By Hannah Christensen
Lou stormed before the council and pushed half-grown Dwight at the elders. “Just look at him!” she scolded. “Cut and bleeding all over! What will it take to persuade you that those brambles are dangerous? A child losing his eyes over a few of your precious berries?”
The headman soberly inspected the scratches. “Where were you playing, child?” he asked.
“By the blackberries on the stream bank.” He shuffled his feet.
“And what has your mother told you about playing on the bank?”
“Never mind that,” Lou interrupted. “How are we to keep our children safe when we’re surrounded by thorns?”
The headman leaned heavily on his staff, right leg twisted under him. “It was less than a handful of years since the council approved the removal of the thorn tree hedge around the village. Prudence would that we maintained some type of barrier.”
Despite Lou’s charges and protests, the council refused to issue a decree, but sent her away while they consulted together.
“She’s a fool if she thinks a few berry bushes are endangering that boy,” said Garvin. “But I do have to admit that maintaining a bramble hedge is harder since we got rid of the trees. They just keep spreading.” He stroked his bushy red beard with his knife.
“Your problem, Garvin, is that you have gooseberries. You should try roses instead,” said Alvin, a council member with a growing bald spot.
“Anyway, we may not need them anymore. We haven’t had the problems with the wolves you predicted when the trees went.”
“But we also spend more time guarding against them,” pointed out Alvin. “Before, we could rest confident with only two men in each breach even during the winter nights.”
No decree was issued that day, but Lou did not give up her campaign. She not only continued to bring complaints to the council, but talked loudly about the matter to everyone in the village. Scrapes, splinters, low visibility, long detours to journey out of the village, extra labor—all were laid to the account of the bramble hedge. And as complaints are contagious, soon a great many other villagers were also complaining about the bramble hedge. The more people complained, the more they began to dislike the stretches of thorn bushes village law required each border dweller to maintain. By the next spring, the mind of the council began to sway.
Alvin came home one evening thumping down the path like a bear just coming out of hibernation. “Well, they’ve done it,” he told his neighbor, Haydon. “The hedge is stricken from the law.” He leaned heavily on the boundary stone. “What are they thinking? We’re breaching our own defenses! And even if the fools were right about not needing the protection, don’t they realize what else they’re throwing out?” He shook his balding head. “Some of my fondest boyhood memories include berrying.”
Haydon laughed quietly as he worked mulch into his black raspberry patch. “Bear in the thicket, yes, I remember. I can’t think Lou would approve of that game.”
Alvin snorted. “No, but her Dwight would have not problem with it. And that woman is the other part of the problem. She won’t be content with this victory, you mark my words. She wants to wage nothing less than full war on these bushes.”
Haydon pulled himself up from his work. His cheek bore red lines where thorns had grazed his skin. “Then we’ll have to work harder than ever on defenses. On our own borders, for anyone who may follow her lead because of the extra work, and reminding everyone of the value of the brambles.”
“It’s not going to be easy,” said Alvin.
“But it will be worthwhile,” answered Haydon.
As the summer progressed, the burden of those promoting the bramble hedge grew as they took on more and more responsibility. There had always been some villagers who had needed help with their brambles, like Blind Widow Blenda. Now, with hedge maintenance optional, more and more found it too much work to keep up. Others worked to maintain their stretch, but not as diligently as before, while still others ripped out all the thorny bushes edging their property.
Haydon picked fewer black raspberries than he usually did. With fewer bushes around, his were raided more often by little fingers. He just smiled when he saw the backs of children disappearing from his yard.
One day Widow Blenda turned down Haydon’s help when he came dressed to prune.
“Ah, Haydon, I’ve appreciated all you’ve done, but Garvin is coming by to help with the bushes.” She twisted a roll of fabric in her skirt.
“Councilman Garvin?” Haydon’s eyebrows raised. Garvin had been among the first to strip his property of any thorns. “How…civic minded of him.”
“Yes…” Her eyebrows peaked together.
“Yes, indeed.” Lou pushed her way in. “A thousand times more than you.”
Garvin came behind the house right after her, armed with saw and clip and fire.
“But the protection of the thorns is—”
“Protection,” scoffed Lou. “Removing the bushes is protection. Blenda doesn’t want an innocent child to get blinded from a wicked back-lashing thorn branch. She knows what that feels like.”
“No thorns took her eyes. Or have you forgotten that summer of fevers? The bushes had nothing to do with those. Besides the virtues of their fruit, the bushes serve to protect us from wild beasts.”
This time Garvin laughed. “Our hunters say that wolves are getting hard to find. I wouldn’t worry about it.”
“Not wolves, primarily. Wild pigs.”
“Piff!” said Lou. “That’s nothing to worry about.”
