He didn’t need to do no pedalling, hardly, heading into town along the Kettering Road. All Henry needed do was roll downhill and touch his brake blocks on the street once in a while, so that he didn’t get up too much speed and shake his trolley what he pulled behind him all to bits upon the cobble stones. The houses and the shops with all they signs and windows flowed by on each side of him like river-drift as he went rattling down into the centre. Pretty much he had the whole road to himself, it being early like it was. A little further on there was a streetcar headed into town the same way he was going, just a couple people on its upstairs there, and coming up the hill towards him was a feller had a cart as he was pushing got all chimney brushes on. Besides that, one or two folks was around, out with they errands on the sidewalk. There was an old lady looked surprised when Henry cycled past her, and two fellers wearing caps seemed like they on they way to work stared at him hard, but he’d been round these parts too long to pay it any mind. He liked it better, though, down where he was in Scarletwell. The folks there, plenty of them, was worse off than he was so he’d got nobody looking down on him, and when they seen him riding round they’d all just shout out, “Hey, Black Charley. How’s your luck?” and that was that.
There was a little breeze now, strumming on the streetcar lines strung overhead while he went under them. He rolled round by the church there on the Grove Road corner to his right and swerved to miss some horse-shit what was lying in the street as he come in towards the square. He made another bend when he went by the Unitarian chapel on the other side, and then it was all shops and public houses and the big old leather warehouse what they had in back of Mr. Bradlaugh’s statue. Leather was important to the trade round here and always had been, but it still made Henry shake his head how otherwise the town was mostly bars and churches. Could be it was all that stitching shoes had folks so that they spent they private time in getting liquored up or praying.
Somebody was even drunk asleep in the railed-off ground that was round the block the statue stood on when he pedalled past it on the left of him. He didn’t think Mr. Charles Bradlaugh would approve of that if he was looking down from Heaven, what with him being so forthright in his views on alcohol, but then since Mr. Bradlaugh hadn’t had no faith in the Almighty it was likely that he’d not approve of Heaven neither. Bradlaugh was somebody Henry couldn’t get to grips with or make up his mind about. Man was an atheist there on the one hand, and to Henry’s mind an atheist was just another way of saying fool. Then on the other hand you had the way he was against strong drink, which Henry could admire, and how he’d stood up for the coloured folks in India when he weren’t standing up for all the poor folks here at home. He’d spoke his mind and done what he considered the right thing, Henry supposed. Bradlaugh had been a good man and the Lord would possibly forgive the atheism when all that was took into account, so Henry figured how he ought to let it go by too. The man deserved his fine white statue with its finger pointing west to Wales and the Atlantic Sea and to America beyond, while in the same sense you could say that Buffalo Bill deserved his shabby piece of stone. Just ’cause a feller said he weren’t no Christian didn’t stop him acting like one, and although he didn’t like to think it, he could see how sometimes the reverse of that was true as well.
He went on past the shop what had the Cadbury’s chocolate and the sign for Storton’s Lungwort painted on the wall up top. He’d had some trouble coughing lately and he thought it could be he should maybe try a little of that stuff, if it weren’t too expensive. Next you’d got the store what had the ladies’ things, then Mr. Brugger’s place with all the clocks and pocket-watches in its window. Up ahead of him he’d nearly caught up to the streetcar, which he saw now was the number six what went down to St. James’s End, what they called Jimmy’s End. There was a paid advertisement up on the rear of it for some enlarging spectacles, with two big round eyes underneath the business name what made it look as though the backside of the streetcar had a face. It reached the crossroads they were nearing and went straight across with its bell clanging, staring back towards him like it was surprised or scared as it went on down Abington Street there, while he turned left and coasted down York Road in the direction of the hospital, touching his wood blocks on the cobbles every now and then to slow him down
.
There was another crossroads by the hospital down halfway, with the route what went on out towards Great Billing. He went over it and carried on downhill the way what he was going. On the corner of the hospital’s front yard as he went past it, near the statue of the King’s head what they had there, some young boys was laughing at his wheels with all the rope on. One of them yelled out that he should have a bath, but Henry made out like he didn’t hear and went on down to Beckett’s Park, as used to be Cow Meadow. Ignorant was what they were, brung up by ignorant folk. Paid no attention they’d move on and find some other fool thing they could laugh at. They weren’t going to string him up or shoot him, and in that case far as Henry was concerned about it, they could shout out what the heck they liked. So long as he weren’t bothered none then all they did was make they own selves look like halfwits, far as he could see.
