Degrees of Heat

by Isaac Newton, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

Hannah smelled the rick before she saw it. She had come out at five to the dairy with the pails, and the air in the yard was cool and grey, and through it, under the smell of the cows, came something sweet and brown, like the floor of a malting house or a loaf left too long at the oven's back.

The rick stood in the stackyard behind the barn, where it had stood eleven days. They had carried the long meadow on a Saturday with the sky coming over black from Grantham way, every cart and every hand, Fenby swearing at the horses, and they had got it in before the rain. She had been pleased with that. She had given the men their ale and said the hay was in and the hay was safe.

Now the rick had sunk at the shoulders, a full foot, so that the thatch sat on it like a hat too large. Fenby was already there in his shirt. He had the long iron out of the cart shed, the one with the ring at the end, and he had driven it in at the waist of the rick at first light, as she would have told him to, and now he was drawing it out again with both hands.

He held it out to her without a word. She put her palm flat on the last yard of it. She took her hand away, and put it back, and took it away.

"Since when?" she said.

"I smelled it Thursday, mistress. I thought it was the new hay sweating."

"It is sweating."

"Yes, mistress."

It was too hot to keep her hand on. She knew what that meant and so did he. Twenty loads of hay, the winter's feed for the cows and the ewes, and the carting of it, and the mowers' wages, and the ale; and if it went, the barn beside it, and if the barn went, she did not like to think further than the barn.

"We'll cut it open," Fenby said. "Today. Get it down and spread it."

"In this wind?"

He looked at the tops of the elms. The wind was in the west and freshening, and the barn stood east of the rick, and the house east of the barn.

"Get Benjamin up," she said. "And fill every bucket in the place from the pond, and the cheese tub. And wet the sacks." She turned to go in. Then she said, because she had been going to say it for some while and it was easier said with her back to him: "And I'll fetch my son."

---

He was in the little room at the top of the stairs with the shutters closed and a bar of sun coming through the crack between them onto the wall. He did not look round when she came in. He was standing at the shutter with an egg held up to the crack between thumb and finger, so that the sun came through the shell and lit it from within, pink, with a dark shape at one end and a fine red thread running out from it like the root of a weed.

"Isaac."

"A moment." He turned the egg a little. He wrote something on the wall with a pencil of lead, beside a column of other things written there, and then he looked at her. "Yes?"

She knew the egg. It was from under the speckled hen in the cart shed, who had been sitting nine days. He would put it back. He always put them back, and the hen never seemed to know.

He was twenty-three. He had come home from Cambridge in the first summer of the sickness and gone back in the spring and come home again when it returned, and in all that time she did not think he had been beyond the orchard wall a dozen times except to go to Grantham for books. He ate when the food was put in front of him and sometimes not then. There were marks on the walls of this room, and on the plaster in the hall, and once she had found a sundial cut into the stone of the south wall that she was sure had not been there when he was a boy, and then remembered that it had.

"The new rick's heating," she said. "We'll have to open it."

She expected him to nod and turn back to the egg. She had expected that coming up the stairs and had not minded it, or had told herself she did not. But he opened his shirt at the neck and put the egg inside it, against his skin, as he did when he carried them back across the yard, and came past her to the stairhead.

"How hot?"

"Too hot to hold the iron."

"How long was the iron in?"

"I don't know. Since first light."

"Then it's had time to come to the heat of the place it's in," he said, already going down. "Good."

---

Fenby did not like it. Hannah could see him not liking it in the way he stood, with his weight back and his arms crossed, while her son walked twice round the rick with his hands behind him and then put his face close to the hay at the waist and breathed in.

"Where's the heart of it?"

"Middle, I'd say," said Fenby. "Low down. Where it was wettest. We put the last loads on top of the wet."

Isaac had gone before he finished, and he came back from the house with his arms full. He had a crock of butter from the dairy, and three tallow candles, and a lump of beeswax the size of a walnut that Hannah had been keeping for the oak chest. And under his arm the brimstone, a yellow cake of it, from the shelf in the barn where they kept the scab dressing for the sheep.

