Harvest

by Jim Crace

  It is not long before he’s whistling. His ridge and furrow channel the tune as we delve across the field. A plowman’s whistle has the strength to soften clods and break up stones. A plowman’s whistle warns the soil a blade is on its way. I am so satisfied I cannot stop myself from chattering. I’m telling him about the many, endless troubles of the week. I talk of Cecily, and Charles Kent, my boyhood friend. I tell him what a brave and decent man Mr. Quill has proved himself to be. Oxen are noble creatures, I say. They work. But sheep “from what I’ve heard”—what’s his experience?—are helpless beasts: “We’ll have to wait on them like slaves on lords, come spring. Like fools.” I can’t be sure if he is listening. He will not cease his whistling. But we both have busy lips this afternoon, and we are intimate through toil. Anything that’s shared across the backs of oxen is intimate. We make our way toward the dell, and make our way back to the top-end gate. Now our wheels are clogged with mud. I have to free them every twenty paces with a heavy kick and, when that fails, with my bare hands. The rooks and starlings pick the furrows in the damp wake of the plow.

  I make my plowman stand away this afternoon when we have cleaned the blades and put the plow back in its place, and let the oxen roam off where they will. This is a task I want to finish without his help. I barrow in a bag of wheat seed for winter planting and use a casting shovel and some sacking in the corner of the field to select the heaviest grain for my baskets. I know I ought to let the strip of turned soil lay and mellow for a week or so, or at least let it be broken down by the rain, which has already begun to lay its own seed on the ground. But there’s no time. Good practice must be sacrificed. I leave Beldam’s husband resting in the corner of the remaining scrub, and sweep my seeded hands across the land, the richest of all scatterings. The farmer in me—yes, I can boast of that—knows that the best cruel nurture for this early crop is that after a week or two of growth its green ribbons are crushed by rolling. That way, the ground is firmed. The plants can take a steady grip. Wheat—like men and women—benefits from being crushed. Crushing makes it fit to stand up all the better. But there is only this afternoon for making good, for marking my revenge, my countryman’s revenge, on Edmund Jordan and his sheep. This narrow sweep of wheat will be my farewell gift. So I walk the furrow for the final time, in the strengthening drizzle, taking it as a blessing that the seed corn is being watered the instant that it leaves my palm.

  It is on my way up from the dell, with perhaps little more than a hundred paces and fifty sweepings of my hand remaining, that the light begins to fail. I turn to look, beyond the hedgerows and the pyramidal oak, at the dark horizon rearing deep and solid with gray-on-purple clouds. The few remaining scraps of blue blink barely brighter than an eye. What sunlight there is hardly makes a mark upon our field, though on the wood end of our land its best surviving ray is broad and strong enough to radiate and rim the beeches’ pale bare branches, the grasping talons of the ash, and the high-veined frettings of the elms. Then it falls and slowly beams from common ground to field, as if searching for something. It is reluctant to depart. It even catches smoke pots and roofs before it lifts again to paste its silver on the clouds. For a moment, they are faced with light. Our field is black. It’s shiny, suddenly. And then the day is gone. Its candle has been snuffed, or drenched. That is the end of it.

  Dusk has deepened now. If it wasn’t for the rain, I could be walking through the steep-domed, unlit chamber of a great cathedral, roofed by coal-black vaults of cloud. This downpour has not got the force to last. But for the moment it takes hold. The clouds carried too much weight before they reached this place. I can almost hear them sigh with relief as they let go their load. The furrows in our barley field are already brimming and draining off like streams in flood. The clouds intend every single seed I’ve spread to have its year’s supply of drink in one delivery. The earth turns sticky. It clings heavily to my feet, and lards my legs with every step I take. It’s hard work even walking in it now. I look up to the corner of the field, and wave at where I last saw Mistress Beldam’s husband. I call out even, although my words are washed away. But anyway I think the man has gone already. He will have had his fill of late of being out in all weathers. He will have gone into the cottages or taken shelter in the barn. For an instant I imagine him in Mistress Beldam’s arms among the field and pasture tools, among the nettles in the dark. She is getting wet and cold as she clings on to him.

