Harvest Home (22 page)

I pictured again the first time I had seen him, the unknown giant with the hoe in the tilled field. Now, as then, he seemed the human manifestation of the growing process, the descendant of the ancient yeoman who works his land and lays by his crops, who hopes for the best and will take the worst, whose lot in life, good or bad, comes from the land.

He smiled warmly and clapped me on the shoulder. “I’ve got to be getting back to work. Sophie’s mightily appreciative of that drawing. We both thank you.”

I said I was glad it had pleased her, and told him of her plan regarding the portrait. Justin smiled. “Well, now, I don’t know as I’d make much of a subject. You want me to put on a coat and tie and come sit in your studio?” I explained my method of work, that I would begin some sketches when he had the time, and that I would like to pose him somewhere here on the farm. I would paint at my portable easel, and when he wasn’t available I could work at home.

Almost in spite of himself, a light had sprung into his eye. I could see he was both touched by Sophie’s gesture and flattered that I would paint the portrait. He shook my hand warmly, and as I looked at his honest face it seemed I saw his honest heart.

He moved down the drive to the pear tree he had set in the ground. He took the shovel leaning against it, and for a moment his hand grasped the slender trunk. I decided then and there that this was how I would paint the farmer Justin Hooke: beside the newly planted pear tree.

I turned and started along the drive to my car, watching the long rows of drying corn as they passed my line of vision. Then something caught my eye and I stopped. At the head of one of the rows, leaning against the broken face of a rock, I saw a little figure. At first I thought it must be Missy’s doll, or one like it; then I realized it was something else. I picked it up and looked at it. It was about eight inches tall and, though of the doll family, it was entirely different. For while Missy’s gaga was merely a child’s plaything, this clearly was something far more extraordinary. It looked like a kind of totem, a fetish of some sort, a little corn god.

In a cornfield? The idea seemed ridiculous, and I wondered if some superstitious farmer, jealous of Justin, was trying to put a country hex on him. I looked back to the barnyard where the men were still working. No one had seen me stop. Tucking the doll inside my jacket, I hurried on my way.

It had been my intention to go to the covered bridge to see whether my true impressions of it had been reflected in paint, or whether I was doing nothing better than a calendar-type reproduction. Driving out along the Old Sallow Road, however, and passing the nearer edges of Soakes’s Lonesome, I came across the Widow Fortune’s buggy parked on the shoulder of the road. A short distance beyond, I saw her black-clad figure making its way through the grass bordering the woods. I tooted my horn and would have passed, but she waved for me to pull over.

“Hello,” I called, getting out.

“Hello yourself. Faired off nice, didn’t it? How’s your bridge picture?”

“Well, it’s a picture of a bridge. Can’t say as it’s much more.”

“You’re gettin‘ awful New England in your twang.”

I crossed the gully to meet her, looking into the splint basket on her arm. “What are you after today?”

“Mushrooms is up.”

“Are they?”

“All over. Rain brings ‘em. Come along, if you like. I’m on a reg’lar expedition.”

I ran back to the car, took my keys from the ignition, and slid the little corn doll into the glove compartment and locked it. I locked the doors, then joined the Widow at the edge of the woods. Her face looked warm and moist, and I detected a note of excitement in her air as, with her usual spry step, she started off among the trees, letting me catch up as I might, she with her head down, so that her keen eye should miss no needed herb or plant.

“Elecampane’s abundant this year.” She bent and broke a sprig from a plant, and held it for me to sniff. “Lovely smell. But we’re not lookin‘ for elecampane today.”

“How about toadstools? Can you tell the difference?”

“No difference. Toadstool’s a moniker, nothing more. Find an ugly mushroom, folks think it’s something a toad might sit on. But they’re all mushrooms. Trick is in knowing which from which.” She proceeded along, from time to time using her spectacles like a lorgnette, for a closer study of the terrain.

“What do you do with elecampane?” I asked.

“That’s what Fred Minerva’s takin‘.”

“What other ingredients?”

She laughed and gave my shoulder a knock. “That’d be tellin‘, wouldn’t it? It’s not sal volatile—you can bet your boots.”

