Grave Misgivings

by Caroline Wood

  In my bedroom, I had piles of boxes that my mother had given me. I hadn’t even opened some of them. Sometimes she forgot and gave me the exact same present only a couple of months later, so some of my boxes were duplicates – it looked a bit like a shop. There were three magic sets, one of them had it’s wand missing, and I used to think it must have been for really advanced junior magicians, who knew how to do magic without a wand or already had their own. There were two chemistry sets, a drawing set, a building set, and a games set with all the board games in one big box – but I had nobody to play them with, of course. My mother always gave me boxed sets for presents. There were whole collections of toy cars or model planes, never just a single, specially chosen treat. It was like she didn't trust herself to get it right, or wouldn't know what I wanted. Instead, she relied on toy manufacturers to provide for my every need.

  I kept the boxes in neat rows under my bed, and that’s where they stayed while I followed Cobb on his daily routine in the garden. I watched him and helped with the planting and digging, the pruning, watering, and seed sowing. I loved it when we worked in the dry potting shed with its neat rows of tools and the smell of peat and leaf mould. I used to sit and watch Cobb's old hands as they pricked out tiny seedlings, or filled terracotta pots with the dark, crumbly mixture from his compost heap. He had strong hands with ropes standing out on the backs, but he could be so gentle. He’d hold the delicate white hair of new roots with tenderness as he methodically transplanted them from trays to pots, then later into carefully prepared soil outside in the garden. I used to watch with a concentration bordering on hypnosis. I lost all sense of time when I was with Cobb.

  The days seemed to stretch on forever, and Cobb got so much done between sunrise and darkness, yet he was always unhurried and precise. Everything was done slowly and thoroughly.

  ‘Go on then boy,’ he'd say after I'd watched him working. ‘You do some now. Careful like I showed you.’ Then he’d pat my shoulder while I filled flowerpots or scored little trenches into finely tilled earth ready for sowing seeds. Every morning I’d go and check to see if anything had grown, and when the first leaves broke through the surface, I could feel a grin stretch my face wide and tight as I ran all the way to Cobb's cottage. And he’d come with me to look at what he must have seen so many times in his long life, but he still let it be special for me.

  ‘You're a natural, boy,’ he’d say. And I could see a shy smile on his face. I knew he was pleased to have passed on his knowledge, and pleased that I was interested enough to absorb it. I felt a warm glow of pride and happiness knowing that I’d done things right for Cobb.

  We’d have our breakfast then, in Cobb's little cottage. He used to cook eggs and toast, and sometimes we had marmalade with thick chunks of peel suspended in amber jelly. I didn't like it at first, but as the years went on that marmalade became one of my favourite tastes and I never found another to match it. Two mugs of strong, steaming tea would complete our meal and then we worked systematically through different parts of the garden. Each day had a pattern. I came to know what we’d be doing just by what day of the week it was, and which season of course. It gave my life a rhythm. I knew where I was with Cobb.

  Gentle, quiet, old Cobb, with his worn tweed jacket gone all out of shape, and his ever-present hat perched on his head. The hat was an indeterminate colour, the result of watermarks from rain and bleaching from the sun – it looked like it had been waxed, but only patchily. Cobb was a tall, thin man. He had a wiry, strong frame with no loose flesh on his old but upright bones. A slight stoop tilted him forward, but it didn't begin until high up on his shoulders, and gave him the appearance of looking down at something on the ground. His hair was always the same during those long years – with silver tufts fuzzing out from under his hat, just in front of his ears. I suppose I loved the old man. I certainly placed all my admiration and respect on him, and I always felt so safe when I was with him. He had a soothing effect on me. Yes, I loved Cobb – steadily and silently, but with a depth missing from other relationships in my childhood. Cobb seldom smiled, but there was such kindness in his eyes – and when he did smile it was like the sun coming out from behind grey clouds. His face lifted, opened, and there was warmth in the crinkles and grooves webbing across his weathered skin. Mostly though, Cobb's face had a slightly worried look – the beginning of a frown that never got any further, as if he was planning out new flowerbeds in his mind.

