The Grassling

by Elizabeth-jane Burnett

  The sweetness deepens. Tobacco and aldehydes lay a masculine note inside vanilla. To flower is to father as well as mother. And if he has a scent, it is this. The bass note in the coumarin coming from me. The woodiness in the sweet vernal-grass. The steel of a fork, of a spade. The crumble of earth across blade. The checked cotton shirt, the tweed jacket, rubber boot. The suede safari shoe. The pressed trouser, the vegetable root. The army knife and the twine, the paper and leather spines. All of these mingle and merge in the bright purple verge.

  In sweet vernal-grass, the change from vegetative tip to young inflorescence is so quick that scientists have found it difficult to study, though they feel it must be there. They think that something does not become something else without leaving signs. But I know it can be instant. The change the honesty makes in me is immediate, as I sink into the slick of its scent, trailing bees. At dawn and dusk I repeat my release, in the bursts of time when sweetness overpowers. For seven days I breathe out flowers.

  When I pick myself up, I look back at the dent I have made. Carefully, I take each flattened plant by the stem, coaxing it back to its original position. I am glad not to have left much of an impression. Moss gleams from beneath like coral at the base of the sea floor. As I move off and back inside, freshened by petalled water, I pick at my hair, finding little purple shreds. I shed bright strands along the ground; white filaments spray my head with a premature ageing.

  41

  Yr

  When the map arrives, it is stunning. The mellowed admittance woman gasps, bending over it. I feel irrationally proud, like I’ve given birth to it: yes, here it is, the map I have summoned from the archives! Its glamour comes from a gold line snaked across it. The fact that it is in colour comes as a surprise. There is no key, so I’m not sure what everything represents, but the gold indicates some sort of boundary line. There are also two shades of green, blue, red and orange. In some places, one colour has been placed over another, producing new ones, like red and blue emerging purple. I think back to what Rebecca said about mixing colours and look at the Drewshill fields. They are bounded in green, which makes me smile, as it is this green that had sung out to us too, in words as well as paint, when we were there.

  I find that my father has worked out the key, so I don’t have to. In his Sketch Map No. 3, he has added a ‘Key to Symbols used’ which shows how the different letters in the fields correspond to different farms. ‘R’ indicates fields belonging to Pynes farm, and I can see where the footpath from the Drewshill fields now emerges. The fields labelled with a ‘Y’ are too far left to feature in my father’s map. For the first time I realize that he too had a specific area of focus, as I have with the Drewshill fields. For him, it is very much the eastern side of the village – around what used to be Woolmans farm. The map as a whole is much larger than the section that he has used. I take a photo of the section that corresponds with his, wondering more about his own boundaries.

  To find the section he used for Sketch Map No. 2, I have to navigate my way by looking at the buildings. I look for the same shapes that appear on his map. Like a game of Tetris, I see how shapes might fit together from one map to the other. It takes a long time, as the survey map operates on a different scale and I have to keep making spatial adjustments. As I trace the Tetris pieces together, I fall on some writing: ‘Part of the Estate called Great Marshall, the Property of Mr Edward Smallridge’, and it reinforces what my father writes about this land being parcels belonging to particular people, strongholds; perhaps, in places, ‘pockets of Romano-British settlement’ surviving long after the Anglo-Saxon conquest. There are also interlocking parish boundaries. Clockwise, the parishes go – Alphington, Exminster, Dunchideock, Ide, so that when you say the name of a place, it is difficult to know what you mean because it is always a collection of other places too – and of people, and of powers. A gathering of state, of local authorities, and, as I glance back at the Book of Court Rolls, of Church. Collectives and individuals, dominion and resistance, all bound together in one earth.

  It is good seeing the map spread out like this, though I am self-conscious about gazing at the map for as long as I am. Do the fields it shows know what a power they had? What a force to have drawn me to them. To have drawn my father and his and his. Is it sacred? Is it the accidental circumstance of being somewhere that offered work to my great-grandfather, or is it more than this? The Anglo-Saxon rune Yr depicts a bow made from a yew tree. This rune denotes the perfect application of skills and knowledge to natural materials. This rune lets you know when you are in the right place. Is the map this kind of rune? That, it doesn’t say, though I ask it. The archivist sits opposite and I don’t know what she must think of my protracted pauses, seemingly staring into nothingness. But there is so much that this map is telling me.

