Sacred Country by Rose Tremain Read Free Book Online Page A

fever that refused to abate. In the cow-sheds, he could see Walter’s head steaming. His neck,above the collarless shirt, was plum red.
    ‘Give that yodel a rest,’ Pete advised, ‘or it’ll burst your brains.’
    But he had forgotten Walter’s devotion to things. ‘Of course I can’t give it a rest,’ Walter said, ‘not till I’ve got it.’
    But he couldn’t get it. Not quite. He could master a kind of warble, a little trill at the back of the throat. The great swoop up to a falsetto that Rodgers and Snow achieved so effortlessly remained beyond him. He could hear it inside him. In his fever, he sometimes felt that he could even see it, as a bouncing light above the trees.
    Then he heard a new song on the radio, Slim Whitman singing ‘Rose Marie’.
    Pete told Ernie: ‘That’s going to be the death of your boy, that “Rose Marie”.’
    Grace advised her son: ‘We’ve all of us got only one voice, Walter, and you’re hurting yours.’
    But he’d bought the record now. He wore out four gramophone needles, playing it over and over. The ease with which old Slim Whitman sang it reminded him of a waterfall. He had dreams of mountains. The word ‘whippoorwill’ (its meaning unclear to him) kept patterning and punctuating his thoughts. He remembered Pete’s tales of ice storms and prayed for one to come and cool him. The morning arrived when his fever was so thick and deep that he couldn’t move.
    And he couldn’t speak. In answer to the doctor’s questions, nothing came out. The pain in Walter’s throat was so spectacular, he thought an ice-pick must have lodged there. He tried to ask his mother to remove it, but realised he was incapable of the least sound.
    He was put into the doctor’s Morris Minor. A blanket was laid round him. On the way to the hospital, he lost track of the seasons and thought autumn had come – autumn known as fall. You lay in the fall, Pete had said, and dreamed. Something came out of that dreaming, but Walter couldn’t remember what. He feared death might come out of it, and silence, for ever. He fought with his blanket, as if death and silence were in that.The doctor’s Morris kept swerving. Having Walter in the back of the car was like having a sick bull there.
    It wasn’t autumn. It was still early spring, grey and chill at its heart.
    In the cold hospital ward Walter, clamped to the bed by a damp sheet, saw old Arthur Loomis come to his side and sit down. He was wearing his apron. His face was pink with vitality and health and his beard was crisp and shiny. ‘Walter,’ he said, ‘I’m glad we’ve got this opportunity to talk.’
    He seemed to wait for Walter to speak, but Walter could say nothing.
    Arthur stroked his moustache. His eyes were brown and gentle, like the eyes of a doe. ‘I think,’ he continued, ‘that this is the right time to remind you that you are alone in your generation, the only Loomis.’
    Walter tried to turn his head towards Arthur, but it seemed to him that his ancestor was holding the handle of the ice-pick, pinning him down.
    He slept a hot sleep. The words of ‘Rose Marie’ filled it up. ‘No matter how I try, I can’t forget you/Sometimes I wish that I had never met you!’ These words were the narrow bridge to a future life, and everything else – his mother, the yard, the blood gulley, the animals and the sky – belonged to the dead past. When he woke, he thought he would try to tell Arthur that all of this was gone, but he found that Arthur’s voice, so often described by Ernie as ‘nice and gentle, nice and slow’, was speaking to him firmly and could not be interrupted.
    ‘… known across East Suffolk, boy. Purveyors of fine meats to some of the best houses. A family business. And the name Loomis on it. On the window in gold and blue letters. On the awning, also in gold and blue. On the bills of sale. On the minds of hostesses. Large on shopping lists …’
    ‘I know,’ Walter tried to say.
    ‘So there’s the