Undersong

by Kathleen Winter

  So I noticed she started caring about feet. And once you notice something you can’t help seeing it over and over.

  It did not matter who came to Rydal. Friend or foe. Lad or lass. Mrs. Dobson down the hill or Mrs. Luff or any of the relatives. First Rotha would greet the person face to face, but then, to herself, she’d note the condition of their feet. I saw her looking at feet and I heard her talk and yes I saw what she wrote. And it was true that William had a very bad toe and it plagued him and stopped him from walking half the distances his sister trod.

  Have ye ever noticed how people will admit something out loud but only in a half-told fashion?

  At first when I climbed the fells with her after William asked me to stand in for him—it was all I could do to keep up with her, and she twice my age! It’s funny about that isn’t it. Rotha was twice my age when we started together, but today she would be only thirty years older than I am, not twice my age at all. Far from it. Time brings you closer in so many ways. But at first we would fly uphill and on our way back down she’d say, James, aren’t our feet wonderful? How they get us up here so efficiently and without any trouble at all?

  She said without any trouble…but even then she glanced at her own feet as if they were getting ready to run away without her.

  And by and by she worried about them more and more. What did she know? Even before they failed her, she stared at them as if they were already starting to lose their miraculous powers. And I’d say, Miss, is it your feet? And half the time she’d say no, it’s not my feet. But the other half she would say perhaps it is my feet. And if William was not around she’d let me give them a rub.

  I felt sorry that he was gone although my hands were better suited to the job than his. She was missing William’s hands and to cheer her up I admitted to her that I had made up a song about feet, did she want me to sing it?

  The song is a song about the wandering life alone on foot, I said.

  I sang it to myself when I wished I could go back to when my da’s family were travellers, a time I only know by song or by old tales that flicker like a faint campfire. But I did not mention that to her. I don’t think she wanted to hear too much of my story. She was very comforted by the fact that I was a quiet and strong person who did not demand anything in the way of attention. She hated it when people gabbed on about themselves, which in my observation nearly everybody does. It’s amazing to me, really, how they don’t notice that nobody really cares about anybody but themselves.

  James, she said, you know I’d like any song you care to sing. And I do think she meant it. Times when we were outside and I made myself believe she forgot I wasn’t her brother, she opened a part of her mind that allowed song or fancy or other things I had to give her.

  So I sang part of my walking song.

  My caravan has a little brown roof.

  My caravan has two blue windows.

  My caravan has a pair of funny little wheels,

  They go slow they go far over the hills, over the fields

  I wouldn’t trade my little caravan…

  And I stopped and said Miss, do you get the riddle?

  Oh, she says, it makes me want to fling myself on the turf and waggle my bare toes!

  Because it’s about feet, Miss, that song. It goes, My caravan has a pair of funny little wheels, and those are your feet, see?

  I want to learn it by heart, she says.

  The little brown roof is your hair, I says…

  She got it right away. Two blue windows for your eyes, and like I told her the pair of funny little wheels well that’s your feet, and the little caravan can take you wherever you want to go—it’s your earthly form you have as long as you’re alive. I have one and Rotha Wordsworth has one, or did have—and my sister Penny. No matter who you are or how much money you have or have not got, you have your little caravan.

  It’s not a complicated song, but my songs never are, not like the poems of William or Sam Coleridge. I don’t think I could ever have sung my songs for the men.

  I even hesitated to sing for Rotha for fear she might repeat my song to William.

  A song—or anything secret—is valuable until the wrong person gets wind of it and thinks it silly or unimportant.

  A great deal of my time with Rotha was like that—precious to me, but if anyone knew the things we talked or sang about or made or played as time went on…Like the maps we would make of all her old journeys so she could take them again in miniature when she was old—

  People would think we were both off our heads.

  But while she still had the use of her feet—before they started obeying her fears or whatever it was that began elsewhere inside her and moved to her feet—I sang My Little Caravan for Rotha. And outside when it was windy and no one heard us I sang it for her that many times, soon she was singing all the verses with me, happy as a lark.

  As long as her funny little wheels worked all right.

  I mean as long as we sang and as long as we brought the botanical glass and she got in right close to all your flowers, she was happiness itself. Even flowers that were only a spangle in the undergrowth. I could hardly see them but they spangled out for her and in she went like ye go in.

  Not like this grey day of her death.

  No. Colour raved everywhere.

  Yellow of yolks and butter in the sun fresh-churned. Bold blooms she’d bring home and stand on her windowsill. Coltsfoot and speedwell and columbines. She’d ask them, do you mind my taking you home?

  And they nodded. They said she could take them and she did. But the spangles, the jewels, the tiny stitches hiding or half-hiding…a violet by a mossy stone, half-hidden from the eye! Fair as a star, when only one is shining in the sky…that was something she whispered.

  You don’t pick certain ones. Even if they say yes. Rotha showed me that.

  I am very good at hanging back, wait and see. And with both Rotha and her brother, what I saw and heard wasn’t run-of-the-mill. It was worth thinking about.

