A Place of Meadows and Tall Trees (20 page)

Ah, it seems like another life now. Another Megan. That girl and then this woman. That night and now this one. Noise and now quiet. A joyous expectation and now nothing.

In the field by the river each shoot is limp and brown; some lie flat against the ground. There is something in the ground, Megan says it is some malicious spirit drowning or poisoning everything that they do. Everything dies here, he thinks, everything withers – crops and children. The shadow returns suddenly, swamping everything, weakening him. Shuddering, he kneels beside one of his shrivelled shoots and supports it with his fingers. No one can survive here. It's hopeless. He pulls the shoot from the ground and with a shout throws it towards the river. It flutters weakly and lands close to his feet. He picks it up again and with a roar runs and throws it again. This time it reaches the water. It floats and is rapidly carried to a rock pool and is caught out of reach.

John Jones has a new horse.

‘Three loaves and a bag of sugar,' he says, happily, patting the animal's rump. ‘I've been promised another one for tomorrow.'

‘But that's not enough,' says Jacob, ‘you're cheating them, surely.'

John shrugs. It is Sunday and Jacob has just finished the morning service. Mary has stayed at home with her children as usual. She has been little seen for two months claiming that her children cannot be seen in public because they have nothing decent to wear, so today John has come for all of them – and to show off his horse. Silas admires it with everyone else. It will do to pull the cart he says, and John nods his head vigorously – he has talked enough for one day. He whispers into the horse's ear and the horse shivers slightly. Then, with the aid of a clack from John's mouth and a twitch on the reins, the horse and rider trot off to their house to the west.

‘Well, the Indians have horses to spare, I suppose,' says Silas.

‘And I'm sure John would not have haggled.'

Caradoc and Silas catch each other's eyes and Caradoc gives one of his rare smiles. The thought of John Jones saying more than a couple of words to the Indians – or indeed anyone at all – is comically unlikely.

‘Maybe I ought to do a bit of trading of my own,' Silas says, ignoring Jacob's tut.

‘Remember their innocence,' Jacob says.

‘Yes, I shall.'

But before Silas can do much to protect that innocence the Indians are gone. One group and then the other. Silas sees them passing his land early in the morning, following the guanaco, going west towards the Andes and the summer-breeding grounds, over a hundred of them, like ants from a disturbed nest, each one on horseback, the women carrying babies in cradles on their backs, and the horses laden down with poles and skins.

The number of them disturbs him – they seem more powerful like this, one after the other, each one astride a horse with a few more horses trotting between. Silas sits where he is, caught in a hollow in his dry field, out of sight, pressed against the ground, not moving, not even breathing, trying to see their cottage and wishing Megan and Myfanwy had stayed in the village with the rest. But the Indians stream past peaceably, the young men making sorties to the land each side to pick up rocks, and once to peer inside Silas' brick store at the edge of his field and Silas stiffens as they look towards his cottage as if they are considering going there, but do not, until the last Indian stops beside him and looks, looks right at him, just looks and looks.

For a short time after the rest of his people have gone Yeluc lingers. He seems reluctant to go. He tells Silas he feels old, too old to keep moving and Silas looks at him surprised. But that's what you do, isn't it? That's what you've always done? The Tehuelche can't stop, can they?

‘Sometimes we stop, Sil-as. Sometimes Elal call us. Sometimes he call our children. He take them on big bird in sky. Then we stop. Then we bless land, the big bird go in sky with children in feathers. Ah, Elal – he stop me many times.'

Whenever a white swan comes close Yeluc inspects it to see if it belongs to Elal. ‘That how Elal go, Si-las. On back. In feathers. Some day we go too. We fly up to stars.'

‘Is that the only time you've stopped, Yeluc?'

The old man shakes his head and sighs. ‘No,
ffrind
, one time I stop with white man, with Cristianos.' He spits. ‘I live with Cristianos. They give me name. Antonio.' He sings it again, bitterly, one syllable after the other, ‘An - ton - i - o.' He stops. ‘Is white man name. Is not name my mother give.'

