第23章 Nancarrow's Hands

Nancarrow lost the use of two fingers of his right hand on the twenty-first of February and would not say so. Tibb saw it first, because she handed him a cup of broth on the nineteenth and he took it in the left. Pippa saw it second, on the twenty-first, when he came up to the door of the kitchen and stood there with his hand behind his back. "That's not the wind," she said. "You walked half a mile in it." "It's the wind." "Nancarrow." He came in and blew his nose with the back of his hand and Pippa saw the two white tips and the skin gone tight and shining on them and everything else about him entirely ordinary. "Elverston," she said. "Elverston's got a chest and I'm not sending for a doctor at eight at night in February for two fingers," said Nancarrow. "It's a bit of frostnip. It'll come back by the thaw." "It will not come back by the thaw. I've had four days of looking at people's hands in this kitchen, Nancarrow. I know what frostbite looks like and I know what a week of it looks like, and I know that you have been doing this winter's work with two fingers on a cold rope for four days because the alternative is that the work isn't done." "The work's done." "The work is done today. The work is not done for another six weeks and there are four hundred ewes inside that wall and one of them gave me a leg on Tuesday because she wants the grain that isn't there." He put the hand out on the table, palm up, in the manner of a man surrendering a sword. "Two at the top. They've gone white and they don't hurt and that's how you know it's bad. If it hurt I'd have said." * * * Elverston came at nine in the morning with two pairs of woollen socks and a jar of something brown. "It's not going to keep the tips," he said, in the yard. "I want you to understand that now so you don't sit up for a week hoping. The tips are gone. They'll come off and the skin'll grow back over the pulp and you'll have a hand that doesn't grip in cold weather and there's no medicine on this coast that'll do anything about that." "I've had a worse hand than this." "You've not." "I've had a hand that was off at the second knuckle and it grew back crooked and I still brought a knife in with it," said Nancarrow. "I was thirty-one. I'm fifty-one and I've got a hand and I'll thank you to look at what I've got rather than what you've decided I've lost." "That's fair," said Elverston. "That is exactly fair and I'll not do it again." * * * The argument took four days and Pippa lost it twice. On the first day she offered him the deep room and he refused it, on the grounds that a shepherd who sleeps twenty feet underground in February is a shepherd who wakes up in April unable to move. On the second day she offered him the room over the parlour, which was the warmest in the house, and he refused that too, and said, and this was the sentence that turned it: "You've got a book in there with my name in it and I'm not sleeping over a book." "You have not got a name in it." "Ay," said Nancarrow. "That's what I mean." * * * So on the third day Pippa did something that she thought about afterwards for longer than she would have admitted. She went and got the register, and the little book off the shelf, and she sat down at the kitchen table opposite him, and she said: "You have been inside this house for nine weeks and you have never once asked what it is that I do, and you have not asked because you have not wanted to be told, and I have let you not ask because I have not wanted to say. That ends tonight. Read that page." Nancarrow put his spectacles on. His hands were shaking, which was the fever and the cold and not the nerves. He read. *Twenty-first of February. Nancarrow has frostbite in two fingers of the right hand and will lose the tips and is telling nobody because he has been a man who does not make a fuss since 1963, and I have been letting him not make a fuss since the fourth of December.* *He has not got a name in it. He has got his own line in it, the same as everybody in this house, in his own hand, on the page for his arrival, and it says: I have been in the high pasture every winter since I was six and I have never once been cold enough to say so.* *He has said it now. That is the trade. That is the whole of it. He has said it and I have written it down and neither of us can take it back, and that is how a warm thing works.