Devotion – by RT Wenzel
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Mary had tried everything for her broken heart over the years. She dragged herself to individual therapy where she cried at people, and group therapy where people cried at her. She’d tried seventeen types of medication. Some helped her sleep, but none of them put her heart back together. Her son offered an ongoing cannabis supply that dulled the ache, but after a few weeks the anguish returned twofold, along with an ashen mouth and stabbing headache. Mary read books, watched webinars, journalled, and visited a spirit medium who was possessed by a Kiwi accent halfway through their session.
Mary missed having someone to laugh about the medium with afterwards. Instead, she cried into her eggplant parma, one of the TV dinners on rotation. Joseph would’ve been furious at the tasteless mush masquerading as eggplant, a vegetable that merited three rows in their garden. But Mary’s son arranged supermarket deliveries after noticing her pantry, and that was just as well because Mary didn’t want to garden or cook or shop. She could cry as much as she liked in the sad intimacy of her kitchen, filled with Joseph’s absence.
Her daughter worried that Mary was depressed, and sent her to a herbalist.
‘Hawthorn helps set boundaries,’ said the herbalist. ‘Good for broken hearts. Best if you harvest and brew a tincture yourself, in the old way. That’s good for the heart, too.’
Picking the berries herself sounded good to Mary. She didn’t like the secrecy of the pharmacist at his elevated workstation as he did whatever he did behind the counter and tucked her money into the pockets of evil empires. Before Joseph died, she’d bought her meat and apples from the farmers’ market, where the farmers told them the names of the pigs and whether the apple varieties hailed from England or France. She enjoyed the brown paper wrappings, textural and real. The supermarket food came in plastic, packaged and nameless.
The herbalist gave her directions, and the tree was so close to her house she could walk. The hawthorn stood like a queen of the abandoned railway line: green feathered leaves, bunches of red berries like miniature cherries. Rabbits milled around the roots and dove into their warren holes as she approached. Mary would’ve liked an escape hole like that, to dive into whenever she saw a moustache, or elderly couple, or straw hat, or eggplant. Grief triggers were everywhere.
She tickled the berries into a paper bag, and the crinkle of it made her smile, remembering the crinkle of the market bags and the lines of Joseph’s face. At home, she crushed the berries gently with a rolling pin, careful not to crack the seeds that contained cyanide. Into a jar of brandy they went, because vodka was too expensive, and for six weeks the tincture deepened on the windowsill.
Mary strained the honey-gold liquid into a medicine bottle, feeling like a hedge-witch brewing a potion. All herbalists were witches, she supposed, but then, witches had always been the village healers. She let a dropperful fall on her tongue, expecting bitterness, but the hawthorn clouded the brandy, softened and buffed the edges. Come in, hawthorn, and mend my broken places, Mary invited the potion, and she felt the alcohol creeping into her bloodstream like a plant. Green me.
She took a shower and went to bed, wept until her pillow was wet, and popped two benzos from the foil pack in her drawer. She kissed the photo of Joseph on the bedside table, and watched the clouds drift over the moon until her eyelids sank closed.
When she woke up, she found the picture of Joseph next to her in the bed. In the photo he was shirtless, just out of the surf. Joseph had loved the ocean, right up till the end. Mary had always been too self-conscious about her body to get in the water with him. She imagined the two of them, playing like seal pups in the sea, sagging bodies and all. But it was too late now. Now he was stuck in a timber-turned urn on her dresser, never to experience the great outdoors again.
Mary walked back to the hawthorn often, to sit in its quiet shade. The berries and leaves fell as autumn closed, revealing the skeleton of the tree. The crown was congested, too cramped for all the branches to reach the light. A long branch had died in the heart of the canopy, and she tugged and wriggled it loose until it fell at her feet. The whole thing needed a good pruning, she thought, leaning on the dead branch. Joseph would’ve pruned it beautifully. He always knew what to cut away to help the tree fruit again.
Armed with the hawthorn branch as a walking stick, Mary braved the farmers’ market, but found the spell had not been broken. Instead of chatting to the farmers, she found herself tongue-tied and reticent. She gloomed at the old couples hobbling around the market, hand in hand. She leaked beneath her sunglasses, and leaned heavily on her staff as she thought about returning to an empty house.
But she managed to buy a bag of Pippin apples, a side of pork, and two eggplants. The rustling of the brown paper bag on the way home did her so much good she pruned a few plums in the backyard, cutting them back as fearlessly as Joseph had. He’d taken out the centre branches to improve the yield before he died and they'd all gone to leaf and shoot. Her knuckles throbbed after, but the swelling went down enough to make a moussaka for dinner.
She’d chosen the black eggplants from the market, because they were the closest to the ones Joseph used to grow. Mary portioned up the finished meal, four servings to freeze, one serving for her, and one for Joseph on the herringbone plate he used to use. Come and take it via whichever messengers you choose, she prayed, and left the plate outside by the back door. The food was gone by the morning, and Mary took the plate in again, and washed it. That was nice, handling Joseph’s things, she thought. Not much feels nice anymore.
Over winter, her arthritis insisted she keep indoors, so she joined the local craft group to meet some other widows. Folks of her generation knew what it was like to lose someone. She asked the names of their husbands, and how their lives had been before. The words rolled off their tongues like oft-told bedtime stories. Mary couldn’t talk about Joseph without crying and stuttering and changing the subject. One conversation at a time, she’d make Joseph a collection of his living stories, she vowed, instead of reducing him to the moment of his death.
She had to keep trying.
Mary returned in Spring to see the hawthorn’s new coat, sawtooth-heart leaves and tiny white blossoms that smelled like death. The long grass over the rabbit tunnels sparkled with dew. She took Joseph with her, and a trowel. Not a spade that might damage the warrens and sever roots and worms. This was slow work, she mused. It was good to take your time.
She moved a stone that the bunnies had dug around and set to work beneath it with her trowel. The rabbits popped their heads up to watch her work, and after a time, came up and played hide-and-seek in the long grass. That did her heart good, to have rabbits scamper in the sun while she made a place for Joseph, until the sky clouded over and they returned to earth.
It began to rain, but Mary kept working. When the hole was deep enough, Mary placed the urn inside. Do your good work, tree, she prayed, her wet hair sticking to her lips. She filled in the hole, and lay down on top of it, and let the rain fall on her and her husband. Joseph was at rest, and now she could visit his wrinkled smile in the knot and burl of the tree. Mary was compelled to mark the magnitude of her feelings with a ritual. She was already wet, she figured. It was time to visit the place Joseph loved best.
The beach cove was desolate. Lonely. Perfect. Mary shed her clothes in the sand, until it was just her naked body facing the big blue.
The water was chilly and woke her animal body, shut her brain up for a while. She could barely remember how to swim. And that felt wonderful, to forget how to do it, and instead just do it. Just keep afloat, Mary, she told herself. All I need you to do is not drown. And her body seemed to know how to do that all by itself. She scooped up great handfuls of ocean, her feet kicked through the swell of the water. Her body followed the rhythm of the waves, ducking under them, rising over them. Mary closed her eyes as she flipped and tucked and dived and imagined Joseph alongside her, the two of them playing like seal pups in the sea.
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Image: Annie Spratt - Unsplash
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