Harvest Home (35 page)

I entered the post office and found two ladies at the window, baskets on their arms. One was mailing a package. Through the grille I could see Tamar Penrose sorting letters into the initialed boxes. Her back was turned, and she had not seen me enter. The teakettle steamed on the hot plate. The Constable hurried in, lifted the hinged panel, and went into the back room, and Tamar, carrying some letters, quickly followed. The door closed behind them.

“Hurry,” one of the ladies at the window was urging the other, darting glances toward the Common and digging in her purse for change. When they finally made a hasty exit, I stepped up to the window and asked Myrtil Clapp for a book of stamps. While I paid for them, the door to the back room opened and the Constable and Tamar came out. She hurriedly finished distributing the mail, turned the hot plate off under the teakettle, and followed the Constable out the door.

Myrtil set her empty teacup aside and went to the letter rack. She looked in the A-B-C box, and returned with several envelopes, which she slid under the grille. “Lots today,” she said, then turned a triangular block which read “Closed” on the inserted card. She lifted the counter panel and passed through. I looked around: the post office was deserted. I picked up my letters and began thumbing through them. A cry from outside froze my hand briefly; then, slipping the letters into my case, I hurried through the doorway.

The sunlight was blinding. When my eyes adjusted, I looked around. The street was empty. On the Common, standing in the yellow light and casting small pools of shadow on the green grass, the women waited.

“How’s your late potatoes, Asia?” Will Jones’s wife asked Asia Minerva.

“Poor, dear. They’re awful poor by now.”

“They want rain. Seems as though the corn took all the rain this year. Soaked it right up, it did. And after all that rain we had last spring.”

Asia craned her neck around the shoulder of the woman in front of her, as if anxiously straining to catch a sound. It could not take much longer.

Then it was done. One of the women called out, another pointed; they broke from the Common, running across the grass and out into the street, milling in the thoroughfare to meet the men coming from behind the barn. Asia was hugging her son, and when she held him back from her I could see the bloody marks on his face. Asia pulled him to her again, clasping him to her bosom, while the rest crowded around, talking excitedly and reaching to touch him as the men stepped up and wrung his hand. Then the group began dispersing, casting looks over their shoulders to where Missy Penrose stood, a little apart, her incredible doll dangling from one red hand.

Going to the Widow Fortune’s house, I noticed that her corn was yet unharvested. A trail of smoke was rising, not from the chimney but from somewhere behind the house.

“Did you think my skirts had caught fire?” she said, laughing, as I rounded a shed to find her bent over a bench with a row of beehives on it. Her face was protected by a net, and in one gloved hand she held a bee smoker, with a small bellows attachment. “Come along,” she said as I stepped back, “no cause for alarm. Them that call this hive home is over in yonder tree. Some dratted raccoons have been playing havoc and eating up my honeybees. I’m giving their house a fall cleanin‘.”

She raised the hive at the end of the bench and scraped the insides free of wax and other material, then reset the dome in place and laid the apparatus aside. “Now all I got to do is catch that coon, then swarm the bees back, and come spring there’ll start to be plenty of honey in the pot.”

I helped her gather up her paraphernalia and carry it into the shed. While she put the things away, I noticed on a dusty shelf in the corner a row of small wooden casks, identical to the one she had presented to us. They were stoppered with pegs and lay under a caul of cobwebbing, seeming as if they had been undisturbed for many years.

She saw me looking at them, told me to come along, then hurried me from the shed. Outside, she dusted her hands and eased her back.

“Winter’s comin‘—my sciatica’s kickin’ up.” She looked off at her corn, nodding in approval. “Pretty soon it’ll be all in, and another year’ll be over. Oh, yes,” she continued as we walked along the edge of the patch, “your year ends come New Year’s, but for a farmer the year’s end comes with the harvest. Harvest, then the huskin‘ bee, then Kindlin’ Night, then the Harvest Home, and that’ll see us safe for another year. Bountiful harvest,” she said, sighing gratefully as she took off her work apron and folded it with precise motions. “Come and have a cup of tea.”

