Harvest A Novel (2 page)

The harvest teamwork allows us to be lewd. Our humor ripens
as the barley falls. It’s safe to spread the gossip noisily, it’s safe to bait and goad, Who’s sharing wives? Which bearded bachelor is far too friendly with his goat? Which widower (they look at me) has dipped his thumb in someone else’s pot? Which blushing youngsters are the village
spares
, that’s to say those children who’ve been conceived in one man’s bed and then delivered in another’s? Who’s making love to apple tubs? Who’s wedded to a sack of grain? Nothing is beyond our bounds, when we are cutting corn.

So it was hardly a surprise yesterday that once “Mr. Quill” in Master Kent’s close company was attending with his survey sticks and measuring tapes to the shape and volume of our fallow field and so beyond hearing, we wondered, out loud, whether our visiting townsman had ever overcome his undisguised deficiencies to secure himself a willing wife. Was he a husband yet? And, if he was, what blushing pleasures might Mistress Quill take from such staggering and stiffness and from having such a likeness of her hairy private part upon her stumbling lover’s chin? “I’d like to take a scythe to him,” said my neighbor John. Another said, “I’d rather take my wooden staff to her.” And then of course the bawdiness increased with such play on the prospect of caressing Mr. Quill’s three-cornered beard and Mistress Quill’s twin attribute that every time that evening and in our company he ruminated with his hand around his chin, as was his habit, the women there could barely plug their grins while their men looked on, biting their lips. “And have you noticed his white hands?” one of our village daughters asked. “I wonder if he’s ever dirtied them … other than to …” No, she would not finish. What she had in mind did not seem possible.

It was only when the gentleman returned in the fullness of the afternoon and stood at our backs on the bristle of the field to quantify and measure us that we began again to wonder what awaited these treasured neighborhoods and to feel uneasy. What was he wanting
from our soil, what were his charts securing? We saw his finger wagging on the count. We heard him numbering, until he reached the paltry fifty-eight that represented us. We know enough to understand that in the greater world, flour, meat and cheese are not divided into shares and portions for the larder, as they are here, but only weighed and sized for selling. Was Mr. Quill the confirmation of the rumor that had gone about our doors that Master Kent was in such narrows now he was a widower that he would need to measure and sell our land? No amount of openness and jollity could raise our spirits once that fear took hold. Our observer’s ready smile was menacing.

We were slow to broadcast our alarm. But we tackled our last barley stands more silently, less lewdly—and more scrupulously, as we were being watched. Now each barking deer or woodcock call was a warning. Each darkling cloud reminded us how nothing in our fields was guaranteed. We only muttered to ourselves, too anxious to raise our voices loud enough to reach our neighbors down the reaping line. Some of the younger men set faces which declared they’d defend our acres with their lives or with the lives of anyone that crossed them. The usual silent swagger. Rather than speak up, they turned their anger on the pigeons and the rooks, and on a handful of our master’s near-white doves, which had descended on the stub and were already robbing fallen grain that, by ancient gleaning rights, should have been ours. These “snowy devils,” their out-of-season whiteness making them seem even more coldly pea-eyed and acquisitive than their gray and black companions, were feasting on our bread and ale, they said, and sent the children to use their slings or shower them with handfuls of grit or yell the thieves away, anything to evidence our tenancy. The air was full of wings and cries. So our final harvesting gained ground.

By my account, once our complicated working day was done and all our flat-eared barley was gathered in and carted away, the Derby twins and Brooker Higgs, unmarried men in a village dismayingly
short of unmarried women, set off for the woods, while most of us, the rest of us, restored ourselves at home, took stock. We shook our heads and searched our hearts, until we had persuaded ourselves that Master Kent was too good and just a man to sell our fields. He’d always taken care of us. We’d always taken care of him. Besides, what was the evidence of any sale? A bearded, skew-whiff gentleman? A chart? The counting of our heads? No, we should not be mistrustful. We should face the rest day with easy hearts, and then enjoy the gleaning that would follow it, with our own Gleaning Queen the first to bend and pick a grain. We should expect our seasons to unfold in all their usual sequences, and so on through the harvests and the years. Everything was bound to keep its shape. That’s what we thought. We were calm and leisurely. But, unlike the three bachelors, we had not found and eaten fairy caps and then concocted ways of getting even with the thieving birds, especially the white ones from the master’s cote. Nor had we stumbled on a moonball, fatter than a blacksmith’s head, but too tindery to eat. Such a dry and hollow moonball is good, as any tree scamp knows, for taking flames from here to there. It’s good, if you are so inclined, while everybody sleeps and only night’s black agents are at work, for taking fire into the master’s yards.

