ALSO BY KATHLEEN WINTER
FICTION
boYs (2007)
Annabel (2010)
The Freedom in American Songs (2014)
Lost in September (2017)
NONFICTION
Boundless: Tracing Land and Dream in a New Northwest Passage (2014)
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF CANADA
Copyright © 2021 Kathleen Winter
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published in 2021 by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.penguinrandomhouse.ca
Knopf Canada and colophon are registered trademarks.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Title: Undersong / Kathleen Winter.
Names: Winter, Kathleen, author.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 2021014355X | Canadiana (ebook) 20210143681 | ISBN 9780735278226 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780735278233 (EPUB)
Classification: LCC PS8595.I618 U53 2021 | DDC C813/.54—dc23
Cover and text design by Jennifer Griffiths
Cover images: (flower) Glow Images / Getty Images; (painting) Newburyport Meadows, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Purchase, Mrs. Samuel P. Reed Gift, Morris K. Jesup Fund, Maria DeWitt Jesup Fund, John Osgood and Elizabeth Amis Cameron Blanchard Memorial Fund and Gifts of Robert E. Tod and William Gedney Bunce, by exchange, 1985.
Interior image credits: All images courtesy of The Internet Archive Book Images: (helicopter seeds) page 868 of “The natural history of plants, their forms, growth, reproduction, and distribution;” (1902), NCSU Libraries; (bee) page 376 of “The ABC and XYZ of bee culture; a cyclopedia of everything pertaining to the care of the honey-bee; bees, hives, honey, implements, honey-plants, etc…” (1910), Smithsonian Libraries; (flower) page 531 of “Cyclopedia of American horticulture, comprising suggestions for cultivation of horticultural plants, descriptions of the species of fruits, vegetables, flowers, and ornamental plants sold in the United States and Canada, together with geographical and biographical sketches” (1900), Boston College Libraries; (owl) page 41 of “The British bird book” (1921), Cornell University Library; (bat) page 119 of “A comprehensive dictionary of the Bible” (1871), The Library of Congress; (dandelion) page 53 of “Dreer’s garden book : 1904” (1904), U.S. Department of Agriculture, National Agricultural Library
a_prh_5.7.0_c0_r0
For Dorothy Wordsworth
Contents
Cover
Also by Kathleen Winter
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Bee Song
1: Where the bee sucks, there suck I
One
Two
Three
Four
2: In a cowslip’s bell I lie
Five
Six
Seven
3: There I couch when owls do cry
Eight
Nine
Ten
4: On the bat’s back I do fly
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
5: After summer merrily
Fifteen
Sixteen
6: The Red Diary
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Sun bursts out before setting—unearthly & brilliant—calls to mind the change to another world. Every leaf a golden lamp—every twig bedropped with a diamond.—The splendour departs as rapidly.
dorothy wordsworth, The Late Journals
bee song
O hand us her secret pages
Each word a golden mote
Preserve her Incantation,
guard the eternal note!
We ferry her simple terms
within each velvet pouch
consigned to our ephemeral halls
marauders cannot touch
Hand us the words she wrote
for we know all they mean:
Trust us in our timeless flight
’round our conspiring Queen
who will preserve the trove
until mad patent dies
caught in its own manacles,
drowned in its own lies
Her word will never die
as long as we exist:
heaven’s daughters are not shy
to delve the sacred list
Vivifying power
of our work and hers—
more potent than male emperors,
more patient than the years
1
Where the bee sucks, there suck I
James Dixon’s face moves in tiny expressive ways, one moment smooth as a new loaf and the next ruffled like windblown Rydal Water. He was far from bald in 1816, when he first came to Rydal to work for Rotha Wordsworth. Then he had a headful of wavy hair and he smelled like sweet baccy, a scent all the garden creatures loved, including myself, Sycamore, oldest tree of our garden. That summer was a very cold one because of a faraway event that humans here did not know about, though anyone with wings or pollen knew: Volcano! Locals knew it as the year without a summer, and were it not for James Dixon’s arrival, many of us living things here in the Wordsworth garden might not have survived. James noticed details you ought to, if you’re to be of use to a garden. Small things. Beautiful things. He worked hard and did very little harm.
But now James Dixon is in his fifties, and he sports one of those wool caps that keep the chill off the bald bit. Poor bald head! How poignant the forward rush of human time. James was with the Wordsworths for so long—nearly forty years—that he became intimate with their patterns.
Patterns are the most useful thing in the world. They help us recall what is about to happen.
