A Table of Green Fields (10 page)

on a limb. I don't think we
can
shed our togs by throwing them one at a time. We'd never get 'em out of the limbs. Come on up. I see another seat just there. I'll show you what we can do.

—
D'accord,
but what?

—Once we're bare-assed, we make a bundle, all knotted together, of both our togs, and that'll have the weight to be chucked clear, out, over, and down. I'll kiss you at the top, or as high as we can go. Tie your
maillot
around your neck. Pull off your shorts and underpants together.

—I'm getting dizzier.

—Quit looking down.

—My knees and elbows have turned to water.

—Come up here. I'll slide around to the other side.

—I think I can. You're naked.

—Nothing to it. Hug the trunk, and I'll get your things off for you. Bernard and Julie are probably feeling pretty good about now, wouldn't you say? They got a little wild yesterday with their hands when they'd had their tongues in each other's mouths, icky, for what seemed like an hour but was really, what, twenty minutes? I'll have to hold my clothes in my teeth till I get you buff. Have you got a good hold?

—I'll stare at your peter. Let me do the button and all you have to do is pull. What? Oh, lift my foot, got you.

Holding all their clothes in a wad against his chest, Marc

said:

—OK now, hold me around the waist, hugging me and the tree together, and I'll knot everything in my
maillot,
and pitch it down. There!

—Did it clear? I couldn't look.

—I can't see where it went. Sit down across the limbs you're standing on, or do you want to climb higher? I can. I've got a good hold on you. You can't fall.

—I'll go as high as you want. I feel weightless, you know, and strange.

—Lean around for a kiss.

—Open mouth, like Bernard and Julie?

They slid jutted tongues into mouths as wide as nestling birds, Marc's eyes crossed for comedy to help his blush. He kneaded Anne-Marie's shoulder blades. She held the back of his neck, for dear life and affection together. The kiss was experimental and brief.

—Hallo.

—Hallo!

—Two limbs higher, Marc said. We'll have a view to take your breath away.

—Your peter's up.

—It was your idea that we show all. Haven't you seen one before?

—Does it feel good? Yours is the first. You're as red as a tomato. I mean I've not seen one up before. Your balls are as pinky purple as a pomegranate.

—Two limbs higher, come on. By the good God, you can see the horizon all the way around up here.

—Can I get on the same limb with you? You can hold me around the waist.

—As long as we're trading secrets, we are, aren't we, I didn't know that girls had such a big notch.

—I know two girls my age who have hair already. I'm slow, I guess.

—Does Julie?

—No. Can I feel your peter? I mean, put my fingers around it.

—I guess so. I mean, sure, Anne-Marie.

—Marc.

—Pull its hood back, Anne-Marie.

—Le prepuce.
It slides easy. Does it hurt, pulled back, I mean?

—Does chocolate cake with Chantilly cream taste good? Hold tight for another kiss. Slide it up, and back.

—And only God seeing us.

—And some interested angels, I hope. Can I touch, too? I know there's a place. Anne-Marie.

—Marc, cher Marc. Here.

Bernard's voice, from below:

—Anne-Marie! Marc! We heard something drop, and we looked all around, our hearts stopped, till we found your duds in a bundle. You're up there? Where? Don't scare us like this! —At the very top! can't you see us?

—
Merde.
At the fucking
top
of which tree?

—The one you're under. Look up. We're Adam and Eve by way of dress.

—Anne-Marie! Julie called. Marc! You're shameless! A scandal! Who would have believed it?

—We're OK up here, Marc hollered down. Go on with your smooching. There are lots of pastilles left.

—Come down! It's dangerous to be that high.

—Go wiggle your toes.

—We may stay up here for an hour or so, Anne-Marie called down. If I lose my hold, I'll float around awhile before drifting to the ground.

—What if somebody comes?

—They won't look up. Can
you
see us?

—Barely.

—I can't, Julie said. Show me where.

—What are you doing?

—Guess.

They were in the tree half an hour. At one point Bernard climbed halfway up, and was shooed down. Marc first, Anne-Marie right above him, they climbed down, whistling in duet Colonel Bogey's March.

