Salt by Jeremy Page Page B

taking wing along the stock. George breached it several times, looked appreciatively down the polished files of its barrels, then, with a nod to the other men, went into the house and stood it against the sideboard in the breakfast room, where it would stay for the next eighteen years.
    Some time in the ashes of the afternoon Lil’ stirred, climbed off the couch and stumbled into the breakfast room, the imprint of a badly frayed cushion on her cheek. Perhaps she stubbed her toe on the gun leaning against the sideboard. Possibly the afternoon’s heat made her curious belly-button itch, and so she stood there, scratching it at the window, listening to the sounds of George moving rusty metal about in one of the sheds. The image of Lil’ standing by the grimy window rubbing her belly seems to fit with things I learned many years later about her. But all that is to come. She stands there, in her olive-coloured button-through shirt-waister dress, staring at four laying hens that had been left in a net in the yard, all of them with their beaks parted in the hot afternoon sun, and then beyond the hens she sees George, dirty George, with his shirt torn and grease down his arm and dust in his hair and a big grin on his face and two very dead and well-hung pheasants strung up and held in his right hand.
    It soothed her to rip the feathers off the birds. She plucked them at the kitchen table, listening to the feathers tearing from the skin like plasters from a wound. The down settled softly on to the tiles, and when she went for a bowl the room seemed to come alive as they stirred round her feet. She watched them settle again, then she crouched and blew delicately across the tiles. The feathers charged up in a rolling wave towards the yard and she kept them in the air, blowing and wafting them and with sudden dizziness she breathed life into that miserable house, sweeping the man’s dark smell into the attic, the under-stairs cupboard, the corners, replacing it with the warm roast of pheasant, the tang of apple sauce and a creamy mash of potatoes and swede. Silverfish were washed down the sink, out went the boxes of tinned vegetables and corned beef. Out went the empty bottles of beer, the rusty tin-opener, the broken-tipped bread knife, the countless mugs without handles. Stale tobacco leaves were bagged-up, the range de-greased and rubbed down. Kettle descaled. The tines were straightened on forks, the knives sharpened. Plates polished till their rims shone like smiles.
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    They ate in the yard using their fingers rather than the former tenant’s cutlery, gazing at the traps with their rusty open jaws. We don’t want them looking at us. Bad omen, George says. Shall I chuck them? she asks, half putting the plate down to show she wants to help him, and he says best not to, you never know, and leaving the traps he turned to the rest of the junk and built a fire, turning all that misery into hot brilliant flames, powdery ash and thick smoke, which couldn’t tarnish the gorgeous cerulean blue of a late-summer sky.
    What a beautiful fire. The first of the fires - for there will be several more: boats set alight; an elm tree; a hen coop with all its secrets; the festivals of fire on the Norfolk marshes, which always conjured trouble; the fire Kipper Langore harnessed in his fireworks; and the smoke he used to cure his fish. My family’s story is of fire in one hand and smoke in the other. Fire to destroy and smoke to preserve.
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    Often, inexplicably, Lil’ woke to find herself standing on the back lawn in the middle of the night, escaping some dark shadow of that house, or in the morning, when George had breezed off to the estate, she might find herself frozen at the kitchen sink, watching soap suds drip one by one from her hands. Sometimes she might catch her reflection in the newly polished curve of a soup spoon, and in it she’d see a life bent beyond recognition for her. As the autumn nights