Harvest Home (32 page)

“Now, then, no recalcitrance today,” she told him. “One-B Weber’s is a restorative, if ever there was. And when you’re done I’ve got soup and some good roast meat, courtesy of our friend here.” Though he did not seem to want the tea, she waited, cup poised, until he sipped. She watched him carefully, her eye never wavering as she made him drink, and while he drank she related what she knew of the tragedy.

She and Asia Minerva, along with Mrs. Zalmon and Mrs. Green, and Tamar Penrose as well, had been quilting at Irene Tatum’s house on the Sunday evening, when they heard a ruckus across the road in Soakes’s Lonesome. There were gunshots and they had trooped out on the porch to investigate. Then out of the woods Jack had appeared, crazed with pain and hardly knowing who he was or where he was going. He saw the light and came to them, blood pouring through his sewn-up lips. They had cut the stitches and discovered the severed tongue. The Widow herself had put the poker in the stove and cauterized the wound; then they had laid him on the davenport in the living room and kept watch until he came out of shock.

“Ashes there were everywhere, en’t that so, Jack?” she continued. The peddler nodded dazed agreement.

“Ashes?” I asked.

“Ashes. When they’d done with their fishing knife and canvas needles, they dunked him in water, then poured ashes from their still over him. En’t that so, Jack?”

I saw him nod.
Ashes
. White
ashes
. Then it dawned on me. The phantom in the windstorm. Not the Ghost of Soakes’s Lonesome, but the mutilated Jack Stump, his mouth stitched up into the grim red smile, the face ash-smeared. I remembered seeing the Soakeses as I was driving to Saxony to visit Mrs. O’Byrne, recalled the decoy-making implements, saw again the skiff on the water.

Patiently the Widow waited until the cup was empty, and when he wiped his mouth she gently took Jack’s hand away. “Don’t do that; you’re wipin‘ off all the salve. Now you just content yourself until I get you shaved; then I’ll fix your supper.” Motioning me to lead the way with the lamp, she brought the cup and saucer into the kitchen and set it on the table.

“Only way to do is to joke with him, else he’ll sink into a fit o‘ apathy and he won’t recover. If we don’t make too much of a thing of it, he’ll be back on his tin-pan contraption come spring. Won’t you, Jack?”—raising her voice again—“I say, Jack’ll be back on his contraption, pedalin’ up to my door fit as a fiddle come spring.”

“What’s being done about them?” I said.

“The Soakeses? Faugh, what’s to be done? The Constable knows, but there en’t a witness. Poor Jack can’t speak for himself. Can’t even write the tale.”

I shook my head. “Jesus, to go through life like that.”

“No need to take the name in vain. And no help for what can’t be helped. Jack don’t need syrup; he needs vinegar, or he’ll never get up.” All was being done that could be managed, she said. The village ladies were taking turns nursing him, and he was never alone for long. The mouth would heal; the main thing was to keep his spirits up. “There’s a lot worse ways to go through life. Plenty of people who can’t talk or hear, both. Some who can’t talk, hear, or
see
. Look at Robert Dodd. A sorely afflicted man, but he’s made a life, him and Maggie. Thing is to survive. You, now, you’re a painter, you don’t need to talk nor hear, but you got to see—ain’t that so? But if you couldn’t you’d survive, now, wouldn’t you? You wouldn’t let a pack o‘ Soakeses put you under.”

She rinsed out the cup and set it in its place on the shelf. I marveled at her. She not only ministered to the sufferings of the body, but she dealt with the psychology of the matter, refusing to let the bodily ailment fall prey to the sickness of the mind. She had no time for feeling sorry, or for despair, or for weakness.

“Life at its worst is better than no life at all, en’t that so?” Briskly she whipped up a lather in Clem Fortune’s shaving mug, took the ivory-handled razor, and went in to shave Jack.

Beth went to New York overnight, driving the car filled with village handicrafts for Mary Abbott. That night, after Kate had gone to sleep, I brought the little wooden cask down from the cupboard shelf and, sitting in the bacchante room, drank from it again. I went out and stood staring at the empty cornfield. There was no music; no figures appeared. I put the cask away and went to bed.