He took a left turn at the bottom, curving round by the old yellow stone wall and into the Bedford Road just over from the park, where he touched down his wooden blocks and fetched his bicycle and cart up at the drinking fountain what was set back in a recess there. He climbed down off his saddle and he leaned the whole affair against the weather-beat old stones, with all the dandelions growed out from in between, while he stepped to the well and took a drink. It weren’t that he was thirsty, but if he was down here then he liked to take a few sips of the water, just for luck. This was the place they said Saint Thomas Becket quenched his thirst when he come through Northampton ages since, and that was good enough for Henry.
Ducking down into the alcove, Henry pressed one pale palm on the worn brass spigot, with his other cupped to catch the twisted silver stream and scoop it to his lips, an action he repeated three or four times ’til he’d got a proper mouthful. It was good, and had the taste of stone and brass and his own fingers. Henry reckoned that amounted to a saintly flavour. Wiping a wet hand on one leg of his shiny pants he straightened up and climbed back on the bicycle, stood in his seat to get the thing in motion. He sailed south-east on the Bedford Road, with first the park and all its trees across from him and then the empty fields stretched to the abbey out at Delapre. The walls and corners of Northampton fell away behind like weights from off his back, and all he had was flat grass between him and the toy villages off in the haze of the horizon. Clouds was piled like mashed potato in blue gravy, and Black Charley found that he was whistling some Sousa while he went along.
The marching music made him think of Buffalo Bill again, sounding all puffed up like it did, which led him back to thoughts of Kansas and Elvira Conely. Great Lord, that woman had some spirit in her, setting up her laundry there in Marshall way ahead of the great exodus and doing as well as she did. She’d knowed Bill Hickok too, but Hickok had been in his grave by the late eighteen-seventies when Henry and his parents got to the Midwest. From how Elvira spoke about the feller, you got the impression that Wild Bill had had a lot of good in him, and that his reputation was deserved. Mind you, in private and among her own kind, she’d admit that Britton Johnson, who she’d also knowed and who was also dead by that time, could have shot the pants off Wild Bill Hickok. It had took a bunch of twenty-five Comanche warriors to bring Britton Johnson down, you never mind about no lone drunk and no lucky shot in some saloon. Yet even little children over here, they knew of Buffalo Bill and Wild Bill Hickok but nobody ever heard of Johnson and you didn’t have to think about it long to figure why that was. Looked like a Pharaoh, how Elvira spoke of him. Looked fine without his shirt on was her exact words.
Uphill and on the left of him, across the fenced-off grass and the black spreads of woodland, Henry could about make out the rooftops of the fancy hospital they’d got up there for people who was troubled in they minds and could afford the rent. For them what couldn’t, there was what you called a workhouse in the old Saint Edmund’s parish, out the Wellingborough Road, or else the Berry Wood asylum round the turn there on the way through Duston. Leaving it behind him, Henry pedalled harder where a bridge bulged up above a river tributary, and had a tickle in his belly like he’d got no weight when he shot down the other side and on towards Great Houghton. He was thinking of Elvira still, admiring her in a more understanding and respectful fashion than the way what he’d admired her in his younger days.
’Course, she’d been only one of the outstanding gals they had in those parts round that time, but she’d been first, upping to Kansas on her own in sixty-eight, and Henry thought a lot of them good women was just following Elvira’s lead, not that it took away from what they did. There was Miss St. Pierre Ruffin helping folks with cash from her Relief Association. There was Mrs. Carter, Henry Carter’s missus, talked her husband into walking with her all the way from Tennessee, him carrying the tools and her the blankets. Thinking of it, it had mostly been the women was behind the whole migration, even when their men-folk shrugged it off and made out they was just fine where they was. Henry could see now what he hadn’t seen back then, how that was ’cause the women had the worst of it down in the South, what with the rapes and having to bring up they children with all that. Henry’s own momma had told Henry’s poppa how if he weren’t man enough to get his wife and son to some place safe and decent, then she’d just take Henry and light out for Kansas on her own. Said how she’d walk there like the Carters if needs be, although when Henry’s pa had finally relented they’d gone in a wagon same as everybody else. Considering those times made Henry’s shoulder itch the way it always did, so that he took one hand from off the handlebar to scratch it through his jacket and his shirt the best he could.
A watermill went by him on his right, ducks honking as they took up from a close-by pond where all the morning light from off it was too bright to look at. Sheridan near Marshall had been where Elvira Conely had made her home after she broke up with the soldier feller she was married to out in St. Louis. Back in them days Sheridan had been considered worse than Dodge for all its gambling and murders and loose women, but Elvira carried herself like a queen, straight-backed and tall and black as ebony. When later on she took up as the governess for rich old Mr. Bullard and his family, Bullard’s children put it all about how she was kin to royalty from Africa or some such, and Elvira never said or did a thing what could be held to contradict that. Last he’d heard she was in Illinois, and Henry hoped that she was doing fine.
