Harvest Home Part 12

Justin shook his head. "It's true. You can hear it. And it's one of the best sounds in the world. Thirteen years ago, we had a Waste, and a man would have given his eyeteeth to hear the corn growing then."

"A bad time-the Widow told me about it."

"When you've seen one of those, you never forget it. A drought that leaves every stalk and leaf withered and the earth dry as dust. And if corn won't grow, nothing will. It's a terrible thing to see, bad enough when it happens to you, but worse when it happens to your neighbors, who maybe don't have as much put by as you do. They get to depend on a fellow, Fred and Will and the others." His brow contracted. "And she that brought the drought made them suffer."

"She?"

"Grace Everdeen. As big a fool as G.o.d ever put in Cornwall. She's the one who brought the last Great Waste."

"How did Grace die?"

"She killed herself. As she ought to have."

"How?"

"She threw herself off the Lost Whistle Bridge. Drowned."

Sophie's face clouding over the cream pitcher; no wonder the bridge had unhappy a.s.sociations.

Changing the subject, Justin took pains to lay out for me the economics that welded the village into such a tightly knit community. The individual land t.i.tles dated as far back as the 1650s, the tracts having been portioned out by Gwydeon Penrose and the elders in accordance with the size of the family and the number of males available to farm the land. The acreage thus balanced, everyone worked it in communal fas.h.i.+on. Today, as then, when the corn was finally dried on the stalk, it would be harvested by hand, the ears loaded into wagons and taken over to the granary at Ledyardtown, where the wagons would be weighed with their contents, emptied, and weighed again; the farmers were paid for the difference in weight, their profits depending on the amount of land they tilled.

If the corn went to the granary, I asked, was it all husked first at the husking bee? Justin shook his head. "My fields will be the first to be harvested, and the corn from my south field will be the last to be husked. That's what goes to the Grange for the husking bee."

When I asked why this was so, he shrugged and said, "It's always been that way." He bent and pulled a weed and stuck it in the pocket of his overalls. "It's part of the rights of the Lord."

"And when Worthy becomes the Harvest Lord, then do the rights go to him?" Yes, he said. I replied that from my observations the idea seemed to have little appeal for Worthy Pettinger. Justin's brow contracted again. "He's got no choice in the matter. He's been chosen."

"By Missy."

"Chosen," he repeated stolidly. "Worthy's just got too darn many modern ideas. He doesn't know how lucky he is."

"You've been lucky."

"Sure have. I got my farm and I got Sophie and I've been Harvest Lord. Maybe that's not so much to you, but it's a lot for me."

I pictured again the first time I had seen him, the unknown giant with the hoe in the tilled field. Now, as then, he seemed the human manifestation of the growing process, the descendant of the ancient yeoman who works his land and lays by his crops, who hopes for the best and will take the worst, whose lot in life, good or bad, comes from the land.

He smiled warmly and clapped me on the shoulder. "I've got to be getting back to work. Sophie's mightily appreciative of that drawing. We both thank you."

I said I was glad it had pleased her, and told him of her plan regarding the portrait. Justin smiled. "Well, now, I don't know as I'd make much of a subject. You want me to put on a coat and tie and come sit in your studio?" I explained my method of work, that I would begin some sketches when he had the time, and that I would like to pose him somewhere here on the farm. I would paint at my portable easel, and when he wasn't available I could work at home.

Almost in spite of himself, a light had sprung into his eye. I could see he was both touched by Sophie's gesture and flattered that I would paint the portrait. He shook my hand warmly, and as I looked at his honest face it seemed I saw his honest heart.

He moved down the drive to the pear tree he had set in the ground. He took the shovel leaning against it, and for a moment his hand grasped the slender trunk. I decided then and there that this was how I would paint the farmer Justin Hooke: beside the newly planted pear tree.

I turned and started along the drive to my car, watching the long rows of drying corn as they pa.s.sed my line of vision. Then something caught my eye and I stopped. At the head of one of the rows, leaning against the broken face of a rock, I saw a little figure. At first I thought it must be Missy's doll, or one like it; then I realized it was something else. I picked it up and looked at it. It was about eight inches tall and, though of the doll family, it was entirely different. For while Missy's gaga was merely a child's plaything, this clearly was something far more extraordinary. It looked like a kind of totem, a fetish of some sort, a little corn G.o.d.

In a cornfield? The idea seemed ridiculous, and I wondered if some superst.i.tious farmer, jealous of Justin, was trying to put a country hex on him. I looked back to the barnyard where the men were still working. No one had seen me stop. Tucking the doll inside my jacket, I hurried on my way.

