Free Apples and Prayers by Andy Brown Page B

myself bruised, my allegiances pulled hither and thither.
    February’s the time for weeding the fields. Lines of crouched serfs and labourers scour the land, with weed-hooks in one hand and tongs in the other, plucking the weeds from the soil. It’s one of the times when fieldsmen offer their services to each other and work as a team. John Toucher and his argumentative neighbour, Reynolds; the odd-jobber, Rawlings; Lucombes the ploughman; the cottagers Barum, Brimley and Putt. These last three men were joined to the communal stalk of friendship like the trefoil of a clover. 
    Tom Putt was their principal dealer, quick minded and clever with his tongue. He was tall, high cheeked, with the guise of natural intelligence, rather than schooled, for he had been put to work in the fields from the cradle. The joker of the three, he’d speak for all of them against the bailiff’s steep demands for rent, or increase in tithes, winning adversaries over with a tale and an amicable smile. It bought them time, though the bailiff would soon enough be back. 
    Brimley was the mover of their group, who organised and oversaw their common work. A small, squat man with wide-set eyes and a nose like a great pebble, he was straight talking. Practical. Barum was their muscle, when muscle was called for; a simple, quiet man, who called a hoe a hoe and did as he was bidden. The arrangement suited each man according to his means and constitution. And where these three men were, perhaps, less dutiful in their observances at church, they held intensely to their landed rights and would protect a fellow’s independence, whatever his beliefs.
    Behind the lines of weeding men come others; children hired to clear the fields of stones. They gather the cobbles together and sell them to the bailiff for repairing lanes and highways, which suffer greatly in the spring rains. Weeding is backbreaking and tedious work and I obliged John Toucher with small attentions at the end of his day. All that kneeling and bending made him stiff and crotchety, as I had lately found.
    The month is also time for planting hedges and mending the old and damaged ones around the edges of the fields. Hazel and blackthorn stand side-by-side, silver-skinned and dark barked alike, shooting straight lines up against the whiteness, like supplicants with arms raised to Heaven. Ash straplings spring from their pollarded boles, their branches tipped with hard, black buds. On the thin tips of hazel twigs, the catkins hang, waiting to open and shed their seeds in the first awakenings after winter. Their soft yellow pom-poms hang bright against the grey-brown understorey of sapling willows. Last season’s beech leaves still cling to their branches in bright patches, emblazoning the hedgerows. A year’s woody growth stands ready to be hacked and twisted into a thick new hedge. Willow’s dug in for new fence posts and shoots to shade the livestock in the summer. Quick sets of hawthorn and blackthorn are rooted into the ground to portion out copses and fields, to stop stray livestock wandering. 
    By mid-month, the hedgerows are full of farming men cutting through the growth at the base with a hand-axe or hatchet, bending the straplings down to the ground, to weave them through the border’s living fabric. Woodbine was the fastest in his craft, but other men vied for his title and there was competition for the speed and neatness of their finished hedges. None is neater than those around my Lord’s woodlands.
    Both deer and coney are plentiful in those woods and they gave excellent sport. In winter, my Lord left the rabbits to their own devices, so they might increase their number in their natural way, for greater sport come spring. The red deer themselves are pests, always eating crops, or the tender new shoots of the coppice, which grows there for valuable fuel. To stop the deer, Woodbine cut the trees into pollarded clumps and each winter I’d make