JOHN ORMOND

My Grandfather and His Apple Tree

Life sometimes held such sweetness for him

As to engender guilt. From the night vein he'd come,

From working in water wrestling the coal,

Up the pit slant. Every morning hit him

Like a journeyof trams between the eyes;

A wild and drinking farm boysobered by love

Of a miller's daughter and a whitewashed cottage

Suddenly to pay rent for. So he'd left the farm

For dark under the fields six days a week

With mandrel and shovel and different stalls,

All light was beckoning. Soon his hands

Untangled a brown garden into near greens.

There was an apple-tree he limed, made sturdy;

The fruit was sweet and crisp upon the tongue

Until it budded temptation in his mouth.

Now he had given up whistling on Sundays,

Attended prayer-meetings, added a concordance

To his wedding Bible and ten children

To the village population. He nudged the line,

Clean-pinafored and collared, glazed with soap,

Every seventh day of rest in Ebenezer;

Shaved on a saturday night to escape the devil.

The sweetness of the apples worried him.

He took a branch of cooker from a neighbour

When he became a deacon, wanting

The best of both his worlds. Clay from the colliery

He thumbed about the hole one afternoon

Grafting the sour to sweetness, bound up

The bleeding white of junction with brad strips

Of working flannel-shirt and belly-bands

To join the two in union. For a time

After the wound healed the sweetness held,

The balance tilted towards an old delight.

But in the time that I remember him

(His wife had long since died, I never saw her)

The sour half took over. Every single apple

Grew - across twenty Augusts - bitter as wormwood.

He'd sit under the box-tree, his pink gums

(Between the white moustache and goatee beard)

Grinding thin slices that his jack-knife cut,

Sucking for sweetness vainly. It had gone,

Gone. I heard him mutter

Quiet Welsh oaths as he spat the gall-juice

Into the seeding onion-bed, watched him toss

The big core into the spreading nettles.

)

G