McCann, Maria - As Meat Loves Salt

by Balefanio

  'Jacob, even I know that thyme grows in meadows. But we'll go in the wood,' he ducked away from me as I tried to kiss him properly, 'to hide this.' He pointed at the money chest he had brought from Cheapside. 'You have your key?'

  I nodded.

  'I'll bury it, and none know where it is, except ourselves.'

  'Not in common, then. Your best notion yet,' I said.

  'You'll come with me?' He winked, and methought at least there would be no Aunt or Becs.

  It was not bad. I took up a small spade; we went very deep into the trees and found a place where we were certain the bushes covered all, Ferris having walked right round it while I lay within and hav­ing glimpsed not so much as a shoe. From inside I could hear him moving about, even several yards off, so we stood little chance of be­ing surprised in there. Clutching his money box, he crawled under the foliage to me and, setting it down, pulled my hands under his clothes. It was my dream of months back, that he lay with me in a wood, then seemingly an impossible delight: that remembrance put me in excellent good humour. I indulged him, until he grew hot as an inexperienced boy; I let him bully me, and play the young prince. Later came the pleasure of paying him out in kind. All this time there was a constant chatter of birds above our heads, and the scent of crushed grass.

  We buried his treasure under the place where we had enjoyed one another, and came out from the wood bearing bundles of timber.

  The remainder of that day was passed in going over the strips, remov­ing stones and uprooting with mattocks any tough weed or bush that might hurt the plough. The oxen were set to eat all the scrub that they could, and were the only ones among us to enjoy a rest. When it grew dark, we took cheese, bread and beer under the stars. There was much laughter and some teasing; spirits were high. We all of us slept fully

  dressed in the tent, side by side, army fashion, and rose with aching limbs to more bread and beer.

  The second day we were to make ourselves huts. The turf should rightly have come off with turving-spades, but we were bound to act as quickly as we could, so the beasts were put back to work, breaking the sod while I walked beside Harry learning how the thing should be managed. I was determined to follow this plough and none other, let Ferris or Jonathan do what they would. At Beaurepair the turf had been burnt and scattered back on the soil with lime, to manure it, but we needed ours for shelters. As we went up and down between the lines Jonathan and Hepsibah had marked out, the women followed, gathering up the grass and stones in baskets. These they took to Botts, who made a pile of stones and stacked the turf clumsily on wooden frames cut by Harry. Every so often the smith took his axe and went to cut fresh poles, leaving me to guide the plough. On coming back he would roar with laughter.

  'Did you say you had worked the fields?' he demanded.

  'Not like this,' I answered, ashamed to see my wavering line after his clean furrow. Worse still was when he found the plough standing motionless, for the oxen felt my unpractised hand.

  Hathersage was digging a pit for a fire, constantly wiping his fore­head on the back of his hand; his fine brows were fixed in a frown, giving him the air of a good child set to an irksome task. His coat was already off and I saw that his shirt was soiled at the wrists, though elsewhere starched very clean. The earth lay in a neat pile beside the firepit; from time to time he patted it down with his spade. Ferris and Jeremiah were in the wood where Ferris was learning how to set snares, whither Elizabeth and her children were also gone to seek fruit and nut trees.

  The sun glared into my itching eyes. Jonathan went ahead of me, hacking at any shrubs which remained before the plough came up to them. The stiffest and thorniest scrub, which the beasts turned from, he laid aside to be used in lining Ferris's drainage sough.

  I could barely keep pace with him, and felt my humiliation. My hands and arms trembled; the plough stopped dead and Pharoah flicked his tail at the flies.

  'Poor beast, he's tired,' said Susannah.

  For a moment methought it was me she meant. Scrubbing my wet face against my sleeve, I saw the linen come away brown with soil and sweat; no breeze sweetened our labour. I watched Catherine fit a slice of turf into her basket, her bronze hair all dust. Both sisters were pink with sun and effort, Catherine's face sprinkled over with fine dark freckles, while her companion's showed paler, more patchy marks, like shreds of October leaves.

  'What's this yellowish stone called?' asked Susannah. Nobody knew. I wished I had one of the other men gathering turf, since I could hardly ask the women to take a turn with me on the plough, and I envied Ferris the cool darkness of the wood.

