Harvest

by Jim Crace

  “Exactly so,” says Mr. Quill, when I indicate my answer with a finger, lifting a smudge of paint as I do so. “And here I’ve plaited in your boundary line.”

  Now I can see the boggy path and Turd and Turf, not yet identified as the Blossom Marsh. There’s our top end. And there’s our deep and tall and goodly wood. Our fortress walls of thorn and scrub. Our unbuilt church. Our commons and our cottages. Our onetime safe and kindly realm.

  I look again but squintingly, and not at the particulars. I’ve never before had a true sense of how our estate is shaped, how stars might shine on us, or what those hawks and kestrels see. It has been too many years for memory since I last observed our land from any greater distance than our clover hill—that first day, in fact, twelve years ago, when I arrived with Master Kent and saw, far off, from the pale green of the higher downs, the true green bowl—no, valley’s not the word—of this isolated place nesting, hidden, in those blank spaces between far rivers, nameless and beyond. But otherwise I’ve put no shape to it. Now I know the village is a profile of a brawny-headed man—a bust, in fact. His neck and shoulders are our pasturelands. Our cattle and our goats are feeding there. The four great fields make up his face. His ear—our pond—is small enough to be a child’s. He almost has a nose, where I suppose that little clovered hillock is. The forests are his hair.

  It is an odd experience, unnerving in its way, to look down on our woods, our commons and our fields at once, to see them side by side, or separated only by the thickness of my thumb, when I have never seen them on the ground with such adjacency. Here the sap-green-painted fallow is seemingly attached by the madly dark blue stitching of a ridgetop copse to the gray-cum-yellow stubble of our barley field. They look like neighbors, exchanging glances through the trees. I’ve walked that thickness-of-my-thumb a thousand times. It’s easy going till you reach the ridge. The fallow field has a subtle slope, so it drains well but keeps its soil. There’s seldom any mud. But there are pebble-stones to set your feet against. You have to take the cow track at the ridge and go downhill a little with the copse thickening on your right until you find another rise, and there an open gap which lets you pass along a lane of thorns into the field where now, this afternoon, you’ll find our cattle gleaning grain. This is the point, at the brimming of the trees, where neither field can be seen. You’re too closed in. Indeed,there’s nowhere on the walk—which takes a little while and some exertion—where both the fallow and the barley field can be looked upon at once. You’d have to climb a tree for that. Or be a bird.

  So Mr. Quill’s true account of here and now is not as honest as he hopes. He’s colored and he’s flattened us. No shadows and no shade. We are too mauve and blue; he’s planted longpurples everywhere. There are no climbs or slopes. The land is effortless: a lie. He hasn’t captured time: how long a walk might take; how long a piece of work might take; how long the seasons or the nights must last. No man has ever seen this view. But it is beautiful, nevertheless. And so, come to that, although it’s hard to acknowledge it, is Mr. Quill’s map of the sheep fields that are looming over us. This chart is even busier with color, and more patterned to the eye. Its patchwork is much tidier. The fields are smaller, broken up and edged. The dark of the wood, with its clustered symbols showing trees, has almost disappeared. I cannot find an eye or ear. The brawny-headed man has lost his face.

  “What do you make of these?” asks Mr. Quill. I take his question as a test. I do not want to say his paintings aren’t as honest as he thinks. But it isn’t hard for me to praise them fulsomely for what they are as pretty things, a kind of vision of the world—our little world, in fact—that I have never seen before and which has left me moved and oddly breathless. With his help these colored papers, unmarked as yet with any names or guides, make sense to me at last. They complicate to simplify. I have translated them. I can tell you where we are on them. I could stub my finger on the spot where I am standing now. But still I’m left to wonder where we’ll be on them in days and years to come. And so my breathlessness. There’s something in these shapes and lines, in these casual, undirected blues and greens, that, for all their liveliness, seems desolate.

