Folk Read online

  When she set off home she walked the long way round, taking the path near Gad’s house. By the glowing window she crouched and heard angry voices, a chair scraping stone. She peered inside and saw Gad and her husband, yelling at each other across the table. Gad said something she couldn’t hear, and then the shouts turned to laughter, somehow, until they were hooting and Gad’s arm was around her husband’s shoulder.

  ‘We’ve had not a harsh word,’ Clotha said to Redwing, when he embraced her at the door.

  ‘Why would I be anything but kind to you?’ he asked.

  ‘Kindness has many forms,’ she said, but he squeezed her tighter, and longer, until she did not have the breath to say more.

  The thaw came early, in February. Clotha’s fingers fiddled. Her feet tapped. She itched to start digging, turning the earth, making good for new growth.

  ‘But my love, we’ve only a month,’ said Redwing when he found her pulling garden tools from the lean-to. ‘Come back in the warm.’

  February was the shortest month, at least. She began cooking stews for Redwing that took hour upon hour of stirring. She stripped the bed and boiled up the sheets until the windows dripped, then hung them out in the rain.

  Each morning while Redwing slept until noon, stretched out in the bed that now felt like his, Clotha tiptoed about the garden, forking the earth half-heartedly. She left the door wide open to wash out the peppery fug that filled her nostrils. Then she sat at the table, drinking up her own stillness. She conjured Gad in the chair across from her, gnawing on lumps from a loaf, grouching about her husband.

  One morning, Redwing woke with her at dawn again. There was only a week of February left. His hair had grown so long it spread across the pillow in a fiery flood. His eyes were solemn.

  ‘Clotha,’ he said. ‘I’m so sorry I have to leave. But I’ve decided. I will come back next winter. I will steer my boat to you, my love, and we will have each other, in this blissful bed, for three months more.’

  Clotha stretched her lips into a smile.

  When he dozed again, she was out of the house in less than a breath, stomping through mud that splattered her legs, up the hill until she was standing outside Gad’s house. Nobody answered her knock, so she let herself in. She paced about on the cold stone floor, round and round the table, back and forth at the window, until finally she saw Gad’s face frowning in at her.

  ‘Had enough?’ she said, and dumped her basket on the table.

  ‘He’s leaving.’

  ‘Thank the stars,’ said Gad, as she pulled out her packages. She handed Clotha the loaf.

  ‘Can I stay, just until he’s gone?’ Clotha asked, when they’d eaten half the bread.

  ‘It’s my fault he’s there,’ said Gad, tearing another piece.

  ‘It’s even worse. He said he’ll come back. Next year.’

  Gad laughed until she was choking on crumbs. ‘You’re welcome in my house, always. You know that,’ she said. ‘But you should go to say goodbye, at least.’

  ‘To be sure that he’s really left?’

  ‘I would. Now eat up. You’re a will-o’-the-wisp.’

  On the last day of November, Clotha was already at her window when Gad knocked. Gad was waddling now, her belly so round and taut that when Clotha pressed her palm to it, she felt the baby kicking inside.

  ‘They’re saying there’s a man arrived, at the shore,’ Gad puffed. ‘I’m going to take a look.’

  ‘I’ll lock the door,’ said Clotha.

  ‘I would.’

  Clotha sat at her table, breathing the air that smelled only of her house, and the faint trace of bread Gad had left behind. While she waited, she planned carvings she might make this year, beasts of the sea and earth and air.

  After a while, there was a scratching at the door, not like the thundering knock Gad used. She slid under the table, where she could not be seen. The scratching stopped. She waited and waited. Then she heard footsteps, a woman’s voice and, answering, unmistakable, Redwing’s deep tones. There was a pause, before two sets of footsteps pattered away down the path.

  ‘He’s gone,’ Gad yelled through the window before she came inside, and lowered herself into a chair. She thumped a large cheese on to the table.

  ‘What was that?’ Clotha asked.

  ‘That was Iska, works at the dairy.’ Gad broke the cheese and shoved a huge piece into her mouth.

  ‘Go on,’ said Clotha.

  Gad chewed and chewed. ‘Iska didn’t get one glimpse of Redwing last year, and didn’t she let us know it, whinging on and on every time I went for milk. So, I told her this was her chance. We came past your house, and I stood there and watched her stride up to him on your doorstep, brazen. He kissed her hand when she held it out.’

