Текст книги "Harvest"

Автор книги: Jim Crace

Соавторы: Jim Crace
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Текущая страница: 13 (всего у книги 15 страниц)

It seems an age since I was here with Mr. Quill and Master Kent. We’d named our Gleaning Queen and the master had said what he always says about “this noble day,” how in order of their station everyone and everything would benefit from gleaning – the families who worked so hard, the thoughtless cattle and the thankless geese, and finally the hogs. He had not said that hogs precede the oxen and the plow. He had not reminded us that this once-was barley field was set aside for winter-planted wheat. He had not promised that bread would follow beer. I remember thinking, bitterly, So our master’s dreams for us do not include another crop. Our final harvest must have come and gone. I remember Master Jordan’s words: “You’ll never need the plow again.” We’ll see.

Mistress Beldam’s husband has taken charge. I’m left to lead the animals and urge them on, flicking their pink ears. He grasps the plow handles and plants his feet into the soil, leaning back in expectation of the pull. He has to find a leverage that takes account of cattle, beam and soil, and finding it ennobles him: I’ve not seen his face so passionate up till now, or so full of consequence. He knows what plowing is. If anyone is watching – and I hope Mistress Beldam is – it will look as if he’s pulling against the oxen rather than working with them, that he’s the strongest of the three. Just for today, he’s walking on a field in heaven rather than on earth, he’s plowing up the lands of time, marking out the ridges and the furrows of a trying life. I can tell he has debts to settle of his own. Did not Mr. Quill say that these newcomers were fugitives from sheep themselves, exiles from their own commons? That would explain the man’s evident keenness to commence. We’ve broken bread together. Now he wants to break the earth with me. We’ll liberate the spirits of the soil. We’ll let the little devils breathe.

The key to plowing is to hold a steady line, to be symmetrical, a skill I never quite mastered. I point down the field at a tapered oak which stands high above the hedgerow in the dell. That is the headland we will be aiming for with our first cut, I say. I fancy that even the oxen lift their heads and take a line on it. They place it in the middle of their horns. The oak is known for being still. It will not duck its head or lean, no matter what the winds might try. An oak is trustworthy. It wants the plow to find a true, straight way, then it can preside all year over a pattern that is pleasing to its eye.

The field seems limitless from where we stand, and beyond our mastery. It would normally take twelve days to plow its stubble under, even if we had our usual team of four oxen, and twenty brawny men to help and take their turns. But we are only two, and we do not mean to make a meal of it. We mean to make only a day of it. A narrow scar is all we have in mind: a field length down, the headland turn, a field length back. We will, though, do our best to make a noble and an honest scar. It will be straight and proud if good fortune labors at our sides. The single central ridge will be a proper height, the pair of furrows deep. “This will be … to all of our advantages,” I tell my helpmate, hoping to provoke a conversation. But he stays silent. He loops the reins over his head, with a practiced hand and a fitting nonchalance, and holds them taut round his right shoulder and under his left arm. I flick the oxen. We begin. Three steps, and already we are opening a top and putting up a high-backed slice of soil.

It is not long before he’s whistling. His ridge and furrow channel the tune as we delve across the field. A plowman’s whistle has the strength to soften clods and break up stones. A plowman’s whistle warns the soil a blade is on its way. I am so satisfied I cannot stop myself from chattering. I’m telling him about the many, endless troubles of the week. I talk of Cecily, and Charles Kent, my boyhood friend. I tell him what a brave and decent man Mr. Quill has proved himself to be. Oxen are noble creatures, I say. They work. But sheep “from what I’ve heard”—what’s his experience? – are helpless beasts: “We’ll have to wait on them like slaves on lords, come spring. Like fools.” I can’t be sure if he is listening. He will not cease his whistling. But we both have busy lips this afternoon, and we are intimate through toil. Anything that’s shared across the backs of oxen is intimate. We make our way toward the dell, and make our way back to the top-end gate. Now our wheels are clogged with mud. I have to free them every twenty paces with a heavy kick and, when that fails, with my bare hands. The rooks and starlings pick the furrows in the damp wake of the plow.