‘Your father is Cristianos?'

Yeluc laughs. ‘No, no, she love the white man game. She play like this.' He mimes the dealing of cards with his hands. ‘She not win. She give Yeluc away as prize. So I white man's child. I learn write, read. Many things. Then one day white man die too. Only wife left. Go live with pigs, she say. You dirty like them. So I run. I find my own kind and then I run again. They not like Antonio. Antonio sees spirits, ghosts. Bad things. Make bad things happen. So I Yeluc now.' He looks up at Silas. ‘We run, yes? All of us. Cristianos, Gallatts, Tehuelche. Run, run, run. All the time. Why, Si - las? Why we always run?'

The afternoon before he departs Yeluc visits Mary's kitchen with Seannu, Tezza and Mareea. Mary has put on a little party for them all and feeds them with freshly-made bread, cakes full of local berries and black tea. She has taken her best white tablecloth and covered their table. Yeluc's eyes open wide and seem unable to move from the table even when Silas speaks to him. His wife and her two sisters grab the freshly cut bread and ram it quickly into their mouths before they have even reached the table. Mary is trying not to smile. Silas can see her lips whiten with the effort to keep them still. Yeluc sips cautiously at his tea, declares it even better than whisky, then sits back in his chair.

‘We go, my friend.'

‘I know, we'll miss you.'

‘We come back. Soon.'

For a few minutes they all drink and eat in silence.

‘We pass our children,' Yeluc says suddenly.

Silas frowns and looks at Megan, who is sitting quietly and still in the corner. ‘Where they're buried?' he asks.

‘Yes,
ffrind
. We not talk. We listen. We know, here.' He slaps his chest then looks at Silas. ‘They play, my friend, together – a happy place – in the stars.'

Silas swallows and looks at Megan. She sips at her tea and looks ahead at the wall. ‘We believe our children go to Christ, Yeluc,' she says suddenly.

‘Christ? You believe in Christ like
Cristianos
? Like thieves at Patagones?'

‘Of course.'

‘But you not
Cristianos
.
Cristianos
cheat, lie, thieve. You not
Cristianos
...' He bangs the table with his fist so all the women around the table start. ‘No! Not
Cristianos
. You different tribe –
Galenses, Hermanos
. Not
Cristianos
.' He stands up, sweeps Mary, John, Miriam, Silas and Megan up to him one by one and then steps back again. ‘My friends.
Galenses
. Not
Cristianos
. No.'

  He hugs them all again and then stands by the door while his women too are hugged.

‘We back soon. We not forget.'

August turns into September and then October. It is spring, a time of showers and wind, a time when crops should be bursting forth, sprouting upwards. A spring, in the wrong months, perhaps, but still a spring – but not this – not three months with hardly any rain at all. If the crops were not already dead they would perish now. In November the weather turns hot. Caradoc calls a meeting of everyone and they cram into the warehouse – men, women and children. Everyone waits, muscles tense. Caradoc's voice is strained and high. He tries to retrieve his joviality from a few months ago but fails. They have been in Patagonia sixteen months, he tells them, two winters, two springs and are on the verge of another summer. They have survived so far but can they hope to survive any longer? He goes from one man to the next, asking for reports. Silas feels Megan slump beside him and sigh. He points to each man in turn, waiting for his response.

‘No yield,' Jacob says and hangs his head. Even the way he sits is subdued.

‘No yield,' repeats his neighbour after him, his voice dull and exhausted.

‘Nor me.'

‘Enough for a mouse, no more.'

‘Nothing, nothing at all.'

‘Silas?'

‘None from me, either. It's pointless. No one can live here.'

‘John Jones?'

‘Nothing – like everyone else.' Mary answers for her husband. ‘Things grow at first but then something happens. It's the same everywhere.'

‘Selwyn?'

‘Nothing.'

Everyone is quiet, waiting.

