Jaen Page 8

  'Now we shall show Ori Day what a feast means,' Baxter had said.

  He held back on the normal use of one of the barns and now planks of wood had been set up as tables to hold the food; large casks of best ale and cider were taken there and broached; extra benches had been knocked-up for the occasion and bales of hay brought in for people to rest upon, and everyone commented upon the vast number of pitch torches, bonfires outside, and horn-lamps, oil-dips and candles within. There was an abundance of light, even in the barn where it was thought to be a novelty, seeing as how nobody needed that much illumination to find their mouths for their victuals nor their feet for the dancing. But Baxter felt that the jokes of his neighbours about it being 'better'n "Day" light' were a satisfactory return on his outlay of expensive candles.

  From early evening neighbours and friends began to gather. The Hazelhurst women and scullery-girls went back and forth between house and barn with baked fowls, pies and tarts which were in addition to the cold meats, cheeses, fancy breads, pickles, spiced hams and belly-pork. All the women up to their armpits in food — excepting Vinnie, who had kept on her wedding finery and presided over Baxter Hazelhurst's wedding day as though it was her own, and Baxter, still in his wig, ordered, pointed and rubbed his hands.

  'We shall show Ori Day what a feast means.'

  And he did. As well as the usual fiddler for dancing, Original Day at his wedding feast had engaged a horn as well. At Baxter's celebration, there was added a tambourine and a drum.

  Ori, after the first, hungry wave of eating had passed, had called all those who liked to see the feathers fly, to follow him into the yard where a pit had been made, and three good rounds of cock-fighting were put on for their entertainment. Baxter provided two bull-baiting dogs and set them about each other, followed by a rope-pulling contest, a story-teller and a singer of tragic and merry songs.

  The bride loved every minute.

  'Nobody in the four parishes an't never had a wedding like ours, Peter, have they?'

  Peter agreed that his father had done pretty well by them.

  Nance Hazelhurst, knowing her own weakness when there was brandy and rum about, at first decided to stick to cider, what with Edwin getting hair on his chest lately and wanting watching when there was the heady mixture of strong brew and music and wenches. But she soon decided that if he was going to do it, her abstinence would not put the stuns on him, and so settled herself down to enjoyment.

  Another one to enjoy herself to the fullest extent, was Betrisse.

  When they had gone over to Cantle in the wagon for Dan's wedding, They had said she might have a new shift for the occasion, because the one she already had was getting felty from washing. When it was nearer the day and her mother still had not got the cloth wove nor had the packman come, Betrisse had asked when she would get it.

  'Saints child!' Martha had said. 'Cloth costs money.'

  Why did They always do that — say something would happen, then forget, and then get cross for carking them about it?

  Betrisse had contained her hot anger until it cooled down to pique, for she had learned that anger only got her a clout, then said sullenly to Martha, 'I wished you hadn't a said about it. Then I wouldn't never a thought about it.'

  But she had thought, and she was learning, watching what went on, and learning. She knew that her father had times when he would do things you wanted . . . help make a kite out of an old rag, or get it down when it got into a tree, or bend a bit of ashwood to make a bow, or listen properly to what she said. He was best at listening when he had been to the Bear with the uncles.

  'Pa, if I gets a full pile of stones out of the top field, will you see that ma gets a shift for me?'

  'My life child!' Luke had said. 'It'd take somebody bigger'n you to get a full pile, as well as see to your other labours.'

  'But if I do.'

  'Ah, so be it then.'

  'Shake hands on it?'

  Her father had roared with laughter. Betrisse was not quite sure why, They did that sometimes when she was being serious, especially Edwin. But Luke had shaken hands, and Betrisse had worked herself into the ground, and had felt pleased when she had shown him the stones.

  'Faith! That's not a bad bit of work for a little 'n,' he had said, and later when They did not know she was listening, he had said to Martha, 'She got some go in her, that one. Now you see to it she gets a shift, and get a bit of decent pretty stuff.'

  'And what about me?' her mother asked.

  'Come on then,' he had said. 'I a show you summit you can do to earn yourself a bit of ribbon.'