On the ground, Marc said:

—Step onto my back, and jump.

Which Anne-Marie did.

They stood grinning, arms around each other's waists. Julie pretended to be shocked, and hid her eyes. Bernard divided his inspection between the two, for information. They were speckled over with sprits of pine bark.

—Have a good snuggle? Marc asked. Where's our bundle?

Julie fetched it from the boxcar, and tossed it to Anne-Marie.

The next afternoon, the summer keeping its blue sky, after Julie had helped her mother shell peas and hang out a wash, after Anne-Marie and Marc had been into Apt with Marc's mother to price school clothes on sale, and after Bernard had bicycled to the parsonage to pick up and deliver his share of the parish magazine, a chore farmed out among his scout troop, they each went by a different and deceptive way to their boxcar in the pinewood.

Bernard, the first to arrive, had washed his wheat-blond hair, and studied himself in the mirror for longer than ever in his life, except to make monster faces. He chinned himself ten times on the boxcar door before he realized that he was making his armpits smelly, quit, sat and cupped his hand over his crotch, shuffled his sneakers in pine needles, untied them and promptly tied them again. A billow of white clouds was piling up over the lavender fields from the east. He turned quickly. Marc was behind him, through the other door.

—Boy! are you sneaky!

—Wanted to see if I could slip up on you. Where are we all?

—A matter of who gets away when.

Bernard slipped his hand down into his pants.

—Like that, huh?

—It's awful.

—Whatever you're scheming won't happen. It never does. Going up the tree just happened. I couldn't have planned it in a hundred years. I see Julie coming through the lavender.

Big smile, and a skip in her walk.

She sat beside Bernard, hugged him around the shoulders, and kissed him on the cheek.

A bird whistled a trill, was silent, and began again with dotted notes and sharp rests, like a dripping faucet, before another trill.

Dry rasp of crickets.

—I didn't, Bernard said, know where Honduras was in class. Put my underwear on inside out this morning.

—Are we different? Julie asked.

Bernard lay back, fainting, his arms as far back as he could reach, legs straight up, pigeon-toed, eyes wide open, dead. Julie traced a circle around his navel with a compass of finger and thumb.

—Where
is
Honduras? Marc asked, picking at his shoe laces.

Julie, watching a ride of midges and a turn of motes in the diagonal shaft of light between the doors of their boxcar while teasing the tongue of Bernard's belt from its buckle, said that Honduras, full of parrots and Mayan ruins in its jungles, was one of the jigsaw countries in
l'Amerique Centrale.

—Other people in other places, Marc said, are instructive to think about, as there are millions of them all doing something, the Chinese up to their knees in rice paddies reading Mao, Mongolians in ear-flaps riding yaks, and so on, with never a thought about us way on the other side of the lavender field, inside the pinewood, in the wilds of France, minding our own business. —Like, Bernard said from his collapse, fallen from the sky, saying poems. Everybody listen.

Sur le chemin de Saint-Germain 

J'ai rencontre trois petits lapins 

J'en mets un dans mon armoire 

Il me dit: il y fait trop noir 

J'en mets un dans mon pantalon 

Il me suce mon p'tit crayon 

J'en mets un dans ma culotte 

Il me ronge ma petite carotte

—That's vulgar, Marc said after a silence in which they could hear through the cricket racket somebody approaching. 

Anne-Marie.

—I saw a lizard on the Roman wall, she said. He let me look at him for two seconds. And there's a stand of blue chicory just before you get to the old pear tree, as pretty as Monet. What was Bernard's poem about, sucking pastilles a
deux?

—Nothing so refined, but sort
of,
Julie said.

Bernard fished around in his pockets. Pastilles. Anne-Marie flopped down beside Marc. Grinning stare, eyes laughing.

—Progress, Bernard said, is what we made yesterday. Never look back.

—Zipper's stuck, said Julie, tugging.

Bernard propped on his elbows, watching.

—Pull up again, and then down. Not that I believe this.

—I had this feeling that the lizard had been there a thousand years, since Apta Julia of the Romans. Their bridge is still here, and their walls. French is just old, old Latin, and what if some of their gods that they brought with them are still around? Between the lavender fields and the hills they'd be, left behind. 

