Harvest Home Part 11

Clutching her red hands on the oilcloth-topped table, she confided to me that she had heard Worthy planning to run off. I replied that I thought young people should be allowed to do with their lives as they saw fit. She listened with a woebegone expression, dabbing at her eyes with her ap.r.o.n.

"He don't laugh no more," she said. "He was the most agreeable of all of 'em, you never seen a boy so pleasing, and so easy to please." Her smile was frail as she stared at her hands. "And he's bright, too. Not like-them." She jerked her head toward the dooryard where Worthy's brothers were shoveling manure. "Seems like he's always had his nose into everything."

But then she'd heard him, out behind the mulch heap, telling Junior Tatum how he planned to run off to Danforth if he couldn't go to college. Her heart had been sorely tried. Planning to leave the village, leave Cornwall Coombe. Had she failed? Hadn't he been raised right?

Finding the mother's grief hard to witness, I tried to speak some words of comfort, but she continued as though I weren't there.

"I tell myself, hope and custom will be my stren'th. But he's a mind of his own; he's different. And in Cornwall Coombe it don't pay to be different. You got to go by what folks say, and what they think." She rose. "And what they do," she added. I sensed that these words were for my benefit as well, as though through some instinctive kindness she did not want me to make a similar mistake.

She followed me to the door, then seized my hand impulsively and said with a pa.s.sionate look, "Help him, mister, can't you?"

I spent the afternoon by the bridge, before my easel, my thoughts on the boy. Last night's hot wind still continued, and it made outdoor painting difficult, but I persevered until I had accomplished two pa.s.sable water-color studies. Shortly after four o'clock, I packed up my gear, stowed it in the car, and drove back up the Old Sallow Road.

I turned the bend where I had seen the "ghost" the night before, and pulled onto the shoulder. I climbed the embankment and made a careful investigation of the terrain, noting that the gra.s.s had been trampled, which bolstered my theory that what I had seen was no supernatural being, but human.

With a backward glance at the Tatum house across the way, I crossed the patch of trodden ground and approached the edge of Soakes's Lonesome. From within its shadowy recesses came the plaintive barking of a fox. Birds overhead chirped and sang as they flitted from branch to branch. Beyond the trees I could just make out the flat blue plane of water that was the river, and heard the dull chug of the Soakeses' skiff from the farther sh.o.r.e. The heat of the day was gradually cooling, condensing into mists along the bank, only to be unraveled by the wind.

I moved farther into the wood, resolved to find last night's phantom or, if I could not, at least to discover the more substantial form Jack Stump had described to me. Parrot-green ferns fanned a toothy pattern in the wavering light. Beyond, the darker green was laurel and alder, with sprawling thickets of gooseberry bramble whose vicious barbs caused me to wend my way with care. Pa.s.sing from glade to glade, I felt the ground give softly and noiselessly beneath my feet, a carpet of pine needles, strewn with wind-tumbled cones.

I heard a faint rush of water: a creek. I continued on till I discovered it winding among the trees, then began following the water's upstream course, stepping from hummock to hummock across pools on whose dimly reflective surfaces water creatures skittered. My feet flattened a patch of skunk cabbage, the squashed leaves emitting a faintly sour stench.

I heard the snap of a twig behind me. I whirled. Something moved in a thicket. I waited, then decided it was the fox, wary and watchful; I continued on.

Now I was deep within the woods, girdled round by leafy shade, stilled by a silence that was almost uncanny. It grew dimmer. The tree trunks were black, their malachite moss bled of color. Somewhere a woodp.e.c.k.e.r rapped; crickets sounded; occasionally I heard the goitered throb of a bullfrog.

The terrain became hilly and rocky as I proceeded into a remote arm of the woods, and I discovered a worn foot trail which I now proceeded to follow. I kept a keen eye out as I went along the trail, and it was lucky that I did so, for otherwise I might have died-as Clemmon Fortune had-lost within those woods. Certainly I would not have discovered the trap that lay waiting for me.

