Harvest Home Page 7

  Which, the Widow pointed out, accounted for the tales of the Ghost of Soakes’s Lonesome. A people who readily believe in ghosts needs must have one. Rumor had it the Soakeses maintained a well-hidden still deep in the woods. Some years before, a revenue agent had come to investigate; it was said he went into the woods and never came out. And around his mysterious disappearance there had sprung up a tale about the Ghost of Soakes’s Lonesome, whose shade was said to haunt the Old Sallow Road close to the Lost Whistle Bridge.

  We got to the Tatum farm and the Widow reined up again. “Here’s where I must leave you now,” she announced. Across the way, a dirt track ran up to the Tatums’ back door, where the lady of the house was stirring something in a large iron kettle. Nope, not pigs, the Widow explained; Irene did homemade soap. Laying down her paddle, then pulling the smoking fire apart, the red-haired Irene bawled to her children not to track ashes in the house as they came from loading food baskets and hampers into the back of a pickup truck.

  I took my drawing case and hopped from the buggy to help the Widow alight. I thought she would pay a call on Irene, but no, “I must be about my herbin’,” she said, “and you’ve got your bridge to sketch.” She hung her shears straight, took her basket, arranged to meet me again in an hour, and, so saying, picked up her skirts and made her way toward the woods through the tall meadow grass.

  I continued along the road on foot, cornfields on my left, then an orchard, and on my right the curving edge of a palisade of lofty trunks, and, beyond, the dark recesses of Soakes’s Lonesome. A little farther along, I passed the peddler’s rig, half hidden behind some thick laurel shrubs where he had sought to conceal it—a precaution, I decided, against the Soakeses’ chancing upon it.

  Arriving at the bridge, I sat under a tree and made several rough drawings, then began a detailed one of the portal. In exactly fifty minutes, I closed my pad, zipped up my case, made a quick tour of the bridge approach to locate the best angle for the painting I planned doing, and then started back down the road.

  Again I passed the sequestered peddler’s cart, and, rounding the next bend, I glimpsed the Widow’s white bonnet bobbing among the trees at the edge of the meadow. I waited until she reached the road, then helped her into the buggy. Suddenly we heard the sharp report of guns within the woods. A voice shouted, and another; then for a time all was silence. In another moment the peddler’s gnome-like figure broke from the woods. He pulled the rig from its hiding place, ran it down the gully and onto the road, hopped onto the seat, and pedaled toward us as fast as his feet could turn the wheels.

  “Ho, Jack,” the Widow called, “what’s about?”

  He made no reply, but an expression of terror contorted his grizzled features. Passing, he gave us a dazed look, as though he had never seen us before, and hurried oft toward the village.

  Behind us, a formidable figure appeared between the tree trunks, a shotgun at the ready. He watched the peddler’s hasty retreat; then, shaking his fist, he entered the woods again.

  “The old man himself,” the Widow said. I replied that I supposed he had caught nosy Jack investigating his still and had scared him off.

  “It’s likely. Jack’s nose is afflicted, too,” she said as she took up the reins.

  Well, thought I, if the sleepy, yesteryear village of Cornwall Coombe provided such intriguing mysteries in this ready-to-hand way, I would prove easily diverted, and without telling my companion, I resolved to find Jack at the fair and discuss exactly what had happened to him in the woods at the hands of Old Man Soakes.

  6

  WITH TERRIFIC RUMBLINGS AND backfirings of failing motors, shiftings and grindings of ancient gears, the creak and grate of decrepit wooden wheels in the dusty roadway, amid shouts and calls and laughter, we arrived at the Common shortly before noon, along with scores of others, old people and middle-aged and young and younger, and crying babes in arms, to say nothing of barnyard beasts of varied description: cattle lowing, horses neighing, sheep and goats bleating and baaing, hens cackling, dogs barking—all these and more. Which was to be expected, for, like Christmas, the Agnes Fair came to Cornwall Coombe but once a year and, like Christmas, people were bound to make the most of it.

