She turned and went back to the barn, and took up her pail and stool. “I bid you good night,” she said.
“No.” My voice rose sharply. She blinked at me, trying to understand my purpose in coming.
“You’re angry,” she said, a trifle wistfully. “Too bad. I hoped we might’ve been friends. You have something more, then?” I nodded. “Come along, say what you have to say.” She motioned me to close the barn door; then, as I followed her, she made her way to the dooryard where she disposed of the stool and ushered me up the steps.
When she had poured the milk into a crock and put it in the refrigerator, she nodded for me to be seated as she put the kettle on to boil. The lamp she had turned on laid a warm pool of light on the scarred and ringed surface of the wooden table. She washed her hands, and when the kettle began to sing she took it from the stove plate. She brought down the box of Weber’s tea; brewing it, she spoke over her shoulder. “Who shall say, ‘Be like me’? ‘Be like all the others’? If the bull cares to give milk, who shall say him nay? And if folks—folks like me—think about the old ways, who shall say them nay? Who shall say me nay? I have a cow, and if I believe the Mother fattens the plain for Caesar’s Wife to provide me milk, no man’s goin’ to tell me no.” She brought the cups on their saucers and laid them on the table. “If your wife tells you that it’s because of women and their strength that men survive, who shall tell her no? Not you, if you’re as smart as I think you are.”
Her step as she laid out the tea things was scarcely as spry as I had seen it on other occasions. Her face looked tired, and without that inner spark that usually animated her every word and gesture, and I saw that she was a very old woman. There was pain in her searching look; in back of the hooded eyes lay a question—hers, not mine, a question in answer to my question. She sipped, then took a hank of wool from a basket and began winding the end around her fingers.
“Planting Day? Spring Festival? Midsummer’s Eve? Harvest Home? Certain they’re older than the hills and they’re not like Santy Claus that you stop believin’ in when you catch your ma hangin’ up stockin’s Christmas Eve. They’re in people’s blood and marrow and hearts and they been there for centuries. You don’t take them things lightly, nor do you laugh nor interfere just because you’ve had too many pulls at the jug. And a man who dares is bound to come to grief.”
Outside, it was dark. The light above the table was a single beacon in the shadowy room. She continued winding the yarn. “Adam delved and Eve span,” she said wearily. Thinking of what I had discovered an hour ago in Soakes’s Lonesome, after leaving Jack Stump’s, what I had known I would find, I remained silent, aloof, watchful of her, one hand employing the spoon to stir my cup, the other deep in my jacket pocket.
I knew I would never come to this kitchen again, never sit at her table, never drink her tea. It was, in a way, like the end of an affair: bitter, hopeless, irreparable.
“Spinning is a woman’s natural work,” I said at last.
“Aye, traditionally.”
“We were speaking of grief. Has Worthy come to grief?”
She bit her lip. Then: “We all come to grief, one time or another.”
“What will happen to him?”
“That’s no concern of yours.”
“Because I’m an outsider? Worthy’s like a son to me.”
“He was a son before he ever met you.”
“He’s a kid! Sixteen! What did he do?”
“He damned the corn!” Her eyes widened. “He damned the crops. That’s a serious business.”
“All he did was run off from something he didn’t want, to find something he did want. Is that so terrible? You never would have found Worthy if—”
“Yes?”
“—if Tamar Penrose hadn’t seen my letters and steamed it open. She told the Constable, who told Mr. Deming. Mr. Deming called you, the night I brought you the sewing machine. You sent him after Worthy.”
“Don’t you go glarin’ at me, you and them dark Greek looks. Worthy Pettinger knew what he was doin’; he had plenty of time to think it out—all them weeks I sent him ’round to you, hopin’ he’d come to his senses. He was chosen. He was to be the Young Lord in the play.”
“But you had the play. The Minerva kid was the Young Lord.”
“How much better Worthy would’ve been. Made for it, he was. Proper age and all. Seven years younger than Justin, almost to the day.” She shook her head sadly. “It’s not so much for him, but for the other boys comin’ along behind him. Can’t have notions like Worthy’s goin’ abroad through the village. He’s got to be taught—”
Now, I thought; now. Say it now. Say it and be done. I said, “Like the Soakeses taught Jack Stump.”
