Harvest Home

21

The grain grew fruitful and the corn was ready in the husk, the fields seeming almost to groan under the weight they bore; then, when the Days of the Seasoning were over, and when the moon had attained its promised phase, it was time, and the harvest began. The villagers gathered at the Hooke farm, where custom decreed they were to commence the reaping; spreading out along the rows, they plundered the golden, opulent land, plucking the ears from the stalks and tossing them in baskets, which were then lifted and emptied into the horse-drawn wagons passing along the rows.

When Justin Hooke’s south field had been picked clean and the corn taken to the Grange for the husking bee, the stalks were then cut with sickles and gathered into giant shocks, which were tied and set at intervals between the furrows, and soon the field was bare. As in the other harvested fields, all that remained were the shocks and the stubble and the scarecrow the Widow Fortune had made, and now the villagers moved to the next field, and the next, and the one after that, and so the days of reaping went by in Cornwall Coombe. Everyone knew that Harvest Home was soon at hand.

Since the incident of my assumed profligacy with Tamar Penrose the night of Kate’s asthma attack, I had seen changes in Beth which, naturally enough, I thought stemmed from her wounded pride. And yet they were puzzling. Much of the time she seemed merely preoccupied, as though trying to remember something. Seated in the bacchante room after dinner, I would catch her as her needle paused in midair while she stared off into space. I would hear a murmured word or phrase, as if she were trying by repetition to stamp it indelibly upon her memory. Or she would make a sign, absently; then, when I looked up, she’d smile as if she herself knew she was addled. Her smile, once so quick and bright, had become bland, almost irritating in its complacency.

And in my own complacency I understood, or thought I did, her secret. Thought I understood the precise urgings that were prompting this change, those stirrings that lie at the very core of womanhood.

She was waiting for something.

So I waited with her.

She developed a habit of crossing her arms over her chest and hugging her waist and making little rocking movements, as though in an effort to stave off the wound she imagined I had dealt her.

She gave up reading the paper, seemingly taking no interest in what was going on in the world. I would find the telephone off the hook, and when I asked why, she would say it must have gotten knocked off, or, more truthfully, that she just didn’t feel like talking to anyone that day. She never watched her favorite television programs any more, preferring instead to be with Kate through her slow stages of recovery. She seemed indifferent to whatever suggestions I made for amusing her.

“How about dinner over on the turnpike tonight?” I might say.

She would look blankly at me and reply, “Turnpike?”

“At the Yankee Clipper.”

“Ohh. All right. If you’d like to.”

“I thought you might like to.”

She would shrug as if dinner at the Yankee Clipper were the furthest thing from her mind, then go and call the Widow Fortune to see if she minded coming to stay with Kate.

Though I was certain she had gone off into some impenetrable woman’s haven to lick her wounds, I was equally sure that if I was patient and bided my time, she would return to me and all would be as before.

Sometimes I would reach for her hand and squeeze it and try to express what I was feeling. She would untangle her fingers, and give my cheek a pat.

“But I want you to believe me,” I would say. “I want to know that you believe me.”

“Of course I believe you, Ned.”

But, I thought, extraordinary as she was, she did not.

Though she continued each day going about the village to gather up the newly produced handicrafts-the quilts and bedspreads, the carved figures, the woven things-the ruling passion of her existence, her obsession, had again become Kate. I saw the warning signals, but made no move to interfere. I told myself it was natural enough-a mother’s response when her child has been taken from her, then through some miracle restored. I think if Kate at that time had asked for the moon Beth would have discovered some way to get it for her.

I had been thinking of how to repay the Widow Fortune for what she had done. Money was out of the question-she would never accept it-so I turned my mind to some token of our thanks that she could not refuse, some extravagance she would never indulge herself in. One day, an idea occurred to me.

To fill in some of Kate’s time, the Widow had brought her a needlepoint canvas, which she had taught her how to work, and Beth moved her sewing things from the bacchante room to Kate’s bedroom, where they would talk and stitch together, Kate on her needlepoint, Beth on her quilt. When the Widow came, I could hear the three of them up there, laughing and talking, and suddenly it came to me: the perfect gift for the Widow Fortune.

That night, after the old lady had gone and Kate was asleep, I found Beth seated by our bedroom window staring out at the night sky, at the waxing moon and the bright frosty stars. I thought of the night I had found her sitting in the same chair, after the “experience.”

I pulled up the dressing-table bench and sat beside her in silence. Her head rested comfortably against the chair back, and I saw how beautifully the moonlight caressed the most prominent features of her face, her cheekbones, the line of her upper lip, her brow.

I reached for her hand. “What is it?”

Her look was distant, and the complacent smile played at her mouth. “I was just remembering.”

“That night?”

“Yes. That lovely music. So-different from what we’re used to hearing.”

“But you never saw anything?”

“No. I told you.”

I described again the two people, the corn figure I was sure must have been Justin, and the veiled female figure.

“Sophie naked?” She laughed lightly. “I don’t think so. More likely Tamar-if you saw anybody.”

If I saw anybody… Perhaps she was right; perhaps, with the magic of the moment and the cask of honey mead, I had confused reality and fantasy. Maybe I had been hallucinating. I had read about fly agaric, the mushroom that the Widow Fortune had hunted in Soakes’s Lonesome. Taken internally, its properties were capable of producing singular hallucinogenic effects; it was also capable of making one see and comprehend things with stunning clarity.

After a while, Beth, who had got up and was doing something with her hair, spoke again. “And if you did see her, but she wasn’t supposed to be the Corn Maiden, who was she?”

Who, indeed…

And I felt then that it was not a hallucination, but real; I saw that she was the sphinx and that it had been given to me to attempt to comprehend her identity.

Then, with the harvest almost in, it seemed that summer was gone altogether. While in the fields the farmers hurried to bring in the last of the corn, the trees turned, as if they had been left outdoors too long and had rusted. The maples were the color of flame, the locusts the deep red shades of cordovan, the beeches spread their tops like golden umbrellas, and all of them were shedding their leaves rapidly. Pumpkins were brought in from the fields and set out by roadside stands where apple cider was sold, and the village began preparing for winter. Then, as quickly, the frost disappeared, the weather warmed again, and with Harvest Home approaching the valley enjoyed a magnificent Indian Summer.

On the morning before the husking bee, which would precede the Corn Play, I drove to an appliance store over on the turnpike. When I came out half an hour later, I had purchased a Singer sewing machine, a little pink beauty with about a hundred different attachments only a genius would know how to use. It would be a far cry from the Widow Fortune’s old Fairy Belle with the footworn treadle; and it had an automatic bobbin.

On my way home, I passed Dr. Bonfils’s car, and again my thoughts turned to Gracie Everdeen. I had for some time now been brooding on the fact that suicides often left notes, usually written in a fury of desperation, but sometimes shedding light on the motives behind their actions. I decided to pay a call on Mrs. O’Byrne in Saxony.

I found her hanging a wash on the line. “I thought they did that on Mondays in the country,” I called, getting out. When she had pinned her pillowcase I told her the few additional obscure details I had gleaned about Grace’s death, and that it had been suicide. The shock of the news set her down on the kitchen steps. I hastened to add I did not think it likely that her anger at the girl had in any way driven her to such extreme measures; it must have had something to do with Roger Penrose. Was there possibly-

“A letter!” She got up and hung her clothespin bag on the line, then led me up the steps. “She did write a letter. I found it on her bureau after she’d gone. It was all addressed, and I supposed she’d forgotten to mail it, being upset the way she was. I put a stamp on it and sent it.”

A letter, but it had gone.

“Do you remember who it was addressed to?”

“To her beau, to Roger Penrose. But he never got it. Come along, I’ll show you.” She took me through the kitchen and down into the cellar, where she attacked a pile of cardboard cartons, each of which was crayoned with some identifying legend: “Christmas Ornaments,” “Dick’s Winter Things,” “Grandma’s Kitchenware.” One bore the single name “Grace,” and this she pulled around into the light. She undid the twine that bound it, and pulled back the flaps. I bent and looked. There were some dresses and sweaters, shoes, gloves, a small box with bits of costume jewelry, and a pocketbook. Mrs. O’Byrne took out the pocketbook and unclasped it. There was a letter inside.

I couldn’t make out the cancellation mark, but the envelope was addressed to Roger Penrose, in Cornwall Coombe, and a faded rubber-stamp mark read, “Deceased-Return to Sender.” The letter was sealed.

“May I open it?” Mrs. O’Byrne paused, then said that after fourteen years, and with Gracie gone, it wasn’t like prying into a person’s things. I took out my penknife, slit the envelope, and drew out the single sheet of paper. Holding it close to the light, I read the handwriting, wild, infirm, distraught:

My Darling,

Forgive me. I did not mean for it to happen that way. Which was why I did not want you to see me. But you know now why it is all impossible. What has happened isn’t my fault. It doesn’t matter, it will die when I die. What no man may know nor woman tell-how I hate the words! I wanted to be there to make the corn with you. I must be there! Oh, I am driven to madness! I will come! No one can stop me. Forgive me.

There was no signature. I read the lines again, then gave the page to Mrs. O’Byrne, and bent to examine the other contents of the carton. When Mrs. O’Byrne had done reading, she refolded the letter and slipped it in the envelope.

“Well, there’s the answer-wouldn’t you say? He’d gotten her pregnant. She was going to have a baby-wasn’t that it? And after bein’ engaged to her, he decided he wanted the other one. A ring he gave her, too.’’

I was examining the shoes. “She still wore his ring?”

“Not on her finger-around her neck, on a little chain, like a locket.”

“Why not on her finger?”

“She couldn’t. It wouldn’t fit.”

I returned the shoes to the box-large, heavy shoes. “Gracie must have been a big girl.”

“Like a horse. But not strong like a horse is.”

“Would you say she was delicate?”

She glanced at the shoes in the box. “Not with feet like them. But delicate in her constitution, yes. She was weak as all getout. She did the housework, but she’d get awful tired. I felt so sorry for her, the way she lagged. Just docile and quiet, and wanting to sleep all the time. Not an ounce of energy. I expect it was the morning sickness.”

I remembered how tired Beth had been before Kate’s birth. Still, Gracie had not long before been shinnying flagpoles and wrestling Roger Penrose to the ground. I picked up one of the gloves, looked at it, and asked her to put it on. She slipped her hand in and held it up; the glove fingers drooped over the ends of her own. I returned it to the box along with the pocket-book and letter, then put the carton back and went upstairs.

I thanked her and left, mulling over the contents of the letter. I did not mean for it to happen that way. It will die when I die. What no man may know nor woman tell… Very possibly, as Mrs. O’Byrne had pointed out, the frantic thoughts of an unwed mother. But when had he gotten her pregnant? Surely not the night he met her at the bridge.

Driving back over the Lost Whistle, I pulled up on the Cornwall side, got out, and walked back under the portal, peering through the open latticework. Twelve or so feet below, the placid river ran under the bridge in a slowly moving current, and I could see a school of brown-colored fish gliding in the depths. On both sides, the bank eased down to the water in a gently sloping, sandy stretch. I wondered from which point along the bridge Gracie Everdeen had thrown herself, and indeed how she had managed to kill herself at all, the drop being, to my eye, insignificant.

I thought over what I knew: Amys said Roger had ridden across the bridge the night before the husking bee. The husking bee took place on the night of the Corn Play, the beginning of Harvest Home. Gracie had died two nights after Harvest Home. If she was pregnant, Roger must have met her sometime earlier that summer, sometime when neither Mrs. Lake nor Mrs. O’Byrne had been watching. Then she went to Harvest Home and accused Roger. Leaving, she returned- where? Mrs. O’Byrne had stated that she went away without her things and never came back. But Irene Tatum hadn’t found the body until two days later. Where had Gracie stayed before she jumped from the bridge? Had she been alone during her last hours alive?

I drove away, my mind both mystified and intrigued by the tragic girl, until my attention was diverted as I heard radio music blaring from the Tatum house: Sonny and Cher singing “I Got You, Babe”; rock and roll in Cornwall Coombe. Stirring her smoking soap kettle, Irene hollered over to the cornfield where some of the children were hauling down the old scarecrow and bringing it up to the house.

Making ready for Kindling Night. Now, all along the way, I noticed how the fields had been emptied of their straw-and-corn watchers, the scarecrows the Widow had done up for the various farmers. I pulled in at the Hooke farm, and talked with Sophie for a while. When Justin came from the barn I posed him by the flowering pear tree, as I had seen him when he planted it. When I began sketching him, Sophie came and asked if she might watch, and I said fine; since my student days, when I used to draw on the subways, people looking over my shoulder had never bothered me.

When some task took her back to the house, I continued working, listening to Justin. He was his usual affable self until I brought up the subject of Worthy Pettinger and the scene in church several weeks earlier. Justin’s sunny face had a way of clouding over when his thoughts were disturbed, and now it became thunderclouds on Mount Olympus.

Worthy, he said angrily, breaking his pose and turning his face away, was a young fool. His sin was double: not only had he refused the honor of the village by renouncing the role of the Young Lord, he had also damned the crops. Though this harvest would not be affected, who knew what the following year would bring? Again Justin spoke of drought and pestilence, and when he turned his face back, I could see the whole history of ancient superstition and fear written there.

Some of the responsibility he took upon his own shoulders. He had known Worthy was dissatisfied, had known he was unhappy and discontented. He, Justin, should have taken more pains; it was his responsibility as Harvest Lord to see to it that Worthy came ‘round before the terrible and furious conclusion, one that was regarded to be as unfortunate as the Grace Everdeen episode.

I took up my bamboo pen again and Justin resumed his pose. “About Gracie-how was she a disruptive influence at Harvest Home?”

“She came-that was enough.”

I tried another tack. “I don’t think Grace Everdeen killed herself. Or if she did, she didn’t do it by jumping off the Lost Whistle.”

“Why?”

“Because a ten-year-old child couldn’t drown in that water, if she could swim a stroke. It’s not more than fifteen feet from the railing to the river, and if a person was determined to commit suicide that’s not what you’d call a guaranteed result.”

“River’s high this year.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning that when Gracie killed herself the river was low. Not much water but lots of rocks along there. They’re smooth, but they’re hard. Hit one of them from fifteen feet and I guess you’ve got a guarantee.”

I guessed I had, and that Gracie had, too. “How long ago was that? When Gracie-”

“Fourteen years,” he replied quickly.

“How do you recall it so exactly?”

“If you’d lived here, you’d recall it too. Not a villager that doesn’t, who was alive then. It was the year before the last Great Waste.”

The last Great Waste. Which somehow in the minds of Cornwall Coombe lay at the hands of Gracie Everdeen. It became more tantalizing, a village mystery whose solution I more and more felt the urge to discover. What had Gracie’s blighted love affair had to do with the blighting of the corn crop thirteen years ago?

I sketched awhile in silence, then said to Justin, “If Sophie wants a painting of you while you’re Harvest Lord, you should have worn your costume.”

Justin laughed. “I’d feel silly standing out here wearing that costume.”

“The one with the corn leaves?”

His look was blank. “It doesn’t have corn leaves. It’s cloth.”

“I meant the one you wore in the cornfield. Interesting show you people put on that night.” I worked to put a touch of irony in the comment.

“What show?”

“You know. Behind my house? With the music?” Using my pen, I imitated a flute. “It was you, wasn’t it? You and-someone else? Tamar, maybe? The night Mrs. Mayberry died?”

He regarded me stolidly, with no trace of a smile, and shook his head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Sophie and I went to the movies that night.”

“I see.” Clearly I was going to get no admission of complicity in the “experience” from Farmer Hooke.

When I finished my sketches of Justin, I left the farm for the village, where I found things busier than usual. Woven harvest symbols swayed in the breeze on the chimneys, and clusters of dried corncobs hung on the front doors of the houses, in preparation for Harvest Home. Cars were parked around the Common; people were hurrying to and fro with a general air of bustle. Men gathered along the street and in doorways, some peering down the street, others checking their timepieces against the church clock; women went in and out through the open doors of the Grange, bent on various errands. Two or three boys were up on the roof of the Grange porch, festooning the entrance with corn garlands, while Jim Minerva stood on a ladder, attaching to the corners bunches of unshelled Indian cobs.

Two girls came down the steps, their heads together as they spoke.

“… want to run off for, just before the play?” Betsey Cox was saying.

“He’s crazy.” Sally Pounder’s face was red with dismay as she looked up at the church steeple. “Amys,” she called over, “is the clock fast?” Amys Penrose paused in his sweeping, leaning on his broom to reply. “Hell and tarnation, no,” he snapped. Sally cast a worried look down toward the Penrose barn as she and Betsey hurried to join a gathering of women on the Common.

A wagon creaked down the roadway and pulled up in front of the Grange. Mr. Pettinger got down from it and began unloading some pumpkins, while his wife watched him from the seat. “Howdy,” he said to Ferris Ott. “Brought these for the show.”

“Don’t think we need pumpkins, do we?” Ferris Ott asked Will Jones with elaborate indifference. Mr. Pettinger glanced uncertainly at his wife. Conversation in the vicinity had come to a standstill, and backs were presented as the farmer stood with his armload of pumpkins.

“No, we got plenty of pumpkins.” Will Jones glanced at Mr. Pettinger. The pumpkins went back on the wagon, and as Mr. Pettinger took up the reins and drove off, Mrs. Pettinger stole a look back from under her bonnet.

“What was that all about?” I asked Amys, in front of the church.

“Shunned. What you might expect around here,” he replied loudly. Heads turned toward him; the bell ringer glared back defiantly. “The boy ‘e run himself off, and I say bless the day he done it. Sometimes it takes the lesser fool to do the greater thing.”

“Sweep with your broom and leave farmin’ to them as farms,” said Ferris Ott in Amys’s direction.

Just then Mrs. Zalmon’s head popped out the Grange door. “Where’s those Tatums with the rest of the decorations?”

She called inside and was quickly joined by Mrs. Brucie and Mrs. Green, and they, too, hurried to meet the group on the Common.

“There’s good luck,” exclaimed Jim Minerva on the ladder, having hung one of the woven harvest symbols over the Grange doorway. Amys paused to spit in the dust, his bushy eyebrows contracting in a scowl.

“For them’s fool enough to hope for luck around here, it should be luck aplenty. If I had my way, I’d see ‘em burned, ever’ last one.” He wiped his sleeve across his mouth.

“Don’t believe in luck, Amys?” I asked. The old man reflected a moment as though lost in some forgotten pocket of time. “Trouble is it don’t seem wuth all the fuss.” He drooped his head, and when he lifted it his faced sagged more and the fierce gleam in his eye had been extinguished. “No, sir, it don’t seem to me the candle’s wuth the game.”

“For shame, Amys Penrose, of course the candle’s worth the game.” Mrs. Buxley came dashing toward the hall, arms laden with costumes. She stopped in mid-flight. “‘And God said, Let there be light,’ remember?” She looked over at the harvest symbol. “Still, we mustn’t put our faith in luck alone,” she cried gaily, giving me a bright, expectant smile. “I mean, we’re not medieval, are we? We have landed men on the moon, haven’t we? Think of it, Ned, your first Corn Play. Our twenty-third. Hardly seems possible. I don’t know how we’re going to fit Sister Tatum into her costume this year unless we can get a brassiere on her.” She resumed her flight, calling, “Jimmy, help me with these, can’t you?” She loaded the costumes into Jim Minerva’s arms and sent him up the steps.

He cast a worried look down the street. “Gosh, Mrs. Buxley, it’s almost time-”

“Gracious, it’s not!” She looked up at the steeple. “Amys, is that clock-”

“Yes, ma’am, it’s right.”

“Tempus fugit.” Mrs. Buxley scrunched her brows mischievously, at me, as if we knew one could do nothing about the fleetness of time. “Dear Amys, come with your broom, can you, and give our stage a sweep?” She shooed the laden Jim Minerva inside, then cajoled Amys up the steps. “See you in church,” she called to me over her shoulder.

Skirting the Common and the waiting women, I glanced at the steeple clock, then entered the vestibule. Mr. Buxley’s vestry room was locked, so I climbed the wooden steps leading up into the belfry. I could hear the gears of the clockworks stolidly moving as I passed the housing, and presently the great bronze dome of the bell itself hung above me. Through the arched portals of the tower, I could see out in all directions: up and down Main Street; behind me to the river, the cemetery plot-Gracie’s gravestone, solitary beyond the iron fence; and directly in front, the Common.

Mrs. Buxley came hurrying from the Grange hall to join the ladies on the grass, the group growing larger each moment; several of them cast looks up to the clock below me. When the bell ringer came out with his broom, I descended the rickety steps again, passing the rope which hung down from the bell. I walked into the church and found Amys in the vestry.

“Nice view from up there.”

“Ayuh.”

“Got a minute?”

“Got two.”

“I’d like to have a look in one of those.” I pointed to the shelf with its line of dated ledgers, which Mr. Buxley took so much pride in.

He gave me a quizzical look, then nodded. “Help yourself.” He left the room, and I brought down the volume marked 1958. Turning to the end, I worked backward from the last of November, checking every entry: births, weddings, funerals. At last, I found an entry, written in an authoritative hand, that read: “Grace Louise Everdeen, suicide, interred this day- outside church burial ground-no services.”

