CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Before drinking wore down the edges of Jepson's mind, he was, without contest, the best companion one could have on a walk. The difficulty was in making sure the walk did not end at the Bell. On the occasions I could talk him into it, he would, rather than slink away after lunch, instead take me out 'hunting'. All we required for our hunt was an empty flour sack and his flask. I wasn't allowed out in the woods alone, and he wasn't supposed to be drunk, so we two criminals conspired together to satisfy our individual compulsions.
"Don't go running off again," he'd have me promise as we left the house.
"Don't sing or cry," I'd extract from him, in trade.
What bought us our freedom was the flour sack. Depending on the season, we'd come back with whatever the woods had on offer: wild garlic and watercress, gooseberries and sorrel, hazelnuts and mushrooms. We filled the bag right away, Jepson nudging things with his toe for me to dig out: "Not that one, little green one next over. Don't break it, now-"
I'd put half of what I dug up into my mouth first, spitting most that of that back out. But it was important that the sack end up reasonably full because on our return Agnes would take it, inspect the contents, and praise us, deceived.
If she'd had any idea how these walks devolved, however... Jepson, lying on his back in the field, hollering drunk, face shining wet, crooning in his hideous baritone, and me down in the creek, naked and lawless, catching fish in my hands, growling, eating everything I could grab, covered in mud and blood and slime- we would never be trusted again. So on the way back to the house we sobered ourselves, dusted the dirt off each other's shoulders, rehearsed our reentry to civilization. It worked. I remember the wink he'd give me as he slouched out the kitchen door towards his cottage, and I remember how peacefully I slept afterward, those nights.
And I remember everything else. Each plant he'd shown me, and what they do, and what parts not to take. So now as I'm walking down the boundary line of my land and it's just before dusk, I'm absentmindedly eating the new hawthorn off the hedge as I've done since I was young. And it's in the meditative act of this- the browsing, the instinctive movements of selection, of hand-to-mouth, of choosing one shade of green over another; the absorption of picking and eating, doing and not really thinking much of anything at all- that the memory of myself in the creek, wholly alive in my body, wholly sensate and perfectly happy, comes back to me in force.
There was really nothing wrong with it, I hear myself think, without knowing where this voice is coming from.
Even if you were a person and not what you are, there wouldn't be anything wrong with it.
There is everything wrong with it, I tell myself.
Not really.
As I am standing there chewing, lost in the argument, explaining to myself the necessity of my position, a scream rises out of the field on the other side. I kneel down to the break in the hedge to look.
The grass is whipping itself around and I watch as the little rabbit leaps up, hawk's claws stuck in its shoulders. I watch them both rolling in a flip of wings and pollen. Downy feathers float up. The hawk goes still, wings spread low and wide, standing atop the rabbit, crushing it, the rabbit motionless beneath it. A soft cry from the trees behind me: the second hawk, the mate.
Tell me where it's wrong; put your finger on the spot, I hear myself thinking, and now I know whose voice it is.
I shake my head and walk back towards the creek, being quiet so as to not startle the hawk, as to not break the rhythm of the world.
.
Of course, Jepson was poisoning himself. That was why he had to do it in secret, or with an accomplice like myself who also had a vice to hide. But what was my vice? I was just the age where I was beginning to understand which of my needs were wrong. Also I was learning that a line existed between playing outside and this, this experience that so absorbed me. If I wanted to join civilization- if I wanted human touch, human empathy- any emotion, actually, to be reflected back to me by my fellows beside ridicule, disgust, fear- there were ways I could not behave. Which meant I had to sever my personal relationship to nature. Rebuild it in the ways that are appropriate to a man.
As mentor I had Jepson himself, who managed the role correctly, who was not of the earth but worked alongside it. His relation with nature was one of utility; he saw land as land, a resource to be cared for, cultivated, thanked. The feral joy I carried in my heart, which came straight from the wild night wind, he found at the Bell instead, if at all.
As for myself, I've tried my best but the severing has proven impossible. For me 'nature' is not land. And certainly it is no resource. For me it is too big to name, necessary, indivisible from my sense of self. What does that make me?
This is the question that found me in the cave. All my life I have been told that the animal inside me is a monster. How ludicrous to realize that instead it might be- I could be- just an animal like any other. That it isn't life itself but social order that stands in jeopardy, were I to embody the thing that I am. The thought alone causes my heart to shake: if monsters are both less and more than men, what is an animal?
I'm walking toward the house. At the crest of the hill Harthome's solitary light is glowing white in the blue dusk. From this angle, in the dark, it might only be a lantern hung in a tree. And it occurs to me, suddenly and sharply, that I might also be looking at things from the wrong side.