Harvest Home Part 10

When we had seen them off for Danforth, with instructions to be back before nine, Beth and I put the dinner dishes in the dishwasher, then walked down the lane and through the meadow to the river, where we found the boat Amys had mentioned. We had brought along a blanket and a transistor radio, and Beth tuned in some music, sitting in the stern, while I turned the boat and began rowing upriver.

It was one of those days a happy man records for his mental posterity. Sunday afternoon, New England, summer's end. A dreaming landscape; faultless sky; dazzling clouds; bursting sunlight; river calm, placid, seductive in its peaceful turnings; the splash of water, creak of oarlocks. Birds singing along the sh.o.r.e; the play of light and shadow among the trees; a little music; your wife, whom you love. What might be called the ingredients for a perfect day.

I could tell Beth was in one of her reflective moods and I did not try to make conversation, but only gave myself up to the beauty of the afternoon. Along the sh.o.r.e, the oncoming autumn was showing itself, not outright, but secretly, in the smallest corners. There was a tang of smoke in the air, making a kind of uneven haze that seemed to lay a golden sheen over everything-water, trees, foliage-with the soft luminosity of a Turner painting. It was a special kind of ease and contentment that enveloped me as we followed the meandering course of the river for perhaps a mile, until we came within sight of Soakes's Lonesome. When we had got around several more bends, I saw on the opposite bank the Soakeses' jetty. Half a dozen ducks floated idly in the water, while on the landing the old man and the boys were hunched over some kind of activity. They looked up, eying us briefly as we pa.s.sed. I got a feeling of menace from this furtive appraisal, and as I glanced back the old man opened his knife and stropped the blade on his boot. Putting more force into my strokes until we were well past them, I looked back again to see one of them getting into the skiff.

I could hear the dull reverberation of the motor as we rounded the next bend, and I wondered if we were to be followed or in some way interfered with, but when the skiff appeared again it was heading for the Cornwall sh.o.r.e. Shortly we had the river to ourselves once more. I wiped my arm across my forehead, rested on my oars, and let the boat drift close to the bank, enjoying our solitary state.

The sun felt warm on my back and shoulders, and I stripped off my s.h.i.+rt, which Beth took and held in her lap. She still continued rapt in some kind of reverie, and I made no effort to disturb it. Once she looked at me with a trace of a smile; then she looked down again, watching her hand in the water. She was wearing a gold snake I had bought for her in Venice, and I saw a fish dart close to it, attracted by the bright gleam of the metal. Then Amys Penrose's flat-bottomed tub became a gondola and the river was the Grand Ca.n.a.l, the sky not American but Italian, and we were back in Venice, that summer seventeen years before, in 1955.

It had begun the previous winter, a bone-chilling one in Paris, where I was studying at the Sorbonne on the G.I. Bill. I picked Beth up on the grand staircase of the Louvre, under the "Winged Victory." She'd come over from London with a college chum she'd been sharing a flat with in Chelsea. I heard her reading from her catalogue: "The 'Winged Victory of Smothrace.'" Smothrace Smothrace, for G.o.d's sake; the opportunity was too good to let pa.s.s; I stopped and pointed out her error. Yes, she knew it was Samo Samothrace, but it always came out Smo Smothrace with her. The three of us spent the afternoon together, and then, out of my mind and over my budget, I invited them to dinner.

The other girl, Mary Abbott, went back to London alone and Beth stayed with me in my loft in the Rue du Bac. Sous les toits de Paris Sous les toits de Paris, and all very romantic and my bed was a lot warmer than it had been in some time. We saw the spring in, and spent a fortune keeping the rooms filled with lilacs, which she loved, and in June I bought a secondhand car, packed up my paints, and we worked our way down to the South of France, then into Italy. We lingered for days in the Uffizi in Florence, then went on to Venice, and finally to Greece.

