The Low Road

The sound of it in the darkness, a thudding, the fracturing next, then silence before a screaming fills the air till it is quite full. I am held in a grip that defeats me.

The man on the black horse is quite still. The constable looks at him. He nods. The stake descends again.

I am screaming again, wet with tears is it or sweat is it and I can feel that I am held and I cannot break free.

The grip releases as my eyes open and they are on each side of me and their voices are low, reassuring. I look at them in the candlelight and slowly come back to here, to now. He helps me up for a moment, I rest against him. She makes the bed and I lie down on cool cotton. Between the two of them.

I wasn’t always like this. I think if I tell the truth it will help me, and so, as the light moves across the swept wooden floor, I make a start. The worst comes first. There will be gaps I don’t doubt. I will tell what I can when I can.

Here I am when it started, as dusk falls at the end of a late spring day. I hear the sound of many footsteps outside the doctor’s house. I stand on my tippy toes and peep out of the attic window and as far as I can see there are people, a great crowd of them, processing slowly down the Thoroughfare. As they come closer I see that John Wypond is at the front.

Then I see my mama lying on a cart. The sacking that should have covered her nakedness has slipped. The great concourse moves on and my eyes are scarred with this, as if a knife has seared my eyeballs.

The birds do not sing so that the only sound is the trundling of the wheels, for the people are quite silent, their heads are bowed.

I tear my sheet from my bed and I run down the backstairs in my linen shift, the one I had won. I keep my head down, join the back of the concourse.

The light has nearly left the sky when we arrive at Lush Bush, where our parish ends and another begins. Everyone halts, and I bend down, creep between their legs. They are spattered with mud I see, blood on the butcher’s apron, the reek of unwashed people at the end of a day’s work.

I see a great deep hole, hard by the willow tree. I hear the sound of a horse, trotting, and there is the Reverend Olderhall, on Black Bessie. He pulls on her bit and she walks through the crowd to the centre. To the hole.

Two men lift my mama from the cart. I see now that she is dead, they spoke true. And then I am whirled upwards and Jem Summers is smiling at me and he hoists me to his shoulders and grips me there so I cannot move. Olderhall nods, once.

The men tip my mama in the hole and it is then that I scream and try and throw my bed sheet in to shroud her, but I cannot reach her. Summers laughs and then is silent. Although Olderhall does not give a blessing all at once we all kneel and the people remove their hats. Olderhall high above us on Black Bessie, frowning.

He nods again.