He sits in the shade on what’s left of the sawn-off log towards the north west boundary of the park. Knees up around his chest. The breeze, still bitter, is at his back, round his kidneys. They ache. Tommy tightens his scarf. Should have worn a thicker coat.
The log is being devoured, oh so slowly, from deep within its interior. Trickles of spewed out wood sit in miniature pyramids beneath Tommy’s feet. He senses, rather than feels, the vibrations. The gnawing. The microscopic mandibles. The marching and carrying and breeding and laying and hatching and marching again. He’s out of sight of the other folk drifting around the park, behind the raspberry canes and the blackcurrant bushes and the gooseberries that the kids never dare pluck because of Old Mr Rasmus.
Old Mr Rasmus is, of course, not a man but a tree, a great gnarled bowed overhung overwrought weeping creature that spits tears and fires needles and curses in the wind and sighs in the sun and sends little children to their certain death in the shallow pond under the willows by the swings.
One child has died in the pond. One that Tommy knows about anyway. But it doesn’t stop the fear of Old Mr Rasmus running through generations like perilous DNA. It was sixty years ago, maybe even seventy, and only folklore provides the details that vary on the who tells and the season of the telling and whether the teller is anywhere near Old Mr Rasmus at the time.
Wee Kathie is the expert with the lowdown. It was an awful affair, according to Wee Kathie, she being not that wee but being the daughter of Kathie Ronald, one of several Kathies in the area, and there’s a need to discern who is who. Wee Kathie is pushing 75, crooked with spondylosis, a proper fairy tale limp and a mouth that won’t stop gobbing.
Wee Kathie was there on the day, so she says, sitting demure, her words, all of these are her words, under Old Mr Rasmus, with her aunt Mathilda, her Uncle Ben and her cousin Big Donald. Big Donald would have been ten, eleven maybe. A soft spreading tummy on the lad, fat pink cheeks and a scramble of ginger curls damp around his forehead and pinned back behind his ears.
Aunt Mathilda is pouring thick dark tea from a metal flask for her and her husband Ben, and Wee Kathie is pouring home-made ginger beer for her and cousin Big Donald. Woman and girl pouring, man and boy waiting to be served.
It was like that in those days, probably still is, Wee Kathie says, pausing to hoik and spit in the docken leaves behind her under the oak tree, or to blow her nose hard into an already used tissue in the community shop, or to take her tea two sugars no milk, hen, in both hands to hide the trembling and stop the spilling.
Well they are both pouring and Uncle Ben is leant back on the big green and black tartan blanket, borrowed from the sofa in the front room, leaning back on his rolled up tweed elbows, taking a puff of his pipe, when there is the most almighty scream.
Jesus wept, Aunt Mathilda says and the spouting tea shoots across the blanket and scalds Wee Kathie’s bare knees. Wee Kathie shrieks and in turn dodges and twists and the spouting ginger beer shoots across Big Donald’s belly and into the groin of his shorts. Looked like he pissed himself he probably did, her eyebrows raise on the telling. Another scream, this one different, louder, even more blood curdling.
Both screams from over there, Wee Kathie always pauses at this point and waves a hand in the general direction of in front of her. By the pond. Well of course we get up and we run. Run towards the screams. All four of us although Aunt Mathilda isn’t’t that fast on her feet what with her good shoes and her Sunday dress and not wanting to leave the best blanket unattended you couldn’t trust anybody in them days not even on the Sabbath.
Tommy rocks back and forward. Tips his head back and stares up at Old Mr Rasmus. The branches spin and jitter in the breeze. Something jumps up up leaping from branch to branch. Needles whirl to the ground. A couple land on his knees. A squirrel? Too fast and too camouflaged to see. The tree smells of disinfectant. The stuff he used to clean floors with. Before pine went out of fashion and they all moved to peach and bleach.
It was such a sunny day, you know, warm, and the park was full of folk, families mainly and when we get to the pond, at this point she always drops her voice, well, you couldn’t believe it.