The trail forked, and I had slowed, wondering which of the two paths to take, when I saw it, carefully concealed, a small, unnatural-looking mound where pine needles and other debris had been sprinkled for camouflage. I halted within feet of it, my eye tracing the tail of chain links winding through the leaves, and the unsprung jaws awaiting the foot of the unwary.

Choosing the left-hand fork, I stepped carefully around the trap, and continued along. The trail made a slight turning, and some low-growing branches partially obscured my way. I half crouched, pushing aside the branches, and when I had pa.s.sed them I straightened-and walked almost into the bristly face of Old Man Soakes. In one hand was a shotgun; with the other he reached out and grabbed me around the throat and spun me up against the trunk of a tree. His arm pressed against my windpipe, intent, it appeared, on choking the life out of me. Through bulging eyes, I stared back at his angry face, the lips compressed with fierce determination, bits of white spittle along the lower one, his breath coming in spurts as he exerted a deadly pressure.

Releasing his hold enough to produce his knife-the large, sharp-edged one I had seen him using on the landing-he stuck its point against the side of my neck. I turned my head, trying to avoid not so much the knife as the rotten smell of his breath. His eyes looked crazed as he demanded to know what I was doing in the woods. I tried to pull away; the knife point held me as though driven through my neck into the trunk behind. There were footsteps; he looked away for a fraction of a second. I yanked my knee up and caught him in the crotch; he let go of me, his face going bloodless as he doubled over. I placed both hands against his shoulders and shoved, then lurched away. Roy Soakes was coming at a jog along the path ahead; I spun, racing back the way I had come. As Roy charged after me, I heard the old man curse him to get out of the way so he could get a clear shot. The shot came; and another. One spanged off a trunk near my head, the second went wild. A quick look behind told me Roy was hot on my heels, and I dashed pell-mell back down the trail. When I neared the fork, I made a quick leap over the trap, then ducked down the right-hand trail, not slowing until a cry reached my ears, followed by a loud metallic sound as Roy's foot sprung the trap. I paused briefly until I heard the old man coming behind him, spouting foul oaths at Roy's stupidity, and more as he tried to release the iron jaws.

I almost felt like whistling. Having moved the trap to catch the innocent and unsuspecting, Old Man Soakes had only snared one of his own brood. I hurried along the trail, occasionally looking back over my shoulder as I plunged still deeper into the innermost reaches of Soakes's Lonesome. I looked up at the sky, trying to find my bearings. A bird slid downward in a wide-winged dive, and I turned first one way, then another, not knowing where I was heading, trying to avoid the malignant tangles of growth blocking my every path. Coils of creepers wound about my feet, dark bramble thickets rose before me. Heedless of the thorns tearing at my legs, I lifted my arms to protect my face and forced my way through.

I came to another stream and crossed it, stepping from one gra.s.sy hummock to another. My foot slipped, there was a sucking noise as it slid into cold, thick muck. I pulled; the foot held fast. A moldy stench arose from the mud as I bent and tried to release myself. At last the foot came free and I raced on.

I found another trail, a narrow corridor allowing me pa.s.sage; I followed it blindly. The country was utterly unfamiliar. I could tell only that I was on an upward climb. Ahead lay an outcropping of shale, a humped ridge of rock that sprang half buried from the earth. I lay down, panting from my exertions, batting at the insects swarming in a thick damp cloud around my head, settling on my neck and throat. I tried to cover them, felt the sticky wetness. My hand came away with blood where the old man's knife had jabbed me.

I rested until my breath returned. Then my eye strayed to the tree which grew, it seemed, almost from the very rock I rested on. It was a tall pine, with an abundant growth of branches towering some fifty feet into the air. On the trunk, as high as a short man might reach, was a naked spot where the bark had been cut away. I got up and went to it, putting my fingers to the open wood, still viscous with sap.

One of Jack Stump's blazes: the tall tree on the rocky knoll. What I had sought with purpose I had found by accident. I circled the knoll, looking for a second blaze. I discovered it below me, on the left side of the outcropping. Now I could make out the trail which wound around the knoll and back into the woods. I pushed on ahead, looking for the next blaze.

