by Morag Joss
“But you still came every year, on Adam’s birthday?”
I remember Howard took up woodcarving the year I was pregnant, I said. He was always whittling away at something, he always had something green and half-done. He never made money at it, of course. Even a simple little figure took so long it wasn’t worth it. When I first knew I was pregnant I asked him if he might make toys and he even began something, a rattle I think it was, though come to think of it, it never got finished. But he was never idle.
“You mean he always had a knife in his hand,” Theo said, looking at Howard’s sleeping face. I laughed to show I wasn’t taking his remark the wrong way. “He was always busy. We both were. There was the pottery and weaving, and the animals, and the garden, and the spiritual retreat,” I said. “And then, of course, Adam.” And I laughed some more. “As a matter of fact, I came up here on the day he was born. I didn’t want to, I was so heavy by then. But Howard brought me up here.” Theo didn’t reply. “Then, do you know, he actually suggested I should stay and give birth up here!”
I knew I’d said too much; I knew Theo was silent from shock, not indifference. “Do you know, I’ve never told anyone that before? So, anyway! It was all a long time ago,” I added.
I went to the basket for the package of sandwiches and we began to eat. Theo fed bits of bread and meat into his mouth and gazed around calmly, but his silence somehow demanded something of me. It was interrogatory, pushing unspoken, impertinent questions in my direction. Why did Howard bring me up here that day—two steep, uphill miles? I didn’t want to think about it, so I started talking again.
“You may have a point there. What you said about not necessarily loving beautiful places. I don’t always love the moor. It can be bleak. Dangerous, too—the weather can change just like that. That’s well known around here.”
Theo didn’t respond, which I took as an invitation to continue. So actually, I then wondered aloud, did we really love it up here, the two of us, as much as all that? In truth, how often did we, committed as we were to our drudgery, allow ourselves to while away time that could be spent working? And did it really never rain? I wanted to think that in those early years there had been many, many afternoons on the moor, but I had to accept that maybe there had been no more than two or three. Maybe I’d torn up my memories of those few like photographs and was feeding them back to myself in scraps, pretending that each fragment came from a different picture in an entire album of pictures that, if it existed, would be evidence of a whole season of happiness, when in fact all we’d ever had was a handful of fine days caught in a handful of snapshots. The very idea that we made our way on to the moor and wasted whole afternoons up here, like people given to even mild pleasure-seeking, was absurd. There was always work to do, something that couldn’t wait, and the impulse for simple fun was never very strong in us, anyway. What was certain—although I did not say this aloud—was that I really did come without fail every twenty-eighth of August, on Adam’s birthday. I couldn’t keep away.
I woke Howard by tapping on his cheek, and I hauled him gently to a sitting position. He ate his way through a sandwich, pulling strings of meat through his teeth and even getting his left hand as far as his mouth so he could lick his fingers. Then, with a look of disgust on his face, he brought out of his mouth a long flap of pork rind that he couldn’t swallow, and dangled it in front of me like a dead flat-worm. Theo reached over his shoulder, took it from him, and flung it hard into the grass. With his index finger Howard hooked a lump of bread out from his bulging cheek and tried to copy him, but he hadn’t got the strength in his arm to throw it anywhere and the ball of sodden dough dropped on to the rug. Theo flicked it away before Howard could grab it back, and pushed another sandwich in his hand. Howard whined and rolled over, Theo eased himself away and helped Howard until he was lying on his side, in the recovery position. It occurred to me to take the sandwich out of Howard’s hand because there was a risk he might choke if he tried to eat lying down, but he was showing no interest in it anyway, and so I left him alone. Theo handed me another sandwich and I crammed it into my mouth, conveying appreciation. There was nothing wrong with the food on this picnic.
“So when was the last time?” Theo asked. “The last time he was here with you for his birthday. When you were all up here together.”
“Oh, the last time?” I said, my mouth still full. I waved loosely around and about in the air with the sandwich in my hand. “The last birthday picnic all together?”