Of course, those fairy-headed men did not intend to kill so many of the master’s doves. Or even mean to start a fire. Their plan was only to create a little smoke and drive the birds away. But when their moonball lantern was pushed before first light into the loft, among the bone-dry chaff and litter that the doves had gleaned and brought inside for nesting, it wasn’t long before its smolder took to flame and the flame, encouraged by the frenzy of flapping wings, spread along the underside of roof beams, fed by timber oils, and found the top bales of that summer’s hay. A bird will stay away from smoke. So these doves could seek the corners of their loft, or beat themselves against the roofing laths, or try to peck an opening. But who truly knows what
doves might do in fires? Perhaps, a dove will simply sit and coo, too foolish to do otherwise, until its feathers are singed black, until its flesh is roasted to the bone. Whatever happened, this is certain: the stable yard this morning smells of undeserving meat. And the twins and Brooker Higgs have woken to the worst dawn of their lives.

In any other place but here, such willful arsonists would end up gibbeted. They’d be on hooks in common view and providing sustenance to the same thieving birds they’d hoped to keep from gleaning. But, as I’ve said, these fields are far from anywhere, two days by post-horse, three days by chariot, before you find a market square; we have no magistrate or constable; and Master Kent, our landowner, is just. And he is timid when it comes to laws and punishments. He’d rather tolerate a wrongdoer among his working hands than rob a family of their father, husband, son. Of course, the burning down of the master’s stable and his cote, the loss of hay and doves, is not a felony that should pass unpunished entirely. If the perpetrators are identified, they can expect a beating, followed by a lengthy sojourn sleeping rough, beyond our boundaries. Some of their family stock—a pair of goats, perhaps, some weaner pigs—might well be claimed in recompense. But their lives will never be at stake, not here. So maybe it is better for the bachelors to hold their nerve, come out to fight their own fire, seem innocent, and hope that everyone will take the blaze to be an act of God. Bad luck, in other words, and not a soul to blame.

But Brooker and the twins are not practiced at deceit. They’d not succeed as players on a stage as so many other renegades and cutthroats do, escaping justice in a guise. Their guilt is on display for everyone to see. They are too noisy and too keen, especially when Master Kent himself comes down, wrapped in the sleeveless mandilion his wife wove for him in the winter of her death, and stands in shock beside his rescued mare, well back, beyond the heat, to watch his stable disappear. His home and peace of mind are scorched. The
guilty men do what they can to make him notice them, make him see how loyal and tireless they’re prepared to be on his behalf. Unlike the rest of us, Master Kent included, they’ll not admit to at least some errant, childlike fascination with the flames, the old and satisfying way they turn such solids into ash and air. Instead, they lead the rush to bring in water from the pond and cisterns. They make too great a show of beating back the flames with spades. The blaze has made their tongues as dry as hay. They show no fear. It is as if their lives depend upon the quenching of this fire.

Of course, they are the ones—and Brooker Higgs especially; he is the orator—who organize the hunt for those responsible. It is clear at once—as soon as he suggests it—that nobody is ready to believe his claim that such a fire was caused by chance or by the natural overheating of a rick. A good rick’s as solid as a cottage, bricked with sheaves. It can sweat, and bake itself. But what could have kindled it? There was no lightning overnight. No one burning farm waste close by sent a vagrant spark across the master’s garths. No one slept in the stable block by candlelight. The master cannot be accused of having gone up among the doves with his tobacco pipe. No, this was done maliciously. Brooker is nodding his agreement. Whoever caused “this devil’s work,” he suggests, pointing at the black remains of the ricking ladder, which only this morning he and his own accomplices leaned against the stable wall for access to the dovecote, probably intended to make off with the master’s doves. To eat. Now who among them has so empty a stomach that they would need to steal a neighbor’s food? Why only last evening the master himself said he would kill a calf to mark the end of harvest and their election of the Gleaning Queen. So who among them would steal and eat a dove and then find themselves too glutted to enjoy the veal? No, the finger of suspicion points not at a villager—the very thought!—but at a stranger.

