The Paul Di Filippo Megapack

by Pau Di Filippo

  Edward was taken aback. He hadn’t expected Lucy to beard him so soon about what they had agreed last night to postpone discussing. But he should have known, given her obvious excitement at the Grange meeting, that she would wait only the barest minimum of time.

  Edward feigned ignorance. “About what?”

  “Don’t be an ape. What about us joining the Grange?”

  Edward looked sheepishly down into his bowl. There was no way out of it now. “I don’t think I want to.”

  “Let me guess why. You’ve got no time?”

  “Well, yes, there’s that.…”

  “You aren’t interested in the kind of things they do and talk about?”

  “I suppose you could say that.…”

  “You don’t like the people? You think they’re clodhoppers?”

  “Well, now, I wouldn’t go that far.…”

  “You had the stuffing scared out of you by Sally Lunn?”

  Edward said nothing. He looked up to find Lucy entreating him with shining eyes.

  “Don’t be scared, Edward. I felt it, too. I don’t know what it was, but it was nothing to be frightened of. It was something entirely natural and good. I think maybe it was just some kind of saintliness or wisdom that comes, if you’re lucky, when you get as old as she is. Maybe it has to do with her living out here in the country all her life. Whatever it was, I liked it. It made me feel good, like I understood for the first time what the world is all about. Sometimes I don’t, you know. Sometimes, in fact, I think everyone but me knows the secret of how things work. You with all your talk about gravity, the way the plumber yelled at me that time I put the plaster down the drains— I get tired of feeling like such a big dope all the time. So I’m going to join the Grange. And that’s that.”

  Edward struggled to speak. Lucy’s words had made him sad. Did she really feel like that? Was he partly responsible?

  “Lucy, I want you to be happy. Do whatever you want. I’ll be glad if you join the Grange. But I just can’t. You see, when you touched that old woman’s hand you felt confirmed in everything you knew. But I felt just the opposite. I felt as if a pit of quicksand had opened up underfoot, as if the whole world I had known and accepted as solid and rational were a sham—which can’t be true. The old woman twisted my vision somehow and showed me everything in a new, unreasoning light. All the careful work I’ve put into explaining the world to myself and others was undone in a second. Maybe it was just momentary self-hypnosis. But I can’t go through that again.”

  “And what,”Lucy asked, “if she was showing you the truth?”

  “I think,”said Edward, “that I’d rather not accept that as a possibility.”

  Lucy scraped the last of her cereal up methodically and swallowed it. “That’s fair, I guess. Will you at least help me with my kitchen garden?”. She licked the bowl of her spoon sensuously like a big, lazy cat.

  “Unfair tactics, and not strictly necessary. Of course I will.”

  “Good. I’m going into town and look up Mr. Calvin Culver, our Sower and tell him I’m in if they’ll have me. You can work off a little of the spare tire you’re accumulating by getting the grass up from that plot I marked near the back steps.”

  And with that, Lucy was gone.

  Spare tire? And who had been feeding him such rich meals, as if fattening him up for a sacrifice? Was there no justice?

  Edward did the breakfast dishes and went outside.

  Even this early in the morning, the June sun was overpoweringly hot, a celestial bonfire. Soon Edward had his shirt off. The sharp, untried, shiny blade of the pointed shovel easily severed the ancient turf demarcated by stakes and string. Edward picked up each heavy clod by its green hair—disturbingly like a severed head—shook the moist earth from its roots, and tossed it aside. Fat and juicy flesh-colored earthworms, some truncated by his blade, wriggled away into the earth.

  After some time, Edward had exposed a square of black earth some twenty feet on a side to the sun’s curious stare. The gaze of the deity was already turning the soil a different, lighter shade as it dried. The pile of turfs made a small warrior’s barrow.

  Edward was resting on his shovel, his back glistening with sweat, when Lucy called out. “Hello! Come help me!”

  Rather wearily, Edward went around to the front of the house. Lucy was struggling with some handled device sticking out of the car’s trunk.

  “I rented a Rototiller,”she explained. “It’ll save us some work.”

  “Us?”

  “We’re a team, aren’t we?”

