The day before the wedding I left the hotel early, walking along the road that led west out of the village. The leaves were red, and the high, baked grass of summer was beginning to soften with the frost. I passed Miss Poppel’s house. She was the only one of them I had any time for. She lived alone, with three stray cats and a car that had been painted an unusual shade of brown. When she drove down the street, all you could see was its huge, disappointed face and then, dimly, through the windscreen’s milky glass, her spectacles tilted upwards as she peered over the wheel and a headscarf which was actually a pair of old silk stockings. The front of her place was heaped with empty bottles and rusting engine parts the way all the Poppel family’s places were. With her, though, it was character, not squalor. She had chimes made out of door-hinges, each one the size of a man’s hand. She’d strung them together on a piece of wire and hung them from a withered crab-apple tree. They were so heavy, the wind didn’t move them much. But they did clang if a storm got up. I could sometimes hear them through the open window of my room at the hotel.
I crossed the bridge, looking down between the wooden slats at the coating of pale-green scum on the water below. Beyond the bridge, the road ran uphill to the horizon, three kilometres away. I took the first turning on the left, a narrow track of mud and leaf-mould. I passed the plough that had been there for years, half-grown over now. There was a keen edge to the air that quickened my muscles as I walked, and I forgot for a moment that it was anger I was carrying.
I saw the clearing ahead of me, the dun-coloured walls and black windows I knew so well. Instead of entering the house, I circled it, taking a path that struck off through the bracken-skirted trees just to the east. I parted brambles, then scrambled down a steep bank to the stream. There was the willow. And there, beneath it, was the flat place where we used to lie. I reached inside my coat and pulled out the folded manila envelope I’d taken from the hotel office. I began to strip one of the branches of its yellow leaves. When the envelope was full, I sealed it shut. I sat down on the bank and took out a pencil and wrote AXEL & EILEEN HEKMANN on the front, then I put the pencil away and laid the envelope beside me on the ground. I stared at the water for a long time. It ran as it had always run in the autumn, loud and purposeful, tumbling over the stones. You could sit there pretending that nothing had ever changed.
The next day, after the ceremony, the Poppels held a party at their farm. While I was there, one of the men came up to me. He stuck his thumbs in his belt and gave me a slanting look.
‘How come you’re against the marriage?’
It cost me a great effort to be polite, but it was someone’s wedding day and besides, I weighed it up and I decided that, in the end, politeness would be more insulting.
‘I’m not against it.’ I smiled. ‘Who said I was against it?’
‘I heard something.’
‘Rumours,’ I said.
‘What about the yellow leaves?’ He altered the angle of his head. ‘What was all that about?’
‘In our family they mean something special.’
‘That so?’
‘Didn’t he tell you?’
‘No,’ the Poppel man said, ‘he didn’t tell us.’ One of his brothers or cousins had joined him, wearing a brown suit and chewing on a blade of grass.
‘Well, ask him,’ I said.
‘So you’re not against the marriage?’
I sighed. ‘No.’
‘You fancy a dance?’ said the man in the suit.
‘No,’ I said. ‘Excuse me.’
I walked across the yard to where a boy was pouring home-made beer and I asked him for a glass of it. I could feel their eyes on me, like snails. I was glad I’d sent the leaves — especially as they were yellow, and yellow meant what it did …
I looked across at the two men. I nodded, raised my glass.
Then I drank.
It was a Friday afternoon and I’d been working at the inn for almost exactly a year. I was sitting on the front porch, taking a short break before I started to prepare the evening meal. The warm weather had lasted longer than usual, and the trees were only now beginning to lose their foliage. My father wiped the sweat off his forehead as he walked up the road towards me, his trousers fluttering and flapping round his ankles. He looked like a man who was standing still in a high wind. I rose slowly to my feet. I’d been wondering when he would come.
He stood at the bottom of the steps. ‘Axel took the truck at half-past seven this morning and I haven’t seen him since.’
‘Where was he going? The market?’ There was a market every Friday morning in a town a few kilometres to the north.
‘Yes. But it’s three o’clock now.’
‘Maybe he’s driving around. You know how that wife of his likes to drive around.’
My father shook his head. ‘I told him to be back at midday. There was something he had to help me with.’
I felt my heart begin to churn. ‘You think he broke down?’
My father turned and stared into the trees on the other side of the road, one hand twitching against his leg as if his brain was in that hand and it was thinking.
‘Get Karl,’ he said.
Karl had the use of an old four-seater that belonged to Eva’s parents. The two men climbed in the front, with Karl behind the wheel. I sat in the back. First we drove out to the Poppels’ place. The mother was in the yard, feeding her chickens. She stood below us, one arm circling a bowl of corn meal, the veins and tendons showing through her transparent skin.
‘I ain’t seen nobody all day.’
Karl spun the car round, ran it fast across the ruts and potholes, back on to the road, the springs complaining loudly all the way.
‘I told you we should’ve fixed the truck,’ he muttered.
My father just stared out through the windscreen. I noticed how his shoulders curved under his jacket.
I thought of the time I’d met Axel in the village. I was buying candles for the restaurant. Eva said candles would create atmosphere. That’s what people want, she told me. Atmosphere. It must have been early spring because I could remember what my first words were.
‘I hear the baby’s born.’
‘Yeah.’ He scuffed his boots on the floor. ‘It’s a boy.’
‘I heard that, too.’ I paid Minkels for the candles and moved towards the door. ‘What are you naming it?’
‘Michael. I call him Mazey.’ He grinned quickly.
‘Mazey?’
‘I don’t know why. That’s what I call him, though. It just feels right.’
I nodded. ‘You got a place of your own yet?’
‘We’re getting one.’ He told me there was a small homestead out towards the lake. It didn’t have any water, but he knew where they could dig a well. There was some land that came with it. He might try farming. Sheep, most likely.