I make my plowman stand away this afternoon when we have cleaned the blades and put the plow back in its place, and let the oxen roam off where they will. This is a task I want to finish without his help. I barrow in a bag of wheat seed for winter planting and use a casting shovel and some sacking in the corner of the field to select the heaviest grain for my baskets. I know I ought to let the strip of turned soil lay and mellow for a week or so, or at least let it be broken down by the rain, which has already begun to lay its own seed on the ground. But there’s no time. Good practice must be sacrificed. I leave Beldam’s husband resting in the corner of the remaining scrub, and sweep my seeded hands across the land, the richest of all scatterings. The farmer in me – yes, I can boast of that – knows that the best cruel nurture for this early crop is that after a week or two of growth its green ribbons are crushed by rolling. That way, the ground is firmed. The plants can take a steady grip. Wheat – like men and women – benefits from being crushed. Crushing makes it fit to stand up all the better. But there is only this afternoon for making good, for marking my revenge, my countryman’s revenge, on Edmund Jordan and his sheep. This narrow sweep of wheat will be my farewell gift. So I walk the furrow for the final time, in the strengthening drizzle, taking it as a blessing that the seed corn is being watered the instant that it leaves my palm.

It is on my way up from the dell, with perhaps little more than a hundred paces and fifty sweepings of my hand remaining, that the light begins to fail. I turn to look, beyond the hedgerows and the pyramidal oak, at the dark horizon rearing deep and solid with gray-on-purple clouds. The few remaining scraps of blue blink barely brighter than an eye. What sunlight there is hardly makes a mark upon our field, though on the wood end of our land its best surviving ray is broad and strong enough to radiate and rim the beeches’ pale bare branches, the grasping talons of the ash, and the high-veined frettings of the elms. Then it falls and slowly beams from common ground to field, as if searching for something. It is reluctant to depart. It even catches smoke pots and roofs before it lifts again to paste its silver on the clouds. For a moment, they are faced with light. Our field is black. It’s shiny, suddenly. And then the day is gone. Its candle has been snuffed, or drenched. That is the end of it.

Dusk has deepened now. If it wasn’t for the rain, I could be walking through the steep-domed, unlit chamber of a great cathedral, roofed by coal-black vaults of cloud. This downpour has not got the force to last. But for the moment it takes hold. The clouds carried too much weight before they reached this place. I can almost hear them sigh with relief as they let go their load. The furrows in our barley field are already brimming and draining off like streams in flood. The clouds intend every single seed I’ve spread to have its year’s supply of drink in one delivery. The earth turns sticky. It clings heavily to my feet, and lards my legs with every step I take. It’s hard work even walking in it now. I look up to the corner of the field, and wave at where I last saw Mistress Beldam’s husband. I call out even, although my words are washed away. But anyway I think the man has gone already. He will have had his fill of late of being out in all weathers. He will have gone into the cottages or taken shelter in the barn. For an instant I imagine him in Mistress Beldam’s arms among the field and pasture tools, among the nettles in the dark. She is getting wet and cold as she clings on to him.

I am excused, I think, for wondering if I am the only one alive this afternoon with no other living soul who wants to cling to me, no other soul who’ll let me dampen her. The day has ended and the light is snuffed. I’m left to trudge into the final evening with nobody to loop their soaking hand through mine. And no one there to lift their hats, as our traditions say they must, when brought on by chaff and damp I cannot help but sneeze, an unintended blessing for the field. But I’d be lying if I said I felt as dark and gloomy as the clouds. I think I’m thrilled in some strange way. The plowing’s done. The seed is spread. The weather is reminding me that, rain or shine, the earth abides, the land endures, the soil will persevere forever and a day. Its smell is pungent and high-seasoned. This is happiness.

15

Y PLOWMAN’S HAPPINESS DID NOT survive the night. Once it was safely dark and the storm had very nearly passed, I stepped out of Kitty Gosse’s home hoping to catch a wink of candlelight or hear the knot and knit of voices – the Beldam couple reunited thanks only to my own leniency and maybe ready now to show some gratitude. I could not imagine they’d be hard to find. They surely would have slept indoors, somewhere in our row of cottages and within earshot of my own refuge. Why would they not have slept indoors? They must have known that here was now an abandoned spot and it was safe to help themselves to any bed they found. I’d sniff them out. I would be truly neighborly, and call on them. Surely I deserved their company.