It had been my intention to go to the covered bridge to see whether my true impressions of it had been reflected in paint, or whether I was doing nothing better than a calendar-type reproduction. Driving out along the Old Sallow Road, however, and pa.s.sing the nearer edges of Soakes's Lonesome, I came across the Widow Fortune's buggy parked on the shoulder of the road. A short distance beyond, I saw her black-clad figure making its way through the gra.s.s bordering the woods. I tooted my horn and would have pa.s.sed, but she waved for me to pull over.

"h.e.l.lo," I called, getting out.

"h.e.l.lo yourself. Faired off nice, didn't it? How's your bridge picture?"

"Well, it's a picture of a bridge. Can't say as it's much more."

"You're gettin' awful New England in your tw.a.n.g."

I crossed the gully to meet her, looking into the splint basket on her arm. "What are you after today?"

"Mushrooms is up."

"Are they?"

"All over. Rain brings 'em. Come along, if you like. I'm on a reg'lar expedition."

I ran back to the car, took my keys from the ignition, and slid the little corn doll into the glove compartment and locked it. I locked the doors, then joined the Widow at the edge of the woods. Her face looked warm and moist, and I detected a note of excitement in her air as, with her usual spry step, she started off among the trees, letting me catch up as I might, she with her head down, so that her keen eye should miss no needed herb or plant.

"Elecampane's abundant this year." She bent and broke a sprig from a plant, and held it for me to sniff. "Lovely smell. But we're not lookin' for elecampane today."

"How about toadstools? Can you tell the difference?"

"No difference. Toadstool's a moniker, nothing more. Find an ugly mushroom, folks think it's something a toad might sit on. But they're all mushrooms. Trick is in knowing which from which." She proceeded along, from time to time using her spectacles like a lorgnette, for a closer study of the terrain.

"What do you do with elecampane?" I asked.

"That's what Fred Minerva's takin'."

"What other ingredients?"

She laughed and gave my shoulder a knock. "That'd be tellin', wouldn't it? It's not sal volatile-you can bet your boots."

I hadn't imagined she would give a recipe for medicine any more than she would for hoecake, unless she left one of the ingredients out. She saw a tree around whose base had grown a series of shelf-like formations, pale brown in color, and she hurried to it, knelt, and examined the growths with her hands, nodding, and muttering anxiously to herself. She rummaged in her basket, and when I asked what she was looking for, she "Drat'ted and said she'd forgotten to bring along a knife. I lent her my penknife, and watched as she sc.r.a.ped around the outer edge of several of the growths, catching the parings in her hand. These she slipped into a sc.r.a.p of tinfoil paper, made a twist, and dropped it in her basket. We proceeded on again, and she stopped here and there, once to sc.r.a.pe some sulfur-colored lichens from the bole of a tree, another time-producing Jack Stump's hatchet from her basket-to hack up some pale roots she had unearthed under the layer of decayed leaves and humus around a strange-looking shrub. A novice in the mysteries of herb-gathering, I was fascinated by the variety of material that struck her eye. Once, when she was on her hands and knees feeling about under the pine needles, she pulled me down with her and brought my ear close. Hear, she said; listen to them, they're at work. There were sounds of minute scurryings under the needles, and she pulled them apart to show me the little beetles and worms crawling about, pale, wet, segmented, decomposing nature as fast as they could-pulverizing leaves, gra.s.s, roots, bark, branches, cones, everything- forming the new matter that would fertilize the next generation of growth in the woods.

We went on, farther into Soakes's Lonesome. When I mentioned the Soakeses, and wondered if we might be considered trespa.s.sers, the old lady cried "Faugh!"-an expletive plainly denoting her contempt for the savage 'cross-river' tribe.

We walked along a path where the leaves had drifted in thick windrows, our feet making shus.h.i.+ng sounds among them, while up in the tree branches birds sang. I was unfamiliar with this section of the woods, and I wondered in what direction lay the tall pine, with the blazed path of the grove of white birches. Once I almost started to confide in her the secret of the skeleton in the hollow tree, and of the gray ghost I had seen, but again I feared being laughed at, and most of all by her.

Suddenly, distant shotgun fire reverberated through the trees, a series of m.u.f.fled detonations. "Devils," the Widow muttered. "There's your Soakeses, over t'the river. Killin'. You a hunter? No? Good. Too many hunters."

Now she uttered a little excited cry and dashed ahead of me. When I caught up with her, she was standing beside a large tree and looking down where, close to the base, grew a ring of mushrooms that had sprung up through the ground covering. She quickly knelt and began breaking the stems at the base and handing them to me. I examined one: though it was handsome, it certainly looked like the most poisonous thing nature could provide. The cap was about four inches across, a brilliant red, with small, warty b.u.mps on it. The surface felt sticky, and bits of pine needles had adhered. The stem was white and pulpy-feeling, and the gills on the underside were a delicate formation of pale white. I had never seen the old woman so excited; her face was flushed from her exertions as she demolished the ring little by little. Then she carefully wrapped each mushroom in a piece of tinfoil. When she had finished, she gave me her hand and I helped her to her feet.