The terrain was sloping downward now; lichen-spotted boulders lay strewn along my path like fallen meteors. I could hear the gentle purl of the stream on my right. Overhead the treetops again closed above me in a vast net of wind-tossed, soughing branches; the sky grew dim.

Minutes later I was still following the hatchet marks, pushing my way through a waste of tall pines where, on either side of me, more outcroppings of rock rose in sedimentary convolutions where the earth had heaved them up in wall-like formations. Proceeding toward them, I saw a deep V between the two sections, through which the stream flowed, more placid now as it widened its course and sluiced past.

I paused again, watching the dark flow of water, listening. A bird called, another replied. Then, silence; the rush of the wind. I had the eerie sensation I was being followed, and not by my friend with the shotgun. My imagination began to work. Shadowy shapes, hostile and sinister, loomed. Again I conjured up the figure of last evening, the whitened face, the red grinning mouth, the pale, supplicating hand.

I pa.s.sed through the gap, footing my way over some rocks in the stream bed, until I could reach the bank again. It was there, standing on a rock in midstream, that I heard the scream.

If it was a scream. Though I thought of it as such, it was utterly unlike any sound I had ever heard. Scream? Cry? Lament? I turned my head one way and the other, cupping my ears, trying to determine its origin. It seemed to come from several directions at once, and I decided this was caused by the shale walls rising at precipitous angles on either side of the stream to form a sort of echo chamber. Was it a moan? It seemed to float along the current of the stream, rising, then dipping, then falling away to nothing, only to return again, a terrible, inhuman sound.

I leaped from the stone onto the bank, advancing through dense growth, while the voice, if it was a voice, always increased in volume. Another few steps brought me to the edge of a wide clearing, where I froze in astonishment.

The trees bordering the clearing were not pines, but white birches, the silvery bark curled in papery spirals, revealing the tan underside. This grove of pale trunks formed a ring around the gra.s.sy open s.p.a.ce, and in the purplish light I saw at the center of this s.p.a.ce another stream issuing forth from a wide pool. It was not the pool that made me stare, but the tree that grew beside it, for it was from this tree, I was certain, that the cries came. It grew above the clearing like some gaunt, storm-twisted t.i.tan, a once-lofty tree, now lifting no more than three or four dead and leafless branches toward the sky.

Again I heard the cry, and I approached, circling the tree until I was looking at it from the opposite side. From gnarled roots to blasted top, the large trunk was split open, a dark wound where a bolt of lightning had rent it apart and fire had burned its center out, leaving it hollow. A mesh of thick vines grew upward from the base, crawling along the withered trunk, sutures trying to close the gaping wound where the sides lay back like flaps of charred flesh. The wind streamed through the gap, tugging the cuffs of my wet pants, brushing at the gra.s.s, tearing at the leaves of the new growth around the tree. Then I heard the cry again, and once more I froze, for I discovered the thing that voiced it, almost hidden behind the moving greenery.

I was looking at a human skull, and it was from behind the parted jaws that the screams came.

There is always something about the slow workings of nature upon death's victim as it eats away the mortal flesh and reveals the armature beneath that is shocking to the living man, knowing that he, too, must at some time fall similar prey. But to come across a skull staring from the heart of a hollow tree screaming maledictions gives rise to a greater fear; and I was afraid. Still, I found it impossible to run, and I remained where I stood, listening to the monstrous thing as it harried me, now screaming, now sighing demoniacally.

My eye was caught for a second by a black form floating down from the sky, a crow which silently glided to a branch of one of the birches across the grove, watching me as the cries rose in the clearing. Then, the wind suddenly dropping, the cries dropped with it, and I realized what was happening. It was the wind itself that caused the sounds. Pouring through the gap behind, streaming across the clearing, the draft was sucked in through the open base of the tree and funneled upward through this flue to where the skull lay caught in the vise-like grip of the new growth; the sound came from the head itself, a freakish woodwind pipe whose stops were the decayed knotholes and whose horn was the gaping jaws.

