Harvest A Novel (5 page)

Master Kent is standing now, and drawing expectant smiles from us. These feasting times are when, fueled by ale, he likes to recall for his soil-bound guests the life he led before his happy coming here. His are embroidered tales of a strange and dangerous world: imps and oceans; palaces and wars. They always leave my neighbors glad they’ll not be part of it. But tonight his mood is clearly not a teasing one. Instead, he has invited Mr. Quill to join him at the makeshift dining board and both of them have clapped us quiet. Is this a moment we should fear? “Here is my good acquaintance, Philip Earle,” he says, taking hold of Mr. Quill’s elbow and pushing him forward for us to greet and inspect. “You will have met him yesterday, and you will see him hereabouts for one more week. He has come to us in my employ to make a map of all our common ground and land. We will prepare some raw pauper’s vellum for his task from that veal skin which is hanging now above my head. He will take note of everything and then draw up petitions for the courts. What follows is—with your willing, kind consents—an organization to all of our advantages. Too many seasons have been hard for us …” As this point Mr. Earle (as we will never think of him) unrolls one of the working charts he has prepared and asks us to come up to see our world “as it is viewed by kites and swifts, and stars.” We press forward, shuffling against one another to fit within the lantern light. “These are more complete than yesterday,” says Mr. Quill, but once again we only see his geometrics and his squares. His mapping has reduced us to a web of lines. There is no life in them. Now he shows a second chart with other spaces. “This is your hereafter,” he says.

“Yes, our tomorrows will be shaped like this,” adds Master Kent. That “Yes” is more uncertain than it ought to be. He pauses, smiles. “I will be exact …” he promises. But not, it seems, for the moment.

Say it, say it now, say the word, I urge him silently. I don’t have to be a swift or kite to know about the world and how it’s changing—changing shape, as Master Kent suggests—and to hear the far-off bleating of incoming animals that are neither cows nor pigs nor goats, that are not brethren. I know at once; I’ve feared this “Yes” ever since the mistress died. The
organization to all of our advantages
that the master has in mind—against his usual character and sympathies, against his promises—involves the closing and engrossment of our fields with walls and hedges, ditches, gates. He means to throw a halter round our lives. He means the clearing of our common land. He means the cutting down of trees. He means this village, far from everywhere, which has always been a place for horn, corn and trotter and little else, is destined to become a provisioner of wool. The word that he and no one dares to whisper let alone cry out is
sheep
. Instead Master Kent presents a little nervously a dream he’s had. He hopes that if he can describe these changes as having been fetched to him by a dream, then we will understand him more and fear him less, for dreams are common currency even among commoners. Surely, we are dreamers too.

In this dream, all his “friends and neighbors”—meaning us—no longer need to labor long and hard throughout the year and with no certainty that what we sow will ever come to grain. We have good years; we have bad, he reminds us. We share contentments, but we also share the suffering. The sun is not reliable. And nor is rain. A squalling wind can flatten all our crops. Mildew reduces it to mush. Our cattle might be ravaged by the murrain fever. Our harvest can be taken off by crows. (“And doves,” a small voice says. My own.) But wool is more predictable. A fleece of wool does not require the sun. Indeed, a fleece of wool will grow and thicken in the dark. A fleece is
not affected by the wind or by the changing seasons, he says, warming to the task—for it is a task, a labor of persuasion. And, as far as he’s aware, crows do not have a taste for wool, despite—he smiles, to alert us to his coming jest—their appetite for flocking.

No, Master Kent has had a dream which makes us rich and leisurely. Every day becomes a day of rest for us. We walk about our fenced-in fields with crooks. We sit on tussocks and we merely watch. We are not plowing; we are shepherding. We are not reaping; we are shearing. We are not freezing to the bone on damp and heavy winter days picking stones out of the soil, wringing the necks of furrow weeds, or tugging out twine roots and couch until our backs are stiffer than a yoke. No, we are sitting at our fires at home and weaving fortunes for ourselves from yarn. Our only industry is shooting shuttles to and fro as if it were a game, child’s play. Our only toil is easy toil—a gentle firming at the heddles, attending to the warp and weft with just our fingertips, untying snags and loosening. Instead of oxen there’ll be looms. Instead of praying for the stems of crops to stay straight and tall against the odds, against the efforts of the elements, and for their ears of corn to thicken and to ripen, we will be closing the sheds on broadcloth, fustian, worsted and twill. “A stirring prospect, isn’t it?” he says. Somewhere too far away to name, in places we can never see, a man is putting on a coat that we have shepherded and then made up with our own hands, a woman pulls a scarf across her head and smells our hearths and country odors in its weave. We start off with the oily wool on the back of our own livestock, our Golden Hoofs, and end up with garments on the backs of noble folk. It is a dream that, surely, none of us find vile. And still he has not said it: Sheep. Am I the only one to recognize what the dream is trying to disguise? The sheaf is giving way to sheep.

