Harvest Home (8 page)

Behind us I heard the noisy clangor of kettleware, the familiar furious din announcing the various comings of Jack Stump, the peddler. Looking back over the seat, I saw him working his cart in a frantic effort to catch up with us. Never turning, but with a serene smile, the Widow made no effort to restrain the mare’s progress, and only let her have her head.

Jack Stump, newly arrived like us, had during that first summer become a familiar sight along the byways and thoroughfares of the village. His improbable-looking rig was little more than a pieced-together relic of a cart constructed atop the several parts of an ancient bicycle. Astride a shiny, cracked leather seat and flying a small tattered American flag on one of the handlebars, he would drive the cart, ringing a cowbell or squeezing the rubber bulb of a brass horn to witness his comings and goings; these and the continual clang and rattle of the tin pans, kettles, and skillets strung above on lines made a mobile pandemonium that alerted the countryside to his continual progresses. And where he came and went, Jack Stump talked.

“Jabberwocky,” the Widow said, “that’s what that one spouts.” She jerked her head to the rear where the peddler strained under his load. “Poor benighted soul.” When he at last pulled alongside, she nudged me with her elbow and offered him the best of the day and weather.

“Whatcha say, Widow. Whatcha say, sir?”

The Widow slowed the mare to a walk. “Well, Jack, glad to see we’re not harboring a slugabed. What gets you up so bright and early?”

He huffed, seeking his breath, until the huff turned to a wheeze. “I’m an early bird, Widow, catching my worms. Yes, ma’am, there’s plenty to do and I’m the fellow to do the doin‘ —oh, yes. The way I see it, the world’s an oyster, and you got to be quick to catch the pearl—”

“Before—” the Widow tried to put in.

“Before the other fellow steals it first. How are you today, sir?” Before I could reply, he had his answer ready. “Fine, sir, fine as rain, I can see that. And your lovely wife? Fine, too, is she? Good enough. You folks come from down New York way, ain’t that so? Seen a bit of the big town myself in my time, damned if I haven’t—sorry, Widow—”

He was a scruffy old fellow, a mite of a man, all head and torso, with hardly any underpinnings to speak of. His merry monkey face was flat and wide. He wanted shaving, his teeth seemed nonexistent, and his hair stuck out under his ruined fedora like scarecrow’s straw, half covering large jug ears. He was scrupulously dirty, as if he worked at maintaining the traditional image of the disreputable hobo. In spite of the temperature, he wore layers of tattered clothing, and where a button had failed a pin would do as well.

“How’s your shears, Widow?” he asked, pedaling alongside the buggy. “Sharp as a tack, I’ll bet, darned if they ain’t. I sharpened ‘em up myself, didn’t I?”

“That you did, Jack.”

“And not a cent of charge.” He gave me a droll look. “Not for no Florence Nightingale such as this dear lady is.”

“How’s your backside, Jack?” she inquired.

“I’m sittin‘, ain’t I?”

“Jack’s been sufferin‘ from a sight o’boils,” she explained, solving the mystery of what had kept him from his daily rounds.

“And that’s no handy place, I’ll admit, for a fellow who sits as much as I do,” Jack continued. “But this sweet creature, she bends me over a barrel and puts on some of that there salve of hers— Say, Widow, what all’s in that salve?”

“That’d be tellin‘. How’s the toothache?”

“Gone, just like you said.”

“Still wearin‘ your little bag?”

He dug down in his shirt and displayed a small bag of red felt hung on a drawstring around his neck.

“No—don’t you feel inside there,” she cautioned as he poked with a grimy finger. “You’ll let out the charm for sure. Where you off to now?”

“To the woods.”

“Soakes’s Lonesome?” Her eyes on the road ahead, she spoke deliberately. “What takes you there?”

“Got to check my traps. I got ‘em staked out all through them woods—”

“Oughtn’t to go in there, Jack.”

“Haw—them Soakeses don’t scare me none.”

“You catch me a rabbit, I’ll make you a rabbit pie, Jack. Wait now, dearie, just a minute,” she said to the mare. “We’ve got a stop here.” She reined up the mare at the roadside and I helped her down. We stood before the Hooke farm, the largest and handsomest in Cornwall Coombe. The house was a gem of Early American architecture, with lawns and gardens in front, broad cornfields on either side, fruit orchards beyond, and cows grazing in the meadows that stretched away to the river.