What moonlight found passage through the clouds misled me once or twice with its glints of silver catching on the puddles or in the rain damps on the roofs. I took them briefly as a sign of life. But candlelight is warmer and more intimate than any moonlight. It will not send a shiver down your spine as these cold glisters did. Orange was the color I was looking for. I ventured for fifty steps or so along the muddied lane, hoping but not quite expecting to discover the Beldams. But, even though I harked my neck and ears about as alertly as any hunting owl, I could not make out any whispered words or catch the nighttime mutter of a lovers’ busy bed.

I was both sorry and relieved to find no ducking candlelight. What would I have done if, when I discovered the glow of household flame or caught the cloying whiff of melting wax, I also heard her crying out with … let me call it gladness? I do not want to think I would have crept up like a cat outside the chicken coup and spied on them. I’d rather imagine myself as their good friend, their warmhearted visitor, wanting nothing from them but some friendliness. So I hope I would have stood a respectful distance from their door and simply called out my name, declared myself to them. “It’s only Walter, come to talk.” It’s only Walter, come to make amends. It’s only Walter, come to share your oval den of candlelight and breathe the warm air of your room. I sorely needed fellowship.

I found no fellowship. I couldn’t see or hear a trace of them. A leather pot would be my only bedmate for the night. Kitty Gosse always had a good supply of greenish barley ale. “I find it beneficial,” she explained. Certainly, she slept on it and woke on it whenever I spent the night with her, and must have done the same when I wasn’t there. It dampened down the sorrows of her widowhood, she claimed, though if anything she was more dampened down by it when Fowler Gosse was still alive. She’s always had a loyal thirst, that woman. A single pot has usually been enough for me. I am reluctant to get drunk. I wasn’t born to it. But last night, after I failed to find my only neighbors, I chased off my own sorrows with enough ale, as we say, to drown a bag of puppies in. For whom should I stay sober, and for what?

The first two pots were cheering companions, though not as fortifying as I’d wanted. I think I expected to take extra courage from the ale, a courage greater than a plowman’s, anyway. I was hoping that my animal response would not be goat’s, or pig’s, or dog’s. I don’t need drink to make me lecherous, or obdurate, or even barking mad. No, I wanted to be as drunk as a bull and ready for a brawl, ready to be strong and reckless. Ready for today. I persevered, heroically, with widow Gosse’s ale. I do not think I much enjoyed the taste, or the leaden feeling in my arms and legs that it produced so rapidly, but I did enjoy the loosening of my anxieties. The next two pots of ale left me more spirited, as I’d hoped, but also more bemused and fanciful. I conjured up some company for myself. I invented visitors. They came up to the cottage door and knocked. I welcomed them, out loud, the fulsome host. But then, of late, I’ve done that often, when I haven’t had even a sniff of ale. A widower will first talk to himself, then – tired of that – he’ll have a noisy conversation with a candle flame or with the shifting shadows in his room, which he persuades himself are family.

Last night, the flames and shadows were those few men and women I most wanted to embrace. I imagined taking this reverie of friends down to the plow-scarred field at first light so that they could inspect my labors, and the evidence of my boldness and my disobedience. I lined them up, my seven sober witnesses. I stood them at the end of Kitty Gosse’s bed. Mr. Quill was soundless, shadowy. He was the bravest of us all. I’d prove to him that I could be daring too. The widow herself was there, of course. She always said she thought I was a cautious man. She counted me a civil owl, too quick to hoot, too scared to show my talons to the world. Well, she would see my talons soon and how I’d scratched a trench into the soil. Beside her, looking down at the back of his stubby, how– to hands, still avoiding my glance, was neighbor John. I’ll not forget him pulling back away from me the last time he came to my cottage door. I flush even to think of it. “Lord help you, Walt, if you’re deceiving us,” he’d said. “Lord help you, John, if you believe I would,” was my reply. Now he would see how defiant I could be on his behalf. Then came Master Kent, my milk cousin. Again he fixed me with the briefest show of eyes, as wide and white as eyes can be. They were asking, “Have you made the land ours again?” The Beldams nodded their encouragement. They trusted me. “You are the man who holds the sword,” the husband said. The woman pulled aside the velvet shawl and showed her wide-cheeked, thin-lipped face, her button nose, her belladonna eyes. Nothing ever frightened her. And finally my thrush was there, my Cecily, full-throated and alive again. I had forgotten what a plump and honeyed creature she could be and how light a voice she had. “Walter, Walter, make me proud of you,” she said.

