The Quality of Mercy - By Barry Unsworth Page 0,43
while the boy hauled on it from the other side, until together they got it shifted into position on the sledge. Then, with one pushing from behind and one dragging from the front, they moved the loaded sledge to the pit bottom, where the corves were tallied, hung on the rope by the onsetters and drawn up.
This series of actions they continued for the fourteen hours of the shift, with two breaks to eat and drink—brief, because their wages depended on the amount of coal they moved. In the final two hours neither man nor boy had any thought at all. There was only the ache of the muscles, the patient endeavor to keep on till the time was up, the wish to be out of the dust and the shifting light, to get to the rope and wrap themselves in it and be drawn up into the open, into the friendly dark.
It was not until evening, when he was washing down, that Michael thought of Walker again, and then only because David was with him, and it was there that he had first noticed the boy’s bruises. David had said he wanted to be there, to see the fight, and Michael had found no reason against it, though knowing that if he were beaten David would suffer a double blow, forced to witness his own defeat and the loss of his champion.
From the beginning he had sworn his brother to secrecy. He had said nothing about the matter to anyone else in the family, hoping particularly to keep it from his father, who was violent in his rages and quite capable of challenging Walker’s father to a bout—or any other member of the family—if he saw things going against his son. Michael was glad, that Sunday morning, as he walked the half-mile or so to the big field—so called because it was a hundred acres in area—that he had made no mention of it. It was a personal quarrel; he had no desire at all for any public triumph. The only thing that mattered was that Walker should stop taking things out on his brother.
He had chosen for his seconds, first making them promise to say nothing to anyone, two men of his own age whom he had known for as long as he could remember—they had all three started down the mine at the same time. One of them was a cousin of Elsie Foster. There was no source of water anywhere near the field; it had to be carried, and the two took turns with the bucket and sponge as they walked beside him. It would have made more sense to choose a place nearer the Dene, where water could have been fetched from the beck, but the corner of the big field was the time-honored place for such encounters, and it would never have occurred to anyone to suggest anywhere else.
At the far end of the field the ground sloped down, then leveled out near the corner, so there was a clear space bounded on both sides by fences and giving a certain sense of enclosure. Michael and his small party were first to arrive, and while they waited he stood a little apart from the others, tense now with knowledge of the test he knew to be coming. In spite of this tension he was curiously detached, taking note of his surroundings as though he would be required afterward to give an account of them. It was a misty morning, with a pale radiance of sunshine. In the copse at the top of the field there was a colony of rooks, and he could hear the bleating of lambs somewhere beyond that. The cries of the rooks had the same wild, plaintive note as those of the lambs; they echoed back and forth until it became difficult to distinguish one from the other. Through this confusion of sound there came the song of a lark overhead, steady and unfaltering, as he felt his own purpose to be now. He thought again of his brother’s face, wide-eyed with the guilt of the bruises.
Across the fields, in the direction of the village, he saw a group of five or six men approaching, dressed in Sunday best, dark suits, caps, white mufflers. As they drew nearer he made them out: Walker was in the center, flanked by his father, two of his uncles and his two older brothers, one of whom was carrying the bucket.