“Aye.”
“Rolling him in ashes—”
“Aye.”
“Old Man Soakes cutting out his tongue with his knife—”
“Aye.”
“The boys sewing his mouth with their canvas needles—”
“Aye. Poor Jack, all he did was talk, and for that they mutilated him beyond hope.”
“No! For that you mutilated him beyond hope! You and the women. The Soakeses never touched Jack Stump!”
“Here, now—” She drew back from me as though to mantle herself in the shadows. I reached in my pocket and produced the scrap of paper with the writing over the skull and bones. “There’s a warning the Soakeses supposedly left him in the woods—only it wasn’t from the Soakeses, it was from you!” I turned it over and laid it before her. “Does that look familiar?” I reached to the shelf above the sink and grabbed a box from it. Tea sprayed around me as I tore out the liner and spread it beside the piece of foil paper, whose silvery reflection had caught my eye by Jack Stump’s fire. “Read it.”
“Can’t see without my specs,” she said truculently.
“You don’t have to see. You can feel it.” I seized her fingers and pressed them on the foil lining. “Weber’s tea. Embossed. With ‘One-B’—remember?” I turned Jack’s message over and pressed her fingers there, on the identical foil, embossed the same way. “One-B Weber’s.”
“I don’t expect I’m the only person to use Weber’s tea.”
“You have to send for it—remember? To London. You used one of those scraps from your kitchen spindle to write the note, and had it put in Jack’s trap, the traps you moved yourself.” She pulled her hand away; I seized her arm and gripped it. “Jack Stump was in the woods all right, and you didn’t want him there any more than the Soakeses did. But you decided to do something about it. You caught him, you and the other women over at Irene Tatum’s for a quilting party. He wasn’t rolled in the ashes from Soakes’s still, but in the ashes from Irene’s soap kettle. Then you cut his tongue out. With these.” I yanked my hand from my pocket, raised it, and brought it down. The teacup and saucer broke as the pair of rusty shears struck them.
“There’s your missing scissors, Mary, and you didn’t leave them at Asia Minerva’s house. You lost them in the woods when you attacked Jack. You were looking for them the day we hunted mushrooms. After you cut off his tongue, you took your needle and thread and stitched his mouth up. You planned it all, the quilting party at Irene Tatum’s house, all of it.”
She looked at me across the broken pieces of the cup, something defiant in her eyes. “First time you ever called me ‘Mary.’ Seems strange. People don’t call me that much. Clem used to, of course—Robert sometimes.” One hand came from her lap and touched a fragment of china. “Aye, Jack was a talker. And a meddler, and that’s a bad combination in any soul, man or woman. Tamar put the quietus to him.”
“Tamar?”
“It was she who done the cuttin’ and sewin’ of poor Jack. Strong measures, I’ll agree, stronger than was warranted, maybe, but sometimes Tamar’s got to be restrained. Yet I couldn’t say it wasn’t necessary. Nobody would’ve been beholden to Jack for goin’ off on one of his territory circuits and talkin’ at every doorstep along the way.”
“Talking about what?”
“Things we don’t want talked about.” She spoke angrily. “Some things are no one’s business but our own. We got skeletons in our closets same as other folks. Jack was afflicted by tongue and nose, both. Went pokin’ his nose around the Lonesome, where he oughtn’t to have been. Went pokin’ it around town and findin’ out things outsiders oughtn’t to be concerned with.”
“I’m an outsider.”
“But we didn’t want you to be.” She looked up at me with mute appeal. “I didn’t want you to be.” She waited for me to speak; I knew I must not, for my own safety. “Jack’s a sly one,” she continued. “Puts one and one together and comes up with two. What he saw, he knew, and what he knew, he was bound to tell. We got our privacies. Some more regrettable than others—even Jack would admit that.”
I spoke coldly. “You don’t have to worry; he won’t talk any more. And you don’t have to worry about getting him back on his rig by spring—he’ll never see the winter out.”
