yards
to my left two men ran side by side. They were farm labourers who had been repairing the fence along the fields
southern edge where it skirts the road. The same distance
beyond them was the motorist, John Logan, whose car was
banked on the grass verge with its door, or doors, wide open
Knowing what I know now, it's odd to evoke the figure of Jed
Parry directly ahead of me, emerging from a line of beeches
on the far side of the field a quarter of a mile away, runni
into the wind. To the buzzard Parry and I were tiny forms
our white shirts brilliant against the green, rushing towards
each other like lovers, innocent of the grief this entanglement
would bring. The encounter that would unning
minutes away, its enormity disguised from us not oly by
the barrier of time but by the colossus in the centre of the
field that drew us in with the power of a terrible ratio that
set fabulous magnitude against the puny human distress at
its base.
What was Clarissa doing? She said she walked quik
towards the centre of the field. I dont know how she resisted
the urge to run. By the ime it happened- the event I
am about to describe, the fall- she had almost caught us
up and was well placed as an observer, unencumbered
participation, by the ropes and the shouting, and by
fatal lack of
co-operatio
What I describe is shaped by what
Clarissa saw too, by what we told each other in the time
of obsessive re-examination that followed: the aftermath, an
appropriate term for what happened in a field waiting for its
early summer mowing. The aftermath, the second crop, the
growth promoted by that first cut in May
I'm holding back, delaying the information. I'm lingering in
the prior moment because it was a time when other outcomes
were still possible; the convergence of six figures in a fat
green space has a comforting geometry from the buzzards
Derspective, the knowable, limited Plane of the snooker table
The initial conditions, the force and the direction of the force,
define all the consequent pathways, all the angles of collision