  9

  ITTLE LIZZIE CARR AND HER GREEN SASH are in Master Jordan’s custody tonight, as is (or so the rumor has it for the moment—Mr. Quill and I have yet to see the living evidence) the widow Gosse, my Kitty Gosse, together with Anne Rogers, her best friend. We need to organize ourselves, of course. This is the moment when our wildest hotheads should raise their sickles and their sticks. But John Carr thinks the hottest heads have already packed their bags and gone. Certainly, Brooker Higgs has not been seen since dusk. And the Derby twins were spotted heading off toward our top end and the setting sun, bundles roped across their backs and walking faster than they’ve ever walked before; their mother looks as gray and blank as pewter, and only shakes her head when questioned. Three of our sons are vagabonds, untethered strays, who clearly feel it’s safer to be anywhere but here. That has never happened to our sons before.

  Whose version of events should I believe? The loudest voices that I overhear are decided—as am I, reluctantly—that the shaven, black-haired woman is behind it all. A dozen different stories hold Mistress Beldam responsible for all the disarrangement of their cottages—and then for every odor that’s not pleasing, for every jug of curdled milk, for every darkening of cloud. And she will take the blame, I know, for driving sheep into our fields. Everything’s uncertain and unhinged because of her. She’s brought a curse onto our land, she’s blighted us. My neighbors say she’ll not be satisfied until we’re all dragged off to rot away with Willowjack. When the threshing barn was inspected at midday, they told the “new gentleman’s” serving men as much, and that the bloody velvet shawl claimed by Master Kent to be his wife’s was not his wife’s at all but the property of this fierce, alluring woman. But no one listens to them anymore, they now complain. No one’s been hunting for “the sorceress” despite their warnings. Those men are picking only on the innocent, on local women and a girl.

  What’s certain, according to these flapping tongues, is that while I was on my knees this afternoon making pauper’s vellum from the calf, Lizzie Carr, still very much the Gleaning Queen in her green cloth and bored with sorting barley, slipped out of the threshing barn, hoping to renew the yellow blossoms she’d been wearing since her crowning. She was bound to be noticed by Edmund Jordan’s men. And they were bound to challenge her. This girl, bedecked beyond her station in a valuable cloth and mustardy with flowers, like a fairy child, was far too young and tame to fit the description of the savage woman they’d only recently been informed about by the less wary of my neighbors and whom the sidemen were now very keen to meet. But she was baffling. And her clothing was suspicious. The men supposed that all expensive cloth—Lizzie Carr’s green sash, that woman’s bloody velvet shawl—must provide some necessary clue in their pursuit of Willowjack’s killer. The meaning of those shawls and sashes, not to mention Master Jordan’s too easygoing cousin’s lies, would reveal itself in time no doubt, and after thorough questioning, beginning with this mystifying child.

  As I imagine it, the men will have held Lizzie Carr by her irresistible plaits—like her uncles will have done a thousand times before, like I have done myself. They would have been more playful than spiteful, at first, and meant only to prevent her skipping off. Why was she in the lane at all, they’d want to know. Hadn’t she been instructed quite clearly by Master Jordan that nobody must stray today beyond the barn? And, more to the point, how was it that a common little girl like her was sporting such a fine and pretty dressing on her head? When she told the truth, that Master Kent had given it to her, and that she was the Queen for one whole year, they were bound to doubt her word, tighten their great hands round her willow arm, and march her off to answer more practiced and judicial questions in Master Jordan’s presence.

  What is not yet clear—at least not clear to me because it seems that, for the moment, I am not
included in the village circles—is how the two women became involved. Anne Rogers is the fiery sort, I know. It’s never wise to disagree with her, even if you’re family. And Kitty Gosse is mulish when she wants to be. If they were working at the entry of the barn, in plain sight of the lane, and witnessed Lizzie being taken off by those three coarse and stony men, who only this morning were party to the prophecy that we should expect to see a neighbor hanging from an oak by sundown—“God bless you all, and God help one of you,” he’d said—I can’t imagine them standing aside. I can imagine, though, a tug of war between the women and the men, with this year’s Gleaning Queen the scrap of flesh they were fighting for. The women wouldn’t have stood a chance. They’d have been outnumbered, for a start; outmuscled too. But it might have taken some kicking and some bruising before they admitted defeat and allowed themselves to be dragged away like sows to face the consequences of their meddling.