The kitchen was the usual potpourri of herbal fragrances. On the stove a large kettle was simmering, and she directed me to carry it to the back porch, where I set it on a table. As she covered it with a piece of cheesecloth, I saw pieces of what appeared to be the large caps of the mushrooms we had found in the woods, drained of their redness but nonetheless recognizable. On the shelf were half a dozen more little casks, newer-looking and unstoppered. When I came back into the kitchen, she had cleared away the remains of herbs and spices and the water kettle was on the fire.

She got out her tea things and set them on a tray. The cups and saucers were a handsome grayish blue, with a Chinese design; looking at the bottom, I saw they were marked “Ironstone, Made in England.” When I admired them, she said the pattern was called Amoy, and that Clem Fortune had given them to her as a wedding present. While the kettle heated, she got down her box of tea and filled the little silver tea ball. The cardboard tea container being empty, she pulled out the lining, flattened it, and spiked it on a spindle on which she saved scraps of paper; the box was relegated to another cupboard. In the Widow Fortune’s house everything was saved, everything was used.

While she carried the tea things into the parlor, I went out to the car and brought in my surprise. She was comfortably ensconced beside her hearth, and I set the large carton on the hooked rug at her feet. Changing her spectacles for the occasion, she used her shears—a pair I hadn’t seen before—to part the gummed tape and open the flaps.

“Oh, dear.” She looked from it to me and back to it, bending forward with the eager expression of a child. “Is it what I think it is?”

“What do you think it is?”

“I think a sewing machine.”

“I think you’re right.”

I lifted it out and set it on a table where she might examine it more closely. Then I showed her the array of attachments for zigzag and buttonholing and for all the other mechanical feats the machine was capable of performing. And the last—

“An automatic bobbin! I declare I thought I’d go to the grave without an automatic bobbin, surely.”

“No one should go to their grave without an automatic bobbin, surely. That’s—well, we just wanted to thank you for—”

“Here, now—here, now.” She took and held my hand, gripping it firmly between hers, then releasing it. She removed her glasses and wiped her eyes. “You’re a good man, Ned Constantine. You’re a good family. Well.” She folded her hands over her broad bosom and smiled. “Well, now, there’s an end to Fairy Belle and I can’t say as I’m sad to see her go.” She peered again at the new machine. Without her spectacles, she had that curiously naked and unfamiliar look of people who habitually wear glasses. “How d’you s’pose I’ll ever learn to run her, at my age?”

I said I believed it was not very difficult, and showed her the accompanying pamphlet of instructions and diagrams. She put her glasses back on to read, slipping her shears on their black ribbon into her lap. “Looks mighty complicated. Perhaps Beth can help me.”

I stuffed the pieces of packing material back in the carton.

“New scissors?”

She shook her head. “Lord knows, I’ve left them others over to Asia Minerva’s or somewhere when we were quilting.” She sipped her cup, eying me over the tops of her glasses, “Leave that, your tea’s gettin‘ cold.” I took the chair opposite and stirred lemon and sugar in my cup.

“One-B Weber’s?”

“Ayuh. You’d like the honey better’n sugar, though.”

“Your bees make a good honey.” I stirred with my spoon. “Interesting honey.”

“How so?”

“Your mead, I mean.”

“Oh. Did you like it, then—what was in the little cask?”

“Yes—I did.”

Her face was deadpan. “I thought perhaps you might.”

“We enjoyed the show, too.”

“Show?”

“You know—the fellow in the corn.”

“Was there a fellow in the corn?”

I smiled; she returned my look with one of watchful interest. “Yes, there was a fellow in the corn. A fellow you put there.”

“Why would I do that?”

“I’ve no idea.”

A flicker of disappointment in her expression. “None?”

“Perhaps I have. I’m not sure. The fellow had a—girl.” Giving the single syllable a slight nuance.

“That’s in the natural way, isn’t it? A man and a maid—”

“In a corn patch—”

“You make it sound mighty pedestrian. Who was the— girl?” Duplicating my emphasis.

“I think she’s a sphinx.”

“Oh? Like we said, sometimes it takes awhile to riddle a sphinx. Sphinxes are notoriously puzzling, as we know. But if you saw something—mind I say
if
—if you thought you saw something, perhaps that something may have given rise to speculation.”

“It has.”

“Then maybe that’s all it was meant to do.”

“ ‘To discover what is possible?’ ”

“Certain. But maybe you only dreamed what you saw.”

“That’s possible. What do you spike your casks with?”