I closed the book, returned it to its place, and went to find Amys, who was carrying a stack of hymnals from the big oak cupboard at the back of the church. I thanked him and left.

Whatever unformed suspicions I had harbored were resolved by the Reverend Mr. Buxley’s register. The entry had proved it-the official church notice of Grace Everdeen’s interment in unhallowed ground, the immemorial resting place of suicides. I resolved to let her bones remain in peace, and dismissed the subject from my mind. The church bell began to toll.

At the firehouse, Merle Penrose, a burly man, one of those who had come with the respirator during Kate’s attack, was polishing the brass trim on the truck. As I passed, he and a helper left off work and hurried out; two others interrupted their checker game and followed, leaving the firehouse doors wide open.

In front of the drugstore was another group-some whittling, some smoking their pipes, some with hands in pockets — apparently waiting for Mr. Deming, for when he suddenly appeared they moved off in a body. Meantime the bell continued to sound, and more women were arriving from all directions to join the group waiting on the Common.

I entered the post office and found two ladies at the window, baskets on their arms. One was mailing a package. Through the grille I could see Tamar Penrose sorting letters into the initialed boxes. Her back was turned, and she had not seen me enter. The teakettle steamed on the hot plate. The Constable hurried in, lifted the hinged panel, and went into the back room, and Tamar, carrying some letters, quickly followed. The door closed behind them.

“Hurry,” one of the ladies at the window was urging the other, darting glances toward the Common and digging in her purse for change. When they finally made a hasty exit, I stepped up to the window and asked Myrtil Clapp for a book of stamps. While I paid for them, the door to the back room opened and the Constable and Tamar came out. She hurriedly finished distributing the mail, turned the hot plate off under the teakettle, and followed the Constable out the door.

Myrtil set her empty teacup aside and went to the letter rack. She looked in the A-B-C box, and returned with several envelopes, which she slid under the grille. “Lots today,” she said, then turned a triangular block which read “Closed” on the inserted card. She lifted the counter panel and passed through. I looked around: the post office was deserted. I picked up my letters and began thumbing through them. A cry from outside froze my hand briefly; then, slipping the letters into my case, I hurried through the doorway.

The sunlight was blinding. When my eyes adjusted, I looked around. The street was empty. On the Common, standing in the yellow light and casting small pools of shadow on the green grass, the women waited.

“How’s your late potatoes, Asia?” Will Jones’s wife asked Asia Minerva.

“Poor, dear. They’re awful poor by now.”

“They want rain. Seems as though the corn took all the rain this year. Soaked it right up, it did. And after all that rain we had last spring.”

Asia craned her neck around the shoulder of the woman in front of her, as if anxiously straining to catch a sound. It could not take much longer.

Then it was done. One of the women called out, another pointed; they broke from the Common, running across the grass and out into the street, milling in the thoroughfare to meet the men coming from behind the barn. Asia was hugging her son, and when she held him back from her I could see the bloody marks on his face. Asia pulled him to her again, clasping him to her bosom, while the rest crowded around, talking excitedly and reaching to touch him as the men stepped up and wrung his hand. Then the group began dispersing, casting looks over their shoulders to where Missy Penrose stood, a little apart, her incredible doll dangling from one red hand.

Going to the Widow Fortune’s house, I noticed that her corn was yet unharvested. A trail of smoke was rising, not from the chimney but from somewhere behind the house.

“Did you think my skirts had caught fire?” she said, laughing, as I rounded a shed to find her bent over a bench with a row of beehives on it. Her face was protected by a net, and in one gloved hand she held a bee smoker, with a small bellows attachment. “Come along,” she said as I stepped back, “no cause for alarm. Them that call this hive home is over in yonder tree. Some dratted raccoons have been playing havoc and eating up my honeybees. I’m giving their house a fall cleanin’.”

She raised the hive at the end of the bench and scraped the insides free of wax and other material, then reset the dome in place and laid the apparatus aside. “Now all I got to do is catch that coon, then swarm the bees back, and come spring there’ll start to be plenty of honey in the pot.”

I helped her gather up her paraphernalia and carry it into the shed. While she put the things away, I noticed on a dusty shelf in the corner a row of small wooden casks, identical to the one she had presented to us. They were stoppered with pegs and lay under a caul of cobwebbing, seeming as if they had been undisturbed for many years.

She saw me looking at them, told me to come along, then hurried me from the shed. Outside, she dusted her hands and eased her back.

“Winter’s comin’-my sciatica’s kickin’ up.” She looked off at her corn, nodding in approval. “Pretty soon it’ll be all in, and another year’ll be over. Oh, yes,” she continued as we walked along the edge of the patch, “your year ends come New Year’s, but for a farmer the year’s end comes with the harvest. Harvest, then the huskin’ bee, then Kindlin’ Night, then the Harvest Home, and that’ll see us safe for another year. Bountiful harvest,” she said, sighing gratefully as she took off her work apron and folded it with precise motions. “Come and have a cup of tea.”

The kitchen was the usual potpourri of herbal fragrances. On the stove a large kettle was simmering, and she directed me to carry it to the back porch, where I set it on a table. As she covered it with a piece of cheesecloth, I saw pieces of what appeared to be the large caps of the mushrooms we had found in the woods, drained of their redness but nonetheless recognizable. On the shelf were half a dozen more little casks, newer-looking and unstoppered. When I came back into the kitchen, she had cleared away the remains of herbs and spices and the water kettle was on the fire.

She got out her tea things and set them on a tray. The cups and saucers were a handsome grayish blue, with a Chinese design; looking at the bottom, I saw they were marked “Ironstone, Made in England.” When I admired them, she said the pattern was called Amoy, and that Clem Fortune had given them to her as a wedding present. While the kettle heated, she got down her box of tea and filled the little silver tea ball. The cardboard tea container being empty, she pulled out the lining, flattened it, and spiked it on a spindle on which she saved scraps of paper; the box was relegated to another cupboard. In the Widow Fortune’s house everything was saved, everything was used.

While she carried the tea things into the parlor, I went out to the car and brought in my surprise. She was comfortably ensconced beside her hearth, and I set the large carton on the hooked rug at her feet. Changing her spectacles for the occasion, she used her shears-a pair I hadn’t seen before-to part the gummed tape and open the flaps.

“Oh, dear.” She looked from it to me and back to it, bending forward with the eager expression of a child. “Is it what I think it is?”

“What do you think it is?”

“I think a sewing machine.”

“I think you’re right.”

I lifted it out and set it on a table where she might examine it more closely. Then I showed her the array of attachments for zigzag and buttonholing and for all the other mechanical feats the machine was capable of performing. And the last-

“An automatic bobbin! I declare I thought I’d go to the grave without an automatic bobbin, surely.”

“No one should go to their grave without an automatic bobbin, surely. That’s-well, we just wanted to thank you for-”

“Here, now-here, now.” She took and held my hand, gripping it firmly between hers, then releasing it. She removed her glasses and wiped her eyes. “You’re a good man, Ned Constantine. You’re a good family. Well.” She folded her hands over her broad bosom and smiled. “Well, now, there’s an end to Fairy Belle and I can’t say as I’m sad to see her go.” She peered again at the new machine. Without her spectacles, she had that curiously naked and unfamiliar look of people who habitually wear glasses. “How d’you s’pose I’ll ever learn to run her, at my age?”

I said I believed it was not very difficult, and showed her the accompanying pamphlet of instructions and diagrams. She put her glasses back on to read, slipping her shears on their black ribbon into her lap. “Looks mighty complicated. Perhaps Beth can help me.”

I stuffed the pieces of packing material back in the carton.

“New scissors?”

She shook her head. “Lord knows, I’ve left them others over to Asia Minerva’s or somewhere when we were quilting.” She sipped her cup, eying me over the tops of her glasses, “Leave that, your tea’s gettin’ cold.” I took the chair opposite and stirred lemon and sugar in my cup.

“One-B Weber’s?”

“Ayuh. You’d like the honey better’n sugar, though.”

“Your bees make a good honey.” I stirred with my spoon. “Interesting honey.”

“How so?”

“Your mead, I mean.”

“Oh. Did you like it, then-what was in the little cask?”

“Yes-I did.”

Her face was deadpan. “I thought perhaps you might.”

“We enjoyed the show, too.”

“Show?”

“You know-the fellow in the corn.”

“Was there a fellow in the corn?”

I smiled; she returned my look with one of watchful interest. “Yes, there was a fellow in the corn. A fellow you put there.”

“Why would I do that?”

“I’ve no idea.”

A flicker of disappointment in her expression. “None?”

“Perhaps I have. I’m not sure. The fellow had a-girl.” Giving the single syllable a slight nuance.

“That’s in the natural way, isn’t it? A man and a maid-”

“In a corn patch-”

“You make it sound mighty pedestrian. Who was the- girl?” Duplicating my emphasis.

“I think she’s a sphinx.”

“Oh? Like we said, sometimes it takes awhile to riddle a sphinx. Sphinxes are notoriously puzzling, as we know. But if you saw something-mind I say if-if you thought you saw something, perhaps that something may have given rise to speculation.”

“It has.”

“Then maybe that’s all it was meant to do.”

“‘To discover what is possible?’”

“Certain. But maybe you only dreamed what you saw.”

“That’s possible. What do you spike your casks with?”

She laughed heartily. “A good drink don’t need to be spiked. At least, not what’s in one o’ them casks. Spikin’ generally dulls the senses, don’t it? Take for example that homebrew of the Soakeses. That’ll fog a man in plenty.” She rummaged in her work basket, came up with a bit of crocheting, and proceeded to ply the hook as though her fingers could not bear to be idle. “Anyways, what you saw-or thought you saw-did you enjoy it?”

“Yes. I did. Very much.”

“But-?”

“I didn’t understand it. At least-” I wanted to query her about the identity of the female figure, yet though I was certain she had manipulated the proceedings in some manner, I could see that she didn’t want to be questioned about it, but wished me to resolve what questions I had by myself. Her silver spectacle rims twinkled as she peered over them at the sewing machine on the table. “Amazing invention, a sewin’ machine. Partic’larly since they electrified them. Interestin’-”

“What is?”

“The effects you can get with a little battery. Sparks, and all.” Her look was sly behind her glasses. She returned to her sewing, and step by step led me away from the subject, but more than ever I wanted to solve the riddle of the sphinx, and to comprehend who the figure in the cornfield had been.

“Yes,” she continued, “I believe you have an understandin’ heart. How’s things t’ home?”

I shrugged noncommittally. “Um-”

“You been philandering?”

“No.”

“As I told your wife. You’re not the type. I can spot them ones a mile away.” She moved her chair slightly to take the leg off a worn spot in the rug. “There’s nothing worse than an unforgiving woman.”

“Beth?”

“I s’pose if you’d been sowin’ oats before now, she’d be used to it. Difference is she believes in you.”

“If she believes in me, why doesn’t she forget about it?”

“She’s hurt. It’s been part of her upbringing to believe in the institution of marriage as prescribed by the vows at the altar. Her faith in you was total. I expect the Tamar episode shook it up a bit.”

“How do you know about it?”

“I hear things.”

“You hear talk, ma’am.”

“No need to get testy. Didn’t I just say you were a good man? Beth was brought up a lady; she don’t understand women like Tamar. But she’ll come ‘round.”

“Will she?”

“‘Course she will. She wants a bit of talking to. She’s bringin’ her quilt over tonight. You let me have a few words with her; then you just go out of your way to be nice, and see if things don’t work out. That Tamar’s a devil. I brought her into the world, I’ve seen her grow up, and I know what goes on in that mind of hers. Don’t flatter yourself she wants you. She don’t. Or if she does it’s only because she can’t have you. Tamar’s always wanted what she couldn’t have.”

“Like Roger Penrose?”

“Aye, like Roger. ‘Ceptin’ she got him in the end, just as she said she would. Or she got of him.” I noted the slight emphasis, waited for her to elaborate; she did not. “‘A man’s good as he ought to be but a woman’s bad as she dares.’ That’s Tamar. Still, she got what she wanted.”

“Which was?”

“Wanted to be Corn Maiden. And she was.”

“In Grace Everdeen’s place.”

“A girl like Tamar can be the downfall of man and woman alike.”

She was not altogether cryptic; her remark was not lost upon me. “It’s not what you think it was.”

“Me? Pshaw, I don’t think anything. Haven’t time. Besides, it’s none o’ my affair.”

I smiled again. The Widow was much more interested in the caprice of the weather and the vagaries of nature and what the earth would yield than she was in the common pursuits of her fellow-creatures. What was here yesterday would be here tomorrow, and if it wasn’t it was no great matter. What mattered was the earth and what it could provide.

The telephone rang. “Now, who can that be,” she said, rising. “Never get used to that contraption if I see the millennium.” She excused herself and went into the hall, where she picked up the receiver. “Yes, Mr. Deming,” I heard her say; then, not to be eavesdropping, I carried the new sewing machine into the other room and set it up on a card table.

“Everything all right?” I asked as she came in and I saw her serious expression.

“Sakes, I don’t expect anything’s ever all right, do you? Mrs. Deming’s got a touch of somethin’ or other. I must go and have a look.” She patted the machine, then thanked me again. At the door, she offered me her cheek to kiss and said, “Happy you came by. And”-almost an afterthought-”don’t you worry none. There’s news t’home that’ll take care of all.”

“News?” I had turned, but the door was already closing. The last thing I saw was the twinkle of her spectacles in the light.

I drove away feeling better. News t’home that’ll take care of all. Wondering what this mysterious disclosure might be, I scarcely saw the other car as it swept by. It was coming from the direction of the Common, traveling fast. I glimpsed Constable Zalmon at the wheel, an unidentified man beside him in the front seat. I waited until the car had reached the country end of Main Street and turned onto the Old Sallow Road, then I continued on my way home.

Kate was upstairs in bed; having eaten, she was resting for the husking bee the following night. It would be her first time out since the attack. Beth had decided that evening to have dinner in the dining room, which lately we seldom used. The table had a festive look to it: there were linen place mats on the dark, polished table top, and linen napkins; a small bowl of chrysanthemums; candles. Usually when we ate there, we sat at either end, with Kate between, but tonight Beth had placed herself at my left, and I wondered if this new proximity indicated a change in her attitude. Still, as we ate and talked of inconsequential things, I found her preoccupied and distant.

“I bought the Widow a sewing machine.”

“Did you?”

“From us both. A little present.”

“Did she like it?”

“She seemed pleased. She wants you to show her how to use the automatic bobbin.”

“Of course.” A silence.

I said, “Good soup.”

“Black bean. I put some sherry in it.”

“I can taste it.”

I looked at her over the ironstone tureen between us. “It needs a little salt, I think,” she said. I passed her the silver cellar and she added a shake to her cup.

“I was at the Hookes’ today,” I said.

“How are they?”

“Fine.”

She was staring at the monogram on the napkin, an elegantly scrolled “E” in thick embroidery. “Elizabeth,” she said.

“Hm?”

“It was my mother’s name.”

“I know.”

She traced the figure of the letter with her nail. “I can remember her.”

“Your mother?”

She nodded; a little smile. “I can remember the smell of her soap-Pears’ it was-and I can remember her talking to me. She and Father had separate rooms, and in her bedroom there was a blue wicker chaise with a pocket in the arm for magazines or whatever. I can remember the chaise made a sound-the wicker, I suppose.”

“But, Beth, you were only two-”

“I know. But I can remember. She had a tea gown-it was rose-colored pongee, I think, or some kind of silk, and it had lace cuffs.”

I was astonished. I was certain it was impossible for people to have such early memories. “And she sang to me, naturally” — a little half-laugh. “It was a song about a bird. Something about Jenny Wren. Then Father would come in and I would be taken to the nursery.”

“By the nurse?”

“No. Mother. She carried me. There was lace on her collar, too.”

“And then?”

“Then she was dead. She just wasn’t there anymore. Only the nurse, and Father. Don’t let your soup get cold.”

“I’m not.”

She was crying. I was aghast. Big tears shone in the candlelight and rolled down her cheeks. I reached for her hand; she put it in her lap with the napkin.

“Beth-I’m sorry.” She bit her lip, ran her fingers through her hair, laughed, a small inconclusive laugh. She looked around the room, at the walls above the wainscoting.

“I love that paper.”

It was a copy of an antique paper showing ships in a Chinese harbor, with men in coolie hats loading tea aboard. We called it the Shanghai Tea Party. “It’s a handsome room, don’t you think?”

“Yes.” I waited until she got control of herself again. “You’re not sorry?”

“About what?”

“That we came.”

“No. I’m not sorry. I’m very glad we came.” She gave this last an emphasis that had a touch of defiance about it, as though she were determined to make it work at all costs.

“More soup?” I picked up the ladle, heavy monogrammed silver. Another curly “E.”

“Yes, please.”

I filled her plate, then mine. She was quiet a moment, then said, “Look how the leaves are falling. I hate to see them go. It seems so final, somehow.”

“There’s always the spring.”

“The Eternal Return.”

“What?”

“Just a phrase.”

It was; still, I had the feeling she hadn’t coined it, but had heard it somewhere. She started crying again. I put down my spoon. “Oh, Beth-”

“I’m going to have a baby.”

“Huh?”

“A baby. I missed my period. It must have been that night we drank the mead. I’m going to have a baby.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

The Widow had said news, news to home. I couldn’t speak, but reached for Beth’s hand, which now she let me hold.

“How long have you known?”

“Since-since the day of Kate’s accident.”

I saw it then. She had been waiting for me to come home to tell me the news, and when I came it was from Tamar’s house, with lipstick on my shirt and buttons off. No wonder she had got so angry. All these weeks she had been carrying the secret, had been frightened. I knew what she must have been feeling.

“Nobody knows yet. Except the Widow, of course. And Maggie.”

I felt a pang of disappointment that Maggie had been told before me, but I guessed I’d had it coming, after the Tamar business. She let me kiss the clenched knuckles of her fingers, and I told her how glad I was.

“It’ll be born in the spring. Just before Spring Festival.” She fingered the monogram again. “Perhaps Elizabeth.”

“If it’s a girl.”

“Yes. And if it’s a boy-”

“Please, not Theodore Junior.”

She smiled. “No, not Theodore Junior.”

“What, then?”

She folded her fingers under her chin and stared thoughtfully out the window. “I have to ask Missy.”

“What?”

“I have to ask Missy,” she repeated.

I was shocked. “I’m not going to have that birdbrain naming any kid of mine-”

“We must. She wants us to.”

“Who?”

“The Widow.” She caught my look. “That’s little enough, isn’t it?” The terrible picture of the child’s bloodied hands was spinning through my brain. “After what she’s done for us. I want our baby to be special.”

“Of course it’ll be special. But-”

“We’ll have to rake the lawn again.” She laid aside her napkin, rose, and went to the window, where she stood, not saying anything, but just looking out. A long moment passed, and I suddenly had the feeling she had forgotten I was there. I went behind her and put my hands on her shoulders and drew her back to me.

“I don’t know what we’ll do,” she said, “now that Worthy’s gone. All the things that need looking after.”

“We’ll get someone else. When they’ve finished harvesting.”

“Yes.” She sounded faraway. “Harvest Home will soon be here. Worthy won’t be in the play. I wonder where he went,” she added musingly.

“Dunno,” I said. I half heard a noise on the stairs as Beth turned to me. “He just said he wanted to go away and-” I broke off; she was staring at me.

“He told you he was going away?”

“Yes. That day we fixed the chimneys.”

“And you didn’t do anything to stop him?”

“How could I stop him?”

“You could have tried to talk him out of it. You could have told someone so they could have stopped him.”

“Why should he be stopped? I think it’s the best thing he could have done.”

The color had drained from her cheeks. She pulled away angrily and turned her back to me. “A young boy like that, off on his own-”

“He’s almost seventeen, almost old enough to vote, old enough to fight-” I stopped myself, remembering what Worthy said about trying to enlist.

“What’s he going to live on?”

“He’s saved some money. I gave him some more. And I’m going to buy his tractor-”

“You gave him money? That’s just abetting him-”

“God, Bethany, he’s not a criminal.”

“It seems you’re taking rather a lot on yourself, aren’t you? Advising and all. I mean, it’s really none of your business.”

I couldn’t believe my ears. We were having a fight about something that didn’t concern us. I tried to sound calm and reasonable.

“Beth, what difference can it make, if that’s what he wants to do? You’re right, it is none of our business.”

She wheeled on me. “Meddler. You’re meddling in things that don’t concern you. You had no right!” Her hands trembled as she picked up the tureen from the table and went swiftly through the bacchante room into the kitchen.

“Hi, sweetheart.”

“Hello, Daddy.”

“How’s tricks?”

“Fine.”

“Can I visit?”

“Sure.”

Beth had gone out. I sat in my club chair beside Kate’s bed, trying to make my voice sound more cheerful than I felt. “How’s the needlepoint coming?”

She held up the piece she was working on, a bouquet of flowers tied with a ribbon. “For Mother’s birthday.”

“Mother?”

“Yes.”

“You usually call her ‘Mom.’”

“I know. Did you have another fight?”

“It wasn’t a fight, Kate. It was just-a discussion.” I watched her small fingers as they threaded the thick needle and carefully worked the yarn through the canvas and drew it out again. “You’ll have that done in no time. Kate, what’s the matter, sweetheart?” I raised her chin and looked at her; tears were welling. “Hey, don’t cry. It wasn’t a fight, honestly.”

