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By Root 313 0

The grass had not been scythed for months, and the branches of the plane trees tangled into the opposing limbs. The writer sat up and followed the gaze. ‘Yes, perhaps,’ he said. ‘Perhaps. Will you wait here?’ All first investigations of possible houses were to be made alone. The family in the cart could not select a home for the man any more than he would know how to choose the correct field for the family—he would not know, for instance, that it should contain a number of exits for them to feel secure. Finding the final home for one’s remaining days was like a decision to be made in a fairy tale, with the prince or princess needing to select a marriage partner before twilight. It had to be a wise but also private desire, knowing what was honestly needed, although at first it might seem appalling—a blind girl instead of a chatelaine, a hedgehog instead of a blue-blooded suitor. The outside world would not know best. And so the family remained in the cart and watched the writer kick his legs to remove the stiffness of sleep and begin his cautious and suddenly youthful walk towards the possible home.

Astolphe

Two days after the writer bought the house along with the nine hectares of land that surrounded it, the two men, Lucien and Liébard, entered the chest-high grass with scythes. Within minutes they had disappeared from each other. Only if one of them paused could he hear the other’s movement, the ceaseless sweep of a blade or, during longer silences, the sharpening of its metal with a stone. They began before dawn, while it was still cool and half dark, and even then insects rose into the air and surrounded them. Their scythes swept above the ground to avoid stones and roots. It would truly have been easier to burn the grass. But Liébard, who was helping Lucien in his campaign to reclaim the overgrown field, had insisted that the meadow needed the ant and the cricket whose lives would be destroyed by such a fire. The unseen traffic was necessary. And the writer might long for that cricket in the grass, or a cicada within the trees in the future.

They pulled the tough blueberry roots out of the ground and burned vines along with the cut grass on the perimeters of the field. They raked open the soil and began crop-seeding it so that bacteria in the mustard and clover would eventually draw in nitrogen. At dusk they walked onto other properties, gathered seeds, and returned with légumineuses, scattering this family of beans and peas onto the writer’s land. Why not? demanded Liébard, who was as much of a traveller in some ways as a blown seed or a bee.

Liébard knew what comforted winged creatures in terms of domicile. He proposed not just birdhouses, but holes drilled into blocks of wood for flying insects. He collected sunflowers and split their stalks and tied them against branches to create a home for bugs. He crammed hay into jars for centipedes to use, for they would eventually eat the larvae of bugs that attacked fruit trees. He was aware of the awkward moral balance in nature. You gave and you took away. Wasps lay eggs that ate the larvae of butterflies, but then wasps were better for plant life than the beautiful flutterers, just as Liébard knew that it was lazy wealth in the fluttering class that made them mean-spirited. In his mépris he knew a thing or two about them—the result of sightings and witnessings over the years, first in towns and now in fields. Although Liébard would never claim to be a moral man. He himself could be diverted by a feather.

On the second day some distance from the writer’s house, the boy discovered a field full of exits. Hearing of this, Lucien suggested the family camp there if they wished. Before actually making the offer, he told them he was giving them a field, not suggesting that he needed companionship. Perhaps they would not even talk much again, but he had a limit of hectares and it was unlikely he would ever journey beyond the small lake. And the field in question was a distance beyond that.

The proposal was this: If Liébard would help him clear the overgrown fields