by Thomas Tryon
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 face 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 swa
rm 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 un-stoppered. 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.