Chapter 1. Overture.
The little river that runs past the water tower is barely more than a ditch these days. Where once there was a bridge that the road ran over there is now a dissected industrial tube carrying the flow under the mud and gravel. No one ever expects a heavy flow. Occasionally, the tube becomes blocked with thicket or large pieces of rubbish. It takes some while for anyone to notice, or bother with it as the natural dam usually corrects itself and even when the road floods it is always passable.
Any hint that the River Bow would be a tributary of its nearest, larger neighbor The Candion has disappeared and so it is with relative surprise that nine year old, moppy headed Kieran watches his walking stick disappear down the stream.
After having hacked his way around the back of the fencing that surrounds the tower.
He was really pleased to find the stream and enjoyed a few quiet moments beside before deciding to use the stick to head down the bank and splash in the water on this cold spring day. However, once down in the shallow water he slipped on the wet stones and landed on his arse, recovering with a curse just in time to see his stick disappear as a signal that the day's adventure was over.
Kieran’s stick- a Wizard's staff, a wand, a sword and a gun- traveled through the tube and out beyond the back of Oxboat Hall. It was here a few hundred years ago that the water from this stream was captured and landscaped into a pretty lake that flanks the north west side of the house. Along with a maze and a walled garden, this beauty feature added to the prestige of the view looking out over towards the village and the larger Candion river from high on Drink Hill.
Here the stream picks up as it heads down into a gully and regains some of its former stature. The greenery surrounding, parts for the flowing water as it boils through the woodlands on the slope of the hill. These woods run behind the graveyard with its collection of similarly named headstones and adjunct to it St Florian’s Parish Church, all gray stone and square. Eventually the Bow widens as it rushes to meet the Candion and the river road Aeon Lane weaves up to join it.
This strength of will to return to the larger and larger propels Kieran’s stick over submerged rocks in shallow water. Here as the road crosses the river a robust stone bridge is needed and had Kieran ran at full speed through the village he may have just been able to get there in time to stand on the apex of the arch frame and watch his stick float past, or to simply wade into the water ankle deep and retrieve it. But the wand has gone, subsumed by the force and flow of the larger river and being carried easterly towards the sea.
But, maybe not. For it is here, looking easterly at the Candion that the river bulges slightly. This huge near mile wide river spreads a pregnant belly into its banks. It is possible if the stick sword were to lose from the main flow of the current and find its way into this river bay that it would collect there like so much other jetsam has before it.
This natural incline has always been a stopping point on the river. A safe haven to moor up boats and hence a meeting place. The very roots of the village of Oxboat lie in these mudded banks. At first a few boats tied up and a fire on the side of the river may have attracted others' attention. The first meetings turned into markets, and camps turned into cabins and then houses. The riverside lane widened and made ready for more traffic.
However, that traffic was never truly to come. As this was a natural harbor it remained a safe haven and a stopover but never really became a port. All ports are harbors, but all harbors are not ports. Oxboat chose to be what it became. A pleasant village on a muddy river. A place of refuge on a river journey.
And the current choice of refuge stands here just half a mile down the lane from where Lloyd's Bridge marks the place where the Bow and the Canadian join. The Floating Goat Inn stands on the banks of the river, once a minor Jacobean folly and now the local drinking hole of choice for dyspeptic locals. A few hundred years of history are clearly visible in the gables and beams of exterior and interior. Although this holds no sway against the clear fortitude of a place that has been a refuge from all around it since the day it was opened. The Floating Goat is held together not by its core materials but by the very need for its existence.
It took Henry Drink to seize the opportunity. He was a merchant who had made his wealth on the river and had seen the potential in the spot. One day rather than stopping at Oxboat with his raft of building supplies and then heading on he decided to remain and put the materials to good use. Now a rich man, he decided to show the villagers his intentions toward grandeur by constructing “The finest inn in England '' by the river. He began work on an honest but fundamentally gauche version of what he considered to be tasteful. The building was too grand for the time and place, and too small to be really grand. This, coupled with a change in Henry's fortunes which saw him lose most of his money in several other questionable ventures, left a strange hybrid construction of the fanciful alongside the practical and cheap. For all the beautiful strap work, columns and rustications the finish was botched and hurried. The Riverside Inn opened in 1690 and after a brief trade caused out of curiosity mainly fell upon hard times with its only function being a watering hole for the locals, something that still persists to this day.
No one is really clear when it became the Floating Goat. There is a story that at some point one of the owners tried to invent a ghost story to attract more customers but it would appear it already had the name by then, and it was always clearly a goat rather than a ghost.
