Stone Cradle (2 page)

E
lijah Smith was born in the graveyard of the church at Werrington, a village in the Soke of Peterborough. I can tell you this for certain, as I am his mother and so was there at the time.

It was a wild winter, dordy, yes. I’ve never forgot how bad it was. Me and my mother and father were staying in this cottage, for a bit, in the corner of the graveyard. Well, I call it a cottage – it was but one room with a little range and a dirt floor and an alcove for firewood, which was where I slept.

When my pains started, my mother wasn’t there. She had gone to the Markestede and wasn’t expected back ’til late – it was Wednesday and Werrington was the carrier-cart’s last drop-off on a Wednesday. I had no idea when the baby might be due, being only a young ’un and not knowing much about those things. So there was no question as to my mother not going to market that day. It could’ve been another two months for all I knew.

At first I thought maybe I’d had too much fried bread at teatime. I had a wild hunger on me when I was carrying and
would eat until I couldn’t sit down any more. So there I was in the cottage, wiping down the little range, with my father sitting in the far corner, snoozing ’neath the lantern. It was dark outside. I’d been feeling peculiar ever since we’d ate and was swaying a little as I worked the cloth, rocking back and forth on my feet, which seemed to help. I didn’t feel tired, though, not at all. I felt as though I could scrub that range ’til I could see my face in it.

I had just finished the surround of the hot-plate when it came, out of nowhere. It was as if the pain inside me had been like a few pebbles in the bottom of a washing bucket, swooshing around in lots of water, then suddenly all the pebbles gathered up into a rock which punched the side of the bucket, the inside of me, that is, and suddenly I knew there was a rock inside me and it was dragging down, down, on its way out.

There was no time to finish my cleaning. I dropped the cloth into the bucket next to the range and grabbed my shawl from the chair behind me. Thank God Dadus was asleep. I made it outside before I disgraced myself. I dropped on all fours and cried out.

I knew I had to get round the back, out of sight, in case my Dadus woke and came to look for me. I had a few minutes to crawl on all fours before it came again,
aieeee
… Luckily, it was windy and my Dadus was a sound sleeper. A few more yards. By the third time, I was only just behind the cottage but beyond caring who might hear or see me. The ground was damp, so I crawled to a flat gravestone and crouched down low over it, on all fours, gripping its sides. The pain came again,
uurrrr
… This time, a different sound. I was bellowing like a cow and pushing, inside. Then it eased.

In the short space it gave me before the next wave, I turned on my side and pulled my skirts up. I wasn’t frightened. I wasn’t anything but strong. I still remember that. The feeling of the pain goes away – nature’s way of trying to fool you into doing it again – but
I have never forgot how determined I was. Every bit of me was up for doing one thing. My baby was coming.

He was trouble from the beginning, was Lijah. I know how people like to say how it was growing up without a father but he had fathers right enough, had them coming out his ears by the time I’d finished with him. No, he was a right bugger from the start.

We were not cottage-dwellers by nature at that time, oh no. When I fell pregnant with Lijah, we were living in our wagon on the green, alongside the others. There were four families altogether. There was my cousins, and some other Smiths they knew, and the Greys with the husband as fat as a pig who took the bed-box all to himself and made his wife sleep on the grass outside with her eight young ’uns. We weren’t keen on them, the Greys, but Redeemus Grey was good at finding work and so we’d found it advantageous to stay with them. There’s something ironic.

The villagers hadn’t bothered us much, so we were quite surprised when the Constabulary came over. They took their hats off, all polite like, and said there’d been a vote or something at the Council and we had to go, and that’s when my Dadus kicked up a bit of a fuss, pointing at me and my belly.

Eventually, the vicar showed up and said there was a cottage at the bottom of his cemetery we could have, just the one room like. Of course, what Dadus was most worried about was our
vardo,
but after a bit of talk, the vicar said, ‘What if we say your wagon may be parked safely behind the vicarage?’ There was even a field for the horse.

So for all the trouble that belly got me into, it got me and Dei and Dadus moved into a cottage in a graveyard.

The others went off, which was just as well. Things had been difficult since I’d started showing. Even before then, everyone knew
certain things, and no one was saying anything, and in a little camp like ours there was no getting away from the badness of that.

I’ve seen girls in my kind of trouble put out to walk the highway on their own, but my mother and father stuck by me. Dadus was mad as a bear when Dei first told him, mind you, and called me every name under the sun. But I was his daughter, and he was damned if any other so-and-so was going to call me names as well. So they made it clear, without saying anything to anyone. Yes, their daughter was going to have a baby and, no, there was no husband within a hundred mile, but that was our problem and nobody else’s and anyone who didn’t like it could take it up with my Dadus.

My Dadus was like that, soft and hard at the same time. I think it’s called being a good man.

I know rightly what you’re wondering. It’s what everyone wonders in a story like mine.
What was the fella what done it?
Who was Lijah’s father? Well, you might ask …

When you have a babby yourself, you look at your own mother and father in a different light. My Dei was a small woman, even smaller than me, and I remember staring at her as I was nursing Lijah one day and thinking, I can’t believe she did what I did – four times, in total. There was a boy who died firstly, then a girl who was an idiot and they had to give her to the asylum, then me, then another little boy who died when I was small. Four times my Dei did what I did on that gravestone, and only one child to show for it.

My Dei, she was the kind of woman who kept all her suffering locked up inside herself. I never heard her complain once about anything. She had very fine wrists, delicately boned they were, and well-kept hands like a lady. She used to keep a little brass tub with oil in it, which she perfumed with lavender and rubbed into her hands at night before she went to sleep. She took such good
care of her hands you might think she was a fine lady or something, instead of a Travelling woman who worked from dawn to dusk her whole life: beautiful hands, but as strong as you like.