"There," she exclaimed with pleasure, dusting her dress and handing me the basket to carry. "I knew we'd find some fly today, if we persevered."

"Fly?"

"Those," pointing to the mushrooms, "are fly agaric." They were called "fly," she explained, because they were once used to kill flies and other insects. If it would kill flies, how about humans? I asked. She laughed.

"I expect it could, you eat enough of them. Or at least they'd make a body mighty sick."

"What do you use them for?"

"A woman always thinks it takes two to keep a secret, but I'm here to say I think it takes one." She touched my arm and we proceeded back along the way we had come. At one point, we pa.s.sed a spot where some more mushrooms grew; she pointed them out but scorned touching them. "Now there's some little mites that only a fool'd touch." Small and white, with dome-shaped caps, these were known as the Destroying Angel, and were deserving of their name. As for the red-topped beauties in the basket-those, she hastened to say, properly used could cure chilblains or, as in the case of Ferris Ott's father, to halt his attacks of St. Vitus' dance; Farmer Ott had had to miss church four Sundays in a row. "You and Beth are gettin' to be quite the churchgoers," she observed as we walked along. I said we were finding it pleasant, that I hadn't been to church since I was a boy, and as for Beth- She laughed. "She told me she's a nonbeliever. Still, nonbelievers can can become believers." become believers."

"Old dogs and new tricks?"

"Why not?"

"I think Beth believes only in what she knows for sure to be true."

The widow had been searching about her as we went along, now stopping to peer intently around a clump of ferns, now upon the ground. "What is truth?" she demanded finally.

"That which exists."

"Many things exist. Things beyond-"

"The ken of man?"

"And others even within his ken. Depends on how broad a ken a pusson's got." She gave the word "ken" an emphasis that caused me to pay closer attention. "Here in this village, in this little place where folks seldom go beyond its boundaries, they tell themselves they understand the world and life. Coming from the city, you perhaps understand more."

"Possibly."

"But not all." Her next question startled me. "You believe in the psychics?"

"Like Missy Penrose?"

"Missy, and other-"

"Phenomena? It's possible."

"Phenomena can be realized, too. By those who-seek." Again the little snick of emphasis. "Take yourself, now. You're a man of perception. Seein's not necessarily believin'. There's many kinds of reality, y'know. Many kinds o' things." She seemed to be leading the conversation, as if making some subtle probe of my nature. "It's a matter of understandin' things that maybe seem impossible to understand."

"How?"

"By a pusson openin' himself up to the possibility." Again she shot me a look to see how I was absorbing this.

"How would a person do that?"

"There are ways."

"Would you show a person?"

The familiar twinkle behind the gla.s.ses. "What makes you think I could?"

It was my turn to shoot her a look. "I think you could."

She laughed and gave me a thump on the back. "Flattery's a poisoned gift, they say." She brushed some strands of cobweb from her skirts where her scissors usually hung. I p.r.i.c.ked up my ears at her next words. "Still," she said in a barely audible tone, "an 'experience' might be arranged."

"How's that?"

"I said an 'experience.'"

"When?" My response was too eager, too forthright. I suddenly realized we were dealing in subtleties. Again she used her gla.s.ses lorgnette-style to peruse the ground carefully.

"Who knows?" she said at last. "A pusson mustn't go too fast. The sphinx in Egypt's been there a long time but no one's solved its riddle yet. Not even the great Napoleon. 'Course, some folks is smarter smarter than others. If they was presented with a sphinx, they might be able to solve the riddle." than others. If they was presented with a sphinx, they might be able to solve the riddle."

"They?"

"They."

"Me?"

"Maybe." She replaced her gla.s.ses and her glance was mischievous as she picked up her skirts and went by me. "A man must learn to discover what is possible."

"Would that be the 'experience'?"

"You got too many questions." I could hear the humor in her voice. "Come along."

14.

The next few days brought more intermittent rain followed by a cold snap. We turned the heat on for the first time since our occupancy, and steam clanked through the labyrinthine pipes, rattling the radiators in furious bursts of energy, but producing little heat. The thermostat, of ancient vintage, was found to be defective, and I called a heating crew from over on the turnpike, asking them to replace it with a new one. Meanwhile we used the fireplaces. These proved to be defective as well, for in each room-the living room, the bacchante room, and our bedroom-more smoke seemed to come down the flue than went up.

