by Thomas Tryon
“Clemmon built that bench. My clock bench, he called it.” The bench was a sundial, and where the sun streamed through the window, hitting the frame, it cast a shadow. “I been tellin’ time from that bench the better part of my life.”
“How do you set it ahead for daylight-saving time, Widow?” asked the peddler, coming in with an armload of clothes.
“You’re a fool, Jack Stump. I been here long before daylight savin’s and I guess I can set my head for any such government notion.” As Jack began laying out his hoard on the piano bench, I glanced at the mantel, where an old-fashioned shaving mug sat, and beside it an ivory-handled razor. Mementos of the dead Clem Fortune, I decided. His widow, meanwhile, was examining each of Jack’s secondhand garments carefully, and with a smile in her eyes, but in a gruff voice, she demanded, “You don’t think I’m goin’ to buy any of these old rags, now, do you?”
The peddler held up a tattered coat. “Feel that material, the finest worsted. And the lining is good as new.”
“New! Horsefeathers!”
“Practically. Needs a bit of sewing, mebbe, but you’re just the one to do it.”
“I wouldn’t ante up a quarter for that rag, Jack Stump. What else have you?”
He displayed another jacket, then some pants, then one or two dresses. “Here, now, what’s this?” she asked, ignoring them and snatching up another garment, her eyes flashing as she inspected it at arm’s length.
“I knew you’d hanker for that one, Widow.” Jack hopped to her side and held out the sleeves to better effect. It was an army tunic, green with age, the epaulettes on the shoulders tarnished to gray, the threads unraveled. “Got this from a woman over to Ledyardtown. Belonged to her great-uncle. Spanish-American War uniform.”
“Sort o’ dashing, en’t it?” She turned it backward and sniffed the material. “Smells o’ mothballs. And the Lord knows what else.” She darted a wary look at him. “How much?”
“Well, I figure I ought to ask ten dollars—”
“Jack Stump, you’re out of your mind if you think you can come into an old lady’s parlor and sell her a motley coat for ten dollars.”
Beth and I exchanged glances, smiling as the pair began haggling over the price, and we benefited by a lesson in good old New England trading. Well, the peddler said, she really had him; he was off on one of his territory circuits which would take him all through the northern part of the state and even over into New York; he couldn’t go dragging them clothes along with him—would she give him eight for the coat? The Widow held out for five dollars for the coat, plus some dresses he had laid out, and two pairs of pants, though what she might do with these she was sure she didn’t know.
The bargain was struck, and, scorning the remainder, she paid for her purchases and took them into the next room, where she dumped them in a corner. Through the doorway, I could see her hanging the tunic on a dress dummy and regarding it speculatively. “All of you, come and see,” she said. “This’ll make a fine scarecrow.
“Pay no attention to the higgledy-piggledy mess,” she told us as we came in. “Here’s where I make my scarecrows, and this is what I make ’em from,” indicating a chaotic array of odd garments. “And that’s what I make ’em on, my old Fairy Belle.” She pointed to an ancient sewing machine, the kind with a foot treadle. “The only thing I ever hoped for was a fancy sewing machine with an automatic bobbin, but I expect I’ll sleep beside Clem before I ever stitch on one of them.” She sighed over the Fairy Belle, then looked around her. “All hodgepodge. It’s the same thing, year in and year out. Seems like I just get to know my scarecrows through the summer and I have to say goodbye to them.”
“Goodbye?” Beth asked.
“Scarecrows don’t last but the growin’ year. Come Kindlin’ Night they’ll all be burned. That’s a treat you folks have in store.” When the crops were harvested, she explained, the scarecrows were collected from the fields and brought to the Common to be put on the bonfire; then the ashes were sprinkled in the fields as a token to the following year’s crop.
She dug around in a large box until, with an exclamation of delight, she produced a cracked and battered cocked hat which she sat on top of the dummy where the Spanish-American tunic hung. She dragged out a pair of tall leather boots, and then a belt which she buckled around the middle of the coat. “Reg’lar warrior, en’t he, Kate? Needs a sword, I expect. This here’ll be someone’s next-year’s scarecrow, and won’t that be a sight for the crows?”