  Perhaps he would get us a rabbit or two. Despite the stale heat my mouth ran at the thought of flesh and I realised I was hollow with hunger. I felt faint directly, and stepping back from the plough, I said I must have some food and drink if I were to go on working.

  Catherine came with me into the tent and opened one of the cheeses she had brought, finding also a bit of bread. I saw the blackish print of her fingers on the fresh-cut cheese, and my own hand that received it was ingrained with the soil. We each looked down at the dirt, then at one another, seeing our new life take on flesh. Ugly flesh. I drank deep of some warm beer which I found in a big pottery jar, probably the property of Botts. All things in common.

  'Where is Christopher?' Catherine asked shyly.

  'Setting snares.'

  'Once Wisdom has the fire going we can cook.' She picked up the jar but had some trouble with the size and weight of it; I supported it for her so she could take a pull. From her gasping I should say she was drier than myself; I wondered how long would she have gone on with­out a word. She tapped the jar to tell me to stop, and the beer slopped down her face and neck, onto her bodice.

  'Sorry,’ I said.

  She rubbed at her wet face and the dirt peeled away in tiny black shreds. 'The cow calved yesterday. In a day or two we can fetch her.'

  'What, walk her from London? It is too soon, surely?'

  'Nay. She's in the next village! All that was arranged weeks ago.'

  She eyed me curiously, probably wondering why Ferris had not told me. I could have enlightened her: he knew that I would be bored. The spilt beer having left a white patch on her chin, she looked like a man who shaves off his beard in high summer. I felt no anger towards this innocent rival, perhaps because she was beaten beforehand, or because I had lived too long with Becs. It was soothing to see myself reflected in Catherine's eyes: Jacob, neither bad angel nor filthy darling, but a poor unlucky man who had bitten his own lip.

  When we returned to the field Harry was back, looking lazily down the sides of his nose as usual. The oxen laboured, stretching their necks to take the strain.

  'Would you like to do something else?' Harry asked me as we stumbled along by the side of the beasts. 'Carry stone? Susannah can help Ben with the poles.'

  'Let me help Ben,' put in Catherine. She walked over to him be­fore anyone else could offer, and knowing how he revolted her, I could not understand what she would be at, until I saw how she kept glanc­ing from the hut into the forest. If she could stomach that man for the sake of keeping an eye on her sweet Christopher, she was deeper in than I thought.

  'My sister-in-law is young,' said Susannah as we bent together over the baskets. 'She relishes frequent change of occupation.'

  I smiled and nodded. Black beads with legs twinkled over the torn soil; cut worms curled upwards as if imploring our mercy. I tried not to touch them. Crouching down was even hotter work, and the warm wet shirt on my back began to sicken me, so at last I took it off. I would now tan like a peasant, but there was no help for it. Susan­nah laboured on in her woollen gown. It was stained in great swathes beneath arms and breasts. Looking at her made me itch.

  'See here,' she exclaimed. In her hand I saw a slab of yellow stone about the size of a brick, but roughly triangular, and embedded in it a scallop, real as on a fishmonger's slab.

  'Look, everybody!'

  They were all glad to leav
e off for a moment. Susannah passed round the stone. 'What do you say to that?'

  'Elves,' offered Catherine.

  'Superstition,' Hathersage sharply corrected her. We passed the scallop about, pressing the stone. I ran my fingernail between the smooth ribs; Harry spat on the object and rubbed at it.

  'I have seen things like this before,' I said.

  'Have you indeed!' cried Harry. 'Just so?'

  'Like great flat snails. There were lots of them buried in the land at home; the farm men built them into the walls for luck. One was the size of a cartwheel.'

  'Lord have mercy!’ cried Hathersage.

  Botts put on a doubting face for superiority. 'And was that built into a wall?'

  'It was left in the church porch,’ I told him. 'There to this day.'

  He sniffed, annoying me, for every word was true.

  'I have seen such things too,' said Hepsibah. 'Sticking out of clay banks after a hard rain. When I was a girl the village children used to keep them.'

