EXCERPT: The View From Foley Mountain
A Field of Tall Grass
Happy the woman who looks out on a field of tall grass at full blow. Such a field begins after a heavy rain on a steamy, hot day in May, with grass spears thrusting up two inches in a single day. In haste it grows on until, by June’s end, the grasses ripen and reach wading depth. To the tune of the slightest breeze they swish and sing.
At dawn, wakened early by birdsong, the woman stands on her porch watching wisps of mist fade from the field before the rising sun. A swallow, its wings warmed by the sun, skims the field seeking insects. “Lyrical, lyrical, lyrical,” calls a sparrow from the heart of the grass. Hanging from the grass, dew-limned spider webs shimmer in the day’s first wind. The woman turns back into the cool dimness of the house.
After breakfast, from her doorstep, the woman watches the two boys and their dog rolling and swimming in the field’s grassy waves. The three snap and snarl at each other like puppies in early summer delight, flinging themselves headlong into the billowing grass. In the stiffening wind the grass shakes its tassels of pollen over the three, touching their play with golden dust.
By the time the woman reappears at the back door with washbaskets, the sun has moved higher in the sky and the boys, having encountered a hidden patch of thistles, have given up their rolling for the gathering of thatch. She sees two walking sheaves of grass stagger through the field to the bare rock further down the field. Encouraged by the dog, they assemble the sheaves into a large mound, remotely suggestive of a grass hut.
“Killdeer, killdeer,” the crooked-winged killdeer skims the field, giving forth the lonesome freedom of his call at noon when the woman stands at the edge of the rushing grass to call the boys for lunch. How confidently the field birds navigate the sea of grass, the woman thinks to herself while she listens for the sounds of her boys. But now all the birds of the field fall quiet and the woman can hear only the song of the grass. A marsh hawk, wings poised over his grey back at a “V”, is hunting the swampy grass of the lower field, silently gliding close to the ground in his search for prey. She watches the hawk cruise in to land in an apple sapling. Here he hovers searching the now-silent field of grass, only to be driven off when the boys struggle noisily homewards across the whole breadth of the field. In their wake tunnels the panting dog, making huge bounds now and then to get his bearings in the deep grass.
In the late afternoon the woman brings a bowl of beans out to slice on the bench overlooking the field and follows with her eyes the paths the wind makes through the dancing grasses. Three beans evenly sliced, one glance outwards across the field to the sky’s edge and back, she allows herself. The grass shadows on the laneway are lengthening now.
When at last the evening light slants across the stilling grass, the woman makes one final, lingering trip to the field. This time she walks idly along the path that leads through the field to the orchard, heedless of the harshness of the grass that cuts at her bare legs. She is followed by her lean, black cat who bounds from stone pile to stone pile, now dabbling at hunting, now rushing a grasshopper, and, like the dog before her, leaping high to get a view over the grass. The woman sees, but does not point out to her cat, the dried ball of grasses of a mouse nest close to her feet, and moves on, admiring the rich variety of life the field of grass nurtures. As the woman walks over the field at evening, each blade catches the sun, leading her onward, seemingly forever, through the burnished, grassy sea.
The View From Foley Mountain
Excerpt: The Rocks Remain
