Heartland, page 15
Wee Hughie started picking them up.
–I’ll look after them, Sonny, don’t worry …
But Sonny didn’t care whether he did or whether he didn’t.
For ‘Sunny’ Sonny Hackett, he had other things on his mind.
You could barely hear him as his knuckles turned white.
–One thing I don’t like is Indians coming around. Whether living in caravans or anything else. Because me and her – we used to be happy.
Then he went over and stood on his own by the side of the fireplace.
As Wee Hughie Munley said to Red Campbell:
–It’s a pity that this had to happen at all.
Red Campbell looked at him, running his fingers through his copper curls and nodding.
–I have other things that I could be doing, at my time of life.
Wee Hughie nodded and after that, said nothing. Before Red became aware that he was gently squeezing his arm.
–I was wondering would you like one of these?
He was offering him some nuts from a bag.
–KP, said Hughie, they’re better, I think, than Planters, Red.
–Yes. I think so too, Red Campbell replied, his overwrought face like a map of rough road.
–I wish, to be honest, all the same, that I could go home.
Wee Hughie nodded.
–Red, he began, do you mind if I tell you something?
–No, said Campbell, go right ahead.
–You were the only one who was ever half-decent to me in the factory. I’ve always had a mind to tell you that.
–That’s OK, said Campbell, you and me always got on fine. Anyhow, I could afford to be nice to people, because that was before we got roasted and let greed get the better of us, terrorising an innocent man. And then, to make it worse, pretending that it was something to do with freedom and politics, instead of the moolah, which is all it was. After that, it could never be the same. The fairy tale was over – and, believe you me, that was exactly what it had been like, in the weeks and months after me and her had won the Kentuckyland prize, after we scooped the Dance-Off trophy. Me and that old Anita, we sure were some team. I used to call her the Kid, did you know that?
–Red and the Kid, smiled Hughie fondly, I sure do remember that OK.
–She looked real good that night, wearing that swirling flamenco skirt. The band were playing ‘Y Viva España’ as we swept and wheeled and dang near lost our minds. ‘The Toast Of El Paso’, they all started shouting up. Up until that time in Glasson County, there had been no Spain, because everyone used to holiday at home. Man, that little bolero jacket she made me, I never thought I’d have the guts to wear it. But there you are – that was the effect the Kid could have on you.
He hesitated as he searched in his pockets for his matches. Then he swallowed hard and said:
–Hughie, can I tell you something?
–Yes, replied Hughie, yes Red you can.
Red Campbell looked frightened, and almost regretful he’d ever made the offer. But Hughie’s eyes looked so hopeful that they provided him with the encouragement he needed.
As, hoarsely, he continued with his story.
–I was sitting in the bar one night with Mr Monroe. Back in the days that used to be. Yes, sitting in the bar along with WW, except for one thing.
–For one thing? said Hughie.
–Yes, Red continued, except for one thing. It isn’t him.
–It isn’t him?
–No. It isn’t him. It isn’t Mr Monroe. O he looks the same all right – in that he’s wearing the very same suit, with the hat and the boots and all the rest. But just as soon as he opens his mouth you can tell.
–What can you tell? demanded Hughie, holding a single nut in a pincer-grip between his left forefinger and thumb. What can you tell Red? Please.
The colour was beginning to drain from his face.
–That it isn’t WW, said Red, like I said, it isn’t him.
–O God, said Hughie, looking away, reaching in his pocket to produce the enormous handkerchief, patting at the sweat that was gleaming on his crown.
–O God, he croaked, I don’t know if I want you to go on.
But Red Campbell couldn’t have stopped himself even if he’d wanted to.
He too looked queasy, almost faint.
–But that isn’t all that happened that night. Not by a long shot, Hughie. Because then the lights come up and who arrives in through a side door only the Dawn King. Yes, the lovely Dawn ‘Kit’ King, the singer, she comes sidling in. Almost out of nowhere, it appears, it seems, as she climbs onstage and starts performing this little swaying dance with the microphone. But – and here’s the strange thing – the very same as with Mr Monroe, you can tell somehow that it isn’t her. Not the real person, the actual Dawn King, if you know what I mean. O it looks like her alright, in almost every way. With that tawny hair tied up in a ponytail at the back, that lovely slender frame, and those big brown eyes. But when you looked real close …
Campbell faltered, saying nothing for a long time.
Then he resumed, seeming pale and agitated.
–And it’s then that it happens – she comes right down off the stage, and like in a dream, only one with no sound, over she comes and sits on his lap. And starts talking, like you could see they’d been doing, about this whole new life they’d been planning to share together. In a place, she says, our beautiful valley, where the dawn will come breaking over the mountain and it’ll be like the very first dawn ever imagined. Some velvet morning, my love, she whispers in that smoky voice, some velvet morning when we wake …
–Some velvet morning, moaned Wee Hughie Munley, some velvet morning, Jesus Christ!
As Sonny suddenly barked, glaring fiercely into Red Campbell’s face:
–What’n the fuck you talking about, Campbell? You’re raving, so you are – talking loco!
