The Devil's Larder

23

OUR NEIGHBOUR’S husband rented a strip of land and an angling hut by the river. He had no children or dog, but he had six fruit trees, some currant bushes and a plot of meadow, where he grew vegetables. I used to pass him on the way to school. In that uncertain light, he seemed the loneliest of working men, sometimes tackling the grey-brown soil with his trenching spade, sometimes sitting on the angling bench with a hand line or a short rod, sometimes struggling up the river bank with his two buckets to irrigate his vegetables, never idle, never anything but occupied, and frightening.

He’d still be on his land when I came home from school, limping on his gammy leg, and always wearing sky-blue jeans so that, even in the grimmer half-light of the afternoon, he could not disappear. I never saw him walking to or from his home. My sisters said he slept in the angling hut, washed in the river, lived on what he grew, wee’d on his lettuces, crapped on his greens and poisoned strangers with his crops. His wife, for reasons more weighty than her loathing of his muddy boots, had not allowed him in the house for months.

Sometimes, when he caught my eye, I’d have to wave in reply, I’d have to smile — embarrassed, I suppose — despite what my parents said about avoiding him and not accepting any fruit or vegetables. Embarrassment is worse than pain, for boys.

One afternoon when I’d had to wave at him in that last year before I went away, he pulled an apple off his tree and threw it at me, high, uphill, across the meadow fence. I caught it with one hand, the crispest catch, the smack of flesh on flesh, of skin on peel. Another time, when he was working near the road, he dropped some berries into my palm. At other times, it was a handful of his manac beans or ripe shrubnuts. And then, occasionally, he’d give me something to take home ‘for the table’, some radishes perhaps, or a lettuce head, or — once — a fine, fat perch he’d caught.

I never tasted anything, of course. I smiled, I waved, I shouted thanks. I took his berries and his beans, his vegetables, his fish, and dropped them from the railway bridge onto the line, a half-minute from our house, then wiped away the poison and the smell of them on snatches of wet grass. At home, I’d dream of him, bad dreams. A train was hurtling down the railway line. The blood and sap of lettuce, carrots, fish and fruit were splashed across its windscreen and its wheels.

Once, though, he caught me off guard. He must have known I’d rather die than not do what he asked. He pulled a baby carrot from the row, snapped off its plume, wiped (half) the earth off on his sky-blue trouser leg, and made me eat it there and then, while he was watching from the far side of the fence. ‘You have to eat it from the earth, at once,’ he said. ‘Or else the flavour flies away. Go on. This is the best.’ And he was right. I put his dirty carrot in my mouth. I chewed, expecting bitterness. But nothing could be more delicate and sweet than that frail root. It is a taste that’s stayed with me for thirty years. A carrot from the shop could not compete. It had to be the earth, I thought, that tasted good.

And so I took to finding new ways to and from the school, and I was thankful when, at the end of the year, I moved to the boarding college and never had to pass the meadow except in father’s car. I don’t believe I saw our neighbour’s husband for a year or two, and by then he had forgotten me — so I was not obliged to wave or smile again or throw his produce on to the railway line.

I grow carrots of my own these days. I draw them from the soil before they’re quite mature and eat them there and then, just like I once did at my neighbour’s husband’s fence, fresh-pulled and half disguised by earth. But there’s no special taste to mine. They seem shop bought and ordinary, according to my son. So now I wonder what his secret was. If it was not the flavour of the soil that made the difference, then perhaps it was the taste of fear and shame. I can’t deny that he had frightened me or that I’d cheated him. Even in the grimmer half-light of the afternoon, I cannot make our neighbour’s husband disappear.

But my son is young enough for simple explanations. I’ve told him how the man was calling from the far side of the fence, the stooping back, the snapping plume of leaves, and how the earth was (half) removed. It could have been his gammy trouser leg that made the carrots delicate and sweet, my son suggests (for loneliness is bound to have its taste). That one swift wipe across the sky-blue cloth, he says, had left its dressing on the root.