Sacrament Page 5

Will wanted to hush the man’s self-recrimination—it was of no use to anybody now—but his tongue would not work to make the words. His eyes, however, opened a fraction, dislodging the dusting of snow in his sockets. He couldn’t see Cornelius, or Adrianna, or Gert Lauterbach. Only the snow, spiraling down.

  “He’s still with us,” Adrianna said.

  “Oh man, oh man,” Cornelius was sobbing. “Thank fucking God.”

  “You hold on,” Adrianna said to Will. “We’ve got you. You hear me? You’re not going to die, Will. I’m not going to let you, okay?”

  He let his eyes close again. But the snow kept coming down inside his head, laying its hush upon him, like a tender blanket put over his hurt. And by degrees the pain retreated, and the voices retreated, and he slept under the snow, and dreamed of another time.

  I

  For a few precious months following the death of his older brother, Will had been the happiest boy in Manchester. Not publicly so, of course. He had quickly learned how to put on a glum face, even to look teary sometimes, if a concerned relative asked him how he felt. But it was all a sham. Nathaniel was dead, and he was glad. The golden boy would reign over him no longer.

  Now there was only one person in his life that condescended to him the way Papa did, and that was Papa himself.

  Papa had reason: He was a great man. A philosopher, no less. Other thirteen-year-olds had plumbers for fathers, or bus drivers, but Will’s father, Hugo Rabjohns, had six books to his name, books that a plumber or a bus driver would be unlikely to understand. The world, Hugo had once told Nathaniel in Will’s presence, was made by many men, but shaped by few. The important thing was to be one of those few, to find a place in which you could change the repetitive patterns of the many through political influence and intellectual discourse and, failing either of these, through benign coercion.

  Will adored hearing his father talk this way, even though much of what Papa said was beyond him. And his father loved to talk about his ideas, though Will had heard him once fly into a fury when Eleanor, Will’s mother, had called her husband a teacher.

  “I am not, never have been, nor ever will be a teacher!” Hugo had roared, his always ruddy face turning a still deeper red.

  “Why do you always seek to reduce me?” What had his mother said by way of reply? Something vague. She was always vague. Looking past him to something outside the window, probably, or staring critically at the flowers she’d just arranged.

  “Philosophy can’t be taught,” Hugo had said. “It can only be inspired.”

  Perhaps the exchange had gone on a little longer, but Will doubted it. A short explosion, then peace: That was the ritual.

  And sometimes a fond exchange, but that too quickly withering.

  And always on his mother’s face the same distracted look whether the subject was philosophy or affection.

  But then Nathaniel had died, and even those exchanges had ceased.

  He was killed on a Thursday afternoon, crossing the street: run down by a taxicab, the driver racing to carry his passenger to Manchester Piccadilly Station in time for a noon train. Struck square on, he was thrown through the window of a shoe store, sustaining multiple lacerations and appalling internal injuries.

  He did not die instantly. He held on to life for two-and-a-half days in intensive care at the Royal Infirmary, never regaining consciousness. In the early hours of the third night his body gave up the fight and he died.

  In Will’s mythologized version of the event, his brother had made the decision, somewhere in the depths of his coma, not to come back into the world. Though he was only fifteen when he died, he had already tasted more of the world’s approbation than most men who lived out their biblical spans. Loved to devotion by those who’d made him, blessed with a face nobody could lay eyes upon without wanting to love, Nathaniel had decided to let go of the world while it still idolized him. He had been adored enough, féted enough. He was already bored with it. Best to be gone, without a backward glance.

  After the funeral Eleanor did not stir from the house. She’d always liked to walk and window-shop; she no longer did so.

  She’d had a circle of women friends with whom she lunched at least twice a week, she would no longer come to the phone to speak to them. Her face lost all its glamour. Her distraction turned to vacuity, her obsessions grew stronger by the day. She would not have the curtains in the living room open, for fear of seeing a taxicab. She could not eat, except off white plates. She would not sleep until every door and window in the house had been treble-locked. She took to praying, usually very quietly, in French, which was her native tongue. Nathaniel’s spirit, Will heard her telling Papa one night, was with her all the time: Did Hugo not see him in her face? They had the same bones, didn’t they? The same French bones.