“Why did you let him go?”

“Nobody let him go. Worthy went because he wanted to.” The stair tread: she had been listening. “He’s a man, he has to do what he thinks is right for himself. We’d only be selfish if we tried to keep him simply because we wished it for ourselves.” I bent closer and took her work from her hands. “Worthy’s got a lot of growing up to do. Like all boys. There are lots of things he wants to find out about, and when he does, one day he’ll come back, and by then you’ll be grown up, too.”

“Then what’ll happen?”

“I guess that’ll be up to you and Worthy.”

She shook her head, the stubborn shake that was her mother’s. “He’ll be different and I’ll be different, and we’ll both have met someone else, and it won’t matter anymore.”

“There are other boys. Corny Penrose is a nice fellow.”

“He’s a clod. And anyway he sent a cob to Elsie.”

“Do you want to come downstairs and watch television?”

“No, thanks.” She took back her needlepoint and began working again. “You go ahead. I’ll be all right.”

“O.K. I’ll see you before you go to sleep.”

I kissed her and went downstairs. I opened the door of the Victorian cupboard and switched on the T.V. I watched until Beth came home. She put her sewing basket on the floor, then came and kissed the top of my head. “I’m sorry, darling. Forgive me?”

I pulled her onto my lap. “Of course.”

“I guess I’m jumpy-the throes of motherhood are looming. I suppose we’ll have to go bassinet shopping and all those things again. Can you still remember how to mix formula?”

“I can take a refresher course.”

She went up to see to Kate and I started around the house turning off the lights and locking the doors, a habit I still could not get out of.

Coming back into the bacchante room, I saw my sketching case where I had left it on the piecrust table. I remembered the mail I had picked up at the post office, slipped the envelopes out, and glanced through them: a circular from a swimming pool company, a letter for Beth from Mary Abbott, a bill from Bonwit’s, a letter for me from the insurance man, and another.

This was addressed to me in pencil. Turning it over, I read the return address: Mr. John Smith, 245 Franklin Street, Hartford, Connecticut. I slipped the single page out, put down the envelope, and read the lines from Worthy Pettinger. He was fine; he would be sending me another address shortly; next week he was going to New York. I could send him the money for the tractor there. I read the letter twice, then threw it on the fire. The white page burst into bright flame and immediately turned black, curling but preserving something of its original shape as it fluttered on the log. I took the poker and pulled the fire apart, and reset the screen. Then I picked up the envelope, and stood staring at its back, thinking that something was odd. Not that it had been written in pencil, or that Worthy had written it, but odd that the edges of the flap were puckered, and that it had parted so easily from the envelope as I lifted it.

Someone had steamed the letter open.

22

I had been right: Worthy Pettinger had left Cornwall Coombe because he was frightened. He had pledged me to secrecy concerning his whereabouts, inventing the mythical John Smith to protect himself. But someone had found out. Now Worthy was in danger. But what kind? I decided that I would go to Hartford and talk to him, tell him his letter had been intercepted, and try to learn the reason behind his danger. I would go tomorrow, after the husking bee.

For it had begun at last, what everyone had been looking forward to-the four-day celebration of Harvest Home. It was initiated by a grand and enormous feast at the Grange hall, and the husking bee, a prelude to the presentation of the Corn Play. I never got to Hartford, however, never met Worthy there, for it was this fateful night that saw my fall from favor among the villagers of Cornwall Coombe, and the beginning not only of my great disgrace but of the terrible things that followed.

The evening began well enough, certainly. Whatever words the Widow had had with Beth seemed to have brought about the desired effect: she was sweet and warm and loving, and with the news of the baby coming, I felt sure the Tamar issue was a closed book. We arrived at the Grange shortly after seven o’clock-Beth, Kate, and I, in company with the Dodds. The lights of the large building cast warm beams through the tall windows and streamed through the wide-flung doors onto the street, bidding all of Cornwall Coombe to enter and be welcome. On either side of the entrance, close to the kitchen, women were laying cloths on long tables while Mrs. Green and Mrs. Zalmon and others accepted the wealth of covered dishes prepared for the evening’s festivities. At the far end of the hall, the stage was festooned with garlands, giant corn shocks and pyramided pumpkins flanking each side, the curtain painted with harvest symbols. In the middle of the floor was an immense pile of corn ears ready for husking, and in one corner a country orchestra was tuning up, five musicians whose notes competed with the tumult of voices while children ran everywhere, crying, “When do we start?”

In the opposite corner from the musicians sat the Widow Fortune, her look grave as she spoke with Sophie Hooke. When Sophie slipped away we went to bid the Widow good evening. A place was found for Robert, and while Maggie went to speak to the orchestra he exchanged pleasantries with the old lady, who was wearing her best cap and her Sunday dress with the bone brooch pinned at her bosom.

“Well, Mary, this is one of my favorite nights in Cornwall.”

The Widow laughed and winked at a passing crony. “Robert, you think the way to a woman’s heart is through your own stomach.” She laughed again, and began describing for him familiar faces and sights around the hall. There were the Tatum kids, jumping on the corn pile and making mischief as usual; there was Sally Pounder in a new dress; there was Sophie Hooke in another; and didn’t Justin look handsome; and there came Asia Minerva-wasn’t she lookin’ proud; and there went Fred-she guessed she knew where he was goin’, to join Will Jones and them others havin’ a pull at the stone jug in the corner, and yes, the orchestra was tunin’ and you could just see how Tamar was itchin’ to get out and dance; and Missy had brought along her doll; and listen to “Turkey in the Straw”-didn’t that bring back memories of Clem!

Mrs. Deming came to pay her respects and shake Robert’s hand, but there was no sign of Mr. Deming. Other ladies, having finished their work at the tables, drew up their chairs and brought out their piecework. Robert said if it was going to turn into a hen party he and I had better join the men, and we went to the corner to have a pull at the stone jug, too.

While the men drank, the ladies sewed, the young children ran wild, and the older ones talked in the corners; there was activity galore backstage, where last-minute preparations for the Corn Play went forward. Mrs. Buxley’s round face popped out between the curtains to scan the hall-looking, it appeared, for Robert, for now she came hurrying toward us.

“Here you are, Robert-no need to hide that jug, Fred, I haven’t lived here twenty-three years not to know you can’t have a husking bee without a spot of the old stuff. Robert, come along, I want to be sure you remember your way to the stage for the narration,” and she went away propelling Robert behind the curtains.

The men passed the jug, tilting it to their mouths on the crook of their elbows and handing it to me to follow suit; I felt the mellow liquor slide down my throat, and accepted the tumbler of water Will Jones offered as a chaser.

A drum rattled, and baskets were brought in and distributed while the men rolled up their sleeves for work, the women fluffed out their aprons, and all began donning corn mitts. When the hands of the clock between the windows pointed to eight, the husking bee commenced, and all of us rushed to attack the giant heap of corn, forming a circle on the floor, stripping off the husks, and shelling the cobs.

In that token ceremonial, it seemed that the village had summoned up all its reserves of bonhomie and good spirits for this merriest of nights; the Grange walls resounded with the good-natured joshing of the farmers, the echoing chatter of the womenfolk, the unquenchable spirits of the children. There was a joyousness in the labor, a high-jinks, devil-may-care attitude as though, the summer’s labors done, now they could relax and share a comradeship that stemmed from the symbolic harvest that towered before them, a mountain of security for the coming year. Farmers I scarcely knew came and slapped me on the back and joked with me; their wives, whom I had seen only in church, stopped to exchange pleasantries and say how glad they were our family had come to Cornwall Coombe. Custom and reserve seemed abandoned, all was jollity itself, so jolly that one pull at the stone bottle surely called for another, and when one jug was empty there was another to take its place.

The time passed and we worked unstintingly; the dust from the husks rose in the air, the kernels falling in golden showers into certain of the baskets, the cobs thriftily reserved in others. When the baskets were filled, they were borne away, to be returned empty, ready to be filled again. Meantime the orchestra kept up any nagging spirits with one old tune after another.

I wiped the sweat from my brow, tilted the jug as it was passed again, and went back to work with renewed vigor. If there was laughter, it seemed I could laugh louder; if there was shouting, I could shout louder; singing, sing louder. The pile of corn dwindled, smaller and smaller, and it became a contest to see, who would get the last ear to shuck. This piece of good fortune fell to Jimmy Minerva-an omen apparently of the utmost significance-he having engaged in a scuffle with the Tatum boys and several others for the prized trophy. A mighty cheer went up when Jim carried it aloft, crying, “I have’t! I have’t!” And the rest chorused, “What have’e?” “A neck! A neck!” he replied in the traditional Cornish formula, brandishing it as he brought it to the Widow Fortune herself to husk. Taking her cue, she rose and performed with ceremony, letting the kernels sift through her fingers into a basket, returning the cob to Jim, then dusting her hands on her apron and solemnly bowing all around.

By God, I thought, slapping my thigh, the old girl was regal. Reg’lar duchess. I took two short steps, listing slightly, then pulled myself upright. Was I tight? I felt tight. It was hot in the hall. Auditorium chairs were brought out, the dishes on the long tables uncovered, and there were “ooh’s” and “ah’s” along the lines that formed; nobody had ever seen such a feast as this one.

There were Mrs. Brucie’s famous Boston baked beans and Mrs. Zalmon’s famous German potato salad and Asia Minerva’s famous buck stew and Mary Fortune’s famous blood pudding, to say nothing of a host of other favorites. And when one was already full, there still remained to be eaten Irene Tatum’s famous double-chocolate family-treat cake and Myrtil Clapp’s famous apple cobbler and your choice of Mrs. Green’s famous pumpkin pie or Mrs. Buxley’s famous mincemeat.

I didn’t feel hungry; I was much more interested in finding the stone jug again. Things were becoming a little bleary for me as I staggered out onto the porch. “Smell that air,” I said, and turned to find another amicable farmers’ gathering with another stone jug of the old stuff, and perfectly agreeable to sharing with me. I dribbled slightly as I tilted the jug to my lips, passed it on, then wiped my chin. I peered over the railing. What were those kids doing down there, peeking around the corner of the hall, all got up like cornstalks-the play? Oh, the play.

“Come spring, I’m goin’ to plant corn,” I informed the empty street, hanging on the corner post and swinging. Yes-sirree, come Planting Day I was going to be right out there with the rest of them, just a-hoein’ and a-plantin’ and a-dancin’-

They gave me the jug again and I raised it high. “Here’s to crime.” They laughed and thumped me again, saying I was a good fellow.

There was another drum roll and we trooped back inside where the eaters who had been corn huskers were now become an audience. The chairs had been rearranged in rows with a wide aisle between the two sections, and without display or haste the villagers moved between the rows to seat themselves — a little solemnly, I thought, a trifle grave. Moving along the back, I slid into the place Kate and Beth had saved for me, taking Beth’s hand and waiting with the others while the last voice trailed off, the hall darkened, and the footlights came up on the curtain and music was heard.

The Corn Play was about to begin.

There was a brief murmur and stir as through the vestibule doors came the youngest Tatum girl, Debbie, looking like a bridal attendant while she ceremonially strewed her way down the aisle with flowers; her steps were slow and measured, the way she had been rehearsed, and she looked neither left nor right but stared straight ahead, pretending she did not know that the Harvest Lord and all his court followed in her train.

My fuzzed brain tried to recall the various figures in the corn quilt the Widow had showed us. These were the courtiers pouring through the doorway, a joyful procession of village boys and girls, singing in clear, melodious voices, and with music-strange music, I thought, but familiar-tambourines and pipes and drums; some shaking rattles, others ringing bells, healthy flesh agleam, expressions eager and delighted. I recognized Sister Tatum and Margie Perkin and Sally Pounder, smiling and not at all shy or modest with the laughing boys whose arms circled their waists, but singing and tossing looks to the audience, the procession becoming a dance as they made their way toward the stage. Great garlands of cornhusks woven with autumn flowers were carried on poles, swagged against the ceiling, while baskets like cornucopias spilled fruit and corn, and those who bore them looked back over their shoulders at who came after.

We all knew who this was: Fred Minerva playing the Harvest Fool-an outrageous country jester decked with bells and tattered ribbons, and for his head a tumble-down corn crown-doing a comical dance that made the people laugh to see someone more foolish than themselves.

Next appeared a lovely figure, all in white, a long shimmering dress trailing to the floor, her head covered by a white veil embroidered with flowers. She stood for a moment in the doorway like a bird poised for flight, then moved down the aisle, almost floating rather than walking, her features hidden, her hands clasped before her.

“The Corn Maiden,” I heard people near me whispering, and I knew this was Sophie Hooke. When she got to the stage her maidens came and led her to her place.

Next came six young village bloods carrying aloft what looked like a giant ear of corn, its contents hidden by a wrapping of husks, and this ear was deposited on the stage.

There was a delay, a stage wait that seemed almost connived, and the audience strained and fidgeted, as if the suspense were unbearable. “Bring him on!” shouted one man. “Show us him,” called another. “Come and make the corn,” a third urged. “Aye, make the corn-make the corn!” It became a clamor echoing to the rafters, with the women joining in, and I tried to recall where I had heard the phrase used before. A line in Gracie Everdeen’s letter to Roger Penrose? Then, suddenly appearing, there stepped into the light the majestic figure of the Harvest Lord himself, a pleated mantle of bright scarlet swirling behind him. He went down the aisle with a long stride, and when he reached the stage he stood center in a spotlight, arms outstretched in generous acknowledgment, the women in the audience visibly charmed, the men now satisfied, all rejoicing at his presence.

Craning my neck as, with a quick flourish of red, he tossed the end of his cloak over his arm, I tried to discover if the costume beneath was the same the figure in the cornfield had worn. What I saw appeared to be sewn of handwoven fabric, embroidered, a duplicate of the figure in the quilt. Nor was he wearing the odd little corn cap I had seen on the night of the “experience.”

The other players had taken up various positions around the stage: the Corn Maiden sat to one side surrounded by a ring of her ladies, the Harvest Lord beside her, all watching as Robert Dodd entered from the wings and began the story of the growing of the corn.

“And the plow entered the earth,” Robert said, “to make the corn. The furrow was turned, and the seed was planted and the earth was fulfilled. Willingly the earth received the seed and the seed sprouted and put forth its leaf. Rain and sun in their changing but never to be broken cycles nourished the crop and it was good, this peaceful time of waiting till the harvest.”

While the narration proceeded, the actors pantomimed the action. First the Harvest Lord and the Corn Maiden came center stage, facing each other. There was a general sigh of anticipation and an audible whisper of “making the corn” rippled through the audience as the Corn Maiden’s ladies lifted away her veil, revealing the radiant Sophie Hooke. Her long blond hair was entwined with flowers and strings of corn kernels, and her blue eyes were huge and innocent as she looked up at Justin, who embraced her. Then they proceeded to “make the corn.” They walked to opposite ends of the stage while two boys wearing great curving horns came drawing a plow. Justin seized the handles and guided the plowshare across the floor of the stage, and at the opposite end of the furrow Sophie held herself ready, ducking nimbly between the horns as they came at her, then skipping over the plowshare and running to the other end of the stage. The horns turned-the plow, and Justin, too-as he now recrossed the stage and the action was repeated. Sophie was waiting to meet him, and again she passed between the horns and over the plowshare.

“Plow the furrow!” someone called; the woman next to me clasped her hands before her, and her husband struck his thigh with enthusiasm. When the field had been plowed, the horned boys and the plow were taken away, while the women used hoes to till the soil all around Sophie and Justin, who again faced each other, in the middle of the stage, waiting for the rain to nourish the ground. The maidens dipped their hands in copper ewers brimming with water, letting the drops fall from their fingers to the earth. Next the seeds were planted, four kernels laid on the stage boards, the young men working with bags slung over their shoulders, just as we had seen them on the day we first came to the village.

All this took place on Planting Day, which was during the Moon of Sowing, and after more rain, the audience became very still, for now it was Spring Festival time and behind the players rose the waxing moon, a cardboard cutout pulled along on a string. Enthroned, the Harvest Lord was now invested: a magnificent crown of intricately woven corn ears and husks was planted atop Justin’s corn-colored hair. Now Sophie, as his consort, was likewise crowned with ceremony and applause. Afterward, their outer robes were taken from them and the Harvest Lord and the Corn Maiden danced together, she demure and shy, a little frightened at his advances, yet encouraging them, too, he stomping heavily on the stage and moving around her in prescribed ritualistic steps.

The courting dance ended. Now-during the period called the Moon of the Good Gathering-the Harvest Lord strode to the footlights and addressed the audience.

“I am the Harvest Lord. The sower of the seed. The King of the Corn. You have made me all-powerful, and in return I offer you the bounty of the earth. I am he. I am he.” As he spoke, he made gestures of giving, while the spectators half rose in their seats, their hands reaching as though to receive his largess.

“Give’t! Give’t!” the men shouted, fingers outstretched in a catching gesture.

“And do ye not,” called another, “be ye curst.”

“Aye, be ye curst.”

“And damned.”

“Aye, then do ye be damned.”

Justin nodded to them, still holding out his hands in his great gesture of giving. “Shall I be cursed then?”

“No!” they cried. “No!”

“Do I drought?”

“No!”

“Do I blight?”

“No!”

“Then tell me your bidding.”

“Make thee the corn!”

“What, with the Mother?”

“Make thee the corn!”

“Yes-with another.”

This response concluded, he smiled, showing his white teeth, then bowed and turned, striding about the stage and lingering briefly with each of the maidens as if he could have his way with any, and they eager to oblige him, but he had eye for no other than the Corn Maiden, the rapturous Sophie, who sat by watching.

Then Fred Minerva pranced about in his corn tatters and, as Harvest Fool, nipped up the skirt of Justin’s tunic, making asides to the audience: “Hey, girls, now there’s a plow to make the corn with! You’ll be harrowed for sure.” Nobody seemed to mind the ribald talk, everyone laughing good-naturedly; one man crowed to Justin, “Hey, old cock-a-doodle-doo!” and another cupped his hands and shouted, “There’s a cock’ll do!” When the fun was over Robert resumed the story:

“And in the way of the seasons and of time, the earth was quickened and proved fruitful and the ears swelled in the husk: the sun lent his glory, decreeing the Harvest Lord should be powerfully endowed; the moon gave him the magic that only she may give; in her turn, she decreed that while the Harvest Lord sat upon his throne and was young and vital all the crops would grow, the people would prosper, that man would have to eat. And the earth burgeoned forth and readied her gift for the taking.”

The Moon of Good Gathering waned and became the Moon of No Repentance, and during this time Justin danced with all the maidens. Though I watched carefully, thinking at some time to see the figure-or a similar one-from the cornfield, I watched in vain. Other than the Corn Maiden herself, no one appeared who might have given me a clue to my riddle.

Next, the children I had seen from the porch came onstage, dressed in corn costumes. They were the growing plants, and they formed the rows between which Justin and the girls danced. Then, as Justin appeared to grow tired and his movements became languorous, he knelt beside Sophie and put his head in her lap. Robert continued the narration:

“And there was wind and cold, but neither sun nor moon nor anything good, for the earth slept. But under her cold white pillow lay a secret, which only men who have tilled the soil may know, and while the earth received unto her the Old Lord, and held him in slumbering embrace, her womb at the same time prepared itself for new birth, and this was the secret that every husbandman knew. And when she threw aside her blanket once again, when Planting Day returned, the Lord who had been the Young Lord, but was now in his turn the Harvest Lord, would rise anew, strong and young and beautiful, and so it would continue, forever, the Eternal Return, for thus it was since the Olden Times.”

Listening, the audience nodded, their faces eager and bright as the tale was told. The play was the duplication of the natural process, a pantomiming of life itself, and it seemed to me that at heart these people were primitives, a clan of ancient lineage, plain and clear in their wants and needs.

Onstage the corn children had clustered together, and when they parted again, a stir went through the audience. The giant cornhusk now lay in the center of the stage. The papery skins rattled, moved, then parted altogether, and with a bound Jim Minerva sprang to his feet.

“Ho!” someone called as he popped up.

“Have’ee’t a new one!”

“New,” they whispered, nodding and applauding as Jim stepped to the footlights and bowed. Then the corn crown was set on his head, the plow was brought again, and when he put his hand to it a great shout went up, and people, rose to their feet while the curtains closed. When they opened again, the cast stood in a line, making the traditional stage bows; the curtains closed again, parted to reveal the principals. As Justin handed Sophie toward the footlights to curtsy, she stumbled slightly; a buzz went through the audience, but Justin set her safely, then raised her. Jim Minerva bowed again; then they all bowed to Robert, and Sophie brought him to center stage; Robert bowed, and the curtains closed for the last time, and the Corn Play was over.

Wasn’t it a fine show this year, they all said. I heard murmurs about Sophie’s having stumbled during her bow, but the rest had gone slick as a whistle.

When the chairs had once more been cleared to the sides of the hall, the dancing began. The orchestra played one or two standards to get people warmed up, and couples were moving out onto the floor a few at a time. Wondering if Beth wanted to dance, I looked around for her. The Widow was again speaking to Sophie, and nearby Mrs. Zalmon was showing Beth her latest quilt. I invited Kate instead, and led her onto the floor, but I could tell from her expression she wished I were Worthy instead, and I had trouble keeping from stepping on her feet.

