Her, and What She's Owed

I do not remember crossing the field. I remember kneeling over the open eyes and the soundless mouth shaping my name, and then I remember the gate latch cold and wet under my hand and the willows going past me upside down in the ditch, which means I must have got up and run after all, the thing I had been so proud of not doing, and I do not remember a step of it. There is a gap where the running should be, and I have tried to put it back and there is nothing there, only the latch, and that frightens me now more than the running would, that the field took the memory the way it took everything, and kept it down where I could not reach it.

I went to the Drowned Lamb because it had lights on and people in it, and because Sefton had looked at the field on the first day the way I now understood it deserved to be looked at, and I needed to be in a room with a man who knew.

It was past opening but barely, the bar empty except for two old men by the fire who looked up and then looked deliberately back at their dominoes, and Sefton behind the pumps in his apron. He took one look at my face and did not ask me what I wanted. He poured a large measure of something amber, set it in front of the stool nearest him, and put his big ruined hand flat on the bar beside it, not touching me, just there, the way you put a hand near a spooked animal so it knows where you are.

"Sit down before you fall down," he said.

I sat. The whisky was in my hand and then it was gone and the heat of it went down into the cold place and did not warm it. He poured another without being asked and one for himself, which I would learn was not his habit before noon, and he drank it off the way a man drinks who has decided something, and his eyes were wet before the drink could account for it.

"You went back out," he said. "On your own. After the hand."

I had not told him about the hand. I had not told anyone but Yusuf and the county voicemail. I set the glass down very carefully so it would not show how my hand was going.

"There are faces under the turf," I said. The flat voice. The report voice, holding. "Right under it. Eyes open. I logged a hand yesterday at the ditch. The fingers closed. Today there's a face in the middle of the field and the eyes followed me and the mouth said my name." I heard myself say it and I waited for the room to laugh, for one of the old men to scoff into his beer, for Sefton to tell me I was overtired and the fen plays tricks on the eyes in flat light. I wanted that more than I had wanted almost anything. I wanted to be a tired woman who had seen shapes in grass.

Sefton did not laugh. Sefton put both hands over his face for a moment, his shoulders going, and when he took them away he was crying, openly, sixty years old behind his own bar, the tears running down into the grey stubble, and he said, very quietly, so the men by the fire would not hear, "I told you not to go out on her. I told you the first day. I told you don't take the wet out of her."

The cold came up the backs of my arms before I had the word. Then I had the word and the word was wrong.

"It," I said. "Don't take the wet out of it."

"Aye," he said, and did not correct himself, and looked at the bar. "It."

But he had said her. He had said her the way you say a name, without thinking, the way you say a name you have said in the dark a thousand times, and I sat with that the way I sit with a reading that cannot be true, and I did not let it go.

"Sefton." I kept my voice level. You keep your voice level when you want a frightened man to keep talking, the same way you keep a gauge steady so the needle will settle and show you the truth. "Who is she."

He poured again. His hand shook on the bottle and the neck of it chattered against the rim of the glass, a small bright sound in the quiet, and he got it down without looking at me and drank, and the drink loosened the thing he had been holding shut for eleven years, I would understand that later, that I had walked in on a wound that had been waiting that long for an outsider stupid enough to drain the field and brave enough or broken enough to ask.

"She's owed," he said.

The fire shifted. One of the old men set a domino down with a click and neither of them spoke. Sefton was looking at the row of bottles behind me, at nothing, at eleven years ago.

"That's all it is, in the end. The old ones make it bigger, with their not-walking-on-her and their keeping-her-wet, but it's the simplest thing in the world, lass, it's a debt. You keep her wet, she sleeps, she's full, she lies quiet under what she's got. You take the wet away." His voice cracked and he steadied it with another mouthful. "You take the wet away and she wakes up hungry and remembers she's owed, and she starts to pull, and once she's pulling she does not stop till she's paid. There's no calling it off. There's no draining round it. I have watched men try. You stop draining, you put every drop back, you flood her to the willows, and once she's woke it's too late, the wet doesn't put her back under, it just makes her comfortable while she takes the one she's reaching for." He turned and looked at me then, full on, the ruined kind eyes streaming, and what was in them was not madness, I have seen madness, it was the opposite, it was a man being entirely and terribly sane in front of a thing the sane world has no shelf for. "She's reaching for somebody right now, water lady. You started her two days ago with that little pump and she has woke up and she is reaching, and I am begging you. Put your tools in your van. Sign whatever you have to sign. Tell the authority the ground won't take it, tell them anything, and you drive out of this hollow tonight and you keep the wet in her and you never come back. Please."

