When Words Don't Work, Stop Talking

If Birdie Lomax had paid any heed to her appearance, she would, in the music hall vernacular, scrub up well. But she’s tossing chicken scratch in the air, and the light of dawn is at the cruel end of the spectrum. Her hair, still more brown than grey, escapes a poorly-drawn knot at the back and flies in all manner of directions, as if in a mood to fall out with its neighbours. 

The farmhouse behind her is long and low, full of rooms she never looks in or clears out. Beneath these timbered beams lie cricket bats and exercise books, beds stripped and remade with misplaced hope on the morning her brothers went to war and didn’t come home. Her parents’ bed, stripped and unmade, where her mother died in agony from drinking lye, the glass still sitting on the bedside table. 

Birdie carried on with her old man, who just faded away to nothing over the course of a couple of years. He died of something, but no one minded too much to find out what. It seemed clear enough. 

And so here’s Birdie, once the catch of the county, running a farm in a lush part of England: the part which looks like a plump, saucy leg poking out to sea. And because no one knows what to say to her, over the years the visiting has mostly stopped and Birdie has mostly stopped minding. She pays the farm hands, she shops in the village square, and she sometimes buys the brewery ale, whose biscuity aroma floods the valley so often that local nostrils are inured to it. 

On this morning, with the hens pecking at her feet, a rhododendron bush, (which had somehow slipped down the valley and rooted itself by the chicken shed), revealed a face. A face of a boy, no more than six or seven. The soil was neutral here and the blooms were neither one colour or the other, but the boy’s eyes were blue. Within them was misery, whose acquaintance Birdie had made. 

She had had no reason to talk for several days, except to sooth the animals and to chide the chickens, and so when she tried, it sounded like a rusty pump. It was just a ‘hello,’ but the boy didn’t respond, so she made a gesture of drinking. ‘Would you like some milk?’ 

The child nodded and extricated himself from the bush, which now had a boy-shaped hole in it. And Birdie had a boy-shaped hole in her heart, because when she looked at this child, she saw her younger brothers, whom she scolded and disciplined and loved beyond all else in the wicked world. 

*****

The boy was a sack of bruised bones, and he didn’t want to talk about it, which was fine with Birdie. She poured him unpasteurised milk and cut him bread with butter. She told him to eat slowly, because if boys were anything like abandoned animals, you shouldn’t feed them up too quick. Slow and steady, she said, and the boy followed her with his eyes as she moved about the kitchen. 

He yawned, but no sound came out. He was used to being stifled, she thought. In the parlour, dusty and rarely used, she swept a cloth over the brocade settee and laid blankets down. The boy was immediately asleep, beneath the poorly-executed portrait of her mother when she was young. Birdie’s father had been the artist and so it was praised, and it stayed. 

While he slept, Birdie drew water from the well and filled the iron bath tub from a bucket. She had placed the tub at that part of the yard which caught the most of the evening sun, where it would warm quickly. At six, she tickled his cheek with a feather and when the boy opened his eyes and regarded her, he did not seem startled. This pleased Birdie. 

They went outside, where the collie sniffed the child and then sat on his haunches, playing sentinel while the boy stripped down and got into the water. ‘You’ve got nothing I haven’t seen before,’ she told him, as she showed him how to wipe the grime away and left him to it, stroking the dog’s ears and raising her face to the sun. 

Later, she showed him around the farm. In the way that animals adhere themselves to quiet souls, he took on the aspect of a benign pied piper, being followed by the dog, the cat, the chickens and the rooster. But at no point did a sound come forth from his lips. Birdie wondered if he was a mute. 

She fried bacon and eggs for supper, and drew him a small beer. He sniffed it and grimaced, but she told him, by way of patting her stomach and flexing her biceps in a parody of a circus strongman, that it would build him up. And when the bacon released its unique aroma, she distinctly heard him sniff. And when he put it in his mouth and chewed, she clearly heard his chords make a sound which seemed like ‘Mmmmm’, and she realised that he must have a voice box after all. She just needed to find the way to make a tune out of it.