The truth is it had acquired that name for a good reason because as the eighteenth century ended and the new century began something had happened in the tiny riverside hamlet of Ox Boat that had carved the place in two and set ruminations for the future that still are felt today.
Chapter Two. The Abbotts.
It all started because John Abbott and his eldest son Paul were very nice men. They had taken it upon themselves to keep a watch out on the part of the Canadian visible from their farm for any trouble on the river. One windswept night in late September Paul had come running up the track to the farmhouse shouting for his father. As he swung the door to full hinge he caught his breath and observed his younger sister building the fire.
“Julie, where’s Dad?”
She looked upon her tall, grown brother. Paul was handsome by the doorframe. A safe person that reminded her in good ways of her father. It was fairly usual for him to be so proactive and bold as he took life and survival seriously and was the oil to the cogs of the family in the absence of a mother.
“Here a while ago, praps with Johnny upstairs”. It was her Fathers habit this time in the evening to spend some time with her younger brother. They seemed to be able to talk freely for hours about any subject and little John Abbott seemed to share his father’s curiosity about all things. This was a point of jealousy for the little girl all though in truth she was loved no less but as the youngest and the only female in the family even at eleven she felt her place in the battle for her fathers affection.
Paul shifted from one foot to the other. “Go get him will you, my shoes are clogged with mud.”
Julia bunged the flaming kindle she was nursing at the plate into the hearth and picked up her skirt. She didn’t rush but she made her way up the wooden steps with ease and was soon creaking her brother’s door open. John Abbot sat upon the bed and looked around to see his daughter poking through the dark of the hallway.
“Paul’s here looks worried.” Under her breath, eyes down.
“We shall finish this… another time”. John Abbot’s sonorous voice to her brother and then to Julia “I’ll be down”.
She skitted away to her room, up another flight of stairs toward the front of the house and spent a few minutes rejecting her curiosity and looking through her schoolwork. In a moment though, noises from outside piqued her interest and she found herself at the high gable window looking down at the activity below.
The slow wind that had pummeled the wooden house that day had risen to a gale and the clouds raced across a clear moon. A gust smacked the window frame and she strained to see past her reflection. She snuffed the lamp and the outside world became less muddy but she still could not see through the darkness. She took a breath and opened the window. Then she shut her eyes and squeezed the lids as tightly as she could. She knew that to be able to see in darkness she could adjust her vision by doing so.
She held it for a moment and then opened her eyes. First radiant circles of light and blur and then a focus in the dark. Two figures, her brother and her father were out at the furthest boat shed and hauling out Spinner. This was the largest of the family’s rowboats. It was a double skull with peeling paintwork and had sat in the boatshed most of the summer awaiting reconditioning work that had been slow to transpire. John Abbot had intended to have the work done by the end of the season but his mind appeared to have been wandering of late and he was unusually off task.
She watched the two men, fairly equal in stature, lug the boat down to the short constructed canal that led out from their homestead to the larger river. It seemed an arduous task in the high wind. It wasn’t unusual for her father and brother to set out at night to help people who had got into trouble trying to come in from the main swell of the river to the safety of the bay. Tonight, however, the wind was picking up and Julia suddenly felt a slither of ice in her heart as she watched her father and brother disappear out of view.
This was the night she was orphaned. Her mother, Elizabeth, had died the day that Johnny came into the world but she was too young to remember that. As the sun came up pink and blue on a typical beautiful morning after a heavy wind she was left sitting upon the step, once again abandoned. Reverend Sykes and her schoolmistress Dolores Canther had been sitting at the breakfast table when she awoke. They told the children that they must be strong and that they would be cared for and that their Father and older brother had died trying to save the life of a boatswain who had come into trouble on the river in terrible weather. Julia, forever practical and sensible, turned her attention to what needed to be done. She would be a rock for her younger brother but in the same way she would never forgive the wind and water for taking her brother and father she would never forgive Johnny for taking her mother also.
Chapter Three. The Feud.
Johnny Abbott was much happier reading, writing and talking than he was doing any real farm work. The Abbotts holding was a huge hundred-acre site around the tiny hamlet of Oxboat, roughly half agriculture and half livestock. With so much land the family employed regular help from locals and so it was easy for Johnny to avoid as much work on the land as he chose. The family heritage was famous for its farming credibility and religious heritage with several of the males going on to study theology and join the church and so it was assumed that Johnny, with his enquiring manner and poetic turn of phrase, had a personality more keeping with that tradition.
