by Thomas Tryon
“Oh, yes. That’s my part. Or part of my part. Someone has to keep track of where the money goes.” She showed me one of the books, the neat columns of figures in her fine hand, the accounts payable, and the accounts receivable, which were apparently nil until the corn was cut.
“They’ll fill up by Harvest Home,” I said.
She closed the ledger and rubbed the tips of her fingers lightly over the gold stampwork on the front. “Yes,” she said softly. Impulsively she reached for my hand. “We’re so glad you’ve come to live in Cornwall. You’re the first outsiders we’ve had, and it’s going to be nice knowing you, and Beth, and your little girl.” She thanked me again for the drawing and said she hoped I would stop by anytime.
“I’m often out this way,” I told her. “I’m doing a painting of the bridge.”
“The Lost Whistle? That should be lovely.” But I saw her face cloud at the mention of the bridge, as though the place held unpleasant associations for her.
“Something wrong with the bridge?” I asked.
“N-no.” She spun, looked at the table. “Gosh, I’ve left the cream out to spoil.” She took the pitcher and held it up. It was of porcelain, shaped like a cow. The tail curled up for a handle and the cream poured out through the mouth.
“It was a wedding present. It comes from Tiffany’s. In New York? It’s a very fine store.”
Her ingenuousness regarding Gotham jewelers made me want to smile. Still, I noticed how she had changed the subject from the Lost Whistle Bridge. I admired the pitcher, saying it reminded me of La Vache Qui Rit, the Laughing Cow cheese Beth used to buy at the deli in New York. She put the pitcher in the refrigerator and sat at the table. When I left, she had begun going over her books again.
“Don’t forget,” she called after me, “about the painting, I mean.”
I found Justin still planting. Like me, he had lost a tree to the storm, and this was one to replace it. Laying his shovel aside, he took a box filled with ashes and sprinkled them around the balled-up roots, explaining that they made good fertilizer. He picked up his spade again and shoveled in the rest of the earth, tamping the dirt with his foot and, from time to time sighting along the narrow trunk to make sure it was straight. When the work was done, he stepped back, looking up at the bare branches.
“There’s a tree for next spring. Ought to bloom just about Spring Festival time.” When I asked what kind of tree it was, he said a flowering pear tree. Then, taking me by the arm, he led me on a tour of his domain, an obvious source of pride.
First he showed me the “blessing stone,” a large block of quarried granite set into the foundation of the barn, with the date 1689 marking the year of its construction. The fine old boards had never been painted but through the years had aged to a beautiful patina. Painting a barn, he said, was a kind of sacrilege.
He took me to the toolshed where all the implements were also dated, giving one the sense that their makers had intended them to be passed on, so that in the distant future by these simple artifacts the past might be better understood.
We saw the pigpens, the hayloft, the stables, all with plenty of light and ventilation, and everything neat as a pin, spruce and straight and clean, with none of the slump and sag of other farms in the community. Looking over the place, I thought—jealously, perhaps—how much greater was the legacy of Cornwall Coombe than was ours, we who had lived half our lives in the city. Here, all around us, was the richness of Justin’s heritage. It was plain to see that there was no master here but himself, and that he knew it; knew, too, what his forebears had bestowed.
He pushed his hat back on his head and looked at me, anxious that I should appreciate his fields for both their beauty and their worth. As I had seen him do before, he stood with feet wide planted in the soil as if, like Antaeus, he renewed his strength by contact with the earth.
Often sober-looking and grave, he showed flashes of a youthful humor that I found ingratiating. There was a delight in him, as if he could not really believe his good fortune. He was easy to like, and I was secretly pleased that Sophie wanted me to paint him. When he returned to being a plain farmer, and Worthy had taken over as Harvest Lord, he and Sophie could look at the portrait on winter nights and tell their children how it had been back then.
“It looks like a good soil for crops.” I observed.