I glanced at Howard still sprawled on the rug and was pleased to see he wasn’t following the conversation, and his eyes were beginning to close. I got up and knelt beside him, and lifted his small, cold head on to my lap. I stroked the side of his face and made a show to Theo of dredging up the recollection, as if our lives were so crammed with incident, so hectic with visits and parties and picnics that I had to sift through a hundred memories of past amusements to pinpoint a particular one.
“Must be a couple of years,” I said. I hesitated; I had to prevent my memory of it from altering the expression on my face. I wasn’t going to tell Theo it was seven years ago. Why spoil the day? Today we were up on the moor, the wind was rattling through the bracken, the grass was silvery under the sun, and we could see for miles. I glanced down at Howard’s face. He remained quite still amid the waving grass, as if fallen on a battlefield. I knew better than to wonder if he remembered it as I did. Our shared history had become mine alone, since long before the stroke.
“Adam’s firm keeps him terribly busy. They send him all over the place, so he can’t always get here,” I said. “But oh, how he would love this! Isn’t it all just lovely!” I leaned across and pushed the open packet of sandwiches toward Theo. “Have another!” I cried. I took one myself and bit into it.
But why did even a simple pleasure have to be forced in this way? When did enjoyment grow so elusive that I had to chase after it and pin it down so desperately? Even more desperate was the sudden knowledge that I wouldn’t be enjoying any of it at all if it weren’t for the presence of Theo.
“How old is he today, then? Older than me?”
I had to chew for a long time before answering. Though it might have been a little tough for some tastes, the pork meat was delicious, dense and fibrous and salty, and the skin was soft and thick.
“Twenty-eight,” I said. “How old are you, Theo? When’s your birthday?”
“I’m twenty-seven,” he said. “My birthday’s next month. The twenty-eighth.”
“Oh, my goodness! September the twenty-eighth? That’s the day Adam was due! He was born nearly five weeks early, you see,” I said. “He wasn’t meant to come till September the twenty-eighth. But I went into labor.”
“Wow, we were nearly twins, then, me and Adam,” Theo said. “Can I have some birthday cake?”
SEPTEMBER 2011
To: deborahstoneyridge@yahoo.com
Sent on thurs 1 sept 2011 at 08.23 EST
HI Mum – sorry about mix-up. Am back from Barcelona in one piece (a bit burnt tho, my back’s peeling!). I’m sorry if you got the idea me coming over was a done deal. You have to realize working for an American parent company it’s not the same as a UK company, you don’t get long holidays, it’s a whole different attitude. Back in office now. Shame I couldn’t get to see you but honestly it wasn’t a viable option. Hope you’re both ok. Next time!
Love, A
To: deborahstoneyridge@yahoo.com
Sent on sat 3 sept 2011 at 15.44 EST
Hey no email last week, you’re not mad at me are you?!? that would be pretty random, after all it really wasn’t my fault and I have said sorry!!! Hope you’re ok, maybe you just didn’t make it to the village last week. But usually you ring instead if that happens, but I don’t think you’ve tried to get hold of me? No missed calls. Sorry if you tried and the m
ob was switched off … I’ll try and call tomorrow. Love A
September is never my favorite month. The weather turns colder before I’m ready to let go of hope for a few more summer days, and at dusk, which also comes too early, a wind particular to the change of season blows through the laurel and privet around the house and whips the trees on the moor with lonely, whining strokes. This wind comes from the west and beats the land with slanting rain that carries in it the tang of seawater. It reaches inside the house, where familiar, faintly acid drafts reveal themselves anew. I tear up old bits of cloth into strips to stuff the gaps in the window frames, and I fit wedges of folded cardboard to silence the rattling of the upstairs doors. The Rayburn starts up with puttering noises that fill the kitchen with coal smoke, and I worry that this year, once again, we can’t afford a new stove. I wear my everyday, year-round dresses as always, but with sweaters on top, and long, thick socks, most often Howard’s old outdoors ones that he doesn’t need anymore. There is nothing golden about the autumn here. Beyond the quagmire of the yard, gray oily puddles form in the mud where deer and sheep browse the trees and hedgebanks. On clear days the sky is a flat, opaque blue. The sere green of August bracken on the moor turns almost overnight to brown, and with the first frosts, to black.
