Harvest Home (28 page)

“Mnm—” she murmured, staring at it.

Again I tried. “Is it a game you play? Like cat’s cradle?”

“No game.”

“What kind of things do you see?”

“Mnm—it’s like looking through glasses,” she said, suddenly speaking distinctly. “Sometimes red, sometimes blue, or maybe black, and then everything’s colored black, and that’s the way it looks… When I see it like it’s supposed to look, that’s when they tell me what to say. Sometimes there’s fire and lightning. Um—and music.”

“Music?”

She thought a moment, a faint burrish humming issuing from her lips. “Like at the play. You know.” She made a flute-like sound and played her fingers on invisible stops; then she made drum sounds and pantomimed rat-tat-tat. “That kind,” she said. Without looking at me, she took my hands and laced the fingers, then began winding the loop of string through them. “Mnmm,” she murmured, her brows drawn together in a scowl of concentration.

“There.” She placed my hands in her lap and stared at me. I pulled at my fingers and discovered they were bound fast. As I tugged, she broke into a fit of laughter, hiking back against the cushion and waiting for me to free myself.

“Missy, untie the man.” Tamar Penrose stood on the step. She took the girl by the hand and opened the door and sent her inside. I got up, trying to loosen the intricate webbing that bound my fingers. Tamar came and examined my hands. “That’s a trick of hers.”

“I can get it.” I struggled to slide out of the knotted web.

“I’ll have to cut it. Come on in.” She stepped inside and waited for me. Out on the street dusk was falling; the occasional passing cars had turned their headlights on. I heard the familiar sound of a vehicle, then the more familiar clip-clop.

“Your little girl’s a good rider,” Tamar said, holding the door. “Missy, make a light.” She closed the door and led me to the kitchen, where the child had turned on the light; then she looked for a knife in a drawer. A large cat blinked on the sill over the sink. “Missy, hon, run out and rustle us up a chicken for dinner.” Missy went out through the screened-in porch. I heard her chasing around the yard, trying to catch a chicken.

“I didn’t know it was little girls you liked,” Tamar said in an insinuating tone, a smile playing at the corners of her red mouth as she sat me down and cut the string. “Isn’t there a law about that sort of thing? Maybe I should just leave you trussed up and call the Constable. Child-molesting and all that?” She laughed and I caught the scent of her perfume. “There,” she said when she had finally freed my fingers. “She’s a dickens, that one. What’s she been telling you?”

“Nothing. We were just playing cat’s cradle and—” I stopped, realizing how silly it sounded. I got up. “Well, thanks for the girl-scout job.”

“What’s your hurry? Now that you’re here, stay and have a drink.”

“Thanks, I’d better be on my way.”

“Come on.” She was getting glasses from a shelf and setting them on the table, her dress stretching provocatively over her full figure. “Roy Soakes brought me a jug of his pa’s corn whiskey. Ever tried moonshine? It’s just behind the door there; bring it—I’ll get the ice.”

She stepped into the back area where the refrigerator was, then went out to peer through the broken porch screening. Missy had caught a chicken, which was making a terrible squawking while she tried to control it. The screen door clattered as Tamar took a hatchet from a nail and went down the steps. I watched her seize the chicken, lay its neck on a box, and decapitate it; then she released the body, which ran in crazed circles, dripping blood onto the dry earth. When it had keeled over and lay kicking on its side, she picked it up by the feet and carried it to a pan near the steps. She tied the legs together and hung the still-flapping body on a nail where the blood drained into the pan below.

She came back in and washed her hands, then got out ice, and presently we were seated opposite each other at the table. The cat on the sill wafted its tail as we clinked glasses for luck. The child must have gone off somewhere, for she did not come in, nor did I hear her out in the yard.

“So.” Tamar hitched her chair closer to the edge of the table. “You’re a painter, is that it? What kind of pictures do you paint?”

I explained about the sort of things I was trying to get down on canvas. “Are you interested in art?”

“I know what I like.” She looked at me under lowered lashes, her eyes narrowing slightly. I had never been close enough to see that they were green. “That’s what they say, isn’t it?” she continued. “ ‘I don’t know about art but I know what I like’? I like pictures, all kinds, long as they’re pretty.” She stretched lazily. “It’s a pretty village, I guess.”

“Have you always lived here?”

She laughed. “Sure, what else? Where d’you go if you’re born in the Coombe? That was our house, where you live.”

