Word was that they were brothers but who knows the truth of that? Neither were they young men. It seemed that they were old and as grim as oldness deserves. If they had womenfolk, none were ever mentioned.
There were times when I had occasion to drive over the hill and, on the northward descent, I’d think of them, their existence advertised by empty buckets hung from the trees. I don’t know if this was a kind of superstition, a way to propitiate some pagan beings, or tree spirits. Perhaps they were hung that way to put them beyond the use of witches. Much in the same way as you crack a hole in bottom of a boiled egg so that witches can’t use them for boats.
I thought about them in passing. After all, I had my own peculiar and modern life to lead. Passing the lichen-hung woods in which they wandered, I was still given to wonder. Fantasies of their lives came easily enough. Flashing past the sloping woods on some summer day, I’d be struck by impressions of stony-faced old men in overalls tending chickens, sheep, a solitary cow. It seemed like a vision of the world held back, a time-shifted tableau, another epoch visible through a hole in ancient woodland.
By all accounts they did not welcome outsiders. Diffident and set in their ways, it would seem you’d get short shrift in any encounter. Hence the speculation, I suppose. In a moment’s conjecture you could imagine bizarre practices, dark and hidden secrets. As if we who drove by in a haze of exhaust fumes, a flash of windscreen reflection, were apparently normal. We gave it no more thought, maybe a joke when visiting or over a drink, but no more thought.
We christened them Les Frères Lupis. The mad brothers. And there it lies, in a little-known backwater in the annals of local colour.
Years later I passed that way again. Twenty of them easily had been laid to rest. A long interval of other strangenesses, the usual, stuff, the world progressively, as ever, going mad.
These old men would be dead by now. If not dead, then, propped up in some kind of institutional decay. Seated patiently, or not, in God’s waiting room. The truth of those earlier days, perhaps, was more like this. These two old men, old even then, set in their ways, had been struggling to survive. Who knows what sacrifices they had made to keep their furrows straight in that dismal place? How little they may have wanted to be there and how hard escape may have been.
If there was superstition behind the holed buckets, if warding off evil was the purpose, probably that evil lived in a world that was changing around them. Old practices becoming slowly useless, obsolete, while all they had were two heads full of pointless tricks and totems with which they shored up their crumbling lives.
Of course they were grim and cantankerous. That was the least of it. Maybe they hated each other. Maybe they hated the world. In its turn, the world didn’t care; cast them in outlandish roles as ragged-arsed misfits. Left them to dwindle in some wooden shack or a tumbledown cottar house.
Goodbye, Frères Lupis, you mad brothers, whoever you were. Yours was the tough choice. The world has moved on even as it was moving for you then. It is no more sane. Spring is coming again in the woods where you used to live. The lichen is grey-green, bearding every birch and rowan. In the sunshine, the woodland seems just as haunted, more so, where your memory is in it. The slope still falls away from the road. Your buckets have all gone. Taken by witches, who will soon be the only ones who remember.
© BH 2012
Some truth, some embellishment. There were two old men, and buckets.
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