Mslexia

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THEY never found the Captain’s body, not one scrap of it, not an ear or a kneecap or a little toe, nor his watch or the bullet-buckled farthing that he turned in his pocket or flipped upwards, spinning in the sky. The Captain had evaporated, he had dissolved into the cordite air, he had been enveloped by the slick of mud, taken away by the green-eyed night-time creatures, dragged back to their lairs on the no-man’s-land.

When she was handed the telegram Lilly Pierson wept, through her tears she made pictures and she saw her husband as small and as stiff as a lead soldier, lying on a molehill of bloody soil. The battlefield remained with her all year, changing colour in February when she added a frost that covered the ground like granite dust and it was only when the peace crowds ebbed past her window that Lilly Pierson knew she must bury the Captain.

She selected a patch of earth under a chestnut tree and she dug his grave in slow imagined shovelfuls. She constructed a wooden coffin of honest oak, placed her husband inside, laid the coffin in the ground and Lilly Pierson pushed the Captain down as far as he would go. She saw the strata of the earth like a diagram, as one might see it in a text book: top soil, sub soil, coffin, right down to the core of the world, and she saw the Captain’s place in the order of things. But the problem for Lilly Pierson was that he kept popping back up: at night she would revisit the grave and she could hear him whispering and she could see his shattered bones sticking up through the grass, sometimes they were naked and sometimes they were half clothed in blood red khaki ribbons.

She gave up the flat, sold his treasures: his library of first editions, his greying glass, the skin-thin porcelain tea sets and the moonlight silver. She sold the oils and prints and watercolours and she bought manuals on growing root crops and winter greens. Lilly Pierson had chosen something real, a house with a garden in a village of browning foxglove spires. No more pictures, she wanted to grow things, she wanted to make things live, she said.

Her cottage was a chain of three low rooms, stony-floored, as dark as caves. Everything dipped, sloped, curved: the beams and the yellow walls and the small chipped flags. There was a cold smell, acid and alive that hovered through the house.

On the mantelpiece in the middle room she placed the Captain’s pride, a pair of hard-paste porcelain figures in costumes trimmed with china ribbons; their faces glass-white, their fingers so fine that the light shone through.

‘Exquisite,’ she heard his voice whisper.

‘Exquisite,’ she echoed aloud.

She liked the bareness of the cottage, she liked it empty and uncovered, she liked seeing the floors and the walls and the joining places between the two, she liked moving around the spaces, touching the cracks in the plaster or the rough grain of the doors. But the thistle-patched, nettle-nested garden would be different she thought, the garden would be filled with rows of parsnips and carrots and leeks and cabbages, there would be strings of beans and peas, she would plant cherry trees by the hedge and in the mould-stained greenhouse she would grow tomatoes.

Lilly Pierson wore her husband’s shirts and breeches, pulled thick socks up to her knees and clad her feet in boots and she dug, and in the soil furrows she planted onion sets and turnip seed and seed potatoes. But at night she would find the Captain half submerged in the earth under the chestnut tree; and in the morning she would look at the garden and see immature potatoes or turnips lying on the soil pushed up or pulled up by something in the dark. She thought it was animals or children who destroyed the lines, or maybe she had done it, sleepwalking bare-footed, into the garden, hands grasping at the stalks and leaves.

When the summer came, when the crops had grown, she cooked them and ate them in the kitchen sitting at the skull-white table. Sometimes after supper, she would enter the second room and watch the figures dancing above the fireplace and she would listen to the Captain whispering, his faint voice reciting, relentlessly, restlessly an inventory of his long gone collection:

‘One decanter, one cut glass bowl, one silver chocolate pot, dent on lid, one pair of cast candlesticks.’

Or perhaps it was only the breeze in the ivy that she heard, or a cat moaning in the village or a sleepy blackbird in the hawthorn hedge.

In the second year Lilly added beetroot seed to the trenches in the garden, and parsnips and cabbages. She sowed them early after the frost days and waited for the green leaves to sprout. But when they grew, the beetroot was the colour of dried blood, the roots seeped red when she cut them; the parsnip tops that peeped through the soil were like discs of yellow cartilage. In the evenings when she dug she felt the earth pulling her down, it made her heavy, her boots were clotted with it, her pockets and the folds of her clothes filled with it. The creases on her fingers and on her hands, were packed with soil and sweat: she was covered in the earth, buried in it.

