Celice should not have been so shocked or taken it so personally. The Mentor’s suicide was not a judgement on the world, on life, on her. It might have been nothing more than chemistry and genes. He was disposed to it, perhaps. This was his programmed death. A better death, she’d thought, despite her desperation, than the one that she was hoping for: a death doled out in microscopic instalments by senility, her tent repitched each day, a footstep nearer home. His suicide had saved him from old age. He’d stopped the stitches fraying in his life. He had departed from this earth intact, before his final fevers came and the lingering was over, the last weekend of snow or sun, the thinning blood, the trembling touch of strangers pulling down his lids. He’d died with all his futures still in place. His will. His might. His could. There were still concert tickets on his mantelshelf. His winter holiday was booked. He still had debts. The Mentor’s suicide, she could persuade herself, was neo-Darwinist.
But it was hard to take a coldly scientific view of sudden death when it concerned a friend, particularly when that friend was someone she could have loved. ‘Such bad luck,’ Celice had said to the Mentor’s sister at the funeral. Though luck, the bad and good, did not belong to natural history, and suicide was not a game of chance.
Nevertheless, somebody should have briefed the Speaker at the funeral that he was lecturing a congress of biologists and that he should avoid such words as paradise, eternity and God. ‘You might consider the spiritual reputation of the sea pine under which our departed brother parked his car and sheltered from the rain,’ the Speaker had told the mourners, including both the author of a standard text on tree classification and a Chetze Prize-winning botanist. ‘We know it as the Slumber Tree. In the scriptures it was called Death’s Ladder. Because its seeds are poisonous. But also because its branches touch the heavens and its roots are deep. They reach into the underworld. And so it is the tree of choice. Choose sin or virtue. Descend into the eternal darkness. Or ascend into the presence of Almighty God. Anyone who knew our brother, for whom we have gathered here to commemorate and celebrate, also knows which choice he made throughout his life. He scaled the highest branches of the pine.’
That night, both irritated and intrigued by such absurdity — a pine is shallow-rooted and not poisonous, there is no underworld — Celice had taken down the book their daughter, Syl, had sent her father for his irritable amusement on his birthday. The Goatherd’s Ancient Wisdom. Page 68, ‘A Sorcery of Trees’. She found, to her surprise, that she was partly wrong about the pine.
The Goatherd’s wisdom was, she read, that ‘Travellers who could not find the money for a bed and had to pass their nights outdoors should prefer the blanket of the thorn before all other trees, And so stay free from harm.’ Those ‘fools and giddy-heads’ who slept below an olive branch would wake up with a headache, ‘lasting for a week’. To nap beneath a fig was to risk hot dreams. Curl up in the roots of oak — and be rewarded with diarrhoea. And, yes, the Speaker’s prejudice, you’d have eternal slumbers if you lay down underneath the pine.
She read out the passage to Joseph, but he was less affected by the Mentor’s death. Indifferent and dismissive, she’d have said. ‘Goatherds should know about such things,’ was all that he could summon. ‘They’ve nothing else to do all day but sleep under trees.’ But, as Celice was to discover when she read on in bed that night, there was some pleasing science buried in the lore. A lengthy footnote by the Goatherd’s modem editor showed why the ancient prejudices were not absurd or idle. ‘The acid nature of the thorn is not hospitable to fungi,’ he observed, “but mushroom pickers should be warned of other trees.’ The migraines and the dreams, it seemed, the never-ending slumbers and the shits were what they’d get from symbiotic fungi growing trader olives, figs and oaks, or from the rings of coffin fungus living under pines. ‘ ‘‘Come to the pines, you suicides,” ’ he quoted, ‘ ‘‘and dine on these grey buttons in the earth. They’ll box you up and bury you. New pines will grow where blood is spilt; though it be human, animal or from the wounds of clashing skies, their thirsts are never satisfied.” ’
Not strictly true. Not scientific on the whole. But this was wisdom widely honest in a way that Celice found comforting. As she imagined it, there was no hose-pipe and no car. There was just the Mentor on his back, awaiting her, the wispy canopy of pines, the deadly buttons on the ground, a ladder leading to his underworld and hers, and everlasting sin.
According to the Goatherd’s wisdoms, then, it should have been entirely safe for Joseph and Celice to lie down on the lissom grass amongst the salt dunes of Baritone Bay. The nearest pine was a kilometre away, but there were sufficient sea thorns there to make their slumbers ‘free from harm’. Had Celice read on, amongst the Goatherd’s later observations (page 121, ‘Green Favours’) she would have found good news about the lissom grass itself. The Goatherd listed all its common names, sweet thumbs, angel bed, pintongue, pillow grass, sand hair, repose, and then the luck that it could bring to fishermen and lovers if they tied a snatch of it to their bonnets or their nets. Good fishing with the lissom grass was guaranteed. There was no ancient promise of misfortune for any ‘fools and giddy-heads’ who rested on its cushions, no ladders to the under or the upper world to tempt Celice and Joseph from their second day of grace.
Their tenant crabs dispersed once it was dark. Their flies stayed put, lodging in the damp recesses of the wounds, until the early hours of the Wednesday when an undramatic storm ran down the coast to chase the starlit sky away and flush the warmth out of the night. No noise or gusts or lightning, just relentless water smudging ocean into land, and steady wind. Even the gnawing rodents that had crossed the dunes to feed on the unusual prize of human carrion could not endure the beating rain or the chilling blocks of air that squeezed it from the sky. They fled back to their burrows. The three sets of footprints leading from the coastal path into the dunes, the one set leading out, were quickly washed away. The Entomology was soaked. The flattened grass where they had walked, resuscitated by the rain, sprang straight again.
The storm cleaned out their bodies. Much of the blood that had coagulated around their wounds was now reliquefied and thinned to pinkish grey. The rain loosened and washed off most of these weaker stains. It dislodged, dissolved, the clots. Celice’s jacket was saturated. Her shirt was black with rain. The water and the cold wind of the storm had some benefits, though. The rotting of the bodies was retarded for an hour or two during night. Bodies decompose most quickly when they’re dry and warm, and when insects are at work, taking off the waste. But even the weather and the night could not delay the progress of death by much. Their lives were irretrievable, despite the optimistic labours of the nails and hair to add their final millimetres. Joseph, normally so meticulous, was stubble-faced.