The man under the pear tree

I was only going to close my eyes until the porridge cooled.

That was the plan. I had been cutting since the light was grey, and when the women came up the path with the jugs and the bread, I took my bowl to the shade of the pear tree and lay back against the roots, and the next thing I knew a painter from Brussels had set me down with my mouth open and my legs flung out like a dropped pair of breeches. My hat has rolled. My jacket is undone. Every soul who looks at this picture for four hundred and sixty years will know I snore.

The others did not wake me. That is the thing I would like recorded. Jan sat right beside my head sawing at the loaf and passing out cheese, Grete spooned out the porridge, someone poured, and not one of them kicked my boot. They let me lie there in the middle of the meal like a fallen sheaf. Over at the edge of the field the lads went on swinging their scythes in the standing wheat, which is taller than they are, and a woman came down the cut path with sheaves on her shoulder, and nobody said, look at him.

From where I lie I can see a great deal I never noticed standing up. The stubble in rows, the stooks leaning together, a cart with hay going home. The church tower in its trees. Beyond the village, a strip of water with ships on it and haze over the far shore. Small figures at the pond. The whole country gone gold and slow, and none of it hurrying except the swallows.

Pieter Bruegel painted us in 1565, one of six pictures of the times of the year for a merchant’s house in Antwerp. Five survive, and we are one of them. He could have put me in the wheat with a scythe like the lads. He chose to lay me here instead, the one children point at, a hand fallen across my belly.

They will come back to the field soon. Grete will bump my shoulder with her knee. Until then I am a man asleep in the best seat in the Low Countries, and I would not give it up for a guilder.

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