  ‘As fine as ever?’

  ‘Oh yes. Iska thought so. The last I saw she was leading him back along the river path.’

  ‘Iska and Redwing,’ Clotha smiled. ‘What can I do to thank you?’

  Gad pushed the cheese towards her. ‘Have some,’ she said.

  Ice has cracked. Snow melt has slid from trees to swell the muddy earth. First shoots have risen, and beech sap has burst into shrill green leaves. The boy, Finch, picks his way through last year’s rusty bracken, making for the wood. He carries a fiddle, and the weight of a promise sworn: he is to practise all morning, far from the house, until the scrape of bow on string becomes a tune.

  In the wood, the melodies belong to birds. The boy listens to their leaping notes. About him, the waking trees stretch. Dark moss springs between their toes. He shins up on to the shoulders of an oak. He feels its limbs lift him as he hunts for early nests. Birds flit wild-eyed to where the new green shade is deepest, and the fiddle lies, forgotten, below.

  The boy’s pockets are plump, eggs nestled in dry leaves. He reaches a glade, where the ground is furred with yellow grass. A tree stands in the middle, broken-limbed, stunted, but lush with ivy. Two wrens dart from its shadows, the tick-tick-tick of their warning call filling the green air. They flee and leave the clearing in the silent stillness of a stopped clock.

  The boy creeps around the ivied trunk, ready to dig for hidden nests. Leaf skeletons lie like hardened snowflakes among the sleeping roots. He bends to pick one up and finds the root beneath is warm. It is a gnarled foot. He jerks his hand away and stumbles back, heart drumming. The tree is hollow, arched like a doorway on the sunlit side. There inside it, garlanded with leaves, stands an old man. His hair is ringlet moss, his skin the weathered grey of winter oak leaves. He holds out his arms. His upturned palms glisten. Droplets hang in his curling beard. His eyes are filled with cloud.

  The boy watches as a bee circles the man’s head and lands on his cheek. Another wriggles up his neck. Another fumbles at his wrist. As the bees rise and return, calling in their drowsy humming song, they bring others. The old man’s palms are soon dotted with their small brown bodies, ambling, busying. Slowly he turns his hands and cups them together, a bowl of thanks with bees inside.

  The old man begins to walk. The boy follows him from the glade and hops close by him through the wood. His feet are quick beside the man’s slow steps. The old man pauses when trees block his path before trailing round them, left, right, lifting his feet high over bramble and fallen branch. Where his soles have printed, woodlice scurry and earwigs waggle their heads into the air.

  The wood folds shut behind them. They pass through a gap in a crumbled wall and into the roofless remains of a cottage, burned down long ago. The boy has heard the tale of the witch who lived here once. His aunt, Gertie, loves to tell it hunched beside the fire. There’s no trace of fire here now. Sunlight warms the weathered stones where lichen blotches gold and blue. An upturned basket sits in the nook where once there was a hearth. The old man crouches, his cloudy eyes gazing up into the sky. When he opens his cupped hands, bees flow like treacle towards the hole at the basket’s edge. They pour inside and are gone. The man sits back on his haunches and licks one palm, then the other
. He wipes his knuckles over his cheeks and licks again.

  ‘Honey,’ the boy says.

  The old man nods. ‘Will be. But you’ve a long wait yet. Fetch me that bowl on the wall there.’ When the boy brings it, the man reaches out with fumbling fingers until he finds water, dips, washes.

  ‘Will you give me some?’

  ‘What do I get in return?’

  The boy fumbles the fiddle to his chin. ‘Play you a tune,’ he says, and plucks at the strings.

  ‘Not for me,’ the old man says. ‘The wood’s own music is kinder to my ears.’

  ‘An egg, then.’ The boy picks one from his pocket and rolls it in the old man’s palm.

  ‘Thrush,’ the old man says. ‘Stealing their treasures?’

  ‘You steal bees.’

  The old man laughs, a flutter deep in his throat. The curls of his beard twist. When he hands back the egg there is an ant running down his forearm, following the winding paths of ridged green veins. ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Finch.’

  ‘A fine name for an egg thief. You’ll have honey if you earn it, Finch. If you take the time.’

