Devil's Day by Andrew Michael Hurley

Author:Andrew Michael Hurley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

A rabbit lifted its head out of the grass and after a moment of indecision it scuttled away, bursting a pair of red grouse from their hiding place in the heather. They went off low across the moor, rattling out their warning—goback goback goback—and as the silence resettled nothing else moved, only scraps of morning daylight raking over the brown horizon miles away.

Look at a map and it’s easy to see how far folk have ventured on to the moors. Farming hamlets like the Endlands are scattered all around the edges, but take your finger a little further and it seems that whatever has been named has been named from a distance: White Heath, Greystone Ridge, Blackmire Edge. And there are pools and bogs and hillocks out in the heart of all the nothingness that have no names at all. The farmers had never gone much further than the edge of the sheep pastures, which stretched almost a mile from where we stood at the top of the valley path to the Wall.

Whoever had lugged the rock up Fiendsdale Clough to build it had been long forgotten, but there’d been a boundary line on the moors of some kind or another for centuries to separate the ewes and the game, the commoners and the rich, tenants and masters, and maybe, at one time, the shepherds and the Devil.

Much of it now was just grassed-over rubble, apart from the small section at the foot of Poacher’s Seat that Jim had rebuilt before he’d died. He’d made a proper job of it, as I remember, taking his time to strip everything back to the foundations with his mattock and crowbar, and lay out the copings, face-stones, fillings, through-stones and footings in neat rows so that reassembly would require a minimum amount of confusion and movement.

When Dadda and I came up to check on the sheep, I liked to try and catch the knack Jim had of selecting the right stone each time. I tried to understand how his hands could remember the contours of the one he’d laid down and find its partner with just a few brief touches. Sometimes he made his decision by sight only and worked mechanically, though never quickly, bending and rising and fitting and bending again, already knowing which stone to pick.

I got the impression that he didn’t mind someone else being there as long as he wasn’t required to engage in conversation, which was fine with me too. Dadda made small talk with him, but it was generally statement of fact or a compliment about the job he was doing, nothing that necessarily invited him to reply. Which he didn’t. He let the knock of the stone’s consonants speak for him. When we said goodbye and went back down to the farm with the dogs, he wouldn’t watch us for long before he was back bending and rising and fitting again.

It was hard to imagine he’d always been as silent as that. Angela wasn’t the type to marry a mouse, nor would someone like that have been much use in the Endlands.

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