Harvest Home (17 page)

The talk got around to gardening,, and I informed the table of my intention to plow up the meadow next spring and plant vegetables. Worthy instantly became excited, and said he would bring his tractor around. We got into a discussion of organic gardening, and he described the kind of operation some friends of his had over in the neighboring town of Danforth. Like ourselves, they, too, had come from the city, and had pooled all their money and resources to form a commune. They had bought a defunct place which they rechristened Nonesuch Farm, and though the townsfolk called them hippies and weren’t being helpful, they hoped in two years’ time to put it on a paying basis.

“I’m going over there this afternoon, if you’d like to see it.”

Another time, I suggested; I had plans for Beth and myself. But perhaps Kate might enjoy the ride. I signaled Beth, who had opened her mouth to protest; she quickly picked up the cue and consented.

“Back to school soon?” I asked him.

“Yes, sir.”

“Are you looking forward to that?” Beth said.

“Yes, ma’am.” He was in his last year of high school, and, as he had told me, hoped, against his father’s wishes, to enter agricultural school next fall. He had been working hard to earn the money, and had been studying nights, “when Pa doesn’t catch me.” As the conversation continued, I watched him closely. His moodiness, habitual of late, seemed to have washed off at the kitchen sink, and he laughed and joked with Kate, who, seated across from him, kept plying him with various dishes. Perhaps the Widow was right, perhaps he just needed more feeding.

I asked him what the latest village news was. Not much, he replied; never any news in Cornwall Coombe. Mrs. Mayberry was ailing, wouldn’t last till Harvest Home; Mrs. Thomas was going to have a baby, probably before next Tithing Day; Elsie Penrose, the librarian’s daughter, was going to be courted by Corny Penrose, her second cousin on her father’s side. Corny had given Elsie a cob.

“Mrs. Thomas is going to have a baby? How wonderful!” Beth exclaimed. “Why is Elsie getting a cob from Corny Penrose?”

Worthy said it was an old village custom; when a boy was interested in a girl he sent her a corn ear, and if she accepted his attentions she husked the ear and returned it; if she wasn’t interested she sent it back unshucked. Sometimes a girl, if she was bold enough, would send an ear to a boy. But whatever ears might be sent, the results had to wait until the crops were in.

“Has anybody sent you a cob?” Kate asked.

“Not yet.”

She looked relieved and began relating what she had learned from the Widow’s quilt concerning the Corn Play. Worthy’s face darkened. “That’s silly stuff.”

By diligent questioning, Kate found out a little more about the choosing of the Harvest Lord and the Corn Maiden. Since the original Agnes Fair, the Harvest Lord had always been picked on that day. He would be crowned with honors the following year at Spring Festival, when the villagers would bring him presents. Then, during the next seven years, he would be given all sorts of privileges, including free communal labor to work his fields and farm. And at some point during that time, he would select a Corn Maiden to reign with him.

“Is it always a husband, who chooses his wife?” Beth asked.

No. The village had been surprised when Justin had married Sophie, then picked her for his Corn Maiden. Usually it was a single girl. When the Corn Play was given, in the Grange hall, the new Corn Maiden would be crowned.

Beth and Kate cleared the table and brought in dessert and coffee. When they were seated again, Kate asked, “Worthy, you’re going to be the new Harvest Lord in the play, aren’t you? Who’ll you pick for Corn Maiden?”

I exchanged a look with Beth: bold as brass, our daughter. Worthy frowned and didn’t answer; he wasn’t interested in all that.

“Do they have square-dancing at the husking bee?”

“Sure.”

“Can you square-dance?”

“Sure.” But he didn’t like doing it. Square-dancing was old-fashioned, for old fogeys who lived in the past. He didn’t want to live in the past; he wanted to live in the here and now. His brows were drawn down in a gloomy line as he toyed with his napkin. “Mr. Deming carrying on like that at the fair. All I was doing was having some fun, but you’re not supposed to bring a tractor on the Common. You’re not supposed to play on the shinny pole. Old geezers like him don’t think anything’s funny. The minute you do different or act different, people talk. It makes you stand out, and people around here don’t want to stand out.”

“Do you?”

“Well, I don’t want to be like everyone else. There’s no point in doing things just because other people do them, is there? I think it’s crazy doing them their way just because it’s their way. Look at Gracie Everdeen.”

“What about Gracie Everdeen?” I put down my fork and prepared to listen.

