Harvest Home (27 page)

“When you ring, is there a difference—I mean for a man and a woman?”

“Sure. For a man you got to ring three times two, for a woman it’s three times three.” He took a long swig of beer, savoring it as it went down. “Hey, Bert, gimme some o‘ them nuts you got back there.”

“Three times three?” I leaned closer. “Is that the way you rang for Gracie Everdeen?”

“Hell, no,” he replied in a hoarse whisper. “No bell was never rung for her. I’d‘ve done it if they’d let me, but they wouldn’t. Not
them
. No bell tolled for Gracie. Not thrice times thrice, not thrice times nothin’. I rang her into the world, but there was none to ring her out.” He rolled a cigarette and lighted it. “Oh, Gracie Everdeen.” He blew out a raspy stream of smoke, then, dirge-like, returned to the topic of the lost Gracie.

“The Coombe never bred a finer beauty than Grace was. Nor a sweeter one. Sweet and delicate she was, a reg’lar pony. There wasn’t a fellow in the village didn’t hanker for her. She grew up tall, but slim, and pretty as a man could hope to see.” He pressed my arm to convince me of the truth of his words. “I mean, she was
pretty
. It was nip and tuck who was gonter win her.”

“Roger Penrose?”

“Ayuh. ‘Twas the end of nip and tuck then. Roger’d been goin’ with Tamar Penrose, who was one of them blamed Penrose cousins. Durin‘ that time, the ladies voted and the honor come to Roger—he was poor enough, but they balloted and chose him for Harvest Lord. Tamar was mighty proud, thinkin’ Roger was bound to ask her for the Corn Lady. But he didn’t. One year went by, then two, and still hadn’t asked her. Hadn’t asked any girl. Now Gracie’s bloomin‘ like a flower, and—did I say was pretty?—I did and she was. Lemme think a minute. Roger’s Harvest Lord, and there’s pretty Gracie. He takes her for a ride in the Widow Fortune’s buggy, and when they come back, Gracie’s been asked. Everyone thought that was fine, ’ceptin‘ for Tamar, who’s got her nose out of joint, bein’ left out—Tamar’s a sulky creature. But there’s Gracie, just—just radiatin‘. Now—where was I? Yes. Roger’s Harvest Lord, Gracie’s Corn Maiden. Roger’s got two years or so to go. The Widow’s educatin’ Gracie in her duties. Anyone who talks about her’s got only the best things to say. Oh, wasn’t she lovely, light and delicate as air—yes, she was. Well, sir, next thing you know, Roger’s give her a ring.”

“Engagement?”

“So to speak. He couldn’t afford no fancy job. Then the banns was posted and read out. It’s not often a Harvest Lord’ll marry his Corn Lady—‘ceptin’ like Justin and Sophie, which come as somethin‘ of a shock. But Roger’s decided on little Gracie. Then Mrs. Everdeen puts her foot down, and revokes the banns. Says Gracie’s got to give Roger back his ring. Then, after a while, Gracie starts actin’ funny. Long about the time she quit the fields and put on shoes, she just seemed to go haywire. Did all sorts of crazy things.”

I motioned Bert for another beer. “Like what?”

Amys blew his nose and wiped his eyes. “Well, she stopped combin‘ her hair, for one thing. Took to wearin’ the same dress day in day out. Sassed the Widow. Hitched her fanny at the pastor. At Midsummer’s Eve, she slipped a whole pie under Mrs. Buxley’s rear end just afore Mrs. Buxley sat down. Rolled her eyes at one of them Soakes boys. Roger was plenty mad. Everyone was. ‘Cept me; I just felt sorry for her. None of this happened right off, mind you—’twas more gradual-like. One Spring Festival, she fought with the boys in the street. Right out there where you put down them Soakeses, she took on Ferris Ott and laid him in the dust. Then when Roger bought his horse—”

“The one he broke his neck on?”

“Ayuh. She challenged Roger to a race, and she won. Now, nobody could beat Roger’s horse—but Grace did. Folks said she stole some of the Widow’s herbs and put it in the horse’s oats. Roger was so mad he says to Gracie to give his ring back. Then she disgraced the whole village—or so
they
think.”

“How so?” I sipped my drink. Amys dragged on his cigarette, blew out the smoke, swigged his beer.

“Well, sir, you can see it, surely. She’d become a terror. Barefooted, wild hair, screamin‘ and yellin’, puttin‘ her nose up, swearin’. Folks were angry. She was the Corn Maiden. Roger’d given her the honor and she didn’t seem to care. There wasn’t nothin‘ she wouldn’t do to shock folks or make them think ill of her. Then come Agnes Fair, and that was the end. Roger was bound to win the pole-shinny, but Grace denied him the pleasure. She loses him the wrestlin’, too. Next, she has words with Ewan Demin‘, and then she’s gone.”