‘We should leave,' says Annie, ‘we should run down what is left of the livestock and leave,' and this time several people murmur their agreement. Silas looks around. Everyone is nodding.

‘Somebody is going to have to tell the government in Buenos Aires. No matter what they say we can't stay here.'

The
Denby
, the ship that Selwyn bought to bring back their supplies from Buenos Aires and wrecked on the sand bar, is their only way out. For two months they work together patching it up using parts from the ancient wreck that lies further downstream. Silas is happy. He feels lighter, as if something has flown from him. They will go somewhere else. All of them. They will start again. Together. There are enough of them to ensure their Welsh and their culture will survive. They will be free of the English, the cold, the dryness and they will be free of Edwyn Lloyd. The man still haunts the place. He is there in the houses, the distribution of the plots of land, the track in between them – even in the pattern that the plough makes as it turns over the toxic soil.

It is decided that Selwyn, Caradoc, Jacob and Silas will make the voyage to Buenos Aires. Caradoc assures everyone the ship is now seaworthy, but it seems uneasily balanced on the water, and when Silas is about to leave Megan grips his arm. ‘It's not safe. Don't go.' Her voice is strained as if she is trying to keep herself from crying.

‘All will be well,' he says and tries to hold her to him but she shakes him off.

‘I don't want any of you to go.' She goes on to her brother, clings onto him, tries to pull him away from the gangplank. ‘Megan!' he says, ‘what's wrong with you? It's just a short journey up the coast, nothing to be afraid of.'

‘It doesn't matter how short it is,' she says, then her voice gives way to a wail, ‘don't leave me.'

Annie tries to comfort her, but she bats her aside. She watches, breathing hard, while the gangplank falls away and a small stretch of water separates them.  

‘There was a halo around the moon last night,' she cries out, ‘didn't you see? It's a bad omen. There's going to be a storm, like there was on the
Maria Theresa
. You'll drown, all of you, and I'll have no one left.'

Silas tells them he'll stay behind, but Annie reassures him. ‘Don't worry, Silas, Mary and I will take care of her. She's tired, that's all it is.'

A new moon. She hadn't mentioned it to him – but recently she'd become more secretive and querulous. Another child hadn't come, and she'd been looking for reasons: single birds, lights in the dark, even something breaking unexpectedly when she cooked, were all signs of some malign presence. She had always tended to ponder over such things looking for a meaning: omens, spirits, the
Tylwyth Teg
– all these rested uneasily alongside ideas of God and the Holy Spirit. Megan believed firmly in everything.

They watch her from the deck as the ship moves away. Annie helps her slowly up the beach. When they are no bigger than matchsticks one of them waves from the headland. Maybe that was Megan, Silas hopes, but he knows he is wrong.

It takes them a couple of weeks to travel up the coast. It is February, midsummer, when they approach the vast estuary of the Río de la Plata and the clear water of the Atlantic becomes turbid.

‘
Dulce de Leche
,' says Selwyn, standing next to Silas on the deck, ‘that's what they say it's like, sweet milk boiled until it's burnt.'

Silas nods. As they round the next promontory the water begins to smell of the land, and in some ways seems to be a mixture of the two. The whole estuary is a caramelised cream, a great expanse separating Argentina from Uruguay, Buenos Aires from Montevideo. There is so much silt it hardly looks like water at all.

‘We have to be careful now, stick to the channel.'

The ship edges forward in the shallow water. In the distance he can see the beaches and behind them something green – maybe a forest or at least lush vegetation. Trees.

  He longs so much to reach out and touch them. Inside him something flickers into life. A memory. Walking under the trees with his mother's hand in his. The shadows of the trees touching them with their cold fingers, something snapping under his foot and the smell of fungus in his hands. His mother is singing and he is joining in; already he can sing in parts, his soprano melody and her alto accompaniment. She smiles at his voice and squeezes his hand as the song picks up speed. Soon they have reached a slope and they are running, not through necessity but because of the song, as if it is driving them forward. They lose some of their mushrooms from their basket but they don't mind. At the bottom they throw themselves down and look up at the roof of moving rafters above them and listen to the wind swishing through the branches. They grow silent listening and watching – endlessly moving patterns and shapes, a world in their leaves.

