The Ravens

There’s Father, I thought. In his eternal cloud.

Bouncing along in Grandfather’s old Ferguson with his body belt drawn tight and his hair growing greyer, and later he’ll come home smelling of earth – because he has no choice. Because this spot is ours, this plot of soil, these acres of farmland. The lake, drained and turned into fields and banks. The marsh, Raven Fen, smoking like ashes and tinder as soon as the dry season sets in, the peat bog that can suddenly catch fire, smouldering and gasping in its depths, burning without a flame, glowing unseen, consuming everything from below until you dig trenches to cut it off.

This is our patch. We have no other.

This soil, observed by the sun and the ravens.

This plot beneath a sky criss-crossed by jet planes.

The tractor was scarcely visible, all you could see was the cloud of dust rising as he chugged past with the roller attached at the back. I got out the telescope and kept him in my sights for a good ten minutes, reluctant to let him out of view. Wondered what he was thinking about down there, what was going on inside his heavy head, why he kept licking his lips. Up and down with that infernal, peaty cloud all round him – length after length of the newly sown fields, back and forth between one ditch and the other, from east to west and back again.

The dust thickened into a dense, ash-brown mist as the telescope brought it closer. You could only make him out as a vague shadow inside the tractor’s roll cage: the peak of his cap, the pipe in his beard, the hands on the steering wheel, the hunched back.

There he is, you think. Sitting in that cloud, breathing all that pulverised organic material into his lungs, coming home and coughing and looking like a Soviet miner – those subterranean half-humans they showed on TV, just restored to the light of day with helmeted heads and fluorescing whites to the eyes in their coal-black faces. Because he’s got to. Has no choice. He’ll never get away from here. He can’t do anything else.

I panned slowly across the thousands of acres of reclaimed bog, from the football pitch to the south, past the clump of alders and the hay barns weathered to greyness on the other side of the Canal and over to the white arrow of the church spire where the sun always set at midsummer – – –

No, there was nobody else out there. Everyone had finished what they had to do. It was only Father left, in his cloud.

The fields, lying there waiting.

Sit on the stone wall and see how many different bird calls I can make out, waiting for the green woodpecker to show herself in her black hole, poke out her bayonet beak and at least say hello.

No sign of life. Dead as May Day in church. My greeny-yellow friend must have hacked out a home elsewhere, moved away and laid her gleaming white eggs in a dead pine tree instead. I had been sitting there for two hours, caught between hope and despair, swinging from one to the other, at my wit’s end, and now it must be dinner time at home, too.

What shall I do, I thought uselessly. Show that I’m me or swallow my pride and lay down my weapon. I nipped a leaf off the Lightning Aspen and sat there holding it in my pathetic girl’s hand. Compared the two sides of the leaf, studied the long, flattened stalk, the super-fine tracery of its veins, the irregular divisions of its blade, like aerial photos of paddy fields in faraway lands. The fresh leaf with its luminous green nerve fibres, as thin and fragile as the capillaries of an eyelid. The distorted yellow patch by the stalk, the rounded points and shallow serrations running along the edge.

I leant forward and sniffed it, put it on my tongue and took it into my mouth like a communion wafer.

The aspen and me, I thought. The least thing makes us shake.

Homo tremula. That’s me.

I gave a start.

The tractor heading this way, and no roller! So it’s dinner time, the hour has struck. Soon they’ll assemble in silence round the table and say a short grace.

Those heavy eyes on you.

Like something pulling at you.

You stay here, the voice ordered. You’re not to be owned by anyone, not even the person who begot you. Today is today. You can do as you will.

Walk, see, feel, listen –

It’s what you exist for.

I held the aspen leaf up to the sun, brought it gradually closer to my eye, little by little, and the veins turned into rivers spreading across a foreign land, waterways with natives paddling along in hollowed-out tree trunks among lethal caimans, rivers winding through steaming jungles where harpy eagles rose from the treetops with baby monkeys and sloths in their claws, sweeping off like their primeval counterparts on vast spreads of wing –

Again I was jolted back to reality. Father was sounding his horn – a long, insistent signal, as if he knew where I was and wanted to show me who was who.