  The stopped clock of the glade is whirring now. The boy can hear it inside the basket of bees where he presses his ear.

  Wind scurries new petals across hillsides. Wood pigeons puff and court. Rabbits pause to warm in noonday sun, and the birds make a choir of the deep green wood. As sun and cloud sweep the sky, the boy learns to catch bees. He does not need to smear last year’s honey on his face and hands like the old man, for he can find the bees by sight, but he chooses to learn this way all the same. They stir rosemary and clover into old honey and set out for places by water, by blossom. The waterfall in the wood, the orchard by the river, they make their daylong home.

  The boy learns to sit, honey-coated, neither twitching nor scratching, until the music of the woods and fields fills his ears. Blackbird melodies slow and echo inside his throat. The hiss of insects, the twang and whisper of trees, the beat of rabbits’ feet, all play above the droning tune of the bees.

  As blossom blows and the hedgerows turn from hawthorn white to fuchsia red, he carries the baskets of bees up to the headland, following the old man through the gorse maze to where the yellow flowers run thickest amongst the thorns. He watches the bees at each new spot, the dip and dance of flower heads, the windblown flight to and from the baskets.

  ‘It’s a dance they do in there, too,’ the old man says. ‘No need for fiddle tunes. There’s sweeter music here than any scratched from a fiddle.’ The hands he lays on the hives are growing more bent, twisted as roots, the nails like trapped flints. Where the bees have stung him there are bumps like barley grains under his wrinkled skin. The old man never grumbles, though these bumps grow, hardening, yellowing.

  The boy learns to still his heart, with his ear against the basket weave, and hear in the bees’ song what they will do. The hives and their golden load, the bees that dance and sing, are precious treasures. He calms the bees with smoke pressed from puffballs, or trickled from kindling. He is proud and pleased to have felt no stings.

  The barley in the fields fattens and leans towards the moon. Mice scurry in its maze, their trails mapped in the starry sky by the sweep of owls. Beside the tumbledown cottage, petals drop from poppies on the witch’s grave.

  While the bees make frantic flights to summer’s last blooms, the old man’s eyes fill up with cloud as deep as a snowy sky. He speaks less and less, but sings back to the birds in the wood where he wanders, each step like shifting stones. His clothes are torn to leaf-shred by a season’s weathering, the skin beneath his shirt a landscape of wrinkled leather. When they sit together amongst the baskets, the boy watches the slow throb in those thick green veins that have webbed the old man’s arms and hands.

  ‘Patience,’ the old man says, as the boy listens to the whirring clocks of the hives, busier, faster. He feels the hum deep inside his ear, a sound like honey.

  Swallows gather and suddenly are gone. Crab apples bulge and drop in perfumed carpets. Leaves fly across the low-lit sky, gold and brown, and sloes make purplish mist of the blackthorn bushes. The old man, stiffened in the chill of autumn’s breath, talks of fire.

  ‘No more time,’ he says, amongst the baskets. ‘You’ve earned your honey.’ His voice creaks. He scratches at the barley grains beneath his skin, his mouth bent in a grimace.

  At dusk, inside the haggard ruin of the cottage, the boy sets a small blaze, making a ring of flame around a flat stone. He remembers the witch in Aunt Gertie’s story. When the fire is crackling, hot-bright, he does as the old man tells him and drops on dead leaves. Wind billows the smoke, and moths mingle with flying ash. The old man stands in the broken cottage doorway, a dark shape rooted in the smoke.

  ‘Take one, Finch,’ he says, a crooked finger pointing to the row of baskets by the wall. ‘Put it straight on the stone.’

  The boy shields his eyes against the fire’s sparks. ‘But the bees.’

  ‘Winter’s coming. They’ve done their work. Only way to get the honey.’

  The boy waits for the old man to laugh, but he is silent. Moths flood up around his head and flicker in the smoke.

  ‘I won’t burn them,’ the boy says. He hears the wheeze of the old man’s breath as he wades now towards the baskets, the effort of lifting each foot like pulling stones from turf. He picks up a basket and leans over the fire to drop it on the glowing stone. The boy trembles as he watches flames lick up around the weave. The willow becomes a web of glow. Bees rage from the hole in its side. They spin in the smoke, hurling themselves at the old man, dropping into the flames. Their sound is like a scream in the boy’s ears. The crackle of burning bodies makes his skin prick and he swipes at the smoke around his head, then feels the rich ache of a single sting on his neck.

