WHEN ALL THE DAYS HAVE GONE
When he is handed a collection of letters written by his predecessor, a gravedigger is rapidly immersed in a strange indeterminate narrative, that seems to overflow with mysterious characters and enigmatic apparitions. The most ordinary of lives suddenly accelerates in a stream of enticing illusions and surreal visions in which he inevitably comes to face his own deeply hidden secrets.
Artwork by Kyle Louis Fletcher
BELOW IS AN EXCERPT FROM THE NOVEL:
Chapter 1
He was staring at the surprising amount of nearly translucent blowfly larvae writhing in the fading sunlight on the moistened dirt. Although the distinct smell of decay was completely at odds with the surroundings, he was nevertheless reminded of the first time he had been sitting in the crammed hull of his uncle’s small boat while a glistening heap of herrings, having been abruptly released from the net, slid across each other with flapping tails, desperately seeking an escape from their constricted newfangled element.
He had been quite a lot older than most of the other boys in the village when his mother had finally relented and allowed his uncle to take him out to sea, and although he had always been familiar with the tools of the trade and equally with the catch, he had nevertheless been caught woefully unaware of how fish behaved when hauled up from the deep. He was instantly ashamed by the lewd images the squirming creatures conjured up in his mind, and even as he blushingly looked away, he secretly savored the continued lubricity behind him and wondered if Fromm could tell where his mind had strayed when he attended church the following Sunday. The image of the tall gaunt priest standing in the shadowed doorway of the small village church, disapprovingly inspecting his entering congregation, darted through his mind and even after all this time had passed, he instinctively pulled his free hand closer to his body as if to forestall the cool and bony grip. Father Fromm had had the most unpleasant tendency to hold on to his hand a fraction too long looking at him with bloodshot eyes from hollowed sockets as if he was searching for a sign of weakness in his soul, and though the priest always smiled, revealing a large set of stained yellowed teeth more befitting the mouth of a horse, he had nonetheless suspected that the grip from the hand of death itself would be not too dissimilar. He inadvertently flexed his fingers a couple of times and rubbed his hand against his trouser leg.
He looked down at the animal on the ground. The fox had been lying perfectly still. Only when he had nudged it with the tip of his left boot had he realised that it must have been dead for some time, camouflaged as it was in the golden hues of the leafy blanket. The tissue beneath the fur was a little too soft and the pressure of his foot caused the gasses in the decaying carcass to send forth a stench with which he was all too familiar. He took a step back and wafted at the cool air with his hand, then he swung the shovel off his shoulder and pushed it under the carcass. The ground underneath the dead animal was all but macerated with decaying juices and it made a rich squelching sound when he separated the shovel from the viscous surface. He lifted the shovel off the ground, and the head of the fox rolled over the edge swinging gently from side to side, drooping like a ripened pear waiting for the right moment to let go. Part of the snout and most of the soft tissue around the mouth had been pecked away by buzzards and other scavengers. They had left behind a hideous toothy grin that made it look as if the fox was permanently sneering at its own misfortune. With its yellowing bared teeth and its empty eye sockets the head of the fox was an effigy of the grotesque painted face on one of the marionettes he had seen hanging behind the puppet master’s stall at the local market. Although he had never once seen it being used in the play, he had nevertheless, assumed it represented death.
He had been standing with the fox as a counterweight at the end of his shovel left to his own thoughts and he almost jumped when a cacophony of croaky sounds broke the evening stillness. A small coven of crows, appearing like small black paper cut outs silhouetted against the darkening sky, watched his movements from a large maple tree across the path. Then they all took off from the branches, leaving the crown of the tree like an undulating murky stream in the evening sky. He watched them fly towards the woods dragging behind them a cacophonous chorus until they dissolved in the air like drops of ink in a bowl of water.
