Terroir by Graham Mort

with dropping the dead overboard. They lost seven sailors and twenty - two negroes on that trip.
    Her father said things that she’d heard no one else say. How all men were born equal until they were made unequal, black and white alike. How ‘nigger’ was no name for a black man and how he’d not bear it said. He’d fought men over that, because God was everywhere and nowhere, in everything and in nothing.
    One day they brought the negroes up on deck for air, chained at the ankles in groups of five. One group started to sing, doing a kind of war dance, stamping in their shackles. When the mate brought the lash to tame them, they jumped over an ill - rigged rail into the sea, dragging each other down. He watched them sink through the clear upper waters into the gloom below, their arms and legs still moving in their chains, air bubbles bursting to the surface. Aye, that’s how much freedom means, Ellen. Freedom is everything to a man. He told her how he’d wanted to join them, to jump for liberty, even if it meant certain death by drowning or sharks. He told her how huge and restless and bright the green Atlantic was, how he’d seen coconuts and pineapple trees in the Indies and women walking around naked to the waist. How the island been set in the sea like a jewel in a crown. As soon as they’d docked in England he’d taken his pay guiltily and stayed sober, slinking past the press gangs, heading north to Yorkshire by country lanes and hedgerows. How he met her mother was never told. She wondered if he’d lain with black women before that. She didn’t care.
    After marriage, he became a lead miner, walking three miles to work and back. Starting at five - thirty and getting home at seven. When she lay in bed between her mother and brother she liked the peaceful feeling of him moving about the house in stockinged feet. She’d hear him taking the bowl of oatmeal from the hearth where it had soaked overnight, then putting on his clogs at the back door, trying not to make a noise. Easing the privy door because it creaked on its hinges, then lighting the lantern he had to carry in winter and greeting the other men of his gang in whispers as they tried not to wake their women. If times were good, they came down to a fire he’d got going from last night’s embers. A cold hearth meant things were bad, even though they were never spoken of. When the hearth was dead you learned not to ask for more than there was.
    It was mid - March now. Fells and fields were still pale brown. Winter had been hard, freezing the pump in the yard. The sheep were almost starving for lack of new grass, though she’d seen ransomes and dog’s mercury spearing through in the woods. The weather was so cold that rabbits had gnawed the bark from the young trees, leaving bare white trunks as high as they could reach. The farmers had come out in gangs to shoot them. Sometimes they put turnips out for the cattle and sheep and she’d sneak down and bring a couple home under her shawl. She roasted them over the fire until they softened enough to eat. Then she’d get the wild shites and spend hours freezing in the privy, emptying her guts.
    There was a crack in the thin window glass where droplets of rain were coming through. Mist blew over the fields below the church and the river had disappeared. The dray horses passed again, dragging the cart away with its load of empty barrels and firkins, the driver hunched into his cape, dangling the whip over the team as if he hadn’t the heart to use it. She wondered where her father was. Van Demons land. The curate told her that was near Australia in the world’s southern half. All she knew was that it would be hot. When her father had pleaded to the court that he’d served his country as a soldier and a sailor, the magistrate joked that the voyage wouldn’t make him seasick then. He was a known poacher and would be made an example of. He