The Heyday in the Blood by Geraint Goodwin

Author:Geraint Goodwin [Geraint Goodwin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781906998691
Publisher: Parthian Books
Published: 2011-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER XI

Summer had gone. The trees had wilted and thinned – the stacks, the roof of the inn, were there again through the trees. And then, as suddenly as the turning over of a page, it was autumn. For a few brief days the colours would hold, the deep bronze and gold of leaf, the tumult of colour piled up around the village. And then as suddenly that would go too. The hawthorn berries, blood red, hung like drops around about; the sloes with their soft moist bloom on them; the blackthorn with the dew on it, glistened in the first frost.

It was the time of the year that excited Evan most. He walked through the little shop, stripped and bare, and stood at the door. The earth had the hard crisp look that frost gives it.

He saw too much – though he was always telling himself that he did not see enough. He saw things separately and with a vivid sense that was wearing him out. Only seldom came that glimpse working through the body, and beyond the body in which the whole landscape would fuse and melt and become a whole.

Before him a hill, cropped and sour, green with the sheen of frost on it. The cub hunting had begun and the fox had gone to earth up there. Backwards and forwards the horses went, framed in the sky. It was a wonderful sight, a man on a horse with the sky behind. Sometimes the horses were hidden and the riders seemed to be moving through space with an effortless, easy motion. He saw the sunlight pick out the horses, saw the flecks of foam on them, the wonderful lines of a horse seen in movement, and his heart thrilled at the sight.

Now and again he could hear the thud, thud of the spades striking the hard earth, and as he went beyond sight and thought he felt the old horror that he always felt. So lovely a thing as a fox on so lovely a morning, to be tossed up to the dogs and torn to pieces in a slaver of blood.

He felt the old panic, the old fear well up. Once to slip off this ecstatic state he was down in the depths. For all his love of life Evan was afraid of it, with a fear he dared not utter nor even contemplate. It was enough that it was there.

‘Evan… Evan!’ His mother’s voice came to him from upstairs like a croak.

‘Coming, Mam,’ he shouted. Then he took the little teapot of pap which was warming on the hob up to her. He knew that she was dying. If he began to think then there was no end to his thinking. But he took a tip from the district nurse who came every day to do her dressing – a job, something to be done with a bustle and a few cheery words which were always on tap. If one refused to feel, if one shut out feeling, life was something quite different.

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