  Cobb had no family, and seemed to have no friends. Like me, he spent much of his time alone and appeared not to mind. He was a very private man who said little, so that when he did speak it was worth listening to. He was always polite and friendly to Mother and Father, although somehow invisible whenever they had guests filling the garden with artificial colours and perfumes for one of their many social gatherings.

  If my Mother and Father noticed Cobb at all, then his deference would have pleased them. They seemed oblivious to his enigmatic quality, which intrigued and charmed me endlessly. All through the long years of my childhood with Cobb, he never changed. Yet there is so little I could really say about the man. He was the solid base from which I went off along different paths to explore life and whenever I came back, he was still there, still the same. I gained the comfort I needed from his presence when I returned home from school, college and later, university. He never seemed to age – he was already ancient. Consistent Cobb.

  It happened on one of my summer holidays home from university. Mother and Father were away on an extended business trip halfway round the world, and Cobb had the garden looking beautiful. Everything was vivid with life and energy – almost growing as we watched. It was a powerful experience, to witness everything budding, blossoming, unfurling, giving off heady smells and glowing with incredible, forgotten colours. I had worked with Cobb all morning and felt so glad to be outside again. My body craved physical work after my long term of sedentary study in dry, academic enclosures. We stopped for a tea break and Cobb's shiny boots creaked as he carried a tray from his tiny cottage to the bench in his garden. It was an old ritual, our special treat, but actually such a simple thing. There was always a biscuit each – plain and brittle – but I'd eat it as if it was chocolate cake, because it was from Cobb. He told me he was going to the nursery for the afternoon. There was no invitation for me to join him – Cobb had a way of making it clear when he wanted to be on his own – so I knew not to ask. He went off then and it happened – the incident I couldn't shake off.

  I’d seen animals fighting, and seen dead or dying animals all my life – it's an everyday event in the country. But there was something so brutal about this killing. The cat caught a baby rabbit as I sat in a deckchair, reading some undemanding paperback. She ripped it apart right in front of me, and her savage behaviour really shook me. Only minutes earlier, the same cat had weaved her way between my ankles, and purred as I stroked my knuckles along her arched back. Now she tore at the flesh of the rabbit and threw it’s gored and still living shape without mercy. There was a long gash sliced down the middle of its white stomach, like it was about to take off its coat. And the poor thing twitched and juddered in front of me. I wanted the cat to kill it, to finish the agony and fear of that shredded little creature. But she played – tossed the broken body in the air and sat with her paw on its fur, waiting for movement. I had to kill it, complete what the cat had started. I felt sick and sad as the spade cracked skull bones. The sound was like breaking an old flowerpot for crocks. Then there was stillness. Followed by my tears. They took me by surprise and wouldn’t stop. I had been shocked by the savage death on a sunny afternoon, but it seemed that the killing had tapped into something else to upset me so much. I wasn’t conscious of a cause for those ready tears. I buried the rabbit. Its body was smashed and bloody, the tiny teeth and delicate claws seemed so innocent and unsuspecting.I patted the soil down and went for a walk to clear my head. I wanted to shake off the picture of torment and death that had taken place in the middle of Cobb’s profusio
n of life.

  Just as I had when I was a boy sowing the little seeds, I went to look at the place where I'd buried the rabbit in the thin light of the next morning. With a grey mist of melancholy hanging over me, I stood and stared at the patch of flat bare soil at my feet for a while. Then I went to find Cobb for the day's work. I never told him about the killing, and tried to put it to the back of my memory, but it wouldn't leave me. Not completely.

  The next time I went to look at the rabbit grave, ten days later, it was again in the thin light of morning. There was a blister of soil on the flat soil, where new growth pushed it's way to the surface. Weeds were taking over the empty space. Filling in the blanks, as Cobb always used to say.

  ‘Plant close,’ he taught me, ‘and the weeds will have to go somewhere else.’