He took an ash pole from the woodpile, a straight one, as long as the iron, and cut the bark off the last span of it with his knife. Close by the tip he cut four small hollows, round the pole and not along it, so that none lay deeper in than another, each the depth of a fingernail, and pressed into the first a pellet of butter, and into the next a pellet of tallow, and then the wax, and last a chip of brimstone that he broke off the cake with his heel. He did it quickly, the way she had seen him as a child build his mills and his water clocks, with no wasted turn of the hand. He did not explain what he was doing and she did not ask.

"Make me a way for this," he said to Fenby, "with the iron. Then draw the iron out and I'll put this in its place."

Fenby looked at Hannah.

"Do as he says."

The pole went in where the iron had been, nearly to the heart of the rick. Isaac marked the time by the sun on the barn wall and sat down on the edge of the water trough with his hands between his knees to wait.

Benjamin had come out by then, fifteen, still buttoning his coat, and Mary behind him, and little Hannah, who was not little any longer but was still called so. Hannah set them to carrying water. The pond was low with the summer and the buckets came up green. They stood them in a line along the foot of the barn wall and laid the wet sacks over the cheese tub. Then there was nothing to do but stand about in the yard, and the smell of baking hay came and went on the wind, and she found she was angry and could not have said with whom.

She went and stood by the trough.

"You'll not make it cooler by knowing how hot it is."

"No," he said. "But I'll know how hot it is."

"And then?"

"And then I'll know." He looked up at her, and it was the old look, the one he had had at nine and at fourteen and had now, as though she had asked him why the sun rose. Then something moved in his face and he said, more gently than she was used to: "If it is past the brimstone it should be opened now, whatever the wind. If it is short of the wax it can wait. Fenby will tell you the same with his hand, but his hand can't tell you how fast it's climbing. I want to read it twice."

She thought of the year she had brought him home from the school at Grantham to learn the farm, and found him under a hedge with a book while the sheep were in Widow Tompson's corn, and paid the fine to the manor court, and paid it again at the next court for the pigs. She had told herself then that he was idle. It had taken her a long time to understand that he was not idle at all.

---

At noon Fenby drew the pole out and laid it across the top of the trough, and they all came to look.

The butter was gone. Its hollow was empty and the wood around it dark and greasy. The tallow was gone. The beeswax had kept its shape but had gone glassy all over and slumped on its lower side, like snow on a south roof. The brimstone sat in its hollow yellow and dry, exactly as he had put it.

Isaac touched the wax with the back of his knife. It took the mark.

"Soft through," he said. He turned the pole round and on its butt he cut two strokes with his knife, a short one and a long one, and then a third between them, very near the short. Then he sat and looked at the strokes, as though there were something between them that the rest of them could not see.

"Well?" said Hannah.

"It's past the wax melting. Just. It's well short of the brimstone." He was quiet a moment. "It is not burning. There's no fire in it at all."

"There will be," Fenby said, "when you open it to the air."

"Yes." Isaac did not seem to disagree. "Yes, I think so. The heat is in the hay, not in a fire. Where does it come from?" He was not asking Fenby. He was not, she thought, asking any of them. "Hay is cut grass. It was cut a fortnight since. It is dead."

Fenby laughed, short. "It's not dead if it's wet," he said. "Wet hay's living. Anyone could tell you that." Then, because the young master was looking at him with an attention he had perhaps never had from anyone in his life, he went red and said: "My father said so."

Isaac nodded slowly. He cut fresh pellets of butter and tallow and wax and began pressing them into the hollows again.

"Mother," he said, without looking up. "When will you open it?"

The wind was still in the west. She stood with her face in it.

"At sundown," she said. "It drops at sundown in July. It always has."

That was the truth, and it was her reason. She knew too that it gave him his second reading, and she let that be.

---

The afternoon went slowly. The children sat in the shade of the barn. Fenby and Benjamin sharpened the hay knives on the wheel, long broad blades with the handle set crosswise at the top, and laid them out on the stones. Twice Hannah went and put her hand flat on the rick, low down where the heart was, and both times it was warm under the outer hay, warm the way a beast's side is warm, and it seemed to her the second time warmer than the first. The smell had turned from new bread to something darker, like burnt sugar at the bottom of a pan.

