“The Green Man” by Georgia Rhoades
The crows were calling as they gathered high in the oaks, planning a raid, and after all these years, knowing they did not call to her, she only watched. But clear in her memory was that first year of market, up in the dark after tying love posies and stacking soaps and bundles of herbs, readying for packing in the pushcart. That cart like a friend, earning its dear cost many times over. There would have been no other way to carry all she needed, and it had carried a body more than once, when she could not.
That first year, May, just at Beltane, a cold chill sunrise, she and the cart walked out together, over ruts blessedly crusted and hard, blackthorns budding, a hoody-crow sitting on her gate. They stalked the meadow, cried to her sometimes, insistently appearing to offer instruction, and she would answer as she could, speak a greeting and something about the day. But this one beauty, large and glossy, only looked. It was one of the times she felt seen and known, after years of making certain she was not. She had stopped, respectfully, spoken, and the crow had given her such a look. Today, there will be something; she felt the word in her chest, as clear as when greeted by the sunflowers who considered her one of their own. Then the setting up, displaying to advantage, relief at the herbs going so well and so early, and Margery, talking idly with her as they waited for custom, wrapped well still in their shawls, said “so he is back this year” with a lilt in her voice, indicating a figure across the way with a pack, “Seems early in the season for him to be back.”
“Who?” She had asked as the man had turned, paused, giving her a look so like the crow’s that she had quickly looked down to fuss with the lavender.
“The Green Man, we call him,” said Margery, and her smile could only be called lewd, and her sixty years. “He comes in spring and brings herbs and spices from places it’s warm and you’ve never heard of. He smells of them as well.”
All through that morning, she had seen him move through the market, in conversation with men and women and children, disappearing for a space only to return in another corner. The greens had gone fast, as she expected. As far as she could tell, no one else had any, though by next market they would be past common. Now they were as dear as love, and the cook from the Bishop’s house had taken them all. And then, when custom had thinned to only a servant sent to find at last minute what had been gone since noon, he stood before her. “I have not seen you before,” he said. “Would you be pleased to see my wares?” And he put before her a red cloth which he untied, to show madder root, which she knew to be dear. His hands were fine.
“From?” She asked, and he replied “Amsterdam,” so that she saw the canal with drifting yellow leaves and heard the dip of oars, she who had never left Eire.
“I am afraid it is too much for me,” She thought of red cloth, a truer red than she could ever get from lady’s bedstraw. In cold water it would come crimson. Even make the powder to lift a curse, it was said.
“For supper it would be yours,” he said and she noted his fine dark eyes. He put it on the table in front of her and smiled, and she saw everything.
“Bread and pottage?” She asked. “No better, but maybe an egg.” And he said “That would be welcome after weeks of hard cheese. And to have a bit of company.”
She still had that shawl, coloured by that gift of madder; she wore it to bed and in the mornings, ragged and safe. She had taken him home, his pack on the cart, which he trundled. By that time of the day it had been warm as it could become, though the sun was withdrawing. They walked the long way, and talk was as easy as if it were she and Margery on the way. But her heart was beating fast, and that had not happened in Margery’s company. They had seen the first star above the water.
Among her memories of sweet things—her sister, the song of peas as they whisper to the sticks they climb, the first greens each year, the gibbous moon—was the memory of that night and day and the two times after. He talked of places she could see in her head, of the Pictish princess who was drawn all over her body in coloured flowers instead of clothing in a picture he had seen, a great wonder, tattooed all over in magical beauty. He said she and others initiated warriors in love and then led them into battle wearing only their flowers and a sword. She told him of the waterhorse at Arbroath and how it would wait beneath the bridge under the round hill for those who were unwary, a story told her from her old mam and never to be lost.
The second morning, as they lay in arms warmed by the sun that fell across the pillows, they talked of where he was next going in his yearly circuit, what weather he might expect, and he told her about the desert he had seen and traveled in a year he had gone the furthest. She knew the ocean and sand but could scarcely separate the two. He said he would be back and she said, ‘I shall be here’. She had tucked rosemary and sage into his pack for protection. He had stopped at the turning, she at the gate, and smiled and gone.
That was an easy year. The summer made good harvest, rain when they needed it and hotter sunshine than the old could remember ever before, saying, “Roasting!” with great satisfaction. Fall came slowly, so that the colours on her walk from the town made her drunk and grateful to have so many to be filled by and to save for memory. Then the winter was mild, and only one death, Jonjo, and that had been expected for many months. He had little pain and left with a word for Maudie and a sweet smile that gave her something to hold until she would follow. All were sad in a gentle way, as after all death will come, and for Jonjo it was as easy as it might ever be. Maudie had pressed into her hand after a coin which she protested, but Maudie said it was from himself and what he wished, as there was a reason the pain had been what he could stand, and she had known to provide it to ease the way.