Sleeping, this is the kind of darkness I saw: a visible, tangible thing; a fathoms-deep ocean, with a thousand improbable shapes colliding, merging, separating; bright sea anemones folding and unfolding; and more intricate organisms, each geometrically perfect, blossoming scarlet, orange, turquoise, gold. It was as though I could reach out and dip my hand into the dark sea they swam. The dark had texture—soft, pliant, furry—like the pelt of an animal; it had dimension, seeming so high and so wide and so much across; immersed in it, my body displaced its own volume. Its flesh yielded, was weighted, ballasted. A breathing dark. A living thing, pulsing like a heart, throbbing with secret incomprehensible emanations, contracting, expanding.

And hidden in the dark, the eyes; the eyes of Missy Penrose. In dream blackness they stared at me. I leaned to the right, they followed; to the left, they followed still. The dark orb, oval, curved, unblinking. Upon its gelid surface I saw my own reflection, Bluebeard distorted. The eye became a solid sphere, an onyx globe, whose depths foretold events unborn, whose mysteries remained obscure. Saw in the eye great black birds hovering; saw cornfields in ruin; a scarecrow figure. The birds were crows, became harpies with human heads and women’s breasts, and in hideous chorus they railed at me. And their eyes again became the child’s eyes, and the eyes pursued me and I was running—and I was not running from, but to, for I had found the answer. In my dream I knew, the secret lay bared, and with the answer came realization, came—

Daylight, and I sat in our church pew, feeling the sweat running from my armpits down my sides, soaking my shirt. Surreptitiously I loosened my tie, felt in my pocket for a handkerchief, blotted my brow.

The windows of the church were open, bringing the outdoors in, and the breeze, and the beautiful fall. Outside I could see the knoll with its tombstones beneath the spreading branches of the red-gold trees. Gazing out, I was only half hearing Mr. Buxley’s sermon, the text of which this morning was taken from the Book of Ruth: “… whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God.”

Ruth, who had left her own land to follow Naomi into hers, where she had gleaned the fields of Boaz. Ruth in tears amid the alien corn.

Turning my head to the gallery where the girls sat, I saw the child, neither listening to the minister nor looking at him, her blank half-wit look instead directed toward me. I had the feeling that she had not taken her eyes off me since the beginning of the service.

As I had done each day, again I worked the riddle over in my mind.
Beware the night
. Which?
The all-prevailing night
. How would it come? When?

I flicked my eye up to her, once, twice, again. I tried to analyze my feelings about her, and I could not. Except the realization that I felt, in some mysterious way, akin to her. She confused me, and my dreams. I had told myself she was only a thirteen-year-old child. She was playing some sort of game with me, a child’s game, nothing more; she was nothing but the village idiot.

Wasn’t she?

Yet her staring eyes filled me with a feeling of dread, as though they foretold a terrible event yet to come.

Portent. Omen. Missy Penrose.

Tamar Penrose.

The mother sat below, listening attentively to Mr. Buxley, and I felt, or perhaps imagined, that she was aware I might be looking at her, might be giving thought to her. As the daughter confused me, the mother angered me. There was something about her that seemed not merely predatory but demanding. Hers were not just the requirements of the town doxy from the local turnip-heads behind a haystack. There was something else in her, a deeply ingrained sense of something primitive, of the Woman Eternal, who demanded to be served —not just between the legs but to make man utterly subservient. Tamar the castrator. Moth to flame, I had come close and had my wings singed if not burned. I would not hover near again. I would avoid her as I would contagion. There would be no more episodes in that lady’s kitchen, no matter how the invitation was delivered.

And, torn shirt aside, how had Beth known I had been at Tamar’s house rather than at the Rocking Horse, or at the covered bridge, or any other place I might have been? Though I told myself women know these things by instinct, still I did not entirely believe it.

From the pulpit, Mr. Buxley droned on interminably, as was his habit. I looked around once more and realized that Worthy Pettinger had changed his mind. He had not come to church, as he had promised the Widow. His seat in the boys’ gallery was occupied by another, and there seemed no need for Amys Penrose’s rod, though I thought the bell ringer looked unusually attentive as he lounged against the rear wall.