The musicians swung into a plaintive waltz, and that went a little better. When Kate said she’d had enough, I took her to the sidelines and we watched the dancers. I saw Sophie Hooke go by in Justin’s arms, holding her long skirt out as he turned her, her head back and a little to one side, her hand resting lightly on his arm that held her, their bodies dipping to the lilt of the music. He was looking over the top of her head with a sober, grave expression, and I wondered if he was enjoying himself. Or if Sophie was, for that matter. She was gazing up at him with that yearning, bittersweet expression she had for him alone. Then I saw there were tears in her eyes. Yet, watching them, it seemed impossible that anything should really spoil the happiness of those two, and when next Justin turned her, I saw the tears were gone and she was smiling again.

When the band began a reel, I went to get Beth to come and watch. The lines were formed, gentlemen opposite ladies, bowing, changing from parallel progression to circle, the couples breaking up into fours, crossing over, making small circles, then spinning in the do-si-do. Never having seen an American country square dance before, I marveled at the dexterity and grace with which these farmer folk, so awkward and shuffling in the field, now executed the intricate patterns. There was Fred Minerva beaming, his heavy farmer’s shoes treading the lightest possible as he bowed to Edna Jones, linked arms, and spun her. There was the minister dancing with Mrs. Deming-where was Mr. Deming? — Will Jones with Maggie Dodd, Cyrus Perkin with Asia Minerva, the whole village mixed together in the community of dance.

When good ol’ Justin passed, the Widow beckoned him with her thimbled finger and he leaned while she spoke in his ear; then he threaded his way through the dancers to Beth, and drew her into the dance, laughing as she got confused in the steps and straightening her out again, handing her along to Morgan Thomas, who passed her to Merle Penrose, as up and down the floor they went. When Will Jones left the dance to join the drinkers, Maggie came laughing and breathless and took my hand and pulled me onto the floor. It was hot and the music was loud and I was drunk and enjoying it immensely. Good ol’ Maggie.

Then good ol’ Maggie was somehow suddenly replaced by good ol’ Tamar, who ended up the reel with me, and when the band began a slow number she was in my arms. Gliding around the floor, I felt quite the stepper, and for the first time that evening I wasn’t treading on someone’s feet. Good ol’ Tamar, she danced like a dream, and who could say anything if we were having one little dance together?

She danced closer than convention might have dictated, but it was hard keeping our bodies separated, they seemed to fit so naturally together. Good ol’ Tamar, with her Medusa’s curls and her red mouth, and her red fingernails sliding under my collar, and the smell of that perfume. Not saying anything, but just dancing, and I recall asking her if she’d cut in on Maggie. Yes, she said, she had. I asked if it was leap year and she said no, just ladies’ choice.

Then I saw good ol’ Beth sitting between the Widow and Mrs. Zee, and I decided we’d danced enough; I stopped and let go of her, but she wasn’t having any of that. She hung on me, laughing. Which, as any fool could plainly see, didn’t set too well with either Mrs. Zee or good ol’ Beth. I undid Tamar’s arms from around my neck and said she ought to cut in on Justin, ha-ha, and good ol’ Beth-there were two of her at this point-had put on her you’re-making-a-spectacle-of-yourself expression, so I guessed I’d go outside for some fresh air.

On the porch another jug had been produced. I took a pull, and they all whacked me, telling me what a good fellow I was turning out to be. And wasn’t that Tamar Penrose some hot stuff, and wouldn’t you know a sly chap like me would be getting some of that, and was I ever going to catch it when I got home! I thumped them back and told them what good fellows they were turning out to be, and no, I wasn’t getting any of that, we were just dancing, and if my wife didn’t like it she could go frib a frabble. They laughed and thought that was funny, and went back to talking corn. When the music started again they all went back inside.

It was then the trouble began.

I was drunk, and knew it, but it didn’t seem to matter-lots of them were in similar condition-and with a last look at the clouds scuttling over the moon, casting rolling shadows along the deserted Common, I stumbled back inside, hearing the music-not the band we had been listening to, but something with a more exotic sound, the same kind we had heard on the night of the “experience,” and it was a pleasant sound, but I saw that none of the men were dancing now, only the women, barefooted, dancing in a circle, the floor strewn with fine grain laid in patterns with designs drawn in it, and Missy Penrose in the center of the dancing circle and what was she wearing- some sort of corn crown-and the women had joined hands as they moved around her in the circle-heads now raised joyfully, now bowed in contrition, now exultant again, backed by the syncopation of drum and tambourine and flute-for the fiddle was silent-with flex of knee and thrust of breast, graceful arms extending, lilting left and right with a sowing motion, the feet tracing patterns in the grain, brows glistening, and radiant Tamar, her Medusa’s locks winding, her woman’s body arching and dipping-I couldn’t take my eyes off her-writhing almost, her face ecstatic, transported, seeking and calling forth with pride and longing, the dance becoming a ritual, and I, uninitiate, trying to make sense of it, bewildered by the mysterious weaving of hands, intertwining of figures back and forth, in and out, up and down, still maintaining the form of the revolving circle, then a rush of awful reality as though those circles marked by the women’s slipping, sliding feet and intertwined fingers manifested some impenetrable knowledge, imprisoned some mystical charm, and the men hot and sweaty, all gape-mouthed and glassy-eyed, watching the sinuous rotations, while I, feeling drunker than I had ever been in my life, dipped the sweat from my forehead, somehow wanting everything to stop now, but it would not, I could not make it-my mouth gaping also as within the circles appeared other figures, small, lewd, primal figures of fecundity, all breasts and buttocks with great blank mouths and staring eyes, and no, I shouted, wanting to stop it, it was wrong, there was something terrible about it, suddenly it was all serious and it seemed to have woven some deeper, more sinister meaning into the circles round and round, the straw figures bobbing on poles, the women crushing them to their breasts with ecstatic moans, and where the children had been dancing the boys were no longer there but only the girls dancing in imitation of their elders, Missy Penrose dancing, not merely dancing, but as she turned, dervish-like, pointing, pointing around the hall, stopping, pointing at me-God damn you! I thought; damn you and your pointing finger and your chicken guts-and one or two of the girls were brought from their circle into the other circle and- What the hell! — there was Kate, dear Kate, sweet Kate, wearing a crown, a corn crown, and what was this, some sort of payment for her life having been saved, but no, I thought, God damn it, whatever was going on they weren’t to bring her into any God-damned circle and put a crown on her, and I lurched across the hall, shouldering my way past the men, dimly aware of Beth’s protesting voice, then of her coming after me and trying to pull me back, and I was resisting her, yanking free and breaking two girls’ link in the circle and stepping into it and roughly tearing Kate away, the crown from her head, hearing hisses and sharp whispers, the children stopping, drawing back in shocked surprise, some crying out, attracting the attention of the rest, an angry murmur arising among the men, a rustling among the old women like wind through dry grass, then my glimpsing an angrier face under a white cap, risen from a chair, eyes flashing in flesh gone pale, closed fist uplifted as though to strike, a sibyl become harpy, the dancing women never pausing but whirling by, giving me deadly looks, Tamar’s face a mask of loathing; but, angry, confused, not knowing I should turn my head away in shame, still dragging Kate, I propelled her to the entrance where I stopped, not letting go her hand but then, astonished, releasing her as the music ceased-not all at once, but by degrees, the dancing as well-all heads turning to see who stood in the lighted doorway, and I blinked in perplexity as I stared at Mr. Deming and the Constable, each gripping an arm of the thin, dark figure between them, and I shouted and lurched toward them, trying to break their hold on the prisoner, staring at Worthy Pettinger’s pale defeated face, and reeling again or spinning or being pushed and the pale face vanishing, the remaining faces no longer friendly as rough hands seized me, shoving me out the hallway and down the steps to sprawl in the roadway while on the porch moths spiraled in pale dementia around the light under the harvest symbol and unsmiling faces aligned themselves in drained fury and they flung cobs at me without passion but remorselessly, and even then I would not turn my head away but lay there, bloodied and astonished, wondering what it truly was I had seen that night.

23

Next morning, a deadly hangover. Vague recollections of disaster, of something-what? Couldn’t remember. Downed Alka-Seltzer, aspirin, took one shower, then a second. Some better; not much. Still couldn’t remember. What had I done? Kate: Skip it, Daddy; it’s all right. Beth: Don’t worry, darling, it was nothing. Giving me a smile, a pat, and I could smell Pears’ soap when she kissed me lightly. About midmorning I remembered dancing with Tamar Penrose; bits and pieces of the evening impinged fractionally on my memory. Still dazed, I found the copy of the New English Bible and, confronting Beth in the bacchante room, swore on the Book never to have anything to do with Tamar again.

“Ned, I don’t want your promise.”

“But I want to promise,” I said. “I want to swear I’ll never have anything to do with her, never even talk to her again.”

“Don’t be so dramatic. It doesn’t matter-really it doesn’t.”

But it did to me, and so I promised, and I felt better for having done so. My earnestness must have made some impression on her, for she laughed and acted sympathetic and was the indulgent wife.

She got up from the sofa and raised the window; she had noticed before I had: the yellow bird had flown. It was curious how silent the locust tree and the drive had become. “Robert says it will be back in the spring; it always comes back.”

“The same bird?” I asked.

“Yes. The very same one. The Eternal Return.” She turned and looked at me. “When it comes back-” Again the complacent smile; I knew what she was thinking.

“There’ll be the baby.”

She nodded, went into kitchen. I followed.

“Are you sure? I mean-”

“Certainly.”

There seemed no doubt of it. The morning sickness had begun; her breasts were swelling, and her belly. Still-

“Don’t you think maybe you ought to see Dr. Bonfils?”

“Ned-don’t worry. I don’t want to see Dr. Bonfils. It’s all right. I know. The Widow says so. And Missy. No-don’t look shocked. It’s true. She says there’s to be a baby in the spring.”

And if Missy, the village idiot, prophesied it, who was I to contradict? For whatever reasons, Beth seemed so certain, so safe and sure in her belief, so happy in it, that I would not have contradicted in any case. As she had made so many other things possible, the Widow Fortune had made this possible, too, for us to have another child.

But for me the prevailing wind that blew through the village of Cornwall Coombe remained one of mystery. I could not fathom the intensity of feeling against Worthy Pettinger’s defection. It was as though they considered him somehow their property or the subject of their demands; as though regardless of his personal wishes, he must conform to theirs. I considered it a much-ado teapot, for they had their replacement, Jimmy Minerva, whom everyone seemed to regard favorably. But Worthy’s anger had taken him beyond the bounds of reason, and his damning of the corn had shaken the village to its foundations. It was considered the worst of omens; Missy Penrose was being frequently and avidly consulted for prognostications, while in church Mr. Buxley offered prayers.

Even Mr. Buxley.

When my thoughts were not with the boy, I found myself, in spite of everything, returning yet again to what I was beginning to call-in my mind, at least-the Mystery of Gracie Everdeen. Some facts seemed clear enough. She had run away because her mother forbade the marriage. She had come back, and her sweetheart had got her pregnant. She had thrown herself from the Lost Whistle Bridge into the river, which was low, and dashed herself on the rocks. Irene Tatum had found the body, which had been buried without ceremony outside the church precincts.

It seemed simple and tragic, both. Still, I wondered. Phrases in the pathetic letter kept popping up in my mind: What has happened isn’t my fault… It will die when I die. What no man may know nor woman tell. In no way was I able to decipher the meaning of the words. And I wanted to be there to make the corn with you. I had seen the “making of the corn” in the play, the ritual tilling of the earth, Sophie jumping over the plowshare; but Gracie’s reference remained lost on me. I recalled the shoes in the box-unusually large for a girl, and the gloves as well. Yet Amys had remembered her as pretty, girlish, delicate. And Mrs. Everdeen-why hadn’t she wanted Gracie to marry Roger? Because he was poor? Because the strain was tainted? And why had she wanted Gracie to give Roger’s ring back? And why had Gracie kept it? And, more important, why had she waited until two days after Harvest Home to do away with herself? Where had she spent the intervening time?

Putting these thoughts from my mind as best I could, I turned to the task at hand, the completion of Justin’s portrait in the time promised. I drove out to the farm for a sitting; Justin’s normally sanguine attitude was at first tinged with a slight coolness, and, though she was sympathetic, Sophie’s demeanor also seemed altered. Her usually bright face was dull, shadowy, clouded by some kind of worry. I observed a growing sense of urgency in her; her actions were composed of quick, brittle movements, and she seemed impatient with the slow thoroughness of my work. I had set up my easel on the lawn between the drive and the harvested cornfield, and I could hear her in the kitchen, banging and rattling pots and pans.

I felt it necessary to make some remark about what had happened at the husking bee, though I was then still having difficulty putting the pieces of the evening back together. Justin laughed good-naturedly, and said I was not the first to have gotten a snootful and made a fool of himself. “I think Fred and the boys were out to get you, anyway.”

“Out to get me?”

“To see how well you could stand up to the old stuff. I guess you didn’t pass the test. They’re annoyed with you, but it won’t last. They’re not down on outsiders as much as they seem to be.”

“I’m a fair drinker, but-”

Justin agreed. “It’s pretty strong.”

“And it leaves you with a blank.” I tried to explain the curious impression I had of something ominous growing out of the dance. He said I was imagining things.

“It’s just one of the old ways, you know. If you transgressed, it was against them, not against the people.”

“What are the ‘old ways’?”

He was friendly and casual. “Well, let’s say they’re the things that are-handed down. Maybe they’re not the most convenient ways, but they suit us. We leave people to live their lives the way they want and we want to live ours the same.” He shrugged. “Hell, Ned, I’m supposed to be the Harvest Lord, and I’m not sure I understand it all myself. All I know is it’s what I’ve been taught. And it’s been fine for me. I’m a lucky fellow. I told them after you went home-you acted the way you did because you don’t understand yet.”

“Understand what?”

He regarded me quizzically for a moment, then glanced over at the cornfield, to the spot where I had discovered the doll. “Well-now don’t get me wrong-but a fellow oughtn’t to go around snaffling pieces out of a friend’s cornfield. Some things are meant for a purpose, y’know.”

I felt the flush of embarrassment at my theft of the corn doll being thus revealed. Who had known besides Worthy? Who had seen me? “I’m sorry, Justin, I didn’t realize-”

“That’s what I mean. I know you didn’t. Don’t worry, the crops are safe in. See-it’s the way we’re born. We can’t help ourselves. It’s all of our ancestors, all the way back.”

“What was it-that little doll?”

“A man has to eat,” he said in a penetrating tone. “His food comes from the earth. And the earth must be thanked.”

“How?”

“It must be reverenced.”

“With corn gods?”

His eyes held mine in a level gaze for a moment; then they took on a puckish gleam. “Did you figure out who it was- that night?”

“In the field? No-”

“We must learn to discover what is possible.”

I heard him, yet I was miles away; not miles, but as far as Soakes’s Lonesome, on the Widow’s mushroom hunt. A man must learn-

“Did you like the little ‘experience’?”

— to discover-

“The music? The little cask? Your friends?”

— what is possible…

Justin’s eyes now held a smile. “Is it such an enigma? Such a sphinx? Come on, Ned, a fellow as smart as you-”

I was trying to put it together. “It was you, then?”

He laughed again, a deep, rumbling laugh. “Not me. I’m no actor. I told you, we went to the movies. And I didn’t mean him, I meant the lady.”

I was mentally stumbling, trying to make the connection, to grasp on to the reality forming in my mind. The doll in Justin’s field-the veiled figure below our meadow. “You mean they’re the same?”

“There is only one.”

“Who?”

His expression sobered. “She’s been a riddle for a long time. We thought sure you’d get it.”

“Not the Corn Maiden.”

“No.”

“Then-”

“She is very old.”

… older than Rome or Greece, older than Crete, than Babylon or Egypt; as old as the dawn of time…

Suddenly I saw. Saw clearly. I knew now who she was: the sphinx unveiled. “I-” Fumbling for words.

“-didn’t know. ‘Course you didn’t. Now you do.” He nodded, his amusement gone. “Now you do,” he repeated. “She’s our Mother. The Mother Worthy Pettinger cursed.”

A man must learn to discover what is possible.

A little “experience.”

Not the Corn Maiden, but someone else.

The Mother.

“You worship something called the Mother? Mother-” He was waiting for the last word; I supplied it: “Earth.”

He made an equivocal gesture with one hand. “She is- paid homage.” If I had watched closely, he went on, I had seen it all in the Corn Play. This was not merely a play, but the enactment of a belief-namely, that the renewal of life is the natural counterpart of the sexual union of the Harvest Lord with a spirit of growth, a goddess of fertility. No, the Corn Maiden was not the Mother, but one acting in her place.

“Fertility is the important thing to us here. Death is a terrible thing. But for us barrenness is worse. If you’re a farmer, that’s about the worst thing that can happen to you. In the play, if the corn sprouts in due season, it’s because the Earth Mother has been impregnated, and was caused to bear.”

“Christ, Justin-fertility rites?”

“If you like.” Again a gentle smile. “But what is to stop people from believing? There are stranger beliefs in this world. Ours is very simple. And it keeps us from-” He paused, gravely looked off at the annihilated cornfield.

“From what?”

“From being afraid. We fear only one thing, that something should interfere or change the cycle.”

“Which cycle?”

“Of life. Of living things, of the seasons. Of the natural order of things. The Eternal Return.” He spoke simply but earnestly, with a depth of conviction I found it difficult to fault.

“But they go to church on Sunday and sing hymns, like everyone else in the land.”

“Is everyone like everyone else in the land? I don’t think a Cornishman would agree with that. Being different’s part of our heritage. Personally, I’m proud of it.” It was not arrogance I read in his face, but a realization of himself, of what he stood for in the eyes of the villagers, and his responsibility to them. They had honored him; he would not fail them. “If you have questions, take them to the Widow Fortune,” he said kindly. “And,” he added, almost as an afterthought, “as you hope for tolerance from the villagers, so they must hope for tolerance from you.”

“What about tolerance for Worthy?”

“What d’you mean?”

“Simply that it doesn’t seem to me that anyone’s taking into account what he wants for himself.”

“I don’t know if Mr. Deming will want to take that into account. Worthy understands.”

“Understands what?”

“What he’s supposed to do. Mr. Deming does not consider that the honor’s to be taken lightly. Nor do the rest of the villagers.”

I started to pretest; he moved toward me, putting his hand on my shoulder. Even in his casualness, he gave me the feeling he was exercising all his influence, cautioning me not to behave rashly, trying to protect me from my own ignorance. That in some unspoken way he was to be trusted, that he of himself could control the situation.

“I understand. It’s natural to doubt. Not to believe. But give it time.”

Who was I to try to solve mysteries that had been insoluble for the ages. Napoleon, trying to solve the riddle of the sphinx. I would give it time-for now.

When Justin went back to work, I stowed my painting gear in the car, then drove over to the Pettinger farm. No one answered my knock at the back door; the barn was closed, the place deserted. As I left, I glimpsed Worthy’s mother at an upstairs window; she made no sign.

Beth passed me going in the opposite direction, toward the bridge. She waved, then sped on without stopping, and I wondered where she was hurrying to. Returning to Penrose Lane, I stopped next door to speak with Maggie. I rang the bell; she answered, kissing me warmly and pressing my hand.

“Hi, Ned! I’m so happy about the baby!” I thanked her, and asked if she knew where Beth had gone.

“She said she had an appointment somewhere, then she wanted to look at wallpapers for the new nursery. Come on into the kitchen-I’ve got Robert’s lunch on. Have some?”

I declined, accepting her offer of a drink instead. Carrying Robert’s tray, she brought me into the sun porch. She set down the tray, waited for a pause in the narrative on the record player, then lifted the arm and shut it off.

“See who’s here, dear,” she said, “Ned.”

“Well, m’boy, pull up a chair.”

“Robert’s reading Anna Karenina.”

Robert readied himself while his wife unfolded a card table and set it up over his knees, put the tray on it, and opened a napkin and tucked it in his hand.

“Thank you, dear.” He began feeling out the carefully cut meat with his fork, the tips of his fingers working like antennas over the implements; Maggie hovered to assist his hand in finding the glass of milk or the salt shaker. When he had finished, she took his napkin from his lap, removed the tray, and bent to kiss him before going out.

“Don’t forget your drops, dear. Perhaps Ned will take down the card table-all right? Anything you need before I go?”

“Can I have a cigar?”

“Oh, Robert, you know what the Widow said.” She gave me a wink, set the tray down again, and took a cigar from the humidor on the desk, did her ritual of preparing it for Robert, then held the match while he lighted it.

“That’s quite a ceremony she performs,” I observed when Maggie had gone.

“Yes, Margaret’s father taught her.” He blew three smoke rings, the last passing through the first. “Did I do it?”

“Bull’s-eye. You should see them-” I stopped in embarrassment.

“It’s all right, m’boy, no need for blushes. The worst thing is for people to be conscious of my-infirmity. I’m used to it. Always amazes me how much I can see.”

“You have some vision still?”

