Harvest

by Jim Crace

  I found the fairy caps growing in an oval ring between two exposed root arms under the goat-willow hedge which we have sometimes coppiced for fencing. At least, I think they were fairy caps. It is the time of year for fairy caps. I’ve seen some picked ones recently and believe I’d recognize their pointed parasols and purple gills. It seems a lifetime ago but it is hardly seven days since the Derby twins and Brooker Higgs jaunted along the lane in front of my cottage with their bloating faces and their bloated sack of toadstools. “Had any luck?” I’d asked them. Oh, what bitter luck indeed. I can still almost smell their forest spoils, the caps, the shawls, the giant moonball beneath their dampening of leaves and the smoky cloud of yellow spores. I think it’s reasonable to say that if it were not for their foraging, there would not have been that fire in the dovecote and the loft. There would have been no men in the pillory. There would have been no slaughtering of Willowjack, or anything that followed on from that. I would not have drunk so much or suffered this throbbing headache. The fairy caps must take the blame for everything. It makes less sense to say there would have been no pasturing of sheep before next spring, that Master Jordan has been conjured up, like a demon, by the young men’s flames, that without their flames he would have stayed where he belonged. In town. But I still feel the truth of it. The tinder of the giant moonball has brought misfortune to our land. The fairy caps have set our lives alight.

  I think if I had not been wearied by the night and growing weary of myself, I might simply have passed those mushrooms by. But my body was still full of ale. I could smell it in my sweat and I could see it in my piss every time I stopped—and that was often, this morning—to relieve myself. My throat was sore from being sick. My head was, surely, just as tender as if it really had been hammered with a lump of stone and pierced with a metal prong. How else should I explain the deep crevice of pain behind my eyes? I had been split and ruptured by that half-imagined prong.

  Of course, I was a novice in the arts of drinking heavily. I was not prepared for such harsh penalties. I was ashamed to be so vulnerable, but also—like all drunkards on the dawn; I’d seen this in my neighbors many times—I was just a bit pleased with myself, pleased at my capacity, pleased that I had lived to tell the tale, pleased to know the innards of a pot at last. I wished that at least some of my old friends could witness me today, especially the ones who’d always been suspicious of my levelheadedness, my reluctance to make myself insensible, no matter what the feast or celebration, no matter what misfortune had occurred. “You do not truly love the barley, Walt,” they said, a terrible rebuke, and more evidence of my timidity. “There’s no fermenting you.”

  I suppose it might have been partly this wanting to prove myself to them again and partly my ale-soaked lack of judgment—I’d loved the barley far too much last night and so could not be sound of mind—that made me bend and look more closely at the fairy caps. I only brushed them with my fingertips. All mushrooms are a fearsome sight and even worse to touch. These were as cold and high and clammy as a week-old corpse. But I suppose my brushing with my fingertips was enough for them to work their sorcery on me. I became their carrion at once. I’d given them a brief taste of my skin. Looking back from the more clear-headed safety of this afternoon, I can’t explain my madness or their sudden taking hold of me. But if I recall it correctly—though good recall isn’t something that has survived undamaged from this morning’s loss and doubling of senses—that timid brushing with my fingertips provided me the courage I had sought and lost so quickly drinking ale. I half remember reaching out and cupping mushrooms in my palms. I pinched them firmly at their stems. Against all reason, I wanted to discover what or who they tasted of.

  Firstly, though, my country wisdom halted me. I had to make sure these were fairy caps. I picked a single one, the one least touched, the one least bruised, by the brushing, cupping, pinching of my hands, and pressed it to my nose. It’s said that if a fungus is harmful to eat, you’ll sneeze on smelling it. Its spores will warn you they’re not safe. I did not sneeze. I smelled the forest and the earth, the dampness of a fast-retreating year, the acridness of leaf mold, and a kitchen odor which I could have taken for yeast but yeast that was soured from neglect. I can only think that I was insanely hungry, or more damaged than I’d thought possible by Kitty Gosse’s ale and the nightmares that followed it, or suicidal, even, because I did not hesitate. The man who always hesitates did not, on this occasion, hesitate. He popped the mushroom in his mouth and started to chomp down on it. It did not taste as he expected it to.