I hadn’t imagined she would give a recipe for medicine any more than she would for hoecake, unless she left one of the ingredients out. She saw a tree around whose base had grown a series of shelf-like formations, pale brown in color, and she hurried to it, knelt, and examined the growths with her hands, nodding, and muttering anxiously to herself. She rummaged in her basket, and when I asked what she was looking for, she “Drat”ted and said she’d forgotten to bring along a knife. I lent her my penknife, and watched as she scraped around the outer edge of several of the growths, catching the parings in her hand. These she slipped into a scrap of tinfoil paper, made a twist, and dropped it in her basket. We proceeded on again, and she stopped here and there, once to scrape some sulfur-colored lichens from the bole of a tree, another time—producing Jack Stump’s hatchet from her basket—to hack up some pale roots she had unearthed under the layer of decayed leaves and humus around a strange-looking shrub. A novice in the mysteries of herb-gathering, I was fascinated by the variety of material that struck her eye. Once, when she was on her hands and knees feeling about under the pine needles, she pulled me down with her and brought my ear close. Hear, she said; listen to them, they’re at work. There were sounds of minute scurryings under the needles, and she pulled them apart to show me the little beetles and worms crawling about, pale, wet, segmented, decomposing nature as fast as they could—pulverizing leaves, grass, roots, bark, branches, cones, everything— forming the new matter that would fertilize the next generation of growth in the woods.

We went on, farther into Soakes’s Lonesome. When I mentioned the Soakeses, and wondered if we might be considered trespassers, the old lady cried “Faugh!”—an expletive plainly denoting her contempt for the savage ‘cross-river’ tribe.

We walked along a path where the leaves had drifted in thick windrows, our feet making shushing sounds among them, while up in the tree branches birds sang. I was unfamiliar with this section of the woods, and I wondered in what direction lay the tall pine, with the blazed path of the grove of white birches. Once I almost started to confide in her the secret of the skeleton in the hollow tree, and of the gray ghost I had seen, but again I feared being laughed at, and most of all by her.

Suddenly, distant shotgun fire reverberated through the trees, a series of muffled detonations. “Devils,” the Widow muttered. “There’s your Soakeses, over t’the river. Killin‘. You a hunter? No? Good. Too many hunters.”

Now she uttered a little excited cry and dashed ahead of me. When I caught up with her, she was standing beside a large tree and looking down where, close to the base, grew a ring of mushrooms that had sprung up through the ground covering. She quickly knelt and began breaking the stems at the base and handing them to me. I examined one: though it was handsome, it certainly looked like the most poisonous thing nature could provide. The cap was about four inches across, a brilliant red, with small, warty bumps on it. The surface felt sticky, and bits of pine needles had adhered. The stem was white and pulpy-feeling, and the gills on the underside were a delicate formation of pale white. I had never seen the old woman so excited; her face was flushed from her exertions as she demolished the ring little by little. Then she carefully wrapped each mushroom in a piece of tinfoil. When she had finished, she gave me her hand and I helped her to her feet.

“There,” she exclaimed with pleasure, dusting her dress and handing me the basket to carry. “I knew we’d find some fly today, if we persevered.”

“Fly?”

“Those,” pointing to the mushrooms, “are fly agaric.” They were called “fly,” she explained, because they were once used to kill flies and other insects. If it would kill flies, how about humans? I asked. She laughed.

“I expect it could, you eat enough of them. Or at least they’d make a body mighty sick.”

“What do you use them for?”

“A woman always thinks it takes two to keep a secret, but I’m here to say I think it takes one.” She touched my arm and we proceeded back along the way we had come. At one point, we passed a spot where some more mushrooms grew; she pointed them out but scorned touching them. “Now there’s some little mites that only a fool’d touch.” Small and white, with dome-shaped caps, these were known as the Destroying Angel, and were deserving of their name. As for the red-topped beauties in the basket—those, she hastened to say, properly used could cure chilblains or, as in the case of Ferris Ott’s father, to halt his attacks of St. Vitus’ dance; Farmer Ott had had to miss church four Sundays in a row. “You and Beth are gettin‘ to be quite the churchgoers,” she observed as we walked along. I said we were finding it pleasant, that I hadn’t been to church since I was a boy, and as for Beth—

She laughed. “She told me she’s a nonbeliever. Still, nonbelievers
can
become believers.”