I came nearer and pulled the vines aside. The skull lay slightly to one side, the rear of the brainpan wedged deeply into the open cleft and locked in place by the growing tendrils. A skull that was large and thick, with a slightly Neanderthal slope to the brow: the cheekbones were prominent, the jaw was large, and what teeth remained were unevenly s.p.a.ced. A spider had spun a web across one eye socket, while slugs had trailed shiny tracks across the temple. Looking closer, I saw a long cranial fracture, running from the temple to the bridge where the nose had once been. I judged the skull to have been split by some heavy object. I tried to dislodge it, but it seemed to have been forcefully jammed into the hollow interior, which held it fast.

Below the skull, the rest of the skeleton remained intact, reclining backward as though in repose, shaping itself to the angle of the trunk itself, the encroaching vines still giving it human shape. The hands were long and large, the bones heavy and coa.r.s.e-looking; the man had been slightly under average height. Kneeling, I now examined the lower extremities, which, comparably large, were held pinioned in the tangle of growth.

Again the wind; again the thing gave utterance, finding its tongue as the current swept in around my face and was pulled upward. I stepped back, one foot almost slipping into the pool of water. Making a small circle around the base of the tree, I tried to probe the secret of this grotesque discovery. In that fiercely defiant expression there was both mystery and revelation. Proof of a life snuffed out, obliterated in a moment of denial or protest. Dimly in the distance I heard the fox barking. Once, then twice more. Sly fox, wary enough to know the deceitful heart of man, to know that in these woods lurked both the hunted and the hunters.

The crow made a lonely, plaintive sound, bleak as death. I felt very alone in the clearing. I looked back at the tree again. If this was Jack's "ghost," what then was the apparition I had been confronted by last night? Yet if that being was phantom, this was not, this nameless carca.s.s in the tree whose death had been managed in the grimmest fashion. Who beside myself had chanced on it? Were these the bones of the missing revenuer? How long had they lain here?

How many winters had sifted snow through those dead sockets, how many springs thawed the ice that rimed the jaws, summers cured the narrow ribcage, lying snug and sepulchered in its charred catacomb? Free at last of worms and scavengers, mere instrument of the capricious wind that even now rose and caught at the imprisoning vines. Again the skull sounded its doleful lament, while on its perch above, the black crow brooded over the spectacle, that victim of so sorry a plight, warning against trespa.s.s in Soakes's Lonesome.

13.

During the next several days, I had little chance to dwell on my shocking discovery in Soakes's Lonesome. Nor did I discuss it with Beth, not wanting to worry her with further distressing tales of grisly woodland apparitions. Though we still rose together and breakfasted together, we usually parted company early in the morning, I to my particular pursuits, she to hers. She would drive Kate over to Greenfarms School, return to do the housework; then, when things were in order, she busied herself organizing a sort of village crafts guild whose products she had arranged to sell in Mary Abbott's New York shop. These affairs sometimes took her to the kitchen of one lady or another, and often I found our house curiously deserted. I realized that I was still accustomed to the bustle of the city, and though I pretended I was becoming used to the country, the emptiness and silence at times were disconcerting. Still, there was much to be done, and I limited myself to afternoons at my painting, first taking care of the countless ch.o.r.es that needed seeing to.

The windstorm having uprooted a maple in the back yard, earth had to be dug from the meadow to fill the hole, the tree sawed up. Storm windows were ordered. I talked to an insurance man down in the county seat about an appraisal on our new furnishings. I sent away for some pamphlets and literature on organic gardening. I looked at station wagons for Beth over on the turnpike. I got myself a bicycle. And I bought Kate a horse.

It was not the doctor but the Widow Fortune who sanctioned this, her discussions with Kate being as effective as her various medicines. Magically, the asthma disappeared. Though I never discovered what the old woman did to effect the cure, a miraculous one it was. And as Beth and I came to trust her, we came more to trust in our own safety and happiness.

As we trusted in the fact of the baby, and that the baby would come as promised. Our daily vitamin doses had been supplemented by a bottle of some pleasant-tasting mixture that the Widow had brought-with directions-to our house. And though we joked about taking it I could see how profoundly Beth wished for the fulfillment of her dream of a son, and how profoundly she believed in the Widow's power to make it possible. It was not misplaced belief.

