edge of the crowd, still watching. Assuming an air of nonchalance, Jack reached for the sickle and tested its edge with his thumb. “Lemme tellya, Will,” he said to the farmer, “you can sharpen up that there sickle a lot faster on a wheel.”
“Haven’t got one,” the farmer replied.
“Come along, I got one on my rig.” Jack brought the farmer back to the rig, moving me aside to reveal under a flap a grindstone clamped to a piece of the cart frame. Instructing the farmer to turn the handle, he laid the blade to the wheel and proceeded to grind the edge. Sparks flew up like meteors, and the peddler cocked his head this way and that, ostensibly checking the angle, but I could see he had an eye on the departing back of Old Man Soakes. The child Missy left her mother’s side and slowly approached, watching the shower of sparks shooting into the air.
“Missy,” Tamar Penrose called insistently, but the child paid no attention as Jack put his thumb to the blade to test it. “Hot damn, now that’s sharp, Will.” The blade glistened like a silver crescent.
“Pretty good,” the farmer agreed.
“Good, hell! It’s perfect! There y’are, Will, sharp as a dime and no charge.” He handed over the implement, leaped onto the saddle of his rig, and started off.
“Jack,” I called, hoping for the rest of his story, but he only shook his head and, without a backward look, pedaled away into the crowd.
When Tamar came to take Missy’s hand, the child hung back for an instant, her bleak eye lingering on the gleaming sickle blade in Will Jones’s hand. Turning, her look fell on me; she gazed for a long silent moment, and I suddenly felt the hairs on the back of my neck tingle as she continued to stare, her body a trifle stiff, her mouth slack. Then she permitted herself to be led away.
I stood alone for a moment, trying to examine the sensation I had felt, a fugitive feeling I could scarcely define. I moved into the crowd, my eye on the tree where Beth was already laying out the picnic things. Though I saw Beth plainly, it was the child’s face that hovered before me; and it was perhaps for this reason alone that I forgot to take Kate’s Medihaler from the glove compartment of the car.
7
“An elegant repast, my dear,” Professor Dodd said to Beth, wiping his lips with one of the checkered napkins. “You have found the way to my heart. Now if you’re truly good, Margaret will give you her recipe for old New England succotash. Most people use salt pork, but she makes it the old Indian way.”
“How did they do it?”
“They baked a dog with it.”
“Oh, Robert, really, the Constantines aren’t going to believe a thing you tell them if you keep that up.” Maggie Dodd took a cigar from Robert’s breast pocket, rolled it between her palms, clipped the end, and held the match while he lighted it.
“I assure you the Indians considered it a great delicacy,” Robert continued. Having finished our picnic lunch, we were sitting under the tree-Robert Dodd in a lawn chair, Worthy Pettinger close to Kate-eating Maggie’s chocolate mousse. Beth, who was wearing my gift of the bone earrings, stretched and lay back on the grass, looking up at the sky.
“It’s hard to believe places like this exist anymore. It seems like a-” She groped for the word.
“Throwback,” Maggie supplied.
“No such thing,” said Robert.
“I mean someone found it and forgot to throw it back.”
“Margaret’s always making jokes at the village’s expense,” Robert said.
I was quick to recognize the flash of intimate response between the couple as Maggie leaned and took Robert’s napkin, shaking off the crumbs and folding it. Watching them, I felt we truly had found friends. To me, Maggie personified that thing I had been trying to express to myself about the villagers, an air of simple, placid grace, with her unmade-up features, her still-clear skin and eyes, her neatly coiffed hair whose style I was sure had not changed since she was a young woman. Her voice was low and serene, with a kind of easy, humorous lilt to it: an imperturbable woman.
“What Robert means,” she went on, “is just what you’re trying to say: there’s a sort of timelessness about Cornwall Coombe that often strikes outsiders-or even newcomers-as unusual.”
Beth lighted a cigarette and blew smoke through her nose. “What does it mean-Coombe?”
“It’s an English word-Celtic, actually,” Robert explained. “Means a valley or a sort of hollow. I suppose it implies a certain remoteness, which we are given to hereabouts. Margaret’s partially correct: there are a number of ‘throwbacks’ around here, like certain of the names which have an ancient and venerable history. Take the Lost Whistle Bridge, for instance, which is a corruption of ‘Lostwithiel,’ one of the towns in old Cornwall.” He pointed his cigar to the house next to the post office. “And when Gwydeon Penrose built that house over there, he named it Penzance House, but it’s come down to us as ‘Penance’ House.”
The horse-drawing contests had begun, and presently the Widow Fortune appeared with some friends, seating herself at a table under a nearby tree. The old lady set down her piece-bag, her splint basket, and her black leather valise, then arranged her skirts and shears while others drew around her and opened various baskets and hampers from which they produced an array of provender. Another lady came with a tall glass of tea, holding it while the Widow reached in her basket and broke off a sprig of mint, crushed it, and put it in the tea.
“Say hello to the Widow, dear,” Maggie prompted Robert.
“How do, Widow,” Robert called, and she called back, putting her tea aside as one of the ladies offered her an ear of corn in a napkin.
Maggie laughed. “Look how she takes that corn off the cob. My teeth wouldn’t stand for it. Isn’t it amazing how she keeps her faculties? And her energies. You’ll see-after her lunch she’ll sit there and quilt the whole afternoon, she and Mrs. Brucie and Mrs. Zalmon.”
“A quilting bee?” Beth asked.
“Quilting’s become fashionable everywhere these days, but it’s never stopped in the Coombe. Our ladies can turn out a dozen quilts a month.”
“Patchwork quilts bring a lot of money down in New York,” Beth said speculatively.
Out on the field, Fred Minerva had hitched his team to a skid with wooden runners like a sled. Worthy explained that this was called a stoneboat, onto which sacks of sand had been loaded. Deftly manipulating the reins, Fred encouraged his horses to pull the stoneboat along the turf, and at a certain point he unhitched his team and another took his place. The various pairs of horses were decked out in bell-laden harness, and I saw that Justin’s team had little corn rosettes stuck up behind the blinders.
I turned back to Robert. “The thing I don’t understand is how, in a day of modern technology and machinery, farmers still continue to use a horse and plow in place of tractors.”
“They don’t
Worthy sat up, attentive to the conversation, as Robert said, “The farmers hereabouts discovered long ago what farmers elsewhere are just coming to realize. There’s a good deal of work on a farm that can be done more cheaply by animal power than by gasoline. And your seed will go in early, before you can use a tractor on the wet ground.”
“Maybe you lose a little time at early planting, Professor,” Worthy put in, “but in the long run you make it up. And I’ll bet if I hitched my tractor onto that skid I could move it farther and faster than all those horses put together.”
“Hot, hot, hot. Never saw a fair day so hot.” It was the redoubtable Mrs. Buxley, the parson’s wife, accompanied by her husband. Wearing a flyaway hat and billowing chiffon, like a four-masted schooner in a high gale she descended upon us. She blew out her cheeks and lowered her bottom into one of the chairs Mr. Buxley had brought along. “Can’t remember a fair day hot as this, not since-James, can’t you bring your chair closer and join us? — the year of the last great flood. That was the year you and Robert came to us, wasn’t it, Maggie? Remember, Robert?”
“I remember.” Robert laughed shortly.
