Too Cold For Snow

listening to a tape player inside the van. He was being seduced by a mellifluous song by Janis Ian.
    ‘At seventeen’, went the refrain.
    Tryfan listened so intently he wanted to still his beating heart. It was a tune pure and fulfilling. When it was over he heard a man’s voice and presuming it was the girl’s father summoning her he raised the collar of his coat and headed back to the farm.
    When he was ten he had met a girl in the fields. One April day he had given her some marsh marigolds wrapped in a cone of paper. She threw them away with scorn and a scathingly cruel laugh. They lay there for months, until the flowers became mere smears of green on the stones and the paper became mulch, a leftover wasp-nest. After that Tryfan left the ways of love to other men who found wives and had children while he ploughed his solitary furrow.
    Once a week Myfyr, the deaf-mute tenant of Mysgryllt Fach, would call to see Tryfan and the two of them would exchange visual pleasantries, nodding like metronomes at each other as the fire settled into its own crackling rhythm in the hearth. He sometimes bought a load of peat from the gypsies, but with times hard and thumbscrews on, he was trying to extract heat out of sods of earth he’d cut out back. The place soon resembled a cheap fish smoke house and the two of them coughed like calves.
    Tryfan mimed the girl singing and Myfyr made a phallus with his fist but Tryfan didn’t laugh. The girl’s song had touched his heart. He was far too old to be thinking of taking a wife and certainly not one that young. Anyway, women were forever decried by his dead mother as an enemy of his inheritance.
    Outside the window, the old preacher Christmas Evans tapped on the glass, hoping for a crust and perhaps even a glass of ale, but despite the length of his yellow fingernails nobody could hear him inside.
    In the morning Tryfan slinked down towards the vans where everyone was still fast asleep, other than the dogs with their wormy skin and decayed teeth. They had been up early to massacre bantams and the dogs were chewing away at innards, their mouths all blood, glue and feathers.
    Tryfan was wearing the suit he wore on the day of his mother’s funeral. As he walked up to one of the caravans he patted his mother’s wedding ring in the left hand pocket. The song had made him feel alive, like the first drifts of snowdrops illuminating paths through dank stands of oak.
    He knocked on the door of her caravan. The door opened and a man as shaggy as a caveman stood there, entirely naked, half asleep and aggrieved. Ken was the woman’s partner. He stared at the old man as he offered the ring on an outstretched palm.
    ‘Piss off you old pervert. I’ve seen you skulking around the bushes, spying on us.’
    Tryfan was hiding the ring in a ball of his fist. Hesitantly, he said he wanted their address.
    ‘Address? You stupid old coot. We’re on your land.’ He then sensed something to his advantage so he added ‘Her name is Rachel. Now fuck off.’
    The old man nodded his head. It was enough for him that he knew her name; a sort of triumph. He walked away with satisfaction in his gait, his fingers laced into each other.
    When he arrived back at the house he went up the dusty ladder into the loft and went to get the gifts. Three days later a small parcel arrived at the yellow caravan, handed over by a bemused postman who had recognised the writing as Tryfan’s: his near-Gothic script scrawled ornately on all the correspondence he generated as secretary and main deacon of Gerazim chapel. The postman gave it to the girl without a word. There was a note to accompany its contents.
    Dear Rachel,
     
    Please find enclosed my mother’s jewels. They were intended for a wife should I ever take one. Please accept them with my sincerest good wishes.
     
     
    Yours,
Mr Tryfan Jones,
Tanyrallt Farm,
Five Roads,
Carmarthenshire
     

    By now the caveman next to her was roused from his narcotic slumbers. The two of them looked at the pearls, the brooches and lengths of gold necklace. Neither said a word, quietly sizing up the other. What would they buy? He needed more drugs. She loved him despite the cloud of violence that always trailed after him. He’d get his own way.
    It was Myfyr who found the old man at the base of the well, where the water had been the sweetest in the shire. He was dressed in his best suit, his hair was drenched and his body had begun to give off gases. Myfyr had looked