We spent that winter in North Africa, where a steady stream of letters arrived for Beth, addressed in a firm, authoritative hand. Reverend Colby, Beth's father, was demanding that she return home. Hers was an unusual situation, and though she was not inclined to talk about it I gradually learned enough to put the puzzling pieces of her life into some sort of order.

She had been christened Bethany, after the town in Connecticut her mother had come from. Mrs. Colby had been rich, and her money enabled the Reverend to enjoy a style of living not permitted to most men of the cloth. Their house, in a suburb of a large New England city, was expensively furnished, but although Lawson Colby liked his creature comforts, he mentally donned a hair s.h.i.+rt, forcing his wife into a strict and regimented observance of Protestant virtues. Mrs. Colby had died of diphtheria when Beth was only two, and from then on Beth lived under the bitter and tyrannical eye of her father, who forced church at her on all occasions. What he raised was not a G.o.d-fearing child, but a G.o.d-despairing one.

After college, Beth had persuaded him to let her come to Europe with Mary Abbott, to "visit cathedrals," but now the year was up and he demanded that she return home. I had decided I was going to marry her, and had notions of what sort of reception this would meet with at the Reverend's Methodist hands. Bethany Colby marrying the son of an immigrant Greek from Jersey City-Catholic Greeks, at that. Raised in a happy home, I could appreciate Beth's basic needs. Being motherless, she felt rootless. She was not religious, she did not love her father. She had never experienced any warm stream of affection as a child, and after her mother's death the father had become a stricter parent-harsh, even-making sure that the minister's daughter didn't go wild. In the Puritan ethic of his Cotton Matherish forebears, to be happy was, by extension, to be sinful, and until we met I do not think Beth had ever been very happy. But there was this about her: she had the characteristics of the chameleon, which takes hue and color from its surroundings; stubborn though she might be at times, Beth was open to influence. I was a happy person, and by some subtle transference she, too, became happy. With me the minister's daughter went wild on the Left Bank and all the Reverend's decrees about Thrift, Work, Virtue, and the True G.o.d were tossed out the windows of our Paris loft.

It was impossible to toss the father as well, so we went home and faced the music, which at best proved discordant. The Reverend had heard tales of bohemian artists living in garrets; he did not deem me a suitable choice for a son-in-law. But by spring Beth's defiance of the old man was sufficient to elicit his agreement to our marriage if I would "settle down to some honest work."

We were married in June and moved into an apartment in Greenwich Village. I put the paintbrushes away, and found a job with Osborne & a.s.sociates. The brushes stayed put away for fifteen years.

Shortly after Kate was born, we took a larger apartment on the West Side, around the corner from Pepe's Chili Palor. Since Mrs. Pepe often baby-sat for us, we would return the favor, and it was while sitting for their daughter that I contracted the painful case of mumps that 'Cita was still apologizing for.

I swelled up, Beth nursed me, I deflated; and went back to Osborne & a.s.sociates, hating every day of it. But during those years Beth and I were happy together. I knew that partly she had married me in order to be free of Reverend Colby, and in many ways she had replaced him with me. Nows if she had no mother, she at least had two fathers. As Kate grew, Beth lavished on the child all the attention she herself had lacked. I could see what was happening from the beginning: that Kate was being smothered with a maternal blanket of the heaviest weave. When she was nine, she had her first asthmatic attack.

These began in the winter of our ninth year of marriage, when something happened to Beth, a breakdown whose origins were both deep-seated and obscure. She withdrew into another world. I thought at first she must be having an affair with some other man, but I was wrong. She came home one evening and announced that she wanted a divorce. She was going to leave and take Kate with her. No amount of reasoning on my part could sway her from this stubborn course, but a friend of ours at Columbia persuaded her to see a psychiatrist. The cause of her morbidity became quickly apparent, and I met with the doctor to learn what he had discovered. Beth had lacked a mother, which had led to a hatred of the father. I had replaced the father, and now her subconscious was transferring the hatred to me.