  I parked the car close to Irene Tatum’s wreck of a pickup truck, and opened the door for Beth. When Kate got out of the back seat, we cautioned her to keep well away from the furred animals, then stood watching the holiday crowd, jocular and gay as they thronged about the booths, exchanging greetings and hugs and kisses as though they hadn’t seen their neighbors for a month.

  They were mostly farm types: sober-sided, raw-cut, stringy men, but well-seasoned like old lumber, with bad barbering and a dusting of talcum, wearing workaday outfits, shirts open at the neck, patched and faded overalls; the women in plain, unfashionable dresses that might have belonged to their mothers, with light straw hats or bonnets looking as though they had been worn forever; the smaller girls in dresses obviously stitched up at home, their older sisters with buxom meaty bodies pushing at the seams of their colorful best frocks, their hair plaited with ribbons or hanging free and halfway down their backs as they grinned at the hooting overalled boys, replicas of their fathers.

  A great scurrying ensued: the men hastening to tie up the animals inside the livestock enclosures; the women, with their baskets and bags and boxes, to set out for display homemade canned goods and bakery items, to spread out their handicraft work and sewing in the booths provided, and betweentimes to gather unto themselves for purposes of gossip and news exchange; the children to lug chunks of already melting ice to cool the milk and butter and cream and eggs in the shade before dashing off to see the fair.

  “Look out for King!”

  Grunting and swaying, a giant hog footed its way along two planks from the back of the pickup truck, on whose dented panel was the legend “King the Pig.”

  “Here he comes!” Irene Tatum proudly bawled as the animal reached the ground.

  “Never seen such a clean pig, Irene,” a farmer said. “Could put that pig in your own bed and sleep with it.” “Yes, you could, Will Jones, could you get your wife to move over,” Irene said, laughing. “Sister, fetch your ma her umbrella, this sun’s thick as honey.” Children were spilling out of the truck like clowns in a circus act. Using the tip of her umbrella, Irene prodded King to a standing position, and while a crowd collected, she showed the hog off as if he were one of her own progeny.

  “How do, Mrs. Zalmon, Mrs. Green,” she shouted. “Junior, you get King over to the enclosure. Sister, bring along the hamper. Treat that pig like family, Rusty. Put him on the cool side so’s he’ll get the good of the breeze. Debbie, pull your skirts down!”

  While they trooped off, along came the Minerva clan. “Your Jim’s growed some this summer,” Mrs. Green allowed to Mrs. Minerva. “Ain’t he a husky fellow. Could be he might be the lucky one t’day—”

  “My Jim?” Asia Minerva looked both shocked and pleased. “Naw,” she said, “naw…”

  “See where the Hookes come, yonder.” Mrs. Green pointed at Justin, who had arrived, his wife on his arm. As a feathery murmur swept the crowd, several girls hurried to cluster around him, Sophie standing a little to one side watching with an air of amused detachment, while her husband was offered smiles and admiring glances.

  The object of these attentions, Justin Hooke, was a perfect child of nature. In spite of his country clothes and simple straightforward manner, he had an élan, a verve that along with his heroic size set him apart from his fellows. An altogether remarkable specimen of a man, tall, husky, broad-shouldered, bluff and hearty, a golden look to him, with his bronze skin, his sun-yellowed hair, the flash of strong teeth showing behind his easy smile.

  Just now he seemed embarrassed by the flutter his presence was creating as the girls pressed closer about him, and I wondered why all the fuss?

  “I’ve got gooseberry tarts in my basket, Justin,” said one of the girls coyly, and another hinted about her raisin pie; a third
, making sheep’s eyes, asked if he were partial to stuffed eggs.

  “Who will it be today, Justin?” the first asked, putting her hand on his arm. “Yes, who will it be?” said the second; then they were all demanding to know of Justin who he thought “it” would be.

  There were more voices and laughter as other girls joined the circle, and calls and shouting, and constant comings and goings, and more newcomers. Worthy Pettinger arrived on his tractor, and from the expressions of some close by, it appeared the noisy gusto of his old John Deere was an affront to their ears.