This didn’t mean that the youngest wasn’t to be found out on the farm, a romantic from an early age he much preferred sitting and reading outside and was often to be found in the remotest reaches of the Abbotts land sitting on fences or walking with his satchel and chewing hay.
His father was very accepting of this behavior and encouraged his young son in his studies and likewise Paul Abbott, eleven years his senior toed the line with his fathers opinions on most things and tended not to bother Johnny unless he was in really dire need of workers. This could not be said of Julia though, who had from an early age waged a campaign on her younger brother to discredit him in any way possible. The normal sibling rivalry of children born so close in age was exacerbated by the fact that Johnny was the person who had detached her from the warm comfort of a mothers love and the only other female in the family.
Resentment floundered in his sister who would find anything and everything she could to criticize, bemoan and infuriate herself in all contact with her brother. This of course meant that as soon as Johnny felt that he was old enough to defend himself he began to fight back and the usually reserved and quiet little boy could turn into a deafening screaming banshee even resorting to cat scratching, kicking violence once or twice.
Julia went to great lengths to get her brother into trouble and therefore receive the punishment that she felt he quite rightly deserved. One opportunity she took was to use the animal shit she had collected with a spade from one of the sheds to litter Johnny’s clothes and give the impression, she hoped, that he had soiled himself. This half-cocked plan never came to fruition as when the housemaid informed her father, who was well frequented with the smell of animal dung, he simply assumed the boy had been playing in the stables and slipped. The lack of discipline for her younger brother drove her insane with rage and injustice.
Johnny, however, managed to usurp his elder sibling's power in more subtle ways by telling stories about her in the playground and covering his back so that she would never be able to trace them back to a source. He made sure that she too was pulled up for every minor infraction at school and at home but handily slid into the shadows and took none of the credit for his work, to the extent that Julia spent a long while at first school thinking she was just the victim of very bad luck.
Things came to a head when a ten-year-old Julia nearly drowned a nine-year-old Johnny whilst swimming on an unusually hot day in the canal by the house. They had been playing amicably in the fervent good mood that hot weather brings out in all creatures, even serious Paul had joined them for a rare moment of frivolity, but after some strenuous water play Paul had returned to work and Julia found herself tired and once again was allowing herself to be annoyed by her younger sibling. Johnny, who had been using a floating oar as a rest went to take a dive and the oar swung up and out nearly connecting with his sister’s crown. In a fit of pique she ducked the boy and held him under- Johnny, still expecting fun play and unaware of his sister's mood swing, started to panic when she wouldn’t release his head from under the water. Julia’s sense of justice for the situation held just a little too long and when he started to kick violently she screamed and released the child who also wailed. This attracted the attention of a few of the farmworkers nearby and eventually her father was called and Johnny was pulled weeping and shivering from the pool.
Julia was scalded severely and her father, who had been aware of the feud but feigning ignorance in the hope it would fizzle out, realized that things had gone far enough and some action was required.
The action took the form of a Nanny goat called Glinny, some chickens and a small plot of left-side land around the back of the house that was cleared of weeds and given in some earnest to the two youngest children. John Abbot had originally decided, rather bluntly, that he would starve the children of food and milk until they provided their own but that was obviously problematic as the set-up and growing took time and the lenient father never implemented this rule. The children however loved working on the small piece of land, sometimes even together and tending to the animals and the goat particularly was very high in Johnny’s affections. John Abbots plan seemed to work and so began a palpable armistice between the two children as they toiled on their crops and attended to their animals.
Johnny talked to Glinny constantly and was often to be found philosophizing with the beast until late at night. He adorned the animal with hair ties and coveted its horns with bells. Goats will eat almost anything and this one was allowed to dine on the best leftovers from the table, once Johnny fed her a whole box of truffles. That was a particularly cold winter and most of the river basin and the canal froze over thickly, ice secured to the banks and all of the farm workers and villagers came down to skate. Johnny and Julia took great delight parading Glinny across the ice on a sled. The goat stood patiently and only slightly bemused as she was carted around the giggling onlookers with her decorative ribbons and she let out several jolly bleats. Johnny went too far that night however and was put straight by his father when John Abbott walked into his son’s bedroom and found the goat curled asleep on the floor in a good blanket. Even Julia’s sterner heart had softened with love of the animal but she still spent most of her time with Glinny in pursuit of the practical, gathering milk and hair and collecting the manure.