That is why, on this so-called twenty-fifth of January in 1855, as James sits under my branches later than his usual hour, we know something has changed. The bees know. The slumbering seeds are aware. And I plainly see. His cap is atilt, his step rusty, and he has a funny, burnt scent. We feel his distress before he says a word. It whooshes through my branches like wind, rattling my few dead leaves. One or two bees scouting for signs of spring sense he is not right, and they bolt for my centre where the hive congregates, keeping itself warm. Snowdrops probe green nubs above the hard soil. It will be a week before they hoist their pale ghost flags.
James sits on what he loves to call my knee. His trousers are well-worn, like the creases in his face and hands. He does not possess new clothing or give off a shiny air. Bees love it when old softness emerges and continues on into new time. We all do. Soon the bee scouts venture back out of their entrance and settle on his lap.
Do ye mind, he says at last, if I just sit quiet for a minute before I take on our last chore of all?
He has a round basket at his side and on top of it lies a red book bright as a rosehip, and he also carries his old tinderbox with a few matches he made from splinters of my deadwood, dipped in the bees’ wax.
Little Miss Belle noses out of Rydal Mount’s side door and sits a distance away on the grass. Normally that dog is
never far from Rotha’s side. As soon as he sees Belle, James calls out Rotha’s name.
Rotha is what Dixon calls Dorothy Wordsworth privately to himself, and to us in the garden—myself and all beings green, living and quick. Rotha is the name of the river that leaps through our haunts, and it is what poor Sam Coleridge called Dorothy when they were young and Sam loved her as deeply as we do now. There will be another Rotha in the family, but there’ll never be another like the one we love best, the Dorothy who has slipped off this morning, five years after her brother William.
Who would have thought she’d outlast him? But on the day William died, his sister rose from her bed as if born again! As soon as he died, up she leapt! Making funeral arrangements, flinging windows open, dashing outdoors to fill her lungs with April air. Quick as in her youth, though everyone had feared news of his death might kill her. No. William’s death quickened Rotha and made her more present to us than ever. The life of the sister.
James weeps and a few more bees venture out despite the cold. They do that when someone they trust is sorrowful. They hold time, humming around the hive quietly as the person gives way to feeling. They accompany the person, but do not try to console. There is nothing worse than consoling the bereaved too soon.
The January wind rustles my last leaves and the bees keep up their faint hum. And this man who has little left in the human world weeps for us, talks to us. He speaks to us all the time. We are his audience and he is ours. He and Rotha both. But now?
My mam, says James, always told me this: When someone you care about dies, you can tell their story to the bees and they’ll keep it, like. Even if everyone else forgets. Bees’ll hold onto it for you, then once you’re dead yourself they’ll scatter it abroad with the pollen so the world never really forgets. That person stays alive and the world hasn’t lost them, and you haven’t lost them either. What about it? Do ye reckon Mam’s right? He reaches his hand forth and five bees alight on it.
Only in our world does James possess anything now. So we denizens of the garden do what we always do for those who acknowledge us the way he and Rotha have done. We eloquesce in the realm of light, wind and water—and with our earthen bodies we listen.
one
look at that, will ye! James Dixon points at a diamond of glittering frost on a low twig on one of the sycamore’s low twigs, and delight flashes through his tears. Rotha’s world aglitter! And me, I fell in! Inside the shimmering. Right in I fell, that very first time I ever saw her…she lying in the road with her brother. I was only five!
And I says to my mam, Are they all right?
Never mind them two, Mam says. Cracked as two piss-pots, the pair of ’em.
But what are they doing? I asked her.
Hoping the road’ll rattle! Then they know the postman’s coming. Letters is all those two cares about.
But how will the road rattle, Mam?
Very feeble it’ll shake, son, from ’es wheels in the distance…
Really?
Get up, son! You’re as daft as they are. Honestly, I just washed them trousers. Slaving away!
I felt it, Mam! It rattled a bit like you said.
And sure enough the two arose, he like a black crow and she tiny all in white as if the crow had married a moth, and off they flew toward Dove Cottage…
Aye, off she flitted like a moth. Or like a quick, flighty bird racing over the hill. But then stopping while her brother ran ahead. She different from him, stoppin’ and startin’ and stoppin’ and startin’ just like a little wild creature. A linnet hopping along or a little rabbit, starting and stopping. Twitching almost, but—she had no idea we saw her. And those eyes! Coal-black but the coal burned with a flame full of its own blackness. Me and Mam hid behind a boulder. Rotha still had her real teeth then and we saw her laughing to the sky and Mam said, She’s right off her head. And him, her brother, look—he’s gone and run off and left his lovely cloak lying on the ground. Forgets everything, him, he’s that daft. But her, she’s more than daft, she’s mad.
But someone mad is not what I saw. I saw somebody that was a snippet of the whole day. A piece of everything. A bit of birdwing, of leaf, of cloud. Everything shimmering around her. The whole world made of gems!
