The old man walked through the long grass, patched with furze and heather, slowly but strongly. He knew this land, all its gentle rolls and the craggy bits sloping up to a slice of sky. He was a boy in this place, and he was walking to the house where he grew up. The landscape so familiar, even after so many years away; as he walked and looked, the present scene was overlain by remembered images of the same place in different seasons, different years. It tugged at him hard, like a fish-hook in the gut. A well-set hook, yes, and now he saw the old croft as he crested a low hill, cradled in its place by the clear cold stream in which he learned to fish. Running smoothly now, but in his palimpsest memory he recalled it winter-stilled and spring-rampant too. At the yard's edge he stood a moment, letting the remembered image die away, deliberately looking hard at the house as it now was. The walls seemed sound enough, but most of the plastering had fallen away in the years of weather, revealing the grey stones that had built it. The roof was sunken in on itself, slate tiles lying here and there, and doubtless more inside. His hand touched the doorframe gently, hesitantly, as though he feared to wake some sleeping spirit within the house with human noise. His fingers slid down the frame edge, stopping when he felt an engraved area: his own name could still be read clearly there, Donnall, scratched into the wood with a pen-knife when he was about 7 years old. He breathed a bit there, one hand on the door, head bowed, wrestling with himself.
After a moment, he sighed and pushed open the door. Inside it was brighter than it should have been, from the light pouring in through the holes in the roof. Only his eyes moved, taking in the empty shelves, the barren hearth, tumbled slates on the floor, a lone flowered teacup by the sink, the rusting pump handle, a tippy stack of old milk pans, dust---so much dust---the empty bedsteads, and oh, his heart---the old rocking chair. Tears brimmed, trembled, and finally spilled down his cheeks. He did not sob aloud, but his chest heaved like the ocean a few times, and he bent forward, resting his arms on his bent knees for a few minutes. Time swam around him. All the years of his boyhood crowded up until he felt nigh smothered by his own lived days, good days though they had been. Slowly he stood up again and moved about the house, tapping timbers with the fire iron, poking at cracked slates, caressing the smooth old table top, and coming to rest on the hard edge of a bed frame. He would not sit in the rocking chair, though it was the only chair left in the house. Not yet. He felt he must earn that, somehow. The house was old, and that rocking chair perhaps two hundred years younger than the house itself; in his own memory it was always his grandmother sitting there, but of course his own mother had nestled him in her arms there for a bit, and the grandmother, and her mother, and so on, in some chair on that hearth, back into the times of vexatious kings.
After his mother had left his father, who turned out to be a shouter and worse, she brought him home to his grandmother's house. There he stayed the day she went back to fetch her things, but she never came back because his father pushed her down the loft stair, and went to prison for it. No one seemed to recall they'd had a toddler, in the turbulence of the times that was just starting, and Donnall's grandmother raised him alone, a law unto herself, and the saving of the quiet child who spoke little but watched everything. The buses still ran regularly then, but mostly they stayed on the croft. He followed his grandmother about from sun-up to sun-down, and only left when she passed away. He was 18 years old, formally unschooled though not unlettered; and he went away to work at the first of many labouring jobs, travelling a bit, and meeting a dark-eyed girl named Mairead who became his wife. They settled in a town nearer to the old coastline, where he did a bit of this and that, bringing up their son, small Donnall. They called him Donnall Beg, and Donall became known as Donnall Mor, to distinguish them. And he grew to a bonny tall lad, settled in his own work, and married a smiling young woman who gave them a grandson within a year. They were happy, and Donnall Mor had no complaints although he had worries, as did all living in the transition times, until the day Mairead fell ill---and shortly after died---of one of the new sicknesses that had been going about the world.
Domnall felt that there was a hole in the world, and it had pulled away his wife. He worried that it would pull too many others along with her. There was truth to that; many died of illness, even illness that in former times was treated easily. Some were pulled away by despair, or by simple hunger, and some by violence or accident, as came to happen to his son. The younger Donnall died senselessly when he was hit by a truck dispersing rioters, though he was not rioting himself, but only queueing to buy food when the rioters rushed past in the narrow street. Ever since his son's death, so soon after his wife's, Donnall had lost the sense of comfort and surety that he had always carried with him. Now, seeing his grandmother's rocking chair, something long asleep curled and stretched within him. It was like a talisman--lost, forgotten, then found unhoped for and unsought in a corner, as powerful as the day it was made. The old chair, dusty as it was, seemed still full of her spirit and love. Although he had no certainty when he came, now he was filled with purpose.
