He, too, was observing us. I felt Beth’s hand squeeze mine, two nervous little tugs. I squeezed it back, and we strolled into the cemetery to wander among the tombstones again, reading the antique inscriptions. Like the living village, this dead one seemed well populated by Penroses.
We climbed a grassy knoll whose far side was also planted with graves, sloping away into a marshy meadowland, with the river gently curving inward beyond. A low iron fence marked the boundary of the cemetery, and on the other side, half hidden under a tangle of briars, was a solitary marker. Curious, I went to investigate. All around the plot the grass was long and untended, the ground wet and soggy.
I pushed the briars aside and read the inscription:
Grace Everdeen
Deceased
1958
Wondering who the unfortunate lady was who had been thus consigned to unconsecrated ground, I returned to Beth on the slope above, and we left the cemetery and passed the church where the old man pursued his woolwork-a muffler, if I was correct-his eye not missing a trick as we continued along the walk to the point where Main Street began. Then we gazed back at the panorama. The sun was bright, the sky blue and cloudless, and spring was everywhere. A man was dressing up a picket fence with a fresh coat of paint; another carried a bucket out behind a house and used an old-fashioned hand pump to fill it. A third sprinkled ashes on a cultivated plot beside his doorway, while beribboned girls dawdled over boys with Sunday-slicked haircuts. Another wagon lumbered past; a dog ran under the horses’ traces, barking at their hoofs.
I loved the feel of the place: the tranquil, bucolic look, the sense of peace that spoke from every doorway, from each plot of well-tended grass, from every newly blooming garden. I loved the solidity and agelessness of it, of the passersby themselves, simple country people with simple country faces. There was a sense of veneration for that which had gone before, a rigid, disciplined effort to preserve things as they were-even, perhaps, a reluctance to acknowledge things as they are.
Mrs. Dodd came for us. We spent a pleasant hour driving over to Ledyardtown, about fifteen miles away, and talking with the head of the Greenfarms School, where we were informed they would be happy to interview Kate for admittance next fall. The school, adequate beyond our expectations in such a remote locale, appeared to meet any educational requirements; there was even a riding academy where a course in “equitation” was taught. Kate would be ahorse yet.
On the way back, I mentioned to Mrs. Dodd that I hadn’t realized tobacco was grown in these parts. Oh, yes, she said, on the other side of the river it was all tobacco, used for cigar wrappers. Beth mentioned the bristly- looking man in the tavern. That must have been Old Man Soakes and his brood from over in Tobacco City, Mrs. Dodd replied. A reprehensible lot, they sometimes came over to buy corn to make whiskey with. Moonshining in New England? Indeed, she replied; the Soakes clan had been making bootleg whiskey for years. It was rumored they kept a still in the woods outside town, though no one had ever bothered to try to locate it. People, she told us, mostly minded their own business. Besides, Soakes’s whiskey was regarded favorably by the village farmers; and it was cheap.
We returned to the Common to pick up our car, again following the Buick out to Penrose Lane where, coming up the walk, I overheard another passage from Dickens.
We found the blind man in the sun porch listening to a record player, a device he called his talking-book machine, on which he played books that had been read onto a disk. Shutting the phonograph off, Mrs. Dodd offered us another drink, and we informed her husband we would take the house. A handshake was all he asked to seal the transaction, with papers to be drawn up subsequently, and we lingered in the sunny room for three-quarters of an hour, becoming acquainted with our neighbors-to-be. The Professor seemed to know a good deal about the history of the village and was happy to answer any questions Beth or I put to him. I tried to explain to him my feelings about the place, the excitement I felt at discovering Cornwall Coombe. He listened, nodding at each sentence, and when I had done he said it was understandable enough, but people often ignored the fact that life a hundred years ago was not easy. Time put a patina of affection on yesteryear, and we tended to forget how appalling existence could be in those times, how long and how hard a man had to labor for his food, how difficult childbearing was, how few medicines and conveniences there were; how stern the realities of life.
Tradition, he continued, was the important thing here: tradition and custom, customs that had been preserved through the villagers’ lineage since olden times. They were a tightly knit, insular group, these corn farmers, apparently determined to cut themselves off from the rest of society in an effort to preserve their own folkways, much as had the Amish in Pennsylvania, the Mennonites in Ohio. What had been good for a man’s father and grandfather was good enough for him; what they had worn, he wore; the tools they used, he used-a scythe to mow the hay, a sickle to cut the corn.
The Professor sat comfortably in his chair, savoring his drink from time to time, his head directed straight before him, his eyes completely hidden behind his dark glasses, whose side pieces admitted no light. The people of Cornwall Coombe were good people, he continued, from good stock, but their ways were different from most people’s, and they took a deal of getting used to. Some might find it difficult adapting to the village ways, he pointed out, with, I thought, a hint of something in his tone, as though he thought perhaps we might not be able to-or, to put it more strongly, not be willing to.
The village was not rich, which was all right; small, which was fine; quaint, which was nice. The farmers were sociable according to their custom; worshiped according to their custom; ate, drank, fasted, worried and wept, married, gave birth, and were laid to rest according to their custom; were not particularly interested in what went on in the world and, according to their custom, never went there to see. Were we, he wondered, prepared to adapt?
Rising with Beth, I said we were. We were prepared for anything. The Professor sipped from his glass and tapped his nail against the rim. He hoped, he said, we would prosper.
3
While Beth squeezed fresh orange juice, I sat at the farm table in our new kitchen scanning the morning news. It all seemed familiar. There had been another skyjacking, an Eastern flight. It was the second that week; the first had ended in shooting, two bandits dead in the cabin, terrified passengers, a disgusted crew. A man in California had gone amok, had killed his wife and four children. It made me sick to look at the paper. The trouble in Ireland-religious persecution in this year of our Lord, 1972; heavy artillery banging away on the Golan Heights; Americans dropping bombs on insignificant Vietnamese huts.
I turned the page to look for Peanuts.
“Don’t forget your vitamins,” Beth reminded me. She pointed to the array of capsules and pills she always set out beside my plate: ascorbic acid, Super-Potent B-Complex Alerts, Multi-Vita-Mineral tablets, brewer’s yeast, niacin, and riboflavin.
I washed them down in sets with the orange juice. Beth poured coffee from the electric percolator, then continued making breakfast while I sipped from my cup. On the radio, Milton Cross was advertising the “Barcarolle” from
Beth paused to gaze out the picture window at the terrace beyond, with its unfinished wall. “It’s like a beginning, isn’t it?”
“What is?”
“Oh-today. Somehow it feels like a beginning.” I supposed the fair, locally signifying the end of summer, had something to do with her thought.
“A new beginning for us?”
“Something like that.”
“Maybe we ought to start by going to church tomorrow.”
“I didn’t necessarily mean
