Catherine, set in 1659).<\/em><\/p>\nLucy and I steal peeps at our stepmother-aunt’s belly. Fish leap in those unquiet
\ndepths while she sighs and shifts her weight. We snigger, my elbow ploughing
\nLucy’s ribs. What is in there? Another of me? Her weary face is a thin, far-away
\nshimmer in the light from the leaded pane; there are soldiers again, she says,
\nsoldiers on the Brecon road. I shrink from this mirror of my mother, more
\nwincingly than from any rumoured militia, in a house of so many mirrorings.
\n‘Your father had a dream last night … Don’t you want to know what it was
\nabout?’
\nWe gape, mute mysteries to her; waifs; wraiths of her elder sister Catherine,
\nwho in our father’s feather bed bore us and died, in blood and unatoning pain.
\nI saw a darling face waxen on the pillow like an effigy but it was not my mother.
\nHer wings beat in the trees till dark.
\n‘Fair and young light,’ my father addressed that darkness.
\nStepmother-aunt’s girls are our sister-cousins. Our brother Thomas found
\nout something. He whispered first to us. He was being nasty. Heads together, we
\nall dug our hands into the pot of sticky nastiness and sucked the sweetness off.
\nIt’s against the law to marry your deceased wife’s sister, he read it in the Prayer
\nBook, it’s incest, it’s … fornication, he said. We squirmed and tittered. One
\nevening it burst out from him. You are a trespasser, you, he said to my father,
\nwho turned pale, whose mouth twisted. You broke the law, hot red To m
\npersisted. No, oh no, said my father, the law was suspended, see. And, he seemed
\nto plead, and the tears came, it was the nearest I could get to Catherine. He
\ndidn’t mean me: he meant my mother Catherine.
\nThere is a complexity, said my father. There is a law within.
\nI saw how he (the bright word-gatherer) struggled for words. His hand
\ncovered his own breast as I have seen my mother’s and stepmother’s on their
\nbellies great with child. The law-within I imagined as a bird or butterfly in his
\nribcage.
\nThe Spirit has its own truth, he added.
\nWhen George Fox the Quaker came to Brecon, and stood on a barrel to speak
\nof the Inner Light, the magistrates got the people to shout him down in gales
\nof Welsh. ‘Shout again!’ cried Mr Jenkins. ‘Sing up, boys, roar again!’ And for
\ntwo solid hours they blared. Hooted all night long outside the inn under the
\nwindow of the witch, with his pale, amazing eyes. The apprentices shouted.
\nThe butcher shouted and waved his cleaver. Tom shouted. My father stood still
\nand was silent.
\nThe Spirit has its own truth. Listen to the silence, said George Fox, my
\nfather’s enemy. My father’s mirror opposite.
\nWalking the hills by night, my father expects some great visitor. His thoughts
\ntangle in the boughs of the oak in our courtyard, as he peers for signs of a final
\nfire. You should see him in the meadow with our sheep. He is amazingly loving
\nto sheep. Also stones and all small plants. If you tiptoe up when he is talking to
\na bird under the eave, he can fondle your hair then and call you pattering girl.
\nPoets are aloof tall men with craggy faces; they gaze at the far hills and trip
\nover doorsteps. Where they walk, the air is hazy and glittering.
\nWhen he comes in at dawn, his bare feet are wet with dew.
\n‘Oh well, if you don’t want to know .. . ‘, Aunt-mother flounces. ‘I suppose
\nyou are too young to know how great a poet your father is.’
\n‘What then’ What did he dream?’
\n‘Oh! Where’s Lucy?’
\nShe looks round distraught.
\n‘I’m here,’ says Lucy.
\n‘No – I mean my Lucy. I told you to keep an eye … she’ll be in the dairy
\nagain, and one day through your carelessness she’ll drown in the milk, she will.’
\nLugs herself up; shambles out, calling, ‘Lucy!’
\n‘Yes, auntie,’ answers my Lucy.
\n‘I don’t mean you, impertinent,’ she shrieks. ‘And stop calling me auntie, I’m
\nyour mother.’<\/p>\n
We hope the Lucy-Pretender does drown in the milk tub. How can there be
\ntwo Lucies in one house? With all those names to choose from … Lucy and I
\nam full of bale and bile against that other Lucy and we hope she falls in, or off,
\nor out of something, we shan’t lick her clean.
\nA spiralling scream. Lucy the Second is hauled off a fleece where she’s
\nsnuggled. She’s brought in flailing and I and Lucy am instructed to hold her.
\n‘Drop her,’ I whisper. ‘Go on.’
\nI was dropped when I was a baby sucking my mother’s nipple, I was dropped
\ninto the fire, I was damaged, I was dropped.
\nBut the Lucy-Baby leeches on to Lucy and smiles into her face; and Lucy
\ngrins back, she can’t help it.