  There’s always things you find when you’re looking for something else.

  And bit by bit I found out there were two of me. Two James Dixons. I mean maybe there were more than two. Maybe we’ve all got a dozen me’s in us or more.

  Loyalty was breaking me into different bits.

  One for William; planning his gardens, placing the stones where they fit together without anything binding them, no lime or clay, only what gathers naturally—a bit of soil blown on the wind. A natural placement of plain things, one against the other in the wind and the rain and the sun and sleet. Mosses gathering in the cracks and garnishing the stone with velvet as time passes. Me and him planting shrubs that sprayed in a fountain William called the fountain of refreshment.

  Aye, I thought, Penny Dixon and her workmates could bloody well use a fountain of refreshment. That thought came to me strong but I kept on working with William and his fancy fountain that had no water in it. His was a fountain of leaves. It was a fountain for a poet who had no lack of water. Who was not parched in a factory where if you did not fall asleep you might be lucky enough to capture a cup of your own sweat.

  You have to laugh at someone who can ignore everything going on right under his nose!

  I had to quell my feelings. I had to be careful of scorn if I wanted to keep my sanity and my job.

  Part of me felt proud of all the work I did for William. I built up a reputation with him for a seriousness and a kind of seeing I’d had from the time I was born. That sight of mine was a seed, and being with Rotha and her brother made it grow.

  But the first me—my old self—knew fine well that we were in a kind of false green world.

  And my old self is the one who wanted to rip away the fantasy and know what lay under it. I knew something lay under it. And that is why I began wandering into Rotha’s bedroom alone.

  Her room
was different without herself or William in it.

  All quiet, like, all white.

  I felt wary of her mysterious window that was covered so no one could see it. It was no longer a visible window, but still…I felt it, an eye open inside the wall, watching me steal in.

  I should not have looked in the red diary Rotha kept for herself alone but part of me could not resist. An old part of me that was not loyal to William or to her.

  I felt the hidden window stare at me from in the wall.

  You can’t see me, I told it.

  And I untied Rotha’s red diary and put my nose close to her very difficult scrawl.

  For this I can only claim that loyalty has its limits when it comes to the shadows in our souls.

  3

  There I couch when owls do cry

  Dear James! Everything in this garden was warm and alive that year your dear Rotha became aware her feet were mortal. You were her young servant and her own youth had only just blown away over the mountains—was that not the year she went running, running up those mountains with her strange friend, Miss Something-or-other, to catch one last wisp of immortal youth? But it’s cold up there! Not a Sycamore kind of place at all. No tree larger than a creeping larch. Not even a single anemone. Even the bees hardly venture there for fear of blowing away.

  And those feet of your Rotha! They had started to run a little less wild, hadn’t they, on her legs that had once been so lithe. Some fluid or poison trickled down, drop by drop, through her belly and legs, and droplet by droplet into her feet, and she felt it. Oh, she did. And James, reliable James, attuned to your Queen's minutest tremor: what was that poison?

  eight

  the very first page I opened—I only glanced upon it where her red book fell open—was so ablaze I could hardly stand it.

  Rubies—sharp-cut. Faceted rubies yet with parts melted, Smashed—poured & sprayed, aglitter on her kitchen floor—& a thrust of silver—undersides aspen show whilst making their castanet song to the universe. Then a crack! The kind lightning is made of & thunder only remembers…

  I slammed the book shut and did not know what I had seen. A thrust of silver? Red glittering on the kitchen floor…I remembered the murder Mary Lamb had committed against her mother. Rotha never mentioned that. No one in the Wordsworth family uttered a word on it. That slaughter was something the whole village knew but nobody in this house seemed to remember. And yet in her red book it continued fresh as if Mary Lamb’s knife slashed even now.

  Did Rotha Wordsworth think the scene horrible or beautiful?

  The way she wrote it! Stronger than her brother’s poems but no verses and no rhyming and no space down the edge. I knew William did not rhyme all his poems. But his were tall and thin like himself, with space around them. Hers sprawled over the page. What was she about?

  When I feel strange, that’s when I go out walking.

  The lakelands are themselves a trance and on them your mind slips into a trance of its own. So you’re floating. You’re a trance within a trance. That’s when the ache of anything drains. Grasses whisper ache away. The thrushes flitter it away—it just dissolves.

  Willows sway.

  The water keeps moving.

  There’s a thing I feel. And Rotha feels it as well.

  Felt it.

  We did agree on it. That when you pass under the branches of certain trees, over your head there’s…

  In your hair as if a loving hand…

  A mother’s hand. Not a mother like my mam. Some other kind of mother has smoothed your hair in your dreams. Shifted the path of your dreaming. Of your song. I could cry thinking about it. The peace walking under a tree can give you. No matter if you’ve seen some terrible frightening trouble. And who hasn’t?

