She entered with the others and presently the bell stopped. Amys Penrose came out, closed the doors behind him, and went down the street toward the Rocking Horse Tavern. I drove past the north end of the Common, where a large pile of debris was being assembled for the Kindling Night celebration; then I parked in front of the drugstore and went in. Except for the boy behind the soda fountain, the place was empty. “What’s going on over at the church?” I inquired. The boy shrugged and gave me a peculiar look. I walked out and, continuing up the street toward the post office, I caught various looks, and had several backs offered to me, which made me think of the shunning of the Pettingers when they had come to the Grange with their pumpkins.
Approaching the entrance to the post office, I received dark and sullen stares from several men lounging in the doorway, and when I attempted to pass, Constable Zalmon came to the door and blocked my way.
“Sorry, son, closed today.”
“Is this a holiday?”
“Nope. Just closed.”
The coldness of his tone told me the frost was on the pumpkin; and not only in the fields. Taking a quick glance over to the church, I proceeded along the sidewalk toward Penance House. I could hear the men’s voices behind me. I leaned against a telephone pole, waiting. They were watching me, I could tell. When I glanced up, they deliberately turned away, focusing their attention on the closed church doors. I slipped up the walk to Penance House, ducked around the corner, and moved quickly across the yard to the side of the barn.
I had not been there since the day of the Agnes Fair, when Missy had pointed her bloody finger at me. There were several outbuildings scattered around, and, a short distance away, what looked like an abandoned hatchway set into the earth. The double doors were secured with a heavy chain and rusted padlock. I wondered what the doors led to.
Across the way was the rear of the post office. There was only one window, with a heavy latticework of metal screening over it. I crossed the lawn separating the two properties and crouched under the window, listening for the sound of voices. There was none. I stood and peered through the grille.
The room was small and sparsely furnished: the Constable’s desk with a wooden swivel chair, askew on a square of worn carpeting, and a folding cot along one wall; on it sat Worthy Pettinger. His hands lay listlessly in his lap, and he looked pale and harried. I ran my nail over the screening; the boy started, then came to the window and opened it.
“You all right?” I asked. He nodded. “What are they going to do with you?” He shrugged and jammed his fists in his pockets, returning my gaze evenly but saying nothing.
“Listen, son. I’m sorry. I guess I’m the one who got you in this jam.” He shook his head again. “They saw your letter. Tamar steamed it open; that’s how they knew where to find you.”
“You told them.”
“No—no, I didn’t, Christ—”
“How did they know which letter to steam open? Why would they look for a letter from John Smith if someone hadn’t told them? Nobody knew ’cept you and me.”
I was perplexed. “I can’t say, boy. But I swear I didn’t tell them.”
“It doesn’t matter.” He turned away, walked to the desk, and stared down at the tray of food on top. “Food’s good, anyhow.”
I examined the screening. It was riveted tight along a solid iron frame, the frame sunk into the stone surround of the window. But the screening could be cut. “Listen, Worthy, you sit tight. I’m going back to the studio and get some heavy cutters, and after dark I’ll come back and get you out of here.”
“Go away.” He threw himself down on the cot, clasping his hands in front of his chest, drawing his knees up in a fetal position. “It wouldn’t do any good. They’d find me again. It wouldn’t do any good.” He was shivering.
I thought a moment. “Christ, Worthy, make sense! What have you done? There’s no law—”
He leaped from the cot and slammed his palms against the iron grille. “Yes, there is!” he exclaimed hotly. “There’s a law for everything! You can’t help me. Nobody can. Don’t interfere or you’ll only make trouble for yourself. It’s what they want. They always get what they want!” His dark eyes blazed; then the light in them went out and he wrenched himself away and sat in the swivel chair. I waited another moment, then left.
The men were still in front of the post office, looking over at the church. I crossed the Common and went into the tavern. Amys was hunched over a beer on the corner stool. I asked Bert for a Scotch-and-soda, and pulled up a stool next to the bell ringer. “What’s going on, Amys?”