\nOur father says it was his sin that tumbled me off mother’s lap, his sin that
\nmade God kill Uncle William, his sin that … he tots up crimes and sentences,
\nneeding to be the biggest sinner of us all … he angles shocked looks at my
\ncrookedness, flinching back, as if I were a sign.
\nBut Uncle Thomas is coming … my Uncle Thomas, the paunchy, the
\nbooming, the quarrel-picker, big at eating and drinking. Our ears clang with
\nthe rumpus of hooves in the courtyard and the racket of his voice, ‘The House
\nof Light. Lovely Lucies everywhere. Good evening, Scintillations!’<\/p>\n
:\u00b7<\/p>\n
Everyone has a double, so they say, and so I can see when I look round the
\ntable, where we’re eating mutton. Everyone has a double so where’s mine?
\nI was dropped.
\n‘So how’s my lamb?’ asks Uncle Thomas, turning to me with his face that is
\nmy father’s face but fleshier and jollier and less holy.
\n‘Can’t you cut it, lamb? Let Uncle cut it for you.’
\nHe saws my helping; feeds me mouthfuls.
\n‘No, I can – look, I can do it.’ I grasp the fork with the stump of my right
\nhand, burnt when I was dropped (she nodded off in the heat of the fire, I
\npitched straight into the hearth and my tender hand roasted and spat like meat,
\nmy brother remembers it).
\n‘Don’t help her, she can manage for herself, don’t pamper,’ Aunt-mother
\nchides. ‘You’ll make her dependent, she’s a bad rebellious girl.’
\n‘Well well,’ says Uncle, and carries on placing morsels on my tongue.
\nHe winks, a left-over like me. Auntie Rebecca’s gone where my mother’s gone,
\nwhere our Uncle William went, and Grandad. Where’s that?
\nInto the world of light, my father said, in his misty way.
\nI begin to drowse, tucked in under Uncle Thomas’ arm, though my eyes are
\nopen and I see through a veil the puzzle of faces echoing.<\/p>\n
‘The legitimacy of mutton . . ., ‘ says my father.
\n‘Dear oh dear,’ says Mr Powell. ‘God gives the creatures to our use.’
\n‘No indeed,’ spark up my father and my uncle in unison; and in their heresy
\nthey are of one accord, twin faces mirroring one another precisely. .’For God is
\nin the creatures … and at the end of time that very mutton you are eating
\nnow will be lamb again, pasturing with its mother beneath the tree.’
\nA shouted ho ho, but they are not joking. They take their food seriously.
\n‘The two of you are no better than Ranters and Anabaptists,’ says Mr Powell.
\n‘I do assure you, sir,’ says my father and my uncle, who are one person, and I
\nam that person too, and I know as my mind swims that the lamb will be born
\nagain from me. What I have eaten (which has become myself, flesh of my flesh)
\nwill be recreated as lamb. The lamb will find its mother again, she will. If this
\nwere not so .. . it would be unbearable. ‘I do assure you, our opinion has not
\nonly scriptural but scientific authority.’
\nAnd Catherine will find Catherine.I drop asleep.<\/p>\n
:\u00b7<\/p>\n
Wild thumpings of the table split my thumb-sucking doze. Uncle and Father
\nare in dispute.
\nThomas, Lucy, Frances and I huddle in shadow under the hall bench. When
\nUncle’s thunderbolts of swear-words come, Tom catches them on his fascinated
\ntongue, for future use.
\nFather holds down his temper, with saintly self-restraint. This annoys Uncle.
\nHe has done that experiment, he says, he should know. He and Rebecca did that
\nexperiment at Pinner, he’s still got the eye-lotion under the bed at their lodgings,
\nwhat further proof do you want? ‘Your wife was there, man, she was helping.’
\nSilence; then our stepmother storms out crying, ‘Catherine, always Catherine.’
\nMy grandmother raises her voice, she caws raw and grating.
\n‘What do you know about alchemical secrets, hold your tongue, woman.’
\nThe rooks outside feud bitterly in the trees.
\nWhen they come out, they have not yet made it up. They look like mirrors
\ndefying their duty to reflect.
\n‘Now, boys, boys,’ witters my gran.
\n‘We are not boys but grown men,’ announces Uncle, as if this will come as a
\nsurprise to all. ‘And just because Henry is the elder by a mere hour … ‘
\n‘Forty-seven minutes,’ corrects my gran.
\n‘Half an hour, and has inherited . . .d oes not give you a monopoly on the
\nlight . . . parochial .. . provincial . .. rural nobody .. . my cousin Aubrey
\nalways says … From me, it’s from me, you get all your secrets.
\n‘Yes,’ my father concedes. ‘I … do know.’
\nI see how he needs Uncle; yearns to him as I need my mother, homing to
\nreflections. Even my mother I don’t think he loved as much until she was dead
\nand translated into light. Starry Catherine in the firmament is easier to love
\nthan any fleshly woman. Uneasily he knows that too, mired in his clay.
\n‘Oh you muddy girl!’ cries our stepmother. ‘What have you been doing?’
