Shepherd by Catherine Jinks

Author:Catherine Jinks
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Text Publishing Company
Published: 2019-05-24T16:00:00+00:00

My father carved the board on my mother’s grave because he couldn’t afford a headstone. He was so drunk he botched the job; folk were buying him liquor for nearly two solid days before she was buried. During that time Jack and I slept on the landing outside the room where she lay—because the room was our home, then. We didn’t move to my grandmother’s cottage till the shame of our bereft condition forced her hand.

She was a mean and grudging soul who hated my father almost as much as she hated his two sons, so I didn’t see him for the next few months. But then, without warning, she followed her daughter into the grave. The damp in that house did for her in the end—and since the landlord was one of my father’s customers, we were allowed to stay. No one but my father would have tolerated such a rundown old hovel.

We lived in the kitchen because the other rooms were full of holes. It amazes me that we didn’t die of consumption, like Uncle John. There was no privy to speak of so we dumped our soil into the neighbour’s privy secretly, at night.

My mother was buried in the village churchyard next to my sister. The last time I paid ’em a visit, the board was already splitting. By that time Jack was dead and my father in gaol, and I was no longer living in my grandmother’s house because the landlord, a local miller, had decided to knock it down and use the stone to repair his mill. Instead I was back at the beer shop, where I was sleeping in a corner of the stables. But I took some comfort from knowing that my mother had once slept nearby. And sometimes I would spend warm nights by her grave, to keep her company.

I was very young then.

My father wasn’t buried. After the hanging, he was sold to a doctor and cut up like a side of beef. I’m glad he’s not lying beside my mother. She never had a moment’s peace from him when she was alive. Perhaps she’s at peace now.

When I kill Dan Carver I’m not going to give him a Christian burial. I’ll cut him up the way the doctors cut up my father.

Then I’ll feed him to the wild dogs.

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