Mrs. Zalmon meanwhile had drawn Kate to her and was explaining the calendar of yearly festivals celebrated in the village. First came Planting Day, some of which Kate had briefly witnessed. Next was Spring Festival, then Midsummer’s Eve, the Agnes Fair, the Days of Seasoning, and finally the four days of Harvest Home, including the Corn Play and Kindling Night.
“What’s the Corn Play?” Kate asked.
“Sakes, child, it’s just a play. It comes at the huskin’ bee.” Mrs. Zalmon looked over to Justin. “Yonder is the Harvest Lord, Mr. Justin Hooke, and the Corn Maiden, Mistress Sophie Hooke.”
“It’s very old, Kate, our Corn Play,” Justin said. “I guess there’s been the play before there was a Cornwall Coombe, even. It was brought from the old country, and it goes back to the olden times, isn’t that so, Widow?”
“What’s it about?”
Justin looked to the Widow, who said, “Why, the Play tells the story of the growin’ of the corn. You’ve never heard that story, have you, Kate? Sophie, run and bring the quilt from the chest at the foot of my bed.”
As Sophie went on the errand, Maggie passed me with a tray of empty coffee cups, and I followed her into the kitchen.
“Ned—hi!” she said gaily, brushing my cheek with her lips. “I haven’t had a chance to talk with you. You’re drawing—let’s see.”
I showed her the sketch of Sophie. “Oh, Ned, it’s lovely.” It was not, I felt, an offhand compliment. She carefully studied the head, which in a rough, sketchy way captured something of Sophie’s glowing character. Maggie rinsed the glasses and one by one set them on the drainboard. I pocketed my sketchbook and took a dishtowel.
“Ned, I don’t think I’ve said how nice it is to have you here. It’s nice for the village, of course, but I mean for us—Robert and myself.” She spoke with an easy warmth, and I could not doubt her sincerity. “I hope you didn’t think I was unfriendly that first day. We’re not used to visitors here. But I told Robert that evening the best thing that could happen would be for you to buy that house. So you see, it’s really from selfish motives I’m saying this. We need you here, we really do.” She turned off the tap and dried her hands on the other end of the dishtowel.
“Hey, isn’t that bad luck?”
She laughed. “I’m not superstitious. There’re enough others around here for that.”
“Maggie, how did her husband die?” I inclined my head toward the other room.
“Clem Fortune? Oh, dear. It was a tragic thing. Of course, it happened long before we came back here—” She broke off, tidied her hair, stared out the window. “He killed himself, accidentally. With an axe. He’d gone out to Soakes’s Lonesome to cut a tree, and the axe slipped. Gashed him terribly in the thigh, and he must have gotten lost in there somehow—it’s easy to do—and before he found his way out again, he’d bled to death.”
A figure stood in the doorway. I turned, saw the Widow. She nodded, hands clasped over her black apron. “Aye. He was like a tree, Clemmon was, and like a tree he cut himself down. Ironwood tree. Never did find out what he wanted with ironwood. Come along, if you want to see the quilt.”
I glanced at Maggie, then laid down the dishtowel and followed the two women into the living room. A giant quilt was spread out on the sofa back, while the guests stood around admiring it. The Widow invited us to draw nearer, settled her spectacles on the bridge of her nose, and began describing the various personages and events that had been stitched in bright-colored pieces. “Now, Kate, here’s himself, the Harvest Lord. Here’s his crown, all made of cornhusks, and his red cloak.” She traced the outline of the figure, immense, stalwart, strong, wearing a diadem of husks and a long bright mantle, with a colorful, short-skirted costume beneath. There was power in the figure; enormous vitality seemed to radiate from it.
By his side was a female figure, surrounded by others in the act of lifting a veil from her face. Another stood by with her crown. This was the Corn Maiden and her court. It was the Corn Maiden who, mated to the Harvest Lord, caused the corn to grow.
Standing beside Justin, Sophie listened with both gravity and dignity. She caught me watching her, and her serious expression changed into a bright smile, as if to say, Isn’t it all silly? The Widow was pointing out other symbols: the rain which nourished the earth, the moon which told when the planting must be accomplished, the sun urging the stalks up through the soil.
She described the rest of the participants as well: the Harvest Fool, in his funny corn clothes, looking rather like a medieval jester, and the Young Lord—he who, by Missy Penrose’s choice, would be played by Worthy Pettinger.
