One
. . . Was this the first thing he wrote of his own?
I am John Collantoday in the yere 1483 I will defeat the goat.In the name of honnour and glory to god highest & for reson that it knocked me in the mud again today& has TRODDEN churlishly over my backhas despoiled!an insult that cannot be borne.John has made a plan of battle. According to the ancient art of the famous Vegetius, who set out in his book how the Roman Empire toppled and suborned all enemies. According to his brother Tom.
Tom did not read that book, but he told John what he was told was in it.
Tom had a favorite military stratagem of his own. This was the goose trap. He’d stand in front of something and call, Little John! Oh, little Johnny John John! You are a pink pig’s arsehole, a hairy ball sack, a shitbeetle—and then, when John, sore wroth, would charge at him, Tom would dodge and John would run into that thing he was standing in front of, which was usually a cow shit. And then Tom would shout: Goose trap!
Now Tom is gone to be an apprentice, and John is goose no longer.
John is a general.
. . .
The wise general uses the ground to his advantage when laying his snare. He positions his light infantry (himself) ahead of the enemy’s advancing cavalry (the goat), with the stream at his rear. From this position, the infantry will make a feint attack with an artillery of pebbles. The cavalry, incensed, will charge—whereupon the infantry will leap up, take hold of a willow tree branch, and swing to safety above the water. The cavalry, unable to halt his charge, will plunge headlong into the stream, and be thusly carried away, probably ending up in the sea.
Toppled and suborned.
And the wise general shall obtain the victory and pass unmolested through the farm to fetch water and weed the herbs and feed the chickens ever after: praise be to God.
John walks with his water bucket and a bag of pebbles toward the stream, whistling.
There are primroses on the bright grass edging the mud tracks, which have dried and cracked. The pigs trample through the richly fetid midden. Bluebells in the wood; wood pigeons flapping on top of each other; blossom crowded onto tree branches, silky, lavish, deeply pink. Above it all, the sky a flawless blue, intensely perfect, like a lid that could be flipped, to show God looking down, saying: Go forward, my son.
This spring you are a man.
This spring you show the goat who is master.
John goes into the kitchen, a small room leaning against the main house like a laborer taking a nap. It’s hot in here, and smells of baking bread, meat cooking in the iron pot above the fire, and a bitter scorch of something starting to burn, because Jennott, as she always tells them, is a head dairymaid and not a fucking cook.
John stands in the door with the water. Jennott’s growling at the bread, which she shovels out of the oven and piles onto the table. The rising heat waves the lines of light and dim that divide the room. She turns around and sees John.
“Old Gaspard got you again, did he?”
Her pretense is that the goat is French. She mislikes the French. They killed her dad.
She takes the water from him.
“You’re covered in scratches. And so wet. Did you fall into the stream?”
John isn’t going to discuss military strategy with plebeians, but calling Jennott a plebeian might get him one of her blindingly fast smacks around the head, so he doesn’t say anything.
“He knows you’re frightened, that’s what it is,” she says. “You’ve got to steel your balls, stand up straight, and stare him out.”
“You can’t stare something out when its eyes go in different directions.”
Jennott laughs. She picks up a loaf of bread and puts it on her head, tucks her lower lip under her teeth, and says, “Who am I?”
“Sir Nicholas,” says John.
Sir Nicholas the parish priest and John’s father, Will, are enemies. In the past, John’s dad said some heretical-flavored things, and Sir Nicholas accused him of being a secret Lollard and threatened to get him burned.
And it’s true, said Will Collan, that my grandfather was a Lollard who didn’t see why knavish priests like Sir Nicholas should be called Sir any more than a cobbler should, or why they should take the confession of honest men, nor their sweated-for money, neither—and then he joined the revolt of the peasants, and was killed just before his own son, my dad, was born.
Will doesn’t hide his bitterness when he says it. But it’s not for any turdly priest to accuse him of sympathies. So Will Collan put manure through Sir Nicholas’s windows. The act was anonymous but also, in a small village, completely nonymous, or whatever the word is. (John, small village boy, is often short of words.)
“Correct,” says Jennott. “The old fart-smeller. That’s what he does in confession. Smells farts.”
“Is that lawful to say?” asks John.
“It is if you cross yourself after and say, ‘Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee,’ ” Jennott says, and, as ever, John can’t tell if she’s joking.
Things John Collan’s father shouts at him in the daytime:
For God’s sakes John pick up your feet stand straight stop bothering the women stop bothering the cows stop bothering Jennott where in the holy hell were you don’t wipe your mouth on your sleeve don’t blaspheme quieten down stand straight how many times where the devil is he now—Things his father says at night:
Get to bed my boy, sleep sweetly.(And a pat, on the head.)
Copyright © 2025 by Jo Harkin. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