‘Look, Buenos Aires!'

A hut and then another hut, then small flat-roofed houses, then larger ones. The greenness fades to brown, and the houses become higher. Then there are sounds, single voices calling out and then more, then bangs and a roar. The
Denby
approaches the land more closely, noses its way through the brown water until it is surrounded by other ships.

Silas looks around him from the deck. So much noise – a great clang of voices and colours. Selwyn tries to talk to him, but he shakes his head. No point. So many people, he had forgotten there could be so many people. They walk unsteadily along the gang plank into the dockland of one of South America's most prosperous cities. Silas is conscious of his worn boots, his frayed shirt and misshapen jacket. He pulls it down, and tries to polish his boots by spitting on them and wiping off the spittle with a rag. He thinks he can smell himself and he hasn't shaved; an untrimmed beard now accompanies his moustache.

The people around them are a mixture: some blond-haired, blue-eyed, some of them dark-haired and olive-skinned, some of them obviously Indian, and some of them have the intense black-blue glossy skin of negroes, but all of them move quickly and talk loudly. He is not used to being shoved, not used to being ignored. He tries out some of the Spanish he has learned from Yeluc and Selwyn but no one seems to be willing to stand still long enough to listen. Sweat is trickling from his armpits. He would like to remove his jacket but is afraid to expose the griminess of his shirt.

They go through slums which have masked their poverty with gaily coloured paint, peopled by women and bare-footed children who have clothes as shabby as his own, then an area of cheap hotels and boarding houses with foul-smelling gauchos playing cards outside – looking lost and ill without their horses. The place stinks. Once Silas had visited his sister in a place called Newtown: a miners' village. The houses had been built rapidly in rows and at the end of the street had been the privies: a row of seats draining into the brook behind. There were tales of old people falling in and never coming out. It seems as if these people in Buenos Aires are drowning in their own effluent too. They move quickly on, silently, so they can hold their breath. Then they turn another corner and it is as if they have entered a different world: huge stores flank impressive avenues lined with trees, affluent-looking shops look onto small tiled plazas, offices with great mortared balustrades and elaborately grilled windows loom over carefully arranged parks. Everyone is fashionably and immaculately dressed. Women sit under sunshades and sip coffee from tiny cups; men loll back and read newspapers. They walk on and the street disappears under market awnings. Farmers with polished burnt skin sell trinkets and fruit, Indians thrust out skins, feathers and blankets. Birds in cages squawk, while a monkey in a small jerkin chatters on a fat man's arm. They walk quickly through, their hands guarding their pockets.

‘We're too far east,' says Selwyn.

‘I thought you knew the place.'

‘It's changed since I was here last.'

Caradoc tuts then turns around to face them all with his hands raised. They have reached a shaded quiet street with brightly painted walls in yellows and pinks, and at one door there is a small inoffensive-looking dog lying outside. All at once there is a burst of music and a man and a woman appear at a door shouting and in some sort of embrace. She is young, dark, her hair falling down her back in waves, her mouth picked out in red in a way none of them have ever seen before. She throws back her head and laughs and the man grabs her by the waist and pulls her back inside.

Caradoc tuts loudly, then marches on briskly, his stick tapping occasionally at the ground beside him.

‘Was that a loose woman, do you think?' asks Jacob.

Selwyn grins at Silas.

Silas looks back at the door, hoping it will open again. Inside it looked cool and light, the floor tiled and through another door he thought he saw a garden, with a fountain of gently falling water. He wonders if Edwyn Lloyd is living in such a house. It seems cool, comfortable – a paradise.