I am harvesting the last of everything in the garden. The lettuces are gone to seed and leak a pungent white juice like dandelion milk when I break them off their stalks close to the ground. The leaves are as tough as cabbages and lacy from slug damage, and I wonder about making a sort of end-of-season soup with them, picturing a pale green broth in which the last of the runner beans, so dry and woody, might also soften enough to be edible. There’s one last courgette that has swollen unseen under its own leaves and is now a marrow, torpedo-sized. I tap my knuckles on the side of it, enjoying the hollow knock against its dark green wall. It’s yellow and wormy on the bottom where it’s been sitting in wet soil, but most of it can be used. The tomatoes that haven’t rotted on the stem cling on in green clusters, and I wonder why it is that Nature lets them survive so long past the time they should have ripened. I start to pick them anyway, trying to remember a recipe for fried green tomatoes I read in a magazine at the library and knowing that no matter what they taste like Howard will make out he doesn’t care for them. Although I’m quite alone out here, as clear as a bell I hear him saying it. American food—it all tastes of death!
He must have really said that once, years ago, for his voice to come into my head now, and so forcefully. What doesn’t come to me at all is what I replied to it. At the time, probably nothing out loud. Almost certainly I didn’t give it much thought; in those days such sentiments were throwaway assumptions among the kind of people we were. Or, I wonder, were his actual words, Fast food—it all tastes of death! I can hear his voice in my head saying that, too. Or maybe it was something else entirely that tasted of death (battery chickens?) and when, exactly, in the chronicle of the nigh-on thirty years I spent listening to him, did he say it? Standing here on a damp afternoon in this twenty-ninth Exmoor September, my hands sticky with clay and sap, I’m amused to find I can’t recall, and Howard’s voice in my head falls silent and suddenly I feel sad and guilty, wishing for his sake that back then I’d been a person who could have helped him laugh off that kind of thing. It has taken me all these years to understand that ideas, even Howard’s, have a lifespan. Like clothes or anything else that goes in fashions, they’re only right for a while and then they turn wrong or plain ludicrous, a lot of them, anyway. Some ideas, of course, come up again and again, like vegetables left in the ground. But nothing much I can think of holds true forever. Maybe even what Howard called his principles were only ideas that survived a bit longer than the others.
But how dare I think these things? I stretch up and gaze at the dusky sky that’s decorated with a high, silver-edged bank of cloud and I wait for Howard’s voice to come again and fill my head with his thundering objections. But I hear nothing, as if even my imaginary, long-ago Howard is struck dumb by my heresy. I’m smiling. So minds—even mine, it would appear—may change, and the sky stays right up there where it belongs. And while it is terrible that the stroke has robbed the real, still-living Howard of speech and he is incapable of claiming or declaiming anything now, I’m relieved I no longer have to listen to the stuff he used to come out with. It’s a thrill to admit it: I’m not sorry that the death of part of Howard’s brain has silenced his ideas. The thought sends a shiver running through me. I don’t want to think about what else must have died to let me even think this way and so I concentrate hard on the picking, fingering my way through the pungent tomato foliage and feeling on the backs of my hands tiny prickles from the sharp hairs on the stalks and undersides of leaves. I strip every plant and I’m pleased with the size of the crop. Theo might like fried green tomatoes.
Yes, Theo is still here.
When we came back down from the moor on Adam’s birthday it was late and we were soaked and shivering; it had rained long before we reached home. Howard was exhausted from the walking and I was, too, from so much heavy lifting; in fact I couldn’t understand where I’d found the strength for it all. I couldn’t quite believe what had happened. But I was quite clear that now the picnic was over Theo would—and probably should—go and leave us in peace.