Master Kent has timed his revelation well. The veal is his. The ale is his too. We are no longer hungry. We’re certainly not sober. We’re
in his debt this evening and know him well enough to want to trust his word, at least for now. His plans might be five years away. Or ten. Tonight’s what matters, and tonight he’s satisfied us with his feast. He only has to raise a hand to wave away anxieties and allow the drinking to continue. We have become like animals in our individual ways, precisely as the brewer’s ballad says: goat drunk and lecherous; dog drunk and barking mad; bull drunk and looking for a brawl; pig drunk and obdurate. But mostly we are as drunk as post-horses—their thirsts are never satisfied—and so, for this evening at least, beyond anxiety.

We are, though, in the mood for music and for dancing. Young Thomas Rogers is our only piper, and our nightingale. He needs no persuading to pick up his instrument. At any chance, he fills his lungs, and empties them for us. He first drums up an uncourtly reaping rhythm with his foot and then commences with his holes and fingertips. We’ve heard his efforts many times before. When Thomas sits at night and practices, we can’t escape his failings and his strains no matter how hard we try to sleep. But then we cherish him. Without him we would never dance. So we egg him on tonight. What we do not expect is this second voice that’s joining him, that’s joining in with greater mastery behind our backs. It’s Mr. Quill, Mr. Earle. We’ll have to call him Mr. Fiddle now. He pushes forward with his ungainly walk, leading with his shoulder, not his chest. He finds a place to sit at Thomas Rogers’s side, lays the instrument across his knees and applies his bow to the strings. He first echoes, then ornaments, then commandeers what the piper tries to play.

Thomas Rogers does not look as pleased as Mr. Quill at the warmth of our applause. The piper loses confidence and face. But the fiddle’s voice—at least, when our visitor has settled himself on his backstool—asks both for our laughter and our tears at once. His tune is both glad to be unhappy and sad to be so gay. Quite soon the children come away from playing loggats, throw their last sticks at
the staff, and take to the barn floor to slide around on the loose straw to the music. Now the few remaining wild-heads of the village—the Derby twins, of course, but other stewards of misrule as well—start the dancing, taking their younger sisters and their nieces by the hands and swirling them. It is the married couples next. And finally our handful of unmarried girls step up, with great solemnity at first, but soon their cheeks are red with effort and not blushes. One of them, the one whose piety and prettiness is judged most spirited, will be our Lady of the Harvest. She’ll be our Gleaning Queen. We will choose her when the music has concluded, if that moment ever comes, if we allow it to. Tomorrow she will be the first to step into the vanquished barley field, to walk across the stub, to bend and find and save a grain against the colder times ahead.

Mr. Quill the fiddler is shaping us again, making us as congruous and geometrical with his melodies as he has done with his charts and ink. His dance is circular, then it is square; it’s forth-and-twenty, swing and stump; it’s reels and sets and thundering. The revelers are being asked to go beyond their normal selves, to be more liquid, actually. I am tempted to join in myself, though I’m a widower. But I dare not chance my smarting fingertips and palms amid such taking hold and hand gripping. I stand and watch with Master Kent, that other recent widower, swaying at my side. The women skirmish with the men, stamping feet and swirling kerchiefs. The mopsies and the lads are far too close. They’re holding wrists. They’re touching waists. It’s possible, in such a ducking light and with such happy havoc in command, that kisses are exchanged, and promises. We are a heathen company, more devoted to the customs and the Holy days than to the Holiness itself. We find more pleasure in the song and dance of God than in the piety. Thank heavens that we do not have a priest to witness it.

