by James W. Morris
One would have to be possessed of a generous disposition indeed to describe the aimless muddy track that wound its way through Hooley’s property as a road. There was nary a carriage nor horseman ever to be spied on it. But why should here be? The pathway led exactly nowhere, except to the dismal scruffy end of the shadowed forest that rimmed our mountain. And old Hooley, being of a stroppy solitary nature, was unlikely to be inviting folks over to visit. Only when needs must.
And not to pile on the poor fella, but you couldn’t call his modest holding a proper farm, neither. All he had were two fields either side of the track. On one side was the shambly little hutch he slept in and the oblong vegetable patch that kept him alive; on the other, too rocky to grow much of anything, he kept a penned-up corner, which he rented to real farmers who needed to separate out one of their animals from its herdmates for some reason or other. In this way, Hooley made a penny or two.
All this blather is by way of explaining why we were all so surprised when little Rhys, the sweep, came in to the Nook (where we bent our elbows) to say he’d spied a labourer toiling away like mad on Hooley’s place. We couldn’t see how the skint old man could afford to hire any help. Was it a long-lost relative who’d finally deigned to show his face, perhaps? Some poor Hooley previously unknown?
Rhys filled his tankard, drank it straight down with nary an intake of breath, then wiped his mouth on a well-collied sleeve. ‘Furthermore,’ he said, ‘this fella’s the biggest fella I think I’ve ever laid eyes on. He must be twenty stone. And not an inch short of eight-foot tall.’
* * *
I’ll interrupt Rhys here just to explain: generations ago, our now mostly-forgotten island was considered a sort of crossroads, not itself a destination by any means, but a quiescent out-of-the-way spot where those set on conducting international commerce put their feet up between more profitable ports of call. In this manner, over the span of a couple of centuries we accrued quite a collection of woebegone leftover citizens from all over the world—to the point that the original culture of the island, whatever it had been, was smothered by an influx of disenfranchised ne’er-do-wells, remittance men, didicoys, and suchlike jabbering away in a dizzying variety of tongues. Eventually, a bastardized pseudo-British English seems to have been rather unenthusiastically settled upon as the default lingua franca.
Rhys and I were the only regular imbibers of our little group in the Nook claiming direct ancestry from English speaking countries—Wales for him and England and Scotland for me—not that either of us had ever been within miles of those lands. But that was why I thought the non-Brits amongst us might not have twigged what Rhys meant when he claimed the fella was ‘twenty stone.’
* * *
‘You mean this fella you spied on Hooley’s patch weighs two hundred and eighty pounds?’ I asked.
‘Every ounce of it,’ he said.
‘And he was eight feet in height?’ I rolled my eyes for the benefit of others.
‘Every inch,’ Rhys said, though by the throwaway manner in which he said it, I cognized he was rapidly losing confidence in his judgement.
Those of us already in the Nook (there were six at this time) found Rhys’s assertions amusing in the extreme, of course. There was a fair bit of story-telling that went on in our little drinking club, some of it nearly as farfetched as the fabulations dispensed regularly in chapel on Sundays. But Rhys was not one to match up with the tellers of tales, really. One of nature’s naively credulous listeners, you might say. When someone told a whopper and he was guffawing with the rest of us, you could tell half the time he didn’t know what the joke was. Kuan claimed the peculiarities of Rhys’s mind were the direct result of a swift kick in the loaf by a horse, but I always just said, ‘He’s Welsh. Leave him be.’
* * *
Despite our affection for him, we had to call out Rhys on his obvious exaggerations, and the only way to do that was for the pack of us to travel to Hooley’s place and appraise the mysterious stranger for ourselves. We decided to venture out immediately, since evening was soon to settle in, and darkness comes over quick to islands. It was the sort of pointless expedition that only men well in their cups would undertake, I suppose, but soon enough we were milling about in the lane in front of the Nook having a disordered chin-wag about the best way to proceed.