He went on with the climbing sun before him and the roadside puddles flashing in his eyes. The shadows from the moving cloud-banks slipped across the shaggy fields a little at a time as though the summer was on its last legs, unshaved and staggering like a bum. Weeds in the ditches had boiled up and spilled into the road or swallowed fence-posts whole, where dying bees was stumbling in the dying honeysuckle, trying to drag the season out a little longer and not let it slip away. Upon his right he passed the narrow lane what would have took him down to Hardingstone and pedalled on along the top side of Great Houghton, where he met a couple farm carts going by the other way all loaded up with straw. The feller on the box of the first wagon looked away from Henry like he didn’t want to let on he could even see him, but the second cart was driven by a red-faced farmer what knew Henry from his previous visits to those parts and reined his horse up, grinning as he stopped to say hello.
“Why, Charley, you black bugger. Are youm come round here to steal us valuables again? Ah, it’s a wonder we’m got two sticks to us name, with all that plunder what youm ’ad already.”
Henry laughed. He liked the man, whose name was Bob, and knew as Bob liked him. The making fun of people, it was just a way they had round here of saying you was close enough to have a joke together, and so he came back in kind.
“Well, now, you know I got my eye on that gold throne o’ your’n, that big one what you sit in when you got the servants bringing in the venison and that.”
Bob roared so loud he scared his mare. Once she was settled down again, the two men asked each other how they wives and families was keeping and such things as that, then shook each other by the hand and carried on they individual ways. In Henry’s case, it wasn’t far before he made a right turn down Great Houghton’s high street, past the schoolhouse with blackberry hedges hanging over its front wall. He went along beside the village church then steered his bicycle into the purse-bag close what had the rectory, where the old lady who kept house would sometime give him things she didn’t want no more. Climbing down off his saddle, Henry thought the rectory looked grand, the way the light caught on its rough brown stones and on the ivy fanned out in a green wing up above its entranceway. The close was shaded by an oak tree so that sun fell through the leaves like burning jigsaw pieces scattered on the cobbles and the paths. Birds hopping round up in the branches didn’t act concerned or stop they singing when he lifted up the iron knocker with a lion’s head on and let it fall on the big black-painted door.
The woman, who he knew as Mrs. Bruce, answered his knock and seemed like she was pleased to see him. She asked Henry in, so long as he could leave his boots on the front step, and made him take a cup of weak tea and a plate of little sandwiches there with her in the parlour while she looked out all the bits and pieces what she’d put aside. He didn’t know why when he thought of Mrs. Bruce he thought of her as an old lady, for the truth was that she couldn’t be much older than what Henry was himself, that being near on sixty years of age. Her hair was white as snow, but so was his, and he believed it might be how she acted with him made him think of her as old, with something in her manner like to that of Henry’s mother. She was smiling while she poured him out his tea and asked him things about religion like she always did. She was a churchgoer like him, except that Mrs. Bruce was in the choir. She told him all the favourite hymns she’d got as she went back and forth about the room and gathered up the worn-out clothes there were what he could have.
“ ‘The Day Thou Gavest, Lord, Is Ended’. There’s another one I like. Did they sing hymns back where you come from, Mr. George?”
Lowering the doll-house china from his lips, Henry agreed they did.
“Yes, ma’am. We didn’t have no church, though, so my folks would sing while they was working or else round the fireside of an evening. I sure loved them songs. They used to send me off to sleep at night.”
Smoothing the doilies or whatever they was on her chair-arms, Mrs. Bruce peered at him with a sorry look upon her face.
“You poor soul. Was there one that you liked better than the others?”
Henry chuckled as he nodded, setting down his empty cup in its white saucer.
“Ma’am, for me there ain’t but one tune in the running. It was that ‘Amazing Grace’ I liked the best, I don’t know if you heard it?”
The old lady beamed, delighted.
“Ooh, yes, that’s a lovely song. ‘How sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me.’ Ooh, yes, I know that. Lovely.”
She looked up towards the picture rail a little down below the ceiling there and frowned like she was trying to think of something.
“Do you know, I think the chap who wrote it lived not far from here, unless I’ve mixed him up with someone else. John Newton, now was that his name? Or was it Newton who chopped down the apple tree and said he couldn’t tell a lie?”
After he’d let that one sink in a while and puzzled it all through he told her that to his best understanding, it had been a man named Newton who sat underneath an apple tree and figured out from that why things fell down instead of up. The feller who’d said how he couldn’t tell a lie, that was George Washington the president, and far as Henry knew it was a cherry tree what he’d cut down. She listened, nodding.