“Blind as a bat. But I can see things in my head. The wonderful part is that for me they never change. Take Margaret, for example. I know she’s older now, but I see her exactly as she was when I lost my sight. And I get along. I have her, and my talking books. After Anna Karenina, I’ll undoubtedly get around to David Copperfield, finally. Is there a small bottle here somewhere?” His fingers were groping among the things at his elbow; I leaned over and put into his hand a rubber-stoppered bottle.

“That’s it, thanks.” As he removed his glasses and set them aside, I was astonished to see that he was not merely lacking vision, but that he lacked the very organs needed for vision. Drawing out the wads of cotton that filled the eyeless sockets, he put drops into each, set the bottle down, and replaced the cotton with fresh pieces. When he had screwed the top on the bottle, he felt for a paper tissue and used it on the lenses of his dark glasses.

“Haven’t seen a thing for a long time, but I still wipe my glasses every time I put them on. Creatures of habit, that’s what we are.” He settled the lenses over the bridge of his nose and felt for his cigar in the chrome stand at his side, then smoked in silence for several moments. “I must admit,” he said reflectively, “going blind came as quite a blow. Bound to, I suppose.”

I thought for an instant he was going to reveal the nature of his accident, but he dismissed the subject with a spin of his cigar tip, as though life’s horrors were unaccountable, and hence not worth discussion. “Some tragedies are unspeakable,” he went on, “but we must endure however we may. I’ll tell you something, m’boy, even though I enjoy my talking-books, I’d give up all the books in the world to see one star again. That’s what I miss the most, seeing the stars. We go out on the lawn sometimes at night and Margaret describes them to me; quite a one with the stars she is.”

“Quite a one with everything,” I said admiringly.

He nodded. “She’s a good right hand. Corrects my letters- I’m a rotten typist. Keeps me from bumping into things. Think of it, these many years of keeping a fellow from skinning his shins-that’s a career in itself. Margaret’s quite a woman.” He felt for the cigar stand and tapped his ash. “Anything particular on your mind?”

“Why?”

“Something in your voice.”

“Robert-what’s going to happen to Worthy?”

He shook his head, and blew out a cloud of smoke. “Hard to tell about Worthy. Lot of feeling about that. You can’t go around damning the corn crop in this village and not have people angry.” Worthy, it seemed, had been given a ticket-of-leave, and was being held in the back room of the post office under the ancient statute of durance vile.

“But he hasn’t broken any law,” I protested.

“No-none that’s in the books. But in Cornwall Coombe there’s a code of ethics not to be tampered with. To go against one is to go against all. It’s not really a village, you know. It’s more a clan, a tribe.”

“Penrose tribe?”

“Partly. But a man has to show respect for both the village and its ways. What time is it?”

I looked at the clock on the desk. “Ten minutes to two.”

“They’ll be starting soon.” He ran his tongue around the inside of his lips, then ruminatively touched it to the tip of his cigar. “About Worthy. I suppose it’s a matter of-choices.” He paused, tapping his ash again. I had the feeling he was picking his words carefully.

“Some probably wouldn’t agree with me, but I believe a man’s fate is in his own hands. ‘Not in the stars, dear Brutus,’ as Shakespeare says. No matter what a fortune teller may say, or an astrologer or a seer, the events that come to a man are determined by him and how he adjusts to those events. We’re all offered choices. Our very existences often depend on these choices. Making the wrong one can change our lives, but at least the decision has been made; the brake has been released, the machinery can go forward again. But in going forward, it may bring a man to meet the fate he himself has sought.”

“Did Worthy make the wrong choice?”

“I couldn’t say.”

“But it’s such a small thing.”

“There are degrees of smallness. I can understand your being interested in the boy’s welfare, but it’s out of your hands. I wouldn’t worry. Most likely the elders’ll give him a lecture and let him off.”

He made a gesture, dismissing the subject, but still I felt that there was more to be said and resolved. He seemed to sense this in the silence. Nodding, he repeated Justin’s words.

“If you have questions, take them to the Widow.”

The church bell was tolling as I drove up to the Widow Fortune’s door and knocked. There was no reply. Nor was the buggy in the drive. I waited another moment, then continued on to the Common. Passing the church, I saw some women moving up the steps. Just inside the open vestibule doors, someone-Mrs. Green, I thought-was handing out slips of paper from a sheaf in her hands. I glimpsed the Widow’s white cap as she took one and started in. Her head turned quickly-a flash of expression, no more, but before she looked away again I read in her face things I had never seen there until that moment. Was it scorn? Contempt? Or was it denunciation?

She entered with the others and presently the bell stopped. Amys Penrose came out, closed the doors behind him, and went down the street toward the Rocking Horse Tavern, I drove past the north end of the Common, where a large pile of debris was being assembled for the Kindling Night celebration; then I parked in front of the drugstore and went in. Except for the boy behind the soda fountain, the place was empty. “What’s going on over at the church?” I inquired. The boy shrugged and gave me a peculiar look. I walked out and, continuing up the street toward the post office, I caught various looks, and had several backs offered to me, which made me think of the shunning of the Pettingers when they had come to the Grange with their pumpkins.

Approaching the entrance to the post office, I received dark and sullen stares from several men lounging in the doorway, and when I attempted to pass, Constable Zalmon came to the door and blocked my way.

“Sorry, son, closed today.”

“Is this a holiday?”

“Nope. Just closed.”

The coldness of his tone told me the frost was on the pumpkin; and not only in the fields. Taking a quick glance over to the church, I proceeded along the sidewalk toward Penance House. I could hear the men’s voices behind me. I leaned against a telephone pole, waiting. They were watching me, I could tell. When I glanced up, they deliberately turned away, focusing their attention on the closed church doors. I slipped up the walk to Penance House, ducked around the corner, and moved quickly across the yard to the side of the barn.

I had not been there since the day of the Agnes Fair, when Missy had pointed her bloody finger at me. There were several outbuildings scattered around, and, a short distance away, what looked like an abandoned hatchway set into the earth. The double doors were secured with a heavy chain and rusted padlock. I wondered what the doors led to.

Across the way was the rear of the post office. There was only one window, with a heavy latticework of metal screening over it. I crossed the lawn separating the two properties and crouched under the window, listening for the sound of voices. There was none. I stood and peered through the grille.

The room was small and sparsely furnished: the Constable’s desk with a wooden swivel chair, askew on a square of worn carpeting, and a folding cot along one wall; on it sat Worthy Pettinger. His hands lay listlessly in his lap, and he looked pale and harried. I ran my nail over the screening; the boy started, then came to the window and opened it.

“You all right?” I asked. He nodded. “What are they going to do with you?” He shrugged and jammed his fists in his pockets, returning my gaze evenly but saying nothing.

“Listen, son, I’m sorry. I guess I’m the one who got you in this jam.” He shook his head again. “They saw your letter. Tamar steamed it open; that’s how they knew where to find you.”

“You told them.”

“No-no, I didn’t. Christ-”

“How did they know which letter to steam open? Why would they look for a letter from John Smith if someone hadn’t told them? Nobody knew ‘cept you and me.”

I was perplexed. “I can’t say, boy. But I swear I didn’t tell them.”

“It doesn’t matter.” He turned away, walked to the desk, and stared down at the tray of food on top. “Food’s good, anyhow.”

I examined the screening. It was riveted tight along a solid iron frame, the frame sunk into the stone surround of the window. But the screening could be cut. “Listen, Worthy, you sit tight. I’m going back to the studio and get some heavy cutters, and after dark I’ll come back and get you out of here.”

“Go away.” He threw himself down on the cot, clasping his hands in front of his chest, drawing his knees up in a fetal position. “It wouldn’t do any good. They’d find me again. It wouldn’t do any good.” He was shivering.

I thought a moment. “Christ, Worthy, make sense! What have you done? There’s no law-”

He leaped from the cot and slammed his palms against the iron grille. “Yes, there is!” he exclaimed hotly. “There’s a law for everything! You can’t help me. Nobody can. Don’t interfere or you’ll only make trouble for yourself. It’s what they want. They always get what they want!” His dark eyes blazed; then the light in them went out and he wrenched himself away and sat in the swivel chair. I waited another moment, then left.

The men were still in front of the post office, looking over at the church. I crossed the Common and went into the tavern. Amys was hunched over a beer on the corner stool. I asked Bert for a Scotch-and-soda, and pulled up a stool next to the bell ringer. “What’s going on, Amys?”

“Little of this, little of that. Not much in a small town like this.”

“That’s not what I mean. What’s happening at the church?”

“Meetin’.”

“What about?”

“How can I tell-I ain’t there.” He tossed off the rest of his beer.

“Amys, over there in the back of Penance House-what’re those hatchway doors in the ground?”

He choked, sputtered, then let go in the spittoon. “Root cellar.” He spun a quarter on the bar, wiped his mouth on a soiled handkerchief, and went out blowing his nose. I saw him look over at Penance House, then back in my direction before he went off toward the church.

Some men came in, Will Jones and Fred Minerva among them, and as they gathered farther along the bar I could tell from their furtive looks that I was the object of their conversation. I finished my drink and went out. The Constable was still in the doorway of the post office talking with the other men. One or two glanced my way, then returned to their discussion. The church doors remained shut. The clock said a quarter after three. I thought again of Worthy on his ticket-of-leave, secured in the back room of the post office, and I wondered what I could do to help him.

I had no idea how long the meeting in the church would take, but I still wanted to talk to the Widow Fortune. In the meantime, I drove south along Main Street, down the River Road to the bait shack. I found Jack Stump seated beside the cold fireplace. I thought it odd, his having no nurse; then I remembered that all the women were at the church meeting.

He turned his head to me as I entered, giving me a long look. Finally he lowered his lids wearily and rested his head against the back of the chair.

“It’s cold in here, Jack. Why don’t I poke up a fire?” He made no sign; I went about laying some kindling. When it began crackling, I brought a blanket from the bed and covered him. As I tucked it around his shoulders, his hand appeared from beneath the folds and grasped mine.

“It’s O.K., old-timer. How about some tea?” He stared at the flames in the fire. “Some of the Widow’s One-B Weber’s?” A faint smile flicked in the corners of his mouth before I went to put the kettle on. When the water was hot, I got down the tea box and brewed tea in the pot and filled the cup. I held it for him while he sipped, but his look told me he found it unpalatable. “Sorry, Jack, I haven’t got anything stronger on me.” A sly look came into his eye. “You’d prefer some of the old stuff to the Widow’s tea, huh?” He flashed another look, and I could see both fear and contempt in his eyes. He made a quick hissing sound through his teeth.

“Don’t worry about the Soakeses, Jack.” He shook his head, pushed the cup away. He leaned back against the chair and immediately fell asleep. I put the cup and saucer aside and carried him, blanket and all, to the cot. His body seemed to weigh scarcely anything, and when I laid him down I had the sudden premonition that spring would never see him back on his rig again.

As I slid my arm from under his neck, I felt something catch. The button of my jacket sleeve had become entangled in the little red cloth bag around his neck, and when I tried to free my arm the string broke. I slipped out the bag and held it between my fingers, looking down at the peddler’s face, agonized even in repose.

The wood crackled in the fireplace, providing a dancing light against the wall. Jack stirred uneasily as a clock chimed the half-hour. Absently, I toyed with the cloth bag for a moment; then, feeling something inside, I opened it and spilled the contents into my hand. There were a few bits of dried, crushed herbs, the rolled scrap of paper the Soakeses had scribbled their warning on, and a ring-a small irregularly shaped circlet, carved in the village fashion from a piece of hollow bone. I smiled, thinking of the Widow Fortune’s charms for toothache and for warts, and wondered what my own little red bag had contained. I blew away the bits of herbs, then unrolled the scrap of paper, the sinister note the Soakeses had left in Jack’s trap:

I stared at it for a moment, holding it up to the fire. My hand must have been shaking slightly for I saw a small bright shape rippling on the sooty wall next to the fireplace, the tiniest beam reflected back from my hand. I thought it was my wedding ring, but as I dropped that hand, holding the paper in the other, the small shape still remained, like the signal of a tiny heliograph flashing a message. I reversed the paper into the light and discovered what was causing the little ripple on the wall. When I had read the too clear words on this other side I felt a sudden chill, though the fire had warmed the room-the chill that comes not from any drop in body temperature but from those faint warning notes that are sounded in the dim recesses of the mind.

I tucked the scrap of paper in my pocket, and was returning the bone ring to the bag when Mrs. Green came with food for Jack. She stopped, and without greeting stared at me. Hurriedly I retied the string around his neck and slipped the bag inside his shirt. I left quickly. There was still time to get to Soakes’s Lonesome before dark.

24

Two hours later, when I arrived at the Widow Fortune’s, the small, gabled house looked gloomy and forlorn with the corn patches cut and shocked. The dying sun seemed to draw the fire from the maple leaves, giving the trees that framed the house a dark, foreboding air. Striding past the stubbled yard, I knocked on the door; again there was no reply. I went along the drive, where I found Fred Minerva’s wagon parked near the beehives: two men had just finished loading the wagon with wooden casks of honey mead from the shed. I moved aside as Fred drove the team out, the men dour, silent, granite-eyed, surveying me from the tailgate. Out on the street, Fred pulled up as Mrs. Green came to meet them. She hurried away with one of the casks.

I went down the lane to the barn. Through the open doorway, I could hear the cow knocking her hoofs against the stall, and the rhythmical sound of milk squirting into a tin pail.

The old lady’s long skirts covered the milking stool she sat on; the cow gave me a bland, uninquisitive look as I entered.

“Good evening.”

“That it is.” She glanced at me briefly, then returned her attention to the cow’s teats, two of which she held loosely in her hands.

“Milking time,” I observed.

“Comes ‘round this hour reg’lar as sin. Cow that’s got milk wants to give it,” she replied indifferently, sitting stolid and taciturn.

“How’s Caesar’s Wife?”

“Not above reproach, as Caesar’s Wife should be. But then, who is? Hold still, there, miss or ma’am, or whatever you are. Girl’s edgy tonight.”

“Why?”

“Hard to tell. Folks and beasts alike gets itchy long ‘bout now, when the harvest’s in and the work’s done.”

“And Harvest Home-?”

“Aye. Harvest Home.” She looked up toward the rafters as though to peer beyond the rooftree to the heavens themselves. “Be a full moon, too. They call it the Moon of No Repentance around here.”

I leaned against a joist. “Why’s that?”

“Come harvest you take what there is-too late for repentance.”

I gave her a thin smile. “Another tradition?”

“Certain.”

“I keep hearing about tradition.”

“‘Pears some folks don’t hear enough, the way they behave in public.” The regular ping of the white stream hitting the side of the milk pail emphasized the deep undercurrent of her words. “Some folks, it appears, have a mind to meddle where it’s none of their affair, and to scoff where they have no right to scoff. There are some hereabouts who don’t take kindly to a man who makes fun at our ways.

“Your bein’ an outsider, them old ways is a pretty hard thing for a man to seize on to. Outsiders always had that trouble; take Robert, for instance. He had trouble some years ago; he learned. But hereabouts in Cornwall Coombe we look on the old ways with partic’lar relish. You take a woman, now. A woman is different than a man. There’s things in a woman a man may never understand. Hold still, there, girl.” She rapped the cow’s flank as its tail switched. “Bein’ a man, you ought to think about the fact that there’s things in women you can never understand.”

I eyed her coldly. “What things?”

Her laugh was rough. “You think you know women? You think you know your wife? Think you understand her body, her mind? Her needs? They’re all different than yours, every last one. But because you don’t understand, you have no way but to accept it.”

“Or perish?”

“Maybe. A woman is supposed by most men to be heavenly, but if the truth was known, she ain’t heavenly a’tall. She’s a creature of the earth, she works and loves and lives with her feet firmly planted on the ground, and them that don’t is a sorry lot of dreamers. Look at your city ladies, in their beauty parlors and their lunch places and their shops and their love nests. Are they happy, them and their nail polish?” She released the two teats, wiped her hands on her apron, pressed the bony joints, then stripped the last drops of milk from the cow’s teats. “There may have been a man before there ever was a woman in the Garden of Eden, but the man would have died long ere he did without her. If it weren’t for the women, where would anyone be? Unborn. Just-not livin’. Just somewhere else in the universe. ‘Ceptin’ the women, you’d have men who’d never know the light or the air or whatever joys God may see fit to bring us.”

“Or the horrors.” I laid an edge to my voice.

“Horrors, too. That’s what comes of bein’ born of woman. But pity the poor creature for what she longs for and for what she never gets. But longin’, they ought to be given their way. There’s a good old girl,” she told the cow, rising and walking to the doorway where she set down her stool and pail. Ignoring me, she crossed the lane and went into the field, looking off at the empty land. She remained there statue-like, and might-have been carved from an immense quarried rock, a massive and columnar sculpture, dark, brooding, sphinx-like. But this riddle-I could read it now. I did not like her anymore; the thought saddened me.

As I came up behind her, I heard her speaking, not to me but to the stubbled furrows.

“‘I was born like the maize in the field, like the maize I was cherished in my youth, I came to maturity, I was spent. Now I am withered and I die.’” Becoming aware of my presence, without turning, she said, “There’s an epitaph for you. It was an Indian’s.” Her voice sounded heavy, weary as she nodded and said, “Aye, she is a friend to man.” I took a step to her. “Mother Earth?”

Her head turned abruptly; she gave me a long look, searching, as though even now she would be friendly, still would command my respect and understanding. “Yes,” she replied simply. Bending, she scooped up some soil, clenched it before my face, then opened her hand. The form of her palm and fingers remained pressed into the moist loam. “This is her. Look at her.” She took my hand and laid the clod in it. “Feel her. Smell her. She is there, has been, will be, till the end. She is the beginning and the end. Who will deny her? Who can deny her? You have questions? Ask them. Listen to her, she will tell you.”

“What will she tell me?”

“Do not be so scornful. She is all of woman, and more. She bears as a woman bears. She gives and sustains as a woman does, but a woman dies, being mortal. But she is not. She is ever fruitful. She is the Mother.”

I stared at the mounded mass in my palm. “Lay seed in her, she will bear. She will nourish and sustain, and in the sustaining will give forth and provide. And that seed you give her will make another seed, and that another, and another, again and again-forever the Eternal Return.” Slowly her arms rose and straightened, her fists opened, spread broad, an impressive gesture of benevolence, a priestess acknowledging the deity. “Let us pay her tribute. Let us beg her for her strength and protection. Let us pray that she may bring forth her strong plants, her rich food, her very life. How selfish we are. We give her but a seed, a kernel, a dead thing. Yet see what she returns to us. Such bounty, such riches, such life! What mortal is there who cannot help but wonder at her love her, fear her?

“The Bible says Eve was born of Adam’s rib, but he was born of the earth, so there was woman before there ever was man. She is not merely a mate, a life’s companion, a helpmeet; she is the moving force, the power. And while Adam was abroad in the forest, she was in the fields planting and tilling. What man but a fool will reject the counsels of his spouse, who will give life to his sons? What man will spurn her, not venerate her, she who shares his bed and board, who tends his fire and his cookpot? The Lord preserve the women. The Lord preserve the fruitful Mother. And she will give, and give, and give, till there is no more to be given.”

She took the clod from me, pressed it, and let it crumble and sift between her fingers, the particles falling into the furrow.

“And in the end she will take it all back. There’s the irony. For as a man dies, so does a woman. It is the Mother who must succeed in the end, since everything must return to her. It is the tribute we must pay for her patronage.” She stared down at the crumbled soil, spread it with her toe. “Come Planting Day, she will need even that moiety.”

She turned and went back to the barn, and took up her pail and stool. “I bid you good night,” she said.

“No.” My voice rose sharply. She blinked at me, trying to understand my purpose in coming.

“You’re angry,” she said, a trifle wistfully. “Too bad. I hoped we might’ve been friends. You have something more, then?” I nodded. “Come along, say what you have to say.” She motioned me to close the barn door; then, as I followed her, she made her way to the dooryard where she disposed of the stool and ushered me up the steps.

When she had poured the milk into a crock and put it in the refrigerator, she nodded for me to be seated as she put the kettle on to boil. The lamp she had turned on laid a warm pool of light on the scarred and ringed surface of the wooden table. She washed her hands, and when the kettle began to sing she took it from the stove plate. She brought down the box of Weber’s tea; brewing it, she spoke over her shoulder. “Who shall say, ‘Be like me’? ‘Be like all the others’? If the bull cares to give milk, who shall say him nay? And if folks-folks like me-think about the old ways, who shall say them nay? Who shall say me nay? I have a cow, and if I believe the Mother fattens the plain for Caesar’s Wife to provide me milk, no man’s goin’ to tell me no.” She brought the cups on their saucers and laid them on the table. “If your wife tells you that it’s because of women and their strength that men survive, who shall tell her no? Not you, if you’re as smart as I think you are.”

Her step as she laid out the tea things was scarcely as spry as I had seen it on other occasions. Her face looked tired, and without that inner spark that usually animated her every word and gesture, and I saw that she was a very old woman. There was pain in her searching look; in back of the hooded eyes lay a question-hers, not mine, a question in answer to my question. She sipped, then took a hank of wool from a basket and began winding the end around her fingers.

