SHINE,THE OCEAN AND THE UNICORN.
Chapter four                                                                                                     Part Eleven




                One morning in the late summer Lettie and I were washing clothes outside in the warm September sun.  The fields were being harvested and the apples were falling.  There was a sadness in the air because the summer would soon be gone and the work that had to be done was no longer light hearted but urgent.  Tom was not in the garden but with other folk in the fields, fields that were filled with activity and silence. I sat on the kitchen steps, deep in thought, scrubbing clothes on a washboard while Lettie dunked them in  tubs of clear water and when they were rinsed she fed them through a mangle and slowly turned the handle with her free hand.  She sighed, she was tired and bored. She kept looking at me and waited for me to speak, but I could not speak, neither could I look at her.  My husband's cruelty could no longer be hidden by the light of day.  His arrogance, his disdain, his cold glory at the top of his dark mountain and his looking down from it with disgust and revulsion at me, my ignorance and my pathetic need for companionship with the lowly and the worthless.  Lettie read my thoughts and said softly,
                                                                                 " Ee's a wrong 'un  Missus.  There's an evil in 'is eyes that the devil 'imself would be proud of. "
               Her words were true.  I knew him to be evil, akin to the devil, a destroyer of souls.  But I had thought that if I did not look I would not see and the world would do the same.  If I kept it from the world the world would keep it from me.  His mother had tried to open my eyes but I had ignored her and so she had branded me with the immortal tears.  Her pearls had not been gift but a sentence.  Now Lettie had spoken the truth, but it clarified nothing, it only oppressed me more.
                 We pegged out the washing and I walked away, alone through the fields, sombre and sullen as the sad September day.  The harvesters were absorbed in the sweeping of their scythes and the bundling of the corn.  They did not see me as I walked by over the stubbled ground they had left behind them.  I walked for miles.  My sorrow was so great it was like a heavy stone from which the tears could not flow.  I knew that I was nearing the very end of a dark journey but its last stages were the darkest and most treacherous.  It was the last confusion before the destination could be reached, from which a light would shine.  I came to a meadow and there I lay down in the grass exhausted and I slept.