Harvest Home (10 page)

“Ain’t got too many left, have you, Amys?” asked one of the gentlemen, winking at his cronies.

Amys tickled his ear with the tip of the straw and thought a moment. “Well,” he said finally, “and if I don’t, I wouldn’t give up what’s left of ‘em to be about such damn foolishness. Look there, will you.”

Some farmers went by leading a sheep on a rope. Missy Penrose suddenly appeared from the crowd, put her doll aside, dropped to her knees, and threw her arms around the animal’s neck. The little bronze bell tinkled as she buried her head in its woolly pelt, while passing mothers smiled and turned to their offspring. The bell ringer made a shredded sort of sound in his throat, then spat.

“Don’t be so irksome all the time, Amys,” one of the old men chided, his fingers working nimbly with the straw in his lap. “Content yourself with the space the Reverend Buxley’s reserved for you in his churchyard.”

“Aaarch.” Amys spat again. “Don’t tell me them cheap boxes the church totes us off in ain’t goin‘ straight to worms before year’s end. Lookit young McCutcheon—don’t you just know them worms is already et up half that coffin and all of Loren.”

“Bury the dead,” said one of the men, nodding philosophically. The group worked in silence for a time, and Amys stood hunched against the tree trunk, toying with his straw. I continued with my pen, sketching one face after another, and several pairs of hands.

“Who’s it to be today, do you reckon?” one of the gentlemen asked after a time.

“Talk among the ladies allows it’s bound t’be Jim Minerva,” another responded.

“Still, it’s hard to say,” a third put in.

“Fine fellow, young Minerva,” said the first. “Father’s a good farmer, got a new barn, Jim’s got growin‘ brothers to help out. Couldn’t go wrong there.”

“Some of Fred’s bad luck might have rubbed off on the boy,” the second replied.

“Luck’s luck,” Amys observed dourly, “which is what folks around here need the most of.”

While this mystifying conversation proceeded, I had turned my attention to Missy’s doll, making several quick sketches of its incredible appearance. Her mother pulled her aside as Jack Stump reappeared on his rig, banging a kitchen spoon against the row of kettles and offering jovial nods right and left as he doffed his hat. In his wake came an excited group of women, Irene Tatum among them, proudly showing off a blue satin ribbon with a rosette attached. “Whatcha say, ladies,” Jack greeted them. “Whatcha say, Irene Tatum? Congratulations are in order, yes? That’s a swell sow you got there. Chinee Polack, ain’t she?”

Mrs. Tatum gave a rowdy laugh. “It’s a Poland China, Jack Stump, and it’s a he, not a she. Can’t you tell the difference?”

“He’s don’t have tits.”

“You’re right there, Jack. Tits on a boar hog is ‘bout as useful as you are. You know where Poland is, Jack Stump?”

The peddler scratched thoughtfully, hair, beard, armpits.

“Poland’s north of It’ly, ain’t it? And China’s due east, 1 reckon. That what Marco Polo discovered.”

A red face appeared among the onlookers. “Marco Polo’s the one sailed around the world, ain’t he?” asked one of the Soakes brothers.

“You better get yourself back in school, boy,” Jack called. “This here Marco Polo’s the one fought the heathen and went into China and discovered spaghetti.”

“China?” said Edna Jones. “I always thought spaghetti’s Eyetalian.”

“ ‘Course it’s Italian, you bewitching creature.” Like a magician, Jack produced a flowered scarf from a drawer and flourished it in her face. “Marco Polo found it growin’ in China over the sea and he brought back some seeds and planted them in Rome and that’s why spaghetti’s Eyetalian. Listen, Doris Duke’s got spaghetti plantations all over Honolulu.”

“Peddler, you’re an ignorant fool!” Old Man Soakes had loomed from beside the Oldsmobile, looking dangerous. “You never been to school, you can’t even write your name. Why don’t you shut your mouth before someone shuts it for you? Spaghetti’s nothin‘ but flour-and-water paste!”

For a moment I thought Jack would be forced to retreat from this spate of fury, but, taking heart from the crowd, he held his ground, setting up his pop-bottle box and stepping onto it. Snatching open a drawer on his rig, he flashed a bright chrome gadget.

“Whatcha say, ladies, lookee here what I got for you, the finest little kitchen helper in the world, garnteed to do twelve —count ‘em, twelve—
diff’rent
household jobs, and all for the price of sixty-nine cents, a fair price which goes with the day.”

Tamar Penrose stood listening to the spiel, holding the child Missy in front of her. During Jack’s come-on, I had been made aware of the postmistress, and I took the opportunity to assess her evident charms.