There’s a boar, you know the black ones with the bristles and the patches of pink and the great tubular snout that is iron-fisted in its strength that boar is standing in the pond with the Keenan’s wee lad under its front trotters, only three he is, that boar, it has him face down in the water and it’s pushing him down pushing pushing, and the boar is roaring and stamping and no one can get near all of them men running into the pond and trying to haul the boar off but it’s too late far too late, that boar did for him, Bob Archer’s prize boar killed wee Jamie Keenan right there in front of us all.
Tommy hugs his knees tighter in. A brown ant crosses his red sneakers, then another and another. Several seem to be carrying tiny grains of white rice. A chain of ants with work to do. He doesn’t have work to do, not this week, not any week. He shakes his feet and the ants keep going. Sticky feet cling-ons. Ants so busy they don’t even notice they’re trucking over his shaking shoes. Him so out of work he doesn’t even notice the day of the week never mind the time.
There’s a plaque on Old Mr Rasmus, about as high up as a small boy could reach on tiptoes. It doesn’t mention the boar, or the wee lad by name. It’s wooden, square, dulled coffee brown with age, the size of a large dinner plate. It just says ‘Prayers’, likely done with a hot black poker, and there’s an outline of what could be a balloon on a string. The plaque is right there on Old Mr Rasmus, like the tree was somehow involved.
But how come the tree, anyone who can think things through in logical steps always asks Wee Kathie in a tone challenging enough for enquiry but not enough to be rude.
Tommy plays through the possibilities. The boar hiding behind the tree. The boar hiding in the tree. The boar waiting to take its chance.
They say Old Mr Rasmus helped the boar, Wee Kathie says, rubbing behind her back with fingers that have long since lost their shape and willingness to scratch. Wee Kathie stops then. She’s got things to do. People to see. Honestly she doesn’t know why she gabs so much.
No one can remember who first found the plaque or even went it went up. You see, says Wee Kathie on other days, no one went to the park for a year or two after that, not even the men with their pipes, certainly not the women. The women took the tram across town, kept the children close. Bob Archer gave up the pigs. No one spoke of the Keenan lad, no one mentioned his name. You didn’t in those days, Wee Kathie says. It was awfully bad luck. No one wants to be touched by that do they. The Keenans, well they moved away. Some said they went to Airdrie, others mentioned Paisley. Either way, they needed a fresh start. You would, wouldn’t you.
Tommy studies Old Mr Rasmus. His bark, his crooks, his knots, his intertwines. He spots his own face up where the trunk separates in two. It’s definitely him. The square jawline. The drooping eyelids. The right ear with its torn lobe. Wee Kathie’s face is further down. He sees the knitted hair. The mouthy lips, the neck too puffed up by thyroid.
And just below, to the left of what might be Wee Kathie’s shoulder, the savage curl of a boaring snout. Around its nostrils a glimpse of bristles. Thick boorish whiskers that stub across its face. Above the snout drilled out holes that are surely eyes. A bee hovers, buzzes, and disappears into the left hole. A fly lands on a protrusion – what must be a tongue. Down on the ground dirt is kicking up on its own. The prints on the ground are cloven. There’s no doubt about that.
Old Mr Rasmus grunts and rumbles. His needles blather and gab. The ants on Tommy’s shoes about turn and march towards the pond. All of them gone. Not a single straggler. Tommy stands up, shakes his jacket. Takes a step towards the trunk.
From deep within Old Mr Rasmus a throaty gargle. A whine that starts shallow and ends deep. A slice of bark falls to the ground. Then another. And another. The Prayer plaque trembles and loosens, its right hand screw falling, landing in the soil that is still digging itself out of the ground. The plaque stills, skewiff.
The smell has changed. From disinfectant to sulphur. Sulphur and urine and shit.
Behind Tommy a rustle, somewhere beyond the raspberry canes. He turns. A small face in amongst the leaves. Blue eyes. A red sunhat. Old fashioned somehow. A chubby hand reaching towards him. Something like pond weed in his grip.
Old Mr Rasmus splitting and cracking. A terrible rupturing roar.
Tommy thrown to the ground by a stinking heaving bristling gallop. Left winded on his back across the log. His head leaking thick sticky blood.
The shriek of a small boy.
And then an adult.
Jamie!
SANDERLINGS 