everything violent and hungry, the young brambles anxious and ambitious to cover every neglected dip and awkward hillock of our fields. Perhaps that is the great note of the summer, an awful anxiety that takes itself into everything like a strange rot in the windowsills, eating out the hearts of things till you could put your finger through the last coat of sorrow.
Never mind that the end of such doings is clear even as they begin, even as the grasses tear up from the warming ground, and the brambles throw strong cables across surprising distances, and the first pale green signs of the blackberries burn in the thorny ropes. For a countrywoman, if such I am, knows the end of such ambitions, the berries at last boiling with the wasteful pounds of sugar in the big cooking pot, the white sugar creating lighter veins of reddish streaks, as bitter berry marries to the sweetness of the beet. The grasses devoured by the milch cows, and all those grasses out of reach lying exhausted and sere in the revenges of autumn. All swept away, vanishing by a fierce magic off the old woven carpets of the earth.
The marriage coverlet is woven and embroidered for the happy pair, the house is built in a few summer weeks by the meitheal of neighbours, the last twist and stitch is put to the thatch, and in they go, the fortunate couple, with strength and purpose—and at length the house is desolate and empty with only rain for a roof, the stranger comes and opens the rotted hope chest, and puts their fingers to the folded coverlet, which falls from their hand in mouldy fragments. And that’s all we can say about it, the shortness, the swiftness, and the strange unimportance of life.
But when June is queen, eternally in the grasses, in the wood pigeons, in the dank rooks, in the potato gardens, in the cabbage patches, wild dreams are given birth to with all the mighty energy of the full-blowing year.
All things and creatures feel it. I am not immune. A strange and inconvenient affection takes a hold of me. I go down beyond the midden to my crab-apple tree and talk to it. Now and then I touch it, like patting a child on the head. I watch its progress carefully, like the mother of the same child. I pinch out whatever the late frosts have done to it, and scrape off the mildew, and every week or so I lime-wash the bottom of the trunk against such insects as like to climb up towards the shoots. I dig and tussle up the soil around its rim, I feed it the tea leaves from our many infusions. When I read the leaves in the cups for Sarah, bringing into her head the dreams of soft futures, I am thinking quietly myself of the crab-apple tree, the nourishment it will get from the makings of such prophecies.
I am at the tree that day when Billy Kerr arrives. He is covered head to foot in a strange painting of what looks like snowflakes, but it is the blurred splashes and drops of the whitewash that he must have been applying to the house of my cousins. Even the backs of his hands are speckled, his cheeks, his nose. It stops in a line on his forehead where he must have had a paper bag over his remnant hair. Any cuts and scrapes now he has on his hands where the lime has touched will be deep pits in his skin by morning, right down to the bone, if he doesn’t wash well. Because the lime eats in the hours after painting with it, in the small hours when you lie in bed dreaming, reminding you of the fact that the bodies of hanged men used to be cast into the lime pits in the prisons, to render them down, to get rid of them, to bring utter destruction. So my father would have described it—‘utter destruction’. For the guilty must not expect mercy from other living men, only God could mend their hurts, or the devil increase them. That was all the mind of my father: retribution, punishment, being lost to the world and never found again. It used to frighten me as a little girl, his certainty and his power, devour me with fright like lime itself, in my cosy iron
Never mind that the end of such doings is clear even as they begin, even as the grasses tear up from the warming ground, and the brambles throw strong cables across surprising distances, and the first pale green signs of the blackberries burn in the thorny ropes. For a countrywoman, if such I am, knows the end of such ambitions, the berries at last boiling with the wasteful pounds of sugar in the big cooking pot, the white sugar creating lighter veins of reddish streaks, as bitter berry marries to the sweetness of the beet. The grasses devoured by the milch cows, and all those grasses out of reach lying exhausted and sere in the revenges of autumn. All swept away, vanishing by a fierce magic off the old woven carpets of the earth.
The marriage coverlet is woven and embroidered for the happy pair, the house is built in a few summer weeks by the meitheal of neighbours, the last twist and stitch is put to the thatch, and in they go, the fortunate couple, with strength and purpose—and at length the house is desolate and empty with only rain for a roof, the stranger comes and opens the rotted hope chest, and puts their fingers to the folded coverlet, which falls from their hand in mouldy fragments. And that’s all we can say about it, the shortness, the swiftness, and the strange unimportance of life.
But when June is queen, eternally in the grasses, in the wood pigeons, in the dank rooks, in the potato gardens, in the cabbage patches, wild dreams are given birth to with all the mighty energy of the full-blowing year.
All things and creatures feel it. I am not immune. A strange and inconvenient affection takes a hold of me. I go down beyond the midden to my crab-apple tree and talk to it. Now and then I touch it, like patting a child on the head. I watch its progress carefully, like the mother of the same child. I pinch out whatever the late frosts have done to it, and scrape off the mildew, and every week or so I lime-wash the bottom of the trunk against such insects as like to climb up towards the shoots. I dig and tussle up the soil around its rim, I feed it the tea leaves from our many infusions. When I read the leaves in the cups for Sarah, bringing into her head the dreams of soft futures, I am thinking quietly myself of the crab-apple tree, the nourishment it will get from the makings of such prophecies.
I am at the tree that day when Billy Kerr arrives. He is covered head to foot in a strange painting of what looks like snowflakes, but it is the blurred splashes and drops of the whitewash that he must have been applying to the house of my cousins. Even the backs of his hands are speckled, his cheeks, his nose. It stops in a line on his forehead where he must have had a paper bag over his remnant hair. Any cuts and scrapes now he has on his hands where the lime has touched will be deep pits in his skin by morning, right down to the bone, if he doesn’t wash well. Because the lime eats in the hours after painting with it, in the small hours when you lie in bed dreaming, reminding you of the fact that the bodies of hanged men used to be cast into the lime pits in the prisons, to render them down, to get rid of them, to bring utter destruction. So my father would have described it—‘utter destruction’. For the guilty must not expect mercy from other living men, only God could mend their hurts, or the devil increase them. That was all the mind of my father: retribution, punishment, being lost to the world and never found again. It used to frighten me as a little girl, his certainty and his power, devour me with fright like lime itself, in my cosy iron
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