“I know. We appreciated your selling.”

She shrugged and held her fingers up and stared at her nails. “Wasn’t my idea. We needed the cash, anyway.” She went on, speaking of her father, who had lost his money through corn speculations during the last drought year. They’d had to move, then move again, always to a smaller place. This had all happened after the last Great Waste; the year Missy was born. Then Tamar’s father had died, and her mother, and the elders awarded her the position as postmistress. “I haven’t always worked at the P.O.” Her eye had fallen on my hand resting on the table top. She was staring at it. I picked up the glass and drank.

“Pretty strong, this.”

“Knock the eyes out of Justin’s rooster. Folks say it’s rare. Smoky flavor. They call it the old stuff.” She lifted the bottle again; I declined and she splashed some in her own glass and rose to add water from the tap. I watched the lines of her body move, the easy sway of her hips and breasts, the arch of the neck while she turned the faucet. “I always figured I’d get married at least five times. Have a gang of kids. Shows you how things work out, don’t it?” She looked up at the ceiling. “Well, I got one, anyhow. She’s like her father, got the same nature when she’s calm.” She studied her reflection in the mirror between the windows. “Same nature when she takes fire, too. I guess she favors him in her coloring. Most girls would’ve tried to hide it—not having a husband, I mean—but what the heck. Nobody around here cares.”

“She’s an unusual child.” I wondered who the father had been.

“Yeah. She is. She don’t make much trouble for me. We get on fine. It’s hard tryin‘ to talk to her sometimes. I mean it’d be nice to have someone who understands what you’re saying.” She sat again. From the sink came the slow drip of water. “Darn that leak,” she said.

“Needs a washer.”

“Lots of things around here need lots of things.”

“You knew Gracie Everdeen?”

Her brow shifted slightly. There was a pause. Then: “You’re full of questions, aren’t you? You interested in Gracie Everdeen?”

“Just trying to get the village history straight.”

“I’ll get it straight for you. Sure I knew Gracie. If it wasn’t for her, we’d still be living where you’re living. It was her who brought the Waste, her who ruined my father, ruined so many around here. She was a sly one, Gracie. Thought she had it all. And she did, for a time. Had Roger, got to be Corn Maiden; she was queen of the May, all right. But things didn’t work out for poor Gracie. I got Roger, I got to be Corn Maiden, and there’s Gracie pushing up daisies in the churchyard. If you want to know what I think about her, I hope she burns in everlasting hell. She
ought
to have killed herself, or if she hadn’t, someone—” She broke off, controlling her anger. She leaned on her elbows; the scoop of her blouse slackened; I could see the deep firm line between her breasts.

“If you want to know the truth, Gracie was dippy. Pure dippy.”

“You mean crazy?”

“I mean crazy. Crazy with love for Roger, and crazy she couldn’t marry him. That’s what sent her off the deep end.”

“What happened?”

“She was supposed to marry Roger. Then Mrs. Everdeen revoked the banns. That’s what drove Gracie crazy, because her mother wouldn’t let her marry Roger.”

“Why didn’t she want her to marry him? Wasn’t he good enough for her?”

“He was a Penrose! Lived just off the Common. Roger was poor, but the Everdeens never were any great account in the Coombe. People think the Penroses are—” She touched her temple. “But in this case it was the other way around. Gracie’s brains went to pudding.”

“How?”

“Lord, Roger’d picked her for Corn Maiden. That was an honor. What did she do? She tossed the honor back in all our faces, the little fool. Nothing she wouldn’t do to shock people or make them think ill of her, she who had everything, Roger included. Know what she did on Agnes Fair? Roger was shinnying up the pole on the Common, and there goes Gracie up the flagpole in front of the post office in about the same time. They wasn’t watching the Harvest Lord then, let me tell you; they were watching her. Then, when Roger was wrestling, out comes Gracie from the platform and throws a hammer lock on him and tosses him to the ground in front of the whole village. The Corn Maiden putting down the Harvest Lord? She was crazy, I tell you. Then she marches up to old man Deming and curses him out, swearing like a trooper. It wasn’t any wonder she ran off, after that.”

“And you were Corn Maiden in her place.”

“Yes. I was. And I’d be again, if I could. Sophie Hooke, for heaven’s sakes. Why, she and Justin are
married
. That’s not right. I don’t think that’s right. Nobody does.” She reached for my glass. I did not release it immediately and I could feel the light tracery of her nail against the back of my hand.

