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A Wearing Of Days
It was the apple trees as jarred him the most, for he
knew Sam would have mentioned them to him if he had thought of it. But
there they stood, fully laden, in the frosty late autumn morning,
already dropping their ripe burden unnoticed into the brown leaves
underneath. A waste of good provisions, he thought automatically, never
considering that the waste and regret were so much greater than that of
a few bushels of fruit. But it helped, somehow, to consider the smaller
picture, for when he thought beyond that, the hurt opened up wider than
he could bear to acknowledge.
All of a fluster Sam had been that day, bursting in on him as he
peaceably enjoyed an afternoon’s pipe alongside of the kitchen fire.
Daisy had gone to the Cottons’ on an errand, so it had been only him at
home at Number Three, Bagshot Row, as his son had flung the door open,
wide-eyed, and rattled off some improbable tale of he and Mr. Frodo
having to leave the Shire, and some other grim folk who might come by a-lookin’
for them. He hadn’t had much time to take it all in before Sam was gone,
leaving him shaken and feeling as if the sun had suddenly taken to
rising in the west, and that the Shire was a far more empty and lonely
place than it had been just that very morning.
And those creatures as Sam had warned him about, they had come by, just
as he said. It was Mr. Frodo that they had been asking about, at least
as far as he could tell. They weren’t any sort of hobbit, and he doubted
if they were Men, either. But whatever manner of being they were, he
answered as briefly and noncommittally as possible, and felt the very
blood in his heart slow down with the fear of them. Whatever sort of
trouble his son and Mr. Frodo had run into was not likely to blow over
anytime soon, so he was not surprised when a couple of weeks went by,
and he saw no sign of them.
&&&&&
There were those in Hobbiton who questioned him, some more tactfully
than others. It was no mystery that there had been strange creatures
abroad, enquiring after Mr. Frodo, and when he and Sam had disappeared,
there was more than one ancient who nodded his head knowingly, and
mentioned Mr. Bilbo’s unseemly disappearance once again, and opined that
it never did any good to be cavorting out of the Shire, no ways.
That was an opinion that was never expressed in the gaffer’s presence,
however. His friends had asked a pertinent question or two, and then
settled for giving the elder Gamgee nonverbal support, such as making
sure that he got to the Green Dragon from time to time, and stopping by
Number Three on all sorts of unlikely errands, just to keep a closer eye
on him.
But the days had worn into weeks, and the weeks into months, and still
the home burrowed into the hill at Bag End remained empty. Daisy had not
neglected it, but had faithfully aired and dusted it at least once a
week, for who knew? Any day their dear Sam and Mr. Frodo could come
tramping over the hill; dusty and footsore, to be sure, but glad to see
the well-loved smial again, and more than ready for a cozy fire and a
hot mug of something strong. So Daisy kept the firewood neatly stacked,
and turned it over, just to make sure the spiders did not decide to take
up residence there. She kept an eye on the larder as well, and the
makings of a quick meal contained within and always ready, for it was
not too likely that any decent sort of food could be found on the wild
roads beyond the Shire.
Hamfast Gamgee had been at a loss, however, and without purpose, until
he realized that the gardens of Bag End were bereft of a gardener. A
master, there was none at the moment, but for the gardens to be without
a gardener would never do, lest Mr. Frodo come home to wilderness and
ruin, and that was quite unthinkable.
It had been many years since he had set his old bones to the task of the
hoeing, the digging, the weeding, and the stooping over newly planted
seed that was necessary for his former trade. Yet it kept his days full,
so he did not regret, no, not at all, the ache of his back of a night,
and how it was hard to straighten up by evening, when it was time to
make his way home in the chilly early dusk.
&&&&&
The strange hoarse call high over his head caused him to look up, into
the somber grey sky. Storks, he remembered Mr. Bilbo had once told him
those long ungainly birds were called. They nested somewhere in the
north, but wintered in southern lands. The Shire only saw them as they
traveled to and fro, and the gaffer wondered, all of a sudden, if his
Sam and Mr. Frodo had ended up where the storks went. The chilly winds
never blew there, leastwise that’s what he vaguely remembered from Mr.
Bilbo’s tales, and he abruptly jammed his hands deep into his pockets,
and heartily wished that he had taken greater heed to Mr. Bilbo’s
outlandish stories. But who knew that his son had been fated to end up
that far from home?
Refusing to look up at the foreign birds again, he scowled, and fiercely
kicked a pebble in the road, on his way home from Bag End.
&&&&&
He had been dead set against it, no mistake, when he first had realized
Mr. Frodo’s intentions towards his son. His Samwise had been over the
moon about the young master ever since he was a fauntling, that was no
mystery to him, but he had never imagined that the young stripling’s
feelings would be returned by the gentlehobbit. Apparently, however,
they were; and he had tried his very best to hate Mr. Frodo for it, for
taking his son’s established future away and giving him naught but
insecurity and shame and the certainty of a broken heart in the end.
But try as he would, he couldn’t quite manage to hate the young slight
hobbit who had come to live at Mr. Bilbo’s smial years ago, with his
awkward bookish ways and his deep eyes filled with more loneliness than
Hamfast had ever seen before, in all his days. He had never taken Mr.
Bilbo for much in the way of a parent, but surprisingly, the young teen
had thrived under the older hobbit’s offhand yet genuine care.
And these days? There was no gainsaying but that the loneliness had been
gone for many a year and it was his Sam as did that. And as for Sam
himself, well, the gaffer knew happiness when he saw it, and he had come
to admit to himself that, no matter how improbable it seemed to him, Sam
had found exactly that, and there was nothing that he could wish for Sam
that Sam didn’t already have. ‘Twas a strange world, and no two ways
about it, but finding one’s place in it was all as really mattered.
&&&&&
But that had been last spring, when the grass had lain thick and lush on
the hills, and the apples had been but tiny hard green knobs hidden in
the heart of the fragile blossoms. And now the ripe fruit fell,
heedless, and his son was gone. A chill wind blew suddenly from the
east, and Hamfast turned back to his humble smial. The days would be
long and dreary until spring should come again.
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