Such a windy day. She was like something the wind had blown through the day. She would bend in the funniest way! She was, all at once, like a stick and a wing. Like bone and wing somehow laced together and set free on the fell.
After that I glimpsed the shimmer all by myself in droplets on the feathery carrot leaves in me mam’s ordinary yard.
I saw it in the quivery bird that stopped right in front of me in the woods.
But later I went to places where I never saw it, nobody could. Places where no one could find any shimmer in the world. And I feared the shimmer had been only an enchantment, it had never been real, or it was only for children. Aye, I saw bad places. Things that are here already and worse things to come. Things I see very plain whenever I shut my eyes! Or whenever I’ve been to see my own born-family, Mam or my sister Penny. Nightmares they have had to live. And I haven’t helped Mam or Penny, have I? No.
And in all the years since I saw Rotha Wordsworth that very first time when I was five, I never met the glimmer in anyone except her. Even her brother the crow borrowed it from her. William. I wonder if I stole my own bit of glimmer when I nabbed his cloak! When we got up close to it, Mam and me, its lining shone, satin Rotha had mended by hand. Anything glitters that Rotha looks upon with her silver needle or her pen or even only her black and fantastic eyes. And now, where has she gone? Can ye tell me that?
Look how Rydal Lake gleams with frost. And down there, that line of froth—the silver frill—lapping onshore. In Rotha’s world everything was all eyes and ears. Things pay attention and you have to answer them. Unless you become dead to the glimmer. And things that deaden you, well, there’s no end to those, is there…Please don’t let me go dead.
* * *
the second time i ever saw Rotha…this was a long time ago, mind, long before I came here to work for her. This was when you could still call her a young woman and I was twelve. Seven years after that first time I saw her running for the mail. This time we weren’t on the fells, we were in Lady Wood. I was crouched in the ferns hunting mushrooms for me and Mam’s tea when I heard the two of them talking, Rotha and her brother.
She sat on a stone covered in moss and her brother loomed over her and he wasn’t happy. I heard her whimper. She was crying fit to break her heart, in fact, and he couldn’t stand it. He wasn’t having it. Some men get that way when a woman is sad. Even if they once had a bit of sympathy they can no longer muster it and they become impatient. They want to get on with their lives, away from a crying woman. I had heard that kind of conversation before and I knew better than to reveal myself because it was private and now William sounded irritated like.
Stop it, he said. It’s only nervous blubbering. You are even worse than when our John died.
At this she cried harder, for John was their brother who had died at sea and she had loved him.
John’s death was much worse for me, William said. For me, it was business. For you it’s only the loss of your own joys and feelings. He sounded very angry.
I lay very still and by and by he left her stooped there and after a few minutes I slithered on my belly a few paces and rose up from behind a slant in the ground as if I’d just come upon the scene. And I made as if to veer off without having seen her but she stopped me. She had wiped her face and she had that quivery transparent whiteness of a flower that has begun shaking raindrops off itself. She seemed interested in the treasure I had gathered up in my shirt.
Are those mushrooms?
This was the first time I ever heard her voice. It’s not like any other voice. Ye know that. Her voice is like a gurgling bit of river. Was like. Is. Was. What do ye think? I mean it was so much like a bit
of river that for all we know it is still so. When she passed might her voice have slipped back where it came from, into the river? Rotha’s voice into the River Rotha. Aye, I’ll wager that might be happening now as I talk to ye.
Mushrooms, aye, I says to her then. A few little ones.
What kind—can you let me look?
I haven’t got very many. Me mam’s very particular about not bringing home maggoty ones.
She had in her own lap a few plants whose roots sprawled in all directions and she untangled a blue flower to show me. I’m transplanting gentians to our new house, she says, but the day is too warm for it. They’re wilting even before I can get them out of this wood.
I says, Miss, what you want is to lay a small quilt of moss round them, here.
And I laid down my mushrooms and scooped some moss up and coaxed the blooms from her. I wondered that she did not know you are never supposed to move that kind of flower. I slipped the coldish cushion, green and refreshing like, under the plants in her hand.
Cover them with this mossy flap I says, folding it over them. Her hand was fine and small and she had on a brooch that looked like a drop of blood. Any blue flower, I says to her, is very difficult to move. It wants with all its heart to stay where it is.
I wanted with all my heart, says she in return, to stay just down that lane here in Dove Cottage, but we have been obliged to move.
She had a like to sob so I says, Try and leave that bundle in the moss and don’t plant them until night, and they might have a chance.
We were two souls in a shady wood and I got a bit frightened and I don’t know why but I said, I have to go home to my dinner now, me mam’ll be waiting—although there was no dinner on our table of that you can be sure—and off I ran.
Undersong Page 1