  Even at the age of thirteen, Will had an unsentimental grasp of the world; he didn’t lie to himself about what was happening to his mother. She was going crazy. That was the simple, pitiful truth of it. For several weeks in May she could not bear to be left alone in the house, and Will was obliged to skip school (no great hardship there) and stay at home with her—banned from her presence (she had no wish to see a face that resembled a poor copy of Nathaniel’s perfection), but called back with sobs and promises if he was heard opening the front door. Finally, in the middle of August, Hugo sat Will down and told him that life in Manchester had plainly become intolerable for all three of them, and he had decided they would move. “Your mother needs some open skies,” he explained, the toll of the months since the accident gouged into his face. He had, in his own words, a pugilist’s face; its monolithic rawness an unlikely rock from which to hear fine distinctions of thought and vocabulary spring. But spring they did. Even the simple business of describing the family’s departure from Manchester became a linguistic adventure.

  “I realize these last few months have been troubling to you,” Papa told Will. “The manifestations of grief can be confounding to us all, and I can’t pretend to fully understand why your mother’s distress has taken such idiosyncratic forms. But you mustn’t judge her. We can’t feel what she feels. Nobody can ever feel what somebody else feels. We can guess at it. We can hypothesize. But that’s it. What happens up here,” he tapped his temple, “is hers and only hers.”

  “Maybe if she talked about it—” Will tentatively suggested.

  “Words aren’t absolutes. I’ve told you that before, haven’t I? What your mother says and what you hear isn’t the same thing. You understand that, don’t you?” Will nodded, though he only grasped the crudest version of what he was being told. “So we’re moving,” Hugo replied, apparently satisfied that he’d communicated the theoretical underpinning of this.

  “Where are we going?”

  “A village in Yorkshire, called Burnt Yarley. You’ll have to change schools but that’s not going to be much of a problem for you, is it?” Will murmured no, it wasn’t; he hated St. Margaret’s.

  “And it won’t hurt for you to be out in the open air a little more. You look so pale all the time.”

  “When will we go?”

  “In about three weeks.”

  II

  i

  The move didn’t happen quite as planned. Two days after Hugo’s conversation with Will, quite without warning, Eleanor broke her own rules and left the house in the middle of the morning and went wandering. She was escorted home in the late evening, having been found weeping in the street where Nathaniel had been struck down. The move was postponed, and for the next fortnight she was watched over by nurses and tended to by a psychiatrist. His medications did some good. Her mood brightened after a few days—she became uncharacteristically jolly, in fact, and dived into the business of packing up the house with gusto.

  On the second weekend of September, the delayed move took place.

  The journey from Manchester took little more than an hour but it might as well have delivered the two-vehicle convoy into another country. With the charmless streets of Oldham
and Rochdale behind them they wound their way into open country-side, sweeping moorland steadily giving way to the steeper fells, whose lush green flanks were here and there stripped to pavements of grim, gray limestone. The wind blew hard on the hilltops, buffeting the high-sided van in which Will had asked to be a passenger. With map in hand he followed their route as best he could, his eyes straying from the road they were taking to venture where the names were strangest: Kirkby Malzeard, Gammersgill, Hortonin-Ribblesdale, Yockenthwaite and Garthwaite and Rottenstone Hill. There was a world of promise in such names.