We got through it. She became whole again, became the Beth I had known, and we even joked about her having the nine-year itch. But there was still the problem of Kate's attacks, which no amount of medical treatment was able to help, which nothing had helped until we had come to Cornwall Coombe and the Widow Fortune.

I felt the keel of the boat strike something, and I opened my eyes. Beth was smiling at me. "We've run aground, darling."

The boat had nosed onto a sandy shoal, and I lifted an oar from the lock to push off. "No. Let's stay here a little," she suggested. I took off my shoes and socks, rolled up my trouser cuffs, and got out to pull the boat onto the shoal. I helped her ash.o.r.e and we clambered onto the bank, where we spread the blanket and lay down.

The river formed a small cove, a secluded inlet screened by shadblow bushes and overhung with willow branches. It was the perfect spot, a country idyll all its own. We had left the radio in the boat and the music came as though from far away. I felt a pastoral serenity and peace that communicated itself to me through the lazy drone of the bees working the patches of meadow flowers close by, the sunlight trembling on the pool below and flickering in the leaves overhead.

In the distance, I heard the sound of gunshots, and I realized we were very likely trespa.s.sing in Old Man Soakes's preserves. One of the boys was probably after squirrels in the woods. There were several more shots; then the air became still once more. We took off our clothes and slid down the clay bank into the water and swam, then lay on the shoal to dry ourselves off. Back on the bank, I moved the blanket even farther under cover, and we made love in G.o.d's great outdoors.

"What do you talk about when you and the ladies get together?"

"Oh, you know-girl talk."

"Mrs. Brucie and Mrs. Green are hardly girls." We had put our clothes on again, and were lying together on the blanket, I with my head back against a fallen log. Beth said, "Mostly we're talking about selling their quilts."

"Selling them?"

"Mm-hm. Remember Mary Abbott from Bennington? She's got that shop on Lexington, and I know if she put a couple in her window they'd sell in no time. I'm going to talk to her about it. And there's all that carved bone jewelry, and the dolls. There's a good market for that kind of handicraft work today. Look at the way they sell things from down in Appalachia."

I agreed it sounded like a good idea. "What else do you talk about?"

"Men."

"Come on."

"Don't you find the Widow fascinating?"

"Mm-hm."

"The things she knows. I don't mean just cooking and sewing, but all that herbal business and her cures." She was playing with the little red bag hung around my neck. "It's really working, huh? Let me see." She inspected my wart, then kissed my finger.

I leaned to brush a leaf that had fallen on her shoulder. As I pulled away again, she stopped me with her hand.

"Ned?"

"Mm?"

A look came over her face, one I did not immediately understand. "Would you like to have another child?"

"Us? We can't-"

She nodded eagerly. "The Widow says we might be able to. She's got a remedy. Wouldn't you like it-a baby brother for Kate?"

"Hey-wait a minute. Not so fast. What kind of remedy?"

"I don't know. One of these elixirs she makes. She says that often it works. Mrs. Thomas has wanted a baby for the longest time, and she couldn't have one, until the Widow had her and Mr. Thomas taking something. Now she's pregnant."

"Aren't we sort of old to start the nursery business all over again-even if the Widow's elixir worked?"

"We're not exactly ready for Sun City. I'm not about to go through the change of life. Kate will be married in no time-darling, she will will. And-"

"What?"

"I'd like to be a mother again. Once more, while there's still time. Oh Ned, I want it. Your child. A son."

I wasn't sure how I felt about it. I had put the idea out of my mind for so long that it felt like a completely new one. And what if the Widow failed? What if Beth's hopes were raised and we couldn't produce? And whose fault would it be? Beth with her obstetrical problems or me with my mumps? I suggested tests; let a medical man determine the case before- No, she said. Stubborn Beth. No doctor-the Widow.