Beth asked whose hands had stitched the quilt originally, and the Widow replied that it had been made by the wife of old Gwydeon Penrose, who had founded the original settlement. Not by herself, of course: almost all the village dames had worked on it. No need to mention that this was more than three hundred years ago, and that this quilt was a copy of another, even older, which had remained in old Cornwall. Of course, in that quilt there wasn’t any corn; corn hadn’t been known in England till after Columbus’s New World discovery. Before that it was just wheat and rye and such; but still they’d had a word, “korn,” signifying the various kinds of grain.
When we had admired the workmanship again, Sophie carefully folded the quilt and bore it off to its storage place. Beth sent me for the box of scraps and soon thereafter the Widow’s sociable began breaking up.
When we had made our goodbyes and thanked our hostess for her hospitality, we went along. Going down the walk, I saw a doll lying on the lawn; then, in the corn patch, a furtive movement between the rows. As we got in the car, the child Missy Penrose stepped out and snatched up the doll. Then, scraping a stick along the fence pickets, she made a noisy clatter as she went away up the street.
11
THE STUDIO HAD TURNED out fine. The skylight provided good illumination, there were shelves aplenty for my art books, storage space for my paints and brushes, racks for my canvases and larger drawing pads. Plaster casts hung on the white walls: a foot, a nose, a giant eye; above these a mask of Danton, guillotined, which I had bought in Paris years ago.
I painted for an hour, immersed in my work, until I heard Beth announcing the roast was done. I rinsed my brushes and shook them off at the sink, then washed my hands. Kate shouted up to the roof overhead, where Worthy was hammering, inviting him to eat with us. “Hey,” I called to him, “there’s a leak down here.” I kicked a bucket under the pipe to catch the persistent drips, and as I dried my hands I noticed how the wart on my finger was shrinking. I slipped out the little red felt bag the Widow had hung around my neck a week ago, wondering what secret Cornish charm she had put into it that caused warts to disappear.
I called to Worthy to come down from the roof and went into the kitchen with Kate.
“What’s the matter with Worthy, Daddy? He’s been so glum lately.”
“Don’t know, dear. Maybe he’s got problems.”
“Don’tcha think he’s good-looking?”
“Very.”
I fingered the back of Kate’s neck. “You getting a crush?”
“Come on, Daddy. Mommy, when can I have a date?”
“Ask your father, dear.”
“Daddy?”
“I think you’d better take that up with your mother, sweetheart.”
“I could go to the movies with a boy, couldn’t I?”
I thought the interest in the opposite sex a healthy sign, and decided Kate was beginning to come out of her shell. “When you get asked, I’m sure your mother’ll let you go to the movies.”
We sat down to dinner, Beth and I at the ends of the table, Kate between us on one side, Worthy on the other. Since coming to Cornwall, we had more or less adopted the habit of the village, which was to have the main Sunday meal in the afternoon. Standing over the large platter of roast beef, I sliced off the end cut that Beth preferred, laid it on a plate, and passed it along to Kate for vegetables. “Worthy, ho
w do you like your meat? Rare?”
“I like it well done, too.”
The other end usually went to Kate; I looked at her and she said quickly, “Oh, that’s good, because we like ours rare—right, Daddy?”
I served Kate, then myself, and pulled up my chair. When we had begun, I quizzed Worthy as to the condition of the studio roof. He had ripped out the section of broken slates, but said that the understructure showed no signs of dry rot; all that was needed was to replace the slates. Where, I asked, did one buy them? He thought a minute, then remembered a woman over in Saxony whose breezeway had collapsed in a snowstorm last winter. The woman had not rebuilt, and he thought possibly she might still have the used slates, which would be better than buying new ones. Her name was Mrs. O’Byrne.
The talk got around to gardening, and I informed the table of my intention to plow up the meadow next spring and plant vegetables. Worthy instantly became excited, and said he would bring his tractor around. We got into a discussion of organic gardening, and he described the kind of operation some friends of his had over in the neighboring town of Danforth. Like ourselves, they, too, had come from the city, and had pooled all their money and resources to form a commune. They had bought a defunct place which they rechristened Nonesuch Farm, and though the townsfolk called them hippies and weren’t being helpful, they hoped in two years’ time to put it on a paying basis.
“I’m going over there this afternoon, if you’d like to see it.”
Another time, I suggested; I had plans for Beth and myself. But perhaps Kate might enjoy the ride. I signaled Beth, who had opened her mouth to protest; she quickly picked up the cue and consented.
“Back to school soon?” I asked him.
“Yes, sir.”
“Are you looking forward to that?” Beth said.
“Yes, ma’am.” He was in his last year of high school, and, as he had told me, hoped, against his father’s wishes, to enter agricultural school next fall. He had been working hard to earn the money, and had been studying nights, “when Pa doesn’t catch me.” As the conversation continued, I watched him closely. His moodiness, habitual of late, seemed to have washed off at the kitchen sink, and he laughed and joked with Kate, who, seated across from him, kept plying him with various dishes. Perhaps the Widow was right, perhaps he just needed more feeding.