  Their destination, the village of Burnt Yarley, was to Will’s eyes indistinguishable from a dozen other villages they’d passed through on their way: a scattering of plain, square houses and cottages built of the local limestone and roofed with slate; less than a half-dozen shops (a grocer, a butcher, a newsagent, a post office, a pub), a church with a small churchyard surrounding it, and a steeply humped bridge rising over a river no wider than a traffic lane. There were, however, three or four more substantial residences on the outskirts of the village. One of them would be their new house, he knew: It was the largest house in Burnt Yarley, so beautiful that according to Will’s father Eleanor had cried with happiness at the thought of their living in it. We’re going to be very happy there, Hugo had said, offering this not as a cherished hope, but as an instruction.

  ii

  The first sign of that happiness was waiting for them at the front gate: a plumpish, smiling woman in early middle-age who introduced herself to Will as Adele Bottrall and welcomed them all with what seemed to be genuine pleasure. She instantly took charge of the unloading of the car and the moving van, supervising her husband, Donald, and her son, Craig, who was the kind of sullen, thick-necked sixteen-year-old Will would have feared an arbitrary beating from in the yard of St. Margaret’s. Here, however, he was a workhorse. eyes downcast most of the time, as he lugged boxes and furniture into the house. Will was given a glass of lemonade by Mrs. Bottrall and wandered around the house to survey it, coming back to the front now and then to watch Craig at his labors. The afternoon was clammy—thunder later, Adele promised, it’ll clear the air—and Craig stripped down to a threadbare vest, the sweat trickling down his neck and face from his low hairline, his neck and arms peeling where he’d caught too much sun. Will was envious of his muscularity, of the curling hair at his armpits, and the wispy sideburns he was cultivating. Pretending a concern for the care Craig was exercising with the tables and lamps, he idly followed the youth from room to room, watching him work. Occasionally, Craig would do something that made Will feel as though he shouldn’t be watching, though they weren’t particularly odd things for anyone to do: passing his tongue over his frizzy mustache, stretching his arms above his head, splashing water on his face at the kitchen sink. Once or twice Craig looked his way, a little bemused at the attention he was getting. When he did Will made sure he was wearing a facsimile of that indifference he’d seen on his mother’s face so often.

  The unloading went on until the early evening, the house—which had not been lived in for two years—subtly resisting its reoccupation. Interior doors proved narrow for several of the tea chests, and rooms too small gracefully to accommodate pieces of furniture from the house in the city. As the hours went on, tempers grew tattered. Knuckles were skinned and bloodied; shins scraped, and toes stubbed. Eleanor maintained an imperious calm throughout, seating herself in the bay window, which offered a magnificent panorama of the valley, and sipping herbal tea, while her husband made decisions as to the arrangement of rooms she would never have trusted to him in the old days. Once, trapping his fingers between a box and the wall, Craig let loose a fair stream of foul language, silenced by a hard slap on the back of the head from Adele. Will chanced to witness the blow and saw how Craig’s eyes teared up from the sting. He was, Will realized, just a boy, for all his sweat and muscle, and his interest in watching Craig’s labors instantly evaporated.

  iii

  That was Saturday. The night did not bring thunder, as Adele had predicted it would, and the next day the air was already sticky before St. Luke’s solitary bell had summoned the faithful to worship. Adele was among the congregation, but her husband and son were not. By the time their task mistress finally reappeared, they had already put in almost two hours of graceless work, unloading the tea chests in such a ham fisted fashion that several pieces of cookery and a Chinese vase had been forfeited.

  Alert to the general malaise Will decided to keep out of the way. While the Bottrall clan stomped around below he remained upstairs in the room with the sloped, beamed ceiling that he’d been given. It was at the back of the house, which suited him fine. From the deep-silled window he had a view up the unspoiled slope of the fell, with not a house nor hut in sight, just a few wind-stunted trees and a scattering of hardy sheep.

  He was pinning a map of the world up on the wall when he heard the wasp, its last days upon it, come weaving around his head. He snatched up a book and swatted it away, but back it came, its buzz escalating. Again, he struck out at it, but somehow it avoided his blow and winding its way around him, stung him below his left ear. He yelped and retreated to the door as the insect flew a victory circuit around his head. He didn’t attempt to swat it a third time, but opened the door, and stumbled downstairs, wailing.

