Spring after Winter

Photo by Joel Holland on Unsplash.

It was the spring after the winter after the crisis ended. Some of us were making an effort to put it behind us and were taking steps to return to lives free from that particular fear. We were carrying out the plans we had made during those long hibernations or we were picking up the pieces of what we thought we had left behind. There were others, like Jack, who could not let go of that which had gripped and imprisoned us. He rented a cottage and wrote me a letter. I arrived ten days later, steering my motorbike along a potholed driveway under a mountain which wore rain clouds like a hairpiece. An estate agent would have described the cottage as characterful, but it had a roof and most of the windows were intact. Jack was fitting a length of wood to a gap in the front door and carried on banging when I killed the engine. He wielded the hammer as though the door had offended him and I suppose it might have done. It might have let in cold air, a rat or a rabbit. A fox could have squeezed through the space and from the tone of Jack’s letter I could see how a visit from a curious vixen would not have been welcome.

He put down the hammer to inspect his handiwork. It looked snug to me, but he used a muddy boot to nudge the wood into place. When my presence registered – I dropped my bag, jingled my keys, coughed and cleared my throat – he seemed surprised. He opened and closed the door to test the hinges, and stepped inside. I followed, as I had always followed, wondering if I should have brought food. The door opened into a Spartan living area in which I could make out two battered armchairs facing an open fire where smoke wheezed from a pile of green logs. Jack muttered something about electricity and running water – no to the former, yes to the latter – and fumbled in the darkness until he struck a match and lit an oil lamp. The glow around his face made me think of one of Dickens’s ghosts, but this was pure Hardy, which was how my brother Jack would have wanted it. Quietly, but determinedly dramatic was how Mum had once excused his bizarre behaviour or a seven day sulk.

The kitchen was warm thanks to the wood-fired oven which Jack announced must be kept lit at all times. A large oblong table bestrode the room like a challenge to anyone or thing with designs on the space. I tried not to notice the half-skinned rabbit and concentrated on the history etched into the table by one or two centuries of knives and tools. Someone named Sam had registered his presence in 1914, his crude slices reminiscent of how Jack and I had used our penknives to lay claim to an ancient oak in the wood behind our childhood home. Was Sam too young to go to war, was he on his way, or was he Samantha? If he fought, had he returned or were his bones lying in a field in Belgium? Next to Sam, the table dipped where a cleaver or axe had cut through bone and muscle, over and over and over. I thought about chickens clucking outside, scratching around and bickering about this and that. I thought about one of them pinned to the table, neck outstretched, never having once imagined that this was how it would end. Jack didn’t offer me food that night and I didn’t ask for any.

My bedroom lived up to the rest of the cottage, but I would have slept on the floor after the journey. The mattress sagged like the dip in the table and my muscles convened in the hollow. I dreamt of poultry and hatchets until Jack woke me with a shove to the shoulders. He was wearing a thick woollen bobble hat, a black compression top and denims cut off higher than was decent. ‘Since when did you talk in your sleep? Come on lazybones,’ he said. ‘We’re going up the mountain.’

We ate toast and drank black tea in the garden behind the cottage, warmed by the rising sun. We sat on a pile of mossy railway sleepers dragged there by a previous occupant whose dreams had come to naught. Jack had built three raised beds, with more to come. In one of them, green shoots were showing willing; he said he had planted the other two, but all I could see was soil as black as the pits in hell. Their time would come, he promised, but I wasn’t sure I’d be around long enough to see. He handed me a billhook with a gleaming blade and varnished handle. He carried one of his own: an older version which other hands would have used to hack at the scrub long before water pipes were laid.

We worked our way to the bottom of the garden, passing through an orchard that Jack had plans to revive. We climbed through what might once have been a gap cut through a thick hedge and raised our chins as we took in the mountainside. I couldn’t make out any semblance of a route, but this was the kind of challenge that Jack would have loved when we were kids. He unclipped the billhook from his belt and stepped over some bracken. He held the blade in front of him and said ‘Onwards.’ I waved mine above my head and added ‘And upwards.’ That was the first time since my arrival that either of us had smiled.

