MATTHEW THATCHER WALKED in the park most days in most weather, almost always alone, stumbling on a stone or branch if his attention strayed. He would sit alone, sometimes for hours, considering the firth, that tongue of ocean and infinite boundary. In stronger health, at the beginning, he drew sketches of each variety of bird in the lord’s realm, tried to capture in words the quiddity of their twittering, until, when every bird he saw was familiar from his own pictures and captions, it was another year.
He attempted to catalog for his lord’s library all the plants and herbs, the buds of each in spring, the leaves of summer, the mushrooms that came the following autumn on the wet and naked roots and under the soft and crumbling fallen logs. He sorted the grasses, ate from each green and berry and mushroom, tried in his rooms to determine their effects and value, in tinctures and distillate and paste, wrote what guidance he could be certain of as he followed each bite of foliage into his sleep and digestion, into his legs’ aches and the spots and threads drifting through his vision, and through the shadows where memories had once glowed, where he raced to extinguish them before they burned him.
Dreams were rarer and less specific with years, less true to the past, and so they could now be tolerated. Early pains, which had once pierced so sharply, had left behind in their place a rotating crew of smaller, childish griefs, as if the process of forced forgetting had turned him into a boy. These petty complaints could trouble Matthew Thatcher beyond reason, and he would at times find himself alone—in his chamber or in the grounds—weeping at the unkindness of beast or child or servant, even while loathing his own weakness.
For example, he feared one of the kennel’s dogs more than the rest. The kennel keeper knew this and so let it run at Thatcher in the park, or so Thatcher suspected. The lord’s youngest child, whom Matthew tutored in natural history, mathematics, geography, and Latin, found amusement in stealing his tutor’s ink, until one day the boy fell and struck his head and recovered only to fall again, this time to a swelling that never healed, and the boy died. Another loss, and surprisingly painful to Thatcher.
Matthew Thatcher sat in the park, older again, held samples of wood and greenery between his fingers, crushed a leaf against his palm, opened its flesh to half its depth with his thumbnail, squeezed. He inhaled its faint scent, and at once, faster than he could resist, smelled lemon. He feared he was recalling more than he was smelling, because how could this leaf in Cumberland contain a wisp of lemon? He had drawn and studied this leaf before, he was almost certain, and it had not then smelled at all of a distant joy.
He dropped the leaf to the ground as if burned, rubbed his palms, and moved away into the wood. He sat heavily on a fallen tree, and the rotted branch yielded a little under his weight.
The mushrooms and toadstools, the logs in the wood that bore them: Why did God teach every rabbit and squirrel which of them were nutritive and which were venomous, so that a hare might pass two identical offerings before nibbling at a third that was, but for a faint tinge to a rib along its stalk or a blush across the velvet of its dome, perfectly the same? Why did God instruct beasts but allow men to ingest blindly and now and again writhe in tortures or die outright, unless a student of nature watched those rabbits first, sketched those tinged stalks and blushing domes, wrote and advised the cooks which mushrooms to avoid? Matthew Thatcher, in his first year at the hall, had drawn and written guides for the cooks and boys, so that all the baron’s people were, with much effort, brought up to the level of knowledge equal to that of a juvenile squirrel. God did not bother much for His humans. Or He expected men to do it for Him.
If one erred, then one died, and God looked to the healthy hare instead. And if one knew the secret laws of the forest but glanced away when gathering the mushrooms, forgot to pay heavenly attention, or if one drank strong drink before gathering them, or simply looked up and enjoyed the sky that God offered (and knew that one was gazing gratefully upon), and then pulled those deadly caps without checking their stalks and domes—
Or, Thatcher allowed himself to think further (or Satan caused him to think), what if one simply pretended not to know the difference, never to have learned it, and took the flesh of the blushing dome into his mouth and let fall away from this life all that he clung to with such effort and exhaustion? Thatcher might then avoid that cannon God had aimed against self-slaughter, as the man onstage had warned, and let go these memories and costumes, these lies and lost worlds, the child growing up without him, the wife, caressed and pressed by other hands, who’d long since forgotten him as he had fought to force her burning image from his own memory. He could simply eat the venomed mushrooms until sleep overtook him forever, and the smell of lemons would be the last scent he knew.
What god would care? The god of squirrels and rabbits? The god who secreted his venom here but not there? Why can I not eat as if I were a hare too old to care any longer, or a boy who had never bothered to ask the necessary questions, and then I could let drop, like so many heavy bags, all the years lost, all the pork and wine consumed under all those suspicious eyes all those years, the brutally heavy years dragging behind me, until I am there again, in the garden atop the hill, the scent of fig blossoms and lemon and the swaying blue below as bright and transparent as all the domed blue above, all of which persists, despite my efforts.
I have not used God’s proper name. God’s name could not matter, not truly. Why would He care what I call Him? Does He not know my real heart always, whatever my lips say? The Jews will not say any name, will not write it, but they do not forget it. And if they did? Still they fear and love and worship Him, even if none could recall the word they’ve been taught never to utter. When they washed me Christian, they asked me to forget the true name of God. And so I have never said it since, not in front of others, and have not for many years even heard it in my head. I cannot recall the last time I heard His name within my quiet mind. But did I forget it?
Atop the hill, above the sea, there is a house with a tree with fruit. The boy, whose name I will not think or say, loves that fruit. The fruit has a name, but I will not— She, the boy’s mother, who gave the boy to me, the mother of the boy whose name I will not think, she said it was a good place for a tree like that, with the round fruit that should not be thought of, since it was gone and therefore should be forgotten.
The boy, the boy’s mother, the roots and leaves, the round fruit. I knew their names but would not say them and cause myself pain, because I am a coward. He knows my real heart, and He deems me damnable.
Those mushrooms, each with a name, each with their God-given taste and purpose, and some might end all this.