Today’s not just any old day. You are you and I am me and I’ll come when it suits me. To the place you lot call home.

From a tree stump with a hundred rings:

If he drives the tractor into the Canal it’s your fault. You’ll have to live with it for the rest of your life.

I clambered down from the wall and shoved the aspen leaf in my back pocket. I went into the woods after all – to what’s mine. To see if the songthrush babies have hatched, track down the wood pigeon with her incessant cooing, find out where the wood ants are swarming on a day like today.

That’s how easy it is. Over the ditch and away.

I crept cautiously towards the young spruce where the thrushes lived, hid in a clump of thorn bushes a little way off and got out my field glasses. The male was babbling in the whitest birch and interspersed his fluting drills with oystercatcher and woodcock impersonations, whistled like a football ref and then did a retake, going for it all over again. And the female flew off! That means the eggs have hatched. A minute or two later she came back with a collection of worms in her beak, landed on the edge of the nest, distributed them among her brood and was off again.

I climbed onto a tree stump at about knee height and gently parted the branches. There were the babies in their smoothly plastered bowl of a nest, and all four had made it. Lying in a helpless, reptilian heap, their salmon pink throats gaping wide like fleshy collecting bags as if they thought I was going to feed them. The male had noticed me and didn’t think I belonged there.

Tix-itix-itix! came his alarm call. Tix-itix-itix!

He advanced on me branch by branch, his call so shrill that it hurt my ears. He looked about him frantically as if hoping for reinforcements or planning his attack.

‘Easy now, easy now,’ I said. ‘It’s only me.’

Tix-itix-itix!

‘Can’t you see it’s me?’

Tix-itix-itix!

‘Calm down a minute and I’ll go.’

Tix-itix-itix!

I went back to my thicket, broke off some spruce branches to act as a roof and made myself invisible. Instantly, peace was restored. The male carried on fluting and singing as before and the female came up to the nest to check all was in order, which it was. So she darted off for her next batch of worms and the male began talking to himself as usual.

In a fortnight’s time, the baby birds will have flown the nest and be coping on their own. Fully qualified worm hunters and berry pickers with their sights set on France or Spain for the autumn.

And what about me?

I carried on towards the cooing wood pigeon, past Drowned Man’s Pond where a teal with Indian warpaint on his face was wondering what kind of animal I was. Took a detour round the badger sett and was soon in the oldest part of the forest, in among the ancient spruces, keeping their thousand needle eyes peeled as I padded past, waiting for every step I took. The tall, rough trunks of spruce, like pillars in a great hall with a murmuring ceiling. The faint wind filtering through the treetops, the goldcrests whispering somewhere up there.

Ssshh –

Only a roe deer breaking a twig and bolting into the darkness, its white rump bouncing between the treetrunks.

The roe deer and the birds. Imagine living here. Turning into a spruce and growing bark.

I could hear the brook ahead of me now. The brook that rippled and flowed, however dry the woods and fields around – that tugged at you because it was without end. I looked down into the flowing water coiling round the rocks and stones in ever-changing patterns, impossible to keep up with. It’s forever running here, I thought, every second and no doubt even in the middle of the night. Running and flowing, eddying on the bends as if it was nothing, frothing white as soon as anything gets in the way. The least little protruding root-end turns into a frothy tuft, like candyfloss tossed by the wind.

Entranced, I looked down into the stream as it ran and ran and ran, never seeming to rest. New water kept coming, yet still it stayed the same.

The brook here in the forest – where did it begin? – – –

Don’t think like that!

Not about beginnings and endings, but just about what is.

Throw in a stone and make time stop.

I grabbed hold of a spindly alder that was growing right by the water but seemed to be dying anyway. I bent it over to use as a handrail and picked my way out to a rock in the middle of the stream. Like the Water Sprite, only without the fiddle and the dancing fairies.

