendous chest, no arms, and of course wings, like two sheaves of kindling-brush gathered in to its back. Its heat pushes me flat against the rock. Its eyes fix on me, red and rheumy as a drunk’s, brainy as a priest’s or showman’s. Why would I bother a creature such as this, that can fly, for goodness’ sake—
‘Your offering?’ Its voice is like a sheep-flock scattering in panic, the big ewes baying, the lambs squealing, all in the same sound.
‘Oh!’ I scrabble for the cheese. My fingers don’t work very well. As I unwrap it, the paper pulls the belly-warmed cheese all out of shape. I step into the heat and lay the stretched, stuck mess on the ground, in the cloud of steam the red feet are raising from the wet rock.
The angel drops, props itself on its iron wing-claws and dips its head, like a gunney-bird into a corpse-cavity. With its teeth it shakes cheese and paper in two. It gulps down the first piece, moves springily to the second. Wrapping and all, that cheese, which Nan and Pa and I would have eked out over a week and maybe more, is gone, and the angel has swung to its feet, cheese-grease all up one cheek …
And now it’s having some kind of fit of indigestion. Its throat rasps as if the cheese-paper is caught there, and it sways and stamps, its wings half-spread, swiping close to my face. Something is wrong with the cheese, or the paper, and the thing could unzip me with one of those claws, throat-to-thigh in a moment, for sickening it.
It retches twice, showing me the white ribs roofing its mouth. Its red-gold eyes weep and roll. Then it spits two bright, wet things, thwap!, thwap!, at my feet—yellow-hot pellets, sheathed in a thick jelly.
Harrumph! It wipes its mouth on its shoulder-mass. ‘You were saying about your nan?’ it hums.
‘Huh?’ Nan? I’d forgotten. Nan has never been smaller or greyer in my mind. ‘I—I think she’s dying,’ I blurt. ‘She’s maybe dead by now.’
The angel looks at the moon. It stretches its face like a cat yawning—eeagh. ‘Not quite. But soon. You’ll need to walk fast, earth-mite. Redden your legs some. I’ll precede you, ah?’
‘Oh.’ I have to think a bit to make sense of its noise. ‘All right. You don’t need—you know the way, then?’
The angel’s eye-blazes sweep down to me. With a claw-tip it rolls the dimming gold pellets towards me, coating them with dirt.
‘Oh—aye. Thank you—’ It’s like picking up warm turds. I put the slippery things in my trouser pocket. The front of my clothes is dry, the front of my hair, from the angel; steam tickles up the back of me, meeting a cold-sweat-dribble coming down.
The angel launches itself straight up. Its wings snap open, and its worm-root smell blasts out. Then I’m cold and damp and blind again, with the moon gone behind a cloud, and the water fighting to free its head in the gorge below.
IT’S NEARLY DAWN. Pa’s pacing up and down the fence like a penned puppy. When he sees me he makes a leap of frustration.
‘It got here, then?’ I call when he’ll hear me.
‘The blamed thing! Nobody said it’d—It’s—’ He’s gibbering angry. ‘It’s sprayed all around the place with its bloody smell, that’ll never go! It’s mad as a cut-snake—You can’t talk to it—It sings, like having your ears sawn off!’ A rough braying starts up inside the house. ‘Hear it!’
The windows and doorway glow orange. ‘It’ll be hot in there,’ I say.
‘All that firewood!’ He’s nearly weeping. Pa’s fires are always mean and miserly; building a blaze like that is like gnawing direct on his heart. ‘’Twould of seen us through three winters, husbanded right—’
‘And Nan?’
He’s angry again. ‘Can I tell? Can I get near the woman for that production going on?’ He follows me into the bright house. ‘The damned creature—’
A stink like fireworks, a sound like accordions being bashed apart against trees, the fire blaring up the chimney. The angel squats on the table, working itself up to a crimson pitch. Veins seem to burst into sweat on its neck, running down, dripping off it. Its head clanks the lamp, which is turned up full as Pa would never have it. Bright yellow light and shadows of the lamp-case giddy about on the walls.
In the middle, Nan sprouts from the bed, her chopped hair all cockscombed from being lain on, the sheets like a swirl of mud around her hips. She has no colour of her own; she’s angel-oranged pleats and bristles, against an orange wall. Even her eyes are oranged over, the pupils pinpricked to nothing.
I fight through the stenches to get to her, to make her lie down. But her body is stuck upright, all bands and wires. If I push her down, her knees will come up stiff, and we’ll both be ridiculous.