“Little of this, little of that. Not much in a small town like this.”
“That’s not what I mean. What’s happening at the church?”
“Meetin’.”
“What about?”
“How can I tell—I ain’t there.” He tossed off the rest of his beer.
“Amys, over there in the back of Penance House—what’re those hatchway doors in the ground?”
He choked, sputtered, then let go in the spittoon. “Root cellar.” He spun a quarter on the bar, wiped his mouth on a soiled handkerchief, and went out blowing his nose. I saw him look over at Penance House, then back in my direction before he went off toward the church.
Some men came in, Will Jones and Fred Minerva among them, and as they gathered farther along the bar I could tell from their furtive looks that I was the object of their conversation. I finished my drink and went out. The Constable was still in the doorway of the post office talking with the other men. One or two glanced my way, then returned to their discussion. The church doors remained shut. The clock said a quarter after three. I thought again of Worthy on his ticket-of-leave, secured in the back room of the post office, and I wondered what I could do to help him.
I had no idea how long the meeting in the church would take, but I still wanted to talk to the Widow Fortune. In the meantime, I drove south along Main Street, down the River Road to the bait shack. I found Jack Stump seated beside the old fireplace. I thought it odd, his having no nurse; then I remembered that all the women were at the church meeting.
He turned his head to me as I entered, giving me a long look. Finally he lowered his lids wearily and rested his head against the back of the chair.
“It’s cold in here, Jack. Why don’t I poke up a fire?” He made no sign; I went about laying some kindling. When it began crackling, I brought a blanket from the bed and covered him. As I tucked it around his shoulders, his hand appeared from beneath the folds and grasped mine.
“It’s O.K., old-timer. How about some tea?” He stared at the flames in the fire. “Some of the Widow’s One-B Weber’s?” A faint smile flicked in the corners of his mouth before I went to put the kettle on. When the water was hot, I got down the tea box and brewed tea in the pot and filled the cup. I held it for him while he sipped, but his look told me he found it unpalatable. “Sorry, Jack, I haven’t got anything stronger on me.” A sly look came into his eye. “You’d prefer some of the old stuff to the Widow’s tea, huh?” He flashed another look, and I could see both fear and contempt in his eyes. He made a quick hissing sound through his teeth.
“Don’t worry about the Soakeses, Jack.” He shook his head, pushed the cup away. He leaned back against the chair and immediately fell asleep. I put the cup and saucer aside and carried him, blanket and all, to the cot. His body seemed to weigh scarcely anything, and when I laid him down I had the sudden premonition that spring would never see him back on his rig again.
As I slid my arm from under his neck, I felt something catch. The button of my jacket sleeve had become entangled in the little red cloth bag around his neck, and when I tried to free my arm the string broke. I slipped out the bag and held it between my fingers, looking down at the peddler’s face, agonized even in repose.
The wood crackled in the fireplace, providing a dancing light against the wall. Jack stirred uneasily as a clock chimed the half-hour. Absently, I toyed with the cloth bag for a moment; t
hen, feeling something inside, I opened it and spilled the contents into my hand. There were a few bits of dried, crushed herbs, the rolled scrap of paper the Soakeses had scribbled their warning on, and a ring—a small irregularly shaped circlet, carved in the village fashion from a piece of hollow bone. I smiled, thinking of the Widow Fortune’s charms for toothache and for warts, and wondered what my own little red bag had contained. I blew away the bits of herbs, then unrolled the scrap of paper, the sinister note the Soakeses had left in Jack’s trap:
I stared at it for a moment, holding it up to the fire. My hand must have been shaking slightly for I saw a small bright shape rippling on the sooty wall next to the fireplace, the tiniest beam reflected back from my hand. I thought it was my wedding ring, but as I dropped that hand, holding the paper in the other, the small shape still remained, like the signal of a tiny heliograph flashing a message. I reversed the paper into the light and discovered what was causing the little ripple on the wall. When I had read the too clear words on this other side I felt a sudden chill, though the fire had warmed the room—the chill that comes not from any drop in body temperature but from those faint warning notes that are sounded in the dim recesses of the mind.