It was in this spirit of kindness and peace that death found the two Abbott children again in the autumn of 1850 and left them to be cared for by an elderly aunt who seemingly was no relation to them. The gap left by their Father and Brother was immeasurable and for a while they turned to each other for solace. John Abbots chief groundsman Captain Sweller took over the day-to-day running of the farm and Aunt Belinda provided minimal care for the children as they grew. They both took to school and waited until the day when they both stood to inherit the farm. The tiny patch of land began to go unattended once again, but Glinny remained a favored pet and glued the two children’s affection as their father had intended.
Julia married at eighteen to a man she only briefly had known but claimed to love and had a child quickly thereafter. It was her request that as the oldest she would take the farmhouse and the adjoining land, her father having modern views on women and the right of ownership had left her entitled as the eldest gender aside. She offered Johnny to stay but it was his lot to be left with the Hint House, a kind of lodge house for the farm that sat on the crossroads of Aeon lane and Drink Hill. This house looked out over the river and was small but magnificently quaint in its octagon architecture and ruffles that echoed some of the more baroque tendencies of the nearby Inn. Johnny married and had a child within the year also. The Abbots had produced two new girls Claire and Ann-Marie, barely a year apart and similar in look; these girls evaporated all traces of the family feud. Johnny farmed the land around Hint House that he had been left with the property and Julia kept the larger land to the east and for a long while the peace between the two siblings remained.
Chapter Four. The Floating Goat.
The body of Glinny the goat washed up on the shore of the Candion eight years later. She was old by goat standards by now but no less cherished. Johnny and Julia were in the Riverside Inn at the time they were told the news and rushed down to the waterfront. By this time the feud had re-kindled and flared again and their meeting was an attempt at a truce (Julia would have to have a very good reason to step inside a “drinking establishment”) for the fighting that had started when the after affects of the two marriages set in.
George Cuthbert was a Wesleyan Methodist and met the young Julia at church Sunday school. She had attended of her own accord after finding delight in the simplicity of the movement. It appealed to her sense of righteousness and social justice. A few years later they married with little fanfare and Julia threw herself into the life of the church. George ran the farm, with Captain Swellers full assistance and Julia toiled with her work from the early hours of the morning until late in the evening. The weekends were devoted to their church and the other attendants' functions and activities. Julia found solace in this large extended family of like-minded thinkers.
By this time the population of the village, as with the general population, was growing. The industrial age was heralding a new era of sustainability and high average income and the few plots that didn’t belong to the Abbots on the south side of the village were changing from dwellings to houses. At this time the First Lord Cavanagh had bought Oxboat Hall, which sat high up on the west side of the Inwood. It was a large and grand building, putting to shame the old Drink Hall Tudor building that was rotting away further down the south side of the hill. With this building's demise the land had been divided and sold off and the hamlet had become a village.
Larger paddle steamers became a common sight on the Canadian hauling coal and corn up to the city. There was much more traffic on the river as goods left the country and fishing boats made their way down to the estuary and the sea beyond.
The Wesleyans were given funding to construct their own church hall and Julia gladly gave up a piece of her land to do so. On the southernmost edge of her land and nearest as she could to the other villages houses so that the church would have the most evangelical impact on the new burgeoning settlement. If this bothered Reverend Sykes up in his big stone monolith on the hill, he never mentioned it.
Rather than freeing her soul, the conversion to more extreme Christianity only seemed to embitter Julia Cuthbert all the more. She saw only the morally redundant around her and her attempts at salvation were often ill fated, as she really couldn’t find the patience to nurse others on the bosom of the Holy Spirit. Most people, according to Julia, just didn’t have it in them and were best left alone, out of sight and mind.
Johnny had met Mabel Reeves whilst out on one of his many walks. She was perched up against one of the tallest trees on the meadow of Drink Hill with a sketchbook resting on her knee and a pencil scraping busily on the page. They started talking and the time flew away.
United in their philanthropy and love of books, Mabel would often ride out on her bicycle to see Johnny and they would spend hours walking and talking about any subject that came to mind. Johnny took a long time to kiss her, feeling that he would be taking advantage of that kinship. Mabel spent long cycle rides home wondering what was stopping him.
Eventually the romance blossomed and this was the time when the veritable young bachelor moved into the small lodge house. Mabel was a regular visitor, much to Julia Cuthbert’s chagrin. She was determined to keep an eye on her brother who did not share her religious tendencies and in fact had, for some time, been absent from Sunday church. He was also known to be a regular at the Inn on the far side of the village. Julia really was glad that Johnny had moved into his own place as she found him unhelpful and lazy in the farmhouse. Johnny was glad to go because he found overwhelmingly more and more that George Cuthbert was asserting his patriarchal authority in the house that Johnny still considered to be his fathers.