  No doubt the sound of Anne Rogers’s battling voice reached the barn. Everybody would have hurried out, glad of the excuse to put down tools and see the last tugs of the struggle in the lane. Those clod-heads in their matching uniforms who were so churlish and so dangerously bored earlier in the day were now setting upon two village women and a child and dragging them off to who-knows-where and with who-knows-what in mind. Of course, the threshing and the winnowing came to an early end at once. This would have been the moment, I am sure, when Brooker and the twins, our arsonists, judged it best to pack and go before their secrets were uncovered. They wouldn’t want to decorate that sundown oak.

  I know my neighbors well enough to share their anger and alarm—though it seems they’re still not so keen to have me in their company and sharing anything this evening. They reply to any simple question I might put with, Why are you asking that? and, Who needs to know? They’re closing ranks already and I am not included, despite my dozen years of standing at their shoulders. Old friends avoid my eyes. They duck away from me. Even John Carr is reluctant to talk. He hardly offers me a phrase. My once darker hair is clashing with their blond again. It is their reminder that I am the master’s man before I am a villager, that I have spent my afternoon with Mr. Quill, preparing for the coming of the sheep, and not with them, helping with the wintering of grain. I did not join them when they faced drawn arrows at the newcomers’ den. I did not join the dancing in the barn. I did not even join the gleaning of the barley field, and that was inexplicable. They know that when their cottages were so roughly pulled apart this morning, I was there to witness it but not to stop it. The knowledge that I spent last evening naked in the widow’s bed will not have come as a surprise, but then it will not have done me any favors either. The half of the village most related to Kitty and Fowler Gosse will see me as a poacher; and the other half are Saxtons or Saxton kin and will count me as a traitor to my—and their—sweet Cecily. The envious men will be the most outraged. Many of my neighbors nurtured a seedling for Kitty Gosse and will resent my success. Maybe even one or two of their wives might once have nurtured shoots for me. I must have represented all the world for them when I arrived, and then when I became a widower … well, I had sweet-natured offers, let me say, but stepped away from all but one of them. So I cannot condemn my neighbors for closing ranks. These are nervous, jealous times for all of them.

  And I know their expressions well enough, even in this evening gloom, to understand that these are also dangerous times for me. If there are offerings to be made, if there’s a name that should be whispered loud enough for this new master to overhear, a name that might conveniently connect a suspect with a crime or might divert suspicion from a native-born, better it is mine than any of their men’s, better I’m dragged off to sleep with Willowjack than anybody else. Unlike the twins and Brooker Higgs, already lost to us, it seems, I never was a local tree, grown in this soil from seed, to die where I was planted. I can be done without, and with no lasting harm. I’m no great sacrifice.

  I do not blame them, honestly. I’m not a person they should trust, not at the moment anyway. I’ve not been loyal of late, or even tried to cling on to their love. I have kept too many secrets and too many confidences to myself. I have not told them what I overheard in the manor house gallery or what Mr. Quill has divulged to me about the older Edmund Jordan’s will and its entitlements. I plead guilty to the charge of being too tight-lipped, though I might say my silence was judicious rather than dishonest: I cannot serve each master and each friend with equal shares. I do not even know myself who it is I want to please, besides myself, or where I most want finally to rest my head. In Mr. Quill’s employ, I think, although there’s something in his colored charts, his hawk-high version of the world, that makes me wonder if he is too skittish and too vulnerable for me with his never-fading smile, his wooden lurch. He said as much himself this afternoon: “I am the roughest piece of furniture.” You won’t be comfortable with me, in other words. I am reminded of that country saw, Only a fool would strap a saddle to a wooden bench and hope to ride it home.

  Perhaps, now that I am fallowed by the cottagers, I ought to speak my piece to Master Kent, persuade him to reemploy me as his man. He might let me move back to the manor house. I’ll take the attic rooms again. He’ll need an ally when his cousin claims command, however distantly, and when the sheep invade his fields. He is my only brother in a way, though I cannot think he is my family. But whatever future I can devise for myself, I cannot be lighthearted about the present. I am furrowed sad tonight to see the village back away from me. My neighbors leave me standing on my own. Now I wonder if I’ve been a fool about this place; my restlessness is just a curse, a moling demon in my heart whose mischief is to have me leave the only acres that can provide me happiness. But then I understand too well, from what I’ve heard and seen, that any happiness—or at least the lands that nurture it—will not survive the autumn frosts.

