“Scarecrows don’t last but the growin’ year. Come Kindlin’ Night they’ll all be burned. That’s a treat you folks have in store.” When the crops were harvested, she explained, the scarecrows were collected from the fields and brought to the Common to be put on the bonfire; then the ashes were sprinkled in the fields as a token to the following year’s crop.
She dug around in a large box until, with an exclamation of delight, she produced a cracked and battered cocked hat which she sat on top of the dummy where the Spanish-American tunic hung. She dragged out a pair of tall leather boots, and then a belt which she buckled around the middle of the coat. “Reg’lar warrior, en’t he, Kate? Needs a sword, I expect. This here’ll be someone’s next-year’s scarecrow, and won’t that be a sight for the crows?”
She yanked another box from a corner and spread the cardboard flaps. “Why, here’s what I wanted, right where I forgot I’d put it. Beth, come and look at all these scraps, what you’ll want to begin your quilt.” While she tugged out remnants of fabrics and examined them, I helped Jack gather up the pieces of clothing the Widow had not taken, and we carried them out to his cart, where he put them away.
“Now, there’s a woman,” he repeated, shaking his head and wheezing. “Ain’t she a woman, though?” He peered at me with his good eye, looking, as the Widow had said, somewhat piratical.
“How’s your jaw?” I asked.
“Good as new.” He waggled it again and grinned; then his brow creased as he frowned. “Skunks, that’s what they are, them Soakeses. A pack of drunken skunks. See what they drew.’ He dug in his pocket and produced a message scrawled on a scrap of soiled paper. “What’s that writin’ say?” I took it from him and read aloud:
“I ain’t afraid of no Soakeses, and they ain’t goin’ to keep me out of no woods, neither,” Jack said.
When I asked again what had happened there on the morning of the Agnes Fair, he launched into a heated jeremiad about the cost of his traps, the difficulty of setting them, and how it had become a job of warfare finding places to put the traps where the Soakeses were not likely to discover them. Between his rapid style of talking and the wheeze punctuating nearly every sentence, I had difficulty following his drift at times, but the essential facts I gathered were these:
On the morning the Widow and I had seen him go into the woods, he had checked his traps and discovered two of them missing. In a third was the scrawled warning to keep out of Soakes’s Lonesome. In another, he found a rabbit, which he put in his bag; then he continued on, finding most of the traps removed from their places. In time he had wandered into a part of the woods where he had not been before. It was there he had discovered the Ghost of Soakes’s Lonesome. Folks might think it a ghost, for it howled like one, but he hastened to assure me it was not the ghost that had frightened him.
“No ghost is goin’ to get the best of Jack Stump, no sirree. I had my look and I seen my fill, and I left, and I’m walking along through those woods when them fellows pop out from behind a tree and snatch me. The old man grabs me around the throat, and another’s got this shotgun and it’s pointing right at my nose. Well, the boys find that hare in my pocket, and they stole it from me, and they pushed me around, and finally they let me go, but the old man grabs up that gun and sets off a blast. By that time, I’d gotten behind this ol’ tree and he don’t see so good, anyhow. That’s when I come bustin’ out of them woods, and him chasin’ right after me.”
And since then he’d gone back to the woods, a fact not unknown to the Soakeses-hence the Sunday altercation. Had he, I asked, come upon the “ghost” again?
“Sure I have,” he boasted. “I seen it, and plenty.” He pointed off, as if the woods were close at hand. “And. it’s a very dark and secret place-out of the way, as you might say.” He waved an axe, saying he had marked the trail from where he had seen the ghost by making blaze cuts on the trees along the way. They began on a tall pine on a rocky knoll.
Just then, the Widow’s face appeared at her kitchen window, and in a moment she brought Kate out into the dooryard.
“Sell me that axe, Jack,” she called. “I need one.” She led Kate into the hen house, and I could hear her through the doorway, explaining the facts and economics of poultry life. Jack handed me the axe, which I laid on the step. “And does the ghost still holler?”