It was the old man who started the change, rock face pitted, skin lined like olive bark. He came one evening when the rain began to fall carrying in his knotted fingers a thin supple book with a paper cover entitled, A Short Treatise on the Southern Vegetable, a volume he had written himself and had published at his own cost 30 years before. He was a proselytiser and a pedagogue and he talked to Lilly of green and red sweet peppers and purple aubergines and yellow-streaked courgettes like the skin of lizards; he talked of garlic bulbs, pink or ivory and smelling as sharp as southern air. Then he brought her seeds and pamphlets and they looked inside the greenhouse and chose pots and special soil and they watched the seedlings grow.

He had travelled south, traced the coast to the seaside cities, walked round ports and up hills and through streets as narrow as knife cuts. It was here that he had tasted jewel dishes, and the flesh of bright-skinned fish and the tiny hedgehog urchins with their yellow yolks. He had returned each spring, studied, made notes and sometimes sketched the groves and the terraced orchards above the sea; and every summer he sat in his room with the pierced shutters closed against the light composing long-sentenced essays praising the restorative qualities of olive oil and the nutritional value of the aubergine.

Lilly was pleased with the peppers and the courgettes and the plum tomatoes and the foreign-named, white-veined leaves. They were gems after the pebble-dull roughness of the roots; they came from the air not from the soil like broken limbs. She dampened the earth every day and she ran her hand over the plants, tucking her finger into corkscrew curls, stroking the flatness of the leaves, watching the flowers open and the fruit buds grow: she no longer felt the soil on her skin, catching in the corners of her mouth or the edges of her eyes. But still the Captain hissed his list in the middle room and still the Captain rolled inside his grave.

When the ripening weather came she harvested the first courgettes and then the peppers and the aubergines, and she carried the vegetables in a basket to the old man’s house. He took them, smelt their freshness and in the empty basket he placed a bottle of purple wine, a glass phial of olive oil and two tiny jars, one containing fat olives and the other thin filleted anchovies.

She sat on the bench outside the cottage, in the sunlight she turned the pages of his book. Later as the finches came to feed on the seed heads around the borders of the garden, she went to the greenhouse and picked for herself three warm peppers: red, green, yellow, a handful of tomatoes, a bulb of garlic, two small courgettes and an aubergine. She took them to the kitchen, cut and salted the grey flesh, slit open a paper-skinned garlic clove, and squashed it against the chopping board with the back of her knife, she chopped tomatoes, sliced courgettes, skewered peppers onto long-handled knives, scorched them over the range, saw the skin blister and pull away. She opened the jars of olives and anchovies and criss-crossed them over peppers; she made a batter of eggs and flour and milk and dropped the drained aubergines into it and fried them until the dripping batter crisped.

She looked at the food she had cooked; she stood back and looked at the dim lit yellow kitchen and then she opened the back door and dragged the table over the flagstones, out into the garden. At first the food was angry, it nipped her tongue, she felt its bitterness sweep into the margins of her mouth and down her throat. Then it tasted like heat, like hot dry earth, clear and sharp, not soft and muddy and buried like the roots; there was something unrestrained and unpredictable about it, there were possibilities in the flavours, solutions, she thought. She sat in the late sun eating the food that tasted of heat and drinking the wine and looking at the poorly-printed images in the old man’s book – the ports, the hills – and she said aloud to the glass of wine, ‘That’s where I shall go,’ for she was tired of the mud.

When the owls began to cry on the roof above, she pulled the table back into the kitchen; she washed her face and neck and hands at the stone sink, and then she lit a candle and opened the door to the middle room, to the whispering room. But there was no mad incantation, no chanting voice listing the contents of the cabinets and cupboards. The middle room was silent, all she could hear was the faint howl of the owls and a pheasant calling beyond the hedge. She held the candle to the dancing figures and they too were silent, their glazed faces, their blank dotted eyes looking nowhere. She stood listening to the calm and then she entered the third room and lay down on the bed.

In the dark Lilly Pierson walked slowly into the old man’s drawing, she felt the black-lined leaves of the trees and bent down and brushed her fingers over the black-lined stones that lay on the hillside, and her touch coloured them. Under the trees the ground was shadow-blue and she started to dig down into the rock dust: when the grave was deep enough she placed the tired Captain inside and filled the hole with earth. She turned and looked from the quiet grave to the sea below the cliffs and then she walked back up the hill passing the courgettes and the pepper plants and the bamboo-staked tomatoes.

JULIET BATES lives in Paris and is a lecturer at the Ecole des Beaux Arts de Caen, Normandy. When she is not teaching, travelling by train or wandering aimlessly through the streets of Paris, she writes a little. Her short stories have been previously published in Ambit and Mslexia, and she is now trying to write a novel.

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