Then it was the spring, and it was true that at Beltane she had wondered if he would return. He did, standing still at the gate and then he had come straight to her and put a packet of ambergris before her with his smile. “For supper?” he had asked and she was too overcome with smiling herself to speak but had nodded, a woman of forty feeling seventeen, and all under Margery’s gaze.
That year he had stayed another day and night. He had been to an apothecaries’ garden in Chelsea in England that he said she would love, as if he expected them to journey there together, of tobacco, which he had tried, and how he had taken dill she had given him and been well next morning after a night of sneezing fits. When he had left, she had walked to the turning with him and given him the blue stone. And she had hoped for a child that year, where the first year she had feared it. There was none, but she had thought of carrying it in her shawl to market, his turning the corner to see the two of them the next spring, a fat fine fellow of three moons. But a child had not come.
And then the third year he had come to the table and kissed her, before Margery and all, and the two of them had packed her stall in the cart and gone for home. There was a drizzle at any rate and few come to market, but whatever reasons were half-hearted. He was wearing a new coat and was that pleased with the green waistcoat she had made for him, soft as moss.
For her he had brought a treasure, a book called The Grete Herbal, precious beyond reasoning. They had read it in part under the covers in the long afternoon, and then had eaten in bowls in bed with ale he had carried from Dublin. She had known he would come that day and had gathered ransoms for the purpose and bargained for mackerel she simmered in milk with the last of the potatoes.
He had asked her to come with him. She thought of her garden, of how no one had come as she had come, to help tend it. She thought of how she loved solitude. But also she would love travel, it was likely. She thought of the three women waiting for her attendance at their births, of old Alice dying soon, who would not find her when they sent word. She had promised, when the pain and incontinence could not be borne, to help her to go quickly and with no one to know. She was still foolish enough at 40 to have belief in her indispensability. And there was also that he had stayed longer each time, this last visit a week. It seemed to her that this was the best it could be, a life of work and peacefulness and dropped into it companionship for one sweet season a year. She had done all to prepare this time to fall with child, and made dandelion wine for the both of them, and she knew him well enough (she told herself) to know he would be pleased and would still go his way. (Yet it was also likely that she had thought he might settle, women being as they are.)
She gave him a buttonhole of forget-me-not as though it were the end of February, just as a safeguard, and beseeched him to always shelter beneath a beech tree if he could. She said the words as he rounded the bend: To keep him from eye, To keep him from omen, To keep him from spell, South and North.
That he had never returned meant she never knew if he had thought himself unloved (would that truly matter to a man?) or that he had taken ill, far from her and what remedies she could offer. That he had been murdered, joining some caravan in the desert or in some Rotterdam alley, as he so clearly carried all his wealth on his back. She tried to see, in the holy pool, but there was no vision, and at any rate that had never been her gift. She drank the mandrake wine but nothing came to her in the shaky mist, though the trees shimmered and the sky came down close to watch.
The next year on the day, when she trudged home feeling heavier than ever she had, the hoody-crow was on the gatepost. She knew him; he knew her. She said “Is it you?” but he did not speak. His eyes were black and fine, but it was time to nest. He had just been waiting impatiently for her to show herself. She watched him fly high and disappear in the dark glossy leaves.
It had been the sweetest thing. Like lambs jumping and racing one another. Her pillows still, twenty long years later, smelled of spice.
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Georgia Rhoades Artist Statement:
I am writing my way toward more clarity and light, taking a feeling into articulation about women of herstory–Mother Shipton, Marian, the mermaid of Zennor, Cecily Jackson, the women of Islandmagee, Gretta Cousins. These women have been documented for unusual quality, but I want to know them as living in women’s bodies in the times they were given. As a researcher and a writer in a community of writers, I want to be true to what we know about these exemplary women but to reach out to what might have also been true given what we know about being female.
I have always written, for myself and then for an audience. For years as an academic, I wanted to write as a way to find writing community and to make theory and practice come together in a humane educational context. As a playwright, I wanted to bring what I had learned as a professor of women’s studies to a larger audience, and as a novelist I wanted to go deeper. This writing has not only educated me but also allowed me to place myself within a continuum of women thinking, talking, writing, and performing. My identity is as a writer.
As a creative woman, my deepest need is: To research and see those openings that allow me to enter the conversation, the synchronicities that let the writer know she’s on the right path toward some kind of illumination.