So I parked Howard in the kitchen and went to the scullery to find towels to dry him off and then I saw that the laundry from that morning was still in the washing machine; of course it hadn’t been emptied. In the excitement of the picnic I’d forgotten all about the soiled sheets and Howard’s stripped bed, which I hadn’t made up with clean linen yet. I wanted to cry. I was so tired, my shoulder was aching, yet I could not delay; Howard was fretting and probably getting a temperature. If Theo were just to leave now, if he left me to tackle this all on my own—if he was to enter and exit my life within the space of a single day—it would be as if I had never had him here at all. Yet I could not very well beg him to stay. So I will always be grateful that as I bent down to open the door of the washing machine, I simply sensed him at my side, as I had first thing that morning.
With a lot of tugging, out came the heavy wet sheets into a laundry basket. “It’s still raining hard out there,” I heard Theo say. With some more effort, the sheets were hauled up onto the drying pulley that hung from the ceiling until they filled the scullery like hanging sails. “There won’t be many cars on the road. I might not get a lift,” he said. I held my breath. “So would it be all right if I stayed another night? I’ll work off whatever it costs. Whatever I owe you.”
I gathered up a couple of dry towels for Howard. “Thank you,” I said. “That’s fine with me.”
For the first few days after that I was a bit jumpy (and probably a bit short with Howard), expecting Theo to go at any moment, but he didn’t, and now I am no longer uneasy in his presence, or anticipating that he’s on the point of taking his leave. He says he’ll stay and do chores for me until he’s worked off the whole of the unpaid bill his unpleasant friend left behind. Even though I have confessed I was overcharging in the first place, he insists on it. I am touched that he wants to stay (and I sense that for him it’s not just about paying off the bill) but I have no idea how to calculate how much time he might owe me. By now it’s even possible I owe him; in any case, I don’t want to put a price on having him around the place.
It’s several days, actually, since money was mentioned. I shan’t raise the matter. Any talk of money would signal a tallying of the account that could be followed only by his departure.
A little more about him is clear now. He does look something like Adam after all, with coloring a bit like his, and of similar height and build and almost as good-looking. He’s unaware of how very pleasing his appearance is. I dug out some photos of Adam for comparison although there are none very recent. Actually there are only a few of Adam past the age of fourteen, the year he went to school in Exeter, and none at all since Howard’s stroke.
I dug
out the old album, too, to show Theo; it was in a box of junk under the bed in one of the Bed and Breakfast rooms. The Year at Stoneyridge Farm 1981–82. I was expecting to be rather proud of it. I wasn’t; I doubt Theo or anyone else would be interested.
In the early days I kept the camera with me and took photographs all the time—that’s another thing that fell by the wayside. I mounted them all in order with dates and excited little captions, intent on making a complete record, an album for every year; I thought I might try to get them published one day as a guide for other people like us, trying to be self-sufficient. I was taken aback, looking at it again, to see how very long ago all this was. Howard’s hair is still dark, and the one or two pictures with me in them that Howard took show me standing straight and tall, my body emanating youth and vigor. But nearly all the pictures are of Howard: Howard with a broken fence, Howard with the mended fence. Howard with the first flock of hens, with the kiln, with the beehives, Howard in various yoga positions with beads around his neck. In all of them, of course, he is Howard with hair, which was even longer in those days and sometimes tied back or in a pigtail, and he is Howard thickly bearded, like some figure from an epic. I took the pictures with the certainty I was capturing a success story, one that featured our integrity and determination and ingenuity, but looking at them again I see they’re simply vain and dull. We were so busy observing and recording ourselves we didn’t see our pioneers’ foolishness all over our own faces. Howard stares at the camera with a look of humorless infallibility. I imagine myself behind the lens, meticulously laying down an archive of my adoration of my husband as if I knew one day I should need reminding of it.
After Adam was born, the times I couldn’t be bothered to fetch the camera began to outnumber the times I could. Eventually there came a day when I saw no point in yet more pictures, not even with Howard in the foreground, of another pile of sheared fleeces, another batch of hens, or more cracked pots warm from the kiln.