As time went on the family fell out of the habit of spending time together. Julia was vocal of her disapproval of her brother’s apparent lustfulness and extended her disdain to just about every aspect of his life. She considered Mabel to be quirky and odd and the two women went out of their way to avoid each other. Julia lived with the shame of her itinerant sibling at church meetings and found herself praying not for her brother’s soul, but for her being rid of him. Eventually the two were married and this seemed to placate Julia, although the lines had been drawn.
The division between the two camps was mapped by the old hedgerow that ran straight up to the boundaries of the farmhouse. The only neutral territory was the old patch of land originally given to them by their father and as both felt like they had a claim on this soil they never discussed splitting it. Of course, Glinny still lived and grazed there unaware that she was the center force in this family war. Both Johnny and Julia visited and cared for the old goat, who had an ephemeral presence for the two. Occasionally they would meet there together, and often with the two daughters in tow who liked and respected each other and so Ginny's Field became no man's land in their petulant fight.
Likewise the cousins seemed to be given free range on both sets of land and were as likely to be seen together in the woodland by the lodge as they were playing on the boat Spinner on the farmhouse canal. The friendship between the cousins was accepted and if anything ignored for want of it shining a light on the pointlessness of the parent’s disagreement.
On a sunny spring day when the mud on goat field had warmed to a thick crust and dandelions had sprouted along the un munched edges, Johnny found his sister sitting on a stool next to Glinny and pulling out her wiry goat hair with a big wooden comb. She wore a white handkerchief fastened around her head and her face was made of rough strewn skin making her look older than her twenty-seven years. This was the effect of hard work and little pampering. She looked up at her younger brother.
“She’s getting older, John Abbot, and so are you by the looks of things. It’s been over a month.”
He grabbed at his new beard remembering that his sister wouldn’t have seen him since he had grown it. Julia thought it added to his general unkemptness.
“I’ve been keeping to myself, Julie,” he replied, squinting in the sunlight.
“Would that you were. Would that you were.” She sighed heavily and stood up, placing the brush on the stool and wiping her hands down her front. “I’ve been told you have had the house open for an exhibition. They’re talking about it all the way to Darrow.” She looked him in the eye.
Johnny had spent the years with his wife learning the basics of fine art and now fancied himself as a painter and sculptor, and Mabel had carried on her drawings and charcoals. They had opened the Hint House as a gallery a few weeks ago and had many visitors. But it seemed to be one of his larger sculptures that was attracting all the attention. A nude of his wife in the bath. It was positioned as the final piece in the collection, just on the back veranda and had caused some stir with some people flouncing off dramatically, comically offended.
If Johnny was honest, that was the effect he was looking for. Although hardly graphic, this type of modern artistry was not appreciated in such a rural backwater. There was just enough nudity on display to cause a stir.
“I can’t imagine how you can be offended by something you haven’t even seen?” questioned Johnny, but there was a malevolence in his tone now.
“I don’t have to imagine, I have had it described to me. Why would that woman want to put her god given body on display to all and sundry…” her words flying out fast.
“I happen to think ‘that woman’” mocking his sister's highlighting of the phrase “is beautiful and a perfect subject for a piece of art. Whatever you have a problem with is only the same thing you have under those clothes of yours.”
She rounded on him “Don’t you dare, John. It is a sin to parade nakedness as so. The Lord does not want us to give into our lustful desires and you know this!”
John laughed “whose lustful desires? Can you not look at an unclothed body without thinking about it? I can appreciate beauty without thinking it’s a sin, and anyway if I do feel any desire that is my choice, no one else’s.”
Their voices were raised now and Glinny the goat decided it was time to leave the situation and go and find something else to do in the sunlight on the far side of the field. The two adults, who were now children once again, were locked in.
“This is the problem with all of you, you’re… sheep!” He blurted, not unconscious of the irony of his surroundings. “The Lord tells you this, the Lord tells you that and you can’t think for yourselves!”
“Oh, I can think for myself.” Julia retorted. “And I know enough to not keep making stupid mistakes and casting myself as a damn fool, Lord forgive me.”
She paused, dramatically, pursed her lips and narrowed her eyes.
“You’ve too much devil in you, John Abbott. It was always this way and you can’t see the good for your own bad.”