  It tells me about the parts of Ide that were important to my father: Woolmans and Great Marshall. It tells me about the colours of the fields. It shows me who the people were who lived in these places, and the names that have held on. It shows how authorities, governmental and religious, trace their own maps over the land, over people’s homes, and names, drawing boundary lines on the shore for time’s tide to wash away or bring back, as if by whim, years later. It also shows that maps have long been a source of aesthetic pleasure; that someone, centuries ago, felt that this one merited a gold line, a red, a green; not knowing that over two hundred years later it would cause an old woman to gasp and a younger one to smirk like a beatific mother. And so, in its own way, it tells me to go on making things of beauty, and, though my literary head shouts ‘don’t use the word beauty’, I shout it down this time. It’s the right word for this gold line, for this crumpled, centuries-old paper; for this tiny, tactile memory.

  42

  Yslende

  A golden field, just above a Woolmans field, is caught in the middle of a fold. The map has been folded into twenty small squares and this field lies in the bottom left corner of the top right square. You have to look deep into the fold to see what is there; it has been literally pressed down, so that a human hand has buried the land into the crevices of paper. You almost need to walk into the map to find it; to get out guy ropes and tack down the rugged paper. The pinch of where the corners meet is intimate, like the pistil of a flower, a small, private part. My eyes flick across to the Drewshill fields, wrapped in their green border, with flecks of gold above and beneath: top left and bottom left. I do not move. Swollen with sap, a great pressure builds in my head.

  Here the land speaks through paper, weathered by centuries of waiting. But words have been pushing up all over the place lately: from soil, from wood, from stone; from all manner and matter of buried time. Records of earlier touchings of hand and earth; Old English tongues, Anglo-Saxon runes, are surfacing. I twist, dusted in gold, as the word yslende covers my lips. Glowing. My tongue has to feel its way into the word, like a bee to a flower, then out again, as the last push of its sound is whispered. Yslende glows the golden field, yslende all along the fold, yslende in between the hills. My petals pull apart. I spill.

  I am lying still in the wheat. Sun washes over – scurrying at the base, floating over the top. This is a day that is to come or, perhaps, has already been. I feel the ripening of skin and lightening of hair. My stem is supported by the soil, the churning molten core, massaging the spine, releasing the nodes. Webs of rain spin on my tips, dots of water glitter the changeling water. Sounds rise. A swallow. A swoop. A swallowing, swooping root. Layered in the hay, in the tightly bounded day, lightly woven. A netting barely visible: the skin starts to itch with each twitch of wheat.

  Clover skin is tightly bound in pollen gusts, seeded dust, bursts of swallow in the hay swallowed swover. Words mix and swoop in the swalloving sway. My eyelids flutter. I swoon in the heat in the heart of a day in midsummer. But my own growth has passed the middle; I am a long way into turning into something else: from animal to grass, from grass to hay, from summer to a saved day. I recognize this feeling, of having b
een saved at the right time, before the rain, sun still seeping in through its lids. To be brought out again, perhaps, in winter and swallowed thick and still turning, still burning, with lives inside, the scent and the shape and the colour bursting and thirsting, swalloving, swovering, wooping and swooping. And the smell is what matters here. The pull of the sweetness in the grass, dairy sweet, nestling sweet, suntrap sweet; the scent and the sweep. The inside so sweet: the seeds.

  And as I splatter into soil I soak in and down the buried language of the ground. I seep into the marrow of the bones of the land. And I call as I fall – to rock, a faint cuckoo, a last halloo. Everything responds, everything is on: listening and being heard are simultaneous. The sounds of becoming and belonging are the same as the spaces opened up for them. My body hollows and braces in the flood of the quiet places.