We forged through thick grass and bramble, but avoided gorse whenever we could. There were paths trodden by sheep, as wide as the wheels on my bike, but they seemed to go sideways more often than up. Jack was following a straight line towards a tree or crag he had spotted at the top, unbothered by the thorns that slashed at his thighs and calf muscles. These muscles, I noted, were thick and taught. His shoulders had widened and so had his chest. His movements in the cottage had been stilted: he had shuffled, dragged his feet and kept his arms close to his sides as though constrained. In the open air, however, he moved with a freedom that spoke of months spent dreaming of liberation. I matched his steps as though I had also been released from captivity. As the incline increased, so did our pace. We said nothing other than ‘watch out for that’ or ‘be careful of this’, but our silence communicated solidarity. For my part, at least, the loneliness and isolation that had defined our lives was slipping away, plunging earthwards as we strove for the sky.

After scrambling up a steep stretch of heather, Jack found a flat rock and took a breather. He sank his blade into the earth and cupped his chin in his hands. I squatted on my haunches and held my billhook in front of me, turning the blade towards the sun. The sheen had gone, replaced by smudges and streaks of green, brown and black. A bloody smear at the top, where the edge was keenest, made me check my forearms and legs for scratches and cuts. Jack let out a sigh that came back on the breeze. ‘Berries,’ he said. ‘Rowan or holly.’ I thought it was too early, or late, for both, but perhaps Mother Nature had been as discombobulated as the rest of us. Jack put his hands onto his knees and scanned the land below. ‘Look,’ he said, pointing to a thin trail of smoke. ‘I put a stew in for later.’ I hadn’t checked the table, but I assumed he’d finished skinning the rabbit. He never liked stew when we were young.

The sun gave way to heavy and gloomy clouds as we neared the top. We were trudging now, eyes to the ground and taking care not to slip. My clothes were dripping and I felt a familiar mood closing in. The warm, moist air stuck in my lungs and I thought about the city and how for two years I would have rather been anywhere else. What had Jack been thinking, in his house in a different city? He had withdrawn, as we all had to some extent, but his hibernation had felt different. His messages were short and terse and never unprompted. I went eighteen months without seeing his face when I most needed him; but we all had to find a way through and as long as he was hanging on I had no right wishing he would be the older brother I had grown up with. ‘You can’t always follow him around,’ Mum had once said when he had gone off on his own. ‘You’ll have to stand on your own two feet at some point.’

There wasn’t much to see when we reached the summit. The view down the mountain was cut off by layers of cloud. I put my hands on my hips and let out a yell, but nothing came back. I opened and closed my mouth; it was parched. Jack tugged at my arm and led me towards a rocky crag. ‘Got something to show you,’ he said over his shoulder. We walked along the ridge and dropped into a hollow. He pointed to the ruins of a shepherd’s hut or bothy. The roof had been subject to crude but recent renovation. ‘Got myself a project,’ he grinned. ‘Come and see inside.’

He had dragged two camping chairs, a saucepan, a five litre water carrier and mugs and spoons up the mountain. He took a cigarette lighter from an old biscuit tin in a wooden crate next to a pit where he had built a fire. Fifteen minutes later we were drinking tea and drying our clothes. ‘Did you do this for me?’ I asked. He nodded. ‘Something to do,’ he said, rubbing at his thigh, and then ‘Shit.’ He reached into the rear pocket of his cut-offs and threw me the kind of Swiss army knife we had dreamed of. ‘Find the tweezers and get this out.’ He pointed at something halfway between his hip and knee. It looked like a mole or a smut, but Jack was grimacing.