  The one and only time I tasted fairy caps before, with John Carr when we were younger men, we’d soaked them first in honey. I remember they were sweet and sinewy. I don’t remember tasting this reasty mix of horse’s hoofs, burned hair and candle wax, nor the leather chewiness. All I could do was break and tear the mushroom with my teeth and swallow the pieces whole. I ought to have stopped after the first piece and let the mushroom declare itself. If there was any poison in its flesh and now in mine, then let it poison me in no great quantity. But he who dithers is a mouse, I heard my neighbors say. I would not allow myself to be a mouse. Only a townsman would be that timid. I finished that first fairy cap but, for an age, it produced nothing in me but a belch—and the certain knowledge, coming to me from thin air, that the one was “not enough,” that only three of them would bring the courage I required. I did not know what voice had whispered that number to me, but I was sure that three would do the trick. One for Brooker and one each for the twins. I would be as mad as they were on the day they played with fire. I wanted their immodest fits of laughter. So I picked another pair of fairy caps. I knew better than to chew this time. I swallowed them whole so quickly that I almost choked and coughed them up. I had to sit on the grass bank, among the willow roots, and catch my breath. What living fairy caps remained were growing in between my knees. I snapped and picked the surviving twenty or so, the ones I did not mean to eat, and tossed them toward Turd and Turf, waxy titbits for our happy pigs. And then I waited. I do remember that I stretched out on the still-damp ground and waited. Simply lingering.

  I must have been expecting to experience again what has been beyond forgetting all these years: the dancing lights and merriment that John Carr and I encountered when we first tasted fairy caps, the melting trails that haloed everything. We were like sun-drenched butterflies and then we were like moon-struck moths. It was a blissful afternoon and night. I’ve not regretted it. What I hoped for most was the enormous fearlessness I’d felt, beneath that long-lost moon that went from pale to blue to red. But what came first this morning, before any melting haloes or oblivion, was a stretch of paralyzing dread. I feared that what I’d eaten were not fairy caps at all, but something much more poisonous and wrathful. I was alarmed. And with good cause. I hadn’t even been born, let alone become a villager, when it happened, but I have heard the tale so many times: one of the Kips’ great grandmothers picked by mistake some red-top toadstools thinking they were edible. She baked them with a rabbit she had snared. She poisoned both her husband and a son. She would have died herself except, as was the habit in those days, the men dined first; the women had their suppers cold.

  I could not help but think this morning of the dying Kips and how they would have felt at first, like me, heavy and unsteady, sick. And how quickly—certainly before their pie had gone quite cold enough for the woman to come to table—they would have begun to cry out with the pain. Already I had stomach cramps, as if I’d eaten palsied meat and it was sitting in my gut just biding time. Just killing time, perhaps, before it started killing me. My time was up. Certainly the fairy caps were keen to keep me on the ground. They would prefer it if I sank into the grass, if I became as rooted to the soil as them. Though stand I must. If I wanted to survive the day, I had to stand and rest my arms against the flat trunk of a beech so that my stomach could heave enough—yet again—to bring up these mushrooms. Yet, no matter what I tried to do, my body was both too slow and too fast t
o offer any balance when I attempted to get to my feet. The fairy caps would have their wish granted unless I could reclaim all the bones in my legs and arms, which were as spongy as the mushrooms themselves; I lay out flat again, spread myself across the ground, and waited to sleep or die or send down roots and put out leaves. But at last I succeeded in raising myself high enough off the ground to rest on my arms and knees, like the commonest and most wretched of beasts. I gagged and coughed but nothing came, except a skein of spittle and the overwhelming stink of barley ale. And then I flattened out again.

  I was lucky, though. I must have been. I have survived to tell the tale, although there’s not much of a tale to tell. Most of the day is robbed from me. Anything could have happened. What might not have happened? I’m aching, though. Whatever it is I’ve done was strenuous. What I recall is hugging animals, and finding gorgeous horrors on the grinning bark of trees, and endless tumbling. Everything was newborn and familiar. My heart beats wildly at the memory. One picture haunts me. I was pinioned to the ground, just weighted to the ground, a seed, expecting only to be wheat and wanting only to be wheat and hoping only for the spring. The plow was heading for my back. Its blade was close. Its blade would bury me. I heard the rattle of the beam and the gritty churning of the furrow. That was the worst and best of it.