“She left.”

“Ayuh.”

“Where’d she go?”

He shook his head, drank, wiped his chin. “Nobody knows. Left on Agnes Fair day and didn’t come back until almost two years later. But it was too late. Roger said if Grace was goin‘ to act that way, Tamar could be Corn Maiden, and come the play, Tamar was crowned in her place. But what most folks didn’t know, Gracie’d returned the spring before. It was like she couldn’t stay away. The winter after she left was a hard one. Snow on the Common five feet deep, people tunneling out to feed the livestock. I lost four of my sheep that year. There was a thaw, then a flood, then spring was behind the barn. And with it come Gracie Everdeen. And, wherever she’d been, she come back sad and sorrowful, and you can bet me, the heart in her poor bosom was cleave in two.”

There was something in the simple country way he put his words together that painted a picture for me. I could see the fallow fields, the drab sky, the melting snow, and the tempestuous, strange creature that was Gracie Everdeen, victim of unbridled passions, spurning the mother who broke her heart, the lover who betrayed her.

“But she didn’t come back to the village that spring, did she?” I was remembering Mrs. O’Byrne’s part of the story.

“No, sir, she didn’t. She was stayin‘ over t’ Saxony, but she wouldn’t cross the river. Wouldn’t come over the Lost Whistle for hide nor hair.”

“Why not?”

He ducked his head briefly, and faltered in his story. Then, regaining himself, “Who knows? Womenfolk do peculiar things sometimes. Roger Penrose heard she was over there, and he rode out and begged her to come home. Time after time, but she wouldn’t.”

“Why wouldn’t Roger cross the bridge?”

“Wasn’t supposed to. It’s the rule. In the seventh year the Harvest Lord’s not to go beyond the village boundaries. Same for the Corn Maiden. But Grace, on her side, she’d never set foot to the bridge. And Roger’d never go to her.”

“But he did, finally.” I told him what I had learned from Mrs. O’Byrne about the night Roger had galloped across the river and carried her to the Cornwall side, and that Mrs. O’Byrne had wanted to fire Gracie for immorality.

Amys stared at me, speechless, then spat again. “ ‘Tain’t true! Roger never touched her that night!”

“How do you know?”

“I—” He stopped uncertainly, glanced quickly at Bert, the bartender, then hollered for more nuts. When Bert had gone to the far end of the bar, Amys continued in a hoarse whisper, “Roger never laid a finger to her. The Harvest Lord can’t have relations with no girl before Harvest Home. It’s against the ways. Anyhow, Roger met her just before the Corn Play. That was poor Gracie’s last chance. He rode back and Tamar was crowned in her place. Next day, the day before Kindlin‘ Night, when they burn the scarecrows, the Widow Fortune buggies over to talk to Gracie. She come back without her, too. So Tamar goes to Harvest Home.”

“To do what?”

“Hell, son, don’t ask me all these questions. I’m tryin‘ to tell you. Roger goes to Harvest Home as the Lord, and Tamar goes as his Maiden.”

“Goes where?”

“To the woods. To Soakes’s Lonesome.”

“Harvest Home is celebrated in the woods?”

“The seventh one is, always. But then, Gracie comes too.”

“And was a disruptive influence.”

“Who says?”

“The ladies. Mrs. Green, Mrs. Zalmon—”

“Damn old biddies. If she was, the Lord God he knows.”

“Then what happened?”

“Two days later, Irene Tatum finds her poor body in the river. Thrown herself off the Lost Whistle. I heard, and I went to toll thrice times thrice. But Mr. Deming comes and says I can’t. He tells me to dig a hole.”

“Outside the cemetery.”

“Mr. Buxley—he says he can’t read service for a suicide, and here come all the elders carryin‘ a pine box, with Gracie inside, and they set it in the hole; then Mr. Deming in his black suit tells me to fill it in, and they go away. Not a soul there for the funeral. Mrs. Everdeen packs up and leaves town for the shame, and there’s the end of it.”

“You buried her?”

He turned his head quickly and used the spittoon again. After a moment he said, “Buried her beyond the fence, where you see her stone. Where she lies without, in disgrace, and Roger lies within, in honor. And
herself
runs the post office and makes fast and loose with anything in pants.” He clutched my sleeve and spoke fiercely. “Don’t you listen to folks. Gracie was a fine girl. And a beauty, don’t you forget. Pretty as spring, a reg’lar fairy, that was Grace.”

Bert came and collected the glasses, obliterating with his rag the wet rings left on the bar.

