bleodswean

He stopped at the edge of the low, stone wall that ringed her cottage and took a deep breath in of the cold autumnal air, struggling to hold it inside his lungs. Diseased. Both lobes. And the heart laboring beneath the blackened rot inside his chest. But no physician would treat him.  

He exhaled and coughed, then hacking and hacking. He wiped his blooded lips with the back of his hand, fingers curled bent into the palm and walked on. He had a muslin bag of poultice in the pocket of his greatcoat; he twisted it between his fingers. When he finally laid his body down for a few hours he would press the plaster against the pain. But he had a furlong to walk.

His stomach ached full of the hot drink she had urged him to finish as he stood uncomfortable and miserable on her stoop. She would have him in, but he would not allow the temptation to comfort. He could see the small, dark warmth of the room behind her. The hearth welcoming, gremalkin asleep on the braided rug, and the rafters hung with her drying herbal wares. She had been caring for his corporeal form for some long time now. He was grateful for her attention but later would tighten the cilice around his left thigh until the pain had him dizzy.

He did not deserve her help. Yet he strove to stay alive, keep swallowing. That he did deserve.

It was very late with the moon waning gibbous, lighting the narrow way through the woods. Deeper. He did not fear the wolf but would prefer not to be eaten for the sake of the devouring beast. Better that the Dark Gentleman step onto the path and save the predator and take the filthy prey. He could be ravaged for eternity then. Perhaps tonight would be that night. He did not know and walked on. Idling on the path would do nothing more than have his head swirling on the morrow when he had work to do.

This responsibility to others, to the dead, had broken both his shoulders and humped his spine and he cut a pathetic figure in the boiled wool coat and the ragged worn boots. He relished this change in his body over the years. Although to count the years, there weren’t quite as many as some would have wagered. No. His work had aged his body. And even those he had shared childhood with no longer remembered him as young or even as himself. Although none of them were young anymore and more often than not he would find himself seated beside the corpse of one of them. Waiting to eat.

Now his skin sagged, his skeleton trembled exhausted, he kept his face hidden in a knit cowl year-round. He could not remember his name. Not really.

Something growled and shrieked in the undergrowth, then an animal yelped and he closed his eyes and offered some sort of prayer. He wondered at his decision to make the trek back to his hideyhole. He was needed in the village proper the next day. Either daybreak or by the gloaming. The villagers buried the elders at dawn and the younger deceased at twilight. He wasn’t able to recollect who was being inhumed but he knew his services, his appetite, had been requested. He could have slept in the hedgerow closer in, along the path. But he was tired, breathing had become choreful, and the moment he arrived back to his moss filled mattress he lowered his body the way six men will lower a casket.

His clockwork brain woke him, and he welcomed the nausea and pain as he pulled his body upright once again and began the long walk to the village.

A figure found him as he approached Taff's Well, just before the sun broke the horizon. He would never have stopped there or used the ladle to scoop the warm thermal waters into his mouth. Never ever. Although once, long ago, he had worked his hands to blistering when part of the limestone wall had collapsed. Worked side by side with the other men until they had repaired it. A time before the village wiped its memory of him.

The well was a central focal point, and he had simply forgotten where he was to be and when. He realized he needed to be found. That was a first. Perhaps the disease was crawling up out of his chest and into his brain pan. His head ached, each throb of blood through the arteries in his neck a stabbing. Would he be able to eat the cake, drink the ale. He would have to be.

The figure drew closer; it was the girl mourner. She with the strange eyes that seemed to move of their own accord in the sockets. She did not speak, he knew that. But communicated with a kind of language told by her hands. He had known her since she was as high as his hip bones and he listened hard with his eyes. Yes, yes, the family did not want him at their doorway. He was to meet them at the lychgate, at Ty Rhiw at eventide. Their beloved daughter deceased. He nodded his understanding and the girl was gone that quickly.

Now he recalled the lanky boy who had found him in the woods just two days prior, the older brother. Taciturn and wary. The drawn expression, the cheekbones gaunt with grief and the eyes hooded and swollen. The terse instructions, her name had been folded over and over into his mind and how could he have forgotten it. The young man was not familiar to him, a new generation birthed and raised, and he recognized not a one of them. For the better, for the better.

He was growing distracted. He pinched and twisted the tender skin of his inner arm. Slake your thirst, assuage your hunger because you drink and feast later upon the corpse cake and offended ale.

He walked once, twice, three times around the well and began to climb the narrow-walled pathway to the cemetery. He had the entirety of the day to wait. If he could evade the priest, he could perhaps visit their grave and maybe even lie down upon it.

He could see the stone chapel and the graveyard, the weeping willows and the lichened stones. He made a wide swathe behind the wall and came through a gap on the deep north side. Closer to where they were buried. His secret his shame. Mother and child in her arms inside the box inside the ground.

He knew it had been her husband found them both in the lying-in bed, strangled. The garrotes tied tight around their necks. They said the hills rang with his screams for days and nights after.

He regretted the murder of his lover, how could he not, but it was their child not three days old who haunted him still, her spirit seemed to inhabit his body, as though he were the gravid female carrying the illegitimate bairn. The illicit child’s mother he could feel like a dead weight upon his back.

Her husband had left the village after he buried them, took their two sons with him. He believed the murderer to live amongst them although it was rumoured to be a raggle taggle gypsy. It was not. It was he. And her husband had been right to be suspicious.

What had they been thinking. He no longer knew. What had he been thinking half crazed and out of his mind. He had never known.

He lowered his body to the indented earth and settled there. He fit so perfectly.

He had sinned beyond forgiveness, he lifted his arthritic fingers to his mouth, hands that had once pulled another man’s wife into an embrace, and he began to chew.