I lifted my fifth pot and toasted all of them. We were the best of friends. I should have stopped the drinking there, while I had friends, while there was still some singing in the ale. Two further pots provided only tears – and anger too. The final pot was like a cudgel to the head. I would have dropped asleep at once if I hadn’t had to go outside to clear both my bladder and my gut. That sobered me a bit. The night air helped. I cannot say, though, that my head had cleared or that my feet were no longer tangled. But I was soon unruffled enough to listen once again, between the heaving spasms of my drunkenness, for any human sounds, other than the voices I’d just invented for myself and the usual mouthings of the stars. There were none, of course. Whatever courage I’d discovered briefly in drink had by now been almost entirely gagged and pissed into the once sweet-smelling garden, and I no longer could pretend to be the hero of the field. I was too wretched for a hero of the field. I could hardly stand, indeed, and either had to sleep among the ghosts of Fowler Gosse’s double-marigolds and thyme or take my spinning head back to its pillow in the room. Now my seven witnesses crowding at the far end of the bed were mocking me. Is that the only stand you’ll take against the Jordans and their sheep? they asked. Is that your fiercest riot and unrest, to put a pair of dumb beasts to the plow and mark your outrage on a field? Our enemies will quake at that, your knee-deep furrow and your knee-high ridge. Those armies will retreat at that. What next? Will you perhaps cut back some weeds or fix a fence to spread more fear into the hearts of those who do not wish our village to survive? Only a townsman could be so timid, Walter Thirsk, and still mistake it for rebellion.

Then I slept, though poundingly and fitfully. My dreams were punishing. I knocked on doors in them – but no matter what I did or said, no one would let me join them in their candlelight. Then my audience of friends and witnesses were standing at the bottom of the bed again, hard-faced. Mistress Beldam hurried forward, light-footed as a little deer, and pushed her velvet shawl into my mouth, to stop my cries of pain. She placed her tethering prong against my head above my ear. I could feel the metal in my dented skin. She hit it once. Then all the others took their turns in striking it home, double-handed, with the square and heavy stone that had killed Willowjack. Even Cecily. She was the cruelest of them all. She said, “It’s not enough. The ridge and furrow are not enough. You really haven’t done enough.”

What was soon clear, once I’d woken late this morning with a drumming head, not feeling brave at all, and gone outside to sober up on air again, was that the Beldams had spent the night in the best rooms of the manor. I was surprised by their audacity. I was not pleased, to tell the truth, though I suppose a couple as young and poor as them will have always wondered about the insides of a master’s house. If they’d ever hoped to sleep in airy space and any opulence, no matter how shabby, this might have been their only chance. I can imagine that they took Master Jordan’s bed, exactly as I had done the night before. I only chose the widow Gosse’s bed last night,rather than returning to the manor, because my evening there had seemed improper, afterward – though I am the manor-keeper for the moment. So if it was improper for me to wrap myself in Lucy Kent’s old riding cape and fall down in the cushioning of carpets, cloths and arrases, surely it was more so for these two passers-by. I’d thought that only bats would have it after me, at least until and if one of the masters came back in the spring. The Beldams are not bats.

I shamed myself by standing in the cottage lane as gray-faced and disapproving as a piece of slate and shaking my ale-sodden head at the mauvish scarf of smoke that was being woven from the lower chimney stack. They must have lit the oven in the scullery. I did not want to guess what they used for fuel, what furniture, what parchments, deeds or books. Or what it was they cooked for their first meals together since the dovecote fire. Or, come to that, what might have happened underneath her velvet shawl last night. I was resolved to hold my tongue. I’d keep away from them, and not only because I felt too ill for conversations of any kind. They were not my business anymore. If only I could find the courage and recover from my seven pots, then there were things to do for Cecily. I knew I hadn’t done enough for her.