She yanked another box from a corner and spread the cardboard flaps. “Why, here’s what I wanted, right where I forgot I’d put it. Beth, come and look at all these scraps, what you’ll want to begin your quilt.” While she tugged out remnants of fabrics and examined them, I helped Jack gather up the pieces of clothing the Widow had not taken, and we carried them out to his cart, where he put them away.
“Now, there’s a woman,” he repeated, shaking his head and wheezing. “Ain’t she a woman, though?” He peered at me with his good eye, looking, as the Widow had said, somewhat piratical.
“How’s your jaw?” I asked.
“Good as new.” He waggled it again and grinned; then his brow creased as he frowned. “Skunks, that’s what they are, them Soakeses. A pack of drunken skunks. See what they drew.” He dug in his pocket and produced a message scrawled on a scrap of soiled paper. “What’s that writin’ say?” I took it from him and read aloud:
“I ain’t afraid of no Soakeses, and they ain’t goin’ to keep me out of no woods, neither,” Jack said.
When I asked again what had happened there on the morning of the Agnes Fair, he launched into a heated jeremiad about the cost of his traps, the difficulty of setting them, and how it had become a job of warfare finding places to put the traps where the Soakeses were not likely to discover them. Between his rapid style of talking and the wheeze punctuating nearly every sentence, I had difficulty following his drift at times, but the essential facts I gathered were these:
On the morning the Widow and I had seen him go into the woods, he had checked his traps and discovered two of them missing. In a third was the scrawled warning to keep out of Soakes’s Lonesome. In another, he found a rabbit, which he put in his bag; then he continued on, finding most of the traps removed from their places. In time he had wandered into a part of the woods where he had not been before. It was there he had discovered the Ghost of Soakes’s Lonesome. Folks might think it a ghost, for it howled like one, but he hastened to assure me it was not the ghost that had frightened him.
“No ghost is goin’ to get the best of Jack Stump, no sirree. I had my look and I seen my fill, and I left, and I’m walking along through those woods when them fellows pop out from behind a tree and snatch me. The old man grabs me around the throat, and another’s got this shotgun and it’s pointing right at my nose. Well, the boys find that hare in my pocket, and they stole it from me, and they pushed me around, and finally they let me go, but the old man grabs up that gun and sets off a blast. By that time, I’d gotten behind this ol’ tree and he don’t see so good, anyhow. That’s when I come bustin’ out of them woods, and him chasin’ right after me.”
And since then he’d gone back to the woods, a fact not unknown to the Soakeses—hence the Sunday altercation. Had he, I asked, come upon the “ghost” again?
“Sure I have,” he boasted. “I seen it, and plenty.” He pointed off, as if the woods were close at hand. “And it’s a very dark and secret place—out of the way, as you might say.” He waved an axe, saying he had marked the trail from where he had seen the ghost by making blaze cuts on the trees along the way. They began on a tall pine on a rocky knoll.
Just then, the Widow’s face appeared at her kitchen window, and in a moment she brought Kate out into the dooryard.
“Sell me that axe, Jack,” she called. “I need one.” She led Kate into the hen house, and I could hear her through the doorway, explaining the facts and economics of poultry life. Jack handed me the axe, which I laid on
the step. “And does the ghost still holler?”
“Sometimes it do, sometimes it don’t. Sometimes it wails like a banshee, sometimes it don’t make utterance.” Asia Minerva was coming up the drive, and Jack, still talking, tipped his hat to her; in a moment the Widow appeared from the hen house and took her into the kitchen.
I fingered the sinister warning, trying not to smile. For all the peddler’s scruffiness and talky ways, I liked him—even if he couldn’t write his name.
“I’ll tell you what about them Soakeses,” he continued confidentially.
“What?”
“You know they’s supposed to be a still in them woods?”
“Yes.”
“And you know about the revenuer that come around?”
“Yes.”
“The ghost is the revenuer.”
“How do you figure?”
“I don’t figure—I know. I seen him. They done him in, them Soakeses. They killed him. That’s the ghost people talk about. But I touched it.” He held up his thumb.
“There’s a body?”
“Bones. The fellow’s bones.”
“How does he howl, then?”
