Boy on the Edge (5 page)

After every service Oswald’s words echoed in Henry’s head for a long time. They fluttered about in his mind with great speed like screeching birds, inches from colliding into one another; shouting words, whispering words, never-ending sentences that he didn’t understand, and then short sharp words, like slaps in the face. Sometimes he didn’t fall asleep until early morning from the racket in his head.

His anxiety flexed its muscles; it was like a troll, punching him on the inside with fists, gnawing at his heart. He woke up screaming from nightmares that were full of angry words. He was covered in sweat, trembling with fear.

Lying awake, breathing in the spicy scent of hay and cow dung, Henry thought about stealing away in the night. Maybe he would fall into a deep pit in the lava and never get back out. Perhaps he would die there. Then nobody would have to worry about him anymore. But then he thought of Emily; she would worry. She wouldn’t want him to run away. She was a good person. Besides, where on earth would he go? There was no place for him anywhere in the world but here.

Still trembling from his bad dreams, he limped out of his room and into the cowshed. The cows looked at him with their large eyes full of surprise, as if they were thinking,
Isn’t it too early for milking?
Some of them rose in their stalls, sniffing toward him, as if murmuring gently,
Go back to sleep, boy.

Henry stood on the edge of the dung canal and peed.

Suddenly there was a great noise behind him, from the bull’s stall; heavy breathing and loud kicking as the monstrous animal rose to its feet.

Henry fell back as a gigantic black head appeared above the fence with an angry frown over its burning eyes. The bull rested its jawbones on the fence and stared at him with its big flappy ears outstretched, spread its nostrils, and knitted its brow. Henry was paralyzed for a moment, overwhelmed by that powerful force of nature measuring him with its angry eyes.

They stared at each other like that for a long time until the black bull suddenly shot its long wet tongue out of its mouth and dug it deep into each of its huge nostrils.

At first Henry was startled, for it happened so suddenly and it seemed completely out of character: the huge, threatening monster picking its nose with its tongue! Henry couldn’t help but laugh, a deep, coarse, limping laughter. There was something that tickled him deep inside as he looked at this huge beast with such a dumb expression on its face.

When the bull saw him laugh, it stretched its head forward and curled its upper lip, causing deep wrinkles to form in the skin above its nostrils and exposing its pink, toothless upper gums. Henry mimicked it and curled his upper lip, breathed hard out of his nose like the bull did, and stretched his neck forward. They stood like this for a while, laughing silently into each other’s faces.

Henry slipped his hand between the bars and scratched the bull’s chin. A deep purr resounded from within the animal, and it closed its eyes gently. He isn’t bad, Henry thought. He’s not evil; he’s just a little angry being fenced in like this. He’s not bad, not bad at all. Just lonely. He just needs a friend.

Henry stepped up onto the fence and embraced the bull’s head, while the bull tried to eat Henry’s sweater with his coarse tongue.

“Good bull,” Henry whispered. “Good bull.”

He scratched the bull behind the ears, dug his thick fingers into the curls on his forehead. And the bull purred like a kitten.

Henry wanted to give him a name. He remembered that Reverend Oswald had talked about a great flood the other day, about Noah’s ark and all the animals. Noah! That was a good name.

Noah purred and pressed himself against the creaking fence, which closed him in on all sides. Carefully, Henry climbed into his stall, squeezing himself into a corner, and stood eye to eye with the bull. Noah sniffed his clothes and pressed his head against Henry’s chest. Henry gasped for breath and saw red, but he wasn’t going to give up. He embraced the large head and squeezed tightly like he was trying to wring Noah’s neck. But Henry knew full well that he wasn’t strong enough to do that. And Noah knew it as well; he rolled his eyes and turned his head to the side, with a hint of a grin around his mouth. It was just a little game between two friends, two kindred spirits who had found each other in the loneliness of the world.

When Henry heard footsteps on the gravel outside at dawn, he climbed back over the fence and waited. It was the last day Emily would be helping him milk. She arrived with a smile and a bucket full of hot water. He would be doing all the milking this morning; she said she would only be observing, making sure he was comfortable being left on his own in the cowshed from now on.

He washed Old Red’s udders, put grease on the teats, and started milking. Emily looked around and noticed he had scraped all the stalls clean.

“They’re so happy when their stalls are clean and dry,” she said. “And they give more milk when they’re happy,” she added.

Henry wondered how to tell her that the bull wasn’t really that dangerous, that he was just miserable and lonely. But he had difficulty forming the sentence in his mind, a sentence she would understand. Perhaps it would be best not to tell her, not just yet. Maybe she wouldn’t understand, being so afraid of the bull and all.

So he said nothing.

Emily asked him how he felt these days, if everything was all right, if he was happy with his room. He nodded and grunted a sort-of yes, deep in his throat.

“I know this place can be lonely at times,” she said, staring out of the small window. “Isolated, perhaps, especially in winter. But the summers here are lovely, you’ll see.”

They were both silent for a while.

Henry poured the first bucket into a container, which floated in a tank full of cold water, and moved the milking stool next to Little Gray.

With Emily around, Henry never felt pressured; it was always relaxing.

“Ages ago, back in pagan times, there were green meadows where the lava fields are today,” Emily said in a low voice, as if talking to herself.

“An eruption cleared the entire area overnight. The lava ran down the mountains in the north, flowed over the fields, and surrounded the knoll where the old farmhouse stood.”

For a moment Henry feared that she was about to give him the same lecture he’d been forced to listen to on the bus. But as she continued speaking in her soft voice, her words had a very different effect on him than he had expected.