  So I stay a little to the side, forgotten or at least ignored in the shadows, and do not add my voice to theirs as they discuss what should be done about their disappearing sons, the pair of women who are held, and little Lizzie Carr. We’re the majority, they protest. We must be listened to. I hear the word petition. I could tell them, had they not decided to be deaf to me, that numbers amount to nothing in such matters. Dissent is never counted; it is weighed. The master always weighs the most. Besides, they can’t draw up a petition and fix it to the doorway of the church as other places do. It only takes a piece of paper and a nail, that’s true. But, even if they had a doorway to a church, none of them has a signature.

  Of course, the loudest voices are the ones that want to arm themselves with sticks and blades and march up to the manor house like maddened geese to save their goslings from the law. But they are only honking, making warning sounds. Nobody wants to storm the manor house, not with Master Kent inside, not with the echoes and impressions it has hoarded in its corridors. Besides, those three sidemen look menacing. They will be used to seeing off a crowd, the angrier the better, for then the greater their excuse for banging heads, and breaking bones, and leaving scars and bodies.

  Some other neighbors say it’s best to let the evening run its course: the master’s bound to intercede on their behalf. There’ll be some displeased questioning of the women, no doubt. There’s been a scuffle, after all. And who can say that Kitty Gosse and Anne Rogers weren’t too fierce and fiery in the lane? That’s no surprise. It might be wise to let the matter boil and steam tonight. It makes no sense to lift a scalding pan. It’s best to let the water settle first, and cool. So, wait, is their advice. The three arrested villagers will be home by midnight, or by tomorrow midnight at least, and none the worse for wear.

  It is the Saxton cousins, those two comic grunters who were once so famously divided by the partition of a pig, who suggest the favored strategy. They will not arm themselves. They will not wait like children while the water cools. Instead, they will present themselves at the manor house tonight—at once—as meekly as they can. They will wear smiles, remove their caps
, and let the masters understand that any troubles that have occurred in these past days have been the work of newcomers and that they propose tomorrow, at first light, to search the alcoves of their land until the culprit—here they mean Mistress Beldam—is caught or driven far away or the victim of an accident.

  I am not there to witness their entreaties at the manor, nor to make my own appeal for Kitty Gosse, as I should, because when we reach the unbuilt gateway to our unbuilt church, I discover Mr. Quill—as was arranged this afternoon, though in the mêlée I’ve forgotten it—in conversation with the one surviving tenant of our pillory. It is his third night fastened here. My neighbors do not even pause or lift their caps for either of the men; their business at the manor house is more urgent. But there is a stifled, communal cry and a shaking of heads. The night is swarming with a hundred tuts. Clearly they’re unsettled and displeased to discover this new conjunction, these two contrary outsiders unified in whispering. They see that Mr. Quill has spread his arm across the young man’s shoulder. They see the gap between the mouth and ear. And it is disturbing. Yet every one of them will admit in their heart of hearts that we have not been just to this ragged, shaven visitor and certainly not to the older man, who died; his fate is far too cruel to contemplate. That is why no one has come in these few days to throw windfalls at the remaining captive or to cuss at him, for fun, as would have happened if he were genuinely culpable of anything more serious than not belonging here. And that is equally the reason why none of us has been more kind, offering to share his burden of bereavement, a crust and rind, at least, a gift of ale. A greeting, anyway. A wave. We’ve been ashamed, I think. And bewildered, truth be told. Bewildered by ourselves. These are not the customary village ways. Our church ground has been desecrated by our surliness. Our usual scriptures are abused. This body on the cross is not the one that’s promised us. Yet, once again, it’s Mr. Quill who teaches us our shortcomings. It’s Mr. Quill who’s intimate and kind. It’s Mr. Quill who’s valiant. It will not make him popular.