Tom, Thom

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  When Tom is seven years old, he dreams of wolves. He lives by the woods. His father is dead. His mother takes in washing from the little town of Leynmouth. Washing is how we make ends meet, she says. In the mornings she washes, and she listens to the wireless. The radio reports the forecast from the North Sea. News comes on after, when Tom’s mother is hanging the washing. Great white sheets shape themselves up and out into sailcloths. They rage over the thistles, the prickly sedge. Far off is the forest they wish to escape to: pines and pale beech and the bulk of yew trunks, a wall of wet-smelling woodland. A threat of further trees that the ridge line holds back. Tom wonders why the sheets want to sail to it. He marvels that the clothes-pegs can keep them contained. He runs through their coiling, sinuous caves. His mother calls, “Don’t dirty up the washing!” Tom lies in the grass, squinting happily upwards. Sometimes an aeroplane goes past, its metal body buzzing, no bigger than an insect. When his mother sees this, she looks weary, and says, “Thank God the war is done.”

  Tom ponders the aeroplane. It outpaces the black wood. From the eye of the aeroplane, the woods must seem a gap, a small slice of shadow that cuts along green country. But Tom knows that the woods are not small or large. They have no shape. Their size is other than this.

  On Saturdays, he walks with his mother to town. He is entrusted with the washing money and the ration book. He shows their coupons for milk, eggs, and sugar. The shopkeeper tears them out of the book. “Young Tom,” he says. “Wouldst like a summer apple?” He puts a small red apple in Tom’s fist. It is soft, and it tastes of tea with honey. The shopkeeper says, “I trust you’re staying out of the woods.”

  “He’s a very good boy,” Tom’s mother replies. Tom hides behind her skirts. The truth is that he is afraid of the forest. He dreams of wolves filling it. Fast silver wolves, loping and silent. They slope between the evergreens and birch. They pant into air grown sweet with frost. They go in packs. Their eyes are gold. Their backs are brindled. “There are no wolves in the wood,” Tom’s mother tells him, when he complains about these dreams. “Where have you seen a wolf, you silly boy?”

  He knows wolves, of course, from fables. From fairy stories. They drag huntsmen to their lairs, or drive bargains with princes, or hide in little children’s beds, ravenous at all times and deceitful, thinking of nothing but how to eat men. His dream wolves are indifferent to him. He stands in the wood and they whisper past, their paws churning up the snow-scrim. He tells his mother, but she does not perceive the terror the wolves inspire in him; she draws him close and wraps him in blankets and says, “There are no wolves in all of England.”

  Tom wonders why his mother would tell him a lie. He turns his face towards the blanket. He can hear the wolves out in the forest. Their broad paws leave prints. They let their tongues loll. They turn their bright eyes towards him.

  * * *

  It is well into November. They are trudging hillwards at the lane-side. Tom’s shoes slip and glance off the patchwork ice. Night is coming on, quick and sullen. For no reason at all, Tom feels afraid.

  “Hurry up!” his mother says, too sharply. Her face is pale. Her nerves are frayed. Winter is hard. The shopman says, “No credit.” Tom has not grown much since his last birthday. He is little and shy and not prone to speaking. “Keeps himself to himself,” is what the neighbours say.

  Up ahead, the outline of their cottage looms. “You run ahead and light the stove. Put the kettle on,” his mother tells him.

  Tom heads for the woodpile at the back of the house, closer to the forest, where the verge holds sway. Come spring, the forest will slink from its boundaries, and Tom’s mother will have to hack at its limbs: the outbursts of field dock in bloody colours, thin fingers of oak reaching out of the grass. Now all is deadened by ice and shadow. Twilight’s damp brush tars the air blue-grey. Tom reaches towards the firewood. He feels a rush of superstition. He hugs a log to his chest. He does not want to look towards the forest. He hears a crackle. He hears feet crisp on frost. He freezes.