Jack silenced his reply as Asia Minerva’s face appeared briefly at the kitchen window. Then, “You believe me, don’t you?” he asked, blinking, his watery eyes appraising me.
“Jack Stump, stop palaverin’ about bones out there with my guest.” The Widow’s face popped up at the window and she shook a wooden spoon. She disappeared immediately, and Jack’s hand tugged at my sleeve. “You believe me, sir, you believe me,” he maintained stoutly, as though a lie were never to pass his stubbled lips. “Lookee, I’m off around my territory for a few weeks, but before I go I’m gonna have another look.”
I returned the scrap of paper, which he made into a small roll, and slipped it into the red felt bag in his shirt. “The Widow’s magic’s good for toothache; mebbe it’s good for Soakes-ache.” He dropped the bag back inside his shirt, then set his feet on the bike pedals and careened the rig up the drive, narrowly missing the Hookes’s El Camino as it pulled in.
Kate came out of the hen house saying she’d like to raise chickens, and we went into the kitchen together, where the Widow was decanting some concoction into a bottle for Asia Minerva. She corked it, then snatched a piece of paper off a spindle and scribbled some directions. Asia appeared upset as she took the medicine.
“No bother, Asia,” the Widow told her. “Fred’ll be well in a jiffy. Come in and have some coffee.” She ushered us into the front parlor which had filled considerably, the Demings having arrived, and Constable Zalmon and his wife, as well as Robert and Maggie and Beth. The conversation broke off suddenly, and I knew they had been discussing the melee with the Soakes gang. I thought I detected a look of approval from the staid Mrs. Deming, and I wondered if perhaps the fight had done something to solidify my position in the community. Even Mr. Deming smiled, and as Justin Hooke came through the front door he hurried to shake my hand like an old friend.
“Here’s the Harvest Lord himself.” The Widow Fortune kissed his cheek, then turned to Sophie. “And his Maiden.” She offered him her own chair, while Sophie sat beside Beth, who was speaking with Robert, and I went and sat on the sofa arm. “You’re right,” Robert was saying, “you’d have to travel far and wide before you found a place like Cornwall Coombe.” He felt in his breast pocket for a cigar, which Beth took and lighted for him the way she had seen Maggie do.
“Thank you, m’dear. You see, part of the reason is geographical, as I said. We’re a small valley—an enclave, really—ringed on three sides by hills, and we sit in a larger valley. On the fourth side is the river. The old turnpike road ran close by for two centuries, but it was thirty miles east of us, and I don’t think anyone who traveled it knew Cornwall Coombe was here. Thirty years ago, the parkway was put through but still no one came near the village. Railroads, sure they built one—six miles due east on the Saxony side. The nearest airport is some sixty miles away, and there still isn’t more than the one road in and the one road out of Cornwall Coombe. That you, Ewan?” Robert turned his head as Mr. Deming joined our group. “I can smell that apple tobacco of yours. I was attempting to tell our new friends how we all came to get fitted into the Coombe. Perhaps you could explain better, having been here longer.”
Mr. Deming puffed his pipe thoughtfully and scratched his head. “Well, I dunno. Possibly I’m correct in assuming one of the things that attracted you to our little hamlet was its quaintness, is that so?”
“Of course,” Beth said. “That’s its charm. It’s so unspoiled.”
“Unspoiled, yes. And the reason is that the march of time, so to speak, has passed us by. People think we’re fighting a lost cause, but don’t tell that to Fred Minerva or Will Jones. They plant when the locust leaf is the size of a small child’s littlest finger, and not before. They clean out their corncribs when the moon is in the second quarter, no other. When Fred courted Asia, or Will was making sheep’s eyes at Edna, it wasn’t in the summer, nor did they marry in June, because that went against custom. They had to wait until winter, when the crops were in. All these things are governed by patterns that go back so far they’re obscure and indefinite even to them. But they do it not knowing why they do it. And outsiders are bound to think it strange. The social unit here is not the family, it’s the community. And the community is founded on corn. As the corn flourishes, so does the village.”