She told him how the burning lava had rushed over the outbuildings and chased the sheep and the people, who fled toward the sea cliffs and threw themselves over the edge.

Then hundreds of years went by.

Long after the lava had cooled down, there were foreign ships anchoring in the bay below the cliffs, the same bay that came to be known as Shipwreck Bay. Farmers from the countryside traded with the sailors and sold them dried fish and meat, which they transported on horses, their heavy hooves gradually chiseling a path that wound across the lava field.

About midway it passed the Gallows, two boulders that rose high up above the lava and leaned against each other.

“They remind me of two friends bidding each other farewell for the last time,” Emily said, almost whispering. “They used to hang thieves and murderers there, you know. It should be a terrible place, but to me it isn’t.”

Then she told him the old stories of poor young women who, century after century, had come here in the night to hide little bundles away in the maze of holes and caves in the lava field.

“That’s the only thing that makes me sad about this place,” she said. “Knowing that so many little babies were brought out here to die because nobody could take care of them. And the poor unmarried women would have been punished with their lives if the truth had been known. How hard it must have been for them, how terribly hard and unjust.”

At this point in the story she fell silent for a while, and Henry thought there was nothing more to tell. He poured the milk from the bucket into the container without thinking, washed Brandy’s udders, and continued milking in a steady rhythm. His mind was ablaze with images from her story. It was like watching a painting come alive.

When Emily spoke again her voice was much brighter and happier, as if she had just needed a little moment to gather her thoughts.

“But then a young farmer came from another part of the country and built the house on the knoll. He also built the garden wall and planted the trees in the yard. He built the barn and the cowshed and sheep sheds. He was a hardworking man, and he laughed when the old people in the countryside told him that the place was cursed.

“He had a lovely wife and many children. Every summer he drove a tractor with a wagon to the faraway fields out east to mow them and then moved the hay back to the barn. It was hard work, but they were happy.

“He had a boat,” Emily said, “and moved it from the smithy, all the way along the path through the lava, and put it to sea in Shipwreck Bay. There’s no easy way to haul a boat down that steep cliff face, but he managed it, and rowed his boat when the sea was calm and smooth, cast out nets, and filled the boat with fish. Then he pulled the boat back up to the edge so the surf wouldn’t crush it when the tide came in. The farmers in the area called him the Miracle Man, because they envied him. None of them had ever tried to row out from these shores, with their steep cliffs and the sea being so rough. But the young farmer was determined to use every means possible to keep his family happy and well fed.

“But then tragedy struck in the most curious manner,” Emily said, and again her voice lowered a little.

“One night in the middle of winter, in a freezing blizzard, the farmer woke up from bad dreams. He told his wife to heat up some food, because they would have visitors that night. Then he went out into the blizzard and followed the path until he reached the edge of the cliffs above Shipwreck Bay.

“Out there he saw a huge trawler, a British trawler called
Young Hope,
stuck on a reef and being crushed to pieces by the roaring waves. Some of the crew were already in the water, fighting for their lives in the surf. But the farmer managed to shoot a line out to the ship. Then he climbed down the cliffs and got hold of the men, one by one, and pulled all twelve of them up onto the edge, to safety.

“The blizzard was so thick and the men so weak that they couldn’t even walk to the house. So he carried them, one by one, on his back along the path, all the way to the farm, where warm food and steaming hot coffee awaited them. Since then, the path has been called Spine Break Path in memory of this superhuman feat.

“How he knew about the trawler in the surf nobody will ever know, for when the twelfth crew member had been brought into the house the farmer disappeared into the blizzard again and never came back. Of course, the superstitious old people in the district said that the devil had demanded his toll, the thirteenth man.

“The poor widow sold the farm and moved far away with her children,” Emily said. “It’s almost ten years now since we bought the farm,” she added in a low voice. “And since then, no tragedy has ever taken place here, thank God.”

She whispered these last words, almost like a prayer.

Henry was dumbstruck. Not because of the superhuman feat of the Miracle Man, although he found that most impressive, but because he had realized that this was the first time anyone had told him a story. A real story of real people who had actually been alive, and their lives had been horrific and hard, happy and sad. Yes, his mom had read him some storybooks when he was little, but she had never told him a real story, told him anything in her own words, like Emily had just done.

Through her gentle voice, rising and descending, he had visualized the farmer and his family in his mind with no effort at all; they had just appeared there, their faces, their happy laughter, their bitter tears. He had almost felt the blizzard on his skin, the weight of the sailors on his own back — and completely forgotten himself. Her words, as if by some strange magic, had brought him into a mysterious new world, out of time and place.

It took him a moment to realize that he was in fact here, in the cowshed, pouring the last bucket of milk into the container.

“You’ve graduated,” Emily said with a sweet smile. “Now you’re officially our farmhand, and a proper cowboy as well!”

After she’d left, Henry stood for a long time beside the water tank, listening to the cold water running.

While his mind had been far away on this strange journey, he had milked eight cows, almost without noticing.

It was a Sunday, and the reverend was giving the boys hell.

“In the beginning the devil’s name was Lucifer,” Reverend Oswald said in a thundering voice. “He was one of the archangels of the Lord, the angel of light. But he was proud. When the Lord ordered all the angels to bow to his creation, man, Lucifer refused. He said he loved God too much to bow to anyone but him. But the Lord saw into his arrogant heart. He became sad and angry that one of his beloved archangels had allowed himself to become so selfish and proud.