*****

Birdie wasn’t much of a churchgoer. It was hard to listen to those words. But she had all the time in the world for Reverend Quayle, the only man brave enough to confront Birdie’s losses without mentioning all those rewards she would get in heaven. 

The next morning, when a low cloud threatened rain in the valley, she togged up the boy in her brother Edwin’s old clothes, (which she’d beaten on the line and hung outdoors overnight), and took him to the vicarage adjoining the red, sandstone church. She knew she had to give him up, that he wasn’t hers to keep, but she needed to be commanded by a higher authority. 

The boy sat mutely in an overstuffed chair while Birdie told the vicar what little she knew. ‘I don’t even know his name,’ she admitted. And it was decided, between them, that until they knew differently, the child should be called Nicholas, after the patron saint of children. The newly-dubbed Nicholas made no objection. 

‘Is he deaf?’ asked Quayle. ‘It would explain the lack of speech.’

‘No,’ said Birdie. ‘This morning, I confess to blowing a toy trumpet in his vicinity. It made him jump. I feel sorry for doing that now.’ 

‘That’s an unworthy burden you’ve taken on there, Birdie,’ said the vicar, smiling. 

‘What will happen to him?’ she asked.

‘The spreading ink blot of bureaucracy will happen to him,’ said Quayle, with disapproval all over him. ‘He’ll be sent to an orphanage in the city, unless his guardians come forward. I visited once, Birdie. Afterwards, I wept.'

A maid brought in tea, and milk for the boy. He was offered a biscuit, and the boy looked towards Birdie for approval. It was at that moment, just an intervention of oats and flour on a willow pattern plate, that her mind settled towards a resolution. 

‘Will you help me teach Nicholas to read?’ she asked. 

‘I have always hankered to be a schoolmaster,’ he smiled. ‘But I will come to you. It will give you a reason to clean up that farmhouse of yours.’ 

‘And what if someone asks about him?’

‘It is not for us to offer information to the men from the ministry, Birdie. It is for them to find it for themselves. And to anyone else, Nicholas is your nephew. There are lots of nieces and nephews around, for all sorts of reasons.’ 

*****

In the years following the loss of her family, the farmhouse had fallen into disrepair. The piano, which had once provided entertainment, was now out of tune and in danger of warping in the room where the curtains were never drawn. Each boxed article, in all the misshapen rooms, would need to be taken out and assessed for its value. Reverend Quayle had quoted William Morris, who had advised to keep nothing you don’t know to be useful or think to be beautiful. 

In this manner, while Nicholas pored over illustrated books Birdie got from the circulating library, large bonfires were lit, night after night, in which the atoms of many memories, not all of them happy, were recycled in the wind. 

*****

The collie, whom Birdie had not named but simply called ‘Dog,’ had somehow insinuated himself into the farmhouse kitchen. When Nicholas was learning to link sounds together, the dog rested its head on the boy’s knee. With the reverend’s help, the child had started to speak, although the progress was slow and stammered, and it was only after the harvest had been brought it that he read aloud his first sentence. ‘Twenty thousand lee-gues under the sea.’

Birdie was profoundly shocked, (and delighted), but took a deep breath and pretended not to notice. ’Leagues,’ said Birdie. ‘We don’t pronounce the U or the E. Don’t ask me why, Nicholas. Some of our words come from the French and they do things differently there.’ 

It was a children’s book, simplified for the audience. But after that, the collie was called Nemo. 

But he still would not speak unless from the printed word. Reverend Quayle thought it was curious, but considered underlying causes. ‘For some reason,’ he offered, ‘that child has spent his earliest years being told to keep quiet. Perhaps he feels safer with someone else’s words. We must be patient, Birdie.’

*****

Birdie took Nicholas to church for the first time on Christmas Eve, where the candle shadows captivated him, and the reverend’s familiar voice seemed to bring him home. He took Birdie’s hand and smiled at her, and for the first time, the smile was not fleeting or diffident, but held the honour of affection and gratitude. Birdie still did not believe in all of those words, but there were other children in church and perhaps it was time Nicholas learned to be amongst them.