There’re newcomers, come out of nowhere to the edges of our
wood, somebody says, precisely as Brooker hopes they will. This informer waves his hands toward the far side of the fields and that other damper, blacker plume of smoke that all of us with eyes have seen this morning on our way to save the stable. From where we stand their smoke is still bending darkly on a breeze across the treetops.

“We’ll call on them, I think,” says the master mildly. “We’ll call on them to test what answers they provide, but not before we’ve dampened everything and made my buildings safe.” He looks around and shakes his head. This has been a blow for him, another burden to survive. His eyes are watery. Perhaps it’s only smoke that makes them watery. “Well …” he says, looking toward the smudgy sky above the newcomers, and lets his comment hang. He means that he is heavy-hearted at the thought—the logical suspicion, in fact—that the second plume of smoke will lead him to the dove-roasters. And then he knows his duty will demand a firm and heavy hand.

I understand that this is the moment when I should raise my own hand and say my piece, report the dry moonball. Or at least I should take Brooker Higgs aside to nudge him in the ribs. But I hold my tongue instead. A moonball isn’t evidence. Nor is bad playing. Besides, I sense the mood is to let this drama run its course and die back with the flames. Today’s a rest day and we want the air to clear—to clear of danger and to clear of smoke—so that we can enjoy ourselves as we deserve. This evening there’s ale to drink, there’s veal to eat, and we will choose the prettiest to be our Gleaning Queen. I’m sure I’m not the only one who elects to hold his tongue and does not, as he should, put up his hand. We do not wish to spoil our holiday, nor will we value bales of straw and doves above our neighbors’ sons.

In fact, my hand—the left—is too damaged to be raised. I was among the foolish volunteers who tried to roll some of the burning bales into the yard toward the line of water buckets so that we might save at least some of the master’s winter feed, his great bulging
loaves of hay. I soaked my neckcloth in a water pail and tied it round my mouth against the smoke, and then, with neighbor Carr at my side, went into the stable block beneath the cracking timbers to see what we could save. We put our hands and chests against the closest bale, braced our legs against the paving flags, and pushed. The bale lurched forward, only half a turn. We braced to push again but this time my one hand plunged into the burning straw and smoldered for a moment. My fingertips are burned. There’s not a hair below my wrist. My palm is scorched and painful beyond measure. I have to say a roasted man does not smell as appetizing as a roasted dove. The damage is severe. The skin is redder than a haw. I do my best to chew the pain, to not create a further spectacle. Still, I am not starved of sympathy. Even the master himself takes me by the shoulders in a hug to show his pity and concern. He knows a farmer with an injured hand is as useful as a one-pronged pitchfork. No use at all, especially at harvest time. No wonder I am more concerned at the moment with my own flesh than with any stranger’s. Now I have to go back to my house and make a poultice for the wound from egg white and cold flour. Then a pinch of salt to pacify the blisters. I will have to be an invalid today. Today, at least, I will have to sit and watch the world. Whatever’s bound to happen when my neighbors reach those newcomers who’ve set up home on the common outskirts of our fields will happen without me.

2

HE VILLAGE IS AFLAME
, but not with fire. This morning, once the master’s stable blaze was deadened and so drenched it could hardly cough a puff of ash, my neighbors were in a bold and rowdy mood. The air was swarming with anxieties. With Master Kent, mindful of his horse’s dung, riding politely at their rear on his recovered mare, they took the carting lane beside the manor house and strode with devilry in their steps—the kind that can flourish only on a day when there’s no other work to do—toward the one remaining twist of smoke. Some of them were armed—or is it fairer to say
equipped
?—with sticks and staves, and “meaner implements,” John Carr reports. We’re not a hurtful people, hereabouts. But we feel naked without tools. And it makes sense in such a distant place as this, where there is little wealth and all our labors are spent on putting a single meal in front of us each day, to be protective of our modest world and fearful for our skinny lives. Master Kent may own the fields. His titles, muniments and deeds are witness to the truth of that. The manor comes to him by right of marriage, through the old master, Edmund
Jordan, and his only daughter, Lucy Kent, both deceased and buried not a hundred paces from my home in the churchyard with no church.