  I enter the earth and speak with the tongues of birds, of worms, with latticed roots, all along my fibres and fathers and mothers and grasses; I rain speech. Itisoccupiedwithsoundandhowtopressitinto-somethingflatitcarrieswithititssoundisallaboutanotheritnamesfather-hetolditaboutthisplaceitsmappedearthedsongbeatshhhhhhhhhhh-hhhhhhhhhhhpillowhhhhhhhhhh glow. (gold. willow.) shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhPILLOW wehearitquickandsmallinthesoilithitsrootsandstonesthatgrindbeside-itlingeringonshalethroughrockitthumpsanddropsitssharpnesspicking-fernoakbeechstrippeditpressesintosoilliftingsaltfromdeepoceanall-thewaybackupmillionsofparticlesofclayofsiltupthroughmillionsof-bacteriathereachofitfromheartobeatingheart.

  I blink. The field moves back to wherever it has been, no longer bound by gold but green. I start to question what I’ve seen, where the map has taken me. Perhaps to a folded-over moment in history that had needed to be opened. Perhaps to an earlier dream where I had seen the fields hemmed by a border made of water. Then, I had entered the stream and swum until it swelled into a pool. Now, I had entered the paper’s knot until it flattened into a sea of dew and a space that grew to a soft cuckoo. Or perhaps it was a moment that was yet to come, that here, resting on the tip of summer, I had only sensed approaching.

  All I really know is that soon the map will close. And I will walk out into the city, showering my pollen, scattered by the wind. And the archivist will carry on cataloguing and the map will be covered and returned to its shelf, perhaps for another two hundred years. But I am happy it’s there. Glowing its hidden gold from behind its cloth and wooden box. I’m glad it’s there.

  43

  Ȳtemest

  ‘How long are you staying this time?’ he asks, the day that I am leaving. But time has started running differently here. He is a mountain, and has millions of years; I am still not sure what I am, but know that it is something thin and long and stretched out. Something that can be here and yet not here. In his room, yet out in his acre. In his acre, yet out in Druid’s Hill. In Druid’s Hill, yet out in Ten Acre Field. It is only when I am in a distant city that I lose my elasticity. That I can’t seem to hold all the places together.

  So although part of me wants to say, ‘Forever’ and mean it, it doesn’t really matter what I answer. I could say what we have: minutes; or I could say what we really have: hundreds of millions of years. ‘Ȳtemest,’ is what I actually say. He waits. ‘Uttermost. To the uttermost ends of time,’ I whisper, as the blackbird flies into the window, landing with a boom against the glass.

  ‘Back again!’ he smiles.

  ‘Back again!’ I smile. And I want to sing in the blackbird’s voice, the way I have learned to now. But the sound won’t come. Out at the uttermost, the extreme edge of our time together, there is not enough breath for song. Here, the lower air pressure makes it difficult for oxygen to enter our blood. Normal physical activities become impaired: climbing the stairs, thinking clearly, recalling memories. Perhaps it is this oxygen deprivation that has plagued him, where doctors attribute other kinds of ailments. Perhaps it is this that worries me. When we travel to high altitudes, our bodies initially respond inefficiently, straining our breathing and as much as doubling the heart rate.1

  The severity of altitude sickness may be due, in part, to your genes. Indigenous communities in the high Andes valleys in Bolivia and Peru are thought to produce more haemoglobin in their blood, while the Tibetans and Nepalese living at high altitudes in the Himalayas seem to breathe faster. Their accelerated breathing through widened arteries and capillaries enables a higher rate of blood flow. In both cases, the amount of oxygen carried in the blood is increased, with those whose ancestors have lived in these high areas for thousands of years having the best results. There is one particular gene – PDP2 – that assists in the conversion of food into fuel in the body and helps acclimatization to low oxygen pressure. I wonder if we have low levels of this gene, or if, perhaps, we have lived too long away from the rock that brought our family together, the mountain-building 300 million years ago, when rock moved over rock in the Bridford Thrust.

  ‘TrilllalalickwrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrTrilllillaliiiiirrwrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrwurrwurrtrickalickalick!’ spills the blackbird, in through the open window, into the edge we wait on. Sometimes the edge is made of root, sometimes thread, sometimes elastic. Today it is rock. Birdsong bounces off the sides of our bodies which are dense with time. I feel my lungs expand. During acclimatization, the lungs grow in order to ease the osmosis of oxygen and carbon dioxide, though the ability of the body to function is rarely the same as it was at a lower altitude.

