Gathering the Water (19 page)

In all my time there it had never once occurred to me
that the lake and the dam would be named for anything other than the place they had drowned.

‘See?' Smith said again, and he too went to climb the steps of the dam and to be part of the man's rejoicing.

Two days later the last of the hefted sheep were gathered in off the high land and penned prior to their sale and slaughter. They were the animals which could not be moved and there was no alternative to their killing. Fellmongers and butchers came from neighbouring towns to bid for them.

In total, over three hundred were brought down. Ten times that number had been gathered in the previous autumn, and these last few were poor specimens. Most of the locals came out to watch, and it was easy to imagine the profitable celebration the occasion might otherwise have been.

Most of the animals were bought by a monger with a contract to supply the militia and were slaughtered soon
after being sold to him. I sought the man out and introduced myself. I asked him if any balance in the loss of value of the sheep was to be made up by the Board and he became suspicious of me and wanted to know what business it was of mine to ask. I left him and wandered among the pens.

The sorry-looking creatures were killed in a small enclosure bordering the chapel. The slaughtermen worked with hammers and knives, either crushing the animals' skulls or stunning them sufficiently with their blows to slit their throats before they were fully aware of what was happening to them.

The dirty fleeces were stripped from the sheep in a single piece, occasionally while they were still in their death throes and feebly struggling against something they could not possibly comprehend. Heads, tails and feet were chopped off and thrown into piles. Bellies were slit open and innards pulled out and left to slide over the ground at the slaughtermen's feet. The carcases were then further reduced, some quartered, some halved, and the meat was cast on to a wagon. I watched the process almost mesmerized, calculating that each living creature was reduced to these pieces in less than a minute.

It was bitterly cold, but the smell of the warm blood and viscera filled the air. Crows congregated along the chapel wall, the bravest of them alighting on the mess of innards while they were still fresh and steaming. The men busy at the killing did little to discourage the birds, threatening them only when they scavenged on the carts of piled meat.

I stood with an old man who guarded the chapel entrance. I remarked on the day's business with him. He
was the same man who had long ago asked me about the wife and children I did not have.

‘First the animals, then the trees, then the dead,' he said, meaning the arrangements already made for the coppices on the far side of the valley to be felled, and after that for the long-awaited removal of the bodies from the burial ground.

I asked him if any of the sheep being slaughtered were his own.

‘Twenty or thirty,' he said, gesturing vaguely in the direction of the penned animals.

I asked him if he didn't find the whole business distressing. He looked at me without feeling and asked me how I imagined it usually happened. A group of children arrived beside us, each holding aloft a dirty tail.

The militia butcher came to us. He asked the old man what we were discussing, and I told him it was none of his business.

‘I'm talking to him,' the butcher said. I saw that he and the old man were acquainted.

‘He thinks there's a better way to kill a sheep,' the old man said, and the pair of them laughed.

‘And what might that be?' the butcher said to me. He chewed on something and then spat heavily at my feet. I looked down. ‘Mutton. I get a sense of the worthlessness of the stuff by chewing on it raw. Not that it matters in this case, not where this lot's going. Want some?' He took out another piece from his pocket and held it in my face. I turned away. Then he offered it to the old man, who pressed the meat into his mouth and sucked hard on it.

A further three days passed, during which time I spoke to no one.

I went again to Mary Latimer's home, but found it just as I had left it, another empty dwelling abandoned, if not to the water itself, then to the emptiness and desolation which preceded it and which now spread outwards in all directions from it.

I searched for her in my usual desultory fashion, calling for her, and still unsettled by the sound of my own unanswered voice coming back to me.

Elsewhere, rumour begat rumour, and the tales needed little encouragement to thrive and to persuade those who repeated them that she was alive and well and living elsewhere, that their concern and my insistence upon it had been
unwarranted. Only the old woman remained genuinely concerned, but she too refused to indulge me and preferred to remain silent rather than to confirm my own dark thoughts.

All talk now was of the new promises made by the Board, and I sensed that those who remained felt a perverse sense of pride in what they believed their stubbornness had achieved for them.

The departure of the Board men had been as inauspicious and as disappointing as their arrival. I was summoned to join them prior to their going, but they showed little real interest in what I had to say to them.

After barely an hour of reassuring and congratulating themselves, they returned to their carriage. The baskets of food and drink were taken down and I was invited to share their meal. The blinds were drawn and we sat in a stale gloom as we ate.

Finally the time came for them to go, and I was again praised. My work here would not go unnoticed or unrewarded, they said.

I left the carriage accompanied only by Smith, who walked with me to the water's edge. I asked him if the others wouldn't be anxious for him to return to them so they might leave, but he gave me an evasive answer and put me on my guard. He said he had hoped to see where I lived and I pointed through the falling darkness in the direction of my house.

‘Did they tell you to come with me?' I said.

He looked away from me. ‘They wanted me to talk to you about the rest of your time here.' He coughed to clear his throat.

‘Three more months. By which time their glorious duckpond will be filled to overflowing.'

‘They wanted me to let you know how surprised they were to see the water already so high in advance of the spring thaw. They didn't expect to see half so much.'

I began then to understand what he was having such difficulty telling me.

‘Do they believe my work here to be finished?'

‘There is no question of you not receiving your agreed salary.'

‘Do they want me to leave?'

