Maggie Shaw lived below a bleak escarpment, hard against an unforgiving sky. A sore rib jutting from the Pennines, a shaper of winds. A place where Judas might have hanged himself. A place where ravens come to die.
She was born there, helpless as any child. She lived and died by candlelight, departing as she began, in a low-beamed room below a heavy roof, against the whale-backed hill, snuffed out where she began, although, this time, alone. Raw-rubbed soil tattooed her hands, stilled only when they placed her in her narrow grave.
Her eyes were bleached by summer heat and winter rain and all she’d ever seen since first peeping round her mother’s skirts. For her first shoes she wore a pair of hobnail boots, chafing hand-me-downs that made her drag her heels. When she cried, she was told to be grateful, even the Lord went barefoot as a child, so how could she dare to ask for more? Even when she learned to lace and tie them, there was no mistaking her ungainly walk. So, she wore them only when the weather turned and froze the milk in pail. Otherwise she took comfort in her saviour and followed His example.
Kneeling by her bed at night, she prayed, her forehead pressed against a crocheted remnant of a grandmother she’d never known. She prayed for a sister to share her life, but none ever came. Perhaps God never heard her or perhaps simply didn’t care for childish prattling. Perhaps she was undeserving of a loving God. And so she pressed her hands together until her knuckles showed white and prayed all the harder in case it was the grasping wind had kidnapped all her wild imaginings. Then she climbed into bed, made a cave, warmed with her breath, nursed her tender bones and traced the grainy pattern the floorboards had imprinted on her knees.
Through childhood summers her gutter rhymes followed tails of shitting cows to milking, skipping round pats of steaming muck behind a swaying lullaby of hat-rack hips and buzzing flies. During February’s flat-iron days, steaming bovine nostrils plumed the air and urine froze in solid runnels on the track.
She accepted the numbing repetition of the daily round. But her kitchen lyrics died the day her mother’s back was broken in the heaving byre and her father relied more heavily upon her services.
She rammed the posser up and down, cranked the handle of the mangle round and round and hung her father’s shirts to dry then brushed the stone-flagged parlour floor around her mother’s useless feet, conducted by the frantic wringing of her hands. She’d ignored her mother’s desperation as she swept beneath her chair. She swore at pigs that stared her in the eye when she dared set foot inside their filthy sty. She filled her wooden pail with steaming milk, squeezed by chilblained hands from dangling teats of white-eyed cows she learned to hate.
Each raw-boned spring in draughty sheds, she stood in fetid straw and dragged new-born lambs from steaming wombs and watched the dozy mothers eat the bloody afterbirths. She stripped the skin from the still born, to swaddle bleating orphans to dupe the lambless ewes. She wiped war-paint across her sweating face from bloodstained hands and stood gasping in the doorway, a crazed midwife, cursing. She kneaded dough for daily bread and mended fences and dry-stone walls. She separated curds and mating dogs and killed young foxes with the back of spades. She fed the earthbound hens with corn and cursed the raucous cockerel with its flaming comb and was glad when her father took a mattock to its neck.
But then her father took the mattock to her mother one hot and sleepless summer’s night, and she was left, after the assizes, with the farm complete and completely to her own devices.
She didn’t ponder long her change of circumstance, as jobs needed doing, just the same. She shut her mind and got on with it. She prayed no more but from her narrow bed stared blankly at the ceiling in the gathered dark. From her mother’s wardrobe she unearthed a second pair of shoes. Nothing fancy, but good enough to wear to chapel on a Sunday where she mouthed the hymns.
Now the undisputed owner of the farm, she was not without offers from men who sniffed around and vied to place a ring upon her finger, but she saw in their slack faces, her father once again and kept her distance. She kept her left-hand shackle free and her knees together. She shed her bloody seed each month and washed the rags as she had before and, like the past, let the future go without regret.
Year by grinding year, with each grey hair that mingled with the dark and with each pale waning of the harvest moon, she resigned herself to solitude. Time’s wheel turned and slowly bent her spine and arthritis took her by the hand until she was unable to lift a pail without biting back the pain.
Eventually, she’d had enough and sent the last remaining cows bellowing to abattoirs, while rotting lean-tos, once a refuge for grunting sows, now stood empty and vagrant hens were free to wander in the corrugated dark.
Unlike the hens, she’d done with scratching at impacted ground.
She gazed up one day, from the yard in envy, at a flock of fantails that had gathered on the bone-flagged roof. They performed a cooing dance, cool against the colder stone, then taking flight, became a spectacle of feathered snow, swirling against the dark escarpment blocking half the sky and she wished that she could join them.
And soon enough, she did, but with no-one moved to compose a eulogy or write an epitaph or place white lilies on her grave, the rough-cut stone, almost hidden now by bending grass, that still bears her name, stands unread, a crooked tooth against the skyline of the Judas hill.
Lyrical and gritty, “Beneath the Judas Hill” mixes allusions and illusions with the realities of farmlife, and in such a short space, the use of descriptive narration and the whispering of prayers create a world of both loneliness and confidence—a journey into the sky after a life of dirt and cows.
Shome Dasgupta
There are lives like that, aren’t there? Lives that seem irremediably destined to envy birds that can fly and leave, to abandon spaces where there is nothing for them, tiny lives, repeated over and over again on farms and in homes around the world. Women’s lives, seemingly insignificant, silly, poor, repetitive. The most successful thing about this story is the way we identify, in so few paragraphs, with this solitary woman and the story of her body and her absences. I loved the tone and the extraordinary use of language. I think creating this level of beauty and pain in a small space is masterful. Bravo.
María Fernanda Ampuero
Glyn is an ex-teacher of English, Art and Drama, for many years a professional artist, evolved into a writer of poetry and prose with a passion for short stories. Although writing mainly for adults, his ideas often grow from the child that hides inside himself and he writes for the child that hides in others.
Oxford Flash Fiction Prize 