  Edward wrestled the machine to the ground. “And your role on the team is—?”

  “I’m the fructifying force.”

  Edward stopped in midmotion, astonished. “‘Fructifying’? Where the hell did that come from? Good old Calvin Culver? Are you sure you don’t mean—”

  “Don’t say it. You’ve got a filthy mind. Just do a good job, and you’ll get your reward.”

  “Oh, by the way,”she added as he wheeled the machine off, “I’m a Grange member now.”

  The Rototiller, despite its noise and stink, did make the job easier. Still, there were what seemed to be thousands of stones to bend over for and pluck from the newly turned earth. In a couple of hours, they soon formed a companion cairn to the sod barrow.

  When it was over, Edward had never felt so tired in his life. Every muscle in his arms and legs and back ached. So this was the pastoral life. Ah, Arcadia! The city had never looked so fine.…

  “Edward,”called Lucy from the back porch. He turned, hoping she had brought something cool for him to drink.

  She wore a circlet of daisies in her hair. And nothing else. Her body glowed white and tan as if lit from within. She stepped down the stairs with a motion like water falling. The air around her appeared to shiver. She crossed the lawn, her bare feet seeming to imprint the grass with a brighter greenness.

  Edward was mesmerized. He felt hot and cold at once. Then his unknown wife, her eyes filmed with a cool light, was upon him, unbuckling his pants, finding him unsurprisingly ready, and pulling him down to the broken soil.

  The earth was cool and moist beneath his knees and palms. He wondered briefly what it felt like to supine Lucy. Then there was nothing left of him to wonder.

  When it was over, Edward had never felt so refreshed in his life. Every muscle in his arms and legs and back throbbed with vitality. So this was the pastoral life.…

  “You don’t pay the lawn-maintenance guys this way, do you?”

  Lucy wasn’t listening to him. She was looking up into the infinite sky. Edward cast his own gaze over his shoulder, and saw the moon watching them.

  “Now it will blossom,”Lucy said.

  That same evening, Lucy announced she was going out.

  “There’s a Grange meeting tonight.”

  “So soon?”

  “It’s an emergency. We have to deal with the gypsy moths.”

  “You mean those stupid caterpillars that are chewing up all the trees? I thought there was nothing that stopped them short of spraying. And the town council’s voted against that.”

  “Sally has a plan.”

  Lucy was gone till after midnight. When she crawled into their bed, beneath the down comforter the country nights still made a necessity, Edward came half-awake.

  “How’d it go?”he murmured sleepily.

  “Shhh, go back to sleep. I’ll tell you in the morning.”

  But in the morning there was no need to ask, for the gypsy moths lay dead in heaps everywhere.

  * * * *

  All work on his book had gone by the board. Edward found he couldn’t concentrate on what had once seemed so important to him. It wasn’t the environment that was distracting him anymore, though. At least not firsthand. He had realized with a start, soon after the wild coupling with Lucy on the garden bed, that his senses had become harmonized to the natural world somehow, had achieved a rapprochement with the forces of sunlight and soil, leaf and limb. The
se forces did not make the same demands on his attention as they had when they were new to him. He found he could go about his daily living without paying much attention to the bewitching, continually varying play of light and odors around him.

  Not that Nature had vanished or retreated from the back of his mind or the depths of his gut. No, that had not happened, no more than one’s heart or lungs had ceased to function, simply because they went hourly unheard.

  No, what preoccupied Edward now was trying to find out what Lucy had gotten herself involved in.

  What exactly was this organization known as the Grange?

  Here and now, in mid-June, this question—along with its corollary, Was the Grange good or bad for his wife?—filled all of Edward’s mind. He attacked it the only way he knew how, short of confronting the Grange members themselves (something he was surprisingly reluctant to do), and that was through research.

  Every morning, Edward set out for the city, leaving Lucy behind to tend to her garden. He worried about what she might be getting up to, picturing her reenacting their fructifying ritual, only with other partners. Then he would admonish himself for a fool. Lucy, despite her newfound interest in matters horticultural, was still the same woman he had always known, and wouldn’t do that to him. Besides, any such activity would surely crush the tiny seedlings that now sprouted where Edward and Lucy had tumbled, and even the sturdier shoots of the transplanted tomatoes, and Lucy wouldn’t stand for that. The garden seemed to be her whole life lately. In the end, there was nothing Edward could or would do if she wanted to rut all day, so he dismissed it from his mind as best he could.