Someone in the forest, not going home –

I put my hand down into the icy water and let it filter between my fingers, felt it sucking, tugging, numbing.

The aspen leaf, I thought.

I scratched a K with my little fingernail, put the leaf in the water and let it be carried away – out to the ditch that Grandfather and Father had dug, down to the Canal and off towards Marsh Pool through the narrow channel in the reeds, cutting straight across the long, thin bird lake, under the hundred-year-old echo of the humpback bridge, past the swidden land and the forest grazing, the water meadows and reclaimed farmland, through dark forest, outlying fields and boggy pools and all the way down to the coast, out into the mighty sea that you knew nothing about. Tens of miles over gliding black currents on the great waterway that never ends –

I can’t see it any more.

The pigeon cooed and called to me – a hundred metres away or a thousand, it was impossible to tell.

Hoo hrooo hoo hu hu – – –

I left the brook and went in amongst the hairiest old spruces, where the Tengmalm’s owl lived: the one with the eerie, dog-bark hoot that frightened the wits out of people at nights. Through undergrowth and thickets and over broken barbed wire fences, down into a brushwood hollow and up again, round a big mound of stones and in the end I scarcely knew where I was. Nothing but the cooing to steer by. Lots of scrub, and twiggy branches to scratch you in the face – but suddenly a ray of light cut through the forest darkness.

A narrow, unassuming roadway, forgotten after some bit of felling perhaps, but there was no trace of wheel tracks. If the sun had not been in exactly the right position I would undoubtedly have missed it. A moss-covered roadway where overgrown rocks and tree stumps made soft little hillocks. Small branches left lying under the thick carpet made bumps that stood out like the veins on the backs of Father’s hands.

I took the roadway deeper into the forest with the sun on my back and my own shadow straight in front of me, as if showing me the way. The forest was as solid as a wall and the lighter roadway went on and on, jinked round an untidy bunch of boulders before emerging into a clearing I had never seen before.

An open space, almost like a circus ring, surrounded by huge spruces that seemed to be leaning in towards the hole at the top, watching over me and everything down below: the flat rock with the oak sapling beside it, the tree stump with springy haircap moss to sit on, the knot of birches on the other side, the little blueberry bushes now in leaf, the anemones with their flowers still white.

Stay here, something told me.

There is nothing here to be afraid of. No eyes boring at you, trying to get in. Just you and what is here, the forest murmuring its murmur, as it always has.

Now and forever.

Filled with a strange sense of peace, I sat down by the flat rock and brushed it clear, picked off some old spruce needles and partly rotted leaves and saw there was something written on it. Three letters that looked as if they had been cut using some kind of template or carved with a hammer and chisel, so clear and sharp were they, so perfect somehow.

I could make out a T and an A and a G.

Tag?

No, there were dots in between: T.A.G.

Father’s initials.

Did he come here? Did he sit here, carving, when he was like me? Sometime during the war maybe, when Grandfather was in the asylum? Did he come here and chisel away? I ran my fingers over the letters, thought how old they looked, as if they had become one with the eternity of the rocks.

Something whispered: They are never going to disappear. In a thousand years from now, they will be the same. The oak sapling may become a tree and rot away, the stream may meander round more bends with every century that passes but the rocks will always be here, will never crumble away.

I felt suddenly light-headed.

I touched the letters again cautiously, as if they might burn me. I got out my bedroom door key and scraped away what I could of the ingrained lichens, and with a generous amount of spit and my sleeve I polished up his letters as best I could, trying to make them look good again.

T.A.G. down in the bottom corner, like the signature on a painting.

Father’s rock in the clearing that belongs to me –

You must never say anything about this to anybody. Not Mum, nor anybody else, not a living soul. This is for only you to know.