I lay on that gravestone after Lijah was born, with him tucked inside my blouse for warmth and the mess that came with him all around me – and I knew that for all the hardness of our stone cradle, all I had to do was wait until my Dei got to me and everything would be all right, and it was.

Four times, my Dei did it, and I knew she carried the ghosts of her three lost babies around with her always, like shadows inside, but she never mentioned them.

After Lijah I knew in my bones that whatever fell upon me in the years to come, I’d never be doing it again. Taken from the outside, then taken from the inside – that was enough for me. I wanted life to be nicer than that.

The vicar must have said something in his church when Lijah was born as for a short while his parishioners left meat pies on our doorstep. I can tell you that was the first time such a thing had ever happened to us, then or since. Dordy, it was a bitter winter. I stayed inside nursing my new babby and it was like the world outside had stopped and gone cold and dark because there was no point in it being otherwise until my Lijah was ready to step into it.

But after a while, the pies had stopped coming and we ran out of coal. We had all felt such a wild happiness, the first few weeks. Then the realness of Lijah being with us and no pies and no coal sank in and the tiredness which I hadn’t minded ’til then started to get a bit much and I thought how I had never been inside anywhere as much as I was then. It’s a bad time to have a baby, that time of year. Isn’t natural. All else calves in the spring.

One morning, Dei said, ‘It’s Sunday, now Father why don’t you take me out on that horse round the villages? We need coal for that babby.’

Dadus replied, ‘It’s a mean winter, Mother, no one’ll give us so much as cup of water even it being a Sunday.’

And Dei said, ‘We’ll take the babby then they’ll have to.’

I loved listening to them talking about my baby like that, arguing about what was best for him. I loved the fact that they loved him like I did, that he was parcelled up with love.

I did think my Dadus was right, though, so I said, ‘No, Dei, it’s too cold outside.’

‘Give him a good feed,’ she said, ‘And I’ll wrap him tight and he’ll sleep the whole way round.’

I didn’t like the thought of my Lijah going door-to-door so tiny but he’d been up half the night and I knew she was right about him sleeping if I gave him a bellyful. And I must admit I did think that I could crawl under the blankets and sleep a bit myself as I was still
mocadi,
you know, Unclean, and Dei wasn’t letting me cook or tidy or anything.

‘You stay wrapped up and we’ll be back before you know it,’ said Dei.

As soon as they were gone, I settled down on my straw mattress all ready to sleep the whole morning, thinking how, in fact, it was a lovely thing to have a few hours to myself for the first time since Lijah was born. I was going to sleep like a log, I told myself.

I should’ve known.

I couldn’t get comfortable. I was so used to Lijah next to me, it seemed strange to be able to move around on the mattress how I liked. Then I started to think of Lijah and wonder if he was all right and think how maybe I shouldn’t have let Dei take him after all and that was a mistake. There was no sleeping then. And even though I’d given him a big feed from both sides before they left, I felt full of milk for him straightaway, and sore, and one side of me seemed a bit hot and hard and Dei had said if you ever get hot and hard you’ve got to feed him until it’s clear otherwise you get a
fever. I started to sweat just thinking of it, and I leaked a little which made my blouse damp and I knew I’d never get to sleep then.

I started to imagine all sorts of things happening to Lijah. I thought of Dadus being careless and cantering and Dei falling from the horse. I thought of some
gorjer
housewife taking a stick to them and not realising there was a newborn babby in my Dei’s arms. What if he needed a feed while they were out?
Be quiet, you fool, you fed ’im right enough. He’ll sleep the whole way round the Soke.
I rolled over and pulled the eider round my ears, closing my eyes.

We’d had dogs set on us often enough. My son would make a tasty morsel for some old rangy hound.

Soon I was up and out of bed and wrapping a shawl around my shoulders. I knew I couldn’t tarry in the cottage. I would go mad with it.

Well, it was far too cold to wander round the village like a bedlamite. So even though it wasn’t wise, there was really only one place I could go.

It was back in the summer that I had first got into the habit of sneaking into the church services. I can’t really say why I started doing it, except I was troubled in my head at that time, for obvious reasons, and it made me feel a bit better. Even before we got given the cottage, we had had some dealings with the vicar who had been good to us. He was a handsome man, tall and straight, white-haired he was, and a kind of peace came over me when I sat there. I suppose it was the only time when I was not with someone else or running errands or some such. It was the only time I could sit and think about things. It is not really done to just sit and think when you’re a Traveller, especially a
biti chai
like me. Thinking doesn’t get a fire built, nor catch a rabbit to stick on top of it.

I hadn’t been inside the church since Lijah was born, so I felt a little strange as I crossed the cemetery, even though I could hear the
service was well under way and knew how to get in without being spotted. I never used the main entrance – the iron door-latch clanged up and down like anything – but there was a little side door that pushed open right easy, so I could sneak down the side and sit at the back, where nobody could see me. From that position, I could watch the
gorjers
being holy.

I crept to my place, at the end of an empty pew, tucked away behind a pillar. Nobody paid any mind to me. They were all on their feet singing away and a right racket they were making.

I closed my eyes and listened, and I thought how the hymns always seemed to be on about blood, and it made me think of the blood when Lijah was born and how it seemed clean blood in spite of all the other muck because this beautiful, new thing was coming through the middle of it. And I felt sad, all of a sudden, about how beautiful and new Lijah was, and me being so dirty and sinful, there in the church, and how he deserved a better mother than me.
The
mud,
the
coin,
the
buckle
pressed
against
my
cheek.
And I found myself wishing things could be different for him, and perhaps he would have been better off if I’d left him on the vicar’s doorstep, for what had he got to look forward to with the life we led? It must have been the lack of sleep made me think like that, for I’m not usually the type to fall to thinking on myself.