"Well," I said. "Well." I grinned, then kissed her, a tacit submission to her wishes. I guessed the spare room could become a nursery, if between us we could provide an occupant. I kissed her again, and decided we had had the perfect afternoon. When we spoke of it later, it became That Day, one I've relived many times since; and I sometimes wonder if she has too.

I decided to go that evening to Saxony and talk to Mrs. O'Byrne about the slates for the studio roof. A sirocco-like breeze had come up when I left Beth and drove out along the Old Sallow Road, and the sun was dropping behind the cornfields on my left as I headed toward the Lost Whistle Bridge. Coming over the rise, I looked down on the panorama of the Tatum farm, its barn and sheds already becoming dark shapes on the hill. Across the road lay the edge of Soakes's Lonesome, with the river winding along its farther side.

Pa.s.sing the Tatum house, I noticed that the fire under Irene's soap kettle was cold. Figures were moving in the front parlor where the lighted windows cast their shadows on the porch. In the drive were several vehicles, and the Widow's little mare stood between the buggy shafts. Silently wis.h.i.+ng the ladies a pleasant evening of quilting, I continued along past the woods. When I pa.s.sed the next bend, I saw the peddler, Jack Stump, on his rig. I tooted the horn as I went by, and he waved. Glancing in the mirror, I saw him trundle the cart over the gully and pull it up among the trees.

I could feel the wind buffeting my car as I drove onto the covered bridge. There were still figures hunched over some work on the Soakeses' jetty, where the skiff was again tied up. Curious to see what they were doing, I stopped halfway across, took the binoculars from the glove compartment, and got out to look through the latticework that trussed the bridge.

Leaning on the railing between the cross-trussings, I adjusted my lenses and brought the group into close view. I recognized Old Man Soakes himself, and the boys I had fought with that morning. There were ducks in the water, and I realized they were not live ducks at all, but decoys, attached to strings. It was the manufacture of these fake birds that the Soakeses were engaged in, the father cutting canvas sections from a pattern, one of the boys sewing them together, another stuffing them with some sort of material. The one sewing was using a sailmaker's curved needle to st.i.tch up the seam along the back.

Twenty minutes later I was in Saxony, and I stopped at a drugstore and looked up the name O'Byrne. The drug clerk gave me directions and I located the house a short distance away.

Mrs. O'Byrne was amiable and friendly, and readily disposed to sell me the slates, which were piled out behind the garage. With the wind whipping her skirts, she took me out to view the slates, and she showed me where the breezeway had collapsed between the house and the "summer kitchen," as she called the large shed that had once been connected to the main structure.

"I figured when that rooftree came down, there wasn't any point in rebuildin'." Besides, she said, she was alone, and couldn't afford any household repairs. I decided the price of slates had just gone up. But they were the proper size and color, each drilled with holes for nailing, so I bought forty of them. When I had loaded them in the car trunk, I wrote out a check for the figure she asked.

Was I, she wondered, interested in old clocks? She had a particularly fine one which she would like to sell, a genuine signed Tiffany. I said I might be interested, and she took me into the house to show it to me.

The clock was a beauty, black onyx and ormolu, with works that made a pleasant ticking sound, and a delicate chime. I offered her a hundred and twenty-five dollars and she took it.

While I wrote out a second check, Mrs. O'Byrne quizzed me about life in Cornwall Coombe: how long had we lived there; did we raise corn; was our daughter in school there; did I know an old lady over there somewheres who birthed babies -she must be pa.s.sed away by now. No, I said, the Widow Fortune was very much alive. Well, Mrs. O'Byrne said, she was compet.i.tion for Dr. Bonfils, who lived here in Saxony. Yes, the doctor had treated our Kate several times.

Then: "Have you come across someone named Gracie Everdeen?"

Yes; in a way, I said. Did Mrs. O'Byrne know her?

"Indeed I did. She stayed with me most of one whole summer back some years ago." She spoke with interest of the girl, whom she immediately dubbed "that poor unfortunate creature."