She laughed heartily. “A good drink don’t need to be spiked. At least, not what’s in one o‘ them casks. Spikin’ generally dulls the senses, don’t it? Take for example that homebrew of the Soakeses. That’ll fog a man in plenty.” She rummaged in her work basket, came up with a bit of crocheting, and proceeded to ply the hook as though her fingers could not bear to be idle. “Anyways, what you saw—or thought you saw—did you enjoy it?”

“Yes. I did. Very much.”

“But—?”

“I didn’t understand it. At least—” I wanted to query her about the identity of the female figure, yet though I was certain she had manipulated the proceedings in some manner, I could see that she didn’t want to be questioned about it, but wished me to resolve what questions I had by myself. Her silver spectacle rims twinkled as she peered over them at the sewing machine on the table. “Amazing invention, a sewin‘ machine. Partic’larly since they electrified them. Interestin’—”

“What is?”

“The effects you can get with a little battery. Sparks, and all.” Her look was sly behind her glasses. She returned to her sewing, and step by step led me away from the subject, but more than ever I wanted to solve the riddle of the sphinx, and to comprehend who the figure in the cornfield had been.

“Yes,” she continued, “I believe you have an understandin‘ heart. How’s things t’ home?”

I shrugged noncommittally. “Um—”

“You been philandering?”

“No.”

“As I told your wife. You’re not the type. I can spot them ones a mile away.” She moved her chair slightly to take the leg off a worn spot in the rug. “There’s nothing worse than an unforgiving woman.”

“Beth?”

“I s’pose if you’d been sowin‘ oats before now, she’d be used to it. Difference is she believes in you.”

“If she believes in me, why doesn’t she forget about it?”

“She’s hurt. It’s been part of her upbringing to believe in the institution of marriage as prescribed by the vows at the altar. Her faith in you was total. I expect the Tamar episode shook it up a bit.”

“How do you know about it?”

“I hear things.”

“You hear talk, ma’am.”

“No need to get testy. Didn’t I just say you were a good man? Beth was brought up a lady; she don’t understand women like Tamar. But she’ll come ‘round.”

“Will she?”

“ ‘Course she will. She wants a bit of talking to. She’s bringin’ her quilt over tonight. You let me have a few words with her; then you just go out of your way to be nice, and see if things don’t work out. That Tamar’s a devil. I brought her into the world, I’ve seen her grow up, and I know what goes on in that mind of hers. Don’t flatter yourself she wants you. She don’t. Or if she does it’s only because she can’t have you. Tamar’s always wanted what she couldn’t have.”

“Like Roger Penrose?”

“Aye, like Roger. ‘Ceptin’ she got him in the end, just as she said she would. Or she got
of
him.” I noted the slight emphasis, waited for her to elaborate; she did not. “ ‘A man’s good as he ought to be but a woman’s bad as she dares.’ That’s Tamar. Still, she got what she wanted.”

“Which was?”

“Wanted to be Corn Maiden. And she was.”

“In Grace Everdeen’s place.”

“A girl like Tamar can be the downfall of man and woman alike.”

She was not altogether cryptic; her remark was not lost upon me. “It’s not what you think it was.”

“Me? Pshaw, I don’t think anything. Haven’t time. Besides, it’s none o‘ my affair.”

I smiled again. The Widow was much more interested in the caprice of the weather and the vagaries of nature and what the earth would yield than she was in the common pursuits of her fellow-creatures. What was here yesterday would be here tomorrow, and if it wasn’t it was no great matter. What mattered was the earth and what it could provide.

The telephone rang. “Now, who can that be,” she said, rising. “Never get used to that contraption if I see the millennium.” She excused herself and went into the hall, where she picked up the receiver. “Yes, Mr. Deming,” I heard her say; then, not to be eavesdropping, I carried the new sewing machine into the other room and set it up on a card table.

“Everything all right?” I asked as she came in and I saw her serious expression.

“Sakes, I don’t expect anything’s ever
all
right, do you? Mrs. Deming’s got a touch of somethin‘ or other. I must go and have a look.” She patted the machine, then thanked me again. At the door, she offered me her cheek to kiss and said, “Happy you came by. And”—almost an afterthought—“don’t you worry none. There’s news t’home that’ll take care of all.”