“Planting Day? Spring Festival? Midsummer’s Eve? Harvest Home? Certain they’re older than the hills and they’re not like Santy Claus that you stop believin’ in when you catch your ma hangin’ up stockin’s Christmas Eve. They’re in people’s blood and marrow and hearts and they been there for centuries. You don’t take them things lightly, nor do you laugh nor interfere just because you’ve had too many pulls at the jug. And a man who dares is bound to come to grief.”

Outside, it was dark. The light above the table was a single beacon in the shadowy room. She continued winding the yarn. “Adam delved and Eve span,” she said wearily. Thinking of what I had discovered an hour ago in Soakes’s Lonesome, after leaving jack Stump’s, what I had known I would find, I remained silent, aloof, watchful of her, one hand employing the spoon to stir my cup, the other deep in my jacket pocket.

I knew I would never come to this kitchen again, never sit at her table, never drink her tea. It was, in a way, like the end or an affair: bitter, hopeless, irreparable,

“Spinning is a woman’s natural work,” I said at last.

“Aye, traditionally.”

“We were speaking of grief. Has Worthy come to grief?”

She bit her lip. Then: “We all come to grief, one time or another.”

“What will happen to him?”

“That’s no concern of yours.”

“Because I’m an outsider? Worthy’s like a son to me.”

“He was a son before he ever met you.”

“He’s a kid! Sixteen! What did he do?”

“He damned the corn!” Her eyes widened. “He damned the crops. That’s a serious business.”

“All he did was run off from something he didn’t want, to find something he did want. Is that so terrible? You never would have found Worthy if-”

“Yes?”

“-if Tamar Penrose hadn’t seen my letters and steamed it open. She told the Constable, who told Mr. Deming. Mr. Deming called you, the night I brought you the sewing machine. You sent him after Worthy.”

“Don’t you go glarin’ at me, you and them dark Greek looks. Worthy Pettinger knew what he was doin’; he had plenty of time to think it out-all them weeks I sent him ‘round to you, hopin’ he’d come to his senses. He was chosen. He was to be the Young Lord in the play.”

“But you had the play. The Minerva kid was the Young Lord.”

“How much better Worthy would’ve been. Made for it, he was. Proper age and all. Seven years younger than Justin, almost to the day.” She shook her head sadly. “It’s not so much for him, but for the other boys comin’ along behind him. Can’t have notions like Worthy’s goin’ abroad through the village. He’s got to be taught-”

Now, I thought; now. Say it now. Say it and be done. I said, “Like the Soakeses taught Jack Stump.”

“Aye.”

“Rolling him in ashes-”

“Aye.”

“Old Man Soakes cutting out his tongue with his knife-”

“Aye.”

“The boys sewing his mouth with their canvas needles-”

“Aye. Poor Jack, all he did was talk, and for that they mutilated him beyond hope.”

“No! For that you mutilated him beyond hope! You and the women. The Soakeses never touched Jack Stump!”

“Here, now-” She drew back from me as though to mantle herself in the shadows. I reached in my pocket and produced the scrap of paper with the writing over the skull and bones. “There’s a warning the Soakeses supposedly left him in the woods-only it wasn’t from the Soakeses, it was from you!” I turned it over and laid it before her. “Does that look familiar?” I reached to the shelf above the sink and grabbed a box from it. Tea sprayed around me as I tore out the liner and spread it beside the piece of foil paper, whose silvery reflection had caught my eye by Jack Stump’s fire. “Read it.”

“Can’t see without my specs,” she said truculently.

“You don’t have to see. You can feel it.” I seized her fingers and pressed them on the foil lining. “Weber’s tea. Embossed. With ‘One-B’-remember?” I turned Jack’s message over and pressed her fingers there, on the identical foil, embossed the same way. “One-B Weber’s.”

“I don’t expect I’m the only person to use Weber’s tea.”

“You have to send for it-remember? To London. You used one of those scraps from your kitchen spindle to write the note, and had it put in Jack’s trap, the traps you moved yourself.” She pulled her hand away; I seized her arm and gripped it. “Jack Stump was in the woods all right, and you didn’t want him there any more than the Soakeses did. But you decided to do something about it. You caught him, you and the other women over at Irene Tatum’s for a quilting party. He wasn’t rolled in the ashes from Soakes’s still, but in the ashes from Irene’s soap kettle. Then you cut his tongue out. With these.” I yanked my hand from my pocket, raised it, and brought it down. The teacup and saucer broke as the pair of rusty shears struck them.

“There’s your missing scissors, Mary, and you didn’t leave them at Asia Minerva’s house. You lost them in the woods when you attacked Jack. You were looking for them the day we hunted mushrooms. After you cut off his tongue, you took your needle and thread and stitched his mouth up. You planned it all, the quilting party at Irene Tatum’s house, all of it.”

She looked at me across the broken pieces of the cup, something defiant in her eyes. “First time you ever called me ‘Mary.’ Seems strange. People don’t call me that much. Clem used to, of course-Robert sometimes.” One hand came from her lap and touched a fragment of china. “Aye, Jack was a talker. And a meddler, and that’s a bad combination in any soul, man or woman. Tamar put the quietus to him.”

“Tamar?”

“It was she who done the cuttin’ and sewin’ of poor Jack. Strong measures, I’ll agree, stronger than was warranted, maybe, but sometimes Tamar’s got to be restrained. Yet I couldn’t say it wasn’t necessary. Nobody would’ve been beholden to Jack for goin’ off on one of his territory circuits and talkin’ at every doorstep along the way.”

“Talking about what?”

“Things we don’t want talked about.” She spoke angrily. “Some things are no one’s business but our own. We got skeletons in our closets same as other folks. Jack was afflicted by tongue and nose, both. Went pokin’ his nose around the Lonesome, where he oughtn’t to have been. Went pokin’ it around town and findin’ out things outsiders oughtn’t to be concerned with.”

“I’m an outsider.”

“But we didn’t want you to be.” She looked up at me with mute appeal. “I didn’t want you to be.” She waited for me to speak; I knew I must not, for my own safety. “Jack’s a sly one,” she continued. “Puts one and one together and comes up with two. What he saw, he knew, and what he knew, he was bound to tell. We got our privacies. Some more regrettable than others-even Jack would admit that.”

I spoke coldly. “You don’t have to worry; he won’t talk any more. And you don’t have to worry about getting him back on his rig by spring-he’ll never see the winter out.”

She stared at the shattered cup and saucer. “You think I’m evil. A bad old woman. Yes, I’m old, and I crave peace. I don’t have much time to grow older. Soon someone’s going to have to relieve me of my-duties. Someone will have to come after me.”

“Missy?”

“You are too disdainful. Missy, perhaps. Or, before her, another. But while I live I’ll be doin’ my duties. I’ve lived as I was taught. I’ve lived in what I believed.”

She looked down at the table, ran her fingertips along the blade of the rusty scissors. “I miss the old humbug, y’know. Hearin’ him comin’ ‘round with his clatter and his bang and gabbin’ a body’s ear off.”

I pulled my hands to me, thrusting them in my lap, wrenching my fingers that I should not strike an old woman. When I could govern myself again, I got up.

“What about Worthy?”

Heir head lifted, her eyes blinked at the light, as if trying to see past it, past me, into some cloudy future. “Worthy Pettinger,” she said softly. The light etched her features; she looked haggard, worn, as she began picking up the shattered pieces of the blue teacup. “Clem bought me them cups the year we was married. All these years, and not a one of ‘em broke. Till now. I don’t s’pose I can mend it, can I?” She thought a moment. Then: “No,” she concluded, “some things is forever past mendin’.” One by one she laid the broken pieces in the saucer.

25

It was the end of the great back-to-the-land movement. Henceforward it would be country mouse into city mouse again. What other answer was there? What else to do. But how could I bring myself to put it to Beth, to tell her how we had been fooled and connived against? To tell her what the women really were?

Tell her what the Widow Fortune was?

Perplexed, indecisive, but with a growing determination, after a sleepless night, the next morning I gravitated to the Common, my mind still working over the reason for the attack on the peddler. We have our privacies, the Widow had said. Something private, which Jack Stump had discovered. Still trying to conjure up an idea of what discovery, I watched Irene Tatum’s pickup truck rattle down the north end of Main Street and pull up to the Common. Some of the Tatum kids leaped out and, under Irene’s supervision, unloaded a stack of wooden planks and hauled them across the grass to the bonfire heap. The construction had grown considerably in the past two days, a crude frame of timbers and boards nailed crisscross to hold together the assemblage of boxes, crates, and debris that had been jumbled inside. Ladders were being used to hand material up to the top, where Jim Minerva was securing it with twine, while below groups of people viewed the work as it proceeded, pointing, laughing, chatting.

From the chimneys and eaves of the houses hung the woven corn symbols, swaying in the breeze: Harvest Home was coming.

Inside the post office, it was business as usual. I passed the open doorway, then slipped along the side of the building to the rear. I crept up to the window and looked in. The room was empty. The door was open and I could see Myrtil Clapp at the counter, stamping a package for Mrs. Buxley, who stood on the other side of the window. Glancing at me, the minister’s wife gave me a quick dither of fingers, and I hurried around to the street to intercept her as she came out, then walked beside her across the Common.

She gave me one of her best smiles. “Lovely day, Ned, isn’t it the loveliest? And tonight will be one of the most exciting- see the bonfire we’re going to have.”

“Mrs. Buxley, what’s happened to Worthy?”

“Worthy? Pettinger? Why, nothing.” She wrinkled her eyebrows. “Worthy’s left.”

“Left?”

She nodded, arranging the neckline of her dress. “Mrs. Zee drove him over to the turnpike to catch the bus. He’s gone to New York. At least he said he was going to New York.” She gave a little shrug. “Of course, one never knows what the young people are going to do these days, does one?”

“He simply left?”

She threw her gloved hands out palms up. “Simply. Ewan Deming had a little talk with him. I think he rather reprimanded Worthy. Set him straight, so to speak. Then he let Mrs. Zee drive him to the bus. Isn’t it strange about the sheep?”

“The sheep?”

“Yes. See-they’re gone. Amys has put them to fold. A sure sign winter’s coming. Whenever the sheep are gone, I know it’s time to get out my fur coat. Hope you’ve got plenty of warm clothes-our winters can be terrible. One year the snow was five foot high right here on the-Ned? Are you all right?”

“Yes. Of course.”

“Suddenly you looked-well-” We crossed to the far sidewalk in front of the church, where she gave me her arm to help her onto the first step. “Thank you.” She let out a little laugh, as if we were wicked. “See you in church.” Waggled fingers, went on up the steps, patted the bell ringer’s shoulder as he sat knitting. “Pretty colors, Amys.” Went inside.

He gave her a look and plied his needles.

“Been here all morning, Amys?”

“All mornin’.”

“Did you see Worthy Pettinger leave?”

“Ayuh. Old Deming gave him what-for; then Mrs. Zee drove him off in his car.”

“Did he have a suitcase?”

“Ayuh.” He began counting stitches. I went a little distance down the sidewalk and turned in to the cemetery, made my way up the slope through the maze of headstones, and stood on the knoll, thinking.

Then I quickly left and went down to the library, where I asked the librarian to find me a particular volume of the Farmer’s Almanac. When my theory had been corroborated, I thanked her and left. Margie Perkin’s head hung out the window of the beauty parlor as she chatted with Betsey Cox, the bank teller, below. On the other side of the Common, the perpetual checker game at the firehouse was interrupted while Merle Penrose and Harry Gill stood in the doorway watching Mrs. Brucie come out of the grocer’s and go into the drugstore. Jim Minerva tied a corncob on a stick and jammed it in the top of the bonfire pile. A cheer arose from among the onlookers, and Mrs. Buxley, who had brought Mr. Buxley out onto the church steps, waggled her fingers. Directly across the way, at the post office, Tamar Penrose came to see what the applause was about.

I stared moodily at the autumn sky, as blue as it had been in August, in June. I recalled the morning of the Agnes Fair, walking down Penrose Lane, pledging myself to the earth, thinking how right it all felt, how we would find our places in Cornwall Coombe. You folks be happy here, said the Widow Fortune; That’s all you’ve got, each other, and bein’ happy together.

My jaw clamped. I felt aloof, apart, a stranger. Who was I? Who were they? The villagers of Cornwall Coombe; and I an alien, an outsider, never to be an insider. But I no longer cared to be. They were altered, and so was I. All I wanted now was — suddenly I wanted terribly to see Beth, to talk to her.

Tamar went back into the post office. The back room was empty now. Worthy had gone. He hadn’t cared much, after all; had left without saying goodbye. When you came down to it, he wasn’t any different from the rest.

Myrtil Clapp came out of the post office, followed by Tamar, who locked the door and went toward her house. I stood on the knoll, thinking about Justin Hooke. Why had he lied? I kept wondering. Why would Justin Hooke tell me a deliberate lie?

I went down the back slope and stepped over the iron fence. The marshy ground squished under me, filling with water. I shoved a branch into the earth. It drove in easily and when I pulled it out the hole filled immediately. The place wasn’t a grave; it was a bog.

Amys was watching me from above. I climbed up and stood beside him.

“Wet down there,” he commented. “Good land if they’d drain ‘er. ‘Bout run out of room up here. Don’t know where I’ll put the next one that kicks the bucket.”

“Why don’t they drain that land?”

“Wouldn’t pay. She’ll wet up like that again.”

“When it floods.”

“Ayuh.”

“Amys, what’s Justin Hooke hiding?”

“How can I tell? I ain’t Justin Hooke.”

“Grace Everdeen didn’t kill herself.”

“She didn’t?”

“No. At least not by jumping off the Lost Whistle. Justin says she dashed herself on the rocks, because the river was low that year. Only it wasn’t. There’d been a flood that spring. You said yourself that the winter before Gracie came back was a bad one. Snow five feet deep, people had to tunnel, some of your sheep died. There was a thaw, and then the river flooded. The river was high all that summer, just like this year. The drought-the Great Waste-came after Gracie died, not before. So there weren’t any rocks. Justin’s lying.” I paused, looked closely at Amys, then said, “And if it was flooded like this, you couldn’t have dug a grave for her.”

He turned away slightly, examining his horny palms.

“Amys? She’s not there, is she?”

He did not reply immediately, and when he did it was with difficulty. “No, sir.”

“You never buried her, did you?”

“Yes, sir. I did. Mr. Deming said to dig and I dug. But it was all mud, and water three inches deep in the bottom. Fast as I bailed ‘er out, water seeped in again. Only a cold man like Ewan Deming’d consign the unhappy dead to such a place. I told him it was wrong. Deming said, ‘Fill ‘er in.’ When the elders left, I pulled out the box and hid it, then filled in the hole. That night I put her on my barrow and took her where she’d be dry and safe.” He turned with a pleading look, his eyes watering. “In the name of God, don’t tell. Please- they’ll-”

“I won’t, don’t worry. What did you do with her?”

He looked once again down the slope to the grave marker, then motioned me with his head. I followed him across the Common to Penance House and out back to the barn. He took me behind it to where the sheds were, and, beyond them, the hatchway dug into the ground. Glancing over his shoulder, he crouched at the doors and undid the lock securing the chain.

Three beams set into the earth served as steps. In the musty dimness, I could make out the earthen sides of a small room lined with bare shelves where roots and vegetables had once been stored for winter use. Along the far wall, I saw a long, dark shape, shrouded by some kind of covering. Amys drew back a dusty tarpaulin and I looked down on the coffin of Gracie Everdeen.

“It’s dry as the Sahara down here,” he whispered hoarsely. “Never gets no water, never no rain nor snow. There she lies- the last of sweet Gracie.”

The pine box rested on two sawhorses, and the boards were badly warped and shrunken, so that there were wide spaces between them.

“Weren’t you afraid someone would find out she’s here?”

“Nobody comes down here. I got the only key.”

“It’s not a very big box, is it?”

“No, sir.”

“But Gracie was a tall girl, wasn’t she?”

“But pretty,” he said quickly. “Gracie was pretty as a picture.”

“I remember you said so.”

He shook out the tarpaulin, raising a cloud of dust, and I helped him redrape the box. He leaned to smooth a corner, and as he stepped back the toe of his shoe caught on a sawhorse leg, sliding it from under the coffin. The end tilted, then hit the floor with a dry, wooden impact. He bent quickly and lifted the end again, replacing it on top of the sawhorse. As he straightened the tarp again, I saw something underneath, a small pile of some substance on the floor. While I watched, it grew larger, a small cone filling out on the sides like sand in the bottom of an hourglass. I knelt, looking closer. Overhead a faint trickle still continued through a crack where the coffin boards were shrunk apart. I caught them in my palm, brought them nearer.

Corn kernels.

Small, infinitesimally shriveled seeds of corn. I moved to the head of the box, motioned Amys to the foot, and together we lifted it. Another trickle of corn fell from the bottom. We shook the box, heard inside the dry rattle as more seeds sifted down, shook it until almost all the kernels had come out, until I was utterly certain there was nothing left inside, that for fourteen years this coffin had contained not the remains of Gracie Everdeen but only a sack of corn.

Requiescat in pace, Grace Everdeen.

But where was she resting? Why the carved inscription, the monument, the false grave?

With a sketch pad open on my knee, I sat on my folding stool, drawing the pear tree under the side window at the Hooke farm. As I laid out on the page the framework of the bare branches, I was reminded of the chestnut trees in the Tuileries in Paris, whose branches are cut back every autumn to grow again in the spring. I was trying very hard to think about Paris, and about anything that might keep me from thinking of what I did not want to think about.

I had not seen either Justin or Sophie when I came, nor were any of the men I had seen on former visits working on the premises. Justin’s El Camino was parked near the barn, and there was bedding hung out to air.

I found it difficult to concentrate on my work, and presently it became even harder, for I heard voices coming from the open upstairs window.

“Don’t, Sophie. Don’t let anyone see you like this.” There was a pause, then again the low rumble of Justin’s voice as he murmured something. Then, “You love me,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Then it’s enough. For me, it’s enough. If we can have a child, it will be raised as we have wished it, and that will be enough, too.”

Her murmured response signified nothing to me.

“In the old ways,” Justin said. “Trust them. Sophie?”

“Yes.”

“Trust them.” Another pause. “And tomorrow, when we go to the Common-”

“I don’t want to go to the Common-”

“We must. We must be there for them. When the bell strikes twelve, we must be there. You will behave as is fitting. Otherwise they’ll hate you. You’ll spend the rest of your life being hated, like-”

“Don’t.” I saw a flash at the half-open window as Sophie passed. She whispered something, and I dropped my head down over my sketchbook.

Justin called, “How’s it going down there?”

“Fine.” I nodded up to him; he lowered the sash and drew the shade. Soon I could hear them in the kitchen, talking in normal tones again, amid the rattle of silverware and the clink of china. Then something fell and broke, and Sophie was crying again; I heard her running upstairs. In a moment, Justin came out the kitchen door and down the steps. I returned to my work as he crossed the drive and stood beside me; from upstairs came the sounds of Sophie’s sobbing.

Justin shoved his hands in his pockets. “Spilt milk.” He drew a long breath. “She broke the cow pitcher.” Making no comment about the drawing of the tree, he wandered a short distance away and stood at the edge of the field, looking off. He took his key ring from his pocket and jingled it, his hands clasped behind his back. He ran his fingers through his hair, then recrossed the drive.

“Well, I’ve got to get going.”

I looked up. “See you tonight?”

“Kindling Night.” He shook his head. “I don’t think we’ll be there. We’ve seen lots of Kindling Nights.” He glanced at my page. “Nice tree. You’re a good artist.” He was holding out his hand. I rose and took it. “Goodbye, Ned,” he said simply. I watched him walk to the truck, get in, and drive out around the other side of the house.

I moved my stool closer to the tree, making a few detail notes of the bark and tips. Then I heard something behind me and turned to find Sophie looking over my shoulder.

“Hi, Sophie.”

“Hello, Ned. That’s a beautiful drawing. How is the painting?”

I said the tree was the last thing to go in, and I would have it finished by tomorrow noontime. “If you and Justin are coming in, you can pick it up, if you like.”

“Yes. Noon.” She nodded absently, and I could see she was thinking of something else. She went to the tree and put out her hand, running her fingertips along one of the branches. “They never bear fruit, you know.”

“Don’t they?”

“No. Just leaves and flowers. I suppose that’s why God gave them to us, just to be beautiful.” She was silent for a moment, and when she spoke again it was with a forced control. “Ned, could you do something for me?”

“Sure, Sophie.”

“Could you make it spring?”

“Spring?”

“Yes. Paint the tree in spring. Not with the bare branches, but with flowers. Make the tree all white and flowery. With little green leaves?”

“Well-” It had been part of the design of the picture that the branches be bare, the simple straight lines meant to play off the simple straight figure of Justin. I did not like the idea of putting in the flowers, particularly white ones; they would make the picture too pretty.

She saw my hesitation and smiled. “That’s all right. It was just an idea.” She turned away quickly and her hand came up and furtively brushed at one eye. I observed her as she stepped away to the tree and stood looking at the bare branches.

“Sophie, did you know Grace Everdeen?”

There was a quick, quivering motion about her shoulders as though a cold wind had touched her. “No.”

“But you’d heard of her.”

Still, head lowered, she looked at the lower trunk of the tree. “Yes.” Her face was turned from me; I got up and approached her, saw her hand break off a dead twig from a branch. Her shoulders stiffened, her chin lifted. “She was bad. Grace Everdeen was bad. The baddest anyone could be. Bad — brought bad to the village-” Speaking by rote, as if hypnotized.