  “Ain’t Missy the prettiest thing in her dress,” cried Irene Tatum in her gravelly voice, while others agreed, parting and forming an aisle through which Tamar Penrose led the child onto the Common. “Did you pick your sheep, Missy?” someone asked respectfully, and “Good Missy,” another said, reaching to touch her ribbons.

  Pallid, thin, with bony joints and brittle-looking limbs, and oblivious to the interest her arrival was causing, the child was regarding me gravely. Even braided and in ribbons, her red hair looked lank and limp, and I noted again the spattering of freckles across her nose.

  Next to appear was Jack Stump. He wheeled his peddler’s rig onto the grass with a cacophony of tinware, sprang from his seat, and hopped about dropping the canvas tatters that passed for awnings on his cart and lowering the panels to display his wares. Now he produced a scratched and battered fiddle from one of the compartments and then a soda-pop box, which he stood on as he began sawing away on the instrument.

  The music was suddenly and thoroughly drowned out as, with horn blatting, a car careened in a wide circle at the edge of the Common; I recognized the pink Oldsmobile belonging to the Tobacco City group. Doors banged open and the five big and beery-looking Soakes boys got out; then, from behind the wheel, came bristling Old Man Soakes himself. Their arrival caused evident consternation to the musician, for the fiddling ceased abruptly, the instrument was whisked from sight, Jack Stump scrambled onto his seat, and, with kettleware crashing, he disappeared into the crowd.

  Old Man Soakes’s look was grim as he waited while his offspring freed a galvanized tub of ice and beer from the trunk of the car and lugged it into the shade of a tree, where they flopped on the grass and began popping tops and passing the cans among themselves. Then the father busied himself at the trunk, bending to set out for sale an assortment of home-sewn stuffed canvas decoys.

  Making my way through the crowd that now separated us, I found Beth and Kate talking to Worthy Pettinger.

  “Worthy’s offered to show us around the fair,” Beth said, and as we moved off together I saw that Kate’s lively interest in the boy was masked by an elaborate show of indifference as he pointed out various sights. We watched the livestock competition, which had already begun; then the pie contest, where Robert Dodd was chief among the judges; then the trained bear; and the Punch-and-Judy show, a small, cheapjack affair that reminded me of one Beth and I had seen years before in Paris. While Judy assaulted Punch from one side of the stage, a white wraith-like figure beat him with a stick on the other, and the sorry victim fended off both spouse and ghost with equal vigor. When we left the tent, I made further reference to the battling phantom, and asked if Worthy had heard tales of ghosts around Cornwall Coombe.

  “You mean the Ghost of Soakes’s Lonesome?” He shrugged. “Folks around here are dumb enough to believe all kinds of things. I guess ghosts are the least of ’em.”

  As we went along, Beth’s attention was continually diverted by the various home arts and handicrafts displayed at the booths: quilted bedspreads, crocheted counterpanes, handwoven materials, figures cleverly carved and whittled from pine, little dolls, basketwork. “They could make a fortune selling these down in New York,” she said.

  Some distance away, I glimpsed the Widow Fortune sitting behind a booth, talking energetically with Sophie Hooke, and at the same time doing a sharp business in the honey trade. Other booths had pickles and preserves for sale, fresh garden produce and dairy things. Strolling among the tents and booths, I was interested in the workmanship embellishing the canvas sides: primitive, country-type designs, crudely but gracefully executed with the naïveté of cave paintings. There were suns and moons and stars, various animals, a horse here, a cow there, a barn, a stick-figure man. And, everywhere, corn: sheaves of corn and shocks of corn and ears of corn, people growing, harvesting, cooking, eating, storing corn. Corn not only in its facsimile, but in reality, some of the tent entrances being framed by bound shocks and festooned with garlands of dried husks and leaves, and bunches of unshelled ears, their kernels yellow, red, brown, some variegated with all three.

  Our guide identified it as Indian corn, breaking an ear off and tendering it to Kate with a smile. He seemed to sense her feeling of awkwardness and kept up an easy line of conversation which, while directed at Beth and me, was designed to make our daughter less self-conscious.