“Ha!” he once again laughed in her face. “It’s you that’s always been evil, Julia. You’re a bully and a coward and you can’t stand not being the one in charge. That’s the way it’s always been.”
Julia snapped. “If that’s the way you think then you can just stay away, I won’t have this kind of talk on my land and you can stay off this field if you don’t mind.”
It took a moment for Johnny to register. “This field is mine and yours, Dad said it was for both of us.” Suddenly he was the younger brother again. Hurt and confused.
“This field is mine. I have the documents. What’s in it is mine too and it’s about time you left my property.”
He glanced over to the far side of the field and was suddenly defeated. The nanny goat bleated as if knowing the direness of the situation. What was once unbreakable was now broken.
The acceleration in the feud was big news all over the village and gossip provided further fuel for the fire as stories became greatly exaggerated. It was heard that Johnny had accused his sister and her husband of stealing her Fathers money. In the modest center of the village, where a small grocery had sprung up, people stopped for the rumors of the developments in the war of the oldest village family. Johnny Abbott was known to have bacchanalian orgies at his house fueled by drink and opium. Claire Cuthbert, Julia’s daughter was removed from the small local school and a home tutor was employed. It was bandied about that the two cousins were now being kept apart for their own good. Some, but not all of this was true.
The two girls managed to still meet. Both not yet ten years old they were victims of the terrible feud and set about to change it. They pieced together as much as they could of the story from their unique perspectives and came up with a simple solution. They waited for Friday to come around and then they both pretended to sleep that night and when each of their houses went quiet and the moon lit the black they snuck out of the house and met in Glinny’s field.
Johnny didn’t see his daughter that morning, which was not unusual as Ann Marie was free spirited and often woke early and disappeared into the countryside on her free days. She was of course usually meeting Claire in secret and although Claire had to be more careful she managed to escape the confines on a Saturday to meet with her cousin. There was nothing particularly unusual about the girls being gone.
Then at midday Julia walked past the goat field and realized that Glinny was missing and instantly started asking after her daughter. It would be unusual for anyone else to interfere with the animal as she was kept as a pet rather than a piece of the farm. She was told that her daughter had left early and immediately discounted her and turned her suspicion to her brother.
It had been weeks since the showdown at the field and the rumor mill had been rife. Julia’s mind settled on the idea that Johnny had taken the goat as a last ditch attempt to settle the score. She was furious. She marched down to the lodge, for the first time in years and banged on the door but there was nobody home. She snuck around the back of the house and looked around the nearest plots of land but there was no sign of Glinny. The thought occurred that Johnny had taken the goat for sale (but nobody would buy such an old and useless animal) or worse for slaughter. This seemed improbable but knowing the depths of her brother’s depravity she wondered if he would have it in him to deliver one final foul blow to their relationship.
It seemed odd to the other villagers to see Julia Cuthbert in her farm clothes stomping through the dusty town on the warpath for her brother, but she had gone beyond caring. It was a hot August day and she eventually made her way up the hill to the parish church and the woodlands beyond in search of her brother.
Reverend Sykes was fixing the gate to the graveyard as she passed. “Good Morning Julia, is everything alright?”
“Yes.” She paused, “No” and then finally “I don’t know”. What had struck her was the old man who had been at her kitchen table the morning after her Father and Mothers death, the churchyard with plots for many members of her family including these most recent, the church which was neglected and gray and above all the large cross standing before her that just at that moment had caught the light.
She sat there, on the fence with the Reverend for nearly an hour and for the first time she found herself thinking clearly about the moments that had shaped her life. Although these moments were out of her control they had made her who she was. She felt a great tension leave her. Reverend Sykes pointed out that above all Christ valued the ability to love and forgive and that she did. Others and herself.
That was how she had ended up in the Inn with her brother that night. When a local waterman came into the pub and said that he had seen the body of a goat washed up on the shore of the Candion she somehow was not surprised, even maybe a little relieved. They made their way down to the river bed and Johnny took Julia’s hand through the slippery mud and stones and there was Glinny, drowned and ragged and up shore from her was the old rowboat Spinner. It was empty and there were no footprints in the mud surrounding.
What the girls had intended for the goat can’t be certain. They may have felt that pushing the goat in the river and drowning it would end the curse of the arguing family, or they may have been rowing the animal to the other side of the wide river to set it free. Whatever the intention, it worked as the feud ended on the banks of the river that day. However, the cousins’ bodies were never found.