“‘T’others are all dead,’ said my gran-da. ‘Our’n is the last family. After us, it’s only animals and the saints as have it. And the animals will only speak to th’uns with the Wonderments.’ But I said to him, ‘I canna be. I canna be.’ I was quite panicked, you know? And he said, ‘Thee’ast heard the otters, right? From the forest and the river?’ I said, ‘I dunna know.’ ‘Well, that’s a yes,’ he said. Then he had cleared his throat, and he said, ‘He makes the night wherein all the beasts of the forest do creep, and the lions seek their meat, but he also makes Sun ariseth.’ He was very ill, poor man. Something with his poor kidneys. And he told me this: ‘Look for a grandson. That’s as’ll have the Wonderments. Or ’e won’t.’”
Cuthbert never recalled his gran, as she grew older, dashing around looking for tricky pixies or talking kingfishers. It wasn’t like that, not at all. The Wonderments were deeper, palpable, more about feeling than sorcery. But she genuinely believed in her forebears’ faith, even if she gave little credence to what her granddaddy had said about her own uniqueness; discounting it enabled her, it seemed, to bear its weight. As she aged, she could better shoulder psychic burdens, including her daughter’s marriage to, as she often put it, “a gowkie* miser born under a threepenny planet.” She felt the conviction of her ancestors as a warm jewel against her own dark skin, a gleam to be preserved for Britain and indeed for the world. The Wonderments chose you.
Yet it wasn’t automatic. The Wonderments apparently ended if a grandparent didn’t instruct the grandchild in them, and many, said Winefride, had declined to do just that, for they wanted their grandchildren to fit into the modern world.
Yet somehow, in ugly West Bromich, five decades before the Property Revolts, before the big suicide cults, before the All-Indigent zones, and before King Henry IX, two sweet grandsons in the line were born. Since Winefride’s other grandchildren were girls, and the Wonderments passed from gender to gender and only every other generation, Cuthbert and Drystan represented to her—as one of her serious flaws was a habit of jumping to direst conclusions—the last of the line. But for all England knew or cared, she might be right. Winefride determined soon after Drystan’s birth that she would need to work around his facile mother and abusive father to make sure the boy understood his birthright.
Her own children, along with countless other Worcestershireans and Salopeans,* had been tricked, as she saw it, by Birmingham’s industry. All the Black Country and Birmingham and indeed much of the whole world lived in a state of fatal anomie, alienated from nature, and dependent on “machines,” as she called all technology.
“We was going after akerns,” she once told Cuthbert, “pounding ’em into flour whilst the hullocks—that’s what we called people like your father—were clammed with hunger.” She whispered the next words: “Your mummy and daddy, they’re rawny-boughs nowadays, as far as it goes. That’s the hard truth. They canna go without their satellites and tellies and Norton bikes,” which was what she called all motorcycles. “But thee and I and Drystan, we can survive off the trees, canna we? We can always go back into the Wyre and up into the Marches and my hills of Clee.”
And survive Winefride had, with her green gleam. But never prospered. The truth was, even before her birth, the landscapes in and around Wyre had been chopped to bits by mining. “Despert chaps, young and owd,” as she called them, sometimes by the thousands at a time, used to vie to deform the very hilltops of Clee and all the Welsh Marches with nothing but hand tools. “They was bent on steekling the hills,” she said, “as if they hills ’ermselves were fattened little porkets for slaughter.” With the Depression, the mining economy had collapsed. She herself, by love and by poverty, was also in time driven off the Clees, like most of her cousins. Indeed, she would go no farther east than the Wyre—a matter of a few miles—until she was forced, as an old woman, by her own petty, city-loving, money-obsessed son-in-law.
before the last photo crumbles
CUTHBERT AND DRYSTAN NOW CROWDED INTO A window, gazing out, elbowing each other.
“I dunna want to go now,” said Drystan, looking toward the forest. “I corr.”
Mary Handley, grimacing at Winefride, said, “Now look what you’ve done, Mum. You’ve worried that child to death.”
“No,” said Drystan. “I’m not afraid of the Wyre, Mum. A’m afraid I’ll never want to come back.”
Cuthbert said, “Well, I’m only a whittle, whittle, whittle afraid.”
They gawked at a lone roan goat, grazing in a small pasture across the road. Cuthbert—whose clearest idea of animals was the moggies and birds of Birmingham and Dylan, the daisy-munching hippie rabbit on The Magic Roundabout—had never seen a goat before.
The animal raised its head nervously, but it kept chewing steadily.
“She’s the prettiest thing I’ve ever seen! Is she a kind of cow?” Cuthbert asked earnestly.
“Dunno, really,” said Drystan. From his pocket, he pulled out a thornless haw-tree twig with a few leaves on it, and began twirling it in his hand. He was always picking up sticks he would fiddle with for hours then toss on his dresser.
“Heard any animals lately?” Winefride suddenly asked the two aunties, as if inquiring about the latest gossip.
The big aunties nodded jovially in agreement, with occasional fixed love-stares at the two children.