More Than Human

when he turned from a jewel he treasured to a green shoot he treasured. He said nothing and concluded nothing; he just knew.

He went on with his work as before. He worked well; Prodd used to say that whatever anyone might think, that boy was a farmer before his accident. He said it not knowing that his own style of farming was as available to Lone as water from his pump. So was anything else Lone wanted to take.

So the day Prodd came down to the south meadow, where Lone was stepping and turning tirelessly, a very part of his whispering scythe, Lone knew what it was that he wanted to say. He caught Prodd’s gaze for half a breath in those disturbing eyes and knew as well that saying it would pain Prodd more than a little.

Understanding was hardly one of his troubles any more, but niceties of expression were. He stopped mowing and went to the forest margin near by and let the scythe-point drop into a rotten stump. It gave him time to rehearse his tongue, still thick and unwieldy after eight years here.

Prodd followed slowly. He was rehearsing too.

Suddenly, Lone found it. ‘Been thinking,’ he said.

Prodd waited, glad to wait. Lone said,’ I should go.’ That wasn’t quite it. ‘Move along,’ he said, watching. That was better.

‘Ah, Lone. Why?’

Lone looked at him. Because you want me to go.

‘Don’t you like it here?’ said Prodd, not wanting to say that at all.

‘Sure.’ From Prodd’s mind, he caught, Does he know? and his own answered, Of course I know! But Prodd couldn’t hear that. Lone said slowly, ‘Just time to be moving along.’

‘Well.’ Prodd kicked a stone. He turned to look at the house and that turned him away from Lone, and that made it easier. ‘When we came here, we built Jack’s, your room, the room you’re using. We call it Jack’s room. You know why, you know who Jack is?’

Yes, Lone thought. He said nothing.

‘Long as you’re… long as you want to leave anyway, it won’t make no difference to you. Jack’s our son.’ He squeezed his hands together. ‘I guess it sounds funny. Jack was the little guy we were so sure about, we built that room with seed money. Jack, he – ‘

He looked up at the house, at its stub of a built-on wing, and around at the rock-toothed forest rim. ‘- never got born,’ he finished.

‘Ah,’ said Lone. He’d picked that up from Prodd. It was useful.

‘He’s coming now, though,’ said Prodd in a rush. His face was alight. ‘We’re a bit old for it, but there’s a daddy or two quite a bit older, and mothers too.’ Again he looked up at the barn, the house. ‘Makes sense in a sort of way, you know, Lone. Now, if he’d been along when we planned it, the place would’ve been too small when he was growed enough to work it with me, and me with no place else to go. But now, why, I reckon when he’s growed we just naturally won’t be here any more, and he’ll take him a nice little wife and start out just about like we did. So you see it does make a kind of sense?’ He seemed to be pleading. Lone made no attempt to understand this.

‘Lone, listen to me, I don’t want you to feel we’re turning you out.’

‘Said I was going.’ Searching, he found something and amended,’ ‘Fore you told me.’ That, he thought, was very right.

‘Look, I got to say something,’ said Prodd. ‘I heard tell of folk who want kids and can’t have ‘em, sometimes they just give up trying and take in somebody else’s. And sometimes, with a kid in the house, they turn right round and have one of their own after all.’

‘Ah,’ said Lone.

‘So what I mean is, we taken you in, didn’t we, and now look.’

Lone did not know what to say. ‘Ah’ seemed wrong.

‘We got a lot to thank you for, is what I mean, so we don’t want you to feel we’re turning you out.’

‘I already said.’

‘Good then.’ Prodd smiled. He had a lot of wrinkles on his face, mostly from smiling.

‘Good,’ said Lone. ‘About Jack.’ He nodded vehemently. ‘Good.’ He picked up the scythe. When he reached his windrow, he looked after Prodd. Walks slower than he used to, he thought.

Lone’s next conscious thought was, Well, that’s finished.

What’s finished? he asked himself.

He looked around. ‘Mowing,’ he said. Only then he realized that he had been working for more than three hours since Prodd spoke to him, and it was as if some other person had done it. He himself had been – gone in some way.

Absently he took his whetstone and began to dress the scythe. It made a sound like a pot boiling over when he moved it slowly, and like a shrew dying when he moved it fast.

Where had he known this feeling of time passing, as it were, behind his back?

He moved the stone slowly. Cooking and warmth and work. A birthday cake. A clean bed. A sense of… ‘Membership’ was not a word he possessed but that was his thought.

No, obliterated time didn’t exist in those memories. He moved the stone faster.

Death-cries in the wood. Lonely hunter and its solitary prey. The sap falls and the bear sleeps and the birds fly south, all doing it together, not because they are all members of the same thing, but only because they are all solitary things hurt by the same thing.

That was where time had passed without his awareness of it. Almost always, before he came here. That was how he had lived.

Why should it come back to him. now, then?

He swept his gaze around the land, as Prodd had done, taking in the house and its imbalancing bulge, and the land, and the woods which held the farm like water in a basin. When I was alone, he thought, time passed me like that. Time passes like that now, so it must be that I am alone again.

And then he knew that he had been alone the whole time. Mrs Prodd hadn’t raised him up, not really. She had been raising up her Jack the whole time.

Once in the wood, in water and agony, he had been a part of something, and in wetness and pain it had been torn from him. And if, for eight years now, he had thought he had found something else to belong to, then for eight years he had been wrong.

Anger was foreign to him; he had only felt it once before. But now it came, a wash of it that made him swell, that drained and left him weak. And he himself was the object of it. For hadn’t he known? Hadn’t he taken a name for himself, knowing that the name was a crystallization of all he had ever been and done? All he had ever been and done was alone. Why should he have let himself feel any other way?

Wrong. Wrong as a squirrel with feathers, or a wolf with wooden teeth; not injustice, not unfairness – just a wrong-ness that, under the sky, could not exist… the idea that such as he could belong to anything.

Hear that, son? Hear that, man?

Hear that, Lone?

He picked up three long fresh stalks of timothy and braided them together. He upended the scythe and thrust the handle deep enough into the soft earth so it would stand upright. He tied the braided grass to one of the grips and slipped the whetstone into the loops so it would stay. Then he walked off into the woods.

It was too late even for the copse’s nocturnal habitants. It was cold at the hidden foot of the dwarf oak and as dark as the chambers of a dead man’s heart.

She sat on the bare earth. As time went on, she had slid down a little and her plaid skirt had moved up. Her legs were icy, especially when the night air moved on them. But she didn’t pull the skirt down because it didn’t matter. Her hand lay on one of the fuzzy buttons of her sweater because, two hours ago, she had been fingering it and wondering what it was like to be a bunny. Now she didn’t care whether or not the button was a bunny’s tail or where her hand happened to be.

She had learned all she could from being there. She had learned that if you leave your eyes open until you have to blink and you don’t blink, they start to hurt. Then if you leave them open even longer, they hurt worse and worse. And if you still leave them open, they suddenly stop hurting.

It was too dark there to know whether they could still see after that.