I found my courage in the woods, by chance. I wanted to give dear Mr. Quill a final opportunity to show his face, to bare his waxy, trowel-shaped beard again. I’d call his name and let the echo seek him out. I took the lane toward the place where the Beldams first set up their den and followed round the outer edge of Turd and Turf, so silent then and glistening with last night’s rains. The storm had quelled the usual stench to some extent. The carcass domes were mostly hidden by the water. Had there been anybody there to follow me, I’d appear a halting figure with legs as weary as any oxen’s and shoulders as tucked as any goose’s. I could not help but stagger on the rougher ground. For once I felt like Mr. Quill must have felt since his sudden palsy as a child, wooden from the shoulder to the ribs, a man who was not fitted for outdoors. But still I did my best to not look to my left, despite the raucous foraging of our abandoned pigs, happy to be free and in the mire. I was in no hurry to discover evidence of Willowjack or what little remained of the short man from the pillory. Nor did I want just yet to risk discovering the body of my Mr. Quill. I’d rather believe for a few moments more what was most likely true. He had been warned. He ran away – or lurched away, I ought to say. He was already safe. But I had to be sure, or surer anyway, before I could feel free to lurch away myself.

The longpurples were beaten down by rain. You wouldn’t name it Blossom Marsh today. The major colors were the grayish-greens of goat-willows and the purple-browns of beech – but there was no sun to liven them or paint reflections in the flood. I found a raft of almost solid ground, then dared to look across the bog. There was an oblong monument of piled stones I hadn’t seen before. The Beldam daughter had been dutiful and loving, unobserved by us. She couldn’t let her father rest without a stone memorial. There wasn’t any sign of Mr. Quill’s distorted frame. Not above the surface anyway. So I spread my legs and cupped my hands and called his name, despite the head pain that the calling out intensified. I summoned “Mr. Quill” and “Mr. Earle,” until the two names caught the booming echo in the dell and merged to make a distant liquid L. The pigs were not disturbed at all. Shouting doesn’t bother them. But I was loud enough to set some rooks and pigeons in the air, and cause some crashing through the undergrowth. A deer. If Mr. Quill was in the woods or hiding somewhere underneath a roof, he would have heard – and recognized, I hope – my voice. I listened then. I half expected his reply. Nothing answered other than the echo, and the muffled sneezing of a skulking snipe. I must have tried a dozen times before I started swaying back toward the open fields.

I found the fairy caps growing in an oval ring between two exposed root arms under the goat-willow hedge which we have sometimes coppiced for fencing. At least, I think they were fairy caps. It is the time of year for fairy caps. I’ve seen some picked ones recently and believe I’d recognize their pointed parasols and purple gills. It seems a lifetime ago but it is hardly seven days since the Derby twins and Brooker Higgs jaunted along the lane in front of my cottage with their bloating faces and their bloated sack of toadstools. “Had any luck?” I’d asked them. Oh, what bitter luck indeed. I can still almost smell their forest spoils, the caps, the shawls, the giant moonball beneath their dampening of leaves and the smoky cloud of yellow spores. I think it’s reasonable to say that if it were not for their foraging, there would not have been that fire in the dovecote and the loft. There would have been no men in the pillory. There would have been no slaughtering of Willowjack, or anything that followed on from that. I would not have drunk so much or suffered this throbbing headache. The fairy caps must take the blame for everything. It makes less sense to say there would have been no pasturing of sheep before next spring, that Master Jordan has been conjured up, like a demon, by the young men’s flames, that without their flames he would have stayed where he belonged. In town. But I still feel the truth of it. The tinder of the giant moonball has brought misfortune to our land. The fairy caps have set our lives alight.

I think if I had not been wearied by the night and growing weary of myself, I might simply have passed those mushrooms by. But my body was still full of ale. I could smell it in my sweat and I could see it in my piss every time I stopped – and that was often, this morning – to relieve myself. My throat was sore from being sick. My head was, surely, just as tender as if it really had been hammered with a lump of stone and pierced with a metal prong. How else should I explain the deep crevice of pain behind my eyes? I had been split and ruptured by that half-imagined prong.

Of course, I was a novice in the arts of drinking heavily. I was not prepared for such harsh penalties. I was ashamed to be so vulnerable, but also – like all drunkards on the dawn; I’d seen this in my neighbors many times – I was just a bit pleased with myself, pleased at my capacity, pleased that I had lived to tell the tale, pleased to know the innards of a pot at last. I wished that at least some of my old friends could witness me today, especially the ones who’d always been suspicious of my levelheadedness, my reluctance to make myself insensible, no matter what the feast or celebration, no matter what misfortune had occurred. “You do not truly love the barley, Walt,” they said, a terrible rebuke, and more evidence of my timidity. “There’s no fermenting you.”