  Martha had said get thee behind me, tis Sunday, and had laughed. It was one of the Sundays when things were nice, when they did things like have a song after supper. Sometimes it was like that, and when it was, Betrisse wanted it never to stop. When her Pa and Ma laughed.

  And now she had the shift. Boughten yellow cotton with a darker yellow buttercups pattern, and a little cap that Annie had made her.

  Now, flouncing so that she could get full pleasure from the feel of the thin stuff against her bare legs, with the barn crowded, and full of talking, moving mouths and greasy chins, she went to her grandfather and told him, 'This'n is the best wedding I ever been to in my whole life.'

  It wasn't prattle, she was serious and she wanted him to know. Theirs was not a society in which 'please' or 'thank you' was ever used, except to their betters, so that Betrisse had no way of articulating what she wanted to say to Baxter. Nevertheless it would have been 'thank you' had she known. She guessed that he would likely laugh or say 'yes yer onner', which she never understood, but she didn't mind, she wanted to let somebody know how she felt, and it was Granfer who had laid on the feast.

  Mellow and unusually genial from rum and compliments, Baxter picked up his eldest grandchild and stood her on a high trestle in the midst of the food, beside the centrepiece, a decorated boar's head. 'There Missie, now you can tell the whole a Newton Clare.'

  Betrisse looked down at Baxter Hazelhurst, her mouth set in typical Betrisse mould — not exactly saying 'No I shan't.' It wasn't fair making her say it to everybody. What she said was to Granfer, not for neighbours to laugh at. She looked around, and suddenly her insides clenched with excitement — she was higher up than anybody in the room. People were looking at her, and she was higher than them all. She had attention.

  'Well, Missie? Go on, tell 'm.'

  Betrisse ignored him, absorbed in the scene from her new point of view. She could see right down the full length of the barn. There was Father and France and Dan standing together; there was Edwin, Peter, Granfer and they all looked at her with the nice smiles they always got when they was a bit boozy. She returned her gaze to her grandfather. Most children of rural labourers spoke with stumbling shyness, inarticulate from the many hours they spent alone from quite an early age, banging clappers at birds, weeding or picking flints from the earth.

  But Betrisse spoke up, fluently.

  'I been to Dick's wedding, and I been to Annie's wedding and I went to Dan's, and I went to Master Day's big feast, but this b'st the best 'n I ever been to.'

  Amused laughter and cheers came from Luke and her uncles, and Betrisse felt warm with pleasure. Baxter lifted her high once, then set her down. She wished for the wedding to go on for ever.

  It was a pity that Betrisse was not the male heir that Baxter had wanted from Luke's firstborn child, for he was so pleased at the way she came out with her praise, that he might at that moment have given her the Up Teg seal from his watch-chain. It was not a true seal, but a coin that Baxter's great-grandfather had dug from Up Teg soil. He fingered it, thinking of the tableau that might have been staged if she'd been a boy.

  Betrisse went to Annie who was seated on a hay bale with Jaen. Annie said, 'You'm a proper little poppy-show, young Bet,' and picked out a few almonds from the boar's head for her.

  'Is it always men who grow tall, Annie?'

  'They don't all grow like the men in this family,' Jaen
said.

  'But an't there any woman who's tall enough to look down?'

  Annie looked at Betrisse sideways, as Annie did when she wasn't going to answer.

  'I don't want to grow little like you an Ma and Auntie Liz. I wants to be like all The Boys and Granfer.'

  'You wants to eat your turnips up then.'

  Sometimes Annie could be like the rest of them, treating her like Kit and Laurie. And there in the middle of the happy feast, she remembered that Laurie was dead, and she got angry with him again.

  'What did Laurie die like that for?'

  The quick turn-abouts in her niece's thoughts was part of Annie's liking to have the child about her.

  'He got a fever, you know that.'

  'What did he get the fever for? I got a fever, and I never died.'

  'You was lucky then.'

  'I didn't want him to die. I liked him, and I was learning him to set a snare.'

  'You will have to learn Catherine.'

  'Kit might get a fever too. Fevers is no use. It's a waste of people. Laurie might as well a not come alive at all. I shouldn't a got to like him then. And he wouldn't a spoiled the wedding.' She left them, angrily.