Thinking back, I suppose those first weeks of early autumn in Cornwall Coombe were the happiest we had ever known together. We seemed to have undergone some subtle transformation that had drawn something to ourselves, both separately and as a family, from the land and the people, who daily were more inclined to accept us as part of their lives. And daily I would see the changes wrought in Beth. She slept better, the smudges under her eyes disappeared, and the lines in her forehead. The brisk air did something to her appet.i.te; she ate sitting down, for a change, and started putting on weight. Her skin took on a fresher look, and I began calling her Peaches because her cheeks reminded me of one, with that same rosy glow.

Kate, too, seemed to be enjoying the beneficial effects of country life. It was a pleasure to see her able to enjoy animals, having been denied them so long. Fred Minerva had steered me to a man in a nearby town who was selling his farm and moving to the city, and had several horses for sale. The mare I ended up buying was large for Kate, but I decided she would soon grow to the proper size. The farmer had warned me that the horse was inclined to be headstrong, and when I presented her to Kate I cautioned her not to get carried away.

It was inevitable that the mare, whom Kate named Trementagne-a French word for north wind she had found somewhere that she shortened to "Tremmy"-would a.s.sume an important place in her life, but she seemed interested in sharing her love for the horse with us, and eager to show off the skills she was rapidly acquiring in Greenfarms' "equitation" cla.s.ses.

Not since the Agnes Fair had she evidenced any symptoms of her tormenting illness. She was healthier and happier and never appeared in the morning with the out-of-sorts expression I used to dread. Watching her, I thought I could discern small but obvious changes in her. She was becoming a young woman. She was losing that gangling, k.n.o.bby look, and, perhaps because of her a.s.sociation with Worthy, she seemed less shy and diffident.

A frequent visitor to our house, the Widow Fortune might stop by, usually late in the afternoon, to watch Kate ride her horse in the field below the stables, or I would hear her and Kate talking in the kitchen, and I knew she was helping Kate allay the fears that brought on the asthma attacks. After a cup of tea, she would take her splint basket and hurry away to nurse old Mrs. Mayberry; then Kate would come out to the studio and watch me paint until Beth returned home.

In the evening, the weather remaining fine, we would barbecue steaks on the terrace, often joined by Worthy Pettinger, for whom Beth and I decided Kate was developing a strong attachment.

Viewed in the light of what occurred later, it was a fool's paradise, but I could not have known that then. Fool's paradise in those weeks was still Heart's Desire, and it seemed nothing could possibly happen to spoil the idyll of our new existence. Above all, and very real, was a profound sense of belonging not only to my family but to the villagers, to the countryside, and, though I did not till it, to the land.

Yet while I worked about the house and at my easel, the grisly souvenir in the hollow tree remained in my thoughts, that and the "gray ghost," as I had come to regard that other, even more puzzling apparition. If I failed to fathom the unfathomable, it was perhaps not so much due to my lack of mental agility as that I did not feel I could confide my thoughts to anyone. I did not want to tell anyone I had been seeing ghosts, nor did I want people saying I was a fool. Whatever I said, and to whom, it was bound to be repeated, and I hated the thought of these farmer people thinking I was as moon mad as they, and as superst.i.tious.

There were, however, two with whom I was anxious to talk: Robert Dodd and Jack Stump. Robert, with Maggie, was out of town-visiting his university, with which he kept up considerable contact. And the peddler had not as yet finished his territory circuit, for nowhere in the village was his tin-pan clatter to be heard, and I listened in vain.

The only other shadow darkening my existence at that period was the boy, Worthy Pettinger. In its quiet but firm way, the village was adamant on the subject of his "accepting the honor," as the phrase was couched. Worthy must and would be the Young Lord in the Corn Play. Though he came regularly to our house after school to do ch.o.r.es, he was now invariably late, invariably offhand, and, when I asked him what was troubling him, invariably reticent.