We should have guessed the spitting woman would arrive just at
the moment we were merriest. This is for me first sight of her. She’s standing at the gate of the barn, beyond the reach of our lights and keeping so still that she also seems beyond the reach of pipe and fiddle. But there is no doubting who she is, unless we have a ghostly visitor, one of our wives or daughters resurrected from her grave, left thin by death. She’s tinier than I expected, imposing in a smaller way than usual. But there’s the heavy velvet shawl I’ve heard about, and there’s the tufted, rudely shaven head. She looks as drenched as a pond-ducked witch or scold. “It’s Mistress Beldam,” Master Kent mutters to me, giving her a name I know will stick. Beldam, the sorceress. Belle Dame, the beautiful. The dancers have not seen her, though. It’s only when our fiddler sets aside his bow, drops his tune and rises from his stool to look across my neighbors’ heads toward our stubbled visitor that everybody stops and turns. She’s hardly visible. She’s little more than dark on dark, a body shape. We cannot see her eyes or face as yet, or make out the bloody scar across her naked head. She does not speak—perhaps we have imagined her; she is a specter summoned up by ale and dance. The mood has changed. It’s heavier. We were liquid; now we’re stones. The night is closing on a broken note.

We know we ought to make amends for shearing her. That’s why she’s standing there, awaiting us. She’s asking us to witness what we’ve done. I have a sense that some men in the throng might any moment offer her their hand, some women too, and lead her to our circles and our squares to swirl with us. For a moment, the temper of the barn is not that she has shamed our evening but that we’ve found our Gleaning Queen. We only need to bring her to the light and crown her there and then, and all is well. Another dream. In this, her hair is long and black again; her men are walking free, uncollared and uncuffed; our wooden cross is restored to holiness and draped in rosaries; and, no, we weren’t surprised by twists of smoke at dawn today; and there are doves. Yes, there are doves. They’re circling, white consciences on
wing. At first the sight of them is heart-lifting. But still they’re circling. They cannot find a place to feed. This is their hereafter. They’re searching for the gleaning fields, but there are none.

At the movement of the dancers, their lifting hands, the woman backs away, still facing us, not trusting us perhaps. She must know that if she hesitates the men will swarm round her like a cloud of gnats. It is only when she draws level with the gate that she turns toward it and the dark and goes forward, steps outside, and we are left to exchange, well,
sheepish
glances. We know the pipe and fiddle cannot play again. We cannot dance. We bid one another uncomfortable good nights, and hurry home to sleep the evening off, or lay awake, or worse.

I hope—like everyone—to find the woman when I leave. But I have better cause than them. Master Kent has asked me to. He says that I should bring her back, bring Mistress Beldam to the barn and let her pass the night with his straw bales as her mattress and a velvet shawl as coverlet. He does not count it proper that a woman, any woman, no matter what her felonies might be, should spend a night alone and unprotected from its dangers. I see him hesitate. He wants to specify what dangers there might be but does not think it seemly. There are no longer wolves to fear. We have not seen the traces of a wolf in living times. There are no bears or dragoncats. And Master Kent is not the superstitious sort that dreads the deeds of devils or spirits, of firedrakes or wood demons. There isn’t frost or snow, of course. It won’t be uncommonly cold tonight. What summer chill we can expect when the hours are small and the night is deep will not prove a danger to anybody sleeping wild and rough but only an inconvenience. Yet, having now seen the woman for myself and then observed the wisting in my master’s eye, I understand what outcome he must fear for her; what he admits to in himself, indeed; what I have felt and still am feeling; what every man among us—even brave and bloodless Mr. Quill—will be dreaming of tonight.

“Do what you can to make her safe,” he instructs me finally.

First I go to keep a promise at the pillory and cross. I will not be surprised to find Mistress Beldam there, attending to her men. Indeed, I pray that she is there. Among other things, I want her as a witness to my kindness. I leave the barn enlivened by my task, but my ardor is dampened straightaway. While we have been at the feast and dancing, deafened to the weather by the fiddle and the pipe, a greater Steward than Master Kent has noticed that our barley has been safely cut and stacked and told the heavens it is safe to rain. It’s midnight rain, the sort that in the darkness has no form until it reaches you, until it strikes with the cold and keen insistence of a silver-worker’s mallet.