When all movement stopped and the quietness returned, he grabbed the smooth head of the well-worn ash handle, expertly turned the shovel sideways to get the smell of death away from his body and carried the remains of the fox and most of its teeming ocean to the edge of the cemetery and into the woods. The heat from the decomposing flesh left a faint misty trail in the cool evening air. He looked around for a suitable spot on the near to lightless ground and eventually deposited the remains in a small hollow close to the base of a small white pine tree. He bent down and gathered a handful of pine needles that he scattered over the carcass and the still grinning face. A few of the needles got stuck upright in the reddish fur, looking like tiny brown lances sticking out of a red haired giant. He grabbed a few more handfuls and spread them until the fox was completely covered, then he turned around and silently walked back towards the path. When he reached the edge of the woods he stopped and wiped the shovel on a tuft of long dried out grass while looking back over his shoulder. At first glance he imagined he saw one of the fox’s ears protruding, like a small white sail in a darkened sinuous sea, but the light must have been playing tricks with his eyes because when he attempted to locate it again, it had disappeared in the dense undulating network of needles covering the ground.
He removed his threadbare black cap and ran his hand across the top of his head feeling the bristly hair that although thinning, still covered most of his crown. The branches of the naked trees cast their elongated finger-like shadows over the gravestones in an almost osculating embrace as the closing glow of the setting sun barely illuminated the ground around him. He put his cap back on, slung the shovel over his shoulder and began walking down the path towards the cottage. His gait was slow and methodical and the gravel made its familiar anhydrous sound as he continuously pressed his heavy work boots against the ground. His legs were slightly bowed under his short thickset body and his free, still powerful arm moved like an adipose pendulum in unison with his steps. He was as always dressed in black, but for the colourless cotton shirt that, although he had put it on clean the same morning, was already grubby at the cuffs and neck.
When he reached the cottage he walked to the end of the small garden and opened the creaking door to the tool shed. Although the inside was nearly pitch black, he reached in and exigently hung the shovel in its appointed place on the wall before closing the door behind him. Then he walked over to the chicken coop. He quietly opened the small door in the fence. He bent down, gently pushed on the door to the coop and turned the small piece of wood that kept the door shut. He listened as the initial cries of alarm from the disturbed birds within changed from cackling to soft throaty sounds of reassurance, before he slowly backed away closing the door in the fence and refastening the hook.
The original coop had been a small half rotten ramshackle and had held only a few hens, so before winter set in he had rebuilt the coop to allow space for a few more birds. He had first dug a trench the width of a spade’s blade, a foot and a half deep and twelve feet square around the coop. Then he had stapled new galvanized chicken wire to a cedar board at the bottom before filling the trench with granite and marble fragments to prevent larger predators digging their way in. He had collected the stone fragments from Mr. Svensson, a Swedish stone carver in the neighboring village who over the last couple of decades had provided a great deal of the grave markers and monuments now on permanent display at the cemetery. Not only was Svensson happy to get rid of the debris, but he had hired him on the spot to build a new fence around his own chicken coop as he had recently lost six hens of his own to what he claimed was a fisher cat. It had gotten under the fence and into the coop during the night quietly killing the sleeping birds leaving nothing but carnage behind. Above and around the fence he constructed a low slanting roof structure that he covered with chicken wire and although the coop was mostly shaded by the long leafy tentacles of a small willow tree, he nevertheless inserted a boarded up old window frame to provide additional shade for the birds during the hot summer months.
He wasn’t exactly a specialist when it came to the care of hens or even particularly knowledgeable of the distinct behavior of the different breeds, but when he was just a boy his uncle had shown him how to properly build and fortify a chicken coop and he was grateful for the advice, because so far he had never lost a bird. In and around the cemetery he had however seen quite a few aftermaths of wild birds being taken. Often the only evidence would be an artfully arranged array of bloodstained feathers lying on the ground and he always found it fascinating how the outcome of an action so utterly brutal could appear so beautifully tranquil. It strangely reminded him of the exhibition of Flemish floral paintings that his aunt had taken him to see so many years ago at the Museum of Art in the city of Copenhagen.