“How?”

Her eyes snapped, the color rose in her cheeks. “She came back for Harvest Home. She shouldn’t have. She was blighted.”

“What had blighted her?”

“She was diseased! That’s why she ran away, so nobody would know. She never should have come back.”

Diseased. Not pregnant, but diseased. Amys had said she was a fairy creature, Mrs. O’Byrne had said a horse.

“No one wants a Corn Maiden who’s sick.” Sophie’s hands trembled at her breast. “Grace Everdeen was cursed by God. As I am cursed.” She covered her face to hide the tears. “Jesus help me.” She tore her hands away from her wet cheeks and looked at me, crying, “Help me!”

“How, Sophie? Tell me. I’ll help you.”

She stared a moment longer, as if she thought I might truly help. Then, “No-you can’t. No one can.” With a wild, despairing look, she spun and ran across the strip of lawn into the field, stumbling along between the gathered corn shocks, her pale hair streaming behind.

When I had gathered my things together, I went into the kitchen and telephoned Dr. Bonfils in Saxony.

Strangely, he seemed to be expecting my call.

When I came out again, Sophie was a small figure in the distance, crossing the field toward the road as the Widow Fortune’s mare appeared around the bend. The buggy slowed, then stopped, and the old lady got down from the seat, and when Sophie came to her she put her arms around her, the blond head resting against the black dress, and I saw the Widow’s large hand as it made comforting gestures about Sophie’s shoulders.

I started up the drive to my car, then turned back, looking again at the pear tree. I decided that when I painted it I would make it bloom for Sophie Hooke. As it would in the springtime.

The Eternal Return…

Dr. Bonfils had agreed to see me if I could come to his office during his lunch hour; I had said it was important. When the nurse showed me in, he was having a “takeout” hamburger and chocolate milkshake at his desk. “Well, Ned,” he began quickly, “I’m sorry. As I told your wife, as right as the old lady is most of the time, unfortunately even she makes mistakes. I’m sure it’s a disappointment but surely one you can bear up under, eh?” He opened a little foil packet and squirted ketchup on top of the hamburger. I stared at him.

“I’m sorry, Doctor, I’m confused-what are you talking about?”

“Your wife. She came to see me yesterday. I’m afraid there’s been a mistake. She’s not going to have a baby.”

“Not?”

“No. I’m sorry, but the examination was negative.” He took a bite of his hamburger, allowing me time to absorb the shock of his news. “She didn’t tell you?”

Beth passing me yesterday on the Old Sallow Road. Maggie telling me she had an appointment. Worried that I had been right; which I was.

“She was disappointed, naturally,” the doctor went on. “All the signs were there. She’s not the first case, of course. A woman wanting a baby, showing all the symptoms of conception. It’s a form of physical hysteria.”

“Doctor, can you do a test on me? To find out if I’m sterile?”

“Of course: Do you think you might be?”

I told him of Beth’s obstetrical problems, but that I had always thought it might be the mumps I had caught from ‘Cita Gonzalez when I baby-sat for her.

While we waited for the results of the test, I told the doctor my real reasons for having come to see him. “I wanted to ask if you remember a girl named Grace Everdeen.”

“I remember her well. What do you want to know about her?”

“During the summer of 1958, while she was living over at Mrs. O’Byrne’s, you were treating her, isn’t that so?”

“I was treating her a good while before that.”

I looked at him, surprised. “You were? Was she pregnant?”

It was his turn to show surprise. “Pregnant? No, nothing of the sort. As a matter of fact, as far as I know, Grace was still a virgin when she-ah, died.”

“You knew she killed herself.”

“Certainly.”

“Do you know why?”

“I believe I do.”

“Was it because of Roger Penrose?”

“Indirectly, I suppose-” He broke off. “Mr. Constantine, what exactly is your interest in the case?”

I said I was a friend of Mrs. O’Byrne’s, and that through her I had taken an interest in the tragic story, and was trying to substantiate for her and for myself the facts of Grace’s death. The doctor listened, and then, wiping his mouth and fingers, he said, “Grace Everdeen killed herself because she had contracted an incurable disease.”

I leaned forward. “Which was-?”

“Acromegaly. It’s a not uncommon condition. Did you know Grace was Swedish?”

“No.”

“On her mother’s side. For some reason, acromegaly seems to have a high incidence among Swedes. It is a condition arising from a hypersecretion of the growth hormone. A pituitary disorder.”

“Is it fatal?”

“Often. In its early stages, it can induce in the patient the ability to perform extraordinary feats of strength. Then, as the disease takes hold, the patient suffers a gradual enfeeblement. He becomes emotional, distraught-manic, even. As it was in Grace’s case-she was subject for some time to acute depression and delusions. Those are some of the mental stresses. In regard to the physical aspects, in extreme cases acromegaly can produce a giant.”

“A giant.”

“Indeed. When the adult body has attained its full growth, it stops. But with the incidence of acromegaly, the extremities continue to become enlarged, the hands and feet, the bones and cutaneous tissues of the face. Where skeletal overgrowth happens, the fingers may become excessively long or thickened. The frontal ridge of the head becomes enlarged, the jaw prognathous, the cheekbones knobby. It may, as in Grace’s case, set the teeth wider apart. The tongue often becomes gross, causing difficulty in talking, and the lips thicken. Generally, the condition produces a monstrous physical change in the patient.”

“How long does it take?” The irony of the situation struck me: all this medical information-I had come to find out one thing, and was on the point of discovering several.

“Sometimes the manifestations are slow to reveal themselves; in other cases-like Grace’s-it can come fast after the initial onset.”

“Not a fairy, but a horse,” I repeated softly.

He glanced at me, crumpled his napkin, and tossed it in the basket. “In a short while, Grace Everdeen would have been an extremely unfortunate-looking young woman. If she had not run away, I might have been able to arrest the symptoms, but during her absence the disease had taken a fierce hold on her. I reinstituted the course of X-ray treatment, and I administered large doses of estrogens to slow down the pituitary action. The radiation, however, had to be repeated at two-month intervals, and by the time Grace returned, it was already too late. If you could wait a moment-”

“Of course.” He finished his milkshake, then went out, dropping the carton in the wastebasket as he passed. When he came in again, he was carrying a large manila folder.

“I kept the X-rays. It was such an unusual case.” He flipped a switch on a light panel and ranged half a dozen negatives on the rack. Several showed the entire figure, several the head and torso. One was of the hands, another of the feet. In some of them the light form of the ring chained around the neck appeared.

“Is something wrong?” he said. I was staring at the remarkable shape of the ring.

“No- Please go on.”

Before he had completed his comments, his nurse came in with a printed form which she placed in front of him. When she went out, the doctor studied the report for a moment, then looked at me.

“It’s as you thought.”

“Sterile?”

“I’m afraid so. There weren’t any little fellows swimming around. Undoubtedly the mumps.”

Well, there it was. Me, mumps: sterile. Such a stupid disease. Much more stupid than Grace’s. And less far-reaching. I couldn’t have a child. Grace had died. But, leaving the doctor, I knew now that he was wrong about one thing. Grace Everdeen had not chosen to do away with herself. She had been murdered. On the night of Harvest Home.

In the outer office, I paused to ask him one final question. “Tell me, Doctor, how is the Widow’s health?”

“Mary Fortune? Why, it’s the best. She’s old, but she’s got a sound heart. At the rate she’s going, she’s good for a lot of years yet. Providing she doesn’t overdo.”

I intended to make it my business that the Widow Fortune should not overdo.

I crossed the Lost Whistle Bridge again, and drove back along the Old Sallow Road. Fred Minerva’s wagon was pulled up along the roadside where some men were clearing a path through the brush. Others were unloading the kegs of mead and carrying them into the woods. Though several glanced at me, none offered any sign of acknowledgment. When I got to Irene Tatum’s orchard, I drove my car behind a shed, ducked across the road, and entered the woods. Hurrying, I found the blazed trail and quickly picked up the stream. I had little time; I knew where the kegs were being taken. When I got to the gap, I went through, scrambled onto the bank, and from there walked into the clearing.

The crow sat in the dark shadows of the pine branches. No wind poured through the gap; there were no moans today. We have skeletons in our closets same as other folks, the Widow Fortune had said. But her skeleton was in no closet; it was hidden in the hollow tree-not the supposed bones of the missing revenuer, but those of the murdered Gracie Everdeen. Then, approaching, I saw the skeleton was no longer hidden; it was gone. The tree tomb was empty.

I might have expected as much. They had come and taken the evidence away. They had killed Gracie and hidden the corpse from chance prying eyes by putting her in the hollow tree, under the vines. But why? Why hadn’t they buried her body, or sunk it? Why in the tree, here in the grove? Prying eyes had found it-Jack Stump’s. And for that he had been silenced. As I would be, if they learned I knew of it. But the corpus delicti had been removed elsewhere. Yet I knew there was a piece of evidence they had forgotten existed. One that Jack Stump knew of, and still had in his possession.

I fled the grove, the scene of Gracie’s murder, and headed toward the river instead of the road. I did not want to go back to the village and to Beth-with the truth I knew I now had to tell her. Following the path of the stream, I tried to work it out. There had been the brutal cranial fracture, where I had supposed the Soakeses had struck down the revenuer with a heavy object. Someone had hit Gracie, causing her death. She had come to Harvest Home, and had been a “disruptive influence.” She had been killed then, not two nights later. They had waited two days and then had Irene Tatum say she found the body under the bridge. Then they brought the corn-filled coffin to the cemetery to be buried, while Grace’s body had been hidden in the tree.

The stream widened; ahead I could see the river through the trees. I came out on a grassy bank and looked down into the cove where Beth and I had swum that day. I saw the log I had leaned against. Across the river were the bare tobacco fields, the sheds low against the line of trees rising behind. I lay down on the grass and leaned my head against the log, thinking.

Beware.

The all-prevailing night.

The filthy bird hanging from her hand. Chicken blood and madness. It was I who was mad. Or if not, I had to do something.

Do something.

We all make our own fate, Robert had said. We all have choices; the thing to do is make the choice.

Right or wrong, make the choice.

I felt a tickling in my ear, then along my neck. I looked down to see small insect shapes swarming from the log, pouring out of the pulpy fibers onto my shoulders and down my back. Jumping up, I began stripping off my clothes, then ran down the bank and plunged into the water, rubbing at my skin to dislodge the insects. When I was free of them, I did not come out immediately. I swam, trying to tire myself, and when I came out I lay on the sand in the shallow water, feeling the sun on my body, the water sluicing along my shoulders and legs. I took deep breaths, trying to relax. I placed my hands on my stomach muscles, felt them constrict. I splayed out my fingers, bent them back against the wet sand to relax them, felt the smooth knuckle joint where the wart had been.

What had happened on that night of Harvest Home fourteen years ago? Fourteen years ago tomorrow night? How had Gracie Everdeen been a “disruptive influence,” for which she had been killed? Killed? Or executed? Where were her bones now? My speculations, like circles, went round and round, always coming back to the women. What do you talk about at the Widow’s? Oh, just girl talk. Superstitions? Country notions? Perhaps. And in Justin’s cornfield, the face with the staring eyes. The little corn god. Goddess. Mother Earth. Bountiful harvest. Moon. Circles. Choices.

“Circles,” I repeated aloud.

“You’re talking to yourself.” The voice, followed by a laugh I recognized. I turned my head, looking up at the bank behind me. Tamar Penrose stood in the grass. She had been wading, her skirt was tucked up; I could see her legs white and glistening, her thighs, her melony breasts. Her red nails flashed as she tossed her hair back.

Not in shame but in contempt, I rolled onto my stomach, resting my head along my arm, the water sliding around my mouth.

“I talk to myself sometimes,” she said. I glanced up at her as she sat in the grass and dangled her legs over the edge of the bank. She plucked an autumn daisy and twirled it between her fingers. I ventured my question.

She was pulling the petals from the daisy. “Loves me, loves me not. Gracie? How should I remember? I’m too busy with parcel post to keep track of people’s comings and goings from this world to another. Loves me, loves me not…”

“What happens on Harvest Home?”

“‘What no man may know nor woman tell.’ I guess that’s the oldest saw in the village. You want to know about Harvest Home? I’ll tell you.”

She had put flowers in her hair, and the blossoms trailed down among the dark tendrils to her shoulders. She lifted the corn necklace at her breast. “This. This is Harvest Home. And these”-touching the flowers in her hair-”and this”-scooping some earth from the bank and lumping it in her hand. “It’s to celebrate this.” She opened her hand and looked at it, her voice curiously pitched.

She tossed the lump of clay and it fell near my shoulder. She rose and came slowly down the bank. I put my head down again. I could hear the light splash of her feet and felt a coolness on my back where her form eclipsed the sun. She bent, gently running the tips of her nails between my shoulder blades. I felt her hair brush against me as she came closer. I could feel her knowing fingers toying at the base of my neck.

“You don’t say what happens.”

“I’m not going to.” There was an allure in her voice, as though she wanted me to urge her. “It’s just what people do.”

I shrugged her fingers away. They immediately returned, kneading the cords of my neck. Despite the coldness of the water, against the sandy grit, I could feel a stirring: loin lust. I pulled away. “And Jack Stump. Is that what people do? Savage their fellow-man?”

“It was necessary.” She spoke lightly, as if the matter were of no consequence.

“Why not have killed him?”

“I could have. I’m very strong. Feel how strong.”

“You bitch.”

“Yes.” An affirmation, a caress, both.

With my head turned away, I called her other names.

“Yes. But feel me. Feel my skin.” She took my hand and invited my touch. “Feel how soft.” I snatched my hand away, swore at her. She accepted my abuse willingly, her fingers gliding over my flesh as I accused; and as I accused, beneath me I could feel myself growing harder.

I spoke angrily. She had silenced the peddler, had cut his tongue and stitched him. Still she caressed me. Yes, she answered in a small voice, she had done these things. “With these hands.” Ran them over my shoulders, down my spine to my buttocks, my legs. I pulled away. “Grace Everdeen died on Harvest Home.”

“Yes.”

I could feel my hardness in the sand, and as though knowing it, she murmured things that sent the blood coursing to where she commanded it.

“She didn’t kill herself,” I said.

“No.”

“She was murdered.” I looked at her quickly, saw the answer in her eyes. “You killed her.”

“Yes.”

“Jesus.”

“Jesus saves. But not Grace. She came. To Harvest Home. Where she had no right. She was diseased. Unclean. She couldn’t be Corn Maiden, and she didn’t want me to be. She came to blight the crops. To blight Roger, if she could. But she couldn’t have him. I did. She came, and I hit her with my hoe. Here.” She had straddled me, her hair brushing my shoulders as she bent and laid her fingers on my temple, showing me the place. “I killed her like she should have been killed. She was put in the tree so she would be there for all the Harvest Homes that came after. So she could watch. You want to know what happens at Harvest Home? I’ll tell you. They make the corn.”

“They-”

“Make the corn! Not like in the play. But really-truly make-the-corn. Roger and I, we made the corn together. Missy is Roger Penrose’s child. We made her that night. At Harvest Home. Justin will make the corn. With Sophie. If Sophie can have a baby from it, it will be good. Then there’ll be a surer chance of good crops.”

“You had a baby and there was a drought.”

Her eyes flashed. “The drought was Gracie’s! And Missy’s the best thing ever happened to this village!”

I loathed her. Her fleshy weight made my stomach heave.

I spread my palms against the pebbles and thrust upward, toppling her sidewise into the water. A light danced in her eyes, a triumphant gleam. I rose to my knees and she uttered a tiny mewling whimper as she saw what her touch had erected. She put out her hand; before she could reach me I leaped up; she lay back with a moan. I stood over her, the sun at my back, my shadow slicing her in half.

With panicky little moaning sounds, she scrabbled to me, sliding her hands up along my thighs, seizing and laying her cheek against me; I could feel the bite of her red nails where she had forced me to power. I lifted my foot, placed it against her shoulder, shoved violently. She fell back in the water, her mouth wet and red, then came to a crouching position and raised her arms as if she knelt upon an altar. The goddess pleading to be fulfilled. I would not. I would not pleasure the goddess; I would destroy her.

Even as I moved toward her, I knew I wanted to kill her. I flung myself on her, my hands murderous as they sought her throat, fingers closing on her windpipe. I seized her chin, wrenched it from side to side in the shallow water. I half rose and, bending, dragged her into the deeper part, thrusting her head up and down, her tantalizing smile appearing amid a froth of bubbles. I drove her under, holding her submerged, watching her hair rippling outward, undulant as seaweed, snakes-Medusa’s head. I would obliterate it.

Again I drove her downward, held her there, watched the bubbles rise, saw the mocking smile, as though she defied me to do it. Her head drifted upwards, the cool, ripe breasts surfacing, the water draining between them. Then, scarcely realizing my intent, as she floated limp but smiling, I dragged her to the clay bank and propped her against it. She lay there, her breasts still rising and falling. She was not dead; but would be. There was another way, a better way. My body imprisoning hers, my hands began tearing at her dress, stripping it from her, shucking her bare. She had revived, but she did not understand what I meant to do. Her hands came up, caressing the back of my neck. She pulled my head close, her lips on mine, her tongue forcing its way into my mouth, her hand fumbling its way between us, stroking, manipulating me. I grabbed her wrists and flung her arms from her sides, using my knees to force her legs farther apart. She drew her thighs around the outsides of my thighs and pulled me in toward her. Her nails dug into my neck, my shoulders, and in return I flailed her breasts with my muzzle, using the beard stubble to abrade the tender skin. And then, fully aroused, I began ramming at her.

The light had not died in her eyes; their whiteness blazed at each thrust, her thighs sliding against me not in protest, but widening, opening herself to let me find her, to make me take her. Digging my feet into the ground for purchase, I felt my buttock muscles knot as I arched my back and drove myself into her. She shuddered and cried out then, but when I freed her hands her arms welcomed me in embrace. I wound my fingers in her wet hair and gripped, still wanting to kill her, not with my hands but with that other part of me that she had aroused. I worked at her and worked, then halted, watching her eyes roll, wild like an animal’s, holding her impaled on me, for I would not finish yet, and when I had mastered myself I worked again, rearing and plunging, and mixed with my curses and her passion were the sounds of our clashing bodies, muscles and tissue, the bulging noises I could force from her, the thud of my chest against hers, the slap of our wet bellies.

It became a duel. Willingly she would take from me, but I would not give to her. There would be no ecstasy for her, only pain. But her pain became her ecstasy. “Oh, yes,” she moaned, “my Greek, my Lord. Plow me, plow me.” A full-throated plea and the water ran from her body in rivulets down the bank, mixing with the dark clay, and I dug handfuls of it and, riding her, ramming her against the ground, I smeared it in her face, the substance of Mother Earth, rubbing it in her eyes and ears, stopping her mouth with it, forcing her cheeks to wallow in it, her shoulders and breasts, ever driving, thrusting, pulling back, and ramming her again, sucking the saliva up from my throat and spitting it in her face, the face of the Mother goddess, driving against her, twisting, to batter her pliant flesh, to drive the goddess back into Mother Earth and bury her there.

She did not stop her words and though I battled her and thought the battle mine, she worked upon me to have her way, inviting my violence, glorying in it, using all her parts, and I, losing, thought that no machine had ever been so cleverly invented, so beautifully crafted to provide pleasure. I fought her with the strength of my body, but hers was stronger. As I surged into her, I heard my curses soften, heard them become endearments. I put my mouth to her breasts and sucked. Murmuring, she held me gently in her arms and I knew I had lost then. The duel was hers. Fulfilling me, she had vanquished me. I had not taken her and violated her, for the earth was not to be taken or violated, and she was of the earth. She was earth itself, the Mother goddess, and even as my semen flowed I could feel my eyes sting as the tears came; the man unmanned, defeated by the woman.

I grasped her wrists again and shudderingly withdrew, our bodies parting with a hollow sucking noise. As she lay panting against the wet clay, I could see her bruised, triumphant smile and I saw she knew it, too; she was the victor.

I tasted earth in my mouth. Turning, I spat, then filled my lungs and, wheeling, flung myself in the water, submerging, rubbing my hands over my flesh, cleansing it, watching the dark clay loosen from my body, break up, and float away in the current. When my breath was spent, I limply pushed myself to the surface. I slicked my hair from my eyes and looked at the bank. She was not there, but imprinted in the wet clay was the hollow of her form, and it seemed as if she had entered there, the goddess returned to the earth.

26

The goddess. I comprehended it, or thought I did. The doll in Justin’s cornfield represented the Mother. The Mother was the goddess. The goddess provided fertility. Fertility was needed. Without it, there would be no corn. Without corn, no money or food. Without them, people died. Doll; Mother; fertility. Hope; belief.

They all believed. All the village. They wanted me to believe, too. It was shocking, yet terribly simple.

And Harvest Home was coming.

Harvest Home! A time o’ joy and celebration. Eat, drink, and be merry. It means success and thanks and all good things.

But this, the seventh year, was special. Not all good things, perhaps. “What no man may know nor woman tell.” This was the heart of it. A secret revealed; but what?