You read about ticks and Lyme disease and that’s why, as we had, you tread carefully when you walk through gorse. You also wear long trousers and not cut-offs, but I understand why Jack had wanted to feel the elements on his skin: we were giddy with rediscovered freedoms while haunted by a vestigial fear of disease and death. I doubt we’ll ever be free from that. My fingers trembled as I eased the tweezers from a groove in the body of the knife, but how was I supposed to remove the tick? I remembered something about a match, but we only had the lighter and I couldn’t burn my brother’s flesh. Should I grab the tick by the head and pull like I was removing a plaster? I felt sweat under my arms and behind my knees as I leaned towards him. He grabbed my wrist as I pinched the tweezers. ‘Careful. Keep your hand steady. Grab it as close to the skin as you can and for Christ’s sake don’t rush or twist.’ His fingers circled my wrist as I pulled the tick out of the borehole in his thigh. ‘Give it here,’ he said, snatching the tweezers. He held the insect towards the light coming through the doorway. Its legs pulsed as if drunk. ‘You got it all. You got it all.’ Turning back to face the fire, he dropped the tick into the embers and watched it sizzle as he ran the back of his hand across his forehead. He spat onto his leg and rubbed his thumb over a bloody dot where the tick had entered.

We tumbled down the mountain, leaping into hollows smothered with bracken and heather and using boulders as launch pads. Jack stopped to check his legs and let me catch my breath every so often, and we fenced with our billhooks, hands on hips or behind our backs like musketeers. I went further, slashing the sign of the Z into an unfortunate hawthorn. ‘Zorro was here,’ I shouted. Jack shook his head and said something about leaving no trace, but his eyes told a different story. He looked as bright and as young as I was beginning to feel and starting afresh seemed neither impossible nor exhausting. When we arrived back at the cottage he set me to work chopping logs while he checked on the stew. I stuck my head under a rusty tap under the kitchen window and let the freezing water wash away the grime. Jack threw a towel from the window and called me in.

He listed the ingredients as we ate: ‘Onion, spuds, carrots, turnip, salt, pepper, some beans, a few herbs, the rabbit.’ He hummed his approval, mopped his gravy with a slab of bread and smacked his lips. ‘No booze in the house,’ he announced, but I hadn’t been thinking of it. I had half-hoped for a great unburdening; an explanation for the radio silence; some inquiries about how I had been getting on; but Jack seemed content to sit and think. We cleared the table and washed the dishes, stacking them on a shelf in a pantry overflowing with tinned vegetables, pasta, pulses and rice. He had lined up the labels like a supermarket display. We returned to the table and played cards until the light gave out. We lit candles and switched to draughts for half an hour, but we were too tired to concentrate. Jack fell asleep in front of the fire and I climbed the stairs in search of my bed.

We worked the garden each morning, building the rest of the raised beds and filling them with soil. Jack showed me a notebook with plans for growing, and we planted early lettuce, spinach, peas, rhubarb and beets from a box full of seed packets he had brought from his house in the city. Five days into my stay, a flatbed truck chugged up the drive with the makings of a polytunnel and various lengths of wood. We cleared and levelled a patch of land at the front of the house and erected the tunnel during a hailstorm. The following morning I was woken by the sound of a saw and hammer. I made my way into the kitchen and watched Jack from the window. He was building potting benches and a frame for I knew not what. A farmer brought hens and a cockerel in a shed on the back of a trailer. Chicken wire arrived and we covered the frame to make a run which we attached to the coop. After that, whenever we sat at the table I thought about what lay in store for some or all of the hens.

Towards the end of my second week at the cottage, Jack asked how much longer I was planning to stay. ‘I took a month,’ I said, ‘but I could maybe ask for bit more time. I’d have go find somewhere to charge my phone.’ He planted his spade in the ground and leaned on the handle. ‘I’m good,’ he said. ‘It’s all done.’

He sold his house and auctioned the contents. He sent me Mum’s albums and I spent a weekend reading the comments and jokes she had written underneath some of the photographs. I abandoned the plans I had made and I made some new ones. The time between our letters stretched from weeks to months until Jack’s stopped coming and I stopped writing. Last year I heard from someone who used to know him that he had rented more land and had opened a market garden where anyone who is struggling can come and pull weeds, plant seeds, sit in the sun and climb the mountain.