  Around the remaining baskets bees hang in the air, drowsy with smoke. The boy bends over them, touching the weave, feeling for the hum. He will not let them burn. He turns and stands, ready to defend his treasure.

  The old man has scooped the combs from the fire stone and holds them out in his hands. Smoke ebbs and blooms in the wind through the broken cottage walls. The boy edges closer, his eyes on the strange pocked mounds of comb. His urge is to dash them to the ground, but they are too beautiful. He glances at the old man’s face. His eyes are shut. His hair and beard whorl in ringlets that reach into the smoke like grasping ivy. The last shreds of his ruined shirt have withered like dead leaves and his dark skin is deeply lined, shrunk hard in furrows over bone and sinew. The bees that clung to him as their basket burned are dropping away, and the boy can see the barley-grain bumps of old stings. He watches as they split and burst out bud and tendril, white stars of flowers on vines that twine across ribs, furl around arms. Petals drop. Seeds fly in the darkening smoke. The creeping coat of leaves entangles wrists and fingers. It twists up to knot with hair and beard. From the old man’s open mouth, more tendrils turn.

  The boy runs in a stumbling sprint through the wood and does not stop until he finds the glade. The only whirr is inside him, the thrum of his heart, the hum in his blood. He touches the sting on his neck and stares at the wood’s bare branches, his feet deep in the tangled roots of the hollow tree.

  Time slows with his pulse. A chill creeps from the wood’s shadows and into his bones. While it numbs him, the leaves of oak and beech sigh to the ground and curl. Bracken droops, and bramble sinks to earth. The boy wakes, shivering, and finds his way by grey moonlight between the trees. Ash has blown white across the grass before the cottage wall. Inside is moonlit stone and shadow.

  Ice has cracked. Snow melt has slid from trees to swell the muddy earth. The boy, Finch, hugs a rug around him on the hearth. All winter he has practised at his fiddle, and now the tunes come easily. He has visited his aunt Gertie and played them for her, by her own fire. Now he watches ash flakes fly through the flames and away up the chimney, the ghosts of a thousand bees.

  Frost shrinks awa
y and the scent of rotten leaves rises around the dripping thatch. The boy walks from the house amongst birds dipping for twigs and moss, their chirrups bright as the spring sunlight, and follows them to where they are busy building nests. The ivy has crept and covered the tumbled cottage stones by the wood, making glossy banks of leaves. Sun warms the boy’s skin. He scratches the bump like a barley grain that still itches on his neck, and ducks through the gap in the wall.

  A tree stands amidst the ivy, one branch outstretched, tender new growth fanning from its crown. It is both old and new, its riven bark breaking here and there to let out budding shoots, lush with sap. The boy turns about it once, and touches the branch, cool against his palm. One day, he knows, he’ll make his own fiddle, like the apprentices before him. He will claim this wood, cut it and bend it until it will play its own tune.

  Behind the tree, the old cottage hearth is grown over. It is too early for eggs, but he parts the leaves to look for where the nests are growing, little cups lined with feather. Behind the ivy he sees the baskets piled in the nook. He bends away the twines and pulls one out. Husks of bees drift in the bottom beneath the comb, still heavy with wax.

  The boy carries the basket into the wood, threading between cold trunks, lifting his feet high over bramble and mossy root. Birds chatter, flitting from branch to branch. The trees drip and creak.

  When he reaches the glade he stands before the hollow tree, its bent limbs spun with clematis and ivy. A blackbird startles and swoops away. The wood ticks, and trees turn. He breaks open the comb from inside the basket, digs out clots of last year’s honey and spreads them on his palm.

  It is warm in the tree’s hollow, where the wind cannot reach. The sunlight glows behind his eyelids. With one arm outstretched, his handful of honey a bowl of thanks, he waits to feel the drone of a bee crossing the glade. Ivy curls about his feet and catches at his skin. He scratches his neck where the bump still itches, until under his fingernail is a crescent of green sap. He feels the blackbird’s song in his throat, and breathes in the damp scent of waking trees.