Owen Sheers - Resistance

They listened again to the rhythm of the hammering. It was slight, a small hammer, metal. Not the wooden impact of a stake beetle or the heavy blows of a sledgehammer. On a different day with a wind up or damper air they might not have heard it at all.

“Maybe he heard The Court’s empty. Brought up some board for the windows p’haps. That’s probably it.”

Sarah could tell Maggie wasn’t convinced by her own conclusion.

“Shouldn’t we go and see? It might be Reg or one of the boys, after all.”

Maggie looked down at Sarah. “No,” she said simply. “We’ve got a job to do, bach. It’s already late to be bringing them down. Mary will go have a look, probably. Evans is one of her cousins after all, isn’t he?”

With that Maggie shortened her reins and squeezed the mare on up the slope. Seren had trotted back down to them while they’d been listening to the hammering. Sarah gave her a light stroke, tracing a finger over her head between her ears, then followed on after Maggie up the hill.

“Hold on the tail,” Maggie called over her shoulder as the mare worked the incline. “She won’t kick, long as that dog keeps out the way.”

Maggie and Sarah worked on the uplands all morning. It was slow going. They had over a hundred ewes to bring down off the hill and parts of The Court’s flock had wandered again. Maggie spent the first hour corralling these ewes from the broad expanses that opened out along the knuckles of the Black Hill. Sarah, meanwhile, set to trying to divide the flock with the dogs. Although the two bitches were instinctively aware of what they must do, they soon became confused by her attempts to guide them through the bunching flow of sheep. It was as if those invisible tethers by which Tom usually played them had become slack and unresponsive, incapable of carrying the pulses of communication needed to keep the dogs edging round the flock in the right directions.

Halfway through the day they brought the first batch of ewes back down the hill to Upper Blaen. The day had failed to find its heat and their breath clouded thickly in the glassy air in front of them. Having enclosed the sheep in the lower meadows by the river, Maggie and Sarah made themselves lunch in the farmhouse, warming their hands at the range, the cold ebbing from their fingers in sharp stabs of tingling pain. Again Sarah suggested they go down and look in at The Court and again Maggie was dismissive of the idea. No time. Still half the lambing ewes to bring down at least. And no need. Mary would have been over.

Before they set out up the hill once more, Sarah went upstairs. “Now, don’t you laugh,” she said as Maggie heard her tread coming down the staircase again.

“Good God, girl! What you thinking of?” Maggie said as Sarah entered the kitchen. She was wearing a pair of Tom’s trousers puckered under a thick belt at her waist. One of his corduroy jackets hung loosely from her shoulders, its sleeves rolled thickly at her wrists.

“They still smell of him,” she explained to Maggie, who was staring at her as if she’d come down the stairs naked. “The dogs’ll pick it up, won’t they? It might help.”

“Well, it might,” Maggie said, “but looking like that you’ll frighten the bloody sheep away too!” She hit the table with the flat of her hand and laughed. It was the first time Sarah had seen her smile for weeks.

By the end of the day they’d managed to round up all the lambing ewes and bring them down for flushing in the richer pastures by the river. After the coarse grazing of the hillside two weeks on this richer grass would improve their fertility. More ewes would take, and of those that did, there’d be more twins too. God knows, though, Sarah thought, they had too many to deal with anyway. The splitting of The Court’s flock had given all the farms in the valley more sheep than they could handle. If Tom had been here they’d probably have sold a third of these ewes by now. But he wasn’t and they hadn’t, so for now the farm and the sheep would have to cope as best they could. And so would they.

By the time Maggie left Upper Blaen the sun was firing up the sharp edge of the Hatterall again, setting its steep mottled sides a deep black. Sarah stood in the yard for a moment, watching the first stars appear in the blue black sky above the ridge. Once again she was exhausted, the ache in her womb a nagging reminder of that morning’s disappointment, which she still felt despite her more sensible self telling her she should be relieved. But beneath these surface sensations Sarah was also strangely contented. They had brought the sheep down. Over the afternoon the dogs had begun to listen to her, retuning themselves to her pitch and tone. The sheep had begun to flow. The job was done and the ewes would be ready for tupping. Tom would have been proud of her. Just for a moment all this lent her a sense of tired ease and she relished being alone in the yard, watching the stars dot to life against the sky like the first raindrops against a window at the start of a downpour. But even this ease was short-lived. It scared her. She didn’t want to feel any second of contentment while Tom was away. She was frightened that if she did, one day she’d become too used to this. She needed to miss him at every moment. If she didn’t, then it would already be too late.

She went inside to rekindle the fire in the range and make herself supper. These were often the hardest hours of the day. Preparing for bed alone. Eating alone. She’d begun reading her small selection of books again, finding some company in the familiar stories of Dickens, Hardy, Eliot, and Scott. They were the books of her girlhood, given to her by Mrs. Thomas, an enthusiastic teacher who’d thought she shouldn’t have been leaving school when she did. She hadn’t read them for years, hardly ever since she’d married. But tonight she was too tired even to read. She would eat, write her diary to Tom, clean up the kitchen, and then go to bed, hoping as ever not to dream at all but to fall into a blank sleep instead. A sleep so deep and blind that it would, for a few hours at least, erase the dull ache of the missing body beside her.

Sarah was on her knees sweeping the ash from under the range when she heard footsteps outside followed by a sharp rap on the kitchen door. She looked up, still on her knees, to see it already opening.

“Hello?” she said.

The clear night outside was washed with moonlight. She could make out a figure silhouetted in the door frame. A man’s figure.

“Tom?” she said quietly, leaning forward on the palms of her hands. The figure didn’t move. “Tom?” she said again, louder, her frown unfolding to the tremors of a smile. The figure stepped forward into the kitchen and it was then, by the dim light of a single lantern, that Sarah saw the battered grey green serge of Albrecht’s uniform. She gasped and jumped back onto her heels, sending the rack of iron pokers and tongs beside the fireplace clattering over the flagstones.

“Please,” Albrecht said, slotting his pistol back into its holster and holding out his hand. “Don’t be alarmed, please.”

Sarah tipped herself further away until she felt the iron of the range’s oven, still warm at her back. She held the brush she’d been sweeping with across her chest, its bristles over her heart.

“Please,” Albrecht said again, “I didn’t mean to surprise you.”

Sarah saw movement behind him. A darker shadow shifting in the night. There was someone else there, in the yard. Why were the dogs so quiet? She’d heard them barking but had been too tired to go out and silence them. She’d thought they were just excited from their day’s work out on the hill.

“You are Sarah Lewis?” Albrecht said, looking down at a notepad.

She looked back into the soldier’s face. The candlelight reflected off the lenses of his glasses. Without his eyes she couldn’t read his expression. She nodded, unable to bring enough air into her clenched chest to do anything else.