I asked him what the latest village news was. Not much, he replied; never any news in Cornwall Coombe. Mrs. Mayberry was ailing, wouldn’t last till Harvest Home; Mrs. Thomas was going to have a baby, probably before next Tithing Day; Elsie Penrose, the librarian’s daughter, was going to be courted by Corny Penrose, her second cousin on her father’s side. Corny had given Elsie a cob.
“Mrs. Thomas is going to have a baby? How wonderful!” Beth exclaimed. “Why is Elsie getting a cob from Corny Penrose?”
Worthy said it was an old village custom; when a boy was interested in a girl he sent her a corn ear, and if she accepted his attentions she husked the ear and returned it; if she wasn’t interested she sent it back unshucked. Sometimes a girl, if she was bold enough, would send an ear to a boy. But whatever ears might be sent, the results had to wait until the crops were in.
“Has anybody sent you a cob?” Kate asked.
“Not yet.”
She looked relieved and began relating what she had learned from the Widow’s quilt concerning the Corn Play. Worthy’s face darkened. “That’s silly stuff.”
By diligent questioning, Kate found out a little more about the choosing of the Harvest Lord and the Corn Maiden. Since the original Agnes Fair, the Harvest Lord had always been picked on that day. He would be crowned with honors the following year at Spring Festival, when the villagers would bring him presents. Then, during the next seven years, he would be given all sorts of privileges, including free communal labor to work his fields and farm. And at some point during that time, he would select a Corn Maiden to reign with him.
“Is it always a husband, who chooses his wife?” Beth asked.
No. The village had been surprised when Justin had married Sophie, then picked her for his Corn Maiden. Usually it was a single girl. When the Corn Play was given, in the Grange hall, the new Corn Maiden would be crowned.
Beth and Kate cleared the table and brought in dessert and coffee. When they were seated again, Kate asked, “Worthy, you’re going to be the new Harvest Lord in the play, aren’t you? Who’ll you pick for Corn Maiden?”
I exchanged a look with Beth: bold as brass, our daughter. Worthy frowned and didn’t answer; he wasn’t interested in all that.
“Do they have square-dancing at the husking bee?”
“Sure.”
“Can you square-dance?”
“Sure.” But he didn’t like doing it. Square-dancing was old-fashioned, for old fogeys who lived in the past. He didn’t want to live in the past; he wanted to live in the here and now. His brows were drawn down in a gloomy line as he toyed with his napkin. “Mr. Deming carrying on like that at the fair. All I was doing was having some fun, but you’re not supposed to bring a tractor on the Common. You’re not supposed to play on the shinny pole. Old geezers like him don’t think anything’s funny. The minute you do different or act different, people talk. It makes you stand out, and people around here don’t want to stand out.”
“Do you?”
“Well, I don’t want to be like everyone else. There’s no point in doing things just because other people do them, is there? I think it’s crazy doing them their way just because it’s their way. Look at Gracie Everdeen.”
“What about Gracie Everdeen?” I put down my fork and prepared to listen.
“I don’t know, really. It all happened when I was small. But there’s been lots of talk.”
“What kind of talk?”
“They say she went crazy.”
Gracie Everdeen, a product of the overly mixed bloodlines of the village? “Was she a Penrose?”
“I don’t know, sir. She may have been. Almost everybody is, one way or another. She was supposed to marry a Penrose.”
“She was?”
“They were engaged, then she ran off.”
“But she came back, didn’t she? She’s buried in the cemetery—or out of it, rather. Why is that?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
“Who was she engaged to?”
“Roger Penrose.”
Ah, Roger Penrose the bone-carver. “Did he marry someone else?”
“He died.”
“How?”
“He got killed jumping his horse. A broken neck, I think. Like I say, it all happened a long time ago. Before—”
“Yes?”
He shrugged. “Before I was old enough to remember.” He glanced at the clock on the wall. “Gee—it’s getting late—”
“Don’t you want dessert?” Beth said.
“Maybe we’d better get started,” he suggested quickly and I had an idea he was trying to extricate himself from a conversation he was sorry he’d begun in the first place.
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 shore; 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 shore, the oncoming autumn was sho
wing 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, eyeing us briefly as we passed. 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 shore. 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 shirt, 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 Canal, 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, for God’s sake; the opportunity was too good to let pass; I stopped and pointed out her error. Yes, she knew it was Samothrace, but it always came out 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.