  When the child had gone, Annie said to Jaen, 'There's times when I think I'm talking to an old granny she's got such a head on her.'

  'She minds me of Ju. Not in looks, but Ju always got angry about things like that. One time she jumped on a whole clump of gilly-flowers for fading and stopping their scent, then she went and propped them all up with sticks when she found out that they would flower again next year.'

  'There's times when I don't know what I should do without young Bet.'

  Jaen nodded. She knew what Annie meant.

  Although a thousand years and more ago, the cross had found its way into Newton Clare, aggressive, thrusting itself at the pagan deities who had lived with their people and made life bearable, the sword-shaped symbol had never destroyed them. It had merely pushed those gods into the stealth and hush, the familiar part of the minds of their faithful — people who lived close to the earth and the elements.

  On nights such as this, safe, welcome, and out of sight of churches built over their old shrines, beyond the grasp of hands with nail-wounds, out of hearing of such words as 'sin', they emerge.

  Germinal deities, soft and round goddesses; dark, square gods; antlers, maypoles; wreathed in vines they join their own kind. They breathe their spiced and mulled breath into the shades of their earthly representations, and the shades take on flesh and blood. For a few hours corn-queens and green-men reign over eating, singing, drinking, dancing, love, lust and blood-lust.

  In the barn, children, unused to such unlimited and rich food, curl up in corners and sleep. Babies reminded by thudding feet and rhythmic drumming of pre-natal heartbeat, are as limp and drowsy as when they had floated in their amniotic ocean. The corn-women and the green-men, faces flushed, full of laughter, are freed of ploughs, scythes and flails, of yokes, hoes and churns. Away from sun, frost, hail, gales, pestilence, fever, aching limbs and breaking backs, they awaken for a few hours.

  Men with rough and calloused hands grasp the hands and waists of neighbours' wives and daughters. Wives and daughters hitch up their skirts, throw off holiday neckerchiefs and loosen bodice laces.

  Dan and Luke were in the midst of everything; sleeves rolled up and shirts open to the waist, they shone with sweat and male pride. They made exaggerated dips and arm-links, twirling their partners and making play of their great height when going under the arches of paired arms.

  Several times, as Dan passed, he grinned at Jaen, beckoning with his head that she should come into the circle, but she indicated that the babe was still feeding.

  From where she sat, with Elizabeth, Martha and Annie, Jaen watched.

  'They'm two of a kind, our two,' Martha said.

  Jaen smiled in reply.

  'I should a said all Hazelhursts was of a kind,' said Elizabeth. 'Blimmin gert oxes!'

  Annie pursed her lips and raised her eyebrows. '"Kind" and "Hazelhurst" an't words that go together.'

  'Ah, but "oxes" goes all right.'

  'Shh,' said Martha, nodding towards Nance, who was sitting, using a platter as a tambourine, knocking it in time to the dance.

  'Ah, don't worry, she's well away. I never know how she can abide drinking spirits like that; it's as much as I can do to hold a spoon of brandy in a bad tooth,' said Elizabeth.

  'Bejowned to her,' Annie went on, 'there's times when I hardly care whether she hears or not. Sometimes I feel I shall call it in church — like they do at weddings — "If there be anybody who knows a reason why this man Hazelhurst shouldn't get wed, speak now or for ever hold your peace." "Yes, your Reverence, he an't kind, and that's a reason enough that he shouldn't be wed."'

  Martha's loud laugh was drowned by music and the thumping of boots. 'If we had to wait for kindness before we took an husband, we a be a long time single maids,' she said.

  Listening, Jaen could not believe that Annie meant that France wasn't kind. On the morning when she thought the baby was dead, and she started in labour, he was kinder than she believed any man had it in him to be. It was just talk.

  Often when the Hazelhurst wives were together, they began this odd sort of wrangling. Their deepest instincts were to side with one another, yet none of them had ever really been so outspoken as Annie had just been. Usually they sparred lightly, all of them being afraid of their mother-in-law. She could herself harangue and tell her Boys what she thought of them, but no one else dare do so.

  They all, from time to time, had wondered about Mrs Nance.

