Feathers

We leave the road and walk off across a field full of some yellow stuff I don’t think I’ve ever seen before. As I trudge my way through it, crushing the bright blossoms with my size tens, I can’t help but feel that here is some profanity and that, somehow, I am taking part in an almost sacrilegious act. I realise my mind is wandering, and try to concentrate.

When we get to the long-abandoned farmhouse, (profanity squared) I am washed with a sense of having been here before, of having to come here again, I keep slipping in and out of memories, future and past.

We walk up to the carelessly whitewashed front door, the bottom scuffed to the wood over the years by the muddy boots of the impatient farmer. Cries of hunger and demands for food; fists and tears; then other days, sudden screams, fistfights, beatings, doors slamming, a shot, silence, quiet sobbing. Nights of drama and fear. A night of lust and death.

I wake up in an uncomfortable chair in the kitchen, the busiest room in any farmhouse, seeing the room alternately hung with washing, bakingly warm and humid, the rain slashing against the steamy windows, a voice humming and occasionally breaking into song with the sheer joy of hard work and achievement, the wireless in the background droning the Home Service days away, then later, the strong and deeply soothing smell of baking bread; other smells, roasts, onions, leeks, cabbage. My mouth, I swear, begins to water, even through the confusion.

Hands on my shoulders. ‘You alright, mate?’

Wrenched back to this terrible moment. Decay and nefarious doings in a remote abandoned farmhouse, Ron’s there, Buster, the rest.

‘Are we genna get this sorted or what?’ comes a voice from my left. I know this voice though I can’t place it. Whoever he is, he’ll die in a prison hospital. I know this.

Three, four, five bags are up-ended onto the table, on top of the ghosts of a thousand plucked chickens, blood seeping slowly into the ancient wood. Human blood, too. Feathers fly everywhere as the notes and bundles of notes, the postal orders, the bank drafts and who knows what else fill the table and flow over the edge onto the filthy, bloody floor.

This room is full of blood; like a giant heart, pumping history through itself day by day, year after terrible year. Yet the room is also the brain of the house, holding the memories to itself, opening, disclosing to only a privileged or cursed few like myself.

There are no feathers, that’s away in the past, although not to this room or me. The kitchen lets the memories become reality, unable to know the difference between the then and the now, and sometimes the never was.

Momentarily, I flicker back to now, the room lets me. I see the stack of money, six people sitting or standing, counting and counting, placing into piles. Another, trusted by all, separating into smaller stacks for distribution to the rest; payments to others not present, for cars, knowledge, weapons; goods and services.

Bites from sandwiches made up by loving wives and girlfriends, hoping they’ll see their men again; sending them off to another war, self-consciously praying for their safe return. Occasional sips from plastic flask cups full of steaming sweet tea, gulps from hip flasks or beer bottles, all empties carefully placed into bags, ready to be taken away. Nothing to be left. Only the house, the kitchen, pondering these mysterious visitors and their pile of paper amid the feathers.

The memories well up again, as though the house has heard my thoughts.

A Judas leads the police here, more by implication than in fact. The fear has loosened tongues, following the news that the old man could die. Murder. Hangings or lifetimes behind bars. I can see this. There are no hangings despite the eventual death.

Blood again.

Just lifetimes of heavy keys in ancient locks for all but one, and for him another kind of prison. Visits with no visitors. Slopping out, stinks and stenches, loss of pride. And worse.

The room feels my pain. It doesn’t care, doesn’t want to share it. It’s seen worse, smelled worse, in its time.

Blood and bars.

Blood and bars, money and feathers and the imprint of a shotgun blast across the years. I can’t have any part of this. I know how it all ends.