Clearly what was needed was Jack Stump, whom I remembered hearing brag that he was handy in the matter of chimneys. He was long overdue to have returned, and I biked down the River Road to the bait shack where he lived.

Jack Stump had never claimed the virtues of homemaker, and his poor dwelling appeared to be in the same sorry state as when he had first taken tenancy back in March, after the spring floods. I could see a watermark girdling the battened sides about halfway up, and I wondered why the shack hadn't been carried away altogether. The lawn was weeds, with cans and other debris scattered everywhere. At one side was a windowless shed where he probably stowed his rig, but the door was padlocked when I investigated. I knocked at the shack door, and got no reply. I knocked again, then called; still no reply.

I would have to tackle the chimneys myself. I turned my bike around and pedaled back up the road, pulling over to the side as a red Volkswagen came toward me from the other direction. I recognized Jim Minerva, who waved as he pa.s.sed. What was he doing down on the River Road when he should be working at the grocery store? Playing hooky, maybe, and getting in a bit of fis.h.i.+ng.

Driving back along Main Street, I saw Tamar Penrose in the doorway of the post office. She was holding a cat in her arms, and she watched me sullenly as she cradled the animal against her shoulders, her red nails running through the fur like so many red beetles.

In its unpredictable, New England way, the weather turned fine again. The following Sat.u.r.day I engaged Worthy's a.s.sistance and together we went about dealing with the chimneys. We laid old sheets at the bottoms of the fireplaces, covered the mantels, then got up on the roof. Using safety ropes, we fished a heavy chain down the chimney and flailed it about, loosening the soot and unclogging the flues.

The Dodds had returned the night before, and I called down to Maggie, who was planting bulbs on her side of the hedge; after a while she brought Robert out to enjoy the sun in a lawn chair and they talked while she gardened. When Worthy and I came off the roof before lunch, we carried away the sheets and emptied them in the trash, then cleaned up at the kitchen sink. While we handed the bar of Lava soap back and forth, I reminded him of the leaking sink in the studio, which he had neglected to take care of.

We had calf's liver for lunch, and when we had eaten, Beth drove over to Mrs. Green's to pick up a quilt. I paid Worthy and sent him along, then walked down the drive to the studio. I closed the door behind me and sat, bemused, on my stool. The thing I was thinking about was in the room, but for the s.p.a.ce of a quarter of an hour I did not look at it. Finally I went to one of the racks and took out the sketchbook I had used at the fair. I nipped through the pages until I found what I was looking for: the drawing of Missy Penrose's doll. I stared at it for some time, then, placing the pad on the drawing board, I drew a s...o...b..x down from the top shelf, where I had hidden it. I removed the cover and placed the doll from Justin's cornfield beside the sketch and compared the two images.

Both had corncob bodies, both had huge eyes secured in the straw head, straw legs bunched together with raffia ties, and tattered bits of rag that pa.s.sed for garments. The doll was just a child's doll, but the other thing-I stared down at the strange, eldritch face, again trying to comprehend its being. It was clearly meant to represent the female figure, for attached to the cob body were large protuberances pa.s.sing for b.r.e.a.s.t.s, and its s.e.x was clearly denned by a deep cleft between the legs.

What was it? Whose hand had fas.h.i.+oned it? Recalling a section in one of my reference books, I found the volume and turned to "Primitive Art," my eyes scanning the pages: a grotesque figure of a painted clay effigy vessel, possibly representing the G.o.ddess Demeter; another, a contemporary doll of the Angolese, representative of the fertility rites practiced by primitive agrarian societies; a giant basalt head found in Mexico, believed to represent Coatlicue, the great Mother G.o.ddess, destroyer of men; an ivory doll carved by an Eskimo, the figure of a shaman or tribal priest; a Pueblo Indian kachina doll with wooden body, dressed in cloth and feathers; a Mayan stone face found in Honduras; a G.o.d of the ancient peoples of Oceania; a carved relief of a female, dug up in France, and believed to be the object of wors.h.i.+p of the ancient Celts. All, as the accompanying text explained, manifestations in the different cultures of a similar deity, that Earth Mother who was older than Rome or Greece, older than Crete, than Babylon or Egypt; as old as the dawn of time.

I turned back to the drawing board, comparing the images again. It was the eyes, mainly. In the sketch they had a blank, almost innocent gaze, but in the figure they seemed mysterious, even malevolent. All-seeing eyes, all-knowing. Omnipotent. Whose did they remind me of? There was a cruelty in their ominous stare, implacable, remorseless. Suddenly I felt a chill. Had I tampered with something I had no right touching, some witch doll or voodoo object one of the superst.i.tious villagers had stuck in Justin's field to cast a spell?