Hooley’s holding was a fair way past the edge of our little village, and without a wagon to carry us, we’d have been reliant on shanks’ mare. I didn’t think many of the fellas were up to it, tell the truth—they too crapulent to manage more than a couple paces in a straight line. (There were no motorcars on the island then; frankly, I doubted there ever would be. The noble horse replaced by some noisome banging contraption? I thought that most unlikely.)
Well, we received an unexampled boon then—our transportation problem was precipitously solved when an empty hay wain made as if to pass us by on the cobbles. In a moment, we had all clambered rather inelegantly aboard the back of it and directed the surprised driver where we wanted to go. He huffishly declined our importuning guidance at first, but cheered up a bit when a few coins were pressed in his hand.
* * *
When exactly the singing began I couldn’t say, but it seemed that a mob of paralytic gits rollicking about atop an empty hay wain on a mission to have a butchers at the reported physical attributes of a mysterious farm labourer could think of little else to do en route but burst into song as a way of commemorating the occasion. (I did not participate—as the eldest and generally soberest of our group, I felt a certain dignified detachment was ofttimes required.)
The crooners started with ‘Greensleeves,’ I think, then bleated out a misremembered verse which only roughly approximated the usual lyrics and melody of ‘The Cuckoo’s Nest.’ Immediately afterwards, Kuan performed an unrequested solo, standing unsteadily and producing a thin, sing-songy tune in his native language that sounded to me like a lullaby, but might—for all I knew—have been a plaintive paean to the minor god of foot hygiene. Then the whole lot of them joined together once more to warble out a particularly filthy version of ‘The Brisk Young Widow,’ their nasal inharmonious voices jostled into a whooping tremolo every few moments by ruts in the road.
* * *
The driver halted his puffing team at the boundary of Hooley’s property; he refused to venture down the muddy track itself for fear he’d be unable to turn around and get himself home again. We were well behaved, however, and gave him nary a lick of trouble for his unwillingness to proceed—instead, we cheerfully clambered off (well, Kuan toppled off) the wagon, and then waved the wain driver a hearty, laughful goodbye. He did not venture a look back.
We tip-toed along the track, which featured a nimiety of wide mud puddles of unknown depth. And then—yes! A way ahead on our left we soon spied a man—a sincerely large man—striding about on Hooley’s property. (We had always referred to poor old Hooley’s holding as consisting of two fields in toto—the ‘rocky field’ and the ‘even rockier field.’ The large man bestrode the rockier field.)
Now, here I’m going give my mate Rhys a pass. Sure, the stride-about man was not actually eight feet tall, but I gauged him to be well over six and perhaps approaching seven feet in length, which would indeed make him a virtual giant to diminutive island folk such as us. And what a colossus he must have seemed to the poor minikin Rhys, who only reached five feet in height when wearing his thickest boots.
Even from a way off you could tell the newcomer—dressed in a simple handmade tunic—was an altogether puissant sort of fella, as broad-shouldered and brawny as any I’d ever encountered. His hair and beard were dusky copper tangles that had likely never seen a brush, and the taut features of his face were reminiscent of a clenched fist. But his eyes were what really startled, so light were they in colour. Milky and pale, they seemed from distance where we stood to be free of irises.
When he paused in what he was doing to face the pack of us approaching him, something in his manner made us drop our salutatory smiles and freeze in place. Sobered us right up, it might be said. The massive fella showed no worry at being the gape-seed, but did give out the briefest of nods, not in greeting, I imagined, but as a sort of acknowledgement to himself that some men were coming his way. Men to be deemed harmless.
As a rule, island folk are friendly to incomers—even an ugly new face can be a pleasing respite from the everyday over-met ones—but the stride-about man put us all off no end. We could think of nothing to say to him and stood there stupidly silent.
After a moment, he turned away as if we weren’t present and approached a large rock jutting from the soil. Grasping the massive dull-white stone firmly on either side, he bent his back and then stood immediately upright, plucking the boulder with seeming ease from the ground. Then he hoisted the dense item onto a shoulder and marched off to the edge of the field, where he dumped it atop a pile of numerous others.
Watching this, the imbibers were mute awhile. Then, finally, someone behind me—I think it was Ricardas—broke the silence.