I should have asked him the one question. I knew even then there was a question under all of it, who, who is she reaching for, and I did not ask it because some part of me already knew, the part that had run across the field without my permission, the part the face had said the name to, and I could not make my mouth form a question whose answer I was already carrying like a stone.

"Sefton," I started, and got no further.

"Mr Crewe is unwell," said a dry voice from the doorway. "He has been since this morning. I should not let him serve."

Edda Lound stood just inside the door in her spotless coat, small and upright as a yard rule, and I had not heard her come in, on a floor that creaks under everyone, and neither, by his face, had Sefton. The change in him was immediate and total. He straightened, wiped his face on his apron in a quick ashamed swipe, picked up a cloth and began to wipe a glass that was already dry, and he did not look at me again. Eleven years of warden's duty came down over him like a sluice gate dropping, and the man who had been begging me was gone, and a publican stood in his place polishing glass.

"Mrs Lound," he said.

"You'll want your tea, Sefton. Go and have it." It was not a suggestion. He went, through the door at the back, heavy and stooped, an old man dismissed, and Edda watched him go and then turned the full weight of her courtesy on me, and I understood that I was now being managed, that whatever Sefton had let slip was being weighed and contained in real time behind those dry old eyes.

"He grieves," she said. "His wife. It comes on him with the drink, and he says things, and people who do not know him take them to heart. You must not." She came to the bar but did not sit. She folded her gloved hands on the wood. "Annie walked into the fen. Eleven years gone. Some people, when they cannot bear the flat of this country, they walk out into the wet at night, and the wet does not give them back, because the wet does not give anything back, you of all people know that, you who study it. There is no mystery in it. There is only a sad old man and a low country and water that always wants to go down. He frightens visitors with it. I am sorry he frightened you."

It was perfect. Kind and reasonable, and it covered everything, the her and the owed and the begging, folded into grief and bad water, and a week ago I would have taken it gratefully and gone to my bed. I looked at her small certain face and thought about the peg handed back clean and warm, and the boot, and the rot that would not come, and the eyes that had turned to find me, and I risked more in front of Edda Lound than I ever had, though I did not know yet how dangerous. I let my own face go flat and pleasant and lied to her as well as she was lying to me.

"Of course," I said. "It's a terrible thing. I'll not pay it any mind." And then, because the engineer in me does not leave a variable un-chased even when the rest of me is screaming to run, "I'll be staying on a day or two yet. There's a question over the old parish drain, whether the order even applies to it, the dates don't line up. I'll want to see the records. You keep them, I'm told."

Something moved behind her eyes, quick, the same weighing I had felt at the gate on the first day. "I keep them," she said. "Two hundred years of them. Whatever you need, dear." She smiled, and the smile did not get within a mile of her eyes, and she said, "Water always goes down. You'll find the records say the same as the water. We have always known what this ground is." And she inclined her head and went, upright, unhurried, the floor not creaking once under her, and left me alone in the bar with the two silent old men and the fire and the smell of woodsmoke and the field out there in the early dark, reaching.

I did not finish the drink. I went out into the dusk to walk back to the cottage, ninety-one steps I never took, because the lane to the cottage runs along the churchyard wall, and the church clock struck the half above me, one stroke, and I looked over the low wall at the graves the way you look at anything when your mind is too full to choose where the eyes go.

There was just enough light. The churchyard sloped, the way they all do here, toward the low ground, toward the field, and the stones leaned, and I had thought nothing of the leaning until tonight, frost-heave, I had said, in the cottage, the night the peg came up, it pushes gravestones up which is why they lean. But it was not the leaning that stopped me at the wall. It was the slabs. Every grave, every single one in that whole sloping yard, had a flat stone laid over the length of it, a great slab of field stone the size of a door, weathered and lichened and old, lying on the turf above where the coffin would be, and on the older graves more than one, two and three great stones piled and weighted, holding the ground shut. Sefton's voice came back to me across two nights and a glass of warm beer. We bury shallow and we weight them. Slab on the lid. Hold them down. You learn to keep things down, out here. A whole churchyard built on the one principle, the same as the field, the same as the whole black country, the ground that gives things back and the people who spend their lives weighting them shut.

And on the slope, near the wall, near me, was a small stone, child-sized, with a smaller slab laid over its short grave, and the light was nearly gone but the name was cut deep and I could read it, I could read it as I read the word off the lips in the grass, clean and certain and impossible. HOLLIS. And under it the dates, the two dates I have carried since I was eight, the year he was born and the year the grain took him, six years apart, my brother's dates, on a weighted grave in a village we left when I was nine, a grave I had never seen, that no one in my family had ever once mentioned existed, with a great stone laid over it to hold down whatever was, or was not, inside.