It was hard to know what to do; how could we help when we didn't really know what the problem was? My own a.s.sessment was that the boy's dark distress stemmed from a reluctance to commit himself to Cornwall Coombe for a seven-year tenure as Harvest Lord-no matter what honors or wealth accrued from this-when it was his desire to be quit of village enc.u.mbrances and old-fashioned ways. Who could blame him for being "newfangled"? But if the father continued to hold to his parochial att.i.tude, forcing him to "accept the honor," there seemed little to be done.

One noontime, having left Worthy using a chain saw on the uprooted tree, I decided to pay a visit to the Hookes. I found the sketch I had done of Sophie at the Widow's Sunday sociable, put it in a little frame I dug out of a box, and drove out to the Hooke farm.

When I got there, I left the car on the road and walked down the drive circling the house, having learned that the back door was where Cornwall Coombe folk paid weekday calls. Approaching the open Dutch door at the kitchen steps, I was greeted by a flying object, a great squawking feathered projectile, which came flying through the opening. I watched the chicken land, then, wings flapping, run off into a patch of nasturtiums. In another moment, Justin's smiling face appeared.

"Come in, come in," he said heartily, reaching to shake my hand and opening the lower half of the door for me.

"Anybody home beside the chickens?" I asked, mounting the steps.

"Tossing a hen through the door brings good luck. Sophie, look who's here." Sophie rose from the table where she had been working on some ledgers and offered me a cup of coffee. When she had moved the ledgers aside and set the cup on the table, I presented her with my gift. She took the package and looked from me to it and back again.

"Go ahead, Sophie," Justin urged, "open it."

A little gasp escaped her lips as she undid the paper and saw the sketch under the gla.s.s. She looked at me gratefully. "n.o.body ever drew me before," she said simply.

Justin came around the table to see. "Why, it's Sophie to the life." He pulled out a chair for me to sit. I put sugar in my coffee, and cream from the pitcher Sophie had brought from the refrigerator. Justin asked where she would like the sketch hung.

"In the living room, I think."

He went to find a hammer, and Sophie led me into the front room, where she picked out a spot for the drawing. "Sophie," Justin said when he had tapped in a hook and hung the sketch, "take him and show him the upstairs. When you've done, Ned, come have a look around the place. I've got to get back to the men or they'll be sitting on their hands." He clumped down the hall in his heavy boots and Sophie preceded me up the stairs.

I glimpsed a crisp white bedroom with a large four-poster bed similar to the one Beth and I slept in. Sophie took me in and showed me the crocheted counterpane her grandmother had made, pointing out the fine workmanship. "It's called popcorn st.i.tch." The room had a serene but solid look to it, with printed curtains at the window, and at the foot of the bed a blanket chest painted with flowers to match the curtains. When I admired it, she blushed, saying she had done it herself.

"You're very talented, Sophie."

"But not like you." A thought suddenly crossed her mind, and she stepped to the window, looking down at the barnyard. A hole had been dug along a strip of lawn between the house and the cornfield, and beside it stood a young tree, ready for planting. Justin came with a shovel, bent to set in the tree. Sophie turned back and said, "Could I ask you something?"

"Sure."

"I have my egg money put aside, and I was wondering- How much would you charge to do a painting?"

"I'd love to paint you, Sophie."

"Not me. Justin. I'd like a picture to hang over the mantel while he's still Harvest Lord."

I said I thought that was a fine idea, and that I would be happy to execute the commission. "It's the first I've had." But I added that since I did not enjoy doing studio portraits, I would want to find a natural spot, revealing of his character, to pose Justin in. She grew more excited at the idea and asked when I might begin.

"Well-I've got some commitments I've got to finish up for my gallery in New York first."

Her face clouded. "How soon could you start?"

Since it seemed important to her that I paint it while the Harvest Lord was still in office-so to speak-I said I would begin some preliminary sketches as soon as possible.

She brought me back downstairs and into the kitchen again where the ledgers lay stacked on the table.

"Do you keep the books, Sophie?"

"Oh, yes. That's my part. Or part part of my part. Someone has to keep track of where the money goes." She showed me one of the books, the neat columns of figures in her fine hand, the accounts payable, and the accounts receivable, which were apparently nil until the corn was cut. of my part. Someone has to keep track of where the money goes." She showed me one of the books, the neat columns of figures in her fine hand, the accounts payable, and the accounts receivable, which were apparently nil until the corn was cut.