  I am excused, I think, for wondering if I am the only one alive this afternoon with no other living soul who wants to cling to me, no other soul who’ll let me dampen her. The day has ended and the light is snuffed. I’m left to trudge into the final evening with nobody to loop their soaking hand through mine. And no one there to lift their hats, as our traditions say they must, when brought on by chaff and damp I cannot help but sneeze, an unintended blessing for the field. But I’d be lying if I said I felt as dark and gloomy as the clouds. I think I’m thrilled in some strange way. The plowing’s done. The seed is spread. The weather is reminding me that, rain or shine, the earth abides, the land endures, the soil will persevere forever and a day. Its smell is pungent and high-seasoned. This is happiness.

  15

  Y PLOWMAN’S HAPPINESS DID NOT survive the night. Once it was safely dark and the storm had very nearly passed, I stepped out of Kitty Gosse’s home hoping to catch a wink of candlelight or hear the knot and knit of voices—the Beldam couple reunited thanks only to my own leniency and maybe ready now to show some gratitude. I could not imagine they’d be hard to find. They surely would have slept indoors, somewhere in our row of cottages and within earshot of my own refuge. Why would they not have slept indoors? They must have known that here was now an abandoned spot and it was safe to help themselves to any bed they found. I’d sniff them out. I would be truly neighborly, and call on them. Surely I deserved their company.

  What moonlight found passage through the clouds misled me once or twice with its glints of silver catching on the puddles or in the rain damps on the roofs. I took them briefly as a sign of life. But candlelight is warmer and more intimate than any moonlight. It will not send a shiver down your spine as these cold glisters did. Orange was the color I was looking for. I ventured for fifty steps or so along the muddied lane, hoping but not quite expecting to discover the Beldams. But, even though I harked my neck and ears about as alertly as any hunting owl, I could not make out any whispered words or catch the nighttime mutter of a lovers’ busy bed.

  I was both sorry and relieved to find no ducking candlelight. What would I have done if, when I discovered the glow of household flame or caught the cloying whiff of melting wax, I also heard her crying out with … let me call it gladness? I do not want to think I would have crept up like a cat outside the chicken coup and spied on them. I’d rather imagine myself as their good friend, their warmhearted visitor, wanting nothing from them but some friendliness. So I hope I would have stood a respectful distance from their door and simply called out my name, declared myself to them. “It’s only Walter, come to talk.” It’s only Walter, come to make amends. It’s only Walter, come to share your oval den of candlelight and breathe the warm air of your room. I sorely needed fellowship.

  I found no fellowship. I couldn’t see or hear a trace of them. A leather pot would be my only bedmate for the night. Kitty Gosse always had a good supply of greenish barley ale. “I find it beneficial,” she explained. Certainly, she slept on it and woke on it whenever I spent the night with her, and must have done the same when I wasn’t there. It dampened down the sorrows of her widowhood, she claimed, though if anything she was more dampened down by it when Fowler Gosse was still alive. She’s always had a loyal thirst, that woman. A single pot has usually been enough for me. I am reluctant to get drunk. I wasn’t born to it. But last night, after I failed to find my only neighbors, I chased off my own sorrows with enough ale, as we say, to drown a bag of puppies in. For whom should I stay sober, and for what?

  The first two pots were cheer
ing companions, though not as fortifying as I’d wanted. I think I expected to take extra courage from the ale, a courage greater than a plowman’s, anyway. I was hoping that my animal response would not be goat’s, or pig’s, or dog’s. I don’t need drink to make me lecherous, or obdurate, or even barking mad. No, I wanted to be as drunk as a bull and ready for a brawl, ready to be strong and reckless. Ready for today. I persevered, heroically, with widow Gosse’s ale. I do not think I much enjoyed the taste, or the leaden feeling in my arms and legs that it produced so rapidly, but I did enjoy the loosening of my anxieties. The next two pots of ale left me more spirited, as I’d hoped, but also more bemused and fanciful. I conjured up some company for myself. I invented visitors. They came up to the cottage door and knocked. I welcomed them, out loud, the fulsome host. But then, of late, I’ve done that often, when I haven’t had even a sniff of ale. A widower will first talk to himself, then—tired of that—he’ll have a noisy conversation with a candle flame or with the shifting shadows in his room, which he persuades himself are family.

