A Short Story about taking control of your life.
By Anthony Farmer
Do it Yourself
‘Well
I can’t stop you from coming can I? You’re going to come anyway. We want to
stay here on the farm. It’s where we’ve been all the years since we got married
and that’s final!’.’
The old man stares out of the window at
the windswept yard and the neglected field beyond where dock and thistle sway
in squalling showers. He listens to his son on the other end of the line,
shakes his head to and fro as if trying to prevent the words getting to him.
He
opens the window and throws the phone out into the yard. He watches it skid
across the grey shiny flag stones and slam into the brick wall of the outhouse.
It rebounds and comes to a stop, spinning slowly inches from the grid with the
collapsed cast-iron cover.
‘I got to get going before he arrives,’ he
mumbles to himself. I owes it My Sweet’.
He
shuts the window at the second attempt; the wood frame has swollen with the
rain through lack of paint and won’t fit the casement without some persuasion.
He pulls himself through the room as if in slow motion, each hand alternately
steadying himself on the sink, then counter, then table, a chair back and
eventually to the doorway, through to the narrow gloomy hall. The house is
silent and smells musty. The wind provides background noise, ruffling, gusting
and somewhere squeezing itself through a crack in the glass of an upper story
window producing a high pitched plaintive whistling. He opens the front door
and slams it behind him.
He makes his way round to the back of the house,
leaning into the unforgiving wind, passing a rusting bath, a tangle of two
push-me-pull-pull-me mowers and bits of an iron gate overgrown with nettle and
willow herb. At the back of the house he doesn’t notice the litter of discarded
machinery, chimney pots, lumps of stone, an ancient bicycle and much that’s
unrecognisable; the flotsam and jetsam thrown in by a tide of years; never
properly getting rid of anything.
He enters a wooden shed through a creaking
door. It’s full to the rafters with all manner of junk, jars full of washers,
screws, nails, nuts and bolts, cup hooks, old keys and clock parts. Boxes
balance precariously upon one another to reach the roof. Rolls of carpet, cardboard tubes, wicker
baskets, several bird cages, folds of bitumen felt, pieces of chicken wire and
flattened cardboard boxes are stuffed into gaps. On almost every surface,
politely bowing columns of yoghurt pots and margarine tubs and all manner of
containers, rest precariously,
Like
the stalagmites in the nearby caves. The benches on either side of the central
isle, where once he’d worked with wood, have been engulfed by the tide of
‘stuff’ too precious to get rid of. Here he once made a kidney shaped dressing
table for his Sweet on their Golden Wedding Anniversary, still in use until
recently in the freezing front bedroom. Generations of spiders have constructed
a net-like web that holds the whole frozen stage-set in a moment of time. He
grabs a dusty drawer knob and yanks open a draw. His bony fingers rifle through
bits of plumbing ware and seizes upon a bright blue plastic ‘threaded stop
end’. He holds it up to the light, blows off the dust. ‘Hmmm, it’ll do the job
quite nicely. Just as well I saved that, init? He shoves the drawer shut with
his knee, turns and walks out of the shed, slamming the door.
Outside,
the rain has stopped. The old man feels better for finding the blue plastic
‘threaded stop end’. ‘If you want something done, do it yourself,’ he mutters.
Behind an open barn, he walks to a recently
excavated hole. He bends to pick up the end of a length of the blue water pipe
that leads back through a hole in the timber cladding of the open barn to a tap
on a standpipe. He holds the end of the pipe and forces on the stop end. He
examines his handiwork. ‘Good job,’ he says to himself. He drops the pipe down
the side of the rough excavation, so that it comes to rest at the bottom.
He turns and walks back to the open barn.
There, he shuffles sideways to the rear of his old grey Massy Ferguson which
has lain idle for more years than he can remember. Behind the tractor he heaves
out two scaffolding planks, one at a time. He’d nicked these two planks from
the roofers who came to make safe the brick chimneys on the house. He reckoned
they wouldn’t miss two planks and he was proved right. ‘I didn’t pay ‘em
neither!’ he confesses aloud, and chuckles. One at a time he drags each plank
and places them so they make a ramp down into the whole he dug.
Hands on hips, breathing hard, he looks
about him. The valley curves gently upward, then steeply to the rim of hills. The
trees in the valley bottom are in full summer leaf, teased by the wind. He
glimpses the wriggling strip of the stream reflecting the silver of the sky as
it splashes over rocks on its way to the sea. Hedges, like a sewer’s seams,
divide the grass green valley bottom into manageable lots. The wind carries to
him the urgent ring tones of his mobile phone on the flagstones of the
backyard. ‘They’ll be ‘ere soon enough,’ he says to himself and sets off with
renewed effort to find the wheelbarrow.
He parks the wheelbarrow outside the front
door and steps into the house. He remains inside for some time before emerging,
staggering under the weight of his recently deceased wife wrapped in a dark
blue blanket. She bends over his left shoulder like a sagging roll of
carpet. Gently he lowers her into the
wheelbarrow. He stands upright gulping lungs full of the damp air, hand on his
hips. When he’s sufficiently recovered he wheels the barrow down the path to
the hole he has dug. At the lip of the hole he rests again before tilting the
wheelbarrow high enough for the bundle of blue blanket to slide down the ramp
of two planks into the hole.
‘Sorry me old dear, but that’s the end of
the journey,’ he mumbles and wipes the end of his nose with the sleeve of his
jacket,’ like I said, it’ll be better for us both in the long run. We’re not
ones to be waited on. we’ve always done things for ourselves.’
He throws the wheelbarrow aside where it
topples over and comes to rest in a clump of willow herb and nettle. The old
man looks around him at the green valley and the stream. His watery eyes follow
the steep sides of the valley up to the ridge where several large crows, teeter
and slide on the updraft of the wind. He turns and slowly tramps to the barn.
At the standpipe he turns the tap
clockwise several times until it jams. The pressure is strong enough to force
tiny jets of ice cold water out of the connection with the blue pipe. The old
man jumps back to avoid being drenched. He walks quickly, almost at a trot back
to the hole. On the way he picks up two common house bricks he sees in the
grass and thrusts one brick in each pocket of his jacket. He drags out the
planks, tossing them aside. That done he sits on the edge of the hole and
lowers himself down, with only his head visible over the rim of the excavation.
He drags his wife closer to the centre and with some effort lowers himself down
to lie beside her on the cold wet earth.
The two shapes lay motionless. Suddenly the
old man thrusts out his left hand and takes hold of the end of the blue pipe
and draws it to him. With his right hand he unscrews the blue ‘threaded stop
end’ and a jet of water busts forth from the pipe, strong enough to snatch it
from his grasp. The pipe stands up and waves momentarily in the air before
coming to rest beyond his reach, the clear glistening water hurriedly flooding
the grave.
The old man closes his eyes and sees in his
mind himself and his beloved wife lying at the bottom of the valley among the
trees and the green pastures, surrounded by the rim of the hills. He hears
clearly the babbling of water which he thinks is the stream and he’s content.
Later, there’s no-one to hear the approach of a white van driven by the old
man’s son with his young family winding its way up the twisting pot-holed drive
to the isolated farmhouse. The water in the hole has already covered the two
bodies and overflows onto the road as the van splashes through it and comes to
a stop.
The End