  King the Pig, he assured us, was bound to win the hog competition. Farmers thereabouts had a way of letting their pigs stay penned up, leaving them to root among their own filth. He had persuaded Irene Tatum to try a new method, that of building King a movable trailer home. When the ground beneath became soiled, Worthy would drive over with his tractor, hook up, and move the pen to a fresh location.

  “Pigs don’t like to be dirty,” he explained earnestly, “any more than people do. Feed them grain like a horse, give them plenty of water for washing, and keep them off the dirty ground.”

  He went on speaking of the things that were nearest his heart, talking with neither constraint nor pretension, but in a frank, affable manner. He had none of the cruder aspects one might expect in the rural character, revealing a sensitivity to both people and surroundings. Though his frame seemed slight for heavy farm work, his complexion was ruddy and healthy, and he had a lithe, agile way of carrying himself that hinted at untapped reserves of strength.

  Next, he pointed out the teams of horses being readied for the horse-drawing contest, and the place where the wrestling matches would be held. One of the largest of the Soakes boys, Roy, had come ’cross-river to take on Justin Hooke, and though Roy had more weight, Justin was stronger, and sure to win. From the way Worthy spoke, I could see Justin was something of a hero to him, too. Still, he planned to take the pole-shinny competition himself.

  “’Course, it’s better for things if the Harvest Lord wins, but he can’t win everything.”

  “The Harvest Lord?” Beth asked, and Worthy explained. This singular honor had been bestowed on Justin Hooke at Agnes Fair seven years before. He had been crowned at Spring Festival, and it was this traditional role he would continue to assume through the weeks of harvest; a pageant was to be held in the Grange hall some weeks hence—the Corn Play, as it was called—where his queen would be crowned. She was called the Corn Maiden, and Sophie Hooke had been chosen for this part.

  “Who chose them?” I asked.

  “Justin was elected by vote, and he chose Sophie himself,” Worthy said.

  “Oh, look!” Beth had stopped to admire a collection of ivory jewelry on display at a booth. She picked up a pair of earrings and held them to her ears. “Soup bones,” Worthy laughed. The pieces—brooches, rings, and the like—were made locally, carved and engraved from odd pieces of bone. They were worked in the elaborate scrimshaw fashion of the old whaling sailors, and the ivory-like patina came from patient sanding and waxing.

  By now we had made a complete circuit of the fair and found ourselves back where we had started. Beth leaned on the jewelry booth counter to pick a stone from her shoe. “Listen,” she said, “I’m about done in. Why don’t I get the picnic hamper and find the Dodds? We can meet under that big tree and see the matches from there.”

  “Maybe Kate would like to watch from the platform with the other girls,” Worthy said, pointing out a wooden structure at the side of the field where the Corn Maiden and her court would be seated for the events. Kate accepted, though she remained silent as Beth invite
d Worthy to picnic with us. When I had got the hamper from the car trunk and Beth had reminded me not to forget Kate’s Medihaler in the glove compartment, she went to find the Dodds.

  “Mr. Constantine,” Worthy said, “I’d like to take Kate to see King the Pig, if it’s all right with you. He’s sure to get a blue ribbon.” He pushed back the wedge of blue-black hair that kept falling across his eyes, and waited politely for my answer.

  I said I supposed that even a Kate could look at a King, so long as she wasn’t late for lunch. I watched them go off, then went back to the jewelry booth and purchased the bone earrings Beth had admired.

  Nearby, the trunk of the Oldsmobile was still open, and Old Man Soakes appeared to be doing a brisk if sub-rosa trade in the decoy business. One farmer after another stole up to slip him some money and carry off not only a canvas duck but a pint of home-brew as well.

  Not far from Soakes sat a group of old men making designs from strips of cornhusks, braiding them into simple but elegant figures, some like pinwheels, others like fans or stars or helixes, still others whose shapes were the product of fancy. I took my sketchbook from my case and my pen from my pocket, and began drawing. One of the men looked up; I asked what they were making.