  Last night, the flames and shadows were those few men and women I most wanted to embrace. I imagined taking this reverie of friends down to the plow-scarred field at first light so that they could inspect my labors, and the evidence of my boldness and my disobedience. I lined them up, my seven sober witnesses. I stood them at the end of Kitty Gosse’s bed. Mr. Quill was soundless, shadowy. He was the bravest of us all. I’d prove to him that I could be daring too. The widow herself was there, of course. She always said she thought I was a cautious man. She counted me a civil owl, too quick to hoot, too scared to show my talons to the world. Well, she would see my talons soon and how I’d scratched a trench into the soil. Beside her, looking down at the back of his stubby, how- to hands, still avoiding my glance, was neighbor John. I’ll not forget him pulling back away from me the last time he came to my cottage door. I flush even to think of it. “Lord help you, Walt, if you’re deceiving us,” he’d said. “Lord help you, John, if you believe I would,” was my reply. Now he would see how defiant I could be on his behalf. Then came Master Kent, my milk cousin. Again he fixed me with the briefest show of eyes, as wide and white as eyes can be. They were asking, “Have you made the land ours again?” The Beldams nodded their encouragement. They trusted me. “You are the man who holds the sword,” the husband said. The woman pulled aside the velvet shawl and showed her wide-cheeked, thin-lipped face, her button nose, her belladonna eyes. Nothing ever frightened her. And finally my thrush was there, my Cecily, full-throated and alive again. I had forgotten what a plump and honeyed creature she could be and how light a voice she had. “Walter, Walter, make me proud of you,” she said.

  I lifted my fifth pot and toasted all of them. We were the best of friends. I should have stopped the drinking there, while I had friends, while there was still some singing in the ale. Two further pots provided only tears—and anger too. The final pot was like a cudgel to the head. I would have dropped asleep at once if I hadn’t had to go outside to clear both my bladder and my gut. That sobered me a bit. The night air helped. I cannot say, though, that my head had cleared or that my feet were no longer tangled. But I was soon unruffled enough to listen once again, between the heaving spasms of my drunkenness, for any human sounds, other than the voices I’d just invented for myself and the usual mouthings of the stars. There were none, of course. Whatever courage I’d discovered briefly in drink had by now been almost entirely gagged and pissed into the once sweet-smelling garden, and I no longer could pretend to be the hero of the field. I was too wretched for a hero of the field. I could hardly stand, indeed, and either had to sleep among the ghosts of Fowler Gosse’s double-marigolds and thyme or take my spinning head back to its pillow in the room. Now my seven witnesses crowding at the far end of the bed were mocking me. Is that the only stand you’ll take against the Jordans and their sheep? they asked. Is that your fiercest riot and unrest, to put a pair of dumb beasts to the plow and mark your outrage on a field? Our enemies will quake at that, your knee-deep furrow and your knee-high ridge. Those armies will retreat at that. What next? Will you perhaps cut back some weeds or fix a fence to spread more fear into the hearts of those who do not wish our village to survive? Only a townsman could be so timid, Walter Thirsk, and still mistake it for rebellion.

  Then I slept, though poundingly and fitfully. My dreams were punishing. I knocked on doors in them—but no matter what I did or said, no one would let me join them in their candlelight. Then my audience of friends and witnesses were standing at the bottom of the bed again, hard-faced. Mistress Beldam hurried forward, light-footed as a little deer, and pushed her velvet shawl into my mouth, to stop my cries of pain. She placed her tethering prong against my head above my ear. I could feel the metal in my dented skin. She hit it once. Then all the others took their turns in striking it home, double-handed, with the square and heavy stone that had killed Willowjack. Even Cecily. She was the cruelest of them all. She said, “It’s not enough. The ridge and furrow are not enough. You really haven’t done enough.”

