Highways to a War by Christopher J. Koch Page A

happened, mate.” His voice was just audible, and he lit a cigarette before continuing. “I had a row with the old man. I walked off the farm. I’ve been doing odd jobs ever since.”
    “I’m sorry,” I said. “Can’t it be made up?”
    He shook his head. “It’ll never be made up. I don’t want to make it up. He’s cut me out of his will like he was going to do with Ken. The old bastard could be dying, and I wouldn’t make it up. I’ll never go back.”
    I asked him if he wanted to tell me about it, but he shook his head again. “It’s history now, Ray. I never wanted to go farming, anyway.”
    I didn’t press him, and the next silence must have lasted half an hour. Then, somewhere in the long straight run through Ep ping Forest, he spoke again, his voice only just audible above the noisy little engine.
    “It was about Maureen Maguire,” he said.
    And now he began to talk. His face, always in profile, showed little expression when I glanced at it. But it was illuminated only fleetingly by passing headlights, and I may not have seen all that showed on it.
    The muted pain in his voice was another matter. It seemed to fill the car; to be one with the buzzing of the engine.
     
     
    He’d wanted to marry her, he said. All through his teenage years, he’d waited for her every summer, when the pickers came. He’d proposed when he was nineteen, and she’d accepted.
    “But nothing would make the old man agree to it,” he said. “He was a bloody snob: he said pickers were rubbish, and no daughter of a picker was good enough to marry. That wasn’t true; they were good people. And Maureen was a Catholic, and he had no time for Catholics. I hated the old man for that. There was no way he was going to stop me marrying her—but we agreed to wait until I was old enough to leave the farm.”
    He paused; then he began again, and there were no more pauses after that. He was talking about Luke Goddard.
    It’s a long time ago now, and I can’t reproduce the rest of his words exactly. The things that come back to me most vividly may not always be the things he laid most emphasis on himself; and it seems to me now that he kept coming back to the nettles in the gully. The stinging nettles and Luke Goddard seemed oddly connected in his mind—and I thought I could half understand this. Like stained and mildewed cloth, their smell itself stained, the dark green weeds recalled something terrible: something in an ancient life that had to be paid for.
    He’d followed Luke Goddard about when he was young, Mike said. This was at eleven and twelve years old, before he took up with Maureen. After that the position would be reversed, and it would be Goddard who would follow them. Since Goddard was said to be mad, he was a diversion; and Mike had the idea at eleven that a mad adult might reveal secrets that sane ones hid from children. But the hermit rarely spoke, except occasionally to turn and abuse him, in that gabbling language of his that could scarcely be understood. Or maybe the words were too difficult, Mike said: his father had once said that Goddard had been “an educated man”—speaking of him in the past tense, as though he were a corpse.
    He told me how he’d once peered through the door of Goddard’s gray weatherboard hut, when the hermit was out. He’d seen unclean bedding, and piles of junk; there was a smell like the den of an animal, and he was afraid to go in.
    The old man had led him over those spaces of grass that were green as Wales, and beyond into the bush grass I remembered: territories wan as paper. And then Goddard went down into the gully: a place of fear and gloom. That was where the stinging nettles were: spiteful, stained weeds from an older, stained century, an older country, making Mike know he’d come too far. He somehow conveyed the notion to me that when he entered this gully he trespassed into the nineteenth century, when the farm had been founded. And he’d come to see Goddard too as