  'They are devilish things,' said Hathersage. 'Animals turned to stones - that's either some witchcraft, or a punishment from God. Do you think this might be from Sodom and Gomorrah?' He stared round anxiously.

  'How would it come here?’ gibed Botts.

  'Not Sodom, but the Flood,' I suggested. 'The waters covered the face of the earth, and this was left behind when they went down.'

  Hathersage's face cleared.

  'But why is it stone?' asked Catherine. 'Could we find stone dogs, or kine?'

  Botts wanted to know was it stone all through.

  'Break it and see,' suggested Harry.

  'No!’ cried Susannah. 'Don't spoil it!'

  'Put it back where it was,' said Hathersage. Susannah frowned, evidently considering the scallop as her own.

  'What do you think?' I asked Jonathan. He shrugged and said it might be some fluke or sport of nature; as a man's seed spilt on the ground grows into a mandrake, so this might be a sea creature spawned in stone. A scholar could perhaps tell us.

  In the end Susannah laid the scallop aside from the pile, to be put

  in a prominent place when we built our first true walls; she said it was too pretty to bury again. I saw Hathersage was unhappy at this, but he did not take it from her.

  I am black, but comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem.

  Thus Ferris's poor attempt to raise a smile. I was grown into that very Ethiope I once jested of when we spoke of mariners, and I was ragged to boot, ragged as Rupert Cane as he lay on the road with nothing worth taking but his hair. After a day or so, I laid by my heavy cloak for the winter. As I closed the trunk lid on the Cheapside citi­zen in his coffin, I recalled my mother's poor beaten pride when My Lady raised me from the furrow and got me the place at Beaurepair. A man's last state is often worse than his first. Printing, strolling about the city: all that brief glory had burnt itself out. The only riches I was like to see now were the stones glittering in the sun.

  Our latrines had been dug behind bushes for decency. I had made a shallow trench with the fresh earth piled up alongside. There was a shovel to hand so that folk could cover up their leavings, filling the trench as they went. The stench was not as bad as I had feared, for the colonists were both fewer and more cleanly in their ways than the New Model Army. Ferris was displeased, considering it a waste of both labour and manure, but I could sooner bear this than making the open furrow my privy, and I was not the only one.

  'Do I ask you to squat under another's nose?' Ferris cried in ex­asperation. ‘All you need do is go to the far end of the field, that is decent enough.'

  'I dig and plough at your command,’ I replied, 'but you will not tell me how to shit.'

  The colonists had been turning up the ground two weeks and a half, which came to roughly two acres; practised labourers would have made it more. We were laying down rye, turkey corn, dredge, and bullimong as well as some peas and beans, carrots, onion, leeks and turnip. The grain was mostly rye (for neither wheat nor barley would thrive in a newly cultivated field) and so the strips had to be harrowed before sowing. I was glad to see that Jeremiah had things in hand, and

  had soaked the grain, all except the rye, in cow dung and water well mixed. We all of us took turns with the wooden harrow, and as soon as each row was turned Ferris and Jeremiah got to work with the setting board.

  I watched Ferris kneel on this board, pouring seed down through the holes; he was so busy getting Mother Earth with child, Cath­erine might have thrown herself naked in the furrow and he would have rested his knees on her. As the plough followed the oxen, so the poor girl followed Ferris, making many small approaches to him, all of which were gently repulsed. He had been right in what he told me in London: Catherine, at least, could not see how it was between himself and me. Of Hathersage I was less sure. Botts, methought, noticed none but himself, and we had none of us much time for ob­servation. Even the children were given rattles and put to bird scaring, though being so young, they lacked skill. The sight of them among the furrows filled me with a pain which I kept to myself. Ferris would not understand. That wound had been inflicted long before I went to war, and the only man who had measured the depth of it was Izzy.

  For most things, it was Jeremiah who had the best notions. To keep off birds he twisted up black rags in the form of crows, laying pack-thread along the furrows. Having once spied ants within the tent, he made it his special care to search out the anthills and discov­ered many under bushes and trees. After sundown, which was in a manner of speaking the ants' curfew, he carried water to these nests, scalding the inhabitants, who would else have carried off our grain on their backs.

