WITH THE RIGHT TOOLS, it was easy to get into the park itself at night, if not the zoo. It wasn’t Buckingham Palace—no spinning spike-wheels or crenellated walls capped with broken bottles pushed into mortar. He threw his leg over a low ironwork fence, well concealed between two bushes, and that was that. He made his way through a strange, manufactured, medievalesque playground, and past a famous sculpture called Wounded Elephant, which looked like a granite boulder melted. He’d seen it in the day and not been impressed, but he found himself stopping now. It was some kind of save-the-whales propaganda art. He sniffed it.
The smell—ancient, like frankincense, like lost time itself—reminded him of a cellar; he thought of the crypts of the old parish church in Worcestershire, in whose soil his grandfather, Alfred Wenlock, the wheat farmer, was supposed to have been buried. Cuthbert had never met the man, of course—he’d died when his mother was a mere four years old from the flash pneumonia traceable to a gas attack at Ypres. Henry had never met his father-in-law Alfie either, but he was the only human being he had ever truly spoken of with an odd respect, and Cuthbert wondered if his own father would have been more humane had the wheat farmer not always been, essentially, a ghost.
It was rare—too rare—that Cuthbert could feel self-pity, but he momentarily sensed the depth of his own unfair treatment, profoundly, and felt a righteous anger whenever he thought of the dead grandfather he had never met.
“Why didn’t you protect us?” he said aloud just then. “Why not? All we had was an old woman—and the otters.”
Cuthbert began to sob, but he soon stuffed the red ropes of pain back down his throat and made himself stop.
green st. cuthbert the wonderworker
CUTHBERT SAW HIS MONSTROUS FATHER WEEP FOR the second and last time in his life when the family—father, mother, and himself—took a harrowing trip to visit his grandfather’s grave, which his parents hadn’t visited for two decades. It was around 1970 or so—two years after Drystan’s vanishing during the trip to the aunties’ cottage, two years after he fell into Dowles Brook and was “saved” by the otter. Granny had been bedridden often at that time, he remembered, and he’d had to swear to his father not to tell Granny about the excursion. It was a rare moment of sensitivity on the part of his father.
“It would break her ’art,” his mother had explained. “She’s buried this part of the past and it shouldna be opened again.”
The Handleys had driven southwest from West Bromwich in their aquamarine Hillman Imp, through Dudley, Netherton, Quarry Bank, and Lye, to the other side of the Black Country, past Stourbridge and Kiddy, and once again to the narrow, jobless old lanes of the Wyre Forest.
Even though Alfie was his father-in-law, Harry Handley had revered the man he imagined—the soldier, the self-starting farmer, the morning drinker—far more than his own father, in fact, who still lived, in a caravan senior community, in Stafford, where he was curiously renowned for his excellent orange-peel rock cakes.
“If yow end up as ’af the bloke as Alfie Wenlock,” Henry was telling his son, “yow’ll make the old man proud.”
“But he wasn’t yowr father, was he?” Cuthbert remembered asking that day. “And Gran says he was gentle. He was very sweet. He was a sweet and gentle man.”
“Ha,” said his father. “He was a right hard man.”
CUTHBERT RECALLED how they careered up to an ancient Norman church, St. Cuthbert’s, his namesake, parking in a gravel semicircular drive. They were less than a kilometer from the Wyre Forest. There was the greenest grass he’d ever seen in the driveway’s center. The day was blue and clement, with splashy sunlight and swifts circling the square belltower like hot, torn electrons.
“Yow’re going to learn a thing or two,” his father told them, smiling, almost skipping up to the church. He was in a rare good mood. “Your granddaddy’s in the oldest church in this part of England!”
The sexton, a very thin man with white hair and thick white eyebrows, had showed them a jumble of misshapen stones mortared into an inside wall, stones, he said, from the “ode times church” the Normans had built St. Cuthbert’s above. An elaborate oak chancel screen, near the altar, was covered by the faces of men with foliage growing around their heads like halos. Oak and ivy leaves poured from their mouths. Some of the faces cried leaves.
Eventually, he took them into the crypt to examine a book of burial records. The “book,” as he called it, was kept in a modern steel strongbox in a desk that seemed unused and dusty. It took a long time to get the volume out and placed solidly upon the desk. There was a smell of frankincense.
“It’s Alfred Wistan Wenlock, you say?”
“Arr, died 1933,” answered his father.
The sexton began looking through the pages. “Handley . . . Handley . . . Handley,” he said. He settled on one page, and ran his thumb down a long column. He peered close, putting his face nearly against the paper. But he suddenly pulled away, almost jumping back. He scrutinized Cuthbert’s father. He seemed boldly nervous, shaking his head, frowning. He began flapping through the large, grid-covered pages again, but he hardly was looking—it was strictly for manners. Then he stopped.