  He sees a shadow cross the wall, a thing of not-here-or-thereness, like a person’s body without any bones or meat. It comes very close. He feels its hot wet breath. He smells damp fur and raw flesh and dead leaves burning. It is a death-in-winter, carrion scent. Something touches his shoulder. He shudders. A black feather whiskers past him and curls at his feet. Whatever it is that stands behind him sighs: a long, slow, drawn-out sound of grief. Then it is gone. It steals back to the forest. Tom listens until he can no longer hear the cold little bone-like crunch of its feet. He stands in the darkness for a long time. His heart pounds and his hands tremble.

  After a while, he knits up his courage. He hurls himself towards the cottage door, not stopping to see what haunts after. He clutches the firewood so fiercely that a splinter works into his finger. There is hardly any blood, but still a wound has been started.

  When he reaches the door, he runs inside. His breath is rattling out of his body.

  His mother is storing the shopping on the shelves. The kettle hums amidst clouds of white steam. But when Tom’s mother turns and sees him, her face goes colourless; she drops the apple that she’s holding. Her hands fly to her mouth. She says, with horror in her voice, “Tom?”

  Tom feels tears slide down his cheeks. He can’t understand his mother’s reaction. Nor can he bring himself to speak of the wintry creature out by the wood stack. He hasn’t the words to try to describe it; not half of the words he would need.

  His mother says, “But if you are my Tom, my own Tom—” She comes close and her hands roam his cheekbones, his ruffled fair hair, the rough fabric of his sleeves. “—and, oh, my darling, you’re cold as death—but if you are my Tom, then who’s that boy in your bedroom?”

  She runs to the bedroom: a sharp, sudden motion. Tom trails behind, uncomprehending.

  There, by the woodstove, another boy is sitting cross-legged on Tom’s little bed. He has the same pale hair as Tom, the same round shape to his features. His eyes are cornflower blue, like Tom’s. But a restless energy hangs about him: like a wolf about to spring, or a storm building over the land, steeped in electric voltage. Tom thinks, I am not like this. How could you think this boy was me?

  The boy looks at Tom with no expression. He shows no curiosity. He blinks very slowly, like an animal. His hands make little fists around the sheets.

  Tom’s mother touches his shoulder. He can feel that her pulse is racing. “Come away,” she whispers. And they leave the boy there. They tiptoe meekly out of the room, back towards the kitchen.

  For a time, his mother is on the telephone, talking to the rector and then to a priest. She talks in a harsh and violent whisper. Tom can hear the voices of the rector and the priest: plain, flat, ca
lm, denying. At length, the phone goes back on its hook. His mother covers her face with her hands. Tom sits at the table. He tries to be still. He says, “Can I have something to eat?”

  He is given bread with butter and jam. He licks the seedy jam off his fingers. He is mouse-quiet; he can see his mother is thinking. He cuts more bread to toast over the fire.

  The other boy comes creeping, step by shuffled step, from the hall. Out of the corner of his eye, Tom sees him, but does not react. He simply stares straight ahead at the fire. The bread gets brown and hot and smells of warm grain sweetly roasting. The other boy licks his lips. Tom ignores him. He spreads the bread with yellow butter—on any other day his mother would reprimand him for eating up all their ration—and deep-red strawberry jam. The jam and butter melt together. The other boy holds out his hand.

  At first Tom resists. If he is hungry enough, he thinks, he will go eat someone else’s bread and jam. But he is a lonely child. He has no playmates. He has often wished for a sister or a brother who would go with him to skim rocks off the shores of Loch Leighin; who would lie in the grass staring up at the clouds and say, “Look, that one is like a rabbit,” and point out aeroplanes as they pass. All this Tom wants, and though he feels a sullenness at seeing the boy look so like him, he still cuts a slice of bread from the loaf. He warms it briefly over the fire, and carpets it with butter and jam. He holds it out, the butter leaking on his fingers, and the other boy snatches it from his hand.

  The boy wolfs the bread down. He eats like a savage. This is something Tom’s mother says: Close your mouth and chew your food. Don’t eat like a savage. But the boy forces his food down fast. His mouth hangs open. When Tom offers him more bread, he tears into it, then scuttles in close to stick his hand in the jam pot. He eats in fistfuls, bread and jam.