—Anne-Marie's gaga, Bernard said, and whimpered. The pastilles are black currant. Pinch one out. Are Anne-Marie and Marc going up their pine?

—That was because Marc was bashful.

—Showing off, you mean.

—We're friends together, aren't we?

—Friends, said Marc.

—Friends, said Julie.

—Friends, said Anne-Marie.

—Friends, said Bernard.

Lavender is one of the verticillate plants whose flower consists of one leaf divided into two lips, the upper lip, standing upright, is roundish, and, for the most part, bifid; but the under lip is cut into three segments which are almost equal: these flowers are disposed in whorls, and are collected into a slender spike upon the top of the stalks. The whole lavender plant has a highly aromatic smell and taste, and is famous as a cephalic, nervous, and uterine medicine.

Theophrastos in his
Plants
places lavender
(Lavandula spica)
or, as his Greek is,
iphyon,
among the summer garland flowers, along with rose campion, the
krinon
lily, and sweet marjoram from Phrygia. He also mentions it as a flower that must be grown from seed.

Vergil in the second eclogue of his
Bucolics
puts lavender along with hyacinth and marigold among the aromatic herbs, and in his
Georgies
with thyme as forage for bees and a flavor for honey. John Gerard wrote in
The Herball or General Historie of Plants
(1597) that lavander spike hath many stiffe branches of a wooddy substance, growing up in the manner of a shrub, set with many long hoarie leaves, by couples for the most part, of a strong smell, and yet pleasant enough to such as do love strong savors. The floures grow at the top of the branches, spike fashion, of a blew colour. The distilled water of Lavander smelt unto, or the temples and forehead bathed therewith, is a refreshing to them that have the catalepsy, a light migram, and to them that have the falling sicknesse, and that use to swoune much.

The floures of Lavander picked from the knaps, I meane the blew part and not the husk, mixed with cinnamon, nutmegs & cloves, made into a pouder, and given to drink in the distilled water thereof, doth helpe the panting and passion of the heart, prevaileth against giddinesse, turning, or swimming of the brain.

John Parkinson in his
A Garden of Pleasant Flowers
(1629) says that Lavender groweth in Spain aboundantly, in many places so wilde, and little regarded, that many have gone, and abiden there to distill the oyle thereof whereof great quantity now commeth over from thense unto us: and also in Lanquedocke, and Provence in France.

It was a breathless, gray day, leaving the golden woods of autumn quiet in their own tranquillity, stately and beautiful in their decaying, an afternoon soon after she had moved into a cottage at Grasmere to keep house for her brother William. She had brought a kitchen chair and a milking stool out into the fine weather, to write in her journal. There would be, in time, a garden where she sat, the public road to her left, the yellowing woods to her right. Tucking back a strayed strand of hair around her ear, opening her journal on her lap, she wrote:
It is a breathless, grey day, that leaves the golden woods of autumn quiet in their own tranquillity, stately and beautiful in their decaying.

Johnson preferred
gray;
William,
grey.

As in Horace, the words are in an order but are free to form associations of their own.
Leaves,
a verb, easily becomes a noun and takes up with
golden,
for golden leaves are what she's looking at. Leaves in the underworld are of gold, where the vegetation is all of metal, with mineral and crystal flowers. Autumn is Proserpina's return to the realm of artifice, where lifeless stone and iron pretend to be apple and pear. Autumnal decay is nature's grief over her departure.

Until she wrote
autumn,
her sentence was in English. Then Latin began to sift in:
quiet
and its cousin
tranquillity,
as if the older language had the power to cast a spell on us when we write.
Decaying,
she knew, meant falling, and thus she can entwine two roots and tie in the English
fall
under
autumn. 
She cannot keep
decay
from meaning
rot. Standing
lies encoded in
stately.
The trees stand on their estate. Caesar (she imagines 
him on a horse) brought
bella
into Gaul. When the Norse king William brought it to Hastings, it had become
beau,
and to its noun
beaute
we English added the
full.