The Beasts: A Winter's Tale

Requiem

Without music, life would be an error. The German imagines even God singing songs.

-Friedrich Nietzsche

“Christophah! Christophah!”

When he was eighteen, Christopher Ashby wondered about the blue edge of sea that joined the blue edge of sky. It was half a day’s march across the fields to the sea, and he didn’t think he would get that far, certainly not to the water or over it.

“Christophah!” his sister called again.

He put down the hoe and turned around, taking his cap off to wipe his brow.

“Mothah says, you’d bettah git t' grandmothah ’s ouse o' thee want t' see ah afore it’s too lairt.”

Chris stared at his sister, almost as if staring at her would change things, and Evangeline cried out, “What are thee still starin a' us fah, thee fool? there’s no time! Come !”

They left the cart horse in the field. On the way back they would tell Old Bart to mind it, and after they did, they went from the long, low, thatched house, out into the wide dirt street, and past the small shops to the house at the edge of the trees. That’s where Gran had gone when she said the old house was too crowded and she wanted to be left on her own. On her own, under the trees, on the edge of the woods, she sang to herself and dried her herbs. She made her healing ointments, and wrapping her shawl about her, she would go out with Evangeline to birth the babies or, in some cases, to make sure the babies never came.

“Sing Oak and Ash and Thorn.
Sing Oak and Ash and Thorn, good Sirs
All of a Midsummer's morn!
Surely we sing of no little thing,
In Oak and Ash and Thorn!”

“What are you…?” Evangeline began. Then, “Gran’s song.”

The house was dark compared to the wide open outside, and it was filled with the smell of smoke from the hearth. Christopher squeezed through the door, and though he and Evangeline stood in the small house, trying to make themselves smaller, Gran raised her head from the bed, blinked and murmured, “There he is. There he is, and there she.

“Well,” the old woman turned to a woman almost as old looking, “Go now, lass, and let me see the children.”

“I’ll will send th’others,” Mistress. Ashby said as she rose.

“No. No, daughter. None o’ that. These be enough.”

As their mother left, she merely nodded to them. Emotional display and other gestures were scarce in the North Country. Seeing her in his mind’s eye, Chris thinks how quickly people aged then, how a woman in this present world who looked like her would easily be close to seventy though his mother was not then forty. But the Christopher Ashby on his knees, on one side of the bed across from his sister who laid his face to his grandmother’s breast while Evangeline laid hers on the other knew only these days.

“Reach undah tha' tabul 'n git 'um beads fah me,” she said with a small smile.

Chris did. He longed to hold onto the heavy beads at the same time he wished to hide them.

“Ah quicklih they forget,” the old woman said, taking the black beads and the silver chain and wrapping them around her hand. “Ah verih quicklih! When ar wur a girl they talked about t' auld religion: T' orned One, T' Ladih , T' oak, T' ash n 'thorn. These wur spoken o' in ushed turns. 'and then kin enrih gets inta a fit o pique 'n suddenlih t' Virgin be t' Auld Religion, 'n t' beads 'n t' Mass 'n t' Latin. ar thurrt, fah so long, we wur so far awair frum it, t' new religion would not touch us. boot even ere people forget about it 'n turn frum t' Auld Ways, arl t' auld ways, t' Saints 'n t' Orned One. But Ar remembered. so thee names, Christophah , fah t' Auld saint ooh bore up t' bairn Jesus, 'n Evangeline. Evangeline, nah, receive t' blessin which none o' thee lads 'n lasss uhl get.”

She placed her bony hands on Chris’s head and on Evangeline’s, and suddenly the bony hand was heavy, was like a vice, was throbbing through his blond hair into his head, weighing him down as the old woman pronounced, “All o' our powah, we place upon thee, 'n upon thee.”

Chris rested under her lightening touch, her touch becoming ever lighter until there was a lightness, and emptiness in the room, and Chris lifted his aching head, blinking, and looked to the old woman.

Evangeline, in her brown smock, her pale, dirty hair falling out of her bonnet, reached down and closed her grandmother’s eyes with two fingers.

“She’s gone, Chris.”

Christopher Ashby woke up, blinking at the yellow white sunlit ceiling that had been his midnight for over three centuries. The memory had been so vivid, for a moment he did not know where he was. He turned on his side to see the brown nude form of Lewis Dunharrow curled up like a child. He had already woken him, and Lewis said, patiently, “Yes, Love?”

“I don’t knah . Ar wur just…” Chris began, “in t' past.”

“What did you say?” Lewis turned to him almost frowning.

“I say,” Chris began.

“Oh, never mind,” Lewis had sat up. “You really were far back.”

Chris shook his head and cleared his throat, taking a moment to speak before his voice altered, raising an octave, into his usual American accent, though touched by something older now.

“I was dreamin’ of my home. Of… being a lad…. I need to stop talking like that. A kid. When I was a boy. When my Gran died. My grandmother.”

“I know what a Gran is,” Lewis said, pulling Chris close to him, “I also know that you’re over three hundred years old and from Yorkshire. Though, I tend to forget it until you wake up sounding like something out of Wuthering Heights.”