‘There are new schemes already being prepared and undertaken elsewhere. My own in Durham. Others in Derbyshire. Over the hills there in Lancashire and Westmorland. Or, if you'd prefer, further south, the Home Counties. I believe there is even a new scheme in Shropshire.' He stopped abruptly, conscious of having said too much.

‘Am I to understand that I'm being offered another contract to undertake work elsewhere?'

‘I don't … they believe that your abilities and talents …'

‘What? That they are now being wasted here?'

‘That they … that you …'

That I now formed an unnecessary link between what was happening here and them, and that they finally wanted that connection severed.

‘Save your breath,' I told him.

‘I'm in no position to argue with them,' he said.

‘You never will be. Never.'

He acknowledged this with a sigh.

‘And presumably their promises of further compensation are lies,' I said.

He was about to answer when someone called to him from the carriage.

‘Did they suggest a date to you?' I asked him.

‘Nothing specific.'

‘But the sooner the better?'

He looked around him. ‘They can't imagine anyone choosing to spend a whole winter up here.'

The voice called again.

‘You'd better get back to them,' I told him.

‘What shall I tell them?'

‘Tell them you told me everything they told you to tell me.'

‘It was why they wanted you to come to the hotel. So we might have had this conversation there.'

‘And so that I might see everything I've been deprived of these past months.'

He held out his hand to me. ‘There's a civic reception next week – it's more than an annual meeting – at which the success of the scheme will be announced and celebrated.'

‘Are you invited?' I asked him.

‘They want to parade me in front of prospective investors. These men never stand still.' He began to walk away from me.

‘Tell them I'll consider their proposals,' I called after him.

I saw then, watching him go, that just as my departure might sever the connection between those men and this place, so, equally, my remaining here would destroy completely whatever small chance I might still have had of being further employed by them, to dance again on the end of their strings. The future beyond this valley had counted
for little in my reckoning of late; it was now a forbidden country to me.

Smith disappeared into the darkness and then became visible again briefly as he approached the light of the carriage lantern. He paused and raised his hand to me and I waved back. There was some further small commotion as he climbed aboard and was beset by questions.

As I walked home it started to snow again, lightly at first, the flakes falling widely separated in the windless night, but then ever thickening and flowing in currents as I reached the middle valley.

And with the killing of the animals, so it seemed that a long-delayed rush of events was set in motion in the place. For after the slaughtermen came the woodcutters, and after these came the men to dig up the graves. The sickening body which had for so long lain barely moving on its deathbed had now begun to writhe and to convulse and to fill the air with its moans.

This was what I saw then, in those few unstoppable days, and it was what I afterwards remained to bear witness to.

The woodcutters came, but kept themselves apart. They worked mostly downriver and on the far side of the valley. They cut at a rapid pace, as though the contraction of time above the dam now also pertained below it, and they
burned in giant fires that wood which they did not take away with them.

As might be imagined, this sudden loss of even the leaf-less trees created a dramatic change in the appearance of the valley. The men were under instruction to clear the slopes completely, to leave nothing which might obstruct the flow of water should the sluices need to be fully opened in an emergency.

The smoke from their fires thickened and gathered in a pall, kept low by the winds which played constantly above it, and watching this interplay of warm and cold air, the smoke looked almost as though it were liquid flowing uphill and harried into turbulence as it rose. And in the falling dusk it even seemed as though the land itself were melting and being drawn away. The smell of burning was in everything and the ground stayed blackened and pocked.

Carts came and went for three days and the hillside was cleared. Some of the local men wandered among the hewn stumps and smouldering ground, looking like the survivors of a great disaster. I watched them from a distance, high on the dam, but did not join them.

More snow fell, this time lying lower down the hillsides. Further up the valley, the paths were blocked and the winter-born streams frozen over. Opposite my house, a small waterfall – previously no more than a glissade of spray from one scarp ledge to another – froze overnight into a brilliantly white ribbon, seemingly more substantial and permanent in this state than when it had been alive and flowing. I had noticed it only recently, and now the frozen course stood like a giant thermometer, a constant reminder of the cold that was settling down through the land as
insidiously and relentlessly as the water was driving up through it from below; air, water and earth all now fixed together in their various combinations, freezing and thawing, transforming and remaking until soon everything would be unalterably changed.

It occurred to me to wonder what might happen if all the feeder streams froze, or if the rising water encountered frozen and impenetrable strata. A month ago the prospect of investigating such a possibility might have intrigued or even excited me. But not now. Now it was merely one more pointless conundrum within a tangle of pointless conundrums. A month ago my charts and instruments would all have been made ready; now my reckonings were passing thoughts of no more consequence than the countless other trivialities which filled my days.

The staff of my authority had been taken from me and I felt its loss keenly in everything I did.

Usually, the snow started to fall in the late afternoon and continued through to midnight, when it abated for several hours before resuming two or three hours before dawn, afterwards falling until mid or late morning.

I saw the land as it might once have been beneath its mantle of ice. I searched the shallows of the lake and in places saw the mash of crystals gathering in the slower currents. I saw a white line form across the wall of the dam where the foam of the waves hit the cold stone and froze there in its shadow.

On the fifth day of my snow-bound isolation, following an afternoon and night during which there were no fresh falls, I made my way laboriously down to the mine road. This was the day when the men were due to come and dig up the graves. A final line drawn through my list of obligations.

It was a clear day, a winter's day a man might otherwise delight in, and for the first time in a month I could not see a single cloud in the sky, only a slight darkening from the washed-out blue to the palest grey of the western horizon.