“What’re we talking about Gracie for? People’d like to stop thinking about her, if they ever could. You’re got good hands. Nice fingers. Long. I guess that means you’re an artist.” She was rubbing her fingertips over the dark hairs. “Nice,” she said in a husky voice.

“Nice?” I let go the glass. She took it to the sink and put some ice cubes in.

“Nice. I mean, sitting around my kitchen. It’s not often I have gentry sitting at my house.” The cat stirred again as she poured two stiff fingers from the stone jug and brought the glass back, bending over my shoulder to place it on the table. I could smell her scent, not just the perfume but the whole womanly, feminine scent of her. I looked up, felt her hair brush across my eyes. I started to turn away; she leaned insistently and the red mouth came closer, the lips moist, parted. She kissed me. I slid an arm around her neck and held her mouth to mine. I released her in confusion, and she shuddered, burying her lips in my shirt collar, then stepping away. “I knew,” she murmured, and her head nodded as though in private conversation. “I knew.”

It had grown dark outside. I rose. “Sorry. I guess that was starting things that shouldn’t have gotten started.”

She leaned back against the sink, her breasts straining against her blouse. “Shouldn’t have? I’ve been waiting these months for you to start something.” She was running cold water in the sink; her red-nailed fingers sparkled under the gushing faucet. She turned the tap, shook her fingers, and came to me; her arms were around my neck, her face tilted to mine. “I’ve been waiting, and now it’s happened. I knew it would.”

There was a light in her eyes that was not mere lust, but a gleam of triumph. I could feel the drops rolling from her fingertips onto the nape of my neck. I reached up and unclasped her hands. She took them away and placed them on my chest.

“I can feel your heart.” A smile grew from the corners of her mouth. I felt unsteady on my feet, locked my knees so I wouldn’t stagger. “The old stuff getting to you?” She laughed lightly. “You can have a high time on the old stuff.” The invitation was now not only in her eyes but on her lips, in the caress of her fingers as they toyed with the fabric of my shirt under my jacket.

I returned her look with the same level gaze, trying to keep my balance. “Sorry, lady—you have the wrong guy.”

“Don’t want to play?”

“In my own back yard.”

“Do you?” The curve of her brow rose, a mocking curve, questioning the truth of my statement. “Lots of play in your back yard? Sandbox and everything? Tin pail, shovel—playmate?”

“Why not? I’m married—remember?”

Her laugh became hoarse, unattractive. “Still waters don’t run very deep in your case, do they?” she said, half choking, half laughing. “I thought at least you’d like to go wading.” She looked at me another moment, then threw her arms about me, smothering me in her embrace. “I want you.” I could feel the warm throb of her against my thighs. Her mouth was all over my face, then across my lips, my cheeks, kissing my eyes, my brow, the tip of her tongue drawing a wet path to my ear, down the side of my neck.

I grasped her forearms and forced her away from me. Her arms bent, her hands came up, wilted in my grasp. Then they took on a tension, resisting my force. Her eyes flashed, and she ran her tongue over her lips.

“You bastard!” she whispered. The fingers convulsed, became claws, as they sought my shirt and tore at the buttons. I stepped backward, struck by her fury, keeping myself steady only by grasping the back of a chair. “You son of a bitch! Get out of here! Go on, get out.” As she came at me, I retreated to the doorway. She snatched up the glass from the table and dashed the liquor and ice at me. Her face had gone white, contorted in rage. She used words I had never heard a woman speak before. Now she flung the glass at me; I threw up an arm as it grazed my head, and it splintered against the door-jamb. The cat sat up. Tamar stood there looking at me, her fury ebbing. I held my hands up, palms outward, a gesture of futility.

“Sorry, lady,” I said. Turning, I saw her hand come up to her mouth and cover it, the long red nails taking sheen from the light. “Sorry,” I repeated dully. The cat meowed, and I turned to the back-porch doorway and stared in horror.

The child stood on the threshold, the front of her dress smeared with blood. In one hand she held the kitchen knife; in the other was the chicken, split down the middle, its insides hanging out in bloody riot. Bits of feathers were caught at the corners of her mouth, sticky with flecks of blood, and I could see her jaws working, trying to swallow something. Her eyes were glazed with some manic dream, while around whatever it was she had in her mouth, she spoke an unintelligible gibberish. I backed away from the disgusting sight as she advanced into the room. Her mother had not moved.