Isaac did not move from the trough except once. He took the egg out of his shirt and held it up between his eye and the sun, cupping it in both hands, and looked a long time. Then he went across to the cart shed and put it back under the speckled hen, and came back and sat down, and looked at the rick, and at the sun on the barn wall, and at nothing.

At sundown the elms stood still. Fenby drew the pole.

The butter was gone and the tallow gone. The wax was gone too, entirely, run out of its hollow and down the wood a finger's length in a hard brown tear. The brimstone sat in its place, yellow, dry, the shape he had broken it.

Isaac cut a fourth stroke on the butt, a little longer than the third. He looked at the four strokes. Then he stood up and put the pole against the barn wall, carefully, out of the way, as a man puts down something that is not his.

"Open it," he said. "From the top. Slowly."

---

Fenby went up the ladder with Benjamin after him, and they stripped the thatch and threw it down, and began to cut.

They cut in from the top in blocks, as one cuts a cheese. The first blocks were green-gold and smelled of the meadow. The next were brown, and warm in the hand. Hannah stood at the foot with the wet sacks over her arm and Mary and young Hannah behind her with the buckets. The smell rose up from the opened top and filled the yard, and the men were in it to the waist, and then to the chest. A thin pale smoke stood up in the windless air, straight as a string.

"Mistress," Fenby said from the top. His voice had changed.

The hay under his knife was black-brown, the colour of tobacco, and when he levered a block of it up there was a hollow beneath, the size of a bread oven, where the hay had shrunk into itself. Hannah could see it from the ground. For a moment it was only a dark hole. Then the air went into it.

It glowed. Not a flame at first, a red that came up out of the black all at once, the way an ember brightens when you blow on it, and then there was flame, small and pale and almost invisible in the dusk, licking up the sides of the hollow. Fenby shouted. Benjamin threw a sack. Hannah handed up the sacks one after the other as fast as they would come, and the men beat and smothered, and the buckets went up, and the hollow hissed and stank and smoked.

Hannah was too busy to look at anything but the sacks and the hands that took them. But once, turning for the next, she saw her son.

He was not at the rick. He had a bucket in each hand and he was standing at the corner of the barn, where the rick lay on one side of him and the house on the other, with his face lifted to the tops of the elms, watching to see if they moved. He stood quite still. He had put himself, she saw, exactly in the one place from which he could see the fire and the wind and the house all at once, and she thought, without wanting to, of a boy of nine in the doorway of the rectory at North Witham, white and shaking, telling her and Mr Smith that he would burn them, and the house over them.

The elms did not move. The fire went down under the sacks. They cut out the heart of the rick, black and smoking, and pitched it out onto the stubble beyond the stackyard wall, and spread it thin with forks, and threw the last of the water on it. Then they took down the rest, block by block, and spread that too, and by the time it was dark they had saved two-thirds of it, and the barn was standing, and Fenby sat down on the trough and put his face in his hands and laughed.

---

She could not sleep. Towards midnight she put on her shoes and a shawl and went out with a lantern to look at the stubble, in case.

There was no spark anywhere. The spread hay lay in long low swathes, dark under the stars. Someone had been out there before her: there were footprints in the dew along the swathes, and at the end of them, laid flat on the ground where the black heart of the rick had been thrown, the ash pole with its four strokes.

She did not pick it up. She set the lantern down and knelt where the hay was thickest, and after a moment she pushed her bare arm into it, to the elbow, as she had pushed it into a hundred ewes at lambing, in the cold, in the dark, to turn a lamb.

It was warm in there. Not hot now. Warm, close, damp, exactly like that.

She knelt a long time with her arm in the hay and the lantern beside her, while the warmth went on coming up out of it into her hand.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem sextum Nōnās Octōbrēs (2 October 2026), ab Isaacō Newtōnō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Isaac Newton, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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