“Shan’t be a moment.” The Widow took her basket and marched down the drive to greet the mistress of the house, Sophie Hooke, who was feeding a flock of chickens in the yard beside the kitchen door. She kissed the Widow’s cheek and they spoke while the fowl pecked at their feet. Suddenly a rooster appeared among them, sending them into a panic of squawks and feathers.

“That’s the biggest rooster I’ve ever seen,” I declared.

“That’s the gen’ral talk. Everyone says Justin Hooke’s got the biggest rooster in town, if you catch my drift.” Jack Stump snapped his hat brim and slipped me a lewd wink. According to village repute and ladies’ gossip, nature had generously endowed Farmer Hooke sexually; hence, “Justin’s rooster.”

“You mean the women talk about that at their kitchen door?” I tried not to sound shocked, but I was surprised that such locker-room subjects were discussed among the housewives of this community.

“You live on a farm, you see everything,” Jack replied philosophically. “They’re a bawdy bunch, farmers. Women, too. I tell ‘em the one about the fellow with twelve inches but he don’t use it as a rule, and don’t they squeal some! They know what Justin’s got, all right. I guess it’s what keeps Sophie smilin’! There’s the old cock himself.” He nodded to the barn where Justin Hooke appeared in the hayloft door. He swung out on the baling rope and made a dramatic sweep to the ground. When he, also, had kissed the Widow’s cheek, she lifted the napkin from her basket and offered him the two puddings.

Straddling his seat on the cart, the peddler shook his head admiringly. “Ain’t she a fine woman, the Widow Fortune? A good strong soul, damned if she ain’t, good for a man’s work as well as a woman’s, no worse in the barnyard than in the kitchen. There’s never a time I stop by her door when there ain’t a slice of pie or a hunk of sausage waitin‘ for me. You’d look a far piece before you’d find a more kindly, generous soul, and I tell it at every door I pass.”

“Goodnight nurse, Jack, how you carry on.” The Widow had returned from her errand to overhear the last of his praises.

Doffing his hat, Jack bowed in a deferential manner. “The world don’t seem so bad a place when a man can find dear ladies like yourself in it.”

“Hush; enough.” She let me help her into her seat, took up the reins, and we continued along toward Soakes’s Lonesome. Here and there in the cornfields, I saw scarecrows stuck between the rows, rising above the tops of the stalks. Not the ordinary, garden-variety of scarecrow, these were fanciful fellows, decked out in extravagant bits of motley costuming and rags. There was one in particular, the head and body stuffed with straw and cornhusks, a battered hat tilted rakishly over one button eye, a long feather stuck in the band like a cavalier’s plume.

Just then two crows swooped up out of the field, their wings black and shiny against the sky. “Two crows,” I heard the Widow murmur. “Now, that’s bad for sure.” She shook her head, and clucked up the mare.

“Jack, I’m in the market,” she hinted to the peddler.

“In what way, Widow?”

“Old clothes. I’ll be needin‘ them to make my scarecrows for next year.”

“How many do you make?”

“Nearly all you’ve seen. Hardly a farmer in the village doesn’t come plaguing me around Spring Festival time to do him up a scarecrow. Can you fetch me some good outfits? Somethin‘ swanky?”

“Sure I can.”

“Cheap, now. I don’t pay good money for rags.”

We had come to the top of a rise, where Jack tipped his scroungy hat again and took his leave, coasting off toward the bottom in a cloud of dust, the echo of his tinware trailing behind.

The Widow laughed, watching him go. “His heart’s in the right place, but his tongue’s an affliction.”

As we moved down the hill, the cornfields spread wide and far. Past the fields and grazing meadows, the treetops rose in lush, billowy foliage, their leaves still a long way off from turning. A curl of smoke rose from the Tatum farm opposite the edge of the woods. Beyond the woods—Soakes’s Lonesome, as it was called—lay the river. On the other side I could make out the brown patches of Tobacco City land, where the crop had already been harvested, and the rolls of white netting which had not yet been taken down. A dirt road wound between two fields, ending at a jetty by the riverbank. A cloud of dust rose as a pink car, an Oldsmobile, pulled up close to the bank. Several men got out and clambered into a motor skiff tied at the jetty. Soon it was cutting a path through the water—the hum of the engine lost to us at that distance—and heading for a point of land on our side where the woods grew down to the river’s edge. I watched the craft’s progress, and as it approached, the voices of the men became faintly audible. When they stepped ashore I caught the dull gleam of sunlight on rifle barrels. Then they entered the woods and disappeared.

