LITMIR.BIZ

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of time, but how was anyone to persuade a man like Thomas Truslow of that truth?

      ‘She died on Christmas Day,’ Truslow went on softly. ‘The snow was thick up here then, like a blanket. Just me and her, the girl had run off, damn her skin.’

      ‘Sally?’

      ‘Hell, yes.’ Truslow was standing to attention now with his hands crossed awkwardly over his breast, almost as if he was imitating the death stance of his beloved Emily. ‘Emily and me weren’t married proper,’ he confessed to Starbuck. ‘She ran off with me the year before I went to be a soldier. I was just sixteen, she weren’t a day older, but she was already married. We were wrong, and we both knew it, but it was like we couldn’t help ourselves.’ There were tears in his eyes, and Starbuck suddenly felt glad to know that this tough man had once behaved as stupidly and foolishly as Starbuck had himself just behaved. ‘I loved her,’ Truslow went on, ‘and that’s the truth of it, though Pastor Mitchell wouldn’t wed us because he said we were sinners.’

      ‘I’m sure he should have made no such judgment,’ Starbuck said gravely.

      ‘I reckon he should. It was his job to judge us. What else is a preacher for except to teach us conduct? I ain’t complaining, but God gave us his punishment, Mister Starbuck. Only one of our children lived, and she broke our hearts, and now Emily’s dead and I’m left alone. God is not mocked, Mister Starbuck.’

      Suddenly, unexpectedly, Starbuck felt an immense surge of sympathy for this awkward, hard, difficult man who stood so clumsily beside the grave he must have dug himself. Or perhaps Roper had helped him, or one of the other fugitive men who lived in this high valley out of sight of the magistrates and the taxmen who infested the plains. At Christmastime, too, and Starbuck imagined them carrying the limp body out into the snow and hacking down into the cold ground.

      ‘We weren’t married proper, and she were never buried proper, not with a man of God to see her home, and that’s what I want you to do for her. You’re to say the right words, Mister Starbuck. Say them for Emily, because if you say the right words then God will take her in.’

      ‘I’m sure he will.’ Starbuck felt entirely inadequate to the moment.

      ‘So say them.’ There was no violence in Thomas Truslow now, just a terrible vulnerability.

      There was silence in the small glade. The evening shadows stretched long. Oh dear God, Starbuck thought, but I am not worthy, not nearly worthy. God will not listen to me, a sinner, yet are we not all sinners? And the truth, surely, was that God had already heard Thomas Truslow’s prayer, for Truslow’s anguish was more eloquent than any litany that Starbuck’s education could provide. Yet Thomas Truslow needed the comfort of ritual, of old words lovingly said, and Starbuck gripped the book tight, closed his eyes and raised his face toward the dusk-shadowed blossoms, but suddenly he felt a fool and an imposter and no words would come. He opened his mouth, but he could not speak.

      ‘That’s right,’ Truslow said, ‘take your time.’

      Starbuck tried to think of a passage of scripture that would give him a start. His throat was dry. He opened his eyes and suddenly a verse came to him. ‘Man that is born of a woman,’ he began, but his voice was scratchy and uncertain so he began again, ‘man that is born of a woman is of few days, and full of trouble.’

      ‘Amen,’ Thomas Truslow said, ‘amen to that.’

      ‘He cometh forth like a flower …’

      ‘She was, she was, praise God, she was.’

      ‘And is cut down.’

      ‘The Lord took her, the Lord took her.’ Truslow, his eyes closed, rocked back and forth as he tried to summon all his intensity.

      ‘He fleeth also as a shadow, and continueth not.’

      ‘God help us sinners,’ Truslow said, ‘God help us.’

      Starbuck was suddenly dumb. He had quoted the first two verses of the fourteenth chapter of Job, and suddenly he was remembering the fourth verse, which asked who can bring a clean thing from an unclean? Then gave its hard answer, no one. And surely Truslow’s unsanctified household had been unclean?

      ‘Pray, mister, pray,’ Truslow pleaded.

      ‘Oh Lord God’—Starbuck clenched his eyes against the sun’s dying light—‘remember Emily who was thy servant, thy handmaid, and who was snatched from this world into thy greater glory.’

      ‘She was, she was!’ Truslow almost wailed the confirmation.

      ‘Remember Emily Truslow—’ Starbuck went on lamely.

      ‘Mallory,’ Truslow interrupted, ‘that was her proper name, Emily Marjory Mallory. And shouldn’t we kneel?’ He snatched off his hat and dropped onto the soft loamy soil.

      Starbuck also dropped to his knees. ‘Oh, Lord,’ he began again, and for a moment he was speechless, but then, from nowhere it seemed, the words began to flow. He felt Truslow’s grief fill him, and in turn he tried to lay that grief upon the Lord. Truslow moaned as he listened to the prayer, while Starbuck raised his face to the green leaves as though he could project his words on strong hard wings out beyond the trees, out beyond the darkening sky, out beyond the first pale stars, out to where God reigned in all his terrible brooding majesty. The prayer was good, and Starbuck felt its power and wondered why he could not pray for himself as he prayed for this unknown woman. ‘Oh God,’ he finished, and there were tears on his face as his prayer came to an end, ‘oh dear God, hear our prayer, hear us, hear us.’

      And then there was silence again, except for the wind in the leaves and the sound of the birds and from somewhere in the valley a lone dog’s barking. Starbuck opened his eyes to see that Truslow’s dirty face was streaked with tears, yet the small man looked oddly happy. He was leaning forward to hold his stubby, strong fingers into the dirt of the grave as if, by thus holding the earth above his Emily’s corpse, he could talk with her.

      ‘I’ll be going to war, Emily,’ he said, without any embarrassment at so addressing his dead woman in Starbuck’s presence. ‘Faulconer’s a fool, and I won’t be going for his sake, but we’ve got kin in his ranks, and I’ll go for them. Your brother’s joined this so-called Legion, and cousin Tom is there, and you’d want me to look after them both, girl, so I will. And Sally’s going to be just dandy. She’s got her man now and she’s going to be looked after, and you can just wait for me, my darling, and I’ll be with you in God’s time. This is Mister Starbuck who prayed for you. He did it well, didn’t he?’ Truslow was weeping, but now he pulled his fingers free of the soil and wiped them against his jeans before cuffing at his cheeks. ‘You pray well,’ he said to Starbuck.

      ‘I think perhaps your prayer was heard without me,’ Starbuck said modestly.

      ‘A man can never be sure enough, though, can he? And God will soon be deafened with prayers. War does that, so I’m glad we put our word in before the battles start drowning his ears with words. Emily will have enjoyed hearing you pray. She always did like a good prayer. Now I want you to pray over Sally.’

      Oh God, Starbuck thought, but this was going too far! ‘You want me to do what, Mister Truslow?’

      ‘Pray over Sally. She’s been a disappointment to us.’ Truslow climbed to his feet and pulled his wide-brimmed hat over his hair. He stared at the grave as he went on with his tale. ‘She’s not like her mother, nor like me. I don’t know what bad wind brought her to us, but she came and I promised Emily as how I’d look after her, and I will. She’s bare fifteen now and going to have a child, you see.’

      ‘Oh.’ Starbuck did not know what else to say. Fifteen! That was the same age as his younger sister, Martha, and Starbuck still thought of Martha as a child. At fifteen, Starbuck thought, he had not even known where babies came from, assuming they were issued by the authorities in some secret, fuss-laden ceremony involving women, the church and doctors.

      ‘She says it’s young Decker’s babe, and maybe it is.

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