"She was the most melancholy thing I ever saw. She just appeared one day, right there at the door. I was canning cherries, so it must have been late June. Usually I'm able to can all season as the various things come along, but just about that time I'd boiled up a mess of corned beef. I was carrying the kettle out to dump the water between the bricks when I slipped and scalded my foot. That would have put an end to my canning that year, except here came Grace Everdeen looking for work. I told her I couldn't pay much, but she could have board, and sleep in the little attic room. That was fine with her, she said.

"So she moved her few things up to the attic and looked after the house pretty well till I could get back on my feet again. She canned the quinces when they came in, and the tomatoes, and all. She was a good worker and a neat one but, as I say, melancholy."

Mrs. O'Byrne shook her head. The wind had caught a shutter and was rapping it against the clapboards; she asked me to oblige her by securing it. When I had done so, she continued her story.

"She'd been in some trouble, and she'd run off. I took it she'd done a deal of travelin' and was gone most of two years. But now she'd come back. She had a sweetheart over in the Coombe and she wanted him, though how she expected she might have him, looking as she did, I'll never know. In any case, there was another woman."

Who, I asked, might that have been? Mrs. O'Byrne did not know. "But she cursed the pair of them, and I could hear her up in the attic crying to break your heart. Then she wrote him a letter, which she asked me to check for spelling, demanding he come and meet her. I stamped and mailed the letter for her, and by well into July-we were canning peaches, I remember-there still wa'n't any answer. Then one day it come. That evenin' she went to meet him. What happened then I got from Mrs. Lake."

"Mrs. Lake?"

"Old Mrs. Lake that lived by the bridge. She's dead nine years at Easter, and the house was pulled down. In any case. She lived close by the Lost Whistle, as they call it 'cross river. Mrs. Lake heard and saw, and when she came to visit me, if I didn't see, I heard."

Mrs. O'Byrne having heard from Mrs. Lake, now I was to hear from Mrs. O'Byrne. Roger Penrose had ridden out on his horse to the bridge, where Grace was waiting for him on the other side, but neither of them, for unknown reasons, would cross to meet the other. Roger begged Grace to return over the river, while she demanded he come to her. But the meeting was a stalemate; Roger rode away without Gracie.

They continued to rendezvous through the summer, always in the evening and always with the same result. Thwarted, Roger became angrier and angrier with Grace, while she, standing at the bridge portal, shouted wild and pa.s.sionate pleas through cupped hands. It was to no avail; still the lovers did not see each other.

"Mrs. Lake said their voices echoed somethin' fierce through the bridge, and the pain of them two was somethin' terrible to hear, like wounded animals. In any case, raspberries came and went, and then we was into blueberries and damson plums, and by this time I was off my crutches, so I did up the gooseberries and currants from the fields, and that must have been September, for that's when gooseberries is ripe. One evening I decided to walk down to the bridge and have a look for myself. I left before Grace had redded up the dishes, and Mrs. Lake and I hid on her porch, with the light off, and here comes Gracie, with a scarf wrapped around her head, standing this side, while there he came ahorseback-I could hear the hoofs as he rode along the road, then cloppin' up on the approach. Then he stops and calls: 'Grace, come home!'

"Finally, he must have gotten mad beyond reason, for now over he came at a gallop. Grace tried to run, but he pulled alongside o' her and scooped her up right out o' the roadway, and carried her back across the bridge."

"Back to Cornwall?"

She sniffed. "Not likely. They went off onto the side of the road, but they was just there on the other side, for we could hear the horse whinnying in the orchard. 'Well,' I said to Mrs. Lake, 'if it come to country matters, I must give Grace her notice in the morning.'

"Then, what do you know, here comes Gracie afoot, back across the bridge, and he's riding off down the road. Her head was still wrapped in her scarf, and she was so unhappy I didn't have the heart to send her away. I brought her home and put her to bed. Next day the old lady comes."

"The Widow Fortune?"