  “Don’t do that,” Tom tells him sternly.

  The other boy stares at him wide-eyed. Perhaps he has never had someone to tell him how to chew his food, someone to butter-and-jam his bread. Patiently, Tom shows him the whole process. Then: how to measure out tea, prime the kettle, pour the milk, dip his bread into the warm-smelling mixture so that it is soft in the mouth and delicious.

  By this time, Tom’s mother is watching. She sits in the corner, her arms gently folded. She seems tired now, and not very angry, though her mouth has the unhappy curve it gets when her nerves have been stretched to their end. When it is late—far past Tom’s bedtime—she gathers the two children and tucks them side-by-side into Tom’s bed. She sits by the woodstove. Embers are burning. She tells a story about twin ravens that sit on a wise king’s shoulder. One is called Dreaming, and the other is Thought: that is what she says. Tom is lulled by the sound of breathing that is not his own. He watches his mother bend close to the stove-side. Its cinderous lighting turns her hair red. She is still speaking, still telling a story.

  Tom does not dream of wolves. When he wakes, he sees the other boy beside him, sleeping soundly, halving the bed.

  * * *

  The next day, Tom’s mother asks over breakfast, “Where did you come from? Who is it that brought you here?”

  The boy says nothing. He stuffs bread into his mouth, and beans, and eggs. He stares at her with a dumb, silent expression. His eyes don’t look blue anymore. By afternoon they have turned gold instead: a dark green-gold that is strange to gaze at. His face, too, has changed, grown thinner. He looks gaunt. His hair curls fox-red. Tom accepts these alterations. He is not bothered by the shape-changing. It is a relief, in fact. He had found it strange to look at his reflection. Now the boy is merely a boy: Tom’s brother.

  Leynmouth’s rector comes by the house that morning, and later on the Catholic priest from St Sadde’s. They both have cursory words with Tom’s mother. They drink their cups of tea and pat Tom on the head. They ignore the other boy. Politely, they chat with Tom about what he would like for Christmas. When they leave, Tom’s mother slams the door behind them. She looks like thunder. She gets on the phone again at once. In an hour a stranger knocks on the door: a white-haired, wizened, age-smelling old man.

  “I am the man you wanted,” he says to Tom’s mother. He is wearing a stained coat and a broad-brimmed hat.

  He peers at the boy who is not Tom. The boy who is not Tom peers back, his gold eyes dense, flat, and guileless. He touches the brim of the old man’s hat, as though he has not seen a hat before. The old man says, “And what is your name, my lad?”

  “Tom,” the boy confidently answers.

  Indignation rises in Tom. “It isn’t ever!” he says. “Tom’s my name. Your name can’t be that.”

  A cloud of doubt flickers over the other boy’s face. “Tom. Tom,” he says again. There is a tone-deaf timbre to his voice. Tom wants to hit him.

  “Tom,” Tom’s mother hurries to interject, “he likes your name so much. Perhaps you can share it a little? You can be Tom without an h, as you are, and let him be Thom with an h in. You remember what I have told you, that sharing is the act of a gentleman.”

  Reluctantly, Tom subsides in his chair. He glares across the table at the new-labelled Thom. Thom gazes happily at him.

  The old man places his hand on Thom’s head. Thom’s red hair curls up under his fingers. The old man winces and grimaces. “Yes,” he says. “He is one of them.”

  “And you can say that, can you, with just a touch?”

  The old man taps the side of his face. “There’s some have the sight, and some have it deeper, the sight that goes down under your skin. I tell you now, he is a child for the woodpile. But fetch iron if you will, a horseshoe or skillet.”

  Tom does not know what a child for the woodpile is. He does not like the thought of it; he thinks of the splinter in his finger, the smell of cut wood, the single drop of blood coming out of him. He watches the man reach into his coat pocket and rummage about as though looking for a stray sixpence. Indeed, he does pull out a sixpence, and a bit of sea-glass, and what looks like a bird’s bone, then a tin toy soldier and a rusted iron nail. He lays them out on the table in front of Thom.