Amys tottered off his stool, a sad, forlorn look on his wrinkled face. “Listen to me, sir. I loved Grace, and I never forgot her, even though
they’d
like to. Sometimes when I ring thrice times thrice, like when Mrs. Mayberry died, I tell Gracie that’s for her.”

He touched his hat brim, thanked me for letting him wet his whistle, and took up his broom and left.

I finished my drink, trying to piece to gether the threads of his story of the unfortunate Gracie Everdeen, and chalked it up to a case of unrequited love.

When I approached the church again, Amys was tolling six o’clock. Above the bronzy notes of the bell, the voices of the choir sounded, floating out through the vestibule door and hanging soft in the air. The sun was dropping behind the post office, and long shadows had crept across the Common, making the circles on the grass more pronounced.

I took a few moments to step into the church and sit in one of the pews, looking up at the choir loft over the doors, where the girls held their sheets of music in pairs and sang the lovely melody. Maggie was at the organ, watching in the little mirror over the keyboard as Mrs. Buxley conducted the voices, while, in the upper corner of the loft, the Widow Fortune sat leaning her head on her hand, lost in some private reverie.

The song ended, and the church was perfectly still for a moment. Then the girls moved from their places, gathering around the old lady as she spoke to them, praising them for their singing. When I went up the aisle, I glimpsed Mr. Buxley seated at a table in the vestry, writing in a ledger. I stopped for a word, and he explained he was entering the date of old Mrs. Mayberry’s death. He brought down another, showing me the entry of her birth sixty-seven years before; then he returned both ledgers to the shelf. Each volume was dated by year, a whole history of village births and marriages and deaths, the three important events of a man’s life, no matter where he may live.

I complimented him on the music I had heard; he said yes, it would pass very nicely for Tithing Day.

I walked along Main Street, looking at the houses with their neat gardens and fences, their windows, some with as many as eighteen panes of glass apiece, the handsome Colonial doorways. The kinds of houses I had never known in the city.

Passing Tamar Penrose’s place, I saw the child Missy perched on the limb of an apple tree, playing with her doll while some chickens pecked in the dirt below. She lifted her head and stared at me as I walked by. Suddenly I thought of the other doll, the one from the cornfield, and was shocked to realize I didn’t know what had become of it. As I tried to recollect the circumstances, I heard her give a little cry. She had caught her dress getting out of the tree, and when she tried to free it she lost her hold and tumbled to the ground. I ran back and opened the gate. She lay at the base of the tree looking stunned. I knelt and lifted her head and asked if she was all right. She stared at me; then her two hands came up and pressed her temples, as though to relieve the pain.

She was wearing a strange-looking cap of knitted wool, pulled down around her ears as though it were the dead of winter. Her dress had grass stains on it, her shoes were muddy.

“Hello,” I said.

She regarded me emptily; then a look of recognition floated into her washed-out eyes.

“Missy, do you remember me?”

“Mnmm—mean, um—paint—”

“That’s right. I’m a painter. Do you remember at Agnes Fair, what happened with the sheep?”

She shook her head.

“You pointed at me, remember?”

Another shake. She was staring at a chicken that was scratching in the dirt around the tree.

“Did someone tell you to point at me?”

A shrug.

“Did someone tell you to pick the Harvest Lord? Or did you pick him because you like Worthy Pettinger?”

Another shrug. She was watching the chicken’s bright little eyes with her dim ones.

I tried again. “When people ask you questions and you tell them things, are they just things you make up?”

She giggled, then spoke. “Sometimes.” Still she eyed the chicken. “Mnmm—um—sometimes not,” she added thickly, sucking air through her mouth.

“When they’re not, who makes them up? Where do they come from?”

“I don’t know.”

“You hear things? Things that someone says to you? Like a voice?”

“Sometimes. Sometimes I don’t hear, I just see.” Still staring at the chicken, she got up and started across the lawn to the porch. She stopped and gave me a quick look. I stepped toward her. She took another step. She seemed to be luring me to her. When I moved, she moved; when I stopped, she stopped, waiting until I moved again. She got to the steps and ran up, then spun around on the porch. When she saw I was coming up the steps, she threw herself in the porch swing and dug a loop of string from her pocket. She looked first at the place beside her, then at me. I sat on the faded canvas cushion and she set the swing in motion.

The rusty chains creaked. She looped the string over each hand, made a cat’s cradle pattern, and held it up for me to take. I inserted my fingertips and lifted it, producing a new pattern. She gave me a sly look, took the string, and made another. Her look challenged me as she waited for me to make the next move. I dipped my fingers into the maze and lifted it. The pattern slid, altered, held.