And he would earn that chair, he would. He came back with a tent, and a toolbox, and a few days later a well-used farm lorry loaded with lumber chugged its way to where the old road ended and the path to the croft began. The road had been made long ago for horses and wagons, and never really paved or widened for cars, and the driver looked a little harried. The old man hailed him and came down to meet him, and together they unloaded the lumber and sundries onto the grass. The young farmer found himself a little worried at the idea of a man his grandfather's age ferrying all that heavy wood up the path on his own, and he asked the old man who was doing the work for him. Himself and no other, was the answer, but he hoped to get a bit of help with the heavy lifting.
He felt fortunate to have had the farmer's help getting the lumber. There weren't many automobiles left on the roads, other than emergency response vehicles and the bare-bones, infrequent transit coaches. All others needed a government permit for farm use or light industry or delivery of essential equipment. Which was a good thing, overall, of course; but it did mean things needed a deal of planning, especially in the hinterlands. He didn't have much cash; few people did, anymore, since the banks had failed. But the farmer had agreed to fetch and deliver his materials in exchange for two years' grazing rights on Donnall's land. Some might have thought it a steep price for an afternoon's drive, but the old man wanted to see sheep about the place again, and was content.
Bit by bit, he cleared the fallen slates from inside and outside, sorting the good ones for re-use and piling the shattered ones in the yard. He cleaned the interior thoroughly, taking great pleasure in seeing the wood gleaming clean and well oiled and waxed as his grandmother had taught him. He sanded and oiled the sink pump, and made a new cistern for it, cleanly and well-sealed in the traditional way. He mended the floor where it was water damaged, and ended up replacing nearly the whole thing, as he had expected. He had hung waterproof canvas up where the roof had holes, with new tubs beneath just to be on the safe side. He cleared and mended the privy behind the house, intending to see about fitting it with a composting septic system later. He piled stones and slates to mark out the kail-yard again, digging the old stones from the overgrown edges and stacking them tidily to make the beds hold soil properly, and made notes of seeds and plants to fetch in. He staked out and wove a wattle fence around the kail-yard, thinking ahead to the arrival of those sheep. He tended to fallen hinges, creaky windows, and popped nails. He shored up the little cow-shed, and planned for its thatching. Not once in all this time did he sit in the rocking chair to rest. Instead, he brought in a pair of second-hand chairs, got in trade for his tent, and sat at the table. In a trading meet he found and polished up a little side table, a wee thing big enough for a candle and a teacup, no more, which looked much like the one that his grandmother used by her rocking chair years ago. In the long evenings, he sat outside, and spoke to passing bees. Soon, house and yard looked very ship-shape, wanting only a new roof and a good thick coat of plaster over the grey stone walls.
Donnall felt that it was time to get in the extra hands needed to tackle the roofing and the other remaining heavy work. He took the weekly coach from the nearest stop, which was a long walk from the croft. It made him ponder building a small stable and getting a horse, a nice draught cross, who might be ridden to the housing estate nearby and also pull a small wagon or cart. The small stable enlarged mentally to make space for storage of hay and said vehicle and tack. He continued to dream his croft dreams as the coach rattled toward town. Once there, he found the house belonging to his daughter-in-law Ivona and grandson Thomas, and after accepting a much-needed cup of tea, began to tell them his plan.
Since her husband had been killed during the riots back when the stores were mostly empty, when people finally lost hope that the old ways were going to be salvaged, Ivona had kept mostly to herself. She let the spare bedroom in exchange for food and other goods, and schooled her small son on her own. She'd lost all comfort in crowds and market places, and left the house as little as she could. No real schooling standards had been established after the breakdown of the old system, so she could let him sing rhymes and read fairy tales along with her and make moss gardens by the brick wall, and leave the arithmetic for later. Her eyes had a light in them not seen for several years when Donnall finished explaining that he wanted to make the croft a proper home for them, for the three of them, away from town's bad memories and with good soil and sun to grow food.