Then he turned away, rocking back and forth on his Cuban heels, closing his fist.
–One of these days, warned Sonny, one of these days, Red Campbell, I swear, you and your raving and those dumb fucking choppers … !
He went over to the jukebox, draping his lanky frame across its front.
–The way it used to be, sang Englebert Humperdinck.
As, without even realising they had spoken at all, Wee Hughie and Red Campbell murmured in unison:
–The way it used to be. That was always on in the canteen long ago.
–I remember it too, said Barney Grue, stirring.
–Let me rest on peaceful mountain, Mervyn Walker whispered softly behind the counter, recalling his old friend standing, as had been his custom, in the very front pew of Glasson village chapel, praising his Maker with his Good Book, page open at Galatians 6:7.
Thinking to himself about the many walks they’d shared together along those quiet country lanes, and those Saturday evenings when they’d stand side by side on the bridge overlooking the lough and sometimes, even, at dawn.
As the sun’s pale rays lanced off the surface of Lake Wynter.
On that morning, long ago, when all had seemed as quiet as the breath of a bird, without a cloud to be seen in the sky.
When two old friends, spin-casting their lines, looked down from the arched stone bridge into a field where they could see a horse nudging a foal on spindly legs. As a woman hung out her washing on a line and her husband whistled a low little tune, from underneath a propped-up car hood, leaning over an engine block.
With it, albeit unspoken, occurring to both men that it somehow didn’t seem to matter how many highways or shopping malls they built in their beloved Glasson because nothing could ever interrupt the unchanging rhythm of the life that both of them had known as boys.
Wilson Gillis and Mervyn Walker: ageless, almost – like two tall stately pine trees themselves, it had somehow always seemed.
–What is Time? his friend had, abstractedly, inquired on that occasion. Can we ever really say what it is, Mervyn Walker – plumb its essential nature? Some say that it tends to move forward. Others, both forward and back at the very same time.
–Who knows, he remembered saying, who knows Wilson? All I care is that, out here, for you and me, it always stands still.
As their lines were played this way and that beneath them – almost, just like Wilson had suggested, the very same as Time itself.
Chapter 18
In the High Country
The very last letter I found myself receiving from Jody, I just can’t tell you how tender it was. Or how sweet and wonderful I felt when I got it – just for having received it, I mean.
With my only regret being that he felt he had to leave in the piece that he wrote about the dream.
But I can understand too why he might have felt the need to say it.
Initially, I remember, after reading that first page, I had found myself in a state of peace, kind of like I was back in the imagined, breathtaking wonderland of our boyhood.
Because I had never actually known that Jody Kane was capable of writing that way.
Except there it was, right there in front of me on those blue-lined exercise book pages, in that very same spidery longhand scrawl which I remembered from the classroom when the two of us would have been in third or fourth class, in Glasson Primary.
O man, Jody wrote, it feels so good to get all of this off my chest at last, and to be able to share these personal memories with you, Ray. Not just about the trauma we both experienced that night, but everything.
Because, he went on, although I’ve met so many special and wonderful people since arriving here, nonetheless there’s still something private and unique and irreplaceable about the experiences you’ve shared with the folks from the place in which you were born.
I was thinking only the other night about the time we skipped out of the orphanage and headed back up the mountains to the waterhole where we just lay down and laughed there, for hours, with our fishing poles dangling there, over the water. Do you remember that Ray? All the things we were going to do. So many things, Ringo – so many things we found it hard to keep track.
My wildwood flower tells me I’m sentimental – and that the way of the world has always been for human beings to keep on shedding their pasts the way locusts do their shells, moving across the plains of history, and that what I got to do is to learn to be more like them if I’m to survive.
Because that’s what the human spirit requires, she says.
And I know that it’s true, like so much of what she says. But there’s a part that holds fast and, no matter how you try, just won’t seem to let you go – do you find that Ray?
Like it’s there when you want it or feel the pressing need of it, a kind of sheltering harbour of nostalgia, I guess you might call it.
That would be one way of describing it.
Sometimes when I think of Glasson and the fields and rivers and hills all around it, it’s like it’s the centre of the universe itself.
For there are few nights that go by when I don’t feel it coming again in my mind, with all of its small bridges and sheds, its letterboxes nailed to trees and lonely petrol pumps, and the river winding through it making its way westward across a pattern of little lakes and hills, as the shadows and the strong scent of the pine trees reaches out into the water.
Every night, believe it or not, in one way or another, that scene drifts right in front of my eyes – gleaming bog pools and the peal of a distant bell, coming drifting across the sleeping countryside from some old churchyard, winding through the pine-fringed mountains and forest lakes.
I love it, Ray – in some ways that’s crazy, for sure, and no one knows that better than me.
But nonetheless it’s true.
And I keep on thinking of those childhood days, especially of the streets on a hot summer afternoon, watching the men in the livery stables, joshing and chatting and smoking by the wagons, yuk-yuk-yukking and guffawing the way they used to do.
