Vere’s billhook had not swung for a season, but the days grew short; the sky dimmer noon by noon, each morning a deeper shade of grey. Dewdrops clung to everything. Tree leaf, flower petal, shrub bed, and vegetable patch: all yielded in the waning days to a hand of withering flirtation and a mind that loves not unrest.
Autumn’s russet cloak had unfurled weeks prior, her songbirds silenced with the coming of Old Man Winter, her close-bosom friend. Gone were June’s blooms — the whites of hawthorn, the bunches of blackberries and elder suspended above bugleherb and the delicate pink of honeysuckle. The hedgerows bore Autumn’s fruits: sloes and brambles, haws, rowan, and juniper. They swayed in her dance with Death, their naked boughs revealing a carpet of mulch. A trail meandered through like a soiled highway, forking into burrows dirty and wet, some filled with the ends of worms.
Vere’s countrymen were well acquainted with the spectacle — the retreat of the auburn warmth, the scent of mould and the fading hues. All passed an eye over the small of Autumn’s back as she waltzed beyond the horizon. They shivered at the first breath of the Old Man, eager to lay down his head and rest for the long night. Still, weather patterns and reaping timetables were elementary compared to Vere’s affinity with the land. He, among his peers, knew billowing clouds, turning leaves, and their helical flutter. Vere was a hedgelayer, a child of Winter, a February baby. He held the cold in high regard.
He spent six days clearing out the hedgerow, a three-hundred-and-forty-three-fot-long mass with three aged trees along its route. Two oaks and a chestnut, their girths ranged between twenty-five and thirty feet. Each bore the marks of three or four cycles — cut, pleached, thicketed, trimmed; cut, pleached, thicketed, trimmed… For three or four quarter-centuries, and those some centuries ago, they had been confined to the bulk of the hedge before some old sod decided them worthy of growing tall and proud.
Like regal towers, their summer splendour betrayed the vision of strength. The sentinels were healthy, the conker stooped but by no means impotent. Yet the worth of any rampart hinges on the steadfastness of its walls. Vere mused that the hedgerow echoed a fabled wall in the northern reaches — a wall said to have crumbled as Winter laid down to rest on the work of giants, who’d come from far across the sea. The hedgerow was in its winter, no doubt. No one had laid it for twenty-five years or more, and reckless trimming had left it in decline. Gap-filled and hollow-bottomed, it was patched with deadwood and iron chains, all rotted and no good for barring cattle or man.
Six days he spent clearing out the hedgerow — carving away its flanks and removing the detritus. No bird or hare crossed his path as he stacked up the brush, mulch, hazel, bramble, and chains. The chestnut shuddered as the pile went up in smoke. Nevertheless, the hedge stood clear — a line of stems, cleaned and primed, each a terse picture of the sentinels in years gone by. Vere sliced each about three-fourths through, leaning them over without severing them from their roots, pleaching them between stakes driven into the ground at intervals.
On the seventh day, Vere rested. No longer a hedge in look or nature, it was a steadfast hurdle, impervious to cattle and man. Reduced to mere spirit, devoid of its fruits and thorns, he thought of the birds that might have been. No leafy thoroughfare would welcome the night-roaming badger. Yet, as the frozen lake rests in the lowest point between lofty peaks, so too does midwinter find its place at the seventh juncture between midsummers past and future; and, so would dawn return in the seventh double hour of the long night. The sixth day, one of great darkness and rest for the hedgerow, yielded to a seventh bathed in light. Like the generations of leaves, the lives of mortal men — Winter's breath would scatter their ashes across the earth, and, come spring, its living timbers would burst forth once again.
In the murmurs of that autumn, Vere caught wind of rumours — hedgerows torn and trampled, their remnants scattered. Uprooted, shattered to carve out vast fields of grain, or left forsaken until their sinewy stems matured into towering trees, their germen was fading into the annals of time. A row of ancient trees may enchant; it may console. Yet trees, much like men, bear the weight of brevity. Verily, Vere's sentinels would one day succumb to Winter’s advances — the oaks calcifying into brittle skeletons, the chestnut descending to merge with the very soil it had once safeguarded, following the fabled northern wall. Nevertheless, he held that rooted souls, initiates of the spirit, would endure long after him, transcending the mortal coil and sowing regeneration into the hedge's stems, cycle after cycle, until the lake in the valley froze over forever more, and the evening light faded over the Western horizon for the last and longest night.
Stunning ...