  I'd have them out when I could get a proper hold on them. There wasn’t enough to pull yet. Another couple of days later I could see the growth more clearly. It looked like the silvery grey leaves of Stachys so I left it alone. I wouldn't have planted anything myself to mark the grave, not like when I was a boy. Back then, I used to plant flowering memorials for every dead bird or squashed hedgehog. Under Cobb's sensitive eyes, I would plant little tussocks of thrift, or pinks with their smell of cloves and ragged edged flowers. This time I was secretly pleased that some dormant seed had been roused into life at the spot where I'd buried the rabbit.

  The rain over the next few days brought the plant on fast – there were two soft shoots, new and full of vigorous growth. The leaves were covered with downy velvet, lovely to stroke. And that’s what I did, the next time I strolled in the garden. I stroked the soft leaves on the rabbit grave. That time it was by moonlight. I hadn’t been able to sleep, and had wandered through the silvered shrubs and foliage, down to the grave. The leaves were getting longer, and they looked just like rabbit’s ears. Stachys byzantina, or Bunnies Ears – it was so fitting and made me smile that that particular plant had come up in such an appropriate place. But when I touched them, I knew that they were rabbit’s ears. I thought that the earth had shifted and somehow pushed up the battered, buried rabbit to the surface. Or that another animal had tried to dig up the little corpse?

  But no, it was something else altogether. It grew. There was a head, a little face, soft and new, with its eyes closed. It was embryonic, vulnerable – sleepy and young.Then there were shoulders. And after a sort of heave, like the ground was giving birth, a perfect little rabbit dragged its back legs from the mound of earth.It hopped around, cleaned its ears carefully with perfect little paws, and removed all traces of the damp soil from its soft, pale brown fur. It sat, small and still in the quiet pale light, just as close to my feet as when the cat had ripped bloody lines into its helpless flesh. Then it nibbled dew-soaked grass and drummed on the ground twice with a strong back foot before hopping off into the fields beyond the garden. I could only think that I’d dreamed the whole thing. That it had been a waking, moon-induced, fantasy. Just like when I was a boy.

  The next morning, I checked the grave on my way to find Cobb. There was a mound of disturbed earth, like a newly risen molehill. There were no ears, no leaves, or weeds. I had to replay the image over and over again to make sense of what I’d seen. It stayed with me for years, but in a cloudy shroud of memory that sometimes got so overcast that I forgot all about it. But whenever the clouds parted, I had that same disorientated feeling of not knowing if my rabbit memory was a dream or my imagination. Or if it had been real.

  That same quality of half-remembered illusion attached itself to the other two plantings, years apart, which also produced new growth. More new growth that produced fresh life following the dry inertia of death, like tender yet young buds on the trees after their gnarled winter hibernation. When I think back on the rapid, shifting movements in the soil, moments before the buried field-mouse twitched itself out of the ground and scurried away into the night, I am still unsure if the memory is real or some vivid dream that has refused to fade. Perhaps it is the same as those created places from my childhood and has become wedged in the folds of my internal vision, taking on the substance of a three dimensional event from the real world. The created places of my childhood had been so real to me while I existed in them, and continued to be sharp enough for me to reflect back on over the years. They were a mixture of intensity and insubstantiality. Like shadows cast by bright lights – dark, sharp and crisply defined, yet when you reach out to them, you touch nothing.Existence running parallel with non-existence.

  The mouse had been a surprise – I had buried it and forgotten about it. It took no time at all to sprout through the surface of the newly disturbed soil. I’d never had any expectations that my rabbit experience would happen again, but that mouse stirred up the old dream. Or the old memory. It felt like a leakage from another dimension, another, subconscious part of me, to be reminded so strongly of the rabbit, and set me somewhat off balance. I couldn’t tell what was genuine memory and what was the fanciful over-spill of my childhood habit. I did make a down-to-earth attempt to separate fact from fantasy and bring the plantings into the realms of reality, and that was with the kitten.