I tucked the scrap of paper in my pocket, and was returning the bone ring to the bag when Mrs. Green came with food for Jack. She stopped, and without greeting stared at me. Hurriedly I retied the string around his neck and slipped the bag inside his shirt. I left quickly. There was still time to get to Soakes’s Lonesome before dark.
24
TWO HOURS LATER, WHEN I arrived at the Widow Fortune’s, the small, gabled house looked gloomy and forlorn with the corn patches cut and shocked. The dying sun seemed to draw the fire from the maple leaves, giving the trees that framed the house a dark, foreboding air. Striding past the stubbled yard, I knocked on the door; again there was no reply. I went along the drive, where I found Fred Minerva’s wagon parked near the beehives: two men had just finished loading the wagon with wooden casks of honey mead from the shed. I moved aside as Fred drove the team out, the men dour, silent, granite-eyed, surveying me from the tailgate. Out on the street, Fred pulled up as Mrs. Green came to meet them. She hurried away with one of the casks.
I went down the lane to the barn. Through the open doorway, I could hear the cow knocking her hoofs against the stall, and the rhythmical sound of milk squirting into a tin pail.
The old lady’s long skirts covered the milking stool she sat on; the cow gave me a bland, uninquisitive look as I entered.
“Good evening.”
“That it is.” She glanced at me briefly, then returned her attention to the cow’s teats, two of which she held loosely in her hands.
“Milking time,” I observed.
“Comes ’round this hour reg’lar as sin. Cow that’s got milk wants to give it,” she replied indifferently, sitting stolid and taciturn.
“How’s Caesar’s Wife?”
“Not above reproach, as Caesar’s Wife should be. But then, who is? Hold still, there, miss or ma’am, or whatever you are. Girl’s edgy tonight.”
“Why?”
“Hard to tell. Folks and the beasts alike gets itchy long ’bout now, when the harvest’s in and the work’s done.”
“And Harvest Home—?”
“Aye. Harvest Home.” She looked up toward the rafters as though to peer beyond the rooftree to the heavens themselves. “Be a full moon, too. They call it the Moon of No Repentance around here.”
I leaned against a joist. “Why’s that?”
“Come harvest you take what there is—too late for repentance.”
I gave her a thin smile. “Another tradition?”
“Certain.”
“I keep hearing about tradition.”
“’Pears some folks don’t hear enough, the way they behave in public.” The regular ping of the white stream hitting the side of the milk pail emphasized the deep undercurrent of her words. “Some folks, it appears, have a mind to meddle where it’s none of their affair, and to scoff where they have no right to scoff. There are some hereabouts who don’t take kindly to a man who makes fun at our ways.
“Your bein an outsider, them old ways is a pretty hard thing for a man to seize on to. Outsiders always had that trouble; take Robert, for instance. He had trouble some years ago; he learned. But hereabouts in Cornwall Coombe we look on the old ways with partic’lar relish. You take a woman, now. A woman is different than a man. There’s things in a woman a man may never understand. Hold still, there, girl.” She rapped the cow’s flank as its tail switched. “Bein’ a man, you ought to think about the fact that there’s things in women you can never understand.”
I eyed her coldly. “What things?”
Her laugh was rough. “You think you know women? You think you know your wife? Think you understand her body, her mind? Her needs? They’re all different than yours, every last one. But because you don’t understand, you have no way but to accept it.”
“Or perish?”