He asked her to name any young folk she knew of who were strong for working and good-hearted, willing to learn what he could teach of the older ways. His childhood, living with his grandmother who'd never made peace with a modern world, in the "unimproved" croft house she clung to despite social workers and government schemes, had given him a grounding in an ancient style of life that very few had in his generation. Now he wanted to share the knowledge with young people, reclaiming a decent life out of the wreckage of modernity. He had been told that the housing estate between the town and the croft had been refashioning itself into something betwixt the old and the new, creating a sort of community to replace the failed services and aiming for self-sustainability with communal gardens, pastures, and fields; even recruiting their best home-brewer to run a sort of pub out of one of the unoccupied homes, and working together on a curriculum and schoolrooms for the children in another. He'd gone to visit the place, and found it hopeful. But they needed help, skilled help, in learning to build and repair structures, in planning their plantings, with a thousand other things: fencing, hedging, preserving food, dairying, foraging, tending orchards, beekeeping, making and using herbal remedies, first aid, midwifery, metal-working, potting, septic systems work, water purification, fibre-crafts and textiles...
It had come to him that his childhood had given him some of the skills they needed, and he felt sure that there must be others his age, and perhaps a few younger too, who could fill in the gaps. He could teach them much on the croft, as they set right the roof under his direction, and built the farm buildings he needed alongside him. He'd put them in touch with the farmer, too, that they might learn husbandry and grain farming and hay-making in the old ways, without much machinery. Rumour was that one day, the interweb would return, once sustainability issues were worked out and technical aspects utterly reconfigured, but no one seemed to know if that would happen within the remainder of his lifetime. In its absence, he and other oldsters and any skilled folk---the original web of knowledge---would have to take its place.
The day that the roof was fully and finely repaired on the old house, extending smoothly over it and the addition on the back that nearly doubled its size, he felt a stone roll off his heart. And the day that the plastering of it was finished, and the house stood white as a winter moon, white as new milk, shining against the grass, another weight slipped from his chest. Leading his daughter-in-law and grandson into the house, he watched them closely; seeing the boy's eyes looking this way and that and finding no fault with anything he saw, and seeing the peace in the mother's eyes as she saw the new bedroom and bath in the addition, he knew that he had done right.
Donnall felt a great contentment, unknown for some years. He felt his grief for his wife and son lying quieter, as though he'd discharged some final duty to his family, although in which direction he could not say; he felt both ancestors and descendants were placated, drawn closer, linked through him and given a new beginning. He rocked gently in the old chair, soothed by the remembered soft creaking of the rockers against wood floor and hearthstone. He thought to himself, we had a hand in breaking the world, my generation; we didn't know, couldn't see, didn't listen. And so it's right that we have a hand in mending it, those of us who can look far enough back into the past to see the future. When Ivona set young Thomas in his grandfather's lap, he felt the child's heart beat under his encircling arm. There seemed almost a word spoken in its rhythm, much like the sound of their gentle rocking. It was a familiar, comforting sound, and he would carry it into his dreams at nights.
After a moment, he sighed and pushed open the door. Inside it was brighter than it should have been, from the light pouring in through the holes in the roof. Only his eyes moved, taking in the empty shelves, the barren hearth, tumbled slates on the floor, a lone flowered teacup by the sink, the rusting pump handle, a tippy stack of old milk pans, dust---so much dust---the empty bedsteads, and oh, his heart---the old rocking chair. Tears brimmed, trembled, and finally spilled down his cheeks. He did not sob aloud, but his chest heaved like the ocean a few times, and he bent forward, resting his arms on his bent knees for a few minutes. Time swam around him. All the years of his boyhood crowded up until he felt nigh smothered by his own lived days, good days though they had been. Slowly he stood up again and moved about the house, tapping timbers with the fire iron, poking at cracked slates, caressing the smooth old table top, and coming to rest on the hard edge of a bed frame. He would not sit in the rocking chair, though it was the only chair left in the house. Not yet. He felt he must earn that, somehow. The house was old, and that rocking chair perhaps two hundred years younger than the house itself; in his own memory it was always his grandmother sitting there, but of course his own mother had nestled him in her arms there for a bit, and the grandmother, and her mother, and so on, in some chair on that hearth, back into the times of vexatious kings.
After his mother had left his father, who turned out to be a shouter and worse, she brought him home to his grandmother's house. There he stayed the day she went back to fetch her things, but she never came back because his father pushed her down the loft stair, and went to prison for it. No one seemed to recall they'd had a toddler, in the turbulence of the times that was just starting, and Donnall's grandmother raised him alone, a law unto herself, and the saving of the quiet child who spoke little but watched everything. The buses still ran regularly then, but mostly they stayed on the croft. He followed his grandmother about from sun-up to sun-down, and only left when she passed away. He was 18 years old, formally unschooled though not unlettered; and he went away to work at the first of many labouring jobs, travelling a bit, and meeting a dark-eyed girl named Mairead who became his wife. They settled in a town nearer to the old coastline, where he did a bit of this and that, bringing up their son, small Donnall. They called him Donnall Beg, and Donall became known as Donnall Mor, to distinguish them. And he grew to a bonny tall lad, settled in his own work, and married a smiling young woman who gave them a grandson within a year. They were happy, and Donnall Mor had no complaints although he had worries, as did all living in the transition times, until the day Mairead fell ill---and shortly after died---of one of the new sicknesses that had been going about the world.
