For getting it proper was little Joe Calf the last time I called on Justin Slaughterer – getting it good to Justin’s song; a bawling blackguard of a song that spouted from the end of his bloodstained pipe and battered on the slaughterhouse walls. O’s and Ah’s from his friends as Joe Calf went down. Shivering is in them at the blood on Justin’s hands, gasps as the belly hide rips to the upward casual stroke, calf one moment, dinner the next. “And I am next,” whispers another as Justin reaches to drag. Powerful on his knees is Justin Slaughterer, bass in the chanting, right on the note, loving his God, grieving for his neighbour. Come to pay respects to Grandfer, newly slaughtered.
“And may the Lord have mercy on his soul,” ends Tom the Faith in deep reverence.
“Amen,” we said.
“Amen,” boomed Justin Slaughterer, dabbing, snuffling.
“Amen,” said Joe Calf, treble from the fields.
I clenched my hands and rose; went out into air.
Couldn’t bloody stick it. The brother of hypocrisy is the blubbering of drunkards.
Biddy Flannigan, every time. Death is a joke.
Much better are the memories of my last spring at Cae White.
The wind blew cool from the south, the country flowered, joyful with birdsong, with the blackbirds singing around our door and the young woodpeckers laughing and twittering in the alders of the Tywi. Sometimes I went down to watch them in their mating, thinking of Tessa, listening to the harsh shrilling of their lovers’ quarrelling, following the tossing and tumbling of the peewits and their bright diamond flutterings in sunlight against a cloudless blue. Pale green were the buds of the willows, shy and waving in the winds of spring, breathless as children before adventure, the bursting ecstasy of their flowering. Foxes stole from lairs among the ripening heather, eyes slanting to the scent of hounds, nose high for the stamping panic of the rabbit. Old Grandfer Badger rolled from his earth down in Bully Hole Bottom and lumbered around the mantraps of Waldo’s preserves, nose twitching for the stink of Jethro Mortymer the man. And at night the young, fresh moon made the circle of her eternal fullness, waning before the invisible Lord. Bill Stork was down on the estuary, one-legged in white purity, monumental against the patterned branches of yew where Hesperus watched. The corncrakes were crying masterful, the herons were singing doleful from Kidwelly. Feather and fur, leaf and branch, man and maiden were reaching up fingers, vital, reborn, for the tumbling, shouting torrent of spring.
Eighteen now, me; feeling the surge of manhood. Six-feet-one in socks, every inch alive, every pound bothering, feeling the rise of the sap in me, with the flicker of an eye for an incautious maiden, longing for Woman.
Tessa was but a dream now, as eggshell china standing behind glass. Even Mari faded in these spring-heat days; something apart and unattainable that washed and mended in her nunlike purity, dedicated to another. So enough of Tessa, I thought, enough of Mari.
Dilly Morgan, me.
Dilly Morgan aged seventeen, lately come from carrots for hair and one tooth missing. God help her since she crossed my path.
Come beautiful all of a sudden, had Dilly; tall and willowy, black-haired and with a beckoning eye and lashes slanted low with a spring come-hither; narrow in the waist and hips, most pleasant in other places to say the least of it. From childhood to womanhood I had watched this Dilly bud, flower and bloom. It is strange to me how the little scrags of females grow to such beauty – the muddy sticks of legs that lengthen to stately grace, the dribble-stained pinafores that peak to curved beauty, the tight-scragged tufted hair that flowers to grace the Helen; discoloured, aching teeth change to pearls and the cracked lips of winter come cupid bows for kissing. From little dumps of shapelessness grows Woman; desirable, desiring, the perfect animal for the mating of Man. And as such grew Dilly Morgan or very damned near it.
Met her one Sunday, resting that Sunday from underground at Ponty. I was wandering down the lanes near Ferry with the Devil sitting on my shoulder looking for idle hands. Bright was the sun, and the world in love with the newborn spring and the hedges all leafy and the azalea bushes golden.
“Good afternoon, Jethro Mortymer,” said Dilly, looking glorious.
“Good afternoon, Dilly Morgan.”
She was picking primroses, fingers dainty and plucking, showing a yard of black-stockinged leg as she leaned to the hedges, so I plucked a posy for her.
“For me?” said she delighted.
“For you,” I said, and pinned it on her breast.
“O, my,” said she. “Hell and damnation for us if that Polly Scandal do see us. Loose me quick, Jethro Mortymer.”
“One kiss first?”
“There is damned forward.”
“Just one for spring, Dilly.”
Soft were her lips.
“Another for summer?”
“Good grief, man, you’ll have me in the heather. One for summer, then, and no more seasons.”
Wind whisper.
“Eh,” she said. “Grown up lately, is it?”
“One for autumn,” I said, “don’t waste time.”
“Damned brutal, you are,” said she, pushing and shoving. “Eh, and none of that here, Jethro Mortymer! Stop it this minute!” And she fetched me a swing with a fist that I just ducked in time.
“Right, you!” said she, furious. “Now you’ve done it. Tell me dad, I will. Front row chapel, mind, strict deacon. Virtue has its own reward and it don’t include that. He’ll be up to see your mam in under five minutes.”
I went like something scalded.
Hettie Winetree next. Second best choice was Hettie, hardly the figure for courting, but you can’t be choosey in spring. Where Hettie went out Dilly went in, but her mam was having trouble with her still, it seemed, yearning for the facts of life. Sitting on a barrel was Hettie Winetree with a straw in her mouth, dressed more for farming than Sunday, with a lace cap on her little black curls and her sleeves rolled to the elbow.
“Good afternoon, Hettie Winetree.”
“O, God,” said she, going crimson.
“Haven’t seen much of you lately,”