‘Jesus Christ,’ he said.
* * *
Next day, plopped down in my favourite porch chair, cuppa by my side, perusing the local morning rag, I decided I felt quite alright, with nary a headache or other consequence of the previous evening’s tipple. I doubted my fellow imbibers felt as well, however, since they had the burden of rising early and having to go off to face the demands of their various occupations. But I was a man in every sense unoccupied, having inherited a tidy bit of money from my late wife—not enough to remake me as an upper-cruster, mind you, but sufficient to allow me the freedom to faff about most days, pursuing any indulgent whim prompted by my zetetic nature. It was in order to appease the nosy aspect of my character that I decided to pay old Hooley—whom I’d known all my life—a visit.
I kept no horse, having so little usual business that would take me outside the immediate environs of the village. I might have hired one, of course, but decided it would do me no harm to venture out to call upon poor old Hooley on foot. On the way, I made a stop at the local purveyors and purchased a pound of tea.
It was a fine, cool, calm-sea sort of day, a truly rare occurrence in these parts. The amble to Hooley’s place was therefore more enjoyable and required less time than I feared it might; it’s consoling to know how much more energetic a man in late middle-age can be without a gallon of ale sloshing about in his belly. When I reached the property, I spied the stone lifter in much the same place I’d seen him toiling the evening before. He was casually toting a rock that would require anyone else wishing the moving of it to employ four men and a mule. I had an impulse to wave a greeting to him but immediately thought better of the idea and held my hand. Instead I passed through a narrow treeline and headed direct to Hooley’s hovel the other side of the track. There behind a hedge I found poor old Hooley sitting outside, as usual—the hovel itself was not a place in which a man could dawdle, being so mightily cramped for space.
‘So, it’s you,’ he said, by way of greeting, glancing up from a tool he was attempting to mend. His beard had new speck of white in it since we’d last spoke.
‘Sorry it took me so long,’ I said. ‘Here’s the pound of tea I owe you.’ I proffered it.
Now, we both knew I didn’t owe him anything. But we also both knew that old Hooley, skint as he may have been, was not one to be seen taking charity. So—somehow, over the years, without speaking directly of the matter, we’d devised between us a fictional narrative in which I was constantly repaying him for goods I’d borrowed.
‘About time,’ he said, fairly snatching the fragrant sack from my hand.
I perched on a nearby upturned keg, careful not to impale myself on a jutting nail, and we dallied in silence awhile. Hooley, a man of a determinately eremitic nature, was not in the running for being crowned the world’s leading conversationalist.
‘So,’ I said at last. “You’ve got yourself some help clearing that field.’
‘Seems so.’
‘Where’d he come from?’
‘Mountain folk, I trow.’
This assertion truly surprised me. ‘Mountain folk? What can you mean? No one lives on our mountain.’
‘I thought not,’ Hooley said. He expectorated on the ground. ‘Though as a lad I was told that deep in the caves there were a clan of giants, who came out from time to time to look things over. It was a warning, to keep us kids in line, like.’
I frowned; I’d never heard such a tale, and my clan had been on the island near every bit as long as Hooley’s. To be fair, though, we weren’t subject to very much country gossip or lore—my lot were a race of merchants who’d dwelt exclusively in town.
‘What’s his name?’ I asked.
‘Won’t say. When I first spied the beast, I went over and marched right up to him—though he’s a massive fella—and told him he was trespassing on my land. I said I knew it needed clearing of stones, but I couldn’t pay him, nor shelter him, nor feed him. He looked right through me with nary a word and set back to work.’
* * *
The next day was Sunday, and I spied a couple of my fellow Nooksters ambling past my porch on the way home from chapel. (I don’t attend myself.) When I caught them up, and relayed Hooley’s opinion that the stone-lifter was a member of a race of giants that supposedly abided deep in mountain caves, they were less captivated by the anecdote than I’d hoped—the state of stone-cold sobriety in a listener has a way of taking the wind out of a storyteller’s sails. Eventually, my mates returned to their original topic, which was about an upcoming Aunt Sally tournament set to take place in the narrow yard behind the Nook. I gave up the conversation and half-slunk home.