  After that the fairy caps began to let me go. I had a twin, a standing twin, who came to rescue me. This other one who had my face, who looked like me and smelled like me and sounded like me, had got me by my shoulders and I was being pulled. I was being gleaned by him. My head came up and back. My bones solidified at last. My sudden twin put me on my feet and made me sensible again. Then, as far as I remember it, I walked the bounds once more toward midday, saying my farewells and making good, freeing any animal that was still tethered or penned, closing all the cottage doors, bolting every shed and barn, shutting gates. I stood and stared across each field, recalling in my reverie how tended and how tilled our years had been, how finely grained our lives. I know I passed the church ground where we never had a church and never will. I know I spent some moments standing on the turf where Cecily still rests, and Lucy Kent as well. My feet were heavy, not with soil, but with a leaden weariness. I think I felt like oxen might feel, if they weren’t so innocent. Yoked to the troubles of the world. But then again, in parallel perhaps, I had a sense that I was flying for a while. At least, I seemed to see our land as Mr. Quill has seen it with his brushes and his pens, his charcoal and his paints—just patterns and patchworks, as beautiful as embroidered cloth, not real in any way, but far below and not quite reachable. Time and distance seemed to play no part. Color was the master. And then I was most like a dove, its cote destroyed by fire, circling in plumes of smoke, without the prospect of a roof at night.

  But now my quest, my heady pilgrimage, my madcap, stupored odyssey, is either coming to its end or resuming on a calmer note, and I am standing in the courtyard of the manor house alone. I cannot tell you how it came about. I don’t recall the final steps I must have taken to arrive, or how long I have been standing within a few paces of the porch, just staring, childlike, at the door, but I am here and it is me. I’ve never been this certain of a truth or more determined to proceed. Someone has packed two bags for me—that sudden twin, perhaps. I can’t remember doing it myself. But I see that I have been equipped with everything a man who travels on his own two feet through empty lands must have with him. There’s water in a leather pouch. There’s dried bacon, biscuit, cheese. There is my brimless working cap, my jerkin and my rain cape. I see the silver spoon, our wedding gift, tucked into one of Cecily’s handkerchiefs. Someone has pulled off my thin shoes and given me my walking boots. I have a sturdy stick. My arms are folded at my back like wings. I swear that they feel feathery.

  16

  HAT STRIKES ME IN THE MANOR HOUSE is how the smell has altered from when I slept here two nights ago. It hasn’t smelled like this for many months, not since Lady Lucy died. I will not say the odor is less manly, although of course this has been, all too recently, the lodging of at least six men apart from Master Kent. Master Jordan himself brought in the odors of a pomander and his casting bottle, so there was a hint, in his room at least, of what is womanly and superior. But the manor smells more homely this afternoon. There is the scent of family, of cooking for a family. Even from the hallway by the great front door I can smell fresh bread and a cooling grate, and other odors that belong to washing and to roasted meat, other odors that don’t belong to recent times. Mistress Beldam has evidently marked the liberation and return of her husband by setting up home in our finest premises and helping herself to the manor’s storeroom and its larder. She has been loving him.

  The downstairs parlor door beyond which Master Kent used to sleep is closed. I hesitate. I am expecting to find them on the other side, despite the silence of the room, despite the stillness of the house. My instant image has the husband sitting on a bench, naked, wrapped up in her velvet shawl. The clothes he wore and muddied at the pillory and labored in yesterday at the back end of our plow are freshly washed and draped at his side; bitter with lye, they are drying at a dancing, open fire. The trestle table there—the oaken table where I last took breakfast, with both the masters on the morning of their departure—is provisioned for eating. Three places have been set. I am anticipated there. The bread, still warm, is cut in wedges. A steaming pot contains a meaty stew … and Mistress Beldam holds the wooden serving spoon. Well, what I’m seeing, what in fact I’m hoping for, is the domestic scene that everybody wants to discover when finally they’re home: the meal, the woman and the fire.