She stared at the shattered cup and saucer. “You think I’m evil. A bad old woman. Yes, I’m old, and I crave peace. I don’t have much time to grow older. Soon someone’s going to have to relieve me of my—duties. Someone will have to come after me.”
“Missy?”
“You are too disdainful. Missy, perhaps. Or, before her, another. But while I live I’ll be doin’ my duties. I’ve lived as I was taught. I’ve lived in what I believed.”
She looked down at the table, ran her fingertips along the blade of the rusty scissors. “I miss the old humbug, y’know. Hearin’ him comin’ ’round with his clatter and his bang and gabbin’ a body’s ear off.”
I pulled my hands to me, thrusting them in my lap, wrenching my fingers that I should not strike an old woman. When I could govern myself again, I got up.
“What about Worthy?”
Her head lifted, her eyes blinked at the light, as if trying to see past it, past me, into some cloudy future. “Worthy Pettinger,” she said softly. The light etched her features; she looked haggard, worn, as she began picking up the shattered pieces of the blue teacup. “Clem bought me them cups the year we was married. All these years, and not a one of ’em broke. Till now. I don’t s’pose I can mend it, can I?” She thought a moment. Then: “No,” she concluded, “some things is forever past mendin’.” One by one she laid the broken pieces in the saucer.
25
IT WAS THE END of the great back-to-the-land movement. Henceforward it would be country mouse into city mouse again. What other answer was there? What else to do? But how could I bring myself to put it to Beth, to tell her how we had been fooled and connived against? To tell her what the women really were?
Tell her what the Widow Fortune was?
Perplexed, indecisive, but with a growing determination, after a sleepless night, the next morning I gravitated to the Common, my mind still working over the reason for the attack on the peddler. We have our privacies, the Widow had said. Something private, which Jack Stump had discovered. Still trying to conjure up an idea of what discovery, I watched Irene Tatum’s pickup truck rattle down the north end of Main Street and pull up to the Common. Some of the Tatum kids leaped out and, under Irene’s supervision, unloaded a stack of wooden planks and hauled them across the grass to the bonfire heap. The construction had grown considerably in the past two days, a crude frame of timbers and boards nailed crisscross to hold together the assemblage of boxes, crates, and debris that had been jumbled inside. Ladders were being used to hand material up to the top, where Jim Minerva was securing it with twine, while below groups of people viewed the work as it proceeded, pointing, laughing, chatting.
From the chimneys and eaves of the houses hung the woven corn symbols, swaying in the breeze: Harvest Home was coming.
Inside the post office, it was business as usual. I passed the open doorway, then slipped along the side of the building to the rear. I crept up to the window and looked in. The room was empty. The door was open and I could see Myrtil Clapp at the counter, stamping a package for Mrs. Buxley, who stood on the other side of the window. Glancing at me, the minister’s wife gave me a quick dither of fingers, and I hurried around to the street to intercept her as she came out, then walked beside her across the Common.
She gave me one of her best smiles. “Lovely day, Ned, isn’t it the loveliest? And tonight will be one of the most exciting—see the bonfire we’re going to have.”
“Mrs. Buxley, what’s happened to Worthy?”
“Worthy? Pettinger? Why, nothing.” She wrinkled her eyebrows. “Worthy’s left.”
“Left?”
She nodded, arranging the neckline of her dress. “Mrs. Zee drove him over to the turnpike to catch the bus. He’s gone to New York. At least he said he was going to New York.” She gave a little shrug. “Of course, one never knows what the young people are going to do these days, does one?”
“He simply left?”
She threw her gloved hands out palms up. “Simply. Ewan Deming had a little talk with him. I think he rather reprimanded Worthy. Set him straight, so to speak. Then he let Mrs. Zee drive him to the bus. Isn’t it strange about the sheep?”
“The sheep?”
“Yes. See—they’re gone. Amys has put them to fold. A sure sign winter’s coming. Whenever the sheep are gone, I know it’s time to get out my fur coat. Hope you’ve got plenty of warm clothes—our winters can be terrible. One year the snow was five foot high right here on the—Ned? Are you all right?”
