Something Short and Sweet

Cloudburst

He woke long before daylight, all hot, in fear of having overslept. The small bedroom was stifling, the candle warm to his touch before he put the match to it. ‘Hey,’ he said gently. ‘Missus. Nell. Missus, rousle up,’ and with a kind of dreamy start she woke, the sweat of sleep still on her.

‘Can’t you lay still?’ she said. ‘You bin rootlin’ about all night. Turn over and lay still.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Rousle up. It’s time we were out. We got that field to mow. That barley.’

Then slowly she realised it. Work, corn. The field. Harvest. Then she realised the heat too, felt it no longer as part of sleep, but as an oppression in reality. The air seemed to drip sweat on her. The candle was like a little furnace. She pushed it away with what was already a tired hand.

Simultaneously her husband got out of bed. He looked, in the candlelight, excessively dwarfed and thin, an old man of bronze bone. Dressed, with blue shirt, leather belt and corduroys, salt-haired, he stood tired, heavy with sleep, dumb. She shut her eyes.

When she opened them again he had gone. Struggling, she got out of bed also, pulled on her clothes clumsily, smoothed her hair. The heat was wet, thunderous. It dripped continually down on her. Then, as she went downstairs with the candle in her hands, it burned up into her face. She was about sixty, very thin, straight-bosomed, and faintly sun-burnt, a stalk of human grass. Downstairs, on the kitchen table, another candle was burning. She set her own beside it. In the better light she saw the time by the alarm on the shelf: four o’clock. Four o’clock, twelve o’clock, four o’clock, five o’clock, eight o’clock, ten o’clock, dark, moonlight. How long was the day to be? She was not thinking. Her mind went round with the clock, stupidly. Like that, not really awake, she poured out tea. Then she cut bread, buttered it, sat down at last. Eating and drinking, she looked out of the window. She saw, then, that there were changes in the sky, far distant appearances of creamy golden light, like the unearthly reflections of the candlelight.

‘It’s gittin’ light,’ the man said. ‘Look slippy.’

Still eating, he got up.

‘You all of itch?’ she said.

‘We gotta be all of itch,’ he said. ‘I don’t like it. It’s too hot by half. We get a storm on that barley we’re done.’

She said nothing. She knew it: useless to deny it. So she got up, still eating too, and began to prepare food for the day: bread, cold meat, cheese, tea in a can. When that was ready she was ready. She had not washed. She put the victual-bag on her shoulders, locked the house, and went out.

Outside it was almost daylight. The heat steamed. There was a great dew on the roadside grass, a heavy silvering that wetted her big lace-up boots to the sweat-browned tips of the uppers. She walked quickly. By the time she was well out on the road it was light enough to see the colours of the August flowers, red and purple of poppy and knapweed, and then, more distantly, the blue of her husband’s shirt as he opened the gate of the barley field.

Then, in the great stillness, long before she had reached the gate, she heard the sound of stone on scythe. It cut the drowsy air in steel discords. It was like the starting up of a rasping engine.

By the time it had ceased she was at the field gate. It was so light, now, that the barley, about five acres of it, was visible like a clean blanket of white, still, rippleless. It stood perfect, flanked by a long patch of scorched-up potatoes on the one side, by roots on the other. And somehow, so white and flawless, it also seemed vast. She could not help standing, for a moment, to stare at it.

As she stood there, two things happened. The man began to mow and, almost simultaneously, far away, across distant acres of cut and uncut corn, the sun came up. It was like the sudden opening of a brass eye above the lid of earth.

It was hot from that moment. She rolled up the sleeves of her blouse. The man mowed a swathe, the first trashy thistle-thick swathe on the edge of the cart track. She took straws from it, quickly and instinctively, combed them straight with her hands, held the ears bunched, tied the first bond, laid it on the earth at last. Barley bonds were awkward. The straw was short, needing to be locked. Wet with dew, it slipped in her hands. So early in the morning, sluggish, stiff, she could not catch the rhythm of the thing. The straws were like steel. She could not twist them. Her own hands were spiritless lumps of bone.

Then the first swathe was finished and another begun. She began to rake, foot under the gathering sheaf, rake light on the straw. Already the world was golden, great-shadowed. But with eyes on the barley and the earth, she hardly noticed it. She was watching how the sheaves would work out: how many to a swathe. At the end of the swathe she looked, but did not count. Some instinct told her that it was fair; that, later, it might be good. Secure in that, she began to go back, bonding the sheaves. For all her age and her sluggishness, she was quick, expert. She worked without premeditation, rapidly. Sheaves began to lie in rows, then in avenues. The stubble took on a new pattern, a great cross-knotting of sheaves, with the fringe of the untied swathe spread out at one end. All the time the man mowed with her own lack of premeditation, her own unconscious fluency. The scythe went sweetly through the barley with the sound of prolonged kissing, the stone swept the steel with ringing discords. They were the only sounds in an empty world.