“I don’t know, really. It all happened when I was small. But there’s been lots of talk.”

“What kind of talk?”

“They say she went crazy.”

Gracie Everdeen, a product of the overly mixed bloodlines of the village? “Was she a Penrose?”

“I don’t know, sir. She may have been. Almost everybody is, one way or another. She was supposed to marry a Penrose.”

“She was?”

“They were engaged, then she ran off.”

“But she came back, didn’t she? She’s buried in the cemetery—or out of it, rather. Why is that?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

“Who was she engaged to?”

“Roger Penrose.”

Ah, Roger Penrose the bone-carver. “Did he marry someone else?”

“He died.”

“How?”

“He got killed jumping his horse. A broken neck, I think. Like I say, it all happened a long time ago. Before—”

“Yes?”

He shrugged. “Before I was old enough to remember.” He glanced at the clock on the wall. “Gee—it’s getting late—”

“Don’t you want dessert?” Beth said.

“Maybe we’d better get started,” he suggested quickly and I had an idea he was trying to extricate himself from a conversation he was sorry he’d begun in the first place.

When we had seen them off for Danforth, with instructions to be back before nine, Beth and I put the dinner dishes in the dishwasher, then walked down the lane and through the meadow to the river, where we found the boat Amys had mentioned. We had brought along a blanket and a transistor radio, and Beth tuned in some music, sitting in the stern, while I turned the boat and began rowing upriver.

It was one of those days a happy man records for his mental posterity. Sunday afternoon, New England, summer’s end. A dreaming landscape; faultless sky; dazzling clouds; bursting sunlight; river calm, placid, seductive in its peaceful turnings; the splash of water, creak of oarlocks. Birds singing along the shore; the play of light and shadow among the trees; a little music; your wife, whom you love. What might be called the ingredients for a perfect day.

I could tell Beth was in one of her reflective moods and I did not try to make conversation, but only gave myself up to the beauty of the afternoon. Along the shore, the oncoming autumn was showing itself, not outright, but secretly, in the smallest corners. There was a tang of smoke in the air, making a kind of uneven haze that seemed to lay a golden sheen over everything—water, trees, foliage—with the soft luminosity of a Turner painting. It was a special kind of ease and contentment that enveloped me as we followed the meandering course of the river for perhaps a mile, until we came within sight of Soakes’s Lonesome. When we had got around several more bends, I saw on the opposite bank the Soakeses’ jetty. Half a dozen ducks floated idly in the water, while on the landing the old man and the boys were hunched over some kind of activity. They looked up, eying us briefly as we passed. I got a feeling of menace from this furtive appraisal, and as I glanced back the old man opened his knife and stropped the blade on his boot. Putting more force into my strokes until we were well past them, I looked back again to see one of them getting into the skiff.

I could hear the dull reverberation of the motor as we rounded the next bend, and I wondered if we were to be followed or in some way interfered with, but when the skiff appeared again it was heading for the Cornwall shore. Shortly we had the river to ourselves once more. I wiped my arm across my forehead, rested on my oars, and let the boat drift close to the bank, enjoying our solitary state.

The sun felt warm on my back and shoulders, and I stripped off my shirt, which Beth took and held in her lap. She still continued rapt in some kind of reverie, and I made no effort to disturb it. Once she looked at me with a trace of a smile; then she looked down again, watching her hand in the water. She was wearing a gold snake I had bought for her in Venice, and I saw a fish dart close to it, attracted by the bright gleam of the metal. Then Amys Penrose’s flat-bottomed tub became a gondola and the river was the Grand Canal, the sky not American but Italian, and we were back in Venice, that summer seventeen years before, in 1955.

It had begun the previous winter, a bone-chilling one in Paris, where I was studying at the Sorbonne on the G.I. Bill. I picked Beth up on the grand staircase of the Louvre, under the “Winged Victory.” She’d come over from London with a college chum she’d been sharing a flat with in Chelsea. I heard her reading from her catalogue: “The ‘Winged Victory of Smothrace.’ ”
Smothrace
, for God’s sake; the opportunity was too good to let pass; I stopped and pointed out her error. Yes, she knew it was
Samo
thrace, but it always came out
Smo
thrace with her. The three of us spent the afternoon together, and then, out of my mind and over my budget, I invited them to dinner.

