“Sure. Would you want my tractor?”
“That’s right-we were going to plow with it next spring. How much are you asking?”
“No-you can have it. It’s a present.”
I said I couldn’t accept it, but if he thought I could manage to keep it running, I’d like to buy it; where could I send a check?
He thought a moment, then said, “Here’s what I’ll do. I’ll write to you, and put ‘Jonn Smith’ on the envelope. That way you’ll know it’s from me.” Again he looked back at the covered hole. “Don’t tell anybody,” he whispered. I took the shovel and we shook hands.
“Tell your wife goodbye, too,” he said, and went up the drive. One thing was clear: he was lying. Something had frightened him.
I looked down at the spot where he had buried the box; then, taking the shovel in my hands, I began digging.
When I had hung the shovel in the garage and come out, the shoebox under my arm, I heard Robert’s hallo from the other side of the hedge.
“That you, Ned? Come and sit.”
Turning the corner of the hedge, I found the blind man in his lawn chair, with his usual stoical attitude, as though he had learned long ago never to expect anything but what life chose to bring him. “Well, m’boy, Margaret tells me you’ve been up on the roof all morning. Be careful-those old shingles can be treacherous.”
I pulled up another chair, explaining that all necessary precautions had been taken, and that Worthy Pettinger had done most of the dangerous work anyway.
“Handy fellow, Worthy,” Robert said ruminatively. “Good-looking boy, too, they tell me. Got the old Cornish blood in him.”
“I thought the Cornish were fair. He looks more like an Indian.”
“In England it’s generally held that the so-called ‘black Irish’ were sired by those Spaniards who made it to shore when the Armada was sunk, but anyone who knows their apples will tell you it’s not the Spanish who blackened the Cornish hair, but men from a civilization far older than that. I’m speaking of the sailors from Knossos, in Crete, long before Caesar’s legions were even settling in England.”
“And Missy,” I asked pointedly. “Is she of the Cornish strain, too?”
“Her mother is, that we know. As to the father-that would be anybody’s guess.”
“Is it true she can prophesy?”
Before Robert could reply, Maggie appeared with a carriage robe which she tucked around his knees, laughing at his protests at being coddled. “Just pretend you’re on shipboard, darling.”
“What time do we get to Le Havre?” He smoothed the cover over his knees while Maggie knelt close by with her gardening things. “What have you fellows been talking about?” she asked, digging in some large new bulbs.
“Ned was asking about Missy’s predictions.”
Maggie laughed again. “Ned, you’ve got to get used to the country notions around here.”
“I don’t think you can toss them off as notions,” Robert argued. “Certainly there are people who appear to be endowed with special powers. Cassandra foretold the downfall of Troy. Montezuma’s priests were able to predict ahead of time the coming of the white man to the New World. Modern psychical research recognizes precognition as possible. People get portents of disaster all the time, and they’re often confirmed.”
“Maybe Missy just makes lucky guesses,” I put in.
“Maybe. But because of her freckles the villagers believe she had communication with the god. Not our Christian God, mind you, but the god that was worshiped in the olden times, as the Widow calls them. In those days, they believed men had the power of divination which stemmed from their knowledge of the stars.”
“And Missy’s stars are written on her face.”
Maggie placed a bulb in the hole and covered it over. “You see, Ned-country notions.”
“What you have to remember,” Robert continued, “is that human nature doesn’t change much. You can’t negate the ingrained imagination of a whole culture. When they came from Cornwall to the New World, the original settlers were a deeply religious sect. What did they find when they got here? Cold, illness, the constant fear of attack; they were foodless and homeless. They were forced to adapt to circumstances, to learn new ways in order to survive. But in learning the new they refused to give up the old, a faith based on the moon and the stars and the tides, and on ancient deities they could turn to for succor in this time of stress. During the first year the village was settled, there was a good harvest, which the Indians had shown them how to grow, and they had food.”
But then, he went on, had come what was still remembered as the Great Waste, the famine where the corn shriveled up and died, and the Cornish settlers felt the cold hand of fear at their throats, and they raised themselves up and prayed for help, not in church but in the fields, inviting the blessings of the old gods, those who had come with the dark-haired Cretan sailors. And the gods answered them, for the land was blessed with crops in the fields and fruit in the orchards.
“But it’s all vestigial,” Maggie hastened to point out. “Like the Spring Festival and the bonfire.”
“Country notions, yes,” Robert replied. “You’ll find evidence, though, that when the Christian priests tore down the pagan temples, the people made them leave the trees that grew around the temples. And, more importantly, the priests couldn’t destroy the thinking that impelled the building of the temples in the first place.”
“What would Mr. Buxley do if he found something like this in Justin Hooke’s corn patch?” I took the lid from the shoebox and brought out the doll.
Maggie, about to set in another bulb, laid it down with her trowel. “What on earth-?” She reached and took the doll from me. “What a strange-looking thing.” She turned it over in her hands, examining it. Then she placed it in Robert’s hands and let him feel it, describing its form to him in all its details. When Robert had done, she stood it up on the ground among her iris cuttings and bulbs and pronounced it a most unhandsome thing.
“It’s really quite awful-looking, Robert.”
“Is it?”
“What do you suppose it means?” I ventured. “Do they believe in hex around here?”
“Hex is Pennsylvania Dutch, isn’t it?” Maggie said. “I never heard of any hex in Cornwall, did you, Robert?”
“No. I don’t believe so.”
“Where did you find it, Ned?”
“In Justin’s cornfield.”
I watched Robert closely, seeking some visible expression behind his dark glasses. It was impossible to see beyond them. He drummed his fingers thoughtfully on the arms of his chair. From the corner of my eye I saw Maggie collecting her gardening things, dropping the iris cuttings and bulbs into her basket. She rose, dusting her knees. “I’m going to leave you men to sort it all out. It’s too much for me.”
“What
He shrugged. “I suppose he’d look the other way, just as the Catholic Church does. The church and the law have learned it’s a lost cause trying to censure such beliefs. How can you hope to fight them, when it’s proved that the old Cornishmen arrived here with the same gods the Indians already had?”
“But-vestigial, you say?”
“Margaret’s word, but I suppose it suffices. All these things are the traces of the older culture. Who knows why Fred Minerva will let his barn burn before he’ll put up lightning rods? Or why the Widow can cure things the doctor can’t? Or how Missy can tell the future?
“Justin traces his lineage back in an unbroken line to the earliest families in Cornwall. Now, those forebears of his were — as Cornishmen are-deeply religious. They believed in one way for countless years, and then the priests came and renamed all the streams and wells and glens, and tore down the temples and built churches and gave them Christ on a cross. They accepted all this for more than a thousand years. But all the time, they were feeling some nameless longing inside. What do they do? They hark back to the olden times, where they find a source of comfort that even they can’t comprehend, a fever that cools the fever, a mask that hides the mask.
“Superstitious? Oh, yes, Justin’s superstitious. It’s in his blood, his bones, his very nature. In his father’s, and in his grandfather’s. Because he believes that come hell or high water, bad crops or plague, what’s going to save