  There must have been a time when she still thought of herself as Nancy Douglas, glad to have the security that Baxter and Up Teg gave her, trying to be Mistress Hazelhurst, but a bit sad to see her natural family fading as surely as though bleached out with white-lead, as in their turn each of their own families had faded.

  The group of wives dispersed when Betrisse, who had had a sleep and was ready for more pleasure, claimed Annie's attention once more.

  The first time that Dan came to get Jaen into the dance circle, she had had the excuse that she was suckling Hanna. The second time he bent over her, took her empty breast in his large hot hand, and removed it from the sleeping child.

  Gentle.

  'Now 'tis my turn.' He spoke low and close to her ear as he had done the first time they met. He was breathless from dancing, heaving his broad chest, milk-white below the weather-line at his neck. His own warmth and dampness turned the soft wave of his hair into curls, his dark beard and eyebrows glistened and, like all The Boys, the only teeth that he had lost were from manly contests with fists. He is a picture of strength and virility.

  The look that he gives her, the odour of his body and the charm that he can summon up for a woman, is Jaen's aphrodisiac. Once in the circle she dances as she has not danced since May Days and Harvest Homes when she was a girl. But here she is not a girl. The Corn Queen dances to the Green Man.

  As, in their turn, they reach the head of the chain of dancers, he does not skip her cross-armed back to their place in the dance, but twirls her out through the door. Luke and Dick give shrill whistles as they have done when other couples have danced with abandon off out into the night. Some pairs, who are not normally bonded, married or otherwise orthodoxly coupled, go out together under eyes turned blind eyes for the night. They all accept that when the old deities come to join a feast and there is darkness on the land, the laws of the new God of the nails and the cross are not enforceable — natural desire is innocent, sexual pleasure is beyond guilt. The kindly gods are abroad.

  Half-way across the yard they stop, Jaen panting from the exercise and the unexpected spark that had lit her when he touched her so gently as he took the child from her. Warmth seems to flow from there, spreading outwards and downwards. The soreness from the child's hard gums on her still-soft skin becomes intense, but for now it does not plague her, rather it is the centre of
a return of other feelings.

  Dan tugs her arm. 'Let's go indoors.'

  A second of panic. 'No, let's not go in the house,' she says. 'It's fresh out here.'

  As they walk, his large hands enjoy her. They hear Vinnie's laugh.

  'She b'st in high spirits.'

  Words form in Jaen's mind, but she does not speak them.

  She laughs because she knows Peter, and Peter knows her. That's the difference. She's been living here since she was a girl. She knows Up Teg ways. It wasn't a stranger she wed today, she hasn't all of a sudden found herself married to somebody she don't even know. Perhaps I might laugh too if I wasn't so knotted up inside all the time, afraid of something I can't even put a name to.

  Instead of answering, she slips her hand through his arm.

  His hands feel rather than caress, but Jaen does not move away from his touch as she has done for months now. The man she gave herself to suddenly last year has come back.

  Either he is being gentle, or she has become so used to crushing and carelessness, that it feels gentle in comparison. She wants to tell him that he might not have to complain of her giving him as little joy as a 'blimmen pile of fleeces' if he would more often be gentle. Wants to tell him that she feels strange and alone being so suddenly away from home, in somebody else's house, an unfamiliar room, a bed that seems almost communal in its nearness to other beds; wants to ask him to be patient, and gentle, gentle, until she gets used to living with such a crowd of people, to the breathing of his brothers close by in the night, to the trying to please him, to please his mother and father, to please everybody.

  Wants to let him know that she is trying hard to like holding the baby, to like feeding it, trying hard to want it.

  But she does not tell him, knowing that when such words are out, the sound of them will act like rennet in milk, separating the unarticulated feeling from what comes out in words, so that the meaning is run off as whey leaving the words as something that they had not been until they were said aloud.

  The grass is long and beginning to turn from summer greenness. The Corn Queen who has been conjured to life for this wedding feast is persuasive. Jaen looks straight up, from beneath him. Dan's shoulder, the branches of a cherry tree, a few bright stars and the dark sky. She feels the glacier that has lately encased her emotions melting, breaking up. If he will just be gentle. Just be a little . . .