The Christ of Otters’ arrival would mark the precise moment of the nadir of humankind on earth, and the beginning of the slow return of a new equilibrium.
“Now don’t get me wrong,” she once told Cuthbert. “I go churching for Jesus Christ our Savior, son of Joseph, son of Heli, Matthat, Levi, et cetera and whatnot.” But she went on to say how those Wonderments “told your owd gran and those before for all time” that God had made a special promise to the animals of Albion.
“’E’d given ’em souls, ’a did,” she said. “And it was down to all the good things they done for all of us, especially out here in the Marches. And they would get their own saint—an animal Lord.”
Souls for their service to England. That was the covenant between humans and Great Britain’s animals, passed down in the Wonderments, as Cuthbert came to understand them. Such inspired animals of the covenant ought never be caged, or looked down upon. “They’ve their own yuds,” his gran always said. They possessed animal motives and animal values; they had a few special saints across the British Isles, their own green shoots off their own Tree of Jesse—St. Aristobulus, St. Columba, and St. Cuthbert; they had their own Cains and Judases. The animals of Britannia did not look for the resurrection of the dead; they sought to live with dignity and purpose in their ensouled eminence. So declared the Wonderments.
“God gave ’em souls, and what did the English give ’em?” she’d once asked. “A slaughterhouse in every town—a bunch of clarty land, dorty seas, rivers turned into gubbon holes,* and thousands of book-learnt clish-clashers who say the bastes* are nothing but bondservants or jumbles of chemicals or whatnot. No wonder they went quate!”
As Winefride remembered it, the Wyre Forest before the Second World War seemed like the last verdant haven against all this, a place of glory and grief somewhere between Eden and Gethsemane.
“It always ’ad a rainbow above it—the ‘bow in the cloud.’ A special green and gold one, like the one God had shown Noah after floodwaters. When I was a much younger lass, ’twas paradise to me, and to the animals,” she had said that morning, in the car. Drystan had been plucking habitually at the end of a dark green thread in the Hillman’s springy plaid upholstery. As he began to pull it, his gran gently took his hand in hers to stop him. “The beasts loved the forest. But they knew its end was coming, and it broke their wild hearts.”
“Mother,” her daughter suddenly said from the front. “These boys are gullible. You’re going to worry them.”
His gran had whispered into Cuthbert’s ear, leaning hard against him, “I wouldn’t ever lie to thee or to Drystan. Ever.” He’d felt safe and happy smooshed into her warm, damp muscles; she felt like some enormous dolphin, carrying him out to sea.
the death of the wheat farmer
BEFORE THEY ARRIVED AT THE OLD HANDLEY relatives’ house, his gran managed to tell Cuthbert the whole history of the region, even how she’d met his long-dead grandfather.
“Tell us, Gran.”
“Ha! You’re really going to suffer now,” she said. “It was this one lovely day, in 1919. I had my long black hair unpinned and hovering in the wind—the villagers sometimes used to call me ‘the Basque Beauty’—and I walked two pretty miles into the town of Bewdley, from the country, just beyond the Wyre, to buy a few stalks of this new fruit being sold called ‘banans,’ as I called them.”
These “banans” had stopped appearing at the grocer during the war, their gran explained, but they were finally back, she’d heard, and she couldn’t wait. They were beautiful things, soft and aromatic, “loik a kind of custard you can hold.” The fish and fruit grocer, Mr. William Wood, swore they were good for heart problems and “general nutrition” (though any girl from the Clees knew you used foxglove for whatever ailed the heart).
“Eat as thee please,” Mr. Wood had said. He was staring at Winefride with something just short of awe. She had long, deft fingers and that hair of hers was as shiny-black as Scottish obsidian—and blown over her one ear just so.
“I was a tall girl, and healthy, and Mr. Wood knew my family was poor, too. Back in the owd times, most of the country people had little meat to eat, but I gave it up on my own as a young lass.”
Being a vegetarian at the time, Winefride said, attracted incredulity in the town, and “a kind of pity” in the country.
But that day in 1919, she stood there near a table piled with bananas, oranges, and plums, pulling the bruised skin off three bananas in a row. She dropped a skin into her purse, almost reluctantly, and plucked another small, squat cylinder off the fruit.
“I’ll be making myself sick,” she said. “You shanna be canting about this to everyone, oo’ll be, Mr. Wood?”
Mr. Wood, a hardy man with a large belly, was amazed she could devour so much.