Domnall felt that there was a hole in the world, and it had pulled away his wife. He worried that it would pull too many others along with her. There was truth to that; many died of illness, even illness that in former times was treated easily. Some were pulled away by despair, or by simple hunger, and some by violence or accident, as came to happen to his son. The younger Donnall died senselessly when he was hit by a truck dispersing rioters, though he was not rioting himself, but only queueing to buy food when the rioters rushed past in the narrow street. Ever since his son's death, so soon after his wife's, Donnall had lost the sense of comfort and surety that he had always carried with him. Now, seeing his grandmother's rocking chair, something long asleep curled and stretched within him. It was like a talisman--lost, forgotten, then found unhoped for and unsought in a corner, as powerful as the day it was made. The old chair, dusty as it was, seemed still full of her spirit and love. Although he had no certainty when he came, now he was filled with purpose.
And he would earn that chair, he would. He came back with a tent, and a toolbox, and a few days later a well-used farm lorry loaded with lumber chugged its way to where the old road ended and the path to the croft began. The road had been made long ago for horses and wagons, and never really paved or widened for cars, and the driver looked a little harried. The old man hailed him and came down to meet him, and together they unloaded the lumber and sundries onto the grass. The young farmer found himself a little worried at the idea of a man his grandfather's age ferrying all that heavy wood up the path on his own, and he asked the old man who was doing the work for him. Himself and no other, was the answer, but he hoped to get a bit of help with the heavy lifting.
He felt fortunate to have had the farmer's help getting the lumber. There weren't many automobiles left on the roads, other than emergency response vehicles and the bare-bones, infrequent transit coaches. All others needed a government permit for farm use or light industry or delivery of essential equipment. Which was a good thing, overall, of course; but it did mean things needed a deal of planning, especially in the hinterlands. He didn't have much cash; few people did, anymore, since the banks had failed. But the farmer had agreed to fetch and deliver his materials in exchange for two years' grazing rights on Donnall's land. Some might have thought it a steep price for an afternoon's drive, but the old man wanted to see sheep about the place again, and was content.
Bit by bit, he cleared the fallen slates from inside and outside, sorting the good ones for re-use and piling the shattered ones in the yard. He cleaned the interior thoroughly, taking great pleasure in seeing the wood gleaming clean and well oiled and waxed as his grandmother had taught him. He sanded and oiled the sink pump, and made a new cistern for it, cleanly and well-sealed in the traditional way. He mended the floor where it was water damaged, and ended up replacing nearly the whole thing, as he had expected. He had hung waterproof canvas up where the roof had holes, with new tubs beneath just to be on the safe side. He cleared and mended the privy behind the house, intending to see about fitting it with a composting septic system later. He piled stones and slates to mark out the kail-yard again, digging the old stones from the overgrown edges and stacking them tidily to make the beds hold soil properly, and made notes of seeds and plants to fetch in. He staked out and wove a wattle fence around the kail-yard, thinking ahead to the arrival of those sheep. He tended to fallen hinges, creaky windows, and popped nails. He shored up the little cow-shed, and planned for its thatching. Not once in all this time did he sit in the rocking chair to rest. Instead, he brought in a pair of second-hand chairs, got in trade for his tent, and sat at the table. In a trading meet he found and polished up a little side table, a wee thing big enough for a candle and a teacup, no more, which looked much like the one that his grandmother used by her rocking chair years ago. In the long evenings, he sat outside, and spoke to passing bees. Soon, house and yard looked very ship-shape, wanting only a new roof and a good thick coat of plaster over the grey stone walls.
Donnall felt that it was time to get in the extra hands needed to tackle the roofing and the other remaining heavy work. He took the weekly coach from the nearest stop, which was a long walk from the croft. It made him ponder building a small stable and getting a horse, a nice draught cross, who might be ridden to the housing estate nearby and also pull a small wagon or cart. The small stable enlarged mentally to make space for storage of hay and said vehicle and tack. He continued to dream his croft dreams as the coach rattled toward town. Once there, he found the house belonging to his daughter-in-law Ivona and grandson Thomas, and after accepting a much-needed cup of tea, began to tell them his plan.