“Best around.” Cornwall Coombe would see a bountiful harvest this year, he said, speaking with a reverence I had seldom beheld in a man. Corn was easy to grow; all that was needed was rich earth, plenteous rains while the kernels formed in the husks, and the long slow heat of the August nights. He asked if I’d heard the Widow tell about hearing the corn grow.
I laughed and said yes. “One of her fancies, I guess.”
Justin shook his head. “It’s true. You can hear it. And it’s one of the best sounds in the world. Thirteen years ago, we had a Waste, and a man would have given his eyeteeth to hear the corn growing then.”
“A bad time—the Widow told me about it.”
“When you’ve seen one of those, you never forget it. A drought that leaves every stalk and leaf withered and the earth dry as dust. And if corn won’t grow, nothing will. It’s a terrible thing to see, bad enough when it happens to you, but worse when it happens to your neighbors, who maybe don’t have as much put by as you do. They get to depend on a fellow, Fred and Will and the others.” His brow contracted. “And she that brought the drought made them suffer.”
“She?”
“Grace Everdeen. As big a fool as God ever put in Cornwall. She’s the one who brought the last Great Waste.”
“How did Grace die?”
“She killed herself. As she ought to have.”
“How?”
“She threw herself off the Lost Whistle Bridge. Drowned.”
Sophie’s face clouding over the cream pitcher; no wonder the bridge had unhappy associations.
Changing the subject, Justin took pains to lay out for me the economics that welded the village into such a tightly knit community. The individual land titles dated as far back as the 1650s, the tracts having been portioned out by Gwydeon Penrose and the elders in accordance with the size of the family and the number of males available to farm the land. The acreage thus balanced, everyone worked it in communal fashion. Today, as then, when the corn was finally dried on the stalk, it would be harvested by hand, the ears loaded into wagons and taken over to the granary at Ledyardtown, where the wagons would be weighed with their contents, emptied, and weighed again; the farmers were paid for the difference in weight, their profits depending on the amount of land they tilled.
If the corn went to the granary, I asked, was it all husked first at the husking bee? Justin shook his head. “My fields will be the first to be harvested, and the corn from my south field will be the last to be husked. That’s what goes to the Grange for the husking bee.”
When I asked why this was so, he shrugged and said, “It’s always been that way.” He bent and pulled a weed and stuck it in the pocket of his overalls. “It’s part of the rights of the Lord.”
“And when Worthy becomes the Harvest Lord, then do the rights go to him?” Yes, he said. I replied that from my observations the idea seemed to have little appeal for Worthy Pettinger. Justin’s brow contracted again. “He’s got no choice in the matter. He’s been chosen.”
“By Missy.”
“Chosen,” he repeated stolidly. “Worthy’s just got too darn many modern ideas. He doesn’t know how lucky he is.”
“You’ve been lucky.”
“Sure have. I got my farm and I got Sophie and I’ve been Harvest Lord. Maybe that’s not so much to you, but it’s a lot for me.”
I pictured again the first time I had seen him, the unknown giant with the hoe in the tilled field. Now, as then, he seemed the human manifestation of the growing process, the descendant of the ancient yeoman who works his land and lays by his crops, who hopes for the best and will take the worst, whose lot in life, good or ba
d, comes from the land.
He smiled warmly and clapped me on the shoulder. “I’ve got to be getting back to work. Sophie’s mightily appreciative of that drawing. We both thank you.”
I said I was glad it had pleased her, and told him of her plan regarding the portrait. Justin smiled. “Well, now, I don’t know as I’d make much of a subject. You want me to put on a coat and tie and come sit in your studio?” I explained my method of work, that I would begin some sketches when he had the time, and that I would like to pose him somewhere here on the farm. I would paint at my portable easel, and when he wasn’t available I could work at home.
Almost in spite of himself, a light had sprung into his eye. I could see he was both touched by Sophie’s gesture and flattered that I would paint the portrait. He shook my hand warmly, and as I looked at his honest face it seemed I saw his honest heart.