Mr. Buxley concluded his sermon with a stentorian list of begats, ending with Ruth’s conceiving Obed, who became the father of Jesse, who became the father of David. He adjusted his glasses, coughed once, and left the pulpit to sit in a chair behind it. Now, from the pews, the village elders arose to station themselves behind a long harvest table below the pulpit. Mr. Deming nodded, and Justin Hooke stood up from his cushioned pew. He smiled as he put out his hand and drew Sophie to her feet; heads nodded and murmurs of approval were heard. Long after, I remembered the picture they made that day, Justin and Sophie, as they paused in their places. The sun streaming through the window caught their hair, turning it golden, surrounding it with a shining aureole. They looked at each other with tenderness and feeling, and I thought how blessed they were. Each bringing an ear of corn, they approached the harvest table below the pulpit, renewing the ancient and respected custom of the corn tithes.

When their symbolic gifts had been offered, the rest of the congregation rose to do likewise. I watched the faces of the farmers, their wives, and children as they filed past, tendering their corn ears to Mr. Deming, who then laid them on the harvest table. I saw the Widow’s white cap and black dress as she joined the line, and when she came opposite Mr. Deming, she handed him not one but two ears. He took her hands and pressed them, then leaned to kiss her cheek as he thanked her. She was the great lady of the town, and there was not a villager who didn’t know it. She was equal to the respect and duty paid her, and I thought how much they owed her, and how much I owed her, including the life of my only child. As she paid over her corn tribute to the church, I silently paid her my own tribute.

Constable Zalmon and his wife, at the head of their pew, joined the line as it wound ceremoniously down to the pulpit. Apart from the antiquated badge of office pinned to his weekday vest, Mr. Zalmon had never looked to me much like a constable, and I supposed very little had occurred during his tenure to occasion his use of force or imprisonment. An ancient village law of durance vile, which could be at any time invoked to restrain drunks or disturbers of the peace, provided that— since the stocks had been dismantled from the Common— the alleged guilty party should be incarcerated in the back room at the post office until a town meeting determined innocence or guilt, and the penalty to accompany the latter. This was called being given a “ticket-of-leave,” and the prisoner a “ticket-of-leaver.”

Though the villagers had by a concerted effort kept the attack on Jack Stump private, it was generally concluded that it remained for Mr. Zalmon to press charges against the Soakes family, and he spent much of his time outside the post office, keeping a sharp lookout for the pink Oldsmobile.

Since I had for some days set up my easel near the bait shack, the window of which I was still painting, I had seen the continual passage of the village dames coming at all hours with their baskets of food, and almost without fail every day at five the Widow Fortune would arrive in her buggy to tend the results of the Soakeses’ violence. The ladies washed Jack’s clothes and linens, made him broths, kept him clean and shaven, and otherwise did whatever was required to revive him. It was the Widow’s object to put him back on his cart by spring, a purpose she went about with diligence and dispatch. In the meantime, Mrs. Buxley had solicited funds from the parishioners to keep him in necessaries through the fall and winter.

I had taken the boat and rowed upriver to the Soakeses’ jetty, but had seen no sign of any of them. Rumor had it they had gone off on a hunting expedition, and it appeared Mr. Zalmon’s vigilance was in vain. Clearly, they had shut Jack Stump up as effectively as they had the revenuer whose skull screamed in the hollow tree.

The tithing line was dwindling. The Dodds went down the aisle, Maggie leading Robert slowly; he held his token ear of corn out from him as though feeling his way with it. Mr. Deming took the ear and laid it on the heap, which by this time had become considerable. The elder shook Robert’s hand warmly, accepted Maggie’s ear, and she brought Robert back to their pew.

In turn, I took my place in line, then handed Mr. Deming the three ears I had brought to church, one for myself, one for Beth, and the smallest for Kate. Mr. Deming took this last and held it up so all might see, and as I passed back up the aisle I knew I was receiving the good wishes of the villagers for Kate’s recovery. I felt the warmth of their glances, saw Asia Minerva smile as I passed her pew, caught Will Jones’s acknowledging nod as I passed his.

When the last of the children had come down from the gallery and passed before the table, the elders turned to Mr. Buxley, who rose out of his chair and, from the pulpit, held his hand above the piled ears of corn on the harvest table and offered a blessing, while the elders and the congregation bowed their heads. When the blessing had been given, Mr. Buxley readjusted his glasses and announced the closing hymn. I stood with the rest of the congregation and turned to face the choir loft over the closed doors. Mrs. Buxley lifted her gloved hand, nodded to Maggie at the organ, and we began singing.