  On the campus, moving from stack to dusty stack in the various familiar libraries where he had spent so much time—and which now seemed so alien—Edward sought answers to the meaning of the Grange and what it stood for.

  He confirmed in detail the brief encyclopedia entry he had read on that day, seemingly ages gone by. The Grange, if this was indeed the same one, had been the brainchild of Oliver Hudson Kelley in 1867. (The word “grange”came from the same Latin root as “grain”, granum, and meant merely a storehouse for grain.) He dug into Kelley’s past. The man had been an immigrant; his father Irish, his mother French. There the personal trail petered out. Edward switched to the public practices of the Grange.

  On the surface, the Grange’s history was one of promoting solidarity among farmers, for the benefit of both individual farmers and farmers as a class. Antitrust, transportation, and education laws were agitated for; cooperatives established; research promoted. There was a social side to the Grange, too. Dances, harvest suppers, lectures. It all seemed extremely innocuous today—although, of course, at the time, it had been considered quite radical and dangerous.

  But through all his readings, Edward began to accumulate the feeling that this surface level of activity was not everything, was not even the most important reason for the Grange’s existence. There was something unspoken beneath the primary texts of a century ago, half a century ago, even two decades ago, something that popped up only now and then, as if it were too powerful to keep completely submerged, rearing its massive green head like the crown of an ancient thick-boled oak bursting full-grown and -leafed through the bland surface of the earth.

  And the unspoken secret seemed, Edward slowly realized, to revolve around a woman—or women—known as Sally Lunn, and how she was…well, there was no word for it but worshipped.

  From a privately printed, anonymously authored book titled Gleanings and Chaff: An Amateur Agriculturalist’s Experiences with the Patrons of Husbandry, 1879, whose spine was broken and pages flaking:

  Sallie Lunne was present that night, for the first time since I had attended the Grange, and I was told to show all proper respect and deference to this old dame, although how she differed from any farmer’s elderly wife I could not immediately apprehend. I was told by the Grange’s Thresher that Dame Lunne was not her baptismal name, but an appellation given to the woman who filled the role of Grain Mistress, and that therefore each branch of the Grange boasted its own Mistress Lunne, simultaneously in attendance all across this broad land—nay, even the globe.

  Mistress Lunne seemed a taciturn, even dull, sort, and spoke not a word during the Grange meeting itself. But afterward, when I was brought forward to be presented to her, I was forced to revise my hasty first impression.

  Her exact words I do not recall, but know with a certainty that they most favorably impressed me with her strength of character and Demeter-like vitality. She seemed a veritable fount and wellspring of pastoral virtues, her high office having caused her to transcend herself, and her touch was correspondingly galvanic. It is hard to overstate her effect on those made of lesser stuff.

  Even more difficult of relation is the aspect she dons during certain private Granger rituals. But I can say no more.…

  One morning, prior to leaving for the city, Edward took his coffee out to the back porch. Lucy was still in the shower. Edward hadn’t told her what he was doing on campus each day; she thought, he believed, that he was working on his book.

  His eyes drifted toward their vegetable garden. It was nine days since he had turned the soil with such backbreaking labor, and he hadn’t paid much attention to it in the interval.

  The tomato plants were spilling over their wire cages, heavy ripe fruit bedecking their leafy sprawl. Peas were ready to pick, as was an abundance of lettuce, eggplants, cucumbers, and zucchini.

  Lucy emerged, barefoot, robed, and toweling her hair. “Oh, I’m sorry—Did I scare you?” she asked.

  Dabbing ineffectually at his coffe-soaked shirt, Edward said, “Just clumsy, I guess”. He set his empty cup and saucer down noisily on the porch rail. Then his eyes caught on what was nailed above the back door.

  Lucy followed his gaze. “It’s a sprig of touch-leaf”, she explained. “Saint John’s wort. Aren’t all those golden flowers beautiful?”