Well, there’s a reason they call it idle curiosity—the compulsive scratching of curious itches can be the bailiwick only of idle men such as myself. Those other fellas needed to pay out attention to such things as wives, children, earning a crust. I rubbed along in life mostly unburdened—a retired fella with a long-dead spouse, and no issue. So, I thought—with an empty day stretching out afore me—why not wander up around old Hooley’s place again, see what the gigantic stone-lifter was doing on this new morning?
(I referred to Hooley as old, though he was probably only about four or five years my senior. Still, he’d always seemed a sombrely elder soul to me, even when we raced about the hills and alleyways of our village together as part of a pack of young tearaways, scrumping in the nearby orchard, or playing conkers, or collecting the stony black shards that tumbled from the ends of wagons that moved through town carrying loads of sea coal. Hooley in my mind was one of those serious types of fellas who’d emerged ancient from the womb.)
As I approached Hooley’s place, I realized there was a modest untended corner of it—a weedy copse well-populated with bent volunteer trees, and even a pleasantly tilted rock on which to perch—that was an ideal spot from which to study the movements of the stone-lifter whilst remaining unobserved. And I did so, marvelling once again at his strength and sedulousness as he extracted stone after stone from the earth and carried it over to the pile. After some time, however—an hour or so—I began to feel a kind of shameful resentment against him, and grew vicariously weary. I rose to go, thinking I’d seen enough—the stone-lifter’s insufferable industriousness had cultivated in me a mighty yen to head home, light my pipe, gulp down a large refreshing whisky, and put my feet up. But here I stopped. At the distant end of the muddy track, from the sad patch of woods at the bottom of the mountain, there emerged three other fellas, each of them a match in size for the first stone-lifter.
The trio of hulking newcomers—dressed alike, and all sharing the original’s light eyes and russet beard—surrounded the first fella. If words were exchanged, I couldn’t tell it, but by the manner in which they embraced and clapped him on the back it seemed he was being congratulated on a job well done. After a few moments, all four proceeded over to ponder the impressive pile of stones he’d amassed, and soon enough they were assorting them by size and shape.
That’s when the idea struck me. The stone-lifters were not clearing Hooley’s field as an unrequested beneficent favour—they were planning to use the stones they’d gathered there to build something.
* * *
I squandered the next two days scrutinizing the quartet of stone-lifters from my new perch. First, they laid out the widest flat stones into a rough rectangle—perhaps twice the size of a grave—and then began adding row after row of the odder shaped stones atop it. Somehow, they wedged them all together—with no tools or mortar—and the structure, whatever it was, took on a tight, well-aligned contour as it rose in height. They seemed to work in a calm contented silence; I witnessed no communication beyond meaningful glances.
The third day was chill and wet, and I decided to stay home with my pipe and whisky. Much as I might desire it, however, I was unable to turn my mind to any subject more intriguing than the actions of the stone-lifters. What was it they were fashioning at the edge of Hooley’s property? It appeared insufficient in size to want to be a worshipping-place or storage hut or suchlike. Anyway, it lacked a hollow interior—the object was being built as a solid stone structure. And I had to wonder—did old Hooley know about the project, accord to them his permission? If not, would he dare confront such an intimidating pack of fellas?
The next day was Thursday, and I spent the morning making my way about town, paying whatever I owed—my club dues, my tally at the grocers, etc. I also drew out sufficient funds to settle upon Mrs. Roka, my housekeeper, her monthly wage.
By the time I returned to my little house, I was feeling enough fatigue to ponder giving a miss to the notion of travelling out Hooley’s way again, but in the end my curiosity simply would not allow me to remain home.
* * *
Twilight had begun to descend by the time I’d settled myself in my now-familiar watching-place. I was somewhat surprised to note that the stone-lifters had already seemingly completed their construction—it was a rectangular stone contrivance, approximately four feet in height, flat and plumb on all sides except the top, which displayed a wide central groove along its length.