Scarcely what would be termed a beauty, Tamar Penrose had good skin and a head of rioting dark hair. She was taller than most of the women about her, with a full, firm body, wide hips, but a narrow waist. She held herself in a lazy, though erect posture, so her breasts strained under the bright print of her dress, showing her nipples to provocative effect. Her lips were very red against the pale skin, and when her hands moved on the child’s shoulders at her waist, I saw that the fingernails were lacquered a matching color. And though I never caught her looking directly at me, still I had the feeling she was observing me. As for the child, her pale eyes were now focused on a farmer standing close by, sharpening a sickle on a handstone.

Jack’s audience having thinned appreciably, I stepped over to the corner of his cart just as Old Man Soakes came striding up. He grasped Jack by his coat lapels, whisked him around to the back of the cart, and spoke in a rough, angry voice.

“I wasn’t doin‘ nothin,” I heard Jack protest feebly.

“Never mind what you wasn’t doin‘,” Soakes replied, “stay out of them woods. You’ve had your warnin’.” He strode back to his place at the rear of the Oldsmobile while Jack reappeared, his fingers shaking as he adjusted his jacket.

“Damned grizzly is what he is,” he muttered, shooting a look from the corner of his eye. “Them woods ain’t private property, y‘ know.” He rubbed the stubble on his chin with the back of his hand.

“What happened in there this morning, Jack?” I asked. He stopped his hand and looked at me closely, as though deciding whether or not to take me into his confidence.

“As strange a thing as I ever hope to see,” he said after a moment, his eye on the bent back at the Oldsmobile trunk. “And I seen it with these here two eyes, which is as good as they come. Twenty-twenty vision, I got—”

“But what happened?” I persisted. “What did you see?”

“I seen a ghost,” he whispered.

I stepped closer to catch his every word. “What sort of ghost?”

“A ghost that once was dead, but now’s come alive. A living ghost, as sure as I stand here. And it was screamin‘.” He ducked another look at Old Man Soakes who accepted some money from a passer-by in exchange for a bottle and then slammed the trunk lid with a loud crash. Straightening, the man cast another baleful glance in our direction.

“Later,” Jack whispered; he left me standing by the cart and quickly hopped over to the farmer who was sharpening his sickle with the handstone.

“Whatcha say, Will Jones, whatcha say,” he began, flicking a glance to where Old Man Soakes stood at the edge of the crowd, still watching. Assuming an air of nonchalance, Jack reached for the sickle and tested its edge with his thumb. “Lemme tellya, Will,” he said to the farmer, “you can sharpen up that there sickle a lot faster on a wheel.”

“Haven’t got one,” the farmer replied.

“Come along, I got one on my rig.” Jack brought the farmer back to the rig, moving me aside to reveal under a flap a grindstone clamped to a piece of the cart frame. Instructing the farmer to turn the handle, he laid the blade to the wheel and proceeded to grind the edge. Sparks flew up like meteors, and the peddler cocked his head this way and that, ostensibly checking the angle, but I could see he had an eye on the departing back of Old Man Soakes. The child Missy left her mother’s side and slowly approached, watching the shower of sparks shooting into the air.

“Missy,” Tamar Penrose called insistently, but the child paid no attention as Jack put his thumb to the blade to test it. “Hot damn, now that’s sharp, Will.” The blade glistened like a silver crescent.

“Pretty good,” the farmer agreed.

“Good, hell! It’s perfect! There y’are, Will, sharp as a dime and no charge.” He handed over the implement, leaped onto the saddle of his rig, and started off.

“Jack,” I called, hoping for the rest of his story, but he only shook his head and, without a backward look, pedaled away into the crowd.

When Tamar came to take Missy’s hand, the child hung back for an instant, her bleak eye lingering on the gleaming sickle blade in Will Jones’s hand. Turning, her look fell on me; she gazed for a long silent moment, and I suddenly felt the hairs on the back of my neck tingle as she continued to stare, her body a trifle stiff, her mouth slack. Then she permitted herself to be led away.

I stood alone for a moment, trying to examine the sensation I had felt, a fugitive feeling I could scarcely define. I moved into the crowd, my eye on the tree where Beth was already laying out the picnic things. Though I saw Beth plainly, it was the child’s face that hovered before me; and it was perhaps for this reason alone that I forgot to take Kate’s Medihaler from the glove compartment of the car.