“Sometimes it do, sometimes it don’t. Sometimes it wails like a banshee, sometimes it don’t make utterance.” Asia Minerva was coming up the drive, and Jack, still talking, tipped his hat to her; in a moment the Widow appeared from the henhouse and took her into the kitchen.
I fingered the sinister warning, trying not to smile. For all the peddler’s scruffiness and talky ways, I liked him-even if he couldn’t write his name.
“I’ll tell you what about them Soakeses,” he continued confidentially.
“What?”
“You know they’s supposed to be a still in them woods?”
“Yes.”
“And you know about the revenuer that come around?”
“Yes.”
“The ghost is the revenuer.”
“How do you figure?”
“I don’t figure-I know. I seen him. They done him in, them Soakeses. They killed him. That’s the ghost people talk about. But I touched it.” He held up his thumb.
“There’s a body?”
“Bones. The fellow’s bones.”
“How does he howl, then?”
Jack silenced his reply as Asia Minerva’s face appeared briefly at the kitchen window. Then, “You believe me, don’t you?” he asked, blinking, his watery eyes appraising me.
“Jack Stump, stop palaverin’ about bones out there with my guest.” The Widow’s face popped up at the window and she shook a wooden spoon. She disappeared immediately, and Jack’s hand tugged at my sleeve. “You believe me, sir, you believe me,” he maintained stoutly, as though a lie were never to pass his stubbled lips. “Lookee, I’m off around my territory for a few weeks, but before I go I’m gonna have to have another look.”
I returned the scrap of paper, which he made into a small roll, and slipped it into the red felt bag in his shirt. “The Widow’s magic’s good for toothache; mebbe it’s good for Soakes-ache.” He dropped the bag back inside his shirt, then set his feet on the bike pedals and careened the rig up the drive, narrowly missing the Hookes’s El Camino as it pulled in.
Kate came out of the hen house saying she’d like to raise chickens, and we went into the kitchen together, where the Widow was decanting some concoction into a bottle for Asia Minerva. She corked it, then snatched a piece of paper off a spindle and scribbled some directions. Asia appeared upset as she took the medicine.
“No bother, Asia,” the Widow told her. “Fred’ll be well in a jiffy. Come in and have some coffee.” She ushered us into the front parlor which had filled considerably, the Demings having arrived, and Constable Zalmon and his wife, as well as Robert and Maggie and Beth. The conversation broke off suddenly, and I knew they had been discussing the melee with the Soakes gang. I thought I detected a look of approval from the staid Mrs. Deming, and I wondered if perhaps the fight had done something to solidify my position in the community. Even Mr. Deming smiled, and as Justin Hooke came through the front door he hurried to shake my hand like an old friend.
“Here’s the Harvest Lord himself.” The Widow Fortune kissed his cheek, then turned to Sophie. “And his Maiden.” She offered him her own chair, while Sophie sat beside Beth, who was speaking with Robert, and I went and sat on the sofa arm. “You’re right,” Robert was saying, “you’d have to travel far and wide before you found a place like Cornwall Coombe.” He felt in his breast pocket for a cigar, which Beth took and lighted for him the way she had seen Maggie do.
“Thank you, m’dear. You see, part of the reason is geographical, as I said. We’re a small valley-an enclave, really- ringed on three sides by hills, and we sit in a larger valley. On the fourth side is the river. The old turnpike road ran close by for two centuries, but it was thirty miles east of us, and I don’t think anyone who traveled it knew Cornwall Coombe was here. Thirty years ago, the parkway was put through but still no one came near the village. Railroads, sure they built one-six miles due east on the Saxony side. The nearest airport is some sixty miles away, and there still isn’t more than the one road in and the one road out of Cornwall Coombe. That you, Ewan?” Robert turned his head as Mr. Deming joined our group. “I can smell that apple tobacco of yours. I was attempting to tell our new friends how we all came to get fitted into the Coombe. Perhaps you could explain better, having been here
