So she ran to the forest, tears in her eyes, gathering wild garlic for a tincture she made with brandy and vinegar. She tore her hands up, pulling the “crow’s garlic” up through nettles and haw branches, and when she returned, her hands dripping blood, the vicar was there, praying over his body, his feet still wet with mud.
THEN CAME, Winefride told the boys, a destitution that ended the world of Merrie Worcestershire. While many of their friends fled for the city, Winefride, numb with grief, turned back to the Wyre.
She’d never lost her awe of the glimmering forest. It always resurrected itself. The disused hearths, after the Great War, quickly grew over with wild strawberry and strange fire moss with orange-tipped setae, as if the hearth’s embers, centuries old, still burned beneath. Wavy hairgrass, cowslip, and valerian took over the old barking brush-piles, and these became sites of badger runs and weasel dens. The Boogles were there, yes—it was their forest, and if you crossed them, they would bedevil the mind. Your next ramble into the forest for tinder might end with an adder biting your ankle. So you must tread with respect. This is what she’d been taught by her own grandfather when she herself was a little girl. When she spoke of the “mysterious mysteries” of the Wyre to Cuthbert and Drystan, she meant it not only as a serious admonition but as a bequest, too, of what to her was sacred knowledge, the Wonderments. She loved Wyre and its creatures, and she feared them, too.
calamity at dowles brook
THIRTY-FIVE YEARS AFTER CUTHBERT’S GRANDDADDY’S death, as the family sat socializing in the dark sitting room, Winefride found herself echoing, once again, the old sentiment about the “Boogles,” as she had with her daughter. This time she was warning her grandchildren as they contemplated a walk into the forest.
“Thee dunna want to hespel the Boogles,” Winefride was telling them. “There bist worse things in this world, but it’ll still be a mighty good job if you taks warnin’, chaps.”
“Hespel? That’s it, stop it, Mother,” Cuthbert and Drystan’s mum had answered. “Speak proper to these children, or they’ll grow up to be thieves living in Dudley. And poor. Or farmers.”
“An what’s wrong with farmers?” Gran had asked. “They inna any worse than the ewkins* in West Bromwich.”
“I want to see the Boogles,” Drystan had said that day. He was jiggling the front door’s knob, rocking on his heels, and nearly waking his sleeping great-uncle George. “And that magpie-sort goat.”
“Be good to that goat,” Granny said. “And stay out of the forest—or be careful. They’ve adders in there, little noodle-like ones, but adders no less.”
The two Birmingham boys obeyed their grandmother—at first. They bolted from the house but stopped almost immediately upon encountering the goat close-up. They stared in silence for a minute at the chewing, imperturbable goat. (“It’s a funny old goat,” Drystan kept saying. “Easily the best one I’ve ever seen.”) They carefully clambered over hedgerows and ran across a barley field and one of Bewdley’s many overgrazed pastures. They finally arrived at the sundrenched southeastern flank of the forest itself. Local children would have scampered right in, and they often did—but Cuthbert and Drystan, out of their West Brom world of street kickabouts and corner shops, dawdled. They’d just have a little look, but not enter the forest.
“Oooooooh, it’s really smashing,” said Drystan.
“It’s all right,” Cuthbert said glumly. “Can’t see much, not from here.”
A stand of very old oaks festooned with huge shriveled globes of gray-green mistletoe stood on the forest’s edge. It had been raining hard in recent days, yet there had been no relief from the high temperatures. The flora seemed scorched, raving with energy, subtropical. Yellowish liverwort with designs as filigreed as fine necklaces hung everywhere in strands. Regal stems of pinkish purple betony and Scottish thistle grew at the feet of the ancient trees. The shiny leaves of the oaks, enmeshed in striated sunbeams and swamped in golden light, gave the forest’s boundaries a kind of honeyed radiance.
Cuthbert leaned over and picked up a gnarled old black stick. For reasons one can hardly conceive, two condoms, uncurled but evidently unused, had been tied upon its end like ribbons of skin. Neither sibling knew what they were. Cuthbert pulled one of the condoms back and let it snap back.
“This is a good stick,” he said.
“Might do,” said Drystan. “Let me coppit for a second?”
Cuthbert handed it to him.