Then, as the day crept up to seven, heat and silence were one, both intense. There was no breath of wind, only a vast sultriness of wet heat, ominous even so early with a gigantic promise of far thunder. The sun was brassy. The big-cracked earth came up at the touch of rake and feet in small puffs of greyish powder. There was a great sweetness of barley ears, of straw warmed in the sun.

Then, at eight, the man made a sign. His scythe was already on the ground and the woman, seeing it, put down her rake. He began to walk, a moment later, towards her. She got the victual bag as he approached; and in a moment, and afterwards for about five minutes, they ate and, between mouthfuls of bread and cold bacon, talked.

‘I ain’t on it,’ the man said. ‘I don’t like it. It seems all of a boil everywheres.’

‘You won’t stop it,’ she said, ‘if it does come.’

‘It’ll come all right. Th’ only thing is, we gotta git that barley down afore it does. That’s all.’

He was on his feet. She followed him, still eating. ‘If this ain’t the best bit o’ barley we ever had I ain’t sharp. We oughta git some pork offa this. This’ll make pigs.’

He was off across the stubble before she could think of anything to say. She swallowed her food, tied the victual bag, laid it under a sheaf, followed him.

And now it was hotter than ever. The dew was drying rapidly, the freshness evaporating. The sun stung her on neck and chest and eyes. She felt in it not only the heat of the moment but the promise of the blaze of noon and the bitter scorching of afternoon. The sky was deeply blue, far off, stainless. It was like some great blue burning glass; only, low down, on the horizon, was there any kind of blemish in it: a dark smokiness, tawnily hot, the promise of thunder.

As they worked on, all morning, up to noon, the promise swelled and sweltered into a threat. The heat never cleared. It dripped on them in invisible spots. The man took off his shirt. And the woman, sweat-blinded, would look up to see his back bathed in veins of molten gold.

At noon they ate again, squatting in the hedgeshadow. The day burned white, the barley a flat sheet of unquenchable white flame, the sheaves like smouldering torches, the beards like smoke. Even under the hedge there was a great sweating oppressiveness, without relief, the sun blinding beyond the black tip of shadow. They ate in silence, hardly speaking. They lay and rested with eyes shut. The heat rained on them through the hedge and the shadow. Sweat came out on them in great waves.

They were almost glad to get up and move again, to feel the slight wind made by their own movements, to feel exertion shake off its own sweat.

‘We gotta git on,’ the man would say. ‘I don’t like it at all. We gotta git on.’

They worked on mechanically. Heat and barley almost effaced them. They moved like two figures of desperate clockwork. They kept up a changeless rhythm, he mowing, she bonding, which gradually the afternoon forged into iron monotony. Once the woman, looking back, tried to count the rows of sheaves. Her mind fainted. She counted, lost count. The sheaves seemed to dance and quiver as the heat itself danced and quivered over the lip of earth and the hedge. Two, four, six, eight. Twice four are eight, twice eight are barley. All barley. Barley for pigs. Pigs, barley, pigs, barley. Winter, pigs, pork, money. Twice two are pig, twice pig are sixteen. Her mind evolved a series of crazy multiplications. Constant heat and barley and motion made her drunk. Knowing that the barley meant so much, she reached a point, in the middle afternoon, where it and herself and all the world seemed to mean nothing at all.

And about that time there was a shout:

‘Hey! You seen that?’

She lifted her eyes. The man was shouting, pointing. Far out, to the south, a vast cloud, tawny and blue, had sprung up out of nowhere.

‘It’s coming!’ he shouted.

‘Very like it’ll blow over,’ she called. ‘It looks a long way off.’

‘Not it! It’s coming. I know. I felt it all day.’

And she knew. Five minutes later, as she looked up again, the cloud had risen up like a tower. It seemed to stand almost over them, an immense dome of strange white and darkness, against a thunderous background of iron and smoke. It was coming. She saw, even as she stood and watched, a great change in the wind currents, a sudden ominous rolling forward of cloud.

‘Hey!’ She turned. The shout startled her. ‘Drop that. We’ll git set up. We’ll set up and be on the safe side.’

He came half running over the sheaves to her. He stopped only to pick up a sheaf in each arm. Dropping her rake, she picked up sheaves too. They met, humped the sheaves together, clawed up others, finished the first shock, went on.