  Thom examines the objects curiously. He gives cursory attention to the sixpence and the toy soldier; he hums when he touches the piece of sea-glass; and when he sees the bird’s bone, he chirps like an infant kestrel. But the nail—the nail receives his full fascination. His eyes open wide, as though he’s seen a rare piece of treasure. His breath comes short. After a moment’s heavy covetousness, he reaches out to snatch the nail up.

  For a moment, Tom does not recognize the sound Thom makes as shrieking. It sounds like an animal-sound or a bird-sound. But then, most things sound the same when they are wounded. And Thom is wounded: his hand is burnt, as Tom sees when his mother gently uncurls Thom’s hand. The nail has left a mark: a charred white line of dead flesh.

  “You see,” the old man says, sounding grim. “Cold iron. He cannot resist it. I tell you, that one has the curdling power. He’ll sour your milk and set fire to your washing. He’ll bring the birds and wolves to your house.”

  Tom’s mother stands for a long time, looking. Tears drip down Thom’s pointed chin. At last, Tom’s mother goes to the cabinet. She fetches butter and herbs and cloth. She binds up Thom’s hand where the burn is welted. She smooths her fingers through his curls and says, “Now, we’ll have no more caterwauling,” which is what she says to Tom when he has fallen down and scraped his shin.

  The old man turns a fierce countenance on her. “And what if your own child was dead?” he demands. “Or taken off in the woods, under the hills, and you not to see him again? Would you so happily take a changeling, then?”

  So there: the word is finally outened. Tom knows its meaning very well. Every child in Leynmouth is taught to beware those other folk that used to live in the wood and are but lately gone; or that linger, maybe, under the ground; or that wait for their name to be said unawares so that they can then come into the world. Their state of half-being arrests people, scares them. And children know that what those folk love is to steal a ch
ild of less than ten years, and to leave in its place their own sickly child. That false child will fail, and die, and be coffined. What becomes of the real child: unclear. He goes off into the woods with them, never to be seen again. Meanwhile, the changeling takes his place, dies here in his stead.

  So that is Thom: the changeling. The other folk brought him. Tom sensed them, smoke-like in the lengthening shadows. They sighed in the night; they smelt of the winter. But they left Tom behind. They did not take him. He stares down at his hand, at the splinter still bedded in his finger. The blood has dried. The pain remains. Why, he wonders, did they not take me?

  His mother murmurs, “Dear, dear.” Thom’s head rests against her arm. Her warm hand still strokes his red-gold hair. Perhaps Thom has never had a mother. Who knows, Tom thinks, how those folk live there.

  “You’d best put him out,” the old man warns. “What life is there for such as him here? No life at all. His own folk did not want him. He brings death into your house.”

  “That’s enough,” Tom’s mother says. She stands up, very flashing-eyed. “Put him out or no, it’s my business. You’ve done what you came to do, and spoken. Now you can leave again.”

  Tom has never seen her hurl someone into exile before. The old man pulls his coat back on and puts his cap on his white head. He gathers up his trinkets and exits the house with hard, hobnailed footsteps. But the iron nail, he leaves on the table behind him. Tom’s mother takes it and turns it between her fingers, with a hard expression, as though it were something distasteful, something dead.

  She puts it into her pocket and sits down by Thom. He curls up beside her. He has stopped weeping, though tears blotch his skin. All at once, Tom’s mother looks very tired. She says to Tom, “Would you mind so much, having a brother, just for a little bit?”

  Tom examines the sleepy face of Thom. His dangerous eyes are heavy-lidded. Before, when the touch of iron had burned him, he had looked at Tom just for an instant. A look of betrayal, a look that said: You let me be hurt. You, myself, my kin. Now Tom feels a certain demand. The weight of it presses down on him, some kind of oath he’s already sworn without realizing it. We are brothers, he thinks, and it can’t be helped. I will not let you be hurt again.