Since no stone-lifters were visibly present, I was tempted to abandon my hidey-hole and advance across the field to get a better view of the mysterious thing, but I was glad that I did not, since the quartet soon came out of the forest, each of them carrying a prodigious armful of dry tinder.
The penny dropped, then. I was unaware of the technical name for it—bier or pyre or catafalque—but it became clear the stone construction was intended for use in the ritual cremation of a body.
* * *
I couldn’t think that the local ordinances administered by our admittedly laissez-faire constabulary allowed the public burning of bodies; I still recalled all the rigmarole and the load of intrusive questions I had to answer at the mortuary in order to have my wife’s body discreetly cremated, a tedious and maudlin process that only served to swell my grief. But who was prepared to inform on these giants to the authorities? Certainly not I.
Some time passed, and as night fell, I could no longer individually recognize the four stone-lifters standing like sentinels at the cremation site—they appeared only as unmoving silhouettes against a wide stelliferous sky.
Eventually, others came—a procession, altogether silent. There were now perhaps as many as fifteen towering silhouettes circling the stone object. I felt a shiver, a vestigial frisson of recognition. This felt like a primordial act I was witnessing, a ritual likely unchanged from the time of man’s beginning.
When the fire began burning, enough light was cast from the initial querling flames that I was able to see that a body—tightly wrapped in a purpure shroud—had been laid upon the complex architecture of wood stacked in the groove.
It was at this crucial moment that I made my mistake—I had become too comfortable in my hidey-hole and unthinkingly struck a lucifer to light my pipe. Somehow—and I’ll never know how—one of the mourners noticed it, and realized an outsider was witness to their private rites. Soon all the silhouettes had turned my way.
The trunk of the tree above me exploded. Instantly, I dropped to the ground in a curl, transported back to my days as a young infantry soldier, when the enemy purposely launched shells high into the overarching silver birch trees that towered above where we’d dug ourselves in, causing a downpour of deadly daggered limbs to cascade upon us. But how—?
A heavy thud sounded beside me, and I flinched again, so much did it resemble the thunder of cannon fire. When I saw a misshapen rock speedily summersaulting along the ground past where I lay, I realized the giants were sending a barrage of left-over stones in my direction. And they were throwing them with deadly strength and precision.
I got to my feet and tore off running into the absolute darkness with my hands over my head against the bombardment, pursued by an oncoming stampede of thumping sounds from cast stones. Inevitably, I stumbled in one of Hooley’s blasted puddles, fell on my face, and came up with a mouthful of mud. As I was righting myself, a heavy stone dropped out of the darkness and struck me directly on the right leg, just below the knee, and I remember having the thought ‘A stone has just shattered my leg’ before passing out with the pain.
* * *
Well, the next few months of my life were lost. I existed, but only in fog; first, there was the tortuous brume of unyielding pain, then the ensuing daze created by the series of morphine tinctures I was administered with the aim of rendering the pain endurable.
I have only latterly been able to reconstruct what likely happened the night I witnessed the cremation. Though I have no memory of doing so, I must have dragged myself from Hooley’s property out onto one of the more-travelled byways in the vicinity. Some person, perhaps a deliveryman, came across me in the dark there, lying half in the mud, and thought me first to be one of the town’s sots, knackered by drink. (I’m speculating—I don’t even know who it was discovered me.) Then, noting the sickeningly misshapen state of my leg, he decided to take pity. He found who I was, pulled me onto his cart, and deposited me at my property, just as my housekeeper, duties done for the day, was exiting the front door. Mrs. Roka, God bless her, immediately switched her duties from those of part-time housekeeper to full-time nurse, a choice for which she has earned my eternal gratitude. (I think she too probably felt pity, knowing I had no one else to care for me.) Doctor Po was called for, and he rushed over and set my dangerously splintered bone, a procedure for which I was quite glad afterwards to have been only semi-conscious. He then immobilised the leg and sentenced me to bed.
Doses of the aforementioned morphine tincture were regularly administered over the succeeding weeks, and what I learned about the drug was that it does not actually erase pain—it simply causes you not give a damn about pain or anything else.
