Sacred Country by Rose Tremain Read Free Book Online Page B

picture,’ said Arthur, ‘you can see it, can’t you, as plain as death. You are the last Loomis and you mustn’t desert the meat.’
    Arthur stood up and went away then, without another word. For the first time in a long while Walter felt cold, and from this moment his fever began to die down.
    It was convenient, after that, not to be able to speak. He wanted no questions to be asked and no promises to be demanded. In silence, he looked at his future and saw that he might not be able to become a hillbilly singer. Yodelling was beyond him. He had almost died trying to do it. And without a yodel, there would only be an imaginary America, not a real Tennessee with its faithful darkies and its faithful dogs. All of that was shimmer.
    He came home and his mother made him broth from marrowbones. The red in his cheeks had faded to a grey mottling; his forehead was a slab of white. He lay in his bedroom and heard the business of the shop going on beneath him, the scratch and thud of the cleaver, the ping of the cash till.
    In time, as if oiled by the real coming of spring, the pain in his vocal chords lessened and his voice began to return, a minute thing at first, with no power to disturb his breath and no will to be heard.
    The first time it came louder was on a late afternoon at the river, under a fish-scale sky. His mother had sent him there to gather watercress for tea. The river flowed through the fields owned by Sonny Ward into the Loomis pastures.
    Estelle was there. She was sitting on the plank bridge Sonny had made on his own in a day. Beside her was a pail of watercress. Her feet were in the water and she was holding on to her shoes.
    Walter waved at her. She looked up at him, but didn’t move or make any greeting. So he called out and heard his voice quite strong again, as it had been in the days before ‘Rose Marie’. He called: ‘Good afternoon, Mrs Ward!’ but Estelle didn’t reply and Walter wondered whether the strength he heard in his voice had, after all, been an illusion. He was about to try calling out again when he saw Estelle stand up and walk away, leaving her pail of cress behind.
    At tea, Grace said: ‘You don’t surprise us, Walter. But you’ve been ill a longish while, dear, and haven’t heard the things they’re saying in the village.’
Estelle:
    They say: Sonny is a good man.
    They say: England is a good place.
    They say: I don’t know what frightens you so, Estelle.
    I can tell them. When I was fourteen, Livia took me to a play. Near the end, the man peels an onion. He is trying to find the onion after all the layers of peel. He gets to the heart of it and there is nothing. How absurd, he says, there is nothing there at all.
    Irene thinks she has found the onion. The onion is the old man, Harker. You could die laughing at this.
    He comes up from the cellar. Hard as an armadillo, she says. Surprising for his years. She switches off the Hoover. ‘It’s wonderful, Estelle,’ she says, ‘I’d forgotten how wonderful.’
    You could die laughing.
    If dying were easy. If you could just say, goodnight etcetera. I tried it one night. Sonny lay on his side, facing me. I put my face close to his mouth and breathed his breath, like mustard gas. For I had often thought, the breath of a person you no longer love or respect could be a poison to kill you, and it does. But it kills you slowly. So slowly that it isn’t often you notice you are dying.
    I try to tell Irene, I used to caress his coral ear, with my fingers and with my lips. I try to remind her, in her onion bliss, these things are like sunlight and vanish. It can happen at mid-day or happen late. And then, what was possible no longer is or ever will be again.
    ‘I never met,’ she says, ‘anyone so full of bad-weather forecasts as you, Estelle.’
    And I say, well Irene, wait and watch and see if from onesplit second to the next, it doesn’t go. Watch and see. You might be on the stairs in just your slip, or you might be somewhere