He moved down the drive to the pear tree he had set in the ground. He took the shovel leaning against it, and for a moment his hand grasped the slender trunk. I decided then and there that this was how I would paint the farmer Justin Hooke: beside the newly planted pear tree.
I turned and started along the drive to my car, watching the long rows of drying corn as they passed my line of vision. Then something caught my eye and I stopped. At the head of one of the rows, leaning against the broken face of a rock, I saw a little figure. At first I thought it must be Missy’s doll, or one like it; then I realized it was something else. I picked it up and looked at it. It was about eight inches tall and, though of the doll family, it was entirely different. For while Missy’s gaga was merely a child’s plaything, this clearly was something far more extraordinary. It looked like a kind of totem, a fetish of some sort, a little corn god.
In a cornfield? The idea seemed ridiculous, and I wondered if some superstitious farmer, jealous of Justin, was trying to put a country hex on him. I looked back to the barnyard where the men were still working. No one had seen me stop. Tucking the doll inside my jacket, I hurried on my way.
It had been my intention to go to the covered bridge to see whether my true impressions of it had been reflected in paint, or whether I was doing nothing better than a calendar-type reproduction. Driving out along the Old Sallow Road, however, and passing the nearer edges of Soakes’s Lonesome, I came across the Widow Fortune’s buggy parked on the shoulder of the road. A short distance beyond, I saw her black-clad figure making its way through the grass bordering the woods. I tooted my horn and would have passed, but she waved for me to pull over.
“Hello,” I called, getting out.
“Hello yourself. Faired off nice, didn’t it? How’s your bridge picture?”
“Well, it’s a picture of a bridge. Can’t say as it’s much more.”
“You’re gettin’ awful New England in your twang.”
I crossed the gully to meet her, looking into the splint basket on her arm. “What are you after today?”
“Mushrooms is up.”
“Are they?”
“All over. Rain brings ’em. Come along, if you like. I’m on a reg’lar expedition.”
I ran back to the car, took my keys from the ignition, and slid the little corn doll into the glove compartment and locked it. I locked the doors, then joined the Widow at the edge of the woods. Her face looked warm and moist, and I detected a note of excitement in her air as, with her usual spry step, she started off among the trees, letting me catch up as I might, she with her head down, so that her keen eye should miss no needed herb or plant.
“Elecampane’s abundant this year.” She bent and broke a small sprig from a plant and held it for me to sniff. “Lovely smell. But we’re not lookin’ for elecampane today.”
“How about toadstools? Can you tell the difference?”
“No difference. Toadstool’s a moniker, nothing more. Find an ugly mushroom, folks think it’s something a toad might sit on. But they’re all mushrooms. Trick is in knowing which from which.” She proceeded along, from time to time using her spectacles like a lorgnette, for a closer study of the terrain.
“What do you do with elecampane?” I asked.
“That’s what Fred Minerva’s takin’.”
“What other ingredients?”
She laughed and gave my shoulder a knock. “That’d be tellin’, wouldn’t it? It’s not sal volatile—you can bet your boots.”
I hadn’t imagined she would give a recipe for medicine any more than she would for hoecake, unless she left one of the ingredients out. She saw a tree around whose base had grown a series of shelf-like formations, pale brown in color, and she hurried to it, knelt, and examined the growths with her hands, nodding, and muttering anxiously to herself. She rummaged in her basket, and when I asked what she was looking for, she “Drat”ted and said she’d forgotten to bring along a knife. I lent her my penknife, and watched as she scraped around the outer edge of several of the growths, catching the parings in her hand. These she slipped into a scrap of tinfoil paper, made a twist, and dropped it in her basket. We proceeded on again, and she stopped here and there, once to scrape some sulfur-colored lichens from the bole of a tree, another time—producing Jack Stump’s hatchet from her basket—to hack up some pale roots she had unearthed under the layer of decayed leaves and humus around a strange-looking shrub. A novice in the mysteries of herb-gathering, I was fascinated by the variety of material that struck her eye. Once, when she was on her hands and knees feeling about under the pine needles, she pulled me down with her and brought my ear close. Hear, she said; listen to them, they’re at work. There were sounds of minute scurryings under the needles, and she pulled them apart to show me the little beetles and worms crawling about, pale, wet, segmented, decomposing nature as fast as they could—pulverizing leaves, grass, roots, bark, branches, cones, everything—forming the new matter that would fertilize the next generation of growth in the woods.
