James Lasdun

They peopled landscapes casually like trees, being there richly, never having gone there, and whether clanning in cities or village-thin stands were reticent as trees with those not born there, and their fate, like trees, was seldom in their hands. Others to them were always one of two evils: the colonist or refugee. They stared back, half disdaining us, half fearing; inferring from our looks their destiny as preservation or as clearing. I envied them. To be local was to know which team to support: the local team; where to drop in for a pint with mates: the local; best of all to feel by birthright welcome anywhere; be everywhere a local... Bedouin-Brython-Algonquins; always there before you; the original prior claim that made your being anywhere intrusive. There, doubtless, in Eden before Adam wiped them out and settled in with Eve. Whether at home or away, whether kids playing or saying what they wanted, or adults chatting, waiting for a bus, or, in their well-tended graves, the contented dead, there were always locals, and they were never us.

It isn’t me , he’d say, stepping out of a landscape that offered, he’d thought, the backdrop to a plausible existence until he entered it;

I’m talking to you old man. Listen to me as you step inside this garden to fill a breakfast bowl with blueberries ripened on the bushes I’m planting now, twenty years back from where you’re standing. It’s strictly a long-term project—first year pull off the blossoms before they open, second year let them flower, watch the bees bobbing in every bonnet, but don’t touch the fruit till year three, and then only sample a handful or two . . . Old man I’m doing this for you! You know what they say about blueberries: blood-cleansing, mood-lifting memory-boosters; every bush a little fountain of youth sparkling with flavonoids, anthocyanin . . . I’ve spent all summer clearing brush sawing locust poles for the frames, digging in mounds of pine needles, bales of peat moss— I thought I’d do it while I still could. You can do something for me in turn: think about the things an old man should; things I’ve shied away from, last things. Care about them only don’t care too (you’ll know better than I do what I mean or what I couldn’t say, but meant). Reconcile, forgive, repent, but don’t go soft on me; keep the faith, our infidels’ implicit vow: “not the hereafter but the here and now  . . . ” Weigh your heart against the feather of truth as the Egyptians did, and purge its sin, but for your own sake, not your soul’s. And since the only certain eternity’s the one that stretches backward, look for it here inside this garden: Blueray, Bluecrop, Bluetta, Hardy Blue; little fat droplets of transubstantiate sky, each in its yeast-misted wineskin, chilled in dew. This was your labor, these are the fruits thereof. Fill up your bowl old man and bring them in.

What’s there to say? We didn’t care for him much, and you can’t exactly commiserate with someone you don’t just not love but almost (admit it) hate. So the news just hung over us like the dud summer weather we’d had— rain since June, the lawn sodden, garden a bog, all slugs, late blight so bad our sickened Beefsteak vines, our Sweet One Hundreds, San Marzanos, the lot, yellowed half black before the fruit had set, which, when it did, began to bloat and rot before it ripened—but like I say (and not to speak ill of the dead) we just didn’t care for him, which is probably all there is to be said.