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56 Lewis 2I help her tighten herself every morning, tensing the hinge of each elbow, each knee. She’s all tendril, no sinew, apparently, inclined to wilt, unable to hold up her eyelids past dusk. Bees clot at her armpits, and the back of her neck. I swat them away, shake pollen grains from her sheets. She complains that everything I cook tastes like honey. I try feeding her spoonfuls of salt, give her garlic cloves whole. I arrange candles in a throng round her pillow; still, she tastes only sugar, and sleeps from sunset until dawn. Each morning, I scrape cold wax from the floor. We stretch, bend, flex; she gets limper as August shrinks to September, and the first autumn fire blurts in the hall. 3Autumn shakes into winter, and we all settle down to our snow-pace: slow hours under candle-light, patching and darning the woollens, salting and curing small game. I don’t see so much of the girl – her husband away, she keeps her door bolted, won’t meet my eye when we pass in the halls.
page 63
Lewis 57 But we’ve had her pegged, in the wash-rooms and kitchens, since the first snowdrop came shouldering up through the frost; since the daffodils, all statuesque and deep blonde, and the plum trees, scattering petals over the still-rigid ground. It gets no warmer, sunlight shallow and brief on the field. Her door bangs at midnight, and again before dawn; she sleeps later, talks faster, flagrant as the clematis limbering over her window. 4She said nothing when she brought me her laundry, the dress bloodied, stuck with wet feathers. In the heat and fat steam of the wash-house I powder the stains with salt-grains and soap-flakes, suds billowing pink at my knuckles. I imagine them both, hand-in-hand by the stream: a low sway of cloud, a lingering dew on the grass. She is jubilant, luminous as a pasture after strong rain. I said nothing when she brought me her laundry, her rose-hip lips twitching; I scrub through the thickening steam, see him lean down for a kiss, see her step aside as the blade shivers clean from the bushes, startling a red brace of wings from his chest.

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56 Lewis

2I help her tighten herself every morning, tensing the hinge of each elbow, each knee. She’s all tendril, no sinew, apparently, inclined to wilt, unable to hold up her eyelids past dusk.

Bees clot at her armpits, and the back of her neck. I swat them away, shake pollen grains from her sheets. She complains that everything I cook tastes like honey.

I try feeding her spoonfuls of salt, give her garlic cloves whole. I arrange candles in a throng round her pillow; still, she tastes only sugar, and sleeps from sunset until dawn. Each morning, I scrape cold wax from the floor.

We stretch, bend, flex; she gets limper as August shrinks to September, and the first autumn fire blurts in the hall.

3Autumn shakes into winter, and we all settle down to our snow-pace: slow hours under candle-light, patching and darning the woollens, salting and curing small game. I don’t see so much of the girl – her husband away, she keeps her door bolted, won’t meet my eye when we pass in the halls.

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