  Whether I am here, in this room, out in the fields, or far off in a distant city, I remain at the uttermost. I acclimatize, but I am not the same as before. I breathe in the song as deeply and as long as it lasts. It is a different kind of air. The blackbird changes the colour of its tone, its timbre, as it lilts along capillaries. The bird brings the fields in from the earth and lays them out in the air; chlorophyll bouncing, licking, trilling, trickling. By breathing the fields, I carry them with me. By carrying the fields, I do not ever really leave.

  44

  Ȳþ-wōrigende

  After a long time adrift, it feels good to take the handle of a bucket, to lift a fork, to have both hands grasped on something solid. Smoothing away the topsoil, I upend a worm: flat and light amid the orange storm of soil. I watch the compartments of its body separate and join again, in a motion I recognize. I have been rootless and rooted, measureless and minuscule, flowerless and fully bloomed. I have known what it is to shoot down, low and far, and yet still to be unsteady. I have felt connected, grafted at the nodes, yet loose as a net; all holes; outstretched. I have felt altogether limbless. The earth crumbles in my fingers, breaking off like chocolate. I draw deep inhales, as gnats circle, dandelion fluff flocks, and finally I reach rock.

  Scooping the beans out of their compost without damaging the roots, lifting them briefly in air before placing them gently down below ground is my favourite part. This lifting and lowering, lifting and lowering, though it is in the thick of the earth, reminds me of the sea. It is familiar, this ebb and flow, a 400-million-year echo of a time this earth still carries in its rock. A time when this field was a sea, and we had yet to come. When the field was a desert, and we had yet to come. When the field was the bottom of a lake, and we were no one.

  And in the sound of this buried sea is the swish of a forgotten speech. The Old English word for ‘tilling’, yrþ, so close still to our word for ‘earth’. Lose a letter, shift the stress, and the word becomes a wave: ȳþ. One letter, then, was all that split the elements, as if they knew more keenly the proximity of land and water, sailing and sinking.1

  We had spoken, the two of us, of these lost words. Those times when we had walked together, passing places my father had wondered about, teasing the past out from their names. As I had studied this older language, I could sometimes help. These were rare moments when one as small and inconspicuous as a grain of earth could help one as wide and knowing as a ranging sea. So that as we had walked the lanes, the names had drawn us together; like a letter falling between sea and soil, the space
had collapsed between us; we had joined.

  But when you have once been sea, it is difficult to be confined, to no longer roam freely over earth. And when you have once been earth, it is shocking to beat against the waves, to have no place to cast your root, to crave a landing. From the worm’s path, I lift the foaming loam asunder and hear the word for wandering on the waves: ȳþ-wōrigende. And I light upon a poem I once learned, The Wanderer, in Old English verse. Though it has been twenty years since the air brushed along my lungs in the song of this ancient tongue, I feel it now against my teeth, I lift my lips apart, I speak: ‘Þēah þe hē mōdcearig’: ‘Though he, sad at heart’. I upturn another worm, unhappy at being disturbed. ‘Geond lagulāde longe sceolde / hrēran mid hondum hrimcaelde sǣ’: ‘Has had to stir for a long time the icy water by hand, moving along the waterways.’ The worm writhes uncontrollably.

  I land upon a strip of wood in various stages of decomposition. Like driftwood it flows through the soil, difficult at first to catch, but coming, after it is pressed, to rest. The ragged edges where the soil has bitten it, the white trail of fungi, the yellow fibre through the tawny dust, seem to speak to me. This wood is coming apart. This wood is on its way to being something else. I pick it up and place it in my pocket.

  It takes an hour to plant the beans. All the while I think of what else I have planted with my father. The sycamore that marked an early birthday, when the tree had not been much taller than myself. Now it towers so high, I can barely find the top. The time, when I was even smaller than that, that I had wanted to help dig with the fork and he had said, ‘Don’t put it through your foot,’ and I had laughed at the thought and put it through my foot, which bears the scar today. The time I had made some grave error in the locking of the shed, causing him to rage, ‘Just when you seem to have grown up, you do something like this’. Or the more drawn-out times, when I had tinkered in the weeds, read or written, while he dug: deep, dark thuds into another realm.