People visit families during this season. Strangers with fresh eyes. After the evening service, the congregation walked to the village square where a small festival had been set up, with carol singing and fairy lights. Birdie was sipping mulled wine and keeping an eye on Nicholas, who was buying roasted chestnuts without using words. A woman, a well-to-do woman in a city hat, tapped her on the shoulder. Birdie recognised her from the service. 

‘I don’t know which words to use,’ she said, ‘and whatever I say next is going to sound dreadfully abrupt, but the boy you are with. Is he yours?’ 

And Birdie found herself without words, even the wrong ones. It was hard to even articulate the lie, and she felt acutely that in that moment of indecision, she had been discovered. 

‘Please,’ said the woman. ‘I’m from the city, visiting my sister. I help to run a charitable endeavour for women who —’

‘He’s my nephew,’ Birdie whispered. 

‘Perhaps he is,’ said the woman. ‘Can I tell you my story? I don’t ask you to say anything in return.’

Birdie mutely nodded, before draining the wine and stopping the woman from speaking further until she had ordered more. 

‘I recognise the child because he is so striking. His mother was a … she was no good. We try to help them. Occasionally, the boy’s mother would bring him with her when she was appealing for rent money. I think that’s really what he was for. He never spoke a word. He was dirty and bruised, and we worried about rickets, although there doesn't seem to be any sign of it.’

‘He is fine,’ said Birdie. 

‘Well, that is a miracle, because the landlady later told me that for most of his days and nights he was locked in a cupboard whilst his mother .. entertained. She had a drug habit, and although she kept busy earning it, I think most of it went into her system. She was found dead and decaying, and still the boy was quiet. It was the landlady who asked them to check the cupboard.’ 

Birdie’s hand flew to her mouth in shock. She had imagined all sorts of terrible things, but never quite that. ‘Are you going to take him away?’ she asked. 

The older woman with the city hat gripped Birdie’s forearm. ‘Why would I do that?’ She looked towards Nicholas, who was standing by the chestnut stall, looking at them both. ‘That child walked due north for over fifty miles. In all that time, the men from the ministry didn’t find him, and I won’t give them their orphanage scalp now. He knew when he was home.’

‘Thank you,’ said Birdie.

‘I would strongly advise you to adopt him,’ the stranger said. ‘I am sure the reverend can help you with that. After all, his mother is dead and his father could be anyone.’ 

‘I will,’ said Birdie. ‘Please .. do you know what his name was?’

‘I have no idea. But I believe you call him Nicholas, which is very appropriate given that he was a lost child in need of protection. Very good.’ 

*****

In February the snow came. The animals were kept inside and the fields lay hard and fallow. Birdie had bought a radio, which sat on the kitchen counter like a grand, miniature organ, fluting out better tunes than those she heard in church. 

The farmhouse was coming along, room by room. The very presence of the child had lifted the spirit which lifted the brush and the broom. Nemo lay with his head on the boy’s lap while the boy hummed a popular song. The fire had been lit long before, and now they both slept in the kitchen, just until the ice left the windowpanes. These were long days to fill with a child who had learned to read and now no longer spoke aloud from a book. He was more silent than ever before.

Birdie sat at the table with her back to the fire, filling out adoption papers. She could read very well, but writing was difficult and she had to concentrate hard. She had to find the right words in the right shapes. Nicholas took Nemo outside. He formed snowballs which Nemo caught, leaping high. 

The bacon burned in the pan. She scraped off the worst bits and called Nicholas in for his breakfast. And at the moment when a buttermilk sun broke the cloud and illuminated the boy in a meagre ray of light, he said, ‘This bacon is burned.’ 

And Birdie dropped her pen and the ink bled on the scoured wood. 

‘Pardon?’ she said. 

And Nicholas formed the words again, slowly and with his teeth and tongue in some terrible wrong places. ‘This bacon is burned.’ 

And she ran around the kitchen, whooping like a girl guide at camp. And then she took a chair next to him, abruptly, like the same girl guide was one step closer to winning musical chairs. 

‘Why now?’ she demanded. ‘Why now, Nicholas?’

And the child, whose cheeks had assumed an Ovaltine bloom since living with Birdie, smiled like the best angel in the entire pantheon of angels, and said, ‘Because, mother, you have never burned the bacon before.’