Sacred Country Read Free

rosettes to the final five.’
    There was laughter at the idea of the rosettes. The babies were hushed by this sudden ripple of noise. Estelle, with Mary and Tim, stood by one of the tent flaps, praying for a breeze and for the unknown to arrive in Irene’s lap. Mary had her eyes closed. She felt a sudden sorrowful fury. She didn’t want there to be a contest after all.
    The judges barely looked at Pearl. They walked on with just a glance and the only thing that came to Irene waiting patiently on her chair was a waft of French perfume as Lady Elliot passed.
    The competition was won by a Mrs Nora Flynn. The unknown became a trug and trowel, and Mrs Nora Flynn laid her baby, Sally Mahonia, in the trug, like a prize cabbage.
    On the way home in the cart, Irene seemed as content as if the day had never been. Timmy was silent, pale from an afternoon like a dream, tugged here and there and seeing nothing but shimmer. Estelle said bitterly that a trug and trowel could not be classified as ‘unknown’ and she drove the pony at a slow, disappointed pace.
    Mary said: ‘I didn’t clap when that Sally Mahonia won. I didn’t clap at all.’ And then, tired out from scratching her chest and eating cake and wanting Pearl to be recognised as the Most Beautiful Baby in Swaithey, she fell asleep in Irene’s lap.
    Pearl, unvisited by any thoughts, slept near her on the barley sacks, softly snoring.
Mary:
    I can remember way back, almost to when I was born.
    I can remember lying in my parents’ bed, jammed between them. It was an iron bed with a sag in the middle. They put me into the sag and gravity made them fall towards me, wedging me in.
    Our land was full of stones. As soon as I could walk, I was given a bucket with a picture of a starfish on it and told to pick stones out of the earth. My father would walk ahead with a big pail that was soon so heavy he could barely carry it. I think he thought about stones all the time and he tried to make me think about them all the time. I was supposed to take my starfish bucket with me wherever I went and have my mind on the stones.
    I can remember getting lost in a flat field. It was winter and the dark came round me and hid me from everything and swallowed up my voice. The only thing I could see was my bucket, which had a little gleam on it, and the only thing I could hear was the wind in the firs. I began to walk towards the wind, calling to my father. I walked right into the trees. They sighed and sighed. I put my arms round one of the scratchy fir trunks and stayed there, waiting. I thought Jesus might come through the wood holding up a lantern.
    My parents came and found me with torches. My mother was sobbing. My father picked me up and wrapped me inside his old coat that smelled of seed. He said: ‘Mary, why didn’t you stay where you were?’ I said: ‘My bucket is lost on the field.’ My father said: ‘Never mind about the bucket. You’re the one.’
    But when I was three, I was no longer the one. Tim was born and my father kept saying the arrival of Timmy was a miracle. I asked my mother whether I had been a miracle and she said: ‘Oh, men are like that, especially farmers. Pay no heed.’
    But after Timmy came, everything changed. My mother and father used to put him between them in their sagging bed andfall towards him. When I saw this, I warned them I would kick Timmy to death; I said I would put his pod through the mangle. So my father began to think me evil. I’d go and tell him things and he’d say: ‘Don’t talk to me, Mary. Don’t you talk to me.’ So I stopped talking to him at all. When we went stone picking together, we would go up and down the furrows, up and down, up and down, with each of our minds locked away from the other.
    My vision began to be faulty soon after Timmy was born. I would see light bouncing at the corner of my eye. Distant things like birds became invisible. People would separate and become two of themselves.
    I tried to tell my mother how