  He got no sympathy. His father was in the midst of a heated altercation with Donald Bottrall and shot him such a glance when he approached that he swallowed his complaints. Gulping back tears he went to find his mother. She was once again sitting at the bay window, with a bottle of pills on the arm of her chair.

  She had a second bottle open, the contents in her palm, and was counting them.

  “Mum?” he said.

  She raised her eyes from the pills, a look of genteel despair upon her face. “What’s wrong?” she said. He told her. “You are careless,” she replied. “Wasps always get nasty in the autumn. You shouldn’t annoy them.”

  He began to protest that he hadn’t annoyed it at all, he’d been the innocent party, but he could see by the expression on her face that she’d already tuned him out. A moment later, she returned to counting the pills. Feeling frustrated and utterly ineffectual, he withdrew.

  The sting was really throbbing now, the discomfort fueling his rage. He went back up to the bathroom, found some ointment for insect bites in the medicine cabinet, and gingerly applied it to the sting. Then he washed his face, removing any evidence of tears. He was done with crying, he told his reflection; it was stupid. It didn’t make anybody listen.

  Feeling not in the least happy, he headed back downstairs.

  Little had changed. Craig was lounging in the kitchen, his mouth stuffed with something Adele had cooked up; Eleanor was sitting with her pills; and Hugo had taken his argument with Donald—who looked bullheaded enough to give as good as he got—out into the front garden, where they were talking at each other in a red rage. Nobody noticed Will stomp off toward the village, or if they did, nobody cared sufficiently to stop him.

  III

  The streets of Burnt Yarley were virtually deserted, the shops all closed. Even the little sweetshop, where Will had hoped he might soothe his frustration and his dry throat with an ice cream, was locked up. He peered in through the window, cupping his hands around his face. The interior was as small as the facade suggested, but packed to the rafters with goods, some clearly targeted at the ramblers and hikers who passed through the town: postcards, maps, even knapsacks. Curiosity satisfied, Will wandered on to the bridge. It wasn’t large—a span of maybe twelve feet—and built of the same gray stone as the tiny cottages in its immediate vicinity. He sat on the low wall and peered down into the river. The summer had been dry, and there was presently little more than a stream creeping between the rocks below, but the banks were fringed with marsh marigolds and clumps of balsam. There were bees around the balsam in their dozens. Will watched them warily, ready to retreat if one winged its way toward him.

  “It
’s all stupid,” he muttered.

  “What is?” said somebody at his back.

  He turned round, and found not one but two pairs of eyes upon him. The speaker, a fair-haired, fair-skinned, and presently heavily freckled girl a little older than himself, was standing at the rise of the bridge, while her companion squatted against the wall opposite Will and picked his nose. The boy was plainly her brother; they had in common broad, plain features and grave, gray eyes. But while she still looked to be in her Sunday best, her sibling was a mess, his clothes winded and grimy, his mouth stained with berry juice. He stared at Will with a scowl.

  “What’s stupid?” the girl said again.

  “This place.”

  “ ’Tisn’t,” said the boy. “You’re stupid.”

  “Hush up, Sherwood,” the girl said.

  “Sherwood?” said Will.

  “Yeah, Sherwood,” came the boy’s defiant reply. He scrambled to his feet as if ready for a fight, his legs scabby with old scrapes. His belligerence lasted ten seconds. Then he said, “I want to go play somewhere else.” His interest in the stranger had plainly already waned. “Come on, Frannie.”

  “That’s not my real name,” the girl put in, before Will could remark upon it. “It’s Frances.”

  “Sherwood’s a daft name,” Will said.

  “Oh yeah?” said Sherwood.

  “Yeah.”

  “So who are you?” Frannie wanted to know.

  “He’s the Rabjohns kid,” scabby-kneed Sherwood said.

  “How’d you know that?” Will demanded.

  Sherwood shrugged. “I heard,” he said with a mischievous little smile, “ ’cause I listen.”

  Frannie laughed. “The things you hear,” she said.

  Sherwood giggled, pleased to be appreciated: “The things I hear,” he said, his voice sing song as he repeated the phrase.