‘If we git set up it won’t hurt so bad,’ he kept saying. ‘If we git set up—’

He did not finish. There was no need to finish. They had only one purpose: to set up, to make sure, to save. They lumped sheaves together clumsily, running to snatch them up. Not looking or caring, they made a line of shocks that was crazy.

Every now and then, looking up, they saw changes in the approach and form of cloud that were staggering. The sky was suddenly more than half cloud, a great hemisphere of shifting blue and smoke, of silent revolutions of thunderous wind. The sun was not quite hidden. The field was a strange world of stark corn-whiteness and emerald and tawny sunlight.

Then, abruptly, they became conscious that the sun was hidden. The world was instantly stranger, the colours more vivid, the air deathly. There was something like fear in the air, a shadowiness of terror. All the time they were running about the stubble, seizing white sheaves, like two ants hurrying their eggs to safety.

Suddenly the thunder came, the first split and rattle of it over the near fields. It seemed to shake them. The woman stood still. The man got angry:

‘Here, here, here! Claw ’em up. Claw ’em up. We got no time to stan’ an’ gape.’

‘That thunder frit me,’ she said.

Almost before she had spoken it cracked again, rolling above their heads almost before the lightning had died. She looked instinctively up. The sky was chaotic, awful. The clouds were like the black smoke of some colossal fire. She ran with sheaves in her hands, still half looking up. The barley was dazzling, beautifully white. Suddenly a great silken shuddering and rustling shook the standing beards. It went across the field in a great wave, died in a tremendous stillness. They themselves were the only moving things on earth.

Suddenly a spot of rain hit the woman’s hand like a warm bullet and the thunder cracked terrifically even as she lifted one hand to wipe the rain off the other. She stood stock still and a scorch of lightning split the sky before she could move again.

‘You run!’ the man shouted. ‘Git in shelter. Go on! Git in shelter.’

‘I’m all right. I—’

‘Run!’

She turned and she saw the rain coming. It was coming out of the south, across the already dark fields, like a running curtain. She heard the sound of it, a great rising hissing. In a second, even as she started to run, it was on her, a smashing deluge of white thunder rain that drowned and blinded her.

She ran crazily across the stubble for the hedge and lay, at last, under the big hawthorns. The world was flooded, the barley washed out. She called feebly across the stubble at the figure of the man still staggering about with his puny sheaves, but rain and thunder annihilated her words as they almost annihilated him.

He came at last, a figure of water, a man saved from drowning, his clothes tragically comic. He stood under the hedge and stared. The stubble was flooded, great corn-coloured pools widening and joining and churned up by wind and rain. The nearest growing barley, just visible, was flattened like a mat. The shocks were like roofs torn apart from an earthquake.

‘It’s a cloud bust, it’s a cloud bust,’ he kept saying. ‘I never see nothing like it. It’s a cloud bust. We’re done.’

Gradually, between themselves and the shocks, a pool widened into a small lake, with sprouts of stubble coming through it like reeds. They stood as though on an island, in desolation. It rained, all the time, with fury, the thunder turning and returning, the lightning scorching the stormdarkened air with savage prongs of gold. The sheaves became like skirted bodies, floating.

It was almost an hour before there was any brightening of sky, a full hour before there was any lessening of rain. But at last the man could walk out, boot-deep in water, and stand in the waste of flood and straw and look about him.

In a moment the woman slopped out too, and they stood still.

It was then that the man saw the victual-bag, shipwrecked as it were against the sheaf where the woman had left it, tea-can adrift, bread and meat spewed out and swollen with rain.

‘Whyn’t you look after things?’ he shouted. ‘Whyn’t you—’

His anger was impotent, useless. It was anger in reality not against her, but against the storm, the ruin. She picked up the victual-bag. Water flowed out of it as out of a net, all over her sodden skirt and legs. She shook it. It hung in her hands like lead.

‘That was a good bag! Whyn’t you— The ruin of the bag seemed to hurt him more than anything else. Then his anger squibbed and died, damped out. ‘Oh! I don’ know! What’s the good? What’s the use? Oh! I don’ know. Look at it. A good bag.’

She clung to the bag, as though in fact it had become precious. They stood and looked out on the waste of flooded water and drowned sheaves. They stood impotent. The man could think of nothing to do and nothing to say but, ‘It was a cloud bust. Didn’t I tell you? Didn’t I say so?’ which came finally to mean nothing too.

At last he waded and slopped across the stubble and found his scythe. He could not dry it. It dripped silver. The woman waited, clutching the useless bag in her hands.

Then, after another look at the field, they slushed out of the gate and down the road and away, clutching scythe and bag, like two figures setting out on a pilgrimage to nowhere at all.

Purchase’s Living Wonders

She was about eighteen when Alfred Purchase first brought his