It was actually Mrs. Roka’s ministrations kept me among the living, truth be told, especially her absolute insistence on drowning me in endless lashings of her homemade bone broth; she resolutely stated that both of her late husbands would have survived their fatal illnesses if they’d only had sense enough to consume more of it. Maybe she was right in a way—it was the dread of being daily deluged with the stuff that finally got me to escape the bed and sit up to the dining table, hoping there to meet real food again.
I wanted my regular glass of whisky, but was told I’d be allowed none until I’d been weaned from the morphine. (Together, Mrs. Roka and Doctor Po constituted a formidable battle-line on that front, and I did not have the strength of will to fight them.) So—it ended being a choice between whisky and morphine, and eventually my best old mate whisky won out. Although the practice was allowed, I never did resume the smoking of a pipe, however—each time I struck a lucifer I found myself back in the dark with deadly stones being hurled my way.
* * *
Once my leg was declared mostly healed, Doctor Po’s next prescription for me consisted of a sturdy walking stick and a routine of daily morning ambulations around the village to rebuild atrophied muscle. I was glad of this direction at first, glad to be anywhere out-of-doors, glad to see the elusive sun, glad even to feel cold torrents of rain on my face. After a time, however, I grew weary of the practice, and became increasingly self-conscious about my limp (which would prove permanent). I passed most mornings sitting with a whisky on my porch, watching life go by.
One day, Hooley sauntered down the road, and I believe he would have passed along by my house without tendering a greeting if our eyes had not happened to meet. Then he stopped, obviously feeling obligated to climb the steps to my porch and ask after my health.
‘Alright, then?’ he asked, taking a seat.
‘Middling,’ I said. ‘But you know how it is—chin out.’
We sat together for a while. It struck me then that Hooley was better-dressed and healthier-looking than I’d seen him for years.
‘You look well,’ I said.
He nodded. I waited for him to verbally expand on this reply, but he did not. In the ensuing silence, which was not anything but companionable, I decided Hooley was the right person—the only person—with whom I might broach the subject of the stone-lifters. (It was not a topic I’d felt able to discuss at any length with my fellow Nooksters or Doctor Po or Mrs. Roka.)
‘So—that massive tribe from the mountain came down, used your stones to build a platform, and then conducted a cremation ritual on your property,’ I said.
Hooley shifted in his seat and faced me directly to give a hard appraisal. Then he seemed to reach some conclusion in his thinking and reclined again in a more relaxed manner.
‘They did,’ he said.
‘Why your land? Why that particular spot?’
‘Got the impression it was important to them somehow.’
‘And they never spoke to you for your permission. Or thanked you.’
‘Well, they never spoke to me, no,’ he said, standing.
His mouth had twisted into a little shape that might have been Hooley’s attempt at a smile. ‘Why don’t you stop out my way?’ he added, eyeing my leg. ‘When you’re able?’
* * *
Well, people are incorrigibly themselves.
It took two days of inner turmoil for my innate curiosity to overwhelm the other, more reasonable and conservative (and lazier) aspects of my nature, but yes—I finally decided to hobble out to Hooley’s place to see what his smirk was all about. In the lane approaching, I experienced a wave of anxiety—I was growing near to the place in which my leg was painfully smashed, after all, where I received a disability that would last the rest of my life. I put all those feelings aside, however, when I saw the farm.
In the distance, the stone object, now blackened, still stood. But every other square inch of Hooley’s fields now showed incontestable evidence of expert cultivation. Row after row after row of his land bloomed with an abundance of tall robust shoots, a lushly rampant growth which far surpassed in verdancy that which I’d witnessed on any other farm. I’m no agronomist, but even I recognized a densely abundant crop of leeks, carrots, neeps and tatties, and God knows what else.
I guess I’m fast becoming a silly old sod, because tears sprung to my eyes at this sight—the absolute, joyful, bounteous beauty of it. But I was moved even more so by the astonishing grace inherent in the stone-lifters’ quiet thank you to poor old Hooley.
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