* Nancarrow read it four times. "You wrote that this morning." "Last night. I heard you come in at eleven and I heard you not sleep, and I came down and you were at the range heating your hands on the oven, and you did not know I was there." "You should have woken me." "I did not wake you because I wanted to see whether you would go and stand at the range again, and you did, twice, and both times you put the bad hand on last." Pippa shut the book. "So I have taken the work away and I have taken the room away and I have given you a room that is not over the book, and if you want to argue about it you may argue about it downstairs in front of everybody, and I would rather you did that than argued about it alone in a cold room like a man who is used to it." * * * They had the argument downstairs in front of everybody, on the evening of the twenty-fourth, and it lasted four minutes, and Kerrith kept it. She said: "Are you going to argue that you can hold a rope?" And Nancarrow said: "I've held a rope for twenty-five year in worse than this." "Then you may keep your room and sleep in it and be told nothing," said Kerrith, "except that there are four hundred ewes inside that wall and they have a man to feed them and he has two fingers that don't work, and you have just told this room that you are the sort of man who goes without saying, and I am ninety-one and I have watched about two hundred of you go without saying, and eleven of them are in that register, and the eleventh one was a woman who carried a lamp up the hill four nights in a gale and scratched a sentence out of the rule book so that somebody would have to stay in with her." "Which is different." "It is entirely the same," said Kerrith, "and I will not have this kitchen treat it as clever." * * * They brought the flock down on the twenty-fifth. It took two days and Nancarrow could not do any of it, which put him in a state Pippa had not known was available, and it took Pippa, Wilby, Wrenfield, Gammon, Marlowes with his fiddle case used as a crook, and two Bredon cousins from Selborne who came up the lane on the first of March and stayed three days without being asked. Eleven hundred ewes and forty store lambs, down off the high pasture in two days, into the fold, in a blizzard, without a dog. And when it was done Pippa walked the line with Nancarrow, who came up the shoulder for the first time since December, and stood at the ring at the top, and looked at the nine ridges, which had gone down about a foot since the thirtieth of January and had gone nowhere else. "They'll come down for the thaw," he said. "All of them, all eleven hundred, off the high pasture and through that wall and into the fold, and they'll do it in one night and I'll not be able to stop a quarter of them." "Is that usual?" "Once in nine years. 1979." He spat, and then looked at her, because he had spat, and then said, "That's not me saying it. That's me habit. 1979 and never before and never since." "Then we shall be ready for it." "How do you ready eleven hundred ewes for something that only happens when it happens?" "You open the top of the wall," said Pippa. "And you leave the lamp on. And you have enough hay in the fold for two thousand, and I have sent Gammon to Selborne this morning and he is buying hay at any price from anybody who has it, including from the coach company." * * * The hay came up on the second of March, fourteen loads, bought with money out of a cellar that had been empty in December. Nancarrow stood in the yard and watched it come in, and then he went to the kitchen and got his coat and came back and said: "I'll take the small room over the scullery, and I'll take my supper with the rest of you, and I'll say one thing about my hand and then I'll say no more about my hand." "Say it." "I lost two fingers at two o'clock on Friday and I did not tell anybody for four days, and every hour of those four days I was up at that range thinking about how I am not going to be able to hold a gate in April." He took his coat off again. "And there is a woman in this house who saw me do it twice and went and wrote it down in a book instead of waking me up, and I have thought about that for four days, and I would like to say that I would have preferred to be woken up, and I would like to say it more than I would like to say anything else, and I am saying it, and that is the end of it." "Sit down and eat your supper." "I'm not hungry." "Nancarrow. There's bread and there's broth and there's a woman of ninety-one who is going to ask you about the ewes." He sat down and ate his supper, and Kerrith asked him about the ewes for forty minutes, and Pippa went out into the passage and stood for a minute with her hand on the lectern. * * * That night she wrote: *Nancarrow has agreed to be fed. That is the sentence and it is the truest thing anybody has written in this book since the second of January and it took four days and a woman of ninety-one and I am not going to pretend it was my doing.* *The consequence is that there will be a man on my hearth all winter who was not on my hearth this morning, and a man on my hearth is a thing that gets added to a book, and what gets added to a book has to be answered in the morning. I have been in this house sixty days and I have begun to understand that I did not come here to keep eleven lamps alight. I came here to find out how a house makes people put things down.* ---