"Marina Fitch - The Scarecrow's Bride" - читать интересную книгу автора (Fitch Marina)

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The Scarecrow’s Bride
by Marina Fitch
“The Scarecrow’s Bride” first appeared in Pulphouse, the Hardback Magazine
Issue 10, Winter 1991.
Author’s Note: “Sometimes a song overwhelms me, creates a yearning that
removes me from the world. That doesn’t begin to explain the feeling—words never
will. Often these are songs that are beautiful in and of themselves, but that I find
much more powerful because of the choice of musicians, instruments and approach.
“The Scarecrow,” sung by June Tabor on her Abyssinians album, is one such song.
It was years before I attempted to write about the images and emotions this
song inspired in me. The story came slowly at first, then I met someone who helped
me understand the heart of what I had written. After that it was easy.”
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EMMA GREY CAME TO ME in spring when the Earth still bore the scars of the
winter storms. Early flowers—clover, milkmaids, poppies—bent beneath the wind as
the old woman skirted patches of snow. Mother and I watched from the window.
“You will be married in a week’s time,” she said.
 I smiled, remembering the promise Gerard Malins made to me in the woods:
to marry me despite my withered leg. I hugged the crutch to my side. “Is that why
Emma comes?” I said. “Or will Ger ask me himself?”
Mother turned from me. “He will not,” she said. “You are to be the
scarecrow’s bride.” I grasped my crutch tighter. In a village of nearly four hundred,
surely there was someone else. “But Tess Dunne’s Mary is blind and Ginny Frye’s
Anne has one arm—”
Outside, footsteps shuffled to a halt on the doorstep. “Your father and I
couldn’t offer a dowry rich enough to please Ger Malins’ parents. A man wants
money, they said, or a woman who can work beside him in the fields.”
Mother opened the door. A breeze preceded the old woman, a breeze that
tasted of honey and rainwater. Emma tucked a lock of white hair beneath the wrap of
her shawl. The strand tumbled free, curling along her plump, florid cheek. With a
grunt, she clutched the doorjamb and pulled herself inside.
She blinked, peering at Mother through milky eyes. “Mollie Scarecrow died
last night,” Emma said. Then she turned to me.
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Dressed in white, my hair garlanded with apple blossoms and red poppies, I
rode the bridal cart through town. The scarecrow rode beside me, its button eyes
agleam with sunlight as its head listed to and fro. Its right arm flopped onto my good
leg, its gloved fingers splayed across my thigh. I lifted its arm by the sleeve and set
its hand in its own lap.
The jingle of the bells that hung from the horse’s bridle tolled the passing of
my dreams: never a home nor children, never a man to love me. Near the village
green, I saw Ger Malins with a girl of fourteen, a girl whole of limb. Ger looked away
as we jangled past, the scarecrow and I; he stepped away from the girl. My eyes
stung with unshed tears. When another jolt threw the scarecrow’s hand across my
thigh, I let it stay.
“Hurry,” I whispered to the three men leading the horse, but they had their
backs to me. We clattered on, leaving the village behind. At a lone cottage at the far