Too Cold For Snow

tales.
    When he was fourteen Mistar had run away to sea, had gone all the way to Kamchatka in Siberia, and when he returned he had run his own one-man coal-mine, with a tunnel that went under the estuary. Mistar told tales of outsmarting the keepers on Maenllwyd estate, bringing home braces of pheasants, woodcock and entire coveys of partridge tied onto his belt. As the old man grew older so Pearce took to looking after him, even after the onset of incontinence which robbed the old man of dignity. And then one day Pearce came to visit him and he had again soiled himself, but this time his wife had smeared the shit across the old man’s face and he was sitting there, too weak to move, too weak to remove the yellow smears of runny excrement. Pearce went to get a knife from the kitchen and he would have killed her, there and then, he really would, but morality bound his hands together, held him back.
    Later that evening, as he carried the old man’s frail frame to bed in the next room, he took hold of the pillow and would have smothered him, put him out of his misery and humiliation, and he would have done it but the wires bit into his flesh again, telling him it wasn’t right. That night he learned all he would ever need to know about love and hatred and from that day on he began to see things in black and white, so that he either loved something or hated it and there was no grey place in between. Life was clearer that way.
    Having checked every remnant of a room, Pearce had to conclude that the old lady was buried under the rubble. Leaving behind the shambles of stone he felt the old lady walking behind him, an after-breath of life. He reached the farms along the ridges, some under heavy blankets of snow, all ruckled now into jagged sheets that were unreachable. The ravens would have their first brood before the men came up from the town, a dozen of them, on a JCB, the yellow machine groaning as it tried to bank the snow onto the sides of the main road.
    At the next farm there was nothing other than a cloying silence, and around him the dead shapes of perished stock. The father, Steve, lay with his head mulched by a falling beam, a dark stain around the eye that faced Pearce. The other three bodies were corralled on the floor around Steve, as if they had moved towards him as a place of safety. His wife, Florence, was frozen in an impossible position, with both hands pulled far behind her back. The children lay at the base of Steve’s chair, one hugging each foot. ‘Bring your little children unto me’ was what it said in the Bible, but Pearce now knew that Jesus didn’t love them. The poor children had pain-wracked faces, taken aback by the absence of angels they’d been promised.
    Pearce decided to sleep that night in the barn. The outbuilding seemed to have deflected the ferocity of snow. When he pushed open the door he heard a little whimper, almost human in the way it affected him.
    ‘Who’s there?’ he asked, peering into the darkness. He could hear the creature holding its breath, willing the very bellows of its lungs to miss a few beats.
    ‘Is there anybody there?’ A wounded whimper.
    Pearce could make out a pair of eyes, which blinked shut as he strained to make out what framed them. Then he heard a voice.
    ‘Gawje?’
    A word which triggered very old memories.
    ‘Y-y-yes,’ he said. ‘I am gawje.’ Not gipsy. He hadn’t spoken Romany for half a century. He never heard it since the horse fairs stopped.
    ‘My name is Pearce,’ he said, stretching out a hand.
    ‘Eiza.’ A thin voice.
    Pearce remembered that he had some biscuits in his pocket. Reaching into his coat for them caused the girl to cower back into the corner.
    ‘It’s alright,’ said Pearce, his voice dropping down through the registers until it reached the pitch he used when reassuring trapped lambs. He showed her the packet. She moved slowly towards him. She took the biscuits and began to pulverise them between her teeth. Pearce hunkered down and rolled a cigarette. The lighter flame shed light on the child.
    She was fourteen or fifteen and dressed in two or three coats which had seen much better days. But she was luminously beautiful and even though she was cold and scared she had a haughtiness about her, the eyes of an Andalucian flamenco dancer. The girl was mad with the business of the biscuits.
    ‘Is that better?’ he asked as she wiped her mouth with her sleeve. Her eyes sparkled with hunger.
    ‘How long have you