  My memories are still blurred and unfocused, so I can never be totally sure if it actually happened, but I can still see the pink pads of Kevin's feet as they pushed through that layer of dark earth. I had found the kitten in the middle of the lane as I walked with Cobb to collect horse manure. It was newly killed and still warm, with one dark drop of blood fallen from it's mouth.

  ‘Can't leave it there, boy,’ Cobb said, and I saw a brief wince pass across his face. He was always touched by death. Not sentimental or shocked, but with a genuine sorrow that something living had been stopped.

  ‘That'll come back,’ he said. ‘One way or another, it all comes back, boy.’ He used to tell me that at the graves of little pets and baby birds when I was young. Or as we cleared flowerbeds, cutting back plants when they were old and straggly, and had finished flowering. He always gave me comfort at times of closing down, and made me see the cycle of decay and growth. I picked up the warm, floppy body of the black kitten and took it back to the garden. Cobb continued to follow the dung trail along the middle of the lane, disturbing clusters of flies as he scooped up the shiny pebbles of brown, compacted straw with his huge, ancient shovel. I laid the dead baby animal on a sheet of newspaper as I sliced into the soil with clean cuts. I felt a sense of sadness for this little creature that should have been learning how to fend for itself through playful, mischievous antics. It should have been swatting at butterflies, pouncing on blades of grass, or chasing its tail in mad, precarious circles. There shouldn’t have been this stillness, and premature setting-in of rigid coldness.

  I wanted that anonymous black kitten to send up new shoots of life just like the rabbit had all those years before. I knew as I placed it in the damp hollow what I hoped for, with the same sense of purpose passed on to me by Cobb when we sowed seeds, or set out crops in the vegetable plot.

  ‘They want to grow boy,’ he would say. ‘They just need a bit of help.’

  I placed the body in a sleeping position and began to surround it with handfuls of earth, until it looked like a patch of velvet cloth lining some secret hiding hole. I looked away as I covered the rest with gentle sprinklings the way Cobb had shown me.

  ‘Them little roots don't want to be disturbed any more than you can help it, boy,’ I could hear him say as I carried out my careful planting. I would tend the spot and give the kitten the best possible conditions for growth. Cobb nodded at me as he pushed the wheelbarrow back into the garden, and I followed him for a mug of tea and a chunk of bread pudding.

  There was no rain for days after the planting so I filled Cobb's galvanised watering can from the big old water butt and gave the ground a good soaking before we started the day's gardening. This time I knew what to expect and checked for signs twice a day. On the fifth day, a woman from one of the nearby farms came to the door. She was met by my Mother's car as it
made another departure from the drive, and directed down to the garden to ask her questions about the missing kitten.

  ‘You haven't seen Kevin, have you? It’s my little boy's kitten – we've been looking everywhere for it.’ She seemed miserable and apologetic at the same time. I felt the poignant stab of familiarity now that the kitten had a name. My unidentified animal took on a personality and had a history, however brief. I told the woman I would keep a look out for Kevin, which was as honest as I could be.

  When Kevin started to sprout on the twelfth day, I made frequent visits to the rising mound of soil. I didn't want to miss him growing, miss the surge of life, which had made the mouse spring from its suspended state in a matter of seconds. I returned to the site several times throughout the day in between my usual routine with Cobb. As it had been when I’d watched the rabbit emerge, the sky was dark when I stood and watched new life break through the surface of the soil. I had no doubts about what I was seeing that time. The kittens pink pads seemed to swell from their blanket of moist earth and rise like buds about to blossom. Kevin's feet all faced upwards, even though I had planted him on his side. He was playful even before he erupted, and kicked his way out of the ground in a tangle of fluff and splinter-sharp claws. He batted at small stones and clumps of mud. When his eyes were visible, Kevin had the startled, curious look of any six-week-old kitten. With a flailing of soft paws, he turned himself into an upright position and leapt from the loose soil in a graceless parody of some lithe feline hunter. He shook off crumbs of earth and sat down heavily to take in his surroundings. Wide-eyed and alert, Kevin was back. I stepped away, grinning and feeling slightly drunk with what I had just seen.