When Mr. Deming had finished, I went into the dining room and put down my coffee cup. Leaning against the doorjamb, I fished out my sketchbook and began a surreptitious drawing of Sophie. Clearly, she had been and still was the village beauty. Her hair was long, dark blond underneath and, where the sun had touched it, soft and yellow like corn silk. Her eyes were the bright blue of a china plate, expressing a bewitching innocence, and her voice had a lilt to it that I found captivating. She seemed easy and relaxed, with an air of calm assurance about her. There was a kind of strength in her face, and the quiet simplicity of the New England goodwife of old. She had no fuss about her, no feathers, and her eyes revealed an honesty and determined cheerfulness that, as I sketched them, only occasionally seemed to betray a slight yearning. I was sure she was a good wife to Justin, a capable homemaker, and probably one day would be a good mother.
Close by, Mrs. Deming, Mrs. Zalmon, and Mrs. Minerva listened from their circle of chairs as the Widow reminisced about her dead husband.
“You still miss him, don’t you, Widow,” Mrs. Zalmon said.
“Ayuh. It don’t do to look backward, I know, but all the same I don’t suppose a day goes by but what I don’t think about him. He was a good man.”
Aye, Clemmon Fortune was a man worth hoeing corn for, they agreed, listening while the Widow talked about that long-ago time when she had been young and was Clem’s wife.
“Oh, he had a singing voice,” she said. “He could sing the day through, dear Clem could.” She remembered how they used to hitch up the buggy and take the Lost Whistle Bridge ’cross river, and how he loved hearing the clop of the horse’s hoofs on the planks, and how the resounding chamber of the bridge itself made his voice sound even more powerful. He’d pull up right in the middle of the bridge and serenade her, singing “Lady Light o’ Love” or “Sweet Nonnie in the Willow Shade,” and put his arm around her waist, romancing in her ear. Well, she said, though Clem was gone now, the covered bridge remained.
“Seems a shame to lose so many of them bridges, somehow,” Mrs. Deming observed. “They give a touch to the countryside, don’t they?”
“They give a touch to Soakes’s Lonesome, anyways,” the Widow said.
“Ah,” said Mrs. Zalmon tellingly. “Did you go a-gatherin’ herbs this week, Widow?”
“’Deed I did.” She flicked an eye about the room to see that her guests were enjoying themselves. “Summer gatherin’ for winter ills. Good bit o’ elecampane out in them woods. Except”—making an awful face—“them hog-footed Soakes boy
s trample a plant to pieces.”
“Why don’t them Soakeses keep to their side of the river?” Mrs. Zalmon demanded.
“That Old Man Soakes is a tyrant if ever there was.” Mrs. Deming tugged Mr. Deming’s coat. “Ewan, the elders ought to do something about them Soakeses.” She turned back to the ladies. “The way he raises them wild sons. They got no more brains than one of Irene’s pigs, and stomachs to match.”
“Aye, they’re troublesome,” the Widow said thoughtfully.
“Why, how’s that, Widow?”
“To tell the time, read the clockface. You’d have laughed to see how Jack Stump come shootin’ out of them trees on fair day, as though the devil himself was on his heels.”
“Jack Stump was in Soakes’s Lonesome?”
“Ayuh.”
“Scared him, did they?”
“You never seen that cart go so fast as it did down the Old Sallow Road.” Peering through her spectacles, the Widow smiled up at me. “What happened was,” she pursued, “Jack went nosin’ about the woods, and the Soakeses caught him snoopin’ and scared him off.”
“He goes trappin’ in there, don’t he?” Mrs. Deming asked.
“Aye. Rabbits and such.”
“Well,” said the Constable’s wife significantly, “if I had an interest in them woods, I’d surely keep a close watch—if I was a Soakes or not.”
“Pooh, them Soakeses.” The Widow slipped me a wink, then changed the subject quickly to arrange an impromptu quilting party that would take place that night at Irene Tatum’s. While she spoke, I observed Justin Hooke. With his yellow crop of curls and blue eyes he could have been Sophie’s brother, not her husband. Folding his ham-like hands across his front, he talked graciously with Mr. Deming, who had moved next to him, but under the farmer’s easy humor I detected greater depths, a sense of a man knowing what he was about, that he had been brought up to a purpose in life, one that he found satisfying in all its respects: a destiny achieved.