His aunt was the second daughter of a school teacher, who had not only been a compassionate autodidact artist, but also had instilled in her a love for the arts in all its multiplicity of forms. Much to her father’s despair she went against his wishes and eventually married a fisherman, but even though her new husband shared very little of her enthusiasm for painting or music, she could never get herself to completely sever the ties to a world for which she had cultivated a deep seated appreciation. Instead she bestowed that continued passion on her nephew and took every opportunity to introduce him to the wonders of the world seen through the eyes of the painter, the elaborate words of the poet or the music of classical composers. She would occasionally bring him to concerts in the city, where the musicians would transform the enigmatic calligraphic marks on the sheets of paper in front of them to an elaborate mesmerizing ocean of sound, in which he would have happily drowned himself.
On the way home on the train, she would talk to him at length about the work they had encountered and always listened carefully and respectfully to his interpretations. She would often encourage him to think about why an artist had selected a certain element to include in a specific painting and would sometimes explain to him a particular religious or political motif that could be found in an object or subtly veiled form hidden in plain sight to reveal a secret message. She had from the very beginning demonstrated the world of art as a tessellation of images and sounds, that everything is interconnected and that new forms of expression can only be achieved if the artist has a comprehensive understanding and appreciation of history and the work produced by anterior artists.
She would illustrate her point by saying: ‘Do not forget that however tall you build a tower; it is always reliant on the foundation to make it stand’. She would frequently lend him books from her own small but refined library, first translations of Bronté, Austen, Conrad and Shelley and somewhat tattered copies of the writings of Ibsen, Gruntvig and Kierkegarrd. Although he sometimes found the writings difficult to comprehend, she always encouraged him to think about what he read and to expand his way of thinking about and interpreting a text. Through this private cultural education, he came to believe that everything created is part of a much larger collective movement, he also came to appreciate the world of art and literature equally as much as his enthused teacher.
For inexplicable reasons he was from the beginning especially drawn to the Flemish flower paintings and would return to those paintings, or paintings like them, repeatedly to see if he could subtract some kind of information or direction from them. However, he found that the longer he stared at the images the further he was from understanding them. There was no florid fragrance, no corporeality or tactility exuding from the two dimensional plane, in fact he could find absolutely nothing alive in the paintings, and yet they had an unnatural almost spellbinding grip on him that he found both mysterious and inexplicable, as he had never been especially interested in the world of flora.
When looking at real flowers, he could hardly distinguish one from another, but when faced with a painting he found himself drawn to counting the number of petals in a crown or the number of leaves on a stem. He noticed the subtleties in the colouration, acknowledged the way the light had been seamlessly captured and the way the illusion of texture had been flawlessly applied. He carefully observed how the flowers had been arranged, how many different samples of flowers were represented and the type of vase in which the bouquets were displayed. He could spend hours staring at these images.
He found the flowers forever trapped in time a strange illusion of a perfect paradise. They were obviously a representation of something incomparably alive, and yet he couldn’t help thinking about the fact that the flowers inside the real vase themselves were long dead. He couldn’t help pondering the actuality of death while looking at life. The flower paintings were in many ways similar, if somewhat antipodal, to the feathers left behind after the attacks. In the beginning when he encountered one of these grisly but picturesque tableaus, he would often lose track of time. He found the images strangely haunting and while he could quite easily recall them later on, it was as if they had left only a faded flocculent imprint on his mind and no matter how hard he tried to bring them into focus, the images remained somewhat nebulous. So he started carrying around a small black notebook and a short square carpenter’s pencil and began to draw the scenes whenever he encountered them. He wasn’t especially good at drawing and at first his sketches were nothing but a jumble of unorganised lines. However, he learned that time and persistence are invaluable tools when you want to learn something new and over time he became, if not exactly prodigious, at least proficient at rendering the morbid yet beautiful tableaus.