“Yes. Of course.”
“Suddenly you looked—well—” We crossed to the far sidewalk in front of the church, where she gave me her arm to help her onto the first step. “Thank you.” She let out a little laugh, as if we were wicked. “See you in church.” Waggled fingers, went on up the steps, patted the bell ringer’s shoulder as he sat knitting. “Pretty colors, Amys.” Went inside.
He gave her a look and plied his needles.
“Been here all morning, Amys?”
“All mornin’.”
“Did you see Worthy Pettinger leave?”
“Ayuh. Old Deming gave him what-for; then Mrs. Zee drove him off in his car.”
“Did he have a suitcase?”
“Ayuh.” He began counting stitches. I went a little distance down the sidewalk and turned in to the cemetery, made my way up the slope through the maze of headstones, and stood on the knoll, thinking.
Then I quickly left and went down to the library, where I asked the librarian to find me a particular volume of the Farmer’s Almanac. When my theory had been corroborated, I thanked her and left. Margie Perkin’s head hung out the window of the beauty parlor as she chatted with Betsey Cox, the bank teller, below. On the other side of the Common, the perpetual checker game at the firehouse was interrupted while Merle Penrose and Harry Gill stood in the doorway watching Mrs. Brucie come out of the grocer’s and go into the drugstore. Jim Minerva tied a corncob on a stick and jammed it in the top of the bonfire pile. A cheer arose from among the onlookers, and Mrs. Buxley, who had brought Mr. Buxley out onto the church steps, waggled her fingers. Directly across the way, at the post office, Tamar Penrose came to see what the applause was about.
I stared moodily at the autumn sky, as blue as it had been in August, in June. I recalled the morning of the Agnes Fair, walking down Penrose Lane, pledging myself to the earth, thinking how right it all felt, how we would find our places in Cornwall Coombe. You folks be happy here, said the Widow Fortune; That’s all you’ve got, each other, and bein’ happy together.
My jaw clamped. I felt aloof, apart, a stranger. Who was I? Who were they? The villagers of Cornwall Coombe; and I an alien, an outsider, never to be an insider. But I no longer cared to be. They were altered, and so was I. All I wanted now was—suddenly I wanted terribly to see Beth, to talk to her.
Tamar went back into the post office. The back room was empty now. Worthy had gone. He hadn’t cared much after all; had left without saying goodbye. When you came
down to it, he wasn’t any different from the rest.
Myrtil Clapp came out of the post office, followed by Tamar, who locked the door and went toward her house. I stood on the knoll, thinking about Justin Hooke. Why had he lied? I kept wondering. Why would Justin Hooke tell me a deliberate lie?
I went down the back slope and stepped over the iron fence. The marshy ground squished under me, filling with water. I shoved a branch into the earth. It drove in easily and when I pulled it out the hole filled immediately. The place wasn’t a grave; it was a bog.
Amys was watching me from above. I climbed up and stood beside him.
“Wet down there,” he commented. “Good land if they’d drain ’er. ’Bout run out of room up here. Don’t know where I’ll put the next one that kicks the bucket.”
“Why don’t they drain that land?”
“Wouldn’t pay. She’ll wet up like that again.”
“When it floods.”
“Ayuh.”
“Amys, what’s Justin Hooke hiding?”
“How can I tell? I ain’t Justin Hooke.”
“Grace Everdeen didn’t kill herself.”
“She didn’t?”
“No. At least not by jumping off the Lost Whistle. Justin says she dashed herself on the rocks, because the river was low that year. Only it wasn’t. There’d been a flood that spring. You said yourself that the winter before Gracie came back was a bad one. Snow five feet deep, people had to tunnel, some of your sheep died. There was a thaw, and then the river flooded. The river was high all that summer, just like this year. The drought—the Great Waste—came after Gracie died, not before. So there weren’t any rocks. Justin’s lying.” I paused, looked closely at Amys, then said, “And if it was flooded like this, you couldn’t have dug a grave for her.”
He turned away slightly, examining his horny palms.