I took off my shoes and climbed onto the rock. Took a few deep breaths and composed myself, as if to pray, squinted cautiously up at the heavens through the hole between the treetops. A few clouds paraded past. The wood pigeon cooed at a distance, the chaffinch and willow warbler trilled and sang, the robin made its urgent ‘tic tic’ and its high ‘tsweee’. And the spruces! Now I could see they were blooming as if we were in Paradise. Every treetop boasted an array of reddish-pink female flowers like gorgeous tropical fruits – the nearer the sun the plumper and deeper in colour, as if flushing with excitement, extending their damp carpels towards the heat of the sun’s rays.

Then there was a gust of wind, the spruces curtseyed and everything went silent and still as if at the snap of someone’s fingers. I filled my lungs with air and turned my face up the bright hole.

‘Yoo-hoo!’ I shouted. ‘Yoo-hoo!’

No.

‘Yoo-hooo! – – –’

Nothing?

I cupped my hands into a funnel and shouted at the top of my voice, straight into the trees instead.

‘Yoou-hooou!!’

Into the dense forest and everything that lurked in there – and an answer came.

And it was no ordinary echo, rolling off and dying away, it was the forest saying it wanted something of me – as if in a dream that had yet to be dreamed.

Spatters of fat hissed on the stove. The smell of cooking mixed with the smell of manure and permanently sweaty socks. It was warm and stuffy in the kitchen, in the closeness of evening, like when there was thunder in the air.

‘So you didn’t want any dinner, then?’ said Mum, giving me a look.

But there was no reproach in it, just vague curiosity about what I had been up to all day, why I never said where I was going before I shoved off.

Important things, I thought feverishly. Something no one else is going to find out about. Something only I will know.

‘Had some nests I needed to look at,’ I answered, and it was no lie. ‘The green woodpecker seems to have gone but the whitethroats have arrived. I heard one in raptures over by Broadleaf Brook.’

She gave me an indulgent, tender smile, came over and stroked my cheek with the back of her hand as if to comfort me. Her skin was glistening with sweat even though she only had on a short-sleeved tunic.

‘You and your birds,’ she said. ‘Don’t you ever get tired of them?’

Father wasn’t listening. He sat there in his corner, entering the weather observations in his black oilcloth notebook, adding arrows and lines, drawing curves and cloud formations, shaking his head dejectedly. He seemed to be finding it hard to get enough air, or maybe there was something that didn’t tally, the right connections were eluding him.

That heavy breathing.

We sat there on either side of the table, Father and I, as far apart from each other as we could get. It was a habit we had got into. He in order to keep the whole kitchen under surveillance, me for the view over the garden. Apple and plum trees in blossom, a patch of sky into which the swifts might come darting any day now.

‘No rain is one thing,’ he muttered, half to himself. ‘But this infernal thundery heat in May. Something’s not right.’

The tufts of hair in his ears were grey with dust from the roller. There was a rusty scythe hanging on the wall behind him, a memento of Grandfather.

‘It’s always something,’ said Mum. ‘If it’s not too dry or too hot then it’s too wet or too cold?’

‘Though of course it’s a leap year with thirteen moons,’ he went on, engrossed in his own thoughts. ‘I didn’t think I’d see another one of those in my lifetime.’

Father had been keeping a record of the weather since he was fourteen. Three times a day he entered the readings for atmospheric pressure, temperature, wind conditions and precipitation, if any, and once he had finished in the cowshed he would sit down and summarise the day’s weather. Whether it had been cloudy or clear, foggy or hazy, how the wind had changed and the cloud varied, the time any rain, hail or snow had started and stopped, how it all compared with previous years. Trends and signs, hundreds of different cloud formations and their consequences.

‘The songthrush eggs had hatched when I got there,’ I said. ‘All four of them. They make the nest of cement inside and put the soft stuff on the outside.’

Father looked up, inspected me thoughtfully as if he had something to find fault with.

‘That’s not bad,’ he said. ‘They’re sweet singers, and all.’