“An elegant repast, my dear,” Professor Dodd said to Beth, wiping his lips with one of the checkered napkins. “You have found the way to my heart. Now if you’re truly good, Margaret will give you her recipe for old New England succotash. Most people use salt pork, but she makes it the old Indian way.”

“How did they do it?”

“They baked a dog with it.”

“Oh, Robert, really, the Constantines aren’t going to believe a thing you tell them if you keep that up.” Maggie Dodd took a cigar from Robert’s breast pocket, rolled it between her palms, clipped the end, and held the match while he lighted it.

“I assure you the Indians considered it a great delicacy,” Robert continued. Having finished our picnic lunch, we were sitting under the tree—Robert Dodd in a lawn chair, Worthy Pettinger close to Kate—eating Maggie’s chocolate mousse. Beth, who was wearing my gift of the bone earrings, stretched and lay back on the grass, looking up at the sky.

“It’s hard to believe places like this exist any more. It seems like a—” She groped for the word.

“Throwback,” Maggie supplied.

“No such thing,” said Robert.

“I mean someone found it and forgot to throw it back.”

“Margaret’s always making jokes at the village’s expense,” Robert said.

I was quick to recognize the flash of intimate response between the couple as Maggie leaned and took Robert’s napkin, shaking off the crumbs and folding it. Watching them, I felt we truly had found friends. To me, Maggie personified that thing I had been trying to express to myself about the villagers, an air of simple, placid grace, with her unmade-up features, her still-clear skin and eyes, her neatly coiffed hair whose style I was sure had not changed since she was a young woman. Her voice was low and serene, with a kind of easy, humorous lilt to it: an imperturbable woman.

“What Robert means,” she went on, “is just what you’re trying to say: there’s a sort of timelessness about Cornwall Coombe that often strikes outsiders—or even newcomers—as unusual.”

Beth lighted a cigarette and blew smoke through her nose. “What does it mean—Coombe?”

“It’s an English word—Celtic, actually,” Robert explained. “Means a valley or a sort of hollow. I suppose it implies a certain remoteness, which we are given to hereabouts. Margaret’s partially correct: there are a number of ‘throwbacks’ around here, like certain of the names which have an ancient and venerable history. Take the Lost Whistle Bridge, for instance, which is a corruption of ’Lostwithiel,‘ one of the towns in old Cornwall.” He pointed his cigar to the house next to the post office. “And when Gwydeon Penrose built that house over there, he named it Penzance House, but it’s come down to us as ’Penance‘ House.”

The horse-drawing contests had begun, and presently the Widow Fortune appeared with some friends, seating herself at a table under a nearby tree. The old lady set down her piece-bag, her splint basket, and her black leather valise, then arranged her skirts and shears while others drew around her and opened various baskets and hampers from which they produced an array of provender. Another lady came with a tall glass of tea, holding it while the Widow reached in her basket and broke off a sprig of mint, crushed it, and put it in the tea.

“Say hello to the Widow, dear,” Maggie prompted Robert.

“How do, Widow,” Robert called, and she called back, putting her tea aside as one of the ladies offered her an ear of corn in a napkin.

Maggie laughed. “Look how she takes that corn off the cob. My teeth wouldn’t stand for it. Isn’t it amazing how she keeps her faculties? And her energies. You’ll see—after her lunch she’ll sit there and quilt the whole afternoon, she and Mrs. Brucie and Mrs. Zalmon.”

“A quilting bee?” Beth asked.

“Quilting’s become fashionable everywhere these days, but it’s never stopped in the Coombe. Our ladies can turn out a dozen quilts a month.”

“Patchwork quilts bring a lot of money down in New York,” Beth said speculatively.

Out on the field, Fred Minerva had hitched his team to a skid with wooden runners like a sled. Worthy explained that this was called a stoneboat, onto which sacks of sand had been loaded. Deftly manipulating the reins, Fred encouraged his horses to pull the stoneboat along the turf, and at a certain point he unhitched his team and another took his place. The various pairs of horses were decked out in bell-laden harness, and I saw that Justin’s team had little corn rosettes stuck up behind the blinders.

I turned back to Robert. “The thing I don’t understand is how, in a day of modern technology and machinery, farmers still continue to use a horse and plow in place of tractors.”

“They don’t
believe
in tractors,” Maggie said.

Worthy sat up, attentive to the conversation, as Robert said, “The farmers hereabouts discovered long ago what farmers elsewhere are just coming to realize. There’s a good deal of work on a farm that can be done more cheaply by animal power than by gasoline. And your seed will go in early, before you can use a tractor on the wet ground.”