I can’t think with the din. I put my face in my hands, down on her kneebone through the grey sheets. My nan and pa raised me to be useful, but there’s nothing I can do here. This is like a big wind, a bad rain, where you just have to sit inside and hope that the roof holds, where you can do nothing ’til after, when it’s clear what’s damaged and what’s gone altogether.
The lamp crashes to the table, cutting off the angel’s roar. I start up, but the thing stops me with its clever red eyes, crushing the flames out of the spreading oil with its feet. Silence billows out with the burnt-leather smell; even the hearth-fire spouts up soundless; Pa’s mouth makes anguished shouts at the door, but he’s no noisier than a fiddle-string, coiled and tied in its box.
And through the silence comes something immense and leisurely, that sheds the filth of the heavens from its dusty wings, to dim the hearth-fire, to lower the angel’s greasy red lids over its eyes’ intelligence, to bow down my pa in the doorway.
Whatever it is, it comes for all of us, ant or angel, lost child in the forest or lady and lord of manners. Tonight it’s come for my nan, and it gathers her up out of the thing that was her self, up out of her own bones into its dark, dirty, soft, soft breast, unfisting her hands from the front of her nightshirt, laying down her remains, moving her on from us like a storm cloud dragging its rain.
Behind it, the night is suddenly vaster, colder, clearer. All the stars zing; the mountains glitter; towns and villages gather like bright mould in the valley-seams and along the coasts. Every movement in byre and bunny-hole, of leaf against leaf, of germ in soil and stream, turns and gleams and laminates every other, the whole world monstrously fancy, laced tight together, yet slopping over and unravelling in every direction, a grand brilliant wastage of the living and the dying.
PA WAKES ME up—hours later, it must be. I’m curled on the bed around Nan’s dead feet. The chill is back on the house, the fire a few red winkings in the hearth. Nothing is in its right place; I remember, I had some dreams that yammered and beat at the walls.
Pa has that dragged-through-a-bush look he gets when he drinks; his eyes could be weeping or just watery from the spirits. He yanks me off Nan, and hauls me outside. He flings me down in the yard-corner.
‘Bury her there, that angel said,’ he challenges me. ‘So dig, boy.’ He brings the spade, hurls it at me, lurches inside where he falls, and swears, and skitters something across the floor, and stays down.
I lie there a little while, listening to pig-snuffles and cowplods. It’s too early for birds; there’s a low moon, strong stars.
Then I up and reach for the spade, because my stiff body needs to dig, because my nan needs to be in the ground, safe from Pa forever.
With the first bite of the spade into the earth, there’s something different, juicier, lumpier than it should be. When I turn the soil, giant pearls fall out of it; some roll away; others, split by the blade, gleam white and wet in the starlight: tiny potatoes, no bigger than quail-eggs, thousands of them. They’re grown so thickly, I have to not so much dig them as sift the soil out from among them with my hands. I eat one, and it crunches like wet stars, but tastes like sweet earth. It needs no salt or softening; it needs nothing but a mouth that’s ready.
When I’ve dug out the whole crop, there’s a Nan-sized hole, earth heaped to one side, a greater pile of potatoes to the other.
I step over snoring Pa, into his beaten house. I carry out the little that’s left of my nan, the cloth of her stiffened with disuse. I lay her in the earth. I draw the bedsheet over not-her-face and bury her. I gather runners of grass, lay a cross-work of them over the grave and water them in well.
I’m hurrying now. I’ll take not quite half the potatoes, in this sack. I’ll wash before I go. I’ll take this spare shirt of Pa’s and the trousers—
I strip off at the pump. Something in the trouser-pocket makes a hard noise on the ground. Angel-pellets. They’ve stuck to the cloth; when I pull them free, they’re brown, withered, and covered with pocket-litter. I lay them on the stone edge of the trough, and when I’m clean and dressed and booted, I take my knife and cut into one rubbery casing, to a harder core. I put my thumbs into the knife slit and pull it hard apart.
My knife has nicked the waist of a fat bean of gold. I roll it in my hand, feeling the weight, perhaps three coins worth. That’d pay us well for a whole year’s cheeses. I think for a while, then slit the other pellet and place it open on the trough-rim. Let Pa find it, let a bird take it—I’m past caring, and I won’t go back in that house.
I hoist my spud-sack onto my back. I leave the wreck of my pa on the floor, the husk of my nan in the ground. I get clear of Pa’s shambling fences, and turn onto the road that leads down to the plain. The plain has towns and markets; it has smiths and shipwrights and mill-owners. A strong lad like me must be some earthly use to someone, down there, if he walks far enough.