‘What would you know about it?’ said Mum in surprise. ‘I thought you were only interested in pests? Spruce bark beetles and Colorado beetles and all that lot you’re forever worrying about, day and night.’

‘Oh there’s room for a few birds in this head of mine as well.’

He gave a self-satisfied little smile and looked out of the window, the way he generally did when he was thinking about something special, something only he knew about, something that was a long time ago and might never come back. A smile in his beard, a little glint in his eyes. Then he slowly turned his head my way and fixed me with a look, and there was no way of telling if it was still a game or something more serious. He stared as if he wanted to get right into me, sat there for ages, glassy-eyed and unblinking.

Finally he parted those dry, shrunken lips.

‘When I was a lad we had a songthrush behind the cowshed,’ he said, raising his voice as if delivering a lesson. ‘He was there for several years in that same spruce – they’ve chopped it down now, by the way – and whenever I came out with the barrow of manure of an evening he’d sing for a bit. Almost made you want to sit down and just listen, it was that sweet.’

He paused and looked up at the wall hanging, with the hymn verse embroidered on it.

‘Have you had a hiding today? Have you had a hiding today? I thought he was singing. But maybe I just imagined that, too?’

He had that strange smile again, like a streak of sunshine across his face.

Mum checked she’d put everything on the table and poured milk into all four glasses as usual, before she sat down. Perspiration beaded her forehead and ran like tears from her neck down into her cleavage.

‘Here we are then, help yourselves,’ she said, with a nod to Father.

He took some smoked sausage and mashed turnip and got straight down to it, shovelling the food in with his fork, grubby fingers helping out as required. He never touched his knife, but there was always a clean one laid for him beside his plate, as she’d been taught at domestic science college.

Partway through the meal, Göran came dashing out of his room, jumped up onto his chair and started fiddling with what was in front of him: he speared a bit of bread on his fork and tapped his spoon against the serving dish and his glass until Father closed his eyes and took a deep breath. Mum went for a damp cloth and dabbed at Göran’s brow, asked him to drink some of his soothing milk, put some food on his plate and pointed and whispered as if talking to someone retarded.

He gradually calmed down and we could carry on eating. Nothing but the sound of grinding molars, the scrape of cutlery on crockery and, once you became aware of it, the click and tick of Grandma’s old wall clock. I made an effort to chew and swallow without a sound, to drink and not slurp. I would really have liked to put the food into my mouth without having to open it.

Above us, the sticky flypaper streamers twirled down from the ceiling, blacker with every passing day: hundreds of wretched captives in the spiral of death, most of them as dry and shrivelled as mummies. But some were still struggling, with a stifled buzz, their wings moving in slow motion, almost automatically, like Grandfather on his deathbed, playing a non-existent accordion. His fingers found only thin air, and moved much more slowly than usual.

After a while Father put down his fork and rapped the underside of the table. Göran flew up and looked out into the hall as if he thought we were about to have visitors, but there was nobody there. It was just Father, signalling that he was about to speak.

‘So that’s the spring sowing almost done for this time,’ he said solemnly. ‘Tomorrow I’ll put in the last corn over on the leasehold. Then it’s all in the hands of Our Lord. If we don’t get any rain we’ll lose the lot, if anyone happens to care.’

Mum forced a smile.

‘Well at least that’s the end of all that dust for now, eh?’ she said. ‘It’ll do you in, swirling around like that all the time?’

He nodded in agreement and seemed content, then brushed down his shirtsleeves, releasing a big cloud of dust. Göran put on an act and started to cough, thumped his chest and sounded like a consumptive.

‘Could we take a bit of time off when it’s done,’ asked Mum, ‘before you start on the fences? Just a couple of days. Give ourselves something else to think about.’

She glanced encouragingly at Göran and me as a wistful look came into her eyes.

‘What about a trip to Gotland!’ she exclaimed. ‘Wouldn’t that be fun? A chance to see the sea.’

Father’s expression darkened and he shot her an injured look.