  There is no proof, but I have determined it was the Beldams who made me ready for the journey, packing everything from water to the spoon. I am pleased to believe it was their way of thanking me. I try to count away the days. Is this the sixth or seventh day? I’m not quite sure, but I know the husband would without my clemency still be in the pillory this afternoon. It’s possible they found me in my stupor, walking on unsteady legs, my chin and chest damp and crusty from my vomiting, and gave me some tonic or some salve to rescue me from mushrooms and from ale. Then they packed these bags for me and placed me in the courtyard, to let the breeze clear out my head and lungs, while they went in and made a meal for us. I can’t be sure of anything. But I would like to think it so. I would like to think they carried me, my arms around their shoulders, the husband’s and the wife’s, and made me safe and ready for the roads. Now they will feed me, and I will leave this village in their company. So, I am feeling ravenous, and long to plunge my black and shiny beak into some food.

  All they’ve left behind for me are smells. Whatever was cooked this morning has been eaten, drop and speck. The only hint of new-baked bread is a wooden board, a carving knife and crumbs. The only evidence of meat and stew is unwashed platters, licked clean of everything, it seems, except for a scrap of bacon rind and smears both of gravy and of sugared blackberries. The only sign of washing hanging on the bench to dry is a salty luster on the wood. The fire is open but it’s dying back. Whatever homely times took place in the manor’s parlor overnight and this morning ended long ago. In fact, it looks as if the room has been stripped of all its comforts and any remaining provisions. Two pairs of practiced hands have rummaged everything. The master’s coffer, where he stores his papers and his documents, has been tumbled over onto its lid. The mattress on his wainscot bed in the corner of the room has been dragged across the floor and slit open with a blade. Someone was hoping to find hidden silver, or some jewelry. Lucy Kent’s small loom, one of the two reminders of his wife that my master kept in this parlor, is missing. Her hairbrush too. He always kept it on the mantelshelf, still twined with her long hairs.

  I cross to the far side of the parlor and step over the gutted mattress into the scullery. The doors of the crockery cupboard are hanging open, and most of the familiar jugs and dishes from Lucy Kent’s dowry are missing. The remains of one cracked cup, its handle snapped, is resting on i
ts side and rocking slightly. The little larder too seems empty, though maybe it was emptied by the Jordan men while they were staying here. I know that there were winter hams inside, and salt and suet, and a row of different preserves. Someone has tipped over the master’s honey jar and left it dripping on the floor. My walking boots are sweet with honey.

  I hurry to discover what mayhem has been inflicted on the rest of the manor, though hoping that the damage is restricted to the parlor rooms and service corridor. But what I find is damage everywhere. A fury has swept through the place, a fury that reserved its wrath for mostly worthless things. In the downstairs rooms, there’s not a table or chair that’s resting on its own four legs. There’s not a piece of cloth in place or any matting where it ought to be. Every floor is strewn with debris, including the shattered remains of Mr. Quill’s sweet-hearted fiddle. What isn’t broken isn’t breakable. What’s in one piece has proved too tough to tear or snap. The disorder in each room is worse than any I witnessed on the day the sidemen pulled apart our village homes. I suppose that is because my master has so much more to disarrange than any of us, but also because the sidemen’s searching was detached to some degree, impersonal, and so not quite as spiteful or as thorough. Master Jordan had required it done, and they were dutiful. But here the work has been completed by an enthusiast. And a pilferer. I am in too great a haste to carry out a leisurely inspection. This is no inventory, but I have become familiar enough over the many years to know where there should be tapestries and curtains in this house, where there once were table drawers and cupboards with valuables, where the pair of silver cups which Master Kent was given as a wedding gift by the cousin-in-law he was yet to meet had stood, where there was both costly furniture and the freely given hand-carved stool that Fowler Gosse’s father made. The Beldams will find a market trader in the town or some eager tinker who’ll happily exchange some food or money for these seized family goods. They’ll sell the richer spoils. The Beldams have suffered at our hands. That is not deniable. But they’ve been feeding off us too. I think I feel betrayed by her, her keenness to punish everyone and everything for her calamities. I cannot say that I am being logical, or calm. Especially when I discover on an otherwise stripped-bare mantelshelf the bloody piece of square stone that was used to murder Willowjack. This is the house where horrors are preserved. This is the house where Kitty Gosse was tortured and abused, and Lizzie Carr, our little Gleaning Queen, has left her stain of tears.