We went on, farther into Soakes’s Lonesome. When I mentioned the Soakeses, and wondered if we might be considered trespassers, the old lady cried “Faugh!”—an expletive plainly denoting her contempt for the savage ’cross-river tribe.
We walked along a path where the leaves had drifted in thick windrows, our feet making shushing sounds among them, while up in the tree branches birds sang. I was unfamiliar with this section of the woods, and I wondered in what direction lay the tall pine, with the blazed path of the grove of white birches. Once I almost started to confide in her the secret of the skeleton in the hollow tree, and of the gray ghost I had seen, but again I feared being laughed at, and most of all by her.
Suddenly, distant shotgun fire reverberated through the trees, a series of muffled detonations. “Devils,” the Widow muttered. “There’s your Soakeses, over t’the river. Killin’. You a hunter? No? Good. Too many hunters.”
Now she uttered a little excited cry and dashed ahead of me. When I caught up with her, she was standing beside a large tree and looking down where, close to the base, grew a ring of mushrooms that had sprung up through the ground covering. She quickly knelt and began breaking the stems at the base and handing them to me. I examined one: though it was handsome, it certainly looked like the most poisonous thing nature could provide. The cap was about four inches across, a brilliant red, with small, warty bumps on it. The surface felt sticky, and bits of pine needles had adhered. The stem was white and pulpy-feeling, and the gills on the underside were a delicate formation of pale white. I had never seen the old woman so excited; her face was flushed from her exertions as she demolished the ring little by little. Then she carefully wrapped each mushroom in a piece of tinfoil. When she had finished, she gave me her hand and I helped her to her feet.
“There,” she exclaimed with pleasure, dusting her dress and handing me the basket to carry. “I knew we’d find some fly today, if we persevered.”
“Fly?”
“Those,” pointing to the mushrooms, “are fly agaric.” They were called “fly,” she explained, because they were once used to kill flies and other insec
ts. If it would kill flies, how about humans? I asked. She laughed.
“I expect it could, you eat enough of them. Or at least they’d make a body mighty sick.”
“What do you use them for?”
“A woman always thinks it takes two to keep a secret, but I’m here to say I think it takes one.” She touched my arm and we proceeded back along the way we had come. At one point, we passed a spot where some more mushrooms grew; she pointed them out but scorned touching them. “Now there’s some little mites that only a fool’d touch.” Small and white, with dome-shaped caps, these were known as the Destroying Angel, and were deserving of their name. As for the red-topped beauties in the basket—those, she hastened to say, properly used could cure chilblains or, as in the case of Ferris Ott’s father, to halt his attacks of St. Vitus’ dance; Farmer Ott had had to miss church four Sundays in a row. “You and Beth are gettin’ to be quite the churchgoers,” she observed as we walked along. I said we were finding it pleasant, that I hadn’t been to church since I was a boy, and as for Beth—
She laughed. “She told me she’s a nonbeliever. Still, nonbelievers can become believers.”
“Old dogs and new tricks?”
“Why not?”
“I think Beth believes only in what she knows for sure to be true.”
The Widow had been searching about her as we went along, now stopping to peer intently around a clump of ferns, now upon the ground. “What is truth?” she demanded finally.
“That which exists.”
“Many things exist. Things beyond—”
“The ken of man?”
“And others even within his ken. Depends on how broad a ken a pusson’s got.” She gave the word “ken” an emphasis that caused me to pay closer attention. “Here in this village, in this little place where folks seldom go beyond its boundaries, they tell themselves they understand the world and life. Coming from the city, you perhaps understand more.”
“Possibly.”
“But not all.” Her next question startled me. “You believe in the psychics?”