The Cottage

The Cottage - by Thomas Ollerhead

I caught up with her by the far gate, haw-frost glistening the
blackened elms, ryegrass stems rustling to her listless tread, and in
the corner of the next field, seeking the comfort of an overhanging
hazel, a small group of heifers nuzzled closely for warmth, their
vapour breath heavy on the still morning air. As we walked in silence
towards the stand of skeletal oaks, a solitary raven caught unawares,
flapped clumsily away from the high branches. She had been this way now
for nearly eleven weeks, seventy something days of self imposed
silence, a deliberate personal catharsis.

We walked to the end of the long meadow, the wooden gate, twisted and
neglected, decaying into the land itself. I held her arm as she
cautiously picked her way over its broken crossbeams, her eyes glazed,
fixed now on the derelict cottage. It was quiet as we approached, a
winter stillness, a chapel-like reverence, the blackened roof beam,
round edged and weathered to generations of neglect, held steady in her
watery gaze.

As on so many mornings I would stand a little behind her, away from her
silence and perhaps her pain, the small sprig of faded wild flowers,
hawkbit, marjoram and fleabane, their newspaper wrapping now long gone,
dry and scattered across the weed-strewn threshold. This particular
morning she took longer than usual, lost somewhere deep in her own
memories. Then walking slowly forward, hesitantly, as though crossing a
mental barrier, she reached out, frail hand steadying against the
blackened door frame, the crushing of underfoot glass the only sound in
that cloying silence. It was the first time she had entered the
cottage, instinctively turning, half-shuffling to the small room beside
the broken hearth. Standing in the doorway she looked at the fallen
table, then slowly, deliberately, turned her gaze up to the heavy roof
beam, its sombre silhouette stark against the light morning sky. I felt
a desperate need at that point to be with her, to reach out and hold
her, knowing instinctively however that it would be wrong, that she
needed this moment for herself. I waited over by the fence, sitting
splay legged on the broken style, the harsh call of a magpie somewhere
along the bare hedgerow, a small spider-web delicate silver in the
morning frost, slanting sunlight catching the tops of the far hills; my
cigarette smoke hanging, unsure, slowly rising into the still air, my
presence in this place little more company than a shadow.

We walked back towards the farmhouse, her step somehow now a little
more positive, a subtle change, she stopped walking and turning to me,
placed a firm hand on my arm, grey watery eyes, a hard outdoor face .
"He never told me, not once, but I know in his own way he loved me,"
held my gaze, defiantly, a slow nodding of my head, and that was it,
the moment was gone, the soft trickle of water in the ditch, the only
sound. The first time she had spoken his memory aloud since that
fragile mist-filled Autumn morning when the neighbour and his two boys
had unfastened the clumsy barbed wire from around his neck, supported
him, lowered him reverently from beneath the blackened roof beam.