They lay together, Chris in Lewis’s arms, and Lewis said, “And how was it? To be back there?”

“A lot less sanitary.”

Lewis flicked Chris on the head.

“Evangeline. She was just a girl. But then I was just a boy. We had no idea what was going to happen to us. Before she died my grandmother blessed us. She said she placed all of her power on us, and then she died doing it.”

Lewis said nothing, and Chris turned around, his arms wrapped about Lewis.

“She was a witch. I sort of knew that then. I know it now. She was a witch. And a Catholic. She held to it. She gave me her rosary. She called them her beads. I wonder now if the reason Evangeline and I are still alive, are what we are, is because of what she did.”

“I wonder if the reason Kruinh chose you is because you are witch blooded,” Lewis said.

“And if that’s why we chose each other?”

“Yes,” Lewis said. “That probably has something to do with it. And then there’s the small detail that I love you.”

They do not hold the wakein that little house. They bring her into the larger house, the long house with the heavy dirty thatch that must be replaced in a moon’s time, where the more lanterns there are, the darker it seems to get, and the old woman’s body, on a table, is lit in dim red and gold. She would have been called a witch and sent to the fire if there was no one to love her, no daughter with seventeen children, no two sons, no house to sing for her. But now she is a cunning woman, and a cunning woman gone.

“THIS ae nighte, this ae nighte,
— Every nighte and alle,
Fire and fleet and candle-lighte,
—And Christe receive thy saule.”

They pass the jug of spirits which has replaced the real beer which came after the small beer, singing.

“When thou from hence away art past
To Whinny-muir thou com'st at last

If ever thou gavest hosen and shoon.
Sit thee down and put them on;

If hosen and shoon thou ne'er gav'st nane
The whinnes sall prick thee to the bare bane.

From Whinny-muir when thou may'st pass,

And Christe receive thy saule.”

And outside the wind blows off of the high moors and makes a lonely howling which seems to join with the mourners at the same time it seems indifferent to things like death, and up on the hill by the forest, where the old hovel lies empty, another woman moves into the home that belonged to Old Woman Saxby, and a new witch takes her place.

When thou from hence away art past
To Whinny-muir thou com'st at last

In this present world, while they are eating breakfast, what has happened several times before happens now. What he missed the first time, he hears now. He does not know if this is something that happens only to Drinkers, but for him the memory remains, all of it, to be played back again, watched and played back like—well, until he saw a film for a the first time, he had no adequate description for it, but—like a film. Only he can loop back, look at it, make what was quiet louder, lower the volume on what no longer seems important. He watches from winter in the present, a harvest time funeral three hundred years ago, and as they keen over his grandmother, Chris hears:

“The crop is failing, and there are too many mouths to feed.”

“What about the boy, the tall lad?”

“What of him?”

If ever thou gavest hosen and shoon,
Sit thee down and put them on;

If hosen and shoon thou ne'er gav'st nane
The whinnes sall prick thee to the bare bane.

From Whinny-muir when thou may'st pass,
To Brig o' Dread thou com'st at last;

From Brig o' Dread when thou may'st pass,
To Purgatory fire thou com'st at last;

“Wadn’t he to be apprenticed this summer?”

“But that cos’ money,” his father grumbles, “and the farm can only go to Kevin. I can barely get the girls married off, but oh…”

“There’s a ship, come near Liverpool. Pay good money for workers.”

“What kind o’ workers?”

“Field. Like whatchu do here. But you’d get paid handsomely. They say they let em go in a few years. They say they give em land and everything.”

If ever thou gavest meat or drink,
The fire sall never make thee shrink;

If meat or drink thou ne'er gav'st nane,
The fire will burn thee to the bare bane;

This ae nighte, this ae nighte,
—Every nighte and alle,
Fire and fleet and candle-lighte,
—And Christe receive thy saule.

“Is that a truth?”

“Aye! The lad could make his fortunes and make your future too….”

Naked at the table in the little hotel room, Chris Ashby drops his cup of coffee and he catches it in time not to break it, but not in time to prevent a mess. As the brown liquid goes across the table. Lewis stands up, goes to the sink, takes the dish cloth and rinses it, coming back to clean up the table, and taking the cup from him.

“Get yourself another cup.”

Chris nods absently and murmurs, “Sorry. Sorry about that.”

As Lewis watches him, Chris wonders, “Did they really believe I would have a good life? Did they really believe I was going to be an indentured servant, or is it simply what they told themselves to make their treachery bearable?”

No, but if they had believed it they would not have hidden it from me, not sold me like Joseph’s brothers sold him. And anyway, what they believed did not matter. What they told themselves did not matter, they had sold him, for money, and they were dead these three hundred years.

“I know what we should do,” Chris said, while stirring creamer into his coffee.

Lewis looked to him. Chris was standing naked, his heavy penis dangling, hair sticking up, holding the new coffee in his hands

“Alright?’ Lewis said. “Fill me in.”