‘Take time off? There’s more than enough to do here, if that’s what you’re all worrying about.’

He nodded out of the window several times and underlined what he had just said.

‘In this place we’re never finished, just so you’re clear on that. There’s the scrap pile waiting to be sorted if nothing else, you all know that as well as I do.’

Mum moistened her finger and dabbed up a few crumbs from the oilcloth.

‘Never mind the scrap pile,’ she said quietly. ‘In a hundred years it’ll all be forgotten.’

‘Forgotten? I wouldn’t be so sure about that.’

At that moment a fly fell off the spiral of death and landed squarely in the milk jug, where it lay helplessly on its back, floundering in the white well.

‘Do you know why aspens tremble at the slightest thing?’ I heard myself say.

‘Aspens?’ said Mum. ‘What aspens?’

‘The ones in front of the forest, I bet,’ said Göran.

‘It’s because they’re going to be made into matches and they’re afraid of fire,’ I answered for them. ‘And because Jesus hung on an aspen cross. They’re scared of death, too. Just like I am.’

Mum put down her knife and fork and sent an embarrassed smile in Father’s direction, not sure whose side she should be on. Talking about the crucifixion at the dinner table. Father was not listening. He had not been allowed to finish what he had to say about sowing and Our Lord.

‘As I said Klas, there aren’t many acres left to do this time. When I was like you, I had to do the whole lot myself, with just a horse.’

He looked at me with a hint of triumph about his mouth, drumming his fingers on the tabletop. Had me where he wanted me now.

‘Let’s see, you’re twelve now, aren’t you?’ he said. ‘In that case it’s high time. And you think you can get to the heavens with the help of those birds?’

‘We live in different times now,’ put in Mum, ‘thank goodness. You can’t go comparing now with during the war?’

‘I wouldn’t say that …’

He stopped chewing and stared out of the window. His eyes shrank as he screwed them up, as if a thought had suddenly struck him. He wiped the saliva from the corner of his mouth, smearing his dirty cheek, and sat there with a mouth full of food.

He’s going to die soon, was the sensation that rushed through me. There’s no one with grey tufts of hair in their ears who isn’t going to die soon. And his eyes, there’s something about his eyes that wasn’t there before.

Die!

Why would he die? He’s going to carry on farming this place that was left to him and provide for us if it’s the last thing he does, he promised that himself.

‘Everything’s crowding in on me, as well,’ he muttered. ‘I’ve said it before and it doesn’t get any better, not a bit. And the barometer’s stuck where it is.’

Mum wiped a bead of sweat from the tip of her nose.

‘Crowding in?’ she said.

‘Yes. There’s not much air, either.’

He looked away.

‘I don’t know what it is –’

There was silence round the table. Mum cleared her throat and whispered something to Göran, reached over and switched on the radio.

‘Forty years,’ he went on. ‘What have I got to show for it? Apart from sciatica?’

‘You’re talking in riddles.’

‘I might have known it was asking too much for you lot to understand anything.’

Mum gave a routine nod and stuck out her lower lip.

‘Have you seen the bunch of flowers?’ she said, trying to change tack. ‘Bearded iris, bleeding heart and some leopard’s bane. Göran picked them in the fields. Pretty, aren’t they?’

‘Flowers? They’ll be dead in a week. You’ll only have to take them out again.’

At that moment my first pied flycatcher of the year alighted in the apple tree outside, perched on a blossom-laden branch, flicked his wings and raised his tail in greeting. Here I am!

Then he pulled himself upright and stared at me through the newly cleaned window, looking so long and so intently that for a while we could not tear our eyes away from each other. He fixed me with the white spot above his bill as if I were the female he was longing for. Here’s where we’ll live!

Can’t you find the nesting box, I mimed surreptitiously. It’s in the aspen by the raspberry canes, I built it for you, this spring. Send the great tits packing if they’ve got in first!

‘I’ll come with you to Africa in the autumn,’ I whispered without thinking. ‘I want to see the