  What was soon clear, once I’d woken late this morning with a drumming head, not feeling brave at all, and gone outside to sober up on air again, was that the Beldams had spent the night in the best rooms of the manor. I was surprised by their audacity. I was not pleased, to tell the truth, though I suppose a couple as young and poor as them will have always wondered about the insides of a master’s house. If they’d ever hoped to sleep in airy space and any opulence, no matter how shabby, this might have been their only chance. I can imagine that they took Master Jordan’s bed, exactly as I had done the night before. I only chose the widow Gosse’s bed last night,rather than returning to the manor, because my evening there had seemed improper, afterward—though I am the manor-keeper for the moment. So if it was improper for me to wrap myself in Lucy Kent’s old riding cape and fall down in the cushioning of carpets, cloths and arrases, surely it was more so for these two passers-by. I’d thought that only bats would have it after me, at least until and if one of the masters came back in the spring. The Beldams are not bats.

  I shamed myself by standing in the cottage lane as gray-faced and disapproving as a piece of slate and shaking my ale-sodden head at the mauvish scarf of smoke that was being woven from the lower chimney stack. They must have lit the oven in the scullery. I did not want to guess what they used for fuel, what furniture, what parchments, deeds or books. Or what it was they cooked for their first meals together since the dovecote fire. Or, come to that, what might have happened underneath her velvet shawl last night. I was resolved to hold my tongue. I’d keep away from them, and not only because I felt too ill for conversations of any kind. They were not my business anymore. If only I could find the courage and recover from my seven pots, then there were things to do for Cecily. I knew I hadn’t done enough for her.

  I found my courage in the woods, by chance. I wanted to give dear Mr. Quill a final opportunity to show his face, to bare his waxy, trowel-shaped beard again. I’d call his name and let the echo seek him out. I took the lane toward the place where the Beldams first set up their den and followed round the outer edge of Turd and Turf, so silent then and glistening with last night’s rains. The storm had quelled the usual stench to some extent. The carcass domes were mostly hidden by the water. Had there been anybody there to follow me, I’d appear a halting figure with legs as weary as any oxen’s and shoulders as tucked as any goose’s. I could not help but stagger on the rougher ground. For once I felt like Mr. Quill must have felt since his sudden palsy as a child, wooden from the shoulder to the ribs, a man who was not fitted for outdoors. But still I did my best to not look to my left, despite the raucous foraging of our abandoned pigs, happy to be free and in the mire. I was in no hurry to discover evidence of Willowjack or what little remained of the short man from the pillory. Nor did I want just yet to risk discovering the body of my Mr. Quill. I’d rather believe for a few moments more what was most likely true. He had been warned. He ran awa
y—or lurched away, I ought to say. He was already safe. But I had to be sure, or surer anyway, before I could feel free to lurch away myself.

  The longpurples were beaten down by rain. You wouldn’t name it Blossom Marsh today. The major colors were the grayish-greens of goat-willows and the purple-browns of beech—but there was no sun to liven them or paint reflections in the flood. I found a raft of almost solid ground, then dared to look across the bog. There was an oblong monument of piled stones I hadn’t seen before. The Beldam daughter had been dutiful and loving, unobserved by us. She couldn’t let her father rest without a stone memorial. There wasn’t any sign of Mr. Quill’s distorted frame. Not above the surface anyway. So I spread my legs and cupped my hands and called his name, despite the head pain that the calling out intensified. I summoned “Mr. Quill” and “Mr. Earle,” until the two names caught the booming echo in the dell and merged to make a distant liquid L. The pigs were not disturbed at all. Shouting doesn’t bother them. But I was loud enough to set some rooks and pigeons in the air, and cause some crashing through the undergrowth. A deer. If Mr. Quill was in the woods or hiding somewhere underneath a roof, he would have heard—and recognized, I hope—my voice. I listened then. I half expected his reply. Nothing answered other than the echo, and the muffled sneezing of a skulking snipe. I must have tried a dozen times before I started swaying back toward the open fields.