The Mulberry Bush

(CW: death, child death, imprisonment, violence)

We wear our uniform without shame for our daily march. Your starfish hand is so small in mine, just big enough to grip tight to my index finger, your body tucked into the starched wool of my skirts. Skirts made from the same material your trousers are made from, your jacket too; they match everyone else who makes up our rank and file, each of us cut from the same cloth in a parade of grey as we walk the prison yard. We start the day with our usual song. The mulberry tree, our substitute maypole, is beautiful this time of year.

Here we go round the mulberry bush, the mulberry bush, the mulberry bush…

Chill-flushed cheeks are a common addition to the regalia when we wake before the sun, and when you shiver I tell you to stand tall, that the sting is nature’s way of elevating us to people of station, placing us among the Ladies and Lords with their rouged cheeks. Why else would it allow us to see such a radiant tree, in its own finery of verdant green leaves and vibrant ruby berries. Why else would I have named you George, the name of so many Kings and nobles. Then, you had seen a butterfly flee the bountiful canopy, and had stopped our song briefly to laugh. It broke my heart to stop you from toddling after it, you with your little legs and huge capacity for wonder, but the guards had already taken notice of the drop in the rhyme, and so I scooped you up in my arms and sang all the louder.

… Here we go round the mulberry bush, so early in the morning.

Back in our bunks, another woman in our caged flock had snorted her derision after hearing the story of our noble house of two, telling us that the Queen found rouge vulgar unless worn by performers. You had looked at her for a long time with your wide brown eyes. Monica, she had been called. Turning back to me, you quietly told me that you shouldn’t have liked to be a Lord anyway, that instead you would like to be a butterfly, to live forever fluttering in and out of the tree in the yard. The next day, you presented Monica with a dandelion you found between the stone slabs, and invited her to be a butterfly, too.

That night was the first night since her little girl had been buried that Monica hadn’t cried herself to sleep.

***

By the time the winter chill struck, she too had succumbed to the weakness that took her baby, and all we could do was hope they were buried side by side.

Some butterflies are too fragile for frost.

Still, even one voice down, the regiment’s song must go on; I wonder if your father ever has to do the same, wherever he is, still singing even as the missing voice of a fallen comrade aches like a lost tooth. I wonder if he knows what became of us, locked up here for the crime of refusing to let you starve.

Here we go round the mulberry bush, the mulberry bush, the mulberry bush…

Your face is gaunt and pale this morning, the redness of the morning flush replaced by your little nose turning blue, no matter how much I hide you in the folds of my dress. My own skin feels like cold marble.

I tell you it’s just Jack Frost and his games, pinching at our skin for his amusement. His humour is different to ours; having always lived in the cold, and all his jokes are barbed and biting, but he means no malice. You suggested through rasping coughs that perhaps you could be his friend, and show him softer games. I, unable to feel my feet any longer, told you that seemed like a very sure way to thaw a heart.

… Here we go round the mulberry bush, so early in the morning.

Your little body goes rigid in my arms that night. Sweet Maria tries to rouse you, to rouse me, but neither of us move, and no one else moves to help her, watching with eyes that already know what the morning will bring. Her own baby, Benny, wails in her arms. He’s still too young to understand.

Winter sun streams like a searchlight through the bars the following day, and hands descend with it, pulling you from me. Your hands, frozen where they had knotted into my blouse, refused to loosen their grip. Your soul still wrapped in your earthly cocoon, you refuse to let go of me, and I fight to keep ahold of you in turn, screaming until my throat tears, until the hands gripping me tear chunks out of my hair and rip my clothes, until I draw blood when I bite one of the guards, until I feel the brutal force of the truncheon hit my skull—

***

I awake when the song calls me back from darkness. I stand by the mulberry tree, in the prison yard, its branches like bars trying to cage the clouds.

Our little regiment, walking again, surrounds me on all sides, but they do not look at me. I march up to the nearest warden, going to fling myself at his chest, to demand he take me to my baby, but I stumble as I make no contact with his form, as though he were simply an image printed on mist. He shudders, but even as I pick myself up from the floor, screaming for him to look at me, to listen, and even eventually to punish me for my continued insubordination, he is not moved.

The yard is packed with bodies, the guards and the guarded, and yet I am entirely alone.

As the song starts, I can do nothing but weep, on my knees beside the wiry skeleton of the tree.

Here we go round the mulberry bush, the mulberry bush, the mulberry bush…

As I wail, my black hair loose and matted like tangled yarn as it falls over my face, little Benny stumbles over his feet in the parade, barely able to warble out the song.

… Here we go round the mulberry bush, so early in the morning.

All butterflies are too fragile for frost.

***

I sleep.

When I wake, time has passed for the living that does not pass for me. And, each time I wake, I look for you. The horse-drawn wagons turn into metal vessels of smoke and din, no animals in sight, just the growl of whatever drives them forward.

The people change too, as walls rise and fall, the inmates become strangers in oddly shaped uniforms, and the wardens carry odd implements that grow ever-stranger, until one day there are conical shaped metal boxes shouting tinny commands from atop barbed-wire topped fences.

All the while, the pattern remains the same, as constant as the changing seasonal garb of the tree that I cannot escape. I wake under the branches. I walk the route our grey regiment once had. And when I sing our song, I sleep once more, until the cycle repeats.

Forsaken, forlorn, forgotten, I am the only one who marches these grounds anymore as we once did, the only one who sings for the women and children who once sang with me. Now, men shuffle past me across the yard towards where they will be put to work, instead.

All the while, I look for you. I listen for where you may have been buried, beg them to release you, scream to be heard only for my words to be whisked away by the wind.

When I can take no more of making my pleas to people who only shiver when my pale fingers brush them and to the tree that will not let me go, I sing, and then I sleep once more.

***

When I awake again, I do so under a sky that dawn is breaking upon.

Orange and pink mingles in candied clouds, gathering to give the night sky and her stars some privacy as she slinks away, making her escape just as the sun peers over the distant horizon.

I watch, and feel nothing but despair as I once again stare down the barrel of brutal routine.

I will look for you. I will not find you. I will wail. I will sing. And then I will sleep.

I had given up asking why I had been abandoned to such a fate long ago.

But, as I look away from the sunrise, I see something new.

It descends on tiny gossamer wings, coloured a delicate daffodil yellow so light it is almost translucent, speckled with flecks of red as it descends towards the branches and their freshly birthed leaves.

Had it survived the frost?

I hold my hand out to it, and it does not move away. Moving my palm underneath where it perches in the foliage, I dream I can almost feel it in my palm, miniscule legs tickling my skin.

No, it had not survived. It could not have. But something must have, ensuring this new little one could be born. Spring itself had persevered through the gloom to bring about new life.

Even the densest frost cannot stop spring’s return, and with it have come the butterfly soldiers who push its front line ever forward until winter is banished for another year.

My soul tears asunder, wide enough to fill with love all over again.

I would not find you in my waking. I would not find you when I sing. I would not find you even if I were to find your bones. All this time, I had been looking for the cocoon, when I should have been looking for the butterfly, the metamorphosis. The next stage.

This time, I do not sing. I do not sleep. I reach for your soul, forever entwined with mine, and fly on gossamer wings from the mulberry bush, never to wake beneath its boughs again.