“Old dogs and new tricks?”

“Why not?”

“I think Beth believes only in what she knows for sure to be true.”

The widow had been searching about her as we went along, now stopping to peer intently around a clump of ferns, now upon the ground. “What is truth?” she demanded finally.

“That which exists.”

“Many things exist. Things beyond—”

“The ken of man?”

“And others even within his ken. Depends on how broad a ken a pusson’s got.” She gave the word “ken” an emphasis that caused me to pay closer attention. “Here in this village, in this little place where folks seldom go beyond its boundaries, they tell themselves they understand the world and life. Coming from the city, you perhaps understand more.”

“Possibly.”

“But not all.” Her next question startled me. “You believe in the psychics?”

“Like Missy Penrose?”

“Missy, and other—”

“Phenomena? It’s possible.”

“Phenomena can be realized, too. By those who—seek.” Again the little snick of emphasis. “Take yourself, now. You’re a man of perception. Seein’s not necessarily believin‘. There’s many kinds of reality, y’know. Many kinds o’ things.” She seemed to be leading the conversation, as if making some subtle probe of my nature. “It’s a matter of understandin‘ things that maybe seem impossible to understand.”

“How?”

“By a pusson openin‘ himself up to the possibility.” Again she shot me a look to see how I was absorbing this.

“How would a person do that?”

“There are ways.”

“Would you show a person?”

The familiar twinkle behind the glasses. “What makes you think I could?”

It was my turn to shoot her a look. “I think you could.”

She laughed and gave me a thump on the back. “Flattery’s a poisoned gift, they say.” She brushed some strands of cobweb from her skirts where her scissors usually hung. I pricked up my ears at her next words. “Still,” she said in a barely audible tone, “an ‘experience’ might be arranged.”

“How’s that?”

“I said an ‘experience.’ ”

“When?” My response was too eager, too forthright. I suddenly realized we were dealing in subtleties. Again she used her glasses lorgnette-style to peruse the ground carefully.

“Who knows?” she said at last. “A pusson mustn’t go too fast. The sphinx in Egypt’s been there a long time but no one’s solved its riddle yet. Not even the great Napoleon. ‘Course, some folks is
smarter
than others. If they was presented with a sphinx, they might be able to solve the riddle.”

“They?”

“
They
.”

“Me?”

“Maybe.” She replaced her glasses and her glance was mischievous as she picked up her skirts and went by me. “A man must learn to discover what is possible.”

“Would that be the ‘experience’?”

“You got too many questions.” I could hear the humor in her voice. “Come along.”

The next few days brought more intermittent rain followed by a cold snap. We turned the heat on for the first time since our occupancy, and steam clanked through the labyrinthine pipes, rattling the radiators in furious bursts of energy, but producing little heat. The thermostat, of ancient vintage, was found to be defective, and I called a heating crew from over on the turnpike, asking them to replace it with a new one. Meanwhile we used the fireplaces. These proved to be defective as well, for in each room—the living room, the bacchante room, and our bedroom—more smoke seemed to come down the flue than went up.

Clearly what was needed was Jack Stump, whom I remembered hearing brag that he was handy in the matter of chimneys. He was long overdue to have returned, and I biked down the River Road to the bait shack where he lived.

Jack Stump had never claimed the virtues of homemaker, and his poor dwelling appeared to be in the same sorry state as when he had first taken tenancy back in March, after the spring floods. I could see a watermark girdling the battened sides about halfway up, and I wondered why the shack hadn’t been carried away altogether. The lawn was weeds, with cans and other debris scattered everywhere. At one side was a windowless shed where he probably stowed his rig, but the door was padlocked when I investigated. I knocked at the shack door, and got no reply. I knocked again, then called; still no reply.

I would have to tackle the chimneys myself. I turned my bike around and pedaled back up the road, pulling over to the side as a red Volkswagen came toward me from the other direction. I recognized Jim Minerva, who waved as he passed. What was he doing down on the River Road when he should be working at the grocery store? Playing hooky, maybe, and getting in a bit of fishing.