"They'll fill up by Harvest Home," I said.

She closed the ledger and rubbed the tips of her fingers lightly over the gold stampwork on the front. "Yes," she said softly. Impulsively she reached for my hand. "We're so glad you've come to live in Cornwall. You're the first outsiders we've had, and it's going to be nice knowing you, and Beth, and your little girl." She thanked me again for the drawing and said she hoped I would stop by anytime.

"I'm often out this way," I told her. "I'm doing a painting of the bridge."

"The Lost Whistle? That should be lovely." But I saw her face cloud at the mention of the bridge, as though the place had unpleasant a.s.sociations for her.

"Something wrong with the bridge?" I asked.

"N-no." She spun, looked at the table. "Gosh, I've left the cream out to spoil." She took the pitcher and held it up. It was of porcelain, shaped like a cow. The tail curled up for a handle and the cream poured out through the mouth.

"It was a wedding present. It comes from Tiffany's. In New York? It's a very fine store."

Her ingenuousness regarding Gotham jewelers made me want to smile. Still, I noticed how she had changed the subject from the Lost Whistle Bridge. I admired the pitcher, saying it reminded me of La Vache Qui Rit, the Laughing Cow cheese Beth used to buy at the deli in New York. She put the pitcher in the refrigerator and sat at the table. When I left, she had begun going over her books again.

"Don't forget," she called after me, "about the painting, I mean."

I found Justin still planting. Like me, he had lost a tree to the storm, and this one was to replace it. Laying his shovel aside, he took a box filled with ashes and sprinkled them around the balled-up roots, explaining that they made good fertilizer. He picked up his spade again and shoveled in the rest of the earth, tamping the dirt with his foot and, from time to time sighting along the narrow trunk to make sure it was straight. When the work was done, he stepped back, looking up at the bare branches.

"There's a tree for next spring. Ought to bloom just about Spring Festival time." When I asked what kind of tree it was, he said a flowering pear tree. Then, taking me by the arm, he led me on a tour of his domain, an obvious source of pride.

First he showed me the "blessing stone," a large block of quarried granite set into the foundation of the barn, with the date 1689 marking the year of its construction. The fine old boards had never been painted but through the years had aged to a beautiful patina. Painting a barn, he said, was a kind of sacrilege.

He took me to the toolshed where all the implements were also dated, giving one the sense that their makers had intended them to be pa.s.sed on, so that in the distant future by these simple artifacts the past might be better understood.

We saw the pigpens, the hayloft, the stables, all with plenty of light and ventilation, and everything neat as a pin, spruce and straight and clean, with none of the slump and sag of other farms in the community. Looking over the place, I thought- jealously, perhaps-how much greater was the legacy of Cornwall Coombe than was ours, we who had lived half our lives in the city. Here, all around us, was the richness of Justin's heritage. It was plain to see that there was no master here but himself, and that he knew it; knew, too, what his forebears had bestowed.

He pushed his hat back on his head and looked at me, anxious that I should appreciate his fields for both their beauty and their worth. As I had seen him do before, he stood with feet wide planted in the soil as if, like Antaeus, he renewed his strength by contact with the earth.

Often sober-looking and grave, he showed flashes of a youthful humor that I found ingratiating. There was a delight in him, as if he could not really believe his good fortune. He was easy to like, and I was secretly pleased that Sophie wanted me to paint him. When he returned to being a plain farmer, and Worthy had taken over as Harvest Lord, he and Sophie could look at the portrait on winter nights and tell their children how it had been back then.

"It looks like a good soil for crops," I observed.

"Best around." Cornwall Coombe would see a bountiful harvest this year, he said, speaking with a reverence I had seldom beheld in a man. Corn was easy to grow; all that was needed was rich earth, plenteous rains while the kernels formed in the husks, and the long slow heat of the August nights. He asked if I'd heard the Widow tell about hearing the corn grow.

I laughed and said yes. "One of her fancies, I guess."