The other girl, Mary Abbott, went back to London alone and Beth stayed with me in my loft in the Rue du Bac.
Sous les toits de Paris
, and all very romantic and my bed was a lot warmer than it had been in some time. We saw the spring in, and spent a fortune keeping the rooms filled with lilacs, which she loved, and in June I bought a secondhand car, packed up my paints, and we worked our way down to the South of France, then into Italy. We lingered for days in the Uffizi in Florence, then went on to Venice, and finally to Greece.

We spent that winter in North Africa, where a steady stream of letters arrived for Beth, addressed in a firm, authoritative hand. Reverend Colby, Beth’s father, was demanding that she return home. Hers was an unusual situation, and though she was not inclined to talk about it I gradually learned enough to put the puzzling pieces of her life into some sort of order.

She had been christened Bethany, after the town in Connecticut her mother had come from. Mrs. Colby had been rich, and her money enabled the Reverend to enjoy a style of living not permitted to most men of the cloth. Their house, in a suburb of a large New England city, was expensively furnished, but although Lawson Colby liked his creature comforts, he mentally donned a hair shirt, forcing his wife into a strict and regimented observance of Protestant virtues. Mrs. Colby had died of diphtheria when Beth was only two, and from then on Beth lived under the bitter and tyrannical eye of her father, who forced church at her on all occasions. What he raised was not a God-fearing child, but a God-despairing one.

After college, Beth had persuaded him to let her come to Europe with Mary Abbott, to “visit cathedrals,” but now the year was up and he demanded that she return home. I had decided I was going to marry her, and had notions of what sort of reception this would meet with at the Reverend’s Methodist hands. Bethany Colby marrying the son of an immigrant Greek from Jersey City—Catholic Greeks, at that. Raised in a happy home, I could appreciate Beth’s basic needs. Being motherless, she felt rootless. She was not religious, she did not love her father. She had never experienced any warm stream of affection as a child, and after her mother’s death the father had become a stricter parent—harsh, even—making sure that the minister’s daughter didn’t go wild. In the Puritan ethic of his Cotton Matherish forebears, to be happy was, by extension, to be sinful, and until we met I do not think Beth had ever been very happy. But there was this about her: she had the characteristics of the chameleon, which takes hue and color from its surroundings; stubborn though she might be at times, Beth was open to influence. I was a happy person, and by some subtle transference she, too, became happy. With me the minister’s daughter went wild on the Left Bank and all the Reverend’s decrees about Thrift, Work, Virtue, and the True God were tossed out the windows of our Paris loft.

It was impossible to toss the father as well, so we went home and faced the music, which at best proved discordant. The Reverend had heard tales of bohemian artists living in garrets; he did not deem me a suitable choice for a son-in-law. But by spring Beth’s defiance of the old man was sufficient to elicit his agreement to our marriage if I would “settle down to some honest work.”

We were married in June and moved into an apartment in Greenwich Village. I put the paintbrushes away, and found a job with Osborne & Associates. The brushes stayed put away for fifteen years.

Shortly after Kate was born, we took a larger apartment on the West Side, around the corner from Pepe’s Chili Palor. Since Mrs. Pepe often baby-sat for us, we would return the favor, and it was while sitting for their daughter that I contracted the painful case of mumps that ‘Cita was still apologizing for.

I swelled up, Beth nursed me, I deflated; and went back to Osborne & Associates, hating every day of it. But during those years Beth and I were happy together. I knew that partly she had married me in order to be free of Reverend Colby, and in many ways she had replaced him with me. Nows if she had no mother, she at least had two fathers. As Kate grew, Beth lavished on the child all the attention she herself had lacked. I could see what was happening from the beginning: that Kate was being smothered with a maternal blanket of the heaviest weave. When she was nine, she had her first asthmatic attack.

These began in the winter of our ninth year of marriage, when something happened to Beth, a breakdown whose origins were both deep-seated and obscure. She withdrew into another world. I thought at first she must be having an affair with some other man, but I was wrong. She came home one evening and announced that she wanted a divorce. She was going to leave and take Kate with her. No amount of reasoning on my part could sway her from this stubborn course, but a friend of ours at Columbia persuaded her to see a psychiatrist. The cause of her morbidity became quickly apparent, and I met with the doctor to learn what he had discovered. Beth had lacked a mother, which had led to a hatred of the father. I had replaced the father, and now her subconscious was transferring the hatred to me.