The Wicken is an old name for the rowan tree. In Norse mythology, Thor was saved from a fast-flowing river in the Underworld when he clung onto the branches of a rowan. The myth says that this was the tree from which the first woman was made, the first man having been made from an ash.
‘What woman in her right mind’s going to take
me on?’
He said it aloud, but though he was alone in the house, maybe someone heard.
The old farmhouse house at Ings was full of ghosts, and some of them he knew. His father had died in the next room, unexpectedly, neatly lying in his stocking feet, not yet sixty. His mother died in the house too, in the kitchen; struck suddenly breathless, refusing the doctor; propped up in Sam’s arms, patting his hand. “Let be, my son!” said the softly patting hand when she couldn’t speak any more. The dimming eyes spoke love; no fear in them. And when he looked again, she’d gone, the wick blown. And then the dogs set up howling out in the yard.
They knew.
The noise outside was tremendous. Hurricane Isidor, just as forecast, had made landfall, all the way from the Gulf of Mexico, screaming round the old stone walls. But it could scream all it liked. Those walls had stood four hundred years in the shelter of the Fell.
‘What woman’s going to want to live here, like this?’ Sam said.
His mother had, of course, and his sister, but they’d been raised to it. Women wanted things easier nowadays, and he didn’t blame them. Sam wouldn’t have minded having a few things easier, himself. Someone there alongside of him, to hold and have her rub his aching back, the wind now gusting eighty, ninety miles an hour, he guessed, tearing at the ivy round the window, walloping the chimney stacks as if testing how to pull them down.
Sam wasn’t too worried about the flock out on the fell. The hefters knew the best places. They’d guide the younger animals to shelter in hollows or in the meandering lees of dry-stone walls, and the mules awaiting the tup were safely down on the in-by.
The dogs were snug enough in their kennel in the byre. The roof though- that did worry Sam, thinking of the loose and broken tiles he’d been meaning to replace when he could find the time.
Send me a woman.
He slept. He must have done, but then he woke with a shock, lurching in the bed like a ship at sea.
There she was.
Standing over the bed.
Looming over him.
She? Or It? He understood at once, paralyzed with disbelief, this was no woman of flesh and blood, come to answer his prayers.
She was the wicken tree that grew on the low rise beyond the yard. He had known her all his life. Knew the initials carved there by his father, when he was still a boy.
The scars and knots in her gleaming bark-skin.
The woman in the rowan snapped stiffly to and fro, tossing her berry-laden hair, cracking and creaking, snapping and lashing her limbs.
She had withstood so many storms. But this time, the storm won, ripping out her roots from their ancient mooring.
The wicken tree let out an agonized, shivering cry, the mouth a black hole, and threw up two skinny black branch-arms.
But she could not save herself, and Sam , still spellbound with disbelief and now the terror of finality, knew he could not move fast enough.
The wicken tree creaking, groaning, slowly toppling to crush him.