  Though I hardly liked to admit it, my friend's endurance surprised me. When he was not sowing his slight figure would be found, as often as not, down by the sough. This sough, a kind of covered drain­age pit, had long been a most precious project of his. He had always wanted to construct one, poring fascinated over diagrams during the winter months and comparing different designs. Now it was begun he preferred to carry out the work alone, at times asking Jeremiah or Jonathan for counsel but refusing all offers to join him in the digging of it. The thing itself was placed in one of the bottoms, where the grass

  was rankest and made a sucking sound if anyone walked across. Ferris had already cut drainage channels into it, to dry out the land nearby, but the special delight of the thing was in the construction of the sough itself, and that was but begun.

  'I'll hollow it out just after the fashion of the plan,' he explained to me one morning as we repaired a hut which had collapsed during the night. I passed him up a piece of turf and he went on, 'It has to be deeper, and then widened on all sides and the brush and branches put in.'

  'Will you want pulling out afterwards?' I asked.

  'Aye. Today I'll finish the pit — there'll be no getting out after that without help. Tomorrow I'll put the stuffing in it.'

  'That's a two-man job. You'd better catch it from below and I'll take the weight of easing it down.'

  He frowned. 'I'm strong enough to lower boughs.'

  'The top man has to pull the other up,' I reminded him.

  Ferris nodded stiffly. I had already noted that since we were come to the common, he envied me my strength as he had never done in Cheapside.

  'After eating, then?' I coaxed him. His face brightened, for early that morning, before starting on the repairs to the hut, we had gone round the snares and found three rabbits.

  Hathersage's firepit worked most excellently. He had banked up the earth in a ring round it, thus permitting air to get to the flames, yet not to blow them out. A trivet made by Harry expressly for this purpose swung over the pit and held Elizabeth's kitchen cauldron. Hathersage toiled back and forth with logs, all over smuts like a sweep's boy and with little Thomas Beste trying to swing from his shirt-tail. I wondered if, labouring thus, the young man thought back longingly to the boredom of Mister Chiggs's house. The infant lay snorting on the grass, punching at the sun.
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br />   Ferris smiled on Elizabeth as we approached. ‘And how do the rabbits swim?' he asked.

  'In their own gravy,' she replied. 'Jacob, you look to be dying of hunger. They are as good as ready, if you will call the rest.'

  I set off to round up the other labourers; Ferris stayed to peer into the cauldron and tease Hathersage about his sooty skin; the words

  black as Jacob drifted to me along with the gusts of steam. I quickened my steps.

  Hepsibah and the Domremys were in the tent, examining salt meat and going through the jars of beer to see how many had been broached.

  'The cheese goes nowhere, we should have brought more,' Cather­ine was saying sadly as I entered.

  "There is something better than cheese waiting for you,' I told her, smiling. Her fine skin turned from pink to dull red, and I per­ceived I had made an error. Backing out of the tent, I added, 'Eliza­beth expects you directly. Be so kind as to fetch the beer,' and fled to seek the men.

  Jeremiah and Jonathan were sorting the piles of stones into big and small. It was dreary work, and when invited to eat they left off without further ado. Jeremiah grinned at me and I noticed that the smile-wrinkles fanning out from his hot blue eyes went right back to his hair. What did he get from our experiment, I wondered: had he perhaps fled some ill-doing or debt? I had been slow to consider such things, except in the case of Botts. Now I realised that we did not know for sure why any man or woman had joined us. I could read nothing in Jeremiah's bright gaze.

  'Harry is cutting wood,' he offered. 'Shall I go for him?'

  'My sincere thanks - where is Ben?'

  The men looked at one another, then at me. 'He's not well,' said Jonathan finally. 'The sun's got to him. What he needs is rest.'

  I set off towards Botts's hut. The others remained where they were.

  'Jacob, don’t!’ called Jonathan suddenly. He came running after me. 'Let him be, eh? The more rabbit for us.'

  I looked on his earth-brown face, the face of one who will buy peace at any cost. 'I shall at least see,' I answered.

  But I had no need to see, for the stink of ale and vomit farted out from the hut even with the door closed. I spat. 'How long has he been like this?'