  And yes, she took the laudanum—Rotha. They gave it to her and they made sure she took it. She didn’t want to, though. If it weren’t for her trusting her brother and Mr. Carr so much she would have asked me to pour more of it in the geranium than she did, and she asked me that quite often. She said it made the geranium bloom where it made herself wilt.

  Any spoon of laudanum you might swallow never mends you as a tree mends you.

  I’ve often thought ends of the willows are hands. What a light strong touch willows have got. I love when they smooth my head.

  Ack listen to that crow! Raw and scratchy.

  Here’s the second bit I read.

  The terror that befell Mary Lamb will never befall Mary Wordsworth, will it. For our wife Mary is far too giving in every aspect. Mary Wordsworth will never let a crack appear. Mary Wordsworth loves it when every moment of her waking life is spent in service for others. Mary Lamb, however, was not like that—

  Mary Lamb stabbed her mother with a kitchen knife unto death. Mary Lamb splayed her mother upon their kitchen floor & the blood sprayed & dropped & dripped & splattered on the stones. This is not something Mary Wordsworth would do.

  Mary Wordsworth harbours not an iota of resentment. Mary Wordsworth is full only of devotion for her husband, Wm, & for me, his sister, Dorothy, isn’t she. Nothing could possess her to do what Mary Lamb has done.

  I hardly knew what to make of it.

  So yes I walked outside as soon I got the chance. Ye fly and ye go in your buttercup chambers and the blue halls of your morning glory and ye know glory not only in your minds but all through your pockets and wings and then you pass that light on in your honey to us all, ye do. Ye have your golden ways figured out. But I don’t fly, and I don’t make honey. I only walk to clear my own head. I walked all the time the Wordsworths were alive and I will have to keep going now that Rotha has followed her brother into death. Over the years the medicine I give myself has not changed.

  So I walked after I discovered things that lay in the strange red book, and Rotha saw me walking. She watched me out the window. A pale face at the glass, like. Talking to me without a sound.

  Take me with you.

  But I kept on alone. I had to. And when I came back, she says, James, you know I have been dreaming and dreaming of a very long walk of my own.

  Yes, Miss, I says. I know.

  I knew she had in her mind to fight her strange worry around her feet. Her feet still worked then as far as anyone else could tell. But according to herself there was something to worry about. She wanted to bring back her young scrambles. Uphill all the way. Something even more strenuous than her young escapes.

  I says Miss, you’re looking for an extra upness.

  Up, up, up, she says, I have to see if I’m still able and how high.

  Right, Miss.

  The last time I exerted all my leg-power was twenty years ago!

  Yes, Miss. I remember seeing you when I was a wee lad and thinking you were the wind. You’re hardly any slower now, though, Miss—

  Oh, I’m afraid I might be, James. And where those twenty years went or who stole them from me I do not know.

  No, Miss, the time flies for me an’ all.

  But I, she says, feel in me the beginnings of a wooden death and if I want to thwart it I have to climb, and I am bound to do it before these legs forget how. James, I have seen you mend your shoes and rub ointment on your feet—what is that stuff?

  Lanolin, Miss. Off sheep.

  Do you think it good for preparing one’s feet for rough terrain?

  Yes, Miss, lanolin is the best.

  And she says well you know I am dying to see if I can still climb the high hills around Borrowdale…

  Around Borrowdale, Miss, I warn, is quite high mountains rather than mere hills—

  Yes, she says, I know they are high.

  Very high, Miss. Nobody goes up there, only the sheep.

  Then do you think you might procure me some of their lanolin? And perhaps also reinforce my shoes the way you mend your own? What is that tool? Can I please hold it? />
  It’s my stitching awl, I says. I hand it to her and I says for a laugh, Miss D, of course I will give you my awl.

  And she laughs as well. She has a smashing laugh.

  Had.

  You think she’s come to the end of her world with sorrow untold but then up she wriggles like a trout and leaps into the sunshine. And she says James, you have been giving me your all now since you were a boy, and for that I thank you from the bottom of my heart. And she lifts her pincushion which is heart-shaped and flips it upside down and slides a pin out, and it’s a hatpin with a pearl animal head. Some animal I do not know. Like a deer but not a deer. And I have it to this day. I have a wool band I wrap around myself when there is a draft, and I secure the end with the pin and I swear it renders the wool twice as warm so as to give off its own heat like embers long after a flame has died.

  I suddenly wanted to ask her why her diary had blood and Mary Lamb and Mary Wordsworth all in the same breath on one page. I found something awful about it. While she was laughing and handing me the pearl pin, a desire to know rose up in me. When you get someone’s confidence and they are off guard…

  I knew Miss Lamb was still in London and I wondered was she better these days or not? I knew her brother Charles was responsible for her and that was why she was not locked up. Could a person get better after a thing like that? Lamb is a funny name for a woman who slaughters her mam. And what about Mary Wordsworth? Not an iota of resentment…Full only of devotion…Nothing could possess her. This all ran through my head and I was dying to ask but I knew I should not have looked in Rotha’s red diary—and I managed to accept the pearl pin off her and thank her without asking her a thing.