“The headman would not agree with that, and he should know.”
Lou pinched her lips up. Everyone knew about the headman’s bad leg. “Maybe they used to be a problem. Not one has been seen for decades around the village, and these days we certainly know better than to go searching for them out in the forest.”
Nothing Haydon said would prevail, and when he met with his neighbor that evening, Alvin was no less discouraged.
“They call my hands blood-stained when they are marked with berry juice,” he groaned.
“They speak as fools,” Haydon comforted him. “They cannot help but see the truth, even if they refuse to believe it.”
As the number of thorn bushes dwindled, the number of animals ranging the village increased. Soon there was not a garden but felt the ravages of hungry deer.
“Where is your protection now?” mocked those who would remove all brambles to those who still maintained hedges. “The deer are no less in your gardens than ours.” They refused to see that their breech had affected all.
That winter the headman died. Slowly, somberly, the villagers removed his name-stone from the commons ring and bore it with his body out to the cairn hill. Pushing aside the snow, they laid the worn body to rest in a trough cut in the frozen ground and piled it high with stones. Wolves howled from the woods as they topped the cairn with the name-stone and filed by to pay their last respects.
Food grew short and wolf hunts grew many. The longer winter stretched, the more Lou wove worry and discontent into complaints about the hedge. By the time the hold of cold and ice over the land began to crumble, she led the villagers before the council in an effective protest against bramble bushes. All thorns were banned from the village.
Alvin returned home bowed with defeat.
“Don’t lose heart,” Haydon encouraged. “The village needs our hedge no less now than before.”
“What shall I do?” Alvin cried. “I am a councilman, and the council has passed judgment against brambles.”
“Do what is right. They have passed judgment to their own doom.”
But when a band came with shovel and axe and fire, Alvin shut himself into his house and let them pass. They laid waste his holly, and clambered over the boundary stone into Haydon’s plot to attack his bushes. Haydon protested and tried to pull them back, but they thrust him away roughly and destroyed his bushes as well.
That night, Haydon crept over to a villager who had admitted to him to maintaining a small black raspberry patch just outside the tree line. Gently, he removed a runner to take home and transplant.
Alvin watched his neighbor with worry as tree after bush with any type of thorns was destroyed, first in the village, and then in the forest surrounding the village. Haydon offered him raspberries of his own, but he hurriedly turned away. “No good,” he murmured. Then one day a mob boiled down the street. He ducked into the back and leaned around the boundary stone. “Haydon,” he rasped. “They’re coming. You have to get rid of them. Haydon!” He began to pass beyond the stone, but a hand held him back. It was his son, red in the face from running. “You can no longer help him. You must get away,” he said, and pulled his father away, keeping the houses between them and the street.
“Berry fiend!” screamed Lou’s voice. “We know who’s been slipping forbidden fruit to our children and sprinkling its seed in our fields!”
Distance muffled Haydon’s answer, but did not blot out the screams of the crowd.
“Child hater!”
“Thorn monger!”
“Bane of the village!”
“You don’t deserve to live here!”
When the violence finally died down, all that was left of Hayden’s house was a heap of embers in a black smear of land. His name stone was smashed and thrown into the river outside the village boundaries.
No one dared to speak in favor of the thorn hedge that had once filled the now barren strip around the village.
No one dared to be seen with the smallest gooseberry leaf.
The hedge destroyers congratulated each other, bragging of their improved safety. They pointed to their successful wolf hunts as proof that the hedge was no longer needed. Soon wolves were almost non-existent in the area, and they assured each other a solution for the deer would not take much longer.
The deer did begin to leave—as the wild boars moved in.
A dozen years later, Alvin was hurrying home to the room he shared in the common fort just north of where the council used to meet before it grew dangerous to walk the streets alone. The outer cottages stood abandoned and tumbled, the stones of the commons ring mostly shattered. No stones had been added for over a year now. Only walled gardens survived, and many of those had been rooted under and collapsed. Alvin searched the shadows, gripping his spear, though he was just as likely to find a boar brazenly strolling the streets. Yesterday the party sent out to find a solution to the failing well in the fort was supposed to come back and meet with the council. They had gone as far as the former hedge, looking in vain for signs of the party. One by one the council members had returned and now Alvin followed suite, leaving behind only Garvin. As he passed his former house, he paused. Sitting on the doorstep was a small covered basket. Puzzled, he stopped to pick it up and poke a finger inside.
“Find something?” boomed Garvin from behind him.
Alvin started and slammed the lid shut. “No, nothing.”
“We’ll find an answer yet.” The council man stumped away, favoring his right leg.
“The answer,” Alvin murmured, looking out toward the old village boundary and fingering the lid of the basket with a purple-red finger. “Yes, the answer.”
Octopencil 