Which brings me, Ray, to what it is I want to talk to you seriously about – this dream that I had the other night. And which has affected me, I got to say.
So much that my flower insisted that, sooner or later, I would have no choice but to have it out with you – or, at the very least, tell you about it.
And, having done that, hopefully, minimise its effects. Possibly even, somehow, end the whole thing.
You see the thing is, Ray, what happened was, I was standing there in the dream whistling and mucking out the stalls, the same as I always used to do in Kentuckyland. And thinking to myself just how fortunate the two of us had been. When I heard a soft , low voice behind me and a couple of hesitant steps approaching. And then I saw him – but not the same way we were used to, with that second-hand shop military jacket and his dented brass bugle. But looking like his whole body had been drained entirely of all its blood, and with that greasy combover falling down across his hunted eyes. As he gave me one of those sickening smiles, and said: Yes, you’ve been fortunate, you and Ray Wade. But me, I’m afraid, I haven’t been quite so lucky. And which is why you owe me one last favour. So, come with me now, little dogie, there’s a good little feller …
That’s what he said – yes, those were his words, Ray – as a matter of fact, I’m actually trembling as I write them.
–Because you and me, I heard him repeat, you and me is going to a garden country. We are going to the Bonny Land, my friend. That place which is known as the Southland of Forever.
And then, whenever I looked again, the two of us were making our way across the High Country Meadow, and he was already pushing the door of the big haggard open.
–All of our whooping, long-gone lonesome games, little dogie. You had better be sure of it, the South is a-gonna rise again!
I was hesitant about going in, Ray – you can understand why – and just stood there listening to him muttering and singing to himself inside.
–Tramp tramp tramp the boys are marching! he hollered and whooped.
He must have been in there for well over half an hour, Ray – at least that was how it seemed in the dream. Over and over and over and over – tramp tramp tramp, tramp tramp tramp, determinedly marching on the spot.
Until, at last, he appeared once more in the doorway, only this time wearing not so much as a stitch, whirling a bloodied garden shears above his head. As he wailed and shrieked and appealed for me to forgive him, to show him whatever little morsel of mercy I might be able to muster.
On account of what he had just gone and done – ‘harvesting his tackle’ – which was how he described the act of self-evisceration in which he’d just been engaged.
That was when I saw it, Ray – the black blood coursing in long twisty rivers down along the insides of his legs.
–See what you gone and done, little feller, I heard him chortle. You’ve only just gone and made me harvest m’godarn tackle!
And, after that, Ray, he was gone.
As was I.
The following page of the letter was blank. And at first I thought that was the end of it. But then I discovered two other pages in which Jody did his best to explain his confused feelings.
I don’t want to overstate it, Ray, he continued, but the truth is that ever since having that ‘tackle’ dream – it’s been having a really bad fucking effect.
And what I want to ask you now is this – and if you choose not to respond, be assured that I’ll do my best to accept that decision.
But I know, you see, that you followed us up top the haggard that day, as you did on many other occasions. With the result that you knew practically everything that was going on. Regrettably, however, deciding to say nothing. Because that’s your nature, isn’t it, Ray? Wait till you see what’s in it for you. Because you’re a watcher, Ray – an uncommitted, selfish copperhead, like they say. Except that it’s even worse than that, ain’t it, Ray Wade.
He paid you, didn’t he? He bribed you, Ray – bought you and convinced you not to breathe a word.
So you put yourself first. As usual, Ray.
Why did you have to do it, old friend?
Because – and here’s the hard part – no matter how anyone advises me, even my love, my sweet beautiful wildwood flower, no matter what they say, I’m still not sure I can do what it is they’re asking. And by that, I mean, Ray, as I’m sure you’ve already guessed, is grant you the the forgiveness that you’ve asked for.
But I’m trying, Ray – please believe me when I say that. And I just pray that, in the end, it will all turn out good.
My beloved is one hundred per cent certain that it will – insisting that all that matters is we all do our best, at this time, to be strong.
On another note, Ray, I was thinking just this morning about the very first day that the ballroom went up – do you remember that, Ray? Like some beautiful new dawn had arrived in Glasson County.
Like the one that’s coming to you and me, old friend, at least I hope so.
I don’t know how many times I’ve read and analysed those words – time after time after time – until they’re little more than a blur in front of my eyes.
I don’t like to dwell on it, but my doctor tells me he’s certain that the relapse I experienced recently can be directly traced back to my receipt of that letter.
And which is why Fr Conway keeps on asking me what was in it – or, at least, to give him some small indication.
But the truth is, I can’t.
I actually couldn’t.
Because I don’t even want to remember it now.
Why, you ask?
To that there is one simple and regrettable response: that never, in the whole of my life, have I ever felt so awful.
And which is the reason I decided I’d no choice but to go out and have a drink – just one.
Perhaps just a pint of beer, I thought.
Because, of course, it’s only the hard stuff that you really have to worry about, I kept on telling myself.
And which, of course, is the fatal error – one made by many similarly afflicted survivors long before me.
Whatever might have made me think I was any different?
In any case, that was what I did – I did it anyway.