"If that's how she's called. Rides up in a buggy, and Grace says can she use the parlor. Which I let her, even to permitting her to offer tea and such. I stayed upstairs, but I could tell the old lady was most sympathetic to Grace's situation-a kind soul, if you don't mind. Then she left."

Grace was now driven to the extremest measures. First she told Mrs. O'Byrne she would leave, then she swore she could not, then she didn't know what to do. In the end, however, she went away, never to return.

"'Twas the night of full moon, I remember that," Mrs. O'Byrne continued. "Grace went out again in the evenin', and that was the last I saw of her. She just left everything here and went. Never came back for her things, neither. Her sweetheart died, didn't he?"

I said yes, wondering how she had come by this particular piece of news. I related what I had learned from Worthy about the horse accident, and Mrs. O'Byrne's look was woeful as she opened the front door for me. "But you didn't say-is Grace there still? Does she fare well?"

"She's dead, too."

"Oh, no-you don't say! Poor thing. Still, I suppose she's better off. I wouldn't want to go through life suffering like poor Grace did."

I stowed the Tiffany clock in the trunk, along with the slates, while the wind, which had increased perceptibly, drove everything before it.

"Hurricane weather," Mrs. O'Byrne called. "Stop by again." She battled the door shut against the gale.

Driving back toward the bridge, I looked at the sky. The moon, round and white, shed a strange light over the landscape, while across its face drifted an intermittent cheesy curd, lending the white light a greenish-yellow cast. Lightning flickered bluely on the horizon, and a steady wind whipped the gra.s.s along the roadside.

The car tires beat a tattoo on the bridge planking as I crossed. Emerging from the farther end onto the Old Sallow Road, I could feel the wind take the car again. The air sizzled intermittently, as if wired with a network of faulty electrical connections. I made the turns slowly, keeping the car toward the center of the winding road as I pa.s.sed the Tatum orchard. I felt melancholy, thinking back over the story of Grace Ever-deen. I found it strange and sad, and a little mystifying.

The lights were still burning at Irene's house, and as I rounded the next bend, the embankment I had pa.s.sed earlier was now on my left, and above me I glimpsed an edge of tree-tops waving wildly in the wind. On the other side of the road, the cornfields were whipped to a frenzy; the wind drove leaves and debris along the rutted track leading up to the house, scuttling them around the wheels of the parked cars and the buggy, past the soap kettle, spiraling ashes and carrying all up the steps onto the porch itself, where the parlor windows were glowing.

I slowed as the wind buffeted the car again, and a large branch broke from a tree and flew onto the road. I swerved, then stopped. Leaving the motor running, I got out and pulled the branch to the side of the road. Straightening, I heard what sounded like a cry above the sound of the wind.

As I kicked the branch into the gully, lightning flashed again, a sharp electric current of blue that turned the sky a sickly green color. Then suddenly, above me, at the top of the embankment, materializing out of the darkness, there appeared what I immediately thought must be the Ghost of Soakes's Lonesome. Ghastly, eerie, the figure was a gray ashen hue, the white garments flapping like cerements, a specter returned from the grave. I have never seen a ghost, nor do I believe that ghosts exist, but at that moment I was absolutely certain I was looking at one. It seemed to glow against the lurid sky, hovering some twelve feet above me, the body cut off by the edge of the embankment, head upraised, arms outstretched. I tried to tell myself I was imagining all this, but there it stood, a haggard, silvery shape, like some ghoul risen from the dead.

It turned on me the most terrible countenance I had ever seen. An appalling face, the flesh was as white as the clothes, except for the dark recesses of the eyes and the red, grinning mouth. It was this grin that made it seem more horrible, scarcely a smile at all, but the parody of one. A poor, painted smile, witless, demented, grim, the inane smile of a rag doll. Dark gouts of liquid erupted from the corners of the mouth while one hand-feeble, supplicating-lifted in a pitiful gesture and tore at the grin, as though to strip it away.