Since her husband had been killed during the riots back when the stores were mostly empty, when people finally lost hope that the old ways were going to be salvaged, Ivona had kept mostly to herself. She let the spare bedroom in exchange for food and other goods, and schooled her small son on her own. She'd lost all comfort in crowds and market places, and left the house as little as she could. No real schooling standards had been established after the breakdown of the old system, so she could let him sing rhymes and read fairy tales along with her and make moss gardens by the brick wall, and leave the arithmetic for later. Her eyes had a light in them not seen for several years when Donnall finished explaining that he wanted to make the croft a proper home for them, for the three of them, away from town's bad memories and with good soil and sun to grow food.
He asked her to name any young folk she knew of who were strong for working and good-hearted, willing to learn what he could teach of the older ways. His childhood, living with his grandmother who'd never made peace with a modern world, in the "unimproved" croft house she clung to despite social workers and government schemes, had given him a grounding in an ancient style of life that very few had in his generation. Now he wanted to share the knowledge with young people, reclaiming a decent life out of the wreckage of modernity. He had been told that the housing estate between the town and the croft had been refashioning itself into something betwixt the old and the new, creating a sort of community to replace the failed services and aiming for self-sustainability with communal gardens, pastures, and fields; even recruiting their best home-brewer to run a sort of pub out of one of the unoccupied homes, and working together on a curriculum and schoolrooms for the children in another. He'd gone to visit the place, and found it hopeful. But they needed help, skilled help, in learning to build and repair structures, in planning their plantings, with a thousand other things: fencing, hedging, preserving food, dairying, foraging, tending orchards, beekeeping, making and using herbal remedies, first aid, midwifery, metal-working, potting, septic systems work, water purification, fibre-crafts and textiles...
It had come to him that his childhood had given him some of the skills they needed, and he felt sure that there must be others his age, and perhaps a few younger too, who could fill in the gaps. He could teach them much on the croft, as they set right the roof under his direction, and built the farm buildings he needed alongside him. He'd put them in touch with the farmer, too, that they might learn husbandry and grain farming and hay-making in the old ways, without much machinery. Rumour was that one day, the interweb would return, once sustainability issues were worked out and technical aspects utterly reconfigured, but no one seemed to know if that would happen within the remainder of his lifetime. In its absence, he and other oldsters and any skilled folk---the original web of knowledge---would have to take its place.
The day that the roof was fully and finely repaired on the old house, extending smoothly over it and the addition on the back that nearly doubled its size, he felt a stone roll off his heart. And the day that the plastering of it was finished, and the house stood white as a winter moon, white as new milk, shining against the grass, another weight slipped from his chest. Leading his daughter-in-law and grandson into the house, he watched them closely; seeing the boy's eyes looking this way and that and finding no fault with anything he saw, and seeing the peace in the mother's eyes as she saw the new bedroom and bath in the addition, he knew that he had done right.
Donnall felt a great contentment, unknown for some years. He felt his grief for his wife and son lying quieter, as though he'd discharged some final duty to his family, although in which direction he could not say; he felt both ancestors and descendants were placated, drawn closer, linked through him and given a new beginning. He rocked gently in the old chair, soothed by the remembered soft creaking of the rockers against wood floor and hearthstone. He thought to himself, we had a hand in breaking the world, my generation; we didn't know, couldn't see, didn't listen. And so it's right that we have a hand in mending it, those of us who can look far enough back into the past to see the future. When Ivona set young Thomas in his grandfather's lap, he felt the child's heart beat under his encircling arm. There seemed almost a word spoken in its rhythm, much like the sound of their gentle rocking. It was a familiar, comforting sound, and he would carry it into his dreams at nights.
This is beautiful. A gift. I have a lump in my throat reading it - for many reasons - possibly all of which you can imagine. Thankyou. xx
ReplyDeletethank you for reading, and for your kind comments. this old gentleman just popped into my head a few days ago, and wouldn't let me concentrate on anything else until he told his little tale. funny how that happens, sometimes.
ReplyDeleteSo beautiful. Donnall is just the kind of elder we need to teach us how to mend the world and each other. Thank you.
ReplyDeletethank you for reading! :)
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