I suppose it might have been partly this wanting to prove myself to them again and partly my ale-soaked lack of judgment – I’d loved the barley far too much last night and so could not be sound of mind – that made me bend and look more closely at the fairy caps. I only brushed them with my fingertips. All mushrooms are a fearsome sight and even worse to touch. These were as cold and high and clammy as a week-old corpse. But I suppose my brushing with my fingertips was enough for them to work their sorcery on me. I became their carrion at once. I’d given them a brief taste of my skin. Looking back from the more clear-headed safety of this afternoon, I can’t explain my madness or their sudden taking hold of me. But if I recall it correctly – though good recall isn’t something that has survived undamaged from this morning’s loss and doubling of senses – that timid brushing with my fingertips provided me the courage I had sought and lost so quickly drinking ale. I half remember reaching out and cupping mushrooms in my palms. I pinched them firmly at their stems. Against all reason, I wanted to discover what or who they tasted of.

Firstly, though, my country wisdom halted me. I had to make sure these were fairy caps. I picked a single one, the one least touched, the one least bruised, by the brushing, cupping, pinching of my hands, and pressed it to my nose. It’s said that if a fungus is harmful to eat, you’ll sneeze on smelling it. Its spores will warn you they’re not safe. I did not sneeze. I smelled the forest and the earth, the dampness of a fast-retreating year, the acridness of leaf mold, and a kitchen odor which I could have taken for yeast but yeast that was soured from neglect. I can only think that I was insanely hungry, or more damaged than I’d thought possible by Kitty Gosse’s ale and the nightmares that followed it, or suicidal, even, because I did not hesitate. The man who always hesitates did not, on this occasion, hesitate. He popped the mushroom in his mouth and started to chomp down on it. It did not taste as he expected it to.

The one and only time I tasted fairy caps before, with John Carr when we were younger men, we’d soaked them first in honey. I remember they were sweet and sinewy. I don’t remember tasting this reasty mix of horse’s hoofs, burned hair and candle wax, nor the leather chewiness. All I could do was break and tear the mushroom with my teeth and swallow the pieces whole. I ought to have stopped after the first piece and let the mushroom declare itself. If there was any poison in its flesh and now in mine, then let it poison me in no great quantity. But he who dithers is a mouse, I heard my neighbors say. I would not allow myself to be a mouse. Only a townsman would be that timid. I finished that first fairy cap but, for an age, it produced nothing in me but a belch – and the certain knowledge, coming to me from thin air, that the one was “not enough,” that only three of them would bring the courage I required. I did not know what voice had whispered that number to me, but I was sure that three would do the trick. One for Brooker and one each for the twins. I would be as mad as they were on the day they played with fire. I wanted their immodest fits of laughter. So I picked another pair of fairy caps. I knew better than to chew this time. I swallowed them whole so quickly that I almost choked and coughed them up. I had to sit on the grass bank, among the willow roots, and catch my breath. What living fairy caps remained were growing in between my knees. I snapped and picked the surviving twenty or so, the ones I did not mean to eat, and tossed them toward Turd and Turf, waxy titbits for our happy pigs. And then I waited. I do remember that I stretched out on the still-damp ground and waited. Simply lingering.

I must have been expecting to experience again what has been beyond forgetting all these years: the dancing lights and merriment that John Carr and I encountered when we first tasted fairy caps, the melting trails that haloed everything. We were like sun-drenched butterflies and then we were like moon-struck moths. It was a blissful afternoon and night. I’ve not regretted it. What I hoped for most was the enormous fearlessness I’d felt, beneath that long-lost moon that went from pale to blue to red. But what came first this morning, before any melting haloes or oblivion, was a stretch of paralyzing dread. I feared that what I’d eaten were not fairy caps at all, but something much more poisonous and wrathful. I was alarmed. And with good cause. I hadn’t even been born, let alone become a villager, when it happened, but I have heard the tale so many times: one of the Kips’ great grandmothers picked by mistake some red-top toadstools thinking they were edible. She baked them with a rabbit she had snared. She poisoned both her husband and a son. She would have died herself except, as was the habit in those days, the men dined first; the women had their suppers cold.