“Maybe. A woman is supposed by most men to be heavenly, but if the truth was known, she ain’t heavenly a’tall. She’s a creature of the earth, she works and loves and lives with her feet firmly planted on the ground, and them that don’t is a sorry lot of dreamers. Look at your city ladies, in their beauty parlors and their lunch places and their shops and their love nests. Are they happy, them and their nail polish?” She released the two teats, wiped her hands on her apron, pressed the bony joints, then stripped the last drops of milk from the cow’s teats. “There may have been a man before there ever was a woman in the Garden of Eden, but the man would have died long ere he did without her. If it weren’t for the women, where would anyone be? Unborn. Just—not livin’. Just somewhere else in the universe. ’Ceptin’ the women, you’d have men who’d never know the light or the air or whatever joys God may see fit to bring us.”
“Or the horrors.” I laid an edge to my voice.
“Horrors, too. That’s what comes of bein’ born of woman. But pity the poor creature for what she longs for and for what she never gets. But longin’, they ought to be given their way. There’s, a good old girl,” she told the cow, rising and walking to the doorway where she set down her stool and pail. Ignoring me, she crossed the lane and went into the field, looking off at the empty land. She remained there statue-like, and might have been carved from an immense quarried rock, a massive and columnar sculpture, dark, brooding, sphinx-like. But this riddle—I could read it now. I did not like her any more; the thought saddened me.
As I came up behind her, I heard her speaking, not to me but to the stubbled furrows.
“‘I was born like the maize in the field, like the maize I was cherished in my youth, I came to maturity, I was spent. Now I am withered and I die.’” Becoming aware of my presence, without turning, she said, “There’s an epitaph for you. It was an Indian’s.” Her voice sounded heavy, weary as she nodded and said, “Aye, she is a friend to man.”
I took a step to her. “Mother Earth?”
Her head turned abruptly; she gave me a long look, searching, as though even now she would be friendly, still would command my respect and understanding. “Yes,” she replied simply. Bending, she scooped up some soil, clenched it before my face, then opened her hand. The form of her palm and fingers remained pressed into the moist loam. “This is her. Look at her.” She took my hand and laid the clod in it. “Feel her. Smell her. She is there, has been, will be, till the end. She is the beginning and the end. Who will deny her? Who can deny her? You have questions? Ask them. Listen to her, she will tell you.”
“What will she tell me?”
“Do not be so scornful. She is all of woman, and more. She bears as a woman bears. She gives and sustains as a woman does, but a woman dies, being mortal. But she is not. She is ever fruitful. She is the Mother.”
I stared at the mounded mass in my palm.
“Lay seed in her, she will bear. She will nourish and sustain, and in the sustaining will give
forth and provide. And that seed you give her will make another seed, and that another, and another, again and again—forever the Eternal Return.” Slowly her arms rose and straightened, her fists opened, spread broad, an impressive gesture of benevolence, a priestess acknowledging the deity. “Let us pay her tribute. Let us beg for her strength and protection. Let us pray that she may bring forth her strong plants, her rich food, her very life. How selfish we are. We give her but a seed, a kernel, a dead thing. Yet see what she returns to us. Such bounty, such riches, such life! What mortal is there who cannot help but wonder at her, love her, fear her?
“The Bible says Eve was born of Adam’s rib, but he was born of the earth, so there was woman before there ever was man. She is not merely a mate, a life’s companion, a helpmeet; she is the moving force, the power. And while Adam was abroad in the forest, she was in the fields planting and tilling. What man but a fool will reject the counsels of his spouse, who will give life to his sons? What man will spurn her, not venerate her, she who shares his bed and board, who tends his fire and his cookpot? The Lord preserve the women. The Lord preserve the fruitful Mother. And she will give, and give, and give, till there is no more to be given.”
She took the clod from me, pressed it, and let it crumble and sift between her fingers, the particles falling into the furrow.
“And in the end she will take it all back. There’s the irony. For as a man dies, so does a woman. It is the Mother who must succeed in the end, since everything must return to her. It is the tribute we must pay for her patronage.” She stared down at the crumbled soil, spread it with her toe. “Come Planting Day, she will need even that moiety.”