“Soakeses,” the Widow commented in a sour tone, as though identifying the men by name were sufficient to sum up their entire and particular natures. Forthwith she revealed to me the salient facts concerning Soakes’s Lonesome, whose history was an interesting one, full of the blood and havoc for which the Cornish people had long been known.

Originally, the sizable tract had been designated by the village founders as communal land, within whose preserves anyone was entitled to hunt or fish. Then, somewhere in the early 1700s, it had become the property of the Soakes family, who accordingly reserved the hunting and fishing rights to themselves. Though the village fields had proved rich for crops, the Soakeses and some others of the old settlers moved across the river, where, eschewing corn, they engaged in raising tobacco. The move, said the village fathers, constituted forfeiture of all rights to land on this side of the river, and henceforward Soakes’s Lonesome would no longer belong to them. The Soakes clan, then extensive, refused to relinquish its title, which was now held in dispute between the family and the people of Cornwall Coombe. The present generation —an old man, his wife, and five sons—were generally regarded as a fierce and savage tribe of “tobacco scut,” who for their part still continued to look upon the land as theirs; and woe to the trespasser.

Which, the Widow pointed out, accounted for the tales of the Ghost of Soakes’s Lonesome. A people who readily believe in ghosts needs must have one. Rumor had it the Soakeses maintained a well-hidden still deep in the woods. Some years before, a revenue agent had come to investigate; it was said he went into the woods and never came out. And around his mysterious disappearance there had sprung up a tale about the Ghost of Soakes’s Lonesome, whose shade was said to haunt the Old Sallow Road close to the Lost Whistle Bridge.

We got to the Tatum farm and the Widow reined up again. “Here’s where I must leave you now,” she announced. Across the way, a dirt track ran up to the Tatums’ back door, where the lady of the house was stirring something in a large iron kettle. Nope, not pigs, the Widow explained; Irene did homemade soap. Laying down her paddle, then pulling the smoking fire apart, the red-haired Irene bawled to her children not to track ashes in the house as they came from loading food baskets and hampers into the back of a pickup truck.

I took my drawing case and hopped from the buggy to help the Widow alight. I thought she would pay a call on Irene, but no, “I must be about my herbin‘,” she said, “and you’ve got your bridge to sketch.” She hung her shears straight, took her basket, arranged to meet me again in an hour, and, so saying, picked up her skirts and made her way toward the woods through the tall meadow grass.

I continued along the road on foot, cornfields on my left, then an orchard, and on my right the curving edge of a palisade of lofty trunks, and, beyond, the dark recesses of Soakes’s Lonesome. A little farther along, I passed the peddler’s rig, half hidden behind some thick laurel shrubs where he had sought to conceal it—a precaution, I decided, against the Soakeses’ chancing upon it.

Arriving at the bridge, I sat under a tree and made several rough drawings, then began a detailed one of the portal. In exactly fifty minutes, I closed my pad, zipped up my case, made a quick tour of the bridge approach to locate the best angle for the painting I planned doing, and then started back down the road.

Again I passed the sequestered peddler’s cart, and, rounding the next bend, I glimpsed the Widow’s white bonnet bobbing among the trees at the edge of the meadow. I waited until she reached the road, then helped her into the buggy. Suddenly we heard the sharp report of guns within the woods. A voice shouted, and another; then for a time all was silence. In another moment the peddler’s gnome-like figure broke from the woods. He pulled the rig from its hiding place, ran it down the gully and onto the road, hopped onto the seat, and pedaled toward us as fast as his feet could turn the wheels.

“Ho, Jack,” the Widow called, “what’s about?”

He made no reply, but an expression of terror contorted his grizzled features. Passing, he gave us a dazed look, as though he had never seen us before, and hurried off toward the village.

Behind us, a formidable figure appeared between the tree trunks, a shotgun at the ready. He watched the peddler’s hasty retreat; then, shaking his fist, he entered the woods again.

“The old man himself,” the Widow said. I replied that I supposed he had caught nosy Jack investigating his still and had scared him off.

“It’s likely. Jack’s nose is afflicted, too,” she said as she took up the reins.

Well, thought I, if the sleepy, yesteryear village of Cornwall Coombe provided such intriguing mysteries in this ready-to-hand way, I would prove easily diverted, and without telling my companion, I resolved to find Jack at the fair and discuss exactly what had happened to him in the woods at the hands of Old Man Soakes.