They huddle closer together trying to retrace their steps. Selwyn is right; they must have come too far. The offices of the Minister of the Interior would be in a more salubrious area of the city, somewhere closer to the plazas and the women sipping their coffee. Selwyn stops a tall thin man in sombre dress and he points and indicates a direction with a nod of his head. They walk past grand churches with their doors open, releasing the smell of incense, dust and coolness to the street. Silas drops back to peer inside and marvels at the statues and small wooden confessionals.

‘Come on,' says Caradoc, ‘it's getting late.' The rest are moving quickly away. They hurry to catch them.

They turn off a busy main road into a street that is quieter than the rest. The buildings are plain, grey and massive. There are guards everywhere in bright uniforms and stern expressions, blocking their way and insisting that they do not enter. Eventually they find a small new building with a mortared frontage and a balcony on the first floor. It has a grand entrance, with two large doors opening into a cool tiled entrance hall. The civilian porter directs them to a room lined in dark polished wood where they wait until a young man ushers them into an office.

The sign on the door says Dr Guillermo Rawson and behind the desk is a tall balding man with an unsmiling face and melancholy eyes. He stands to meet them and holds out his hand, then says a few quick words in Spanish. The room is large. Books line two walls, and on a third is a large map. Besides a large desk there are also a couple of winged leather chairs arranged by a table near the window. There is someone there. Someone reading a book: a silhouette in the light of the window. They are just turning to Selwyn for his translation of Dr Rawson's words when the man sitting in the chair stands too. For a few minutes it is difficult to see his face, but then he steps out of the light and into the centre of the room.

‘Edwyn!' Jacob says, and leaps forward with his arms outstretched.

When the
Meistr
hears their plans he is quiet. His beard has grown longer and more grey since they saw him last, and the skin beneath his eyes is creased and dark as though he is tired. He combs his long fingers through his beard then says quietly and incredulously, ‘You want to move from the land the Lord has kept for us?'

Caradoc blusters and reddens a little, while the other men look down, embarrassed. Silas glares at them. In the presence of Edwyn Lloyd they seem to lose their resolve. They seem shy of him, as though their backbone dissolves away.

‘
I
didn't,' says Jacob plaintively and for a few seconds there is an awkward silence.

‘Nothing grows,' Caradoc says defensively, ‘the shoots come up but then they just wither away.'

‘But the Lord gave it to us. He wouldn't give us land that was infertile!'

Turning his back on Jacob, Caradoc turns to face Edwyn. ‘Everything dies, everything. That's how it is, Edwyn. We can't carry on. We've tried our best.'

‘I see.' The
Meistr
glances around the room, and looks at each man in turn. The darkness of the skin around his eyes makes them look deeply set, and as they settle on Silas he has a curious feeling of falling into them – as if Edwyn Lloyd's eyes contain their own small world.

Guillermo Rawson coughs quietly and they turn to look at him. Selwyn apologises to him in Spanish – in the excitement of seeing Edwyn Lloyd again they had almost forgotten he was there. Selwyn takes a piece of paper from his jacket. On board the
Denby
they had spent most evenings discussing what they would say to the minister of the interior and how they were going to say it. In the end Silas had suggested that someone should take notes and this is what Selwyn looks at now. He examines it for a moment as if refreshing his memory or formulating what he is to say then starts speaking slowly to the minister. It is clear immediately that if he used to be fluent in Spanish he is not any longer and after a few minutes of speech during which he has stumbled over words and Rawson's face has become fixed with a frown of puzzlement, Edwyn asks quickly if Selwyn would prefer it if he took over.

Rawson's eyes follow the conversation. ‘I speak English, yes?' he says in English. ‘Is better?'

Edwyn shakes his head and speaks a few words in Spanish. Rawson smiles, nods, and gestures for them all to find themselves seats.

After looking at the rest of the party Selwyn slowly hands over the sheet of paper.

Edwyn Lloyd talks quickly to Dr Rawson, and then turns back to them. ‘He says that last year there were droughts everywhere and that is probably why the crops have failed. It has been exceptionally dry. People have had problems all over Argentina.'