Then the haggard thing performed a grotesque reel, a dance of agony, twirling slowly, slowly, head once more thrown back to the night sky.

In another moment it had disappeared, vanished as though, in the tradition of ghosts, it had dematerialized. I ran and shut off the car motor, then laboriously made my way up the embankment, using rocks and projecting roots to clamber up the steep incline and onto the gra.s.sy plateau at the top.

There was nothing, only the swath of wind-whipped gra.s.s, the edge of the woods beyond, and, beyond that, darkness. I called out. No answer came, and no sign at all of the white apparition.

The clouds sc.r.a.ped across the face of the moon. Suddenly bright and s.h.i.+ny as it moved slowly toward the west, it again poured a dazzling white over the dark landscape. I thought how big and bright and s.h.i.+ning it was, and how far away, noting its visible geography, its clearly delineated craters, mountains, deserts, seas. Again I lowered my gaze, taking one last look for that other, impossible shape I had seen. And standing there, listening to the wind, I felt sure this was no ghost, no supernatural creature, but something as real as the moon itself, real enough to have been human and alive.'

12.

Real enough; but had it been alive? Or was I falling under the influence of Cornish witch tales and charms? I thought of telling Beth of the strange apparition, then, remembering the old trouble, and how easily influenced she was, I decided against it. Better to let the village weave its more salutary spells, whose good effects were so clearly already at work upon her. I was persuaded that it was better to leave my tale of the Ghost of Soakes's Lonesome for another, more appropriate time.

The next day, Monday, I worked in the studio sanding the gesso panel I would use for my painting of the covered bridge. When Worthy came, I interrupted my work to help him tackle the roofing job. He was moody again today, with little to say regarding the excursion to Nonesuch Farm, other than that Kate had enjoyed it. I made no allusion to the strange event of last night, and between us we limited ourselves to the scantest of small talk until Beth called us to come in. We ate lunch from folding tables in the bacchante room so we could watch the replays of the Olympic events. Mark Spitz had captured another gold medal, and they were saying he would take an even seven and make Olympic history; I wished him the joy of all that gold.

When we had eaten, I left Worthy to complete the roofing job alone and, taking my water-color equipment, I set out for the Lost Whistle Bridge. On a sudden thought, I pulled in at the Pettinger farm to have a word with Worthy's mother and father. The place wasn't much by anybody's standards, not "all-electric" like the Hookes's, and without indoor plumbing. Like the rest of Cornwall Coombe, the Pettingers had planted corn wherever the ground might bear it. There was a well and a springhouse, a chicken run, and a barn. If Fred Minerva was jokingly referred to as the biggest hard-luck farmer in the community, Wayne Pettinger surely was the poorest. He had two other sons to help him with the work, but it quickly became evident that he begrudged the time "the boy" was giving to others, myself included.

Both of them, the mother and the father, had the tired, careworn look of the workaday farmer fighting a losing battle against the soil, and neither seemed inclined to discuss Worthy's trouble when I bearded them in the kitchen, but only sat bleakly and with unswerving gaze as they heard me out. I told them I felt that Worthy should be given a chance, that a great disservice would be done in stopping his schooling, Mr. Pettinger was angry and adamant. The boy was full of fool notions. Theirs was a poor farm, but with seven years of Worthy's being Harvest Lord it could become a rich one. Men would come and work it for him and not charge for labor; it could be the place they'd always dreamed it might be. Honor had been conferred; but no, the boy didn't want honors, he wanted to be off with them hippies over to Danforth. Mr. Pettinger d.a.m.ned left and right: d.a.m.ned machinery, d.a.m.ned modern methods, d.a.m.ned folks who wasn't satisfied with what they had but was so greedy they had to have more. Kids today didn't know how well-off they was.

He turned to Mrs. Pettinger. "It's your fault, givin' him learnin'. There's where the trouble starts-never should've let him go to school." He clumped out to the barn, leaving me facing his wife, whose eyes were now streaming.