Night of the Animals(31)
“Mmm,” she said. “Oh god. Yes.”
THE TWO MARRIED at St. Cuthbert’s Church in Far Forest on a rainy spring day in 1921; Winefride wore a silk gown that practically her entire village had helped stitch.
“I carried a bouquet of purple saxifrage with a few straws of wheat stuck in for luck,” she said. The rain, that day, had seemed providential, “a gift from the Green Man,” as she put it, “from the otters.”
The union brought much love and abundance, and Alfie’s field became renowned around Wyre for its flavorful, nutlike, quality cereal. Yet the small holding’s revenue never grew much; every year in the 1920s, it seemed wheat prices tumbled a little more. Cheap American wheat had begun pouring into England, too. Many farmers grew angry and moved to Birmingham; most who remained moved into dairy or subsidized sugar beets.
“Alfie,” Winefride remembered telling her husband. “If we have a few young cows, think of all the cheese we’ll sell. And they’re such lovely creatures.”
“But bread,” he answered. “Who doesn’t eat bread? Bread is everything.”
“I’d rather a’kern bread, Alfie. This wheat—it worries me, my love.”
“One day,” Alfie said, “wheat will conquer all.”
Two daughters and a son came, and in 1929, Cuthbert and Drystan’s mother, Mary, was born. But 1929 also brought more rain and more and more and more of it—and then poverty.
All summer, Winefride would hear around the village the phrase “wheat loves dry feet.” She grew to hate the words. Day after day, she would watch Alfie, his cheeks scarlet, trudge out to their plot with his shovel and pickaxe, struggling to carve channels and build temporary wooden sluices in mud as thick as what he’d faced at the Battle of Flers-Courcelette. He would come back, sometimes clutching evidence of what he considered his failure, torn straws of the yellow “gally wheat” that he would show to his wife and hurl down in shame.
ONE MORNING in the early autumn of 1933, Alfie drank his usual morning brandy with a raw egg in it and ate a bowl of porridge he heavily salted. On the wireless, he listened briefly to the news—Germany was withdrawing from the League of Nations, and a great drought was ravaging the American state of Oklahoma. Alfie went out to his scrubbly wheat field, hoping to salvage a bit of wheat for personal milling. The family needed food.
Later that morning, little Mary found her father, fallen in the mud, gasping for breath, his face bright red.
“Get up, Daddy!” She ran back to the house, terrified, screaming for her mum.
Alfie was carried inside by Winnie herself, and a doctor was sent for.
“It’s acute lobular pneumonia,” the doctor told Winefride, outside the sickroom. “It’s tough, Winnie. It’s the kind that gallops. You need to get the vicar over here.”
“Nonsense! He was fine yesterday.”
So she ran to the forest, tears in her eyes, gathering wild garlic for a tincture she made with brandy and vinegar. She tore her hands up, pulling the “crow’s garlic” up through nettles and haw branches, and when she returned, her hands dripping blood, the vicar was there, praying over his body, his feet still wet with mud.
THEN CAME, Winefride told the boys, a destitution that ended the world of Merrie Worcestershire. While many of their friends fled for the city, Winefride, numb with grief, turned back to the Wyre.
She’d never lost her awe of the glimmering forest. It always resurrected itself. The disused hearths, after the Great War, quickly grew over with wild strawberry and strange fire moss with orange-tipped setae, as if the hearth’s embers, centuries old, still burned beneath. Wavy hairgrass, cowslip, and valerian took over the old barking brush-piles, and these became sites of badger runs and weasel dens. The Boogles were there, yes—it was their forest, and if you crossed them, they would bedevil the mind. Your next ramble into the forest for tinder might end with an adder biting your ankle. So you must tread with respect. This is what she’d been taught by her own grandfather when she herself was a little girl. When she spoke of the “mysterious mysteries” of the Wyre to Cuthbert and Drystan, she meant it not only as a serious admonition but as a bequest, too, of what to her was sacred knowledge, the Wonderments. She loved Wyre and its creatures, and she feared them, too.
calamity at dowles brook
THIRTY-FIVE YEARS AFTER CUTHBERT’S GRANDDADDY’S death, as the family sat socializing in the dark sitting room, Winefride found herself echoing, once again, the old sentiment about the “Boogles,” as she had with her daughter. This time she was warning her grandchildren as they contemplated a walk into the forest.
“Thee dunna want to hespel the Boogles,” Winefride was telling them. “There bist worse things in this world, but it’ll still be a mighty good job if you taks warnin’, chaps.”
“Hespel? That’s it, stop it, Mother,” Cuthbert and Drystan’s mum had answered. “Speak proper to these children, or they’ll grow up to be thieves living in Dudley. And poor. Or farmers.”
“An what’s wrong with farmers?” Gran had asked. “They inna any worse than the ewkins* in West Bromwich.”
“I want to see the Boogles,” Drystan had said that day. He was jiggling the front door’s knob, rocking on his heels, and nearly waking his sleeping great-uncle George. “And that magpie-sort goat.”