\n‘Rooting,’ I say, and begin to rustle.
\n‘I wonder about your mind, I really do.’
\n‘My mother is a tree,’ I reveal, and they all scare.<\/p>\n
:\u00b7<\/p>\n
In two days’ time, Grisell and Other-Lucy have a new sister, Rachel, not the
\nlonged-son. Tom snorts at the load of no-good girls.
\n‘Uncle Thomas, Uncle Thomas, come and see my mother.’
\nUp the slopes of Allc-yr-Esgair behind our house we scramble. I haul him fulltilt,
\ngreen-edged thoughts beguiling me to call to the birds in my twin tongues.
\nUncle steps lightly for such a chubby man, dainty in his London\u00b7boots over the
\nmossy roots and leaf-mould.
\n‘I do not wish to disturb the Spirit of the Place,’ he explains.
\n‘Oh! A dryad!’ I spin round. ‘Too late, you’ve missed her!’
\nI ride though the glades on the high horse of Uncle’s shoulders, through
\nsoughing waves of light and shadow.
\nBirds nestle in my mother’s arms, mosses coat her roots with velvet. She must
\nreach underground fathoms deep. Slender and call, she grows straight up to
\nfoam in a high tide of leaves syllabling in the wind on the quietest day.
\nI hug her often and lay my cheek against her bark.
\n‘You see, she didn’t die. She only changed.’
\n‘Glory, no. There’s no such thing as dying. Every child knows that. And does
\nshe talk to you?’
\n‘Oh yes. Secret things.’
\n‘I’d rather hear that beech speak,’ he said, ‘than the sweetest flute in London.’
\n‘Why go back then?’ I urge. ‘Stay here, with us.’
\n‘Oh but I’ve the elixir to make. The world must be taught. Beehive-brain they
\nmay call me but I muse discharge my Truth upon them.’ He bunches his hands
\ninto fists. And I see he fidgets to get back to the quarrelsome capital.
\nAn oval stone lies in my palm, worn egg-smooth and skinned with a powder
\nof green lichen. Sun and shadow dapple the egg-stone on my lap, sitting there
\non the rotting log beside my uncle who rarely laughs at me. First cousin twice
\nremoved, he says, to the philosopher’s stone and do I know it’s magnetic? God
\nis in the stone. If I coddle it, brood upon it, it may possibly hatch? Together, we
\nlisten in to the stone’s silence, in the swaying shadow of my mother’s boughs. I
\ntranslate its meaning into streams of bubbling words, Welsh and English, and
\nUncle praises me as an educator and a natural poet. All children are, he muses,
\ngirl-child as well as boy, in that great hermaphrodite, the universe.
\n‘My Rebecca was like me. You … are not unlike your father.’
\nI sit bolt upright like an exclamation mark.
\nMy heartstring ties me tensely to my father as he mounts the sunset hill behind
\nNewton and, when he draws away, the lifeline between him and me twitches on
\nits root in my ribcage. With many small pangs, I creep the forbidden path in his
\nbeloved footsteps, stretching my stride to match his. My eyebeam latches on to
\nhim and will not, cannot, let him go, though he keeps disappearing into bushy
\nshadows. I am hauled home to him like a fish spasming on a line.
\nPast the riddle-stones he clambers, through the bleat of late lambs, an insect
\nhum, din of birds and the river-chuckle.
\n‘I cannot reach it …,’ the breeze tosses the phrase back over his shoulder
\nfor me to catch.
\nI want to be in my father as he yearns aloud to be in his Father: ‘Something
\nI had, which long ago … Did learn to suck, and sip, and taste …’ .I s he crying?
\nHe mourns that he is a cast-off from God’s lap, unequal to the humble fly
\nor the sensitive primrose. I scurry like a spy in his suffering wake, and as he
\nruns to Father, I home to father.
\nI hunker behind a rock, shredding seeds from a rusty head of dock.S inking
\nnow to his k nees, he scans the damp, lush grass as if he’d dropped something
\nby the wayside. He spots … some little creature, snail or worm or sunsetgilded
\nfrog; stoops. The heartstring yanks me with quivering sharpness. As he
\nraises his hand to bless the creature, I rush stumbling in under his palm and
\nsnatch a share of the blessing.
\nHe winces back, and says, not without kindness, ‘Go down now, child. It’s
\nyour bed-time.’
\n‘You magneted me. I had to come.’
\n‘No, you must go down. Home to mother. This is private business – God’s
\nbusiness.’
\nI am a little dark thing he’s fathered, like a sin, crooked and bereft; not even
\nan important mistake. I finger the secret stone in my pocket as I am gently
\nordered off. Milky light curdles and the hillside judders as he pats my retreating
\nback, to help me on my way.
\nWith all my force, in a riot of grief, I round on him and hurl the stone, and
\nmiss.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Table of Contents Author Title # M. Wynn Thomas In Occidentem & tenebras’: putting Henry Vaughan on the map \u2026<\/p>\n
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