I slowed my car as the Tatum farm rose at the crest of the hill on my right, the silhouetted buildings bleakly huddled together. There was no sign of the pickup truck, nor indeed of any activity, other than the youngest girl, Debbie, standing in the dirt track, twisting the hem of her dress and wailing, evidently frightened by the fierce clamor of hogs in the pen near the barn.

I stopped to investigate. I could hear the pigs’ grunting bodies heaving against the sty, their wet eyes inquisitively surveying me. A board had become loosened, and I pounded it in place with a rock, then drove off. Begrimed, with a runny nose, Debbie watched me go.

Beyond the house the landscape lay in somber peace. A smoky haze drifted over the cornfield, the cornstalks lying helter-skelter among the bearded stubble, the shocks diminishing in size as they stretched away from the road to the ridge. Behind them slid the sun.

Pulling to the roadside, I gazed off at the desolate vista; then, listening carefully, I got out, crossed the road, and stepped into the field. Dead stalks cracked underfoot. From somewhere ahead in the field was coming a strange sound: an uncanny, hollow clank or rattle, faint at first, then more distinct. In the amber light, the hulking sheaves seemed forbidding, sinister. Then I recognized the sound: tin cans swaying on the ends of their strings, the pebbles inside making a dull clanking noise, but doing little to repel the two crows which, shiny and black, sat huddled like felons, one on each shoulder of a solitary scarecrow.

It was impossible to account for the tumult of the pigs; squeals and cries pierced the air as their fury drove them to fresh efforts to break from the sty. I got back in the car and began driving down the road; then behind me I heard Debbie’s cry. I looked back to see her dashing for the porch as the boards of the pen gave way and the pigs raced past her, charging across the lawn, heads lowered, a tide of frenzied shapes spilling down the slope and into the field, their short legs trampling the earth, overturning the piled shocks as they swept across the furrows.

Debbie sat down on the steps and wailed louder than ever.

Lights had come on in the windows of the houses along the way, and I could see people sitting down to early supper before Kindling Night. I was tired, and awash with guilt. I cursed myself for a fool, scarcely remembering the scene with Tamar on the mudbank-not what had happened, but how it had come about. Arriving at the country end of Main Street, I drove past the dark figure of a man leaning on a rake handle, watching piles of leaves smolder and burn. As the smoke drifted, blue and pungent, I heard the sound of a horse’s hoofs, and the familiar creaking of wheels; ahead, the Widow Fortune’s buggy emerged from Penrose Lane. The mare looked docile as she moved along; not so the old lady, who sat upright on the seat, her shoulders thrown back, her hands gripping the reins. I couldn’t see her face, only the white cap tied under her chin, nor did she notice me coming along; or if she did she made no sign. She wheeled onto Main Street and headed the horse in the direction of her house. I watched the white cap disappear into the gloom; then I drove into the lane.

“Hello, Ned.” Maggie Dodd was out in front of her house, laying plastic covers over the flower beds along the side of the hedge. I called good evening.

“I’ve just been putting my bulbs to bed. Have a good day?”

I made some reply and turned into my drive. The Invisible Voice came from Robert’s sun porch. Beth’s station wagon was in the garage. Leaving my car in the drive, I went in through the kitchen door. There was no light on, except for the fluorescent stove panel, which glowed eerily. Kate was standing by the table-not doing anything, just standing there.

“Hi, sweetheart.” I lay down my sketching case and kissed her, dredging up a semblance of cheerfulness.

“Hi.”

“Nice day?”

“Yes.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.” She picked up my case from the table and laid it on the counter, then stood with her back to me. I went to her and turned her, holding her face between my hands. She looked pale, a little tired.

“Nothing?”

“Honest-nothing.”

“Where’s Mom?”

She nodded toward the closed door of the bacchante room, beyond which I could now catch the low sound of the T.V. set.

Kate placed something in my hand: my pencil flashlight. “I borrowed it from your studio.”

“O.K.”

She started out, stopped in the doorway with a look I couldn’t read. Then she went out through the hall.

I dropped the flashlight into my jacket pocket and opened the bacchante room door. Beth did not look up as I came in, but sat on the green velvet sofa, hands folded in her lap.

“Hello,” I said.

“Hello.” An imprecise emphasis, betraying nothing of her present mood.

“No martini?”

“No. I didn’t think so. Tonight.”

“Guess I’ll have a Scotch.”

“All right.”

“Anything wrong with Kate?”

“No.”

I made a drink, then sat down in the club chair. A small fire crackled in the grate, and a large bowl of fresh chrysanthemums bloomed on the Victorian sideboard. I moved a copy of House and Garden and put my feet up on the coffee table. “Have a nice day?” I asked over Walter Cronkite’s voice.

“Umm.” She placed her palms together and rubbed them with a slow rotary motion. “Did you?”

I tried to force my voice to sound casual and light. “Yeah. I was out at the Hookes’.”

“How are they?”

“O.K. I guess. Sophie seems upset for some reason. I wanted to make a couple of sketches of the pear tree for the painting.”

In the light from the screen, I could see a little furrow of impatience appear between her brows. She picked up the remote control and switched off the set. I sipped my drink, watching the firelight play on her face.

“Cozy,” I said.

She turned on the floor lamp and pulled her work basket to her.

“You all right?” I asked.

“Yes. Of course.” She gave me a quick glance, then drew the quilt onto her lap and pulled the needle out. I listened to the ticking of the Tiffany clock.

“Coming right along,” I offered, referring to the quilt.

“Yes. I should have it done by Christmas.”

I held my glass up, watching the play of firelight in the swirl of amber Scotch and ice cubes. I caught her staring at me. Her eyebrows lifted the faintest fraction, then she resumed her work. Something was terribly wrong, I could tell. Her face was pale; she needed lipstick.

“And-?” she said.

“Hm?”

“And then what did you do?”

“After the Hookes’?”

“Yes.”

“I-uh, I went to see Dr. Bonfils.”

She gave me a quick, tight glance, then looked down again at her work. I put my glass on the table and sat beside her on the sofa, trying to take her hands.

“I’m sorry, Bethany.”

“Sorry?”

“About the baby.”

“He told you.”

“Yes.”

“He shouldn’t have. He should have let me.” She made a futile gesture with her shoulders, then laughed. “It appears I’m a wishful mother, nothing more.”

“Beth-”

“Please. I don’t want to talk about it.”

“It’s not you, it’s me.”

She shook her head uncomprehendingly. “There’s no fetus. Nothing growing in me-”

“I know. I’m sterile. It was the mumps. The doctor did a test. You can have children, but I can’t. It’s my fault.”

“It’s-not-me?”

“No. Me.”

She paused, holding herself rigid, motionless. Then she visibly relaxed. She dropped her head to hide the tears in her eyes. “It’s all right. It doesn’t matter. Any more.” She spoke calmly, matter-of-factly, dismissing the topic as if we’d been discussing an unfortunate change of weather.

I stood up and looked around the room. It suddenly seemed different-not a room we had made, part of our house, but-simply a room. I glanced at Beth; she seemed different too, somehow. A stranger-wife. I knew she was upset about the baby, but there was something else as well, something she had not said yet.

She raised her head. “What is it, Ned?”

“I was wondering…”

“What?”

“If maybe we ought to move.”

She looked at me, then around the room, then shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t understand.”

“I mean, I’m thinking maybe we ought to leave Cornwall Coombe. Sell. Get out.”

“What on earth for?” She laid aside her work and gave me all her attention.

“I don’t know. I just have this feeling.”

“Where would we go?”

“Mm-back to New York, maybe. Europe, maybe.”

“But we’ve been so happy here.”

“Have we?”

“I thought we were. And if we haven’t-really, Ned-I don’t think you’ve given this much thought, have you? I mean, it isn’t exactly fair to Kate. Taking her out of school again. And there’s all the work we’ve done on the house. The money that’s been spent.”

“We can get it back.”

“On a resale? I don’t think so.”

“Why not?”

“Because they won’t- because somebody isn’t just going to buy us out and move in.”

“Why?”

“Because.” She looked at me. “Because they won’t let anybody. Not just anybody.”

“Weren’t we ‘just anybody’?”

“No. We weren’t. You know that. They wanted us.”

“The hell they did.”

“Yes, they did. It took some time, but they did. The Widow wanted us.”

“Did she?” I set my glass down rather sharply.

“You knew that.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Well, she did. That was the reason Maggie called us. It was all because of-”

“The Widow. You mean, she arranged it.”

“Yes.”

“She can arrange for somebody else, then.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Bethany, listen. I don’t know what’s happening around here, but I don’t like it. I don’t know what’s happened to you, or to us, or to anything. I want to get out. Now! Get the hell out while we still have the chance. Can’t we? Beth, remember Paris? And the lilacs?”

“I remember.”

“We could go back to them again.”

“You’ve got lilacs outside that window, if you can wait until spring. Besides, who can ever go back again? Can we?”

“Sometimes it’s not a bad idea, going back.”

“I want to go ahead.”

“To where?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Bethany?”

“Yes.”

“Do you remember that night?”

“Which?”

“That night. The ‘experience.’”

“Yes.”

“That was arranged too.”

“Who-?”

“Who do you think? When I came into our bedroom, you had been watching, hadn’t you? I mean, you’d seen?”

“Seen what?”

“Whoever it was that came out of the cornfield.”

“No. I didn’t see anyone. I was waiting for you. I was-”

“What?”

“Dreaming, I imagine. Ned, listen. Some things are better left not talked about. Some things are better left-”

“Unsaid.”

“I like it here. You’ve liked it here. Kate does, too. It’s the first time I’ve felt-”

Safe. I saw it then. In Cornwall Coombe she had found a place. She was secure. And not only secure, but changed. It had become more and more apparent. Not only city mouse into country mouse; she seemed in some way on the brink of something, as though poised for some indefinable leap. I saw her as she had been, blazing with unfulfilled yearnings, something she had been searching for. Baby-loss-

There are things women long for, and longin’, ought to be given their way.

The Widow, Edna Jones, Asia Minerva, Ruth Zalmon.

Mothers. All of them, all mothers. For her. Mothers. And the Mother.

“You don’t like me very much, do you?” I said the words before I realized it.

“I love you,” she replied simply.

“It’s not the same, is it? It’s not the same at all.”

“You make all the decisions,” she said, “You always decide what’s to be done. Even about coming here. You decided. I’d like to do my share.”

“Is that what you want, to run things? Go ahead.” I finished my drink. “Or do you want to run me? Some women do.”

“I’m not that kind.”

“Make sure you’re not, or go find another fellow.”

She gave me a long look, then drew out her needle again. “How was the rest of your afternoon?”

“All right. I-went for a swim. Can you beat that? This time of year.”

“What happened to your lip?”

“Huh? Oh, I must have hit it on something. A rock, maybe.” Remembering how I must look, I started quickly for the kitchen. “Guess I’d better change. What’s for dinner?”

“Crab casserole. Ned.”

“Yes.”

“I don’t want to sound like True Confessions, but tell me it isn’t true.”

“What?”

“That you raped Tamar Penrose.”

“Ohh-listen-Beth…” The Widow in her buggy. And I had thought the old lady wasn’t interested in gossip. Beth was returning my look, waiting. I tried to fumble an explanation. I had no defenses. How could I explain what had happened? What excuse could I make? “Beth, listen to me, it’s not the way you think. It’s not that way at all. It happened- but it didn’t happen that way.”

“She says you raped her.”

“It’s not true! Beth, listen.”

“I am.” Her tone was weary, as if she weren’t really interested. I pushed the table aside and crouched, took her hands in mine. They felt unresponsive, lifeless. I had so quickly run out of anything to say. She faced my imploring look quietly with no sign of emotion.

“Why did you promise?”

“I meant it. I meant that promise. Honest to God I did.”

“Then. But not now.”

“Beth. Don’t listen to them. Don’t listen to what they told you. Let me tell you what they’re like. I didn’t want you to know. I didn’t want to tell you. Because I know how you feel about her.”

“About whom?”

“The Widow. Mary Fortune. But she’s not like that at all.” Now the words came spilling out, and I told her about Jack Stump, about the attack, about the paper from the One-B Weber’s tea box, about finding the shears. She tried to pull away and I held her by the wrist, forcing her to listen. “And that’s not the worst. They killed Grace Everdeen. Murdered her.”

She pulled away again and jumped up. “Don’t talk such rubbish!” I had never seen her look so angry. “After what she has done for us, after saving our child’s life, after the days and weeks she’s spent in our house looking after us, cooking for us, helping us, you try to make me believe such things! You must take me for a complete fool. You made me a promise. Which obviously was impossible to keep. You had to have her. Not just have her, but against her will-”

“It wasn’t against her will-”

“And then to get out of it you tell terrible things about the Widow. Everyone knows who attacked Jack. Everyone knows Grace Everdeen committed suicide-”

“She didn’t. I can prove it. The Widow-”

“Stop. I don’t want to hear any more about the Widow. Not another single word.” Her face was drained of color, her mouth was pulled down in an angry curve, her body trembled. “Just because you’ve had a lark in the woods with the town slut and you’re sorry-oh, yes, you’re sorry, not sorry you did it, but sorry you were found out. Did you think she’d never tell? Never say anything? And just because you were found out, you try to turn the facts all around, you try to besmirch the name of the finest woman who ever walked God’s green earth.”

“She murdered Gracie Everdeen. She and Tamar and the rest of the women. On Harvest Home.”

“Don’t speak about Harvest Home. You don’t know anything about-”

“‘What no man may know nor woman tell?’” I could not resist the taunt. She started forward, then managed to restrain herself. I could not believe what was happening. I fought down a feeling of panic. She was going to tell me again-as she had that other time-that she was going away, that she wanted to leave me, to take Kate, get a divorce. Just as it had happened then.

Still I could not resist. “They’re murderers.” The word hung there, sounding ridiculous. Murderers were people you read about in the paper, in New York or somewhere-not in Cornwall Coombe. I looked at her, then away, through the dining-room doors; my eyes absently traveled the Shanghai Tea Party-ships in the harbor, coolies with pagoda-shaped hats-familiar and curiously real. I looked back. I went on. “I can bring you proof.”

She was making visible efforts to keep herself calm. She pressed her palms together again, rotating one against the other. “Bring it. It won’t prove anything.” Her eyes were wet; her chin took on the stubborn tilt that had been her father’s. “I will have the child… I will… I will…” In the blind and futile assertion, I sensed a kind of withdrawal. At that moment she looked quite strange, not only in her features but in her whole manner, her being. A sudden flash went through my mind that she wasn’t Beth at all, but someone else entirely.

She stared back, saw, failed to recognize me. The stranger-husband. Each of us now was imprisoned behind the bars of mistrust, of doubt, of disappointment. What could heal the breach? For no apparent reason, I thought of the rainbow we had seen on that first day, bridging us between the life we had known and the life that was to be. This was the life that was to be. This room would be peopled with ghosts, not of others who had inhabited it, but our own, future ghosts, relic-specters of a might-have-been. At that moment I knew we were doomed. She had already retreated from me spiritually; now it would be physically as well. She would leave me.

“I will… I will…”

With her free hand she struck the flat of her stomach. “If there is no child here, it’s be’cause you couldn’t put one there. I’m not the barren one-you are.”

I looked at her again, backed away to the door. “Murderers,” I said; said again I would bring proof.

Upstairs, Kate’s door opened; her footsteps sounded along the hall. I opened the front door and stepped out. Kate was coming down the stairs. Closing the door, I heard from the other side the whispered word.

“Mother…”

But it was not Kate who whispered it.

I drove to the bait shack. Mrs. Brucie was doing things in the kitchen; Jack was in the chair by the fire. He seemed not to know me at all; I suspected they must be keeping him drugged on something the Widow had concocted. He looked at me as I fumbled inside his shirt, but showed no sign of recognition. Mrs. Brucie came and stood in the doorway, watching. I pulled out the red cloth bag and tugged it open, then inserted my finger and felt. It was empty. The ring was not there. The oddly shaped bone ring that had been not the Widow’s charm but Gracie Everdeen’s engagement ring, which I had seen hanging at her throat in the doctor’s X-rays. I dropped the bag back inside Jack’s shirt. Mrs. Brucie was smiling at me, saying nothing.

The evidence gone. Jack Stump cut and stitched… by the women… because-because why? What were they trying to hide? The peddler had been silenced because he had found Gracie. Gracie had been murdered because, blighted, she had come to Harvest Home…

Harvest Home…

What happened on Harvest Home?

Suddenly I became terribly afraid. And as suddenly I felt certain that Worthy Pettinger had never left town at all.

At the Common, the street lights had been turned off, and in the dark the villagers waited expectantly for the bonfire to be lighted. I pulled my car up near the post office and went looking for Amys Penrose, stopping to stare up at the gigantic wood structure, towering thirty feet and more into the air. The doors of the firehouse were thrown wide and the beams of the engine headlights illuminated the applauding crowd as the apparatus was brought onto the turf and hoses were run to the hydrants. The ladders that had been used to build the pyramid and to set the scarecrows on it were taken to the curb and stacked, while the firemen, donning their helmets, walked around the base, moving the spectators back to a safe distance.

I found myself caught up among them, and as I backed away with the others, the firemen ran to fling burning torches onto the pile. The bonfire began in clear limpid pockets of bright flame, glowing here and there. Then, as the wood and debris gradually caught, it became an awesome sight. I stopped where I stood, watching it grow, the flames slicing their way up the outside shell, orange, yellow, red, eating away at clapboards, boxes, beams, whatever they discovered, while from the wooden heart of the pile came the roar of the conflagration.

Of its own volition, the crowd retreated from the intense heat, and into this widened breach leaped a troop of living scarecrows, an array of ragged, wildly prankish straw-clad figures, bobbing and turning, doing a crazy dance while the onlookers joined hands and began circling the blaze in a clockwise direction, forming a great urgent chain.

Scornfully I watched. It was like a grotesque sports rally, and as they passed, link after link in their human chain, I hated them, these hayseeds with their stupid dance, their stupid singing, their stupid beliefs. “The old ways”-how I despised the phrase. I moved aside as more came to break their way into the circle, which grew larger, spreading out toward the edges of the Common, moving counterclockwise now.

Then, without apparent signal, the moving circle bulged outward toward me. Hands parted, arms lifted over my head, and I was swept up into the line by two incredible straw-and-rag men, who seized my hands in an iron clasp, drawing me along with them. Their effigy heads nodded at me as I, too, was forced to participate, moving faster and faster, the great blaze spinning past my vision. Another circle appeared before me, countering my own circle, and dark heads passed before the flickering light like figures in a silent movie. I was pulled along; the circles broke and re-formed into a serpentine braid, human ropes weaving themselves together, while the fire mounted.

Within the labyrinth of movement, distinguishable faces appeared: Robert’s, Kate’s, Beth’s; and faceless details: Mr. Buxley’s clerical collar, his wife’s hat, the Widow’s bonnet, whirling, kaleidoscopic; another face, rubicund, choleric. “That’s him,” cried Irene Tatum, “that’s the one let the hogs out! Debbie seen him! He let the hogs out deliberate!” I could I feel her hands snatching at me from behind, tugging at my clothes, trying to yank me from the circle, but still the straw hands held me fast and willy-nilly I was dragged away.

The line swept out again and, like a giant amoeba, divided itself from the larger circle to form a smaller one. Someone shoved me and I was propelled into the center; wheeling, I saw fire-washed faces, peripheral and with the sheen of exertion on their brows, now bright, now dim in the leaping light, all somehow sinister. They closed in on me with menace; I could feel the press of bodies, feel their hot breath, the air being pushed from my lungs by the sheer force of their weight. Quickly they moved toward me and as quickly withdrew, as if I were the butt of some enormous joke, and all was merriment once more as they rejoined the larger circle, bringing me with them, a swirl of leaping forms, my scarecrow cronies gripping my hands as they circled the flaming heap. The rancorous hag-cry sounded again- “… let my hogs out!” — as I passed, the voice fading, becoming lost; and pull as I might I could not free myself. I gave up all resistance. They took me where they might, and the scarecrow men were laughing and nodding at me as though I were not in thrall to them, their jester faces wild, looking upward at the whirlwind of fire and smoke-See! See! — their eyes glittering with ardor as they reflected the blaze.

I looked up, too. Saw a picture. A picture no man could paint, or scarcely dream. Saw a hell of burning scarecrows: straw and sacking and button eyes, cross-poles and uprights, hats and coats all lost in flame, a holocaust of straw men, saw in the picture one higher than the rest, arms outstretched in cruciform supplication, leaning backward into the fire that icked at the tattered war tunic, the tarnished epaulettes, the cocked hat, saw the wind enfold the flames around the face as hough in a caress. “Worthy!”

The scarecrow in the field. The pigs gone mad with the scent…!

I shouted and struggled, but they held me and pulled me back as in the picture the giant structure seemed visibly to swell, to belch and heave in its last convulsive throes. Shouting with all my might, I saw it lean away from the wind, totter, tremble, and with a thunderous crash of flame and charred timber the hideous pile tumbled to earth. Still I shouted, saw people fleeing past me to safety, saw hot sparks spiraling upward in a fiery shower, saw the ashes borne like feathers on the breeze, sifting in a gray spectral snow among the tombstones in the churchyard, saw a hand raised over me, brought down on my head in a savage blow, saw the picture crack, break into fragments, saw…

Nothing.