well enough. I think it gains comfort from the manure heap near by, the heat of it, a strange insurance against frosts. I think that evil weather has passed now, the peace of the summer has returned. Now and then the rare note of the hens sounds, that ripple of clucking they do in their sleep, as if they are dreaming of foxes. I think of all the animals of the night creeping across the darkened fields.
‘I am thinking now,’ says Sarah, ‘of Joe McNulty, that went out one morning with a scythe and scythed a whole acre of wheat, to set a marker, he said, for the next generation. And boys brought buttermilk to him all the live-long day, against the monster of thirst grew in his throat. His huge back swiping and swiping at the standing wheat. At the setting of the sun he threw down that scythe, and flung his whetstone far off into the bog just by him there, and let out a crazy roar. The boys sat up on the ditch and cheered. He was something of a man, and that was the man I wanted for my bed. But he might as well have been the president of America, for all I could get close to him.’
‘I always thought there were hundreds of boys trying to get you. You were a lovely long slip of a girl, all wheaten-haired and brown and strong.’
‘Hundreds,’ she says, and laughing a little.
The mice are afoot too in the ceiling. Sometimes tiny drips of water come down from between the ceiling boards. Can it be they are trying to piss on our heads? I think of the silence of the kitchen with its patient and never-regretting clock, the plates in the dresser with the destroyed light altering the blue and white in their glaze. It must be half ten at night, it is only the early summer, not yet the peculiar long days of light when we draw the curtains to encourage sleep, and the daylight lies in the yard like drying straw. Perhaps I will not sleep tonight, but Sarah sleeps, the old embroidered blanket over her face, its hart and hounds forever caught hunting across the low, unstable hills of her breast. What keeps me awake is a dread, an anxiety, an unease I have no name for. My own breaths are short and sharp, my body cannot obey the commands of sleep. And yet by length of trying, by hook or by crook in the woods of the night, seemingly I do sleep.
Chapter Seven
In the folds of the dark she awakes, Sarah, drawing me up like a dark bucket from the deep well of sleep, hand over hand. I can already feel her agitation when I have not even broken the soft surface of normal wakefulness. In the dropping shadows I can see her. She seems to loom up as far as the wooden boards of the ceiling, although she is merely sitting up in the bed, the old bones of her bottom crushing down into the tight straw of the mattress, the tight ticking, so I am almost rolling over against her. My angle of vision from the pillow enlarges her, expands her, her wild white hair like foam or fire, her nostrils begging air, her long hands beating gently on the coverlet. Maybe she was dreaming darkly under the coverlet, till it became a little hot hell of nightmares, which she is by custom afflicted by. The dark of the room is stirred by her fears, the browns and blacks seem to boil around us, the sticks of furniture themselves caught in the petty maelstrom of her panic, twisted out of their places, crooked side table, the pitcher for water in its hole, rickety chairs to take a throw of clothes but never the weight again of a person, except it was a child, swinging its legs to make the creaks come alive in the damaged wood. The leaves of the sycamores make a green waterfall of the wind, all unseen, beyond the cold glass of the window. The mice no doubt scamper in the rafters gleefully. The two old dames below awake!
Billy Kerr is almost a memory when next he returns. That is the way of the summer. Even to an old woman, time gains again some of the rope and length of early days. We are mired even happily in the sweet weeks of June, when vigour is everywhere, the green of
‘I am thinking now,’ says Sarah, ‘of Joe McNulty, that went out one morning with a scythe and scythed a whole acre of wheat, to set a marker, he said, for the next generation. And boys brought buttermilk to him all the live-long day, against the monster of thirst grew in his throat. His huge back swiping and swiping at the standing wheat. At the setting of the sun he threw down that scythe, and flung his whetstone far off into the bog just by him there, and let out a crazy roar. The boys sat up on the ditch and cheered. He was something of a man, and that was the man I wanted for my bed. But he might as well have been the president of America, for all I could get close to him.’
‘I always thought there were hundreds of boys trying to get you. You were a lovely long slip of a girl, all wheaten-haired and brown and strong.’
‘Hundreds,’ she says, and laughing a little.
The mice are afoot too in the ceiling. Sometimes tiny drips of water come down from between the ceiling boards. Can it be they are trying to piss on our heads? I think of the silence of the kitchen with its patient and never-regretting clock, the plates in the dresser with the destroyed light altering the blue and white in their glaze. It must be half ten at night, it is only the early summer, not yet the peculiar long days of light when we draw the curtains to encourage sleep, and the daylight lies in the yard like drying straw. Perhaps I will not sleep tonight, but Sarah sleeps, the old embroidered blanket over her face, its hart and hounds forever caught hunting across the low, unstable hills of her breast. What keeps me awake is a dread, an anxiety, an unease I have no name for. My own breaths are short and sharp, my body cannot obey the commands of sleep. And yet by length of trying, by hook or by crook in the woods of the night, seemingly I do sleep.
Chapter Seven
In the folds of the dark she awakes, Sarah, drawing me up like a dark bucket from the deep well of sleep, hand over hand. I can already feel her agitation when I have not even broken the soft surface of normal wakefulness. In the dropping shadows I can see her. She seems to loom up as far as the wooden boards of the ceiling, although she is merely sitting up in the bed, the old bones of her bottom crushing down into the tight straw of the mattress, the tight ticking, so I am almost rolling over against her. My angle of vision from the pillow enlarges her, expands her, her wild white hair like foam or fire, her nostrils begging air, her long hands beating gently on the coverlet. Maybe she was dreaming darkly under the coverlet, till it became a little hot hell of nightmares, which she is by custom afflicted by. The dark of the room is stirred by her fears, the browns and blacks seem to boil around us, the sticks of furniture themselves caught in the petty maelstrom of her panic, twisted out of their places, crooked side table, the pitcher for water in its hole, rickety chairs to take a throw of clothes but never the weight again of a person, except it was a child, swinging its legs to make the creaks come alive in the damaged wood. The leaves of the sycamores make a green waterfall of the wind, all unseen, beyond the cold glass of the window. The mice no doubt scamper in the rafters gleefully. The two old dames below awake!
Billy Kerr is almost a memory when next he returns. That is the way of the summer. Even to an old woman, time gains again some of the rope and length of early days. We are mired even happily in the sweet weeks of June, when vigour is everywhere, the green of
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