  “Beautiful, yeah, they are. I guess. Why’s it there?”

  “To guard against thunder, lightning, and fire. There’s a spray over the front door, too.”

  Lucy regarded her husband as if waiting for him to inquire further, or contest what she had said. Edward didn’t bite. He was just waiting for what came next. Something had to come next. It was in Lucy’s eyes. They were floating in that same opalescent light as on the day the two of them had consecrated the miraculous garden.

  “Saint John’s Eve is just a few days away, you know. Midsummer Night. It’s an important day for the Grange. There’ll be a lot going on. Do you think you might come?”

  “I—I’ll see. Listen, I’ve got to be going now. A lot of research to finish—”

  Lucy kissed him chastely good-bye. “If you call, I might be out. There’s a red tide on the coast, and we’re helping the local Grange there to deal with it.”

  “I see,” said Edward.

  The car radio confirmed that one of the nuisance-making algal blooms had just been spotted that morning. Edward didn’t give it a snowball’s chance in hell of lasting more than a day.

  Edward had run into a dead end investigating the Grange itself. Nowhere were the more arcane practices he suspected them of described in detail. He was forced to turn to anthropological and mythological works, notably Grave’s The Greek Myths, Frazer’s Golden Bough, and Campbell’s World Mythology.

  In the Frazer, he found that the ceremony he and Lucy had participated in was old, old, old, as old as agriculture itself. Fucking in a field, by couple or community, to ensure fertility, was a ritual found from Central America to New Guinea to Central Africa to the Ukraine. Edward could now personally testify to its efficacy.

  There were a hundred, a thousand other bizarre and not-so-bizarre practices connected with raising crops. An activity so central to civilization could not have failed to accumulate myriad superstitions over the millennia, contributions from every ethnic and racial group known to history. Druids, Gauls, Bantu, Aztecs, Greeks, Romans, Seminoles, Apache—Edward wallow
ed in the descriptions till his head reeled. Intercourse with trees, beating recalcitrant crops, supplicating the rain and sun, chastising the moon, sacrificing animals and humans—

  Which of these did the Grange practice?

  Sacrifice?

  Human sacrifice?

  Yes, Edward was suddenly convinced. He was the intended victim for the Saint John’s Eve festivities. Coinciding with the summer solstice, after which the days began to shorten and vegetation implicitly to die, the archaic holiday was marked with propitiations to distant winter. In Russia, a straw figure was drowned in a stream. The Druids burned their sacrificial king in the Midsummer bonfires. This was why Lucy had been fattening him up, like some hapless Hansel. Oh Lord, what was he going to do?

  Almost blinded by tears of fear and disappointment at the treachery of his wife, Edward continued to flip uselessly through the pages of the book before him. A phrase leaped out at him:…known as soleil lune.

  He backtracked.

  A large, round cake was baked from the summer’s first harvest of grain and consecrated to the Sun and the Moon, twin tutelar deities of husbandry, by whose radiant beneficence the crops ripened, and by whose phases propitious times for sowing and reaping were determined. This cake was ritually broken and shared among the community. Known as soleil lune in France, this symbolic body of Ceres was, due to misunderstanding of the original phrase, called Sally Lunn in England.…

  * * * *

  The flames soared high. Edward could see them from across the field in the night. A circle of leaping bonfires, they ringed a small wooded hill. The air was thick with their smoke, and with the richness of the Midsummer vegetation.

  Lucy handled the jouncing car well on the rutted dirt road. She whistled as she drove. Edward, slumped miserably in his seat, thought he recognized again “John Barleycorn Must Die.”

  In the end, he had agreed to accompany Lucy to the Grange’s ceremony. What else could he do? If Lucy wanted to get rid of him, then there was no reason for him to go on living. He had never quite realized what she meant to him until now. Only her apparent abandonment of him as a sacrifice to her new religion had showed Edward the depths of his ties to her. She had been everything that had supported him in his work, his bastion during hard times, his joy during good. If their life together was at an end, he’d at least be loyal to her up to the ultimate moment, for all they had shared, even if she had betrayed him.