This house is quiet, too quiet. The small tatty portable radio isn´t playing Radio Humberside in the kitchen. The aroma of homemade lemon meringue and apple pie is conspicuous by its absence. The back door is not open to let in sunlight and down the bottom of the garden the chicken run is empty and the nettles are taking hold. As I stand here waiting in the hallway, I feel my younger self brush past me, running up the staircase, re-enacting some game of hide and seek, but the hearse arrives and the moment passes. Once again I´m forced to face reality. Granny has gone from this house and soon we all will be.

We troop out to the pavement, silent and looked upon by neighbours who have gathered at their garden gates to watch. Men in black coats and top hats with black ribbons wait for us and look strangely out of place in this street of old working class terraced houses. Car doors are opened and we climb inside. None of the family is much for useless exchanging of words, so we sit in silence and wait.

I´m struck by the formality of the occasion. The director takes position in front of the gleaming hearse and begins to walk our cortege in slow and certain footsteps down the street. Somewhere in the back of my mind I think he´s going to walk like this all the way to church and it´s going to take ages. Granny wouldn´t have the patience for it; no nonsense and get on with it was her style, not this.

We pass familiar places that I have not seen in years. Places I used to know so well; places where I used to play. I´ll never play in them again and perhaps I won´t even see them again. They take on a feeling of urgency as I think about this possibility. I seem to have to imprint them in my mind or lose them forever and so I fix my gaze to the outside as it flows by.

Fields of golden wheat strike at my very soul as we pass by another familiar territory. I know those fields. I know what was in them once.


******

I was a city kid and every summer as I was growing up, I had been left at Granny´s for a week or two of precious decadent freedom. My foster sister, Christine, was with me that particular summer, and my cousins Jane and Sally were always around. They lived on a housing estate nearby, behind which lay miles of wheat fields, edged by tangled hedgerows and woods, all beneath a great blue sky.

I don´t remember much rain at all, ever. I know the summer in question was certainly roasting. We had all sat around lethargic and listless in my cousins´ back yard, swatting at flies and gazing at fat lazy bees bumbling about between the flowers.

"We know where there´s a field with a dead dog," Jane announced between trying to blow sounds through a blade of quickly wilting grass.

Christine and I were hooked. My foster sister didn´t have much experience of the free wild outdoors. An adventure would be the pinnacle of her week. I wondered what a dead dog would look like, as horrible bloody pictures lit up red and oozing in my mind.

A maze of alleys led the way through the houses until the blessed shade ended. A patch of wasteland, with dry cracked earth and tall, dead yellow grasses stood between the fields and us. We crossed it as the relentless heat of the day prickled our skin and made us itch.

A wall that stretched to the sky separated us from the fields. Jane was the eldest and the tallest and scaled it with no problem. The rest of us scrambled frantically until she dragged us one by one over its summit. Then there they were, the golden fields. They mesmerized me, those tall straight uniformed strands of wheat. They danced for me. I joined in, swaying back and forth in perfect harmony but the tune was cut dead by Jane urging us forward to the darker end of the field.

As we walked along the baked edge, the wheat whispered to the trees and the trees answered back. Nothing else stirred. My bare summer arms prickled, no longer with heat but with pensive anticipation. A spooked blackbird chattered in a bolt of black surprise from the hedge. Christine squealed with alarm. Far behind us, just peeking over the hedges were the roofs of the housing estate. The feeling of isolation and distance stretched, like looking through binoculars backwards.

My cousins found the dog quickly. Christine hesitated, but only briefly, and then she stepped forward and peered through the thicket of twiggy branches. I didn´t want to see it. I wasn´t sure I could face it and ever be the same person again. Would it live with me forever more? Would it give me nightmares? Would the horror of it be etched on my face for all to see?

I did want to see it though.

Christine´s expression did nothing that I expected. She just stood and stared. Cautiously I stepped forward and looked. It was very dead but without gore and without blood that I could see. I felt strangely cheated, then for one bright moment I thought it might be sleeping, tired from the long hot day. But it was dead. It was a large dog with black fur that once must have glossed in the sunlight but now its body was shrunken and caved in, a parched colorless tongue poked out between its teeth. I could only stand and stare as my fluttering heart slowed and gave up on the terror it had anticipated. I wondered if it had been scared and lonely, as it had crawled against the ground to find a quiet place to die. The thought depressed me. The trees whispered again and I shivered. We seemed to make our minds up all together that it was time to go.

As we left the field, the sun seemed to brighten and I felt warmed through once again and welcomed the hot rays that licked my skin this time. Jane ran ahead and counted out loud. We needed little encouragement to rise to the challenge of hide and seek. We fled in different directions into the midst of the wheat, diving down just in time as she came to the end of her count.

Death now seemed as far from me as it possibly could as I crouched in hiding, stifling giggles. I felt absolutely safe, cocooned under the blue sky and surrounded by thick strands of endless wheat. No one would find me here, certainly not Jane who sounded as if she was thrashing about in the opposite direction. What if no one found me here? What if they left me here? I wouldn´t even know it because I couldn’t see anything, nothing except the big blue sky. I was torn between the need for the assurance that I had not been left alone and the fight against revealing my position.

Then a shot! It came without any warning, loud in the afternoon air. The earth beneath me seemed to vibrate from the shock of it. Any dilemma I had been having about staying hidden was forgotten and I leapt up in unison with Christine and Sally from the midst of the wheat. Jane whirled round from her position somewhere off towards the far side of the field. We looked at each other uncomprehending.

Then we ran. We ran for the wall.

With my heart thundering in my chest I crashed as fast as I could through the thick crop. It was like trying to run in water. The wheat strands conspired against me as they laced about my feet, tripping me up in payback for wrecking their beautiful uniformity.

We all scaled the wall with little effort, driven by our own fear and need for survival. I glanced back and saw a man with a shotgun. The farmer whose field we had just wrecked? He stood shaking his fist at us from the edge of the wheat. I wondered in that moment if he had killed the dog. It took a long time for my heart to stop hammering in my chest that day.


******

Our funeral cortege halts in front of the church and we make our way slowly behind the coffin, up the aisle of the cool hushed church. It´s time to say goodbye to that day and days like it. I hadn´t realized they were gone until now. Granny gave me my summers by allowing me my freedom and I thank her for that. They were the best days.

As we all open our hymn books I glance at my cousins, standing all sensible and grown up and with their own children beside them. They look nothing like those girls who used to run through the wheat with me, but then neither do I anymore. I haven´t seen Christine for years. She was returned to her real mother not long after our summer of adventure. I often wonder what it would have been like to grow up with a sister, but I´ll never know – it makes me sad.

After the funeral I´ll ask Jane and Sally if they remember the dog.


© Carolyn Eddy 2005

Published in Outercast Summer 2005