single name “Grace,” and this she pulled around into the light. She undid the twine that bound it, and pulled back the flaps. I bent and looked. There were some dresses and sweaters, shoes, gloves, a small box with bits of costume jewelry, and a pocketbook. Mrs. O’Byrne took out the pocketbook and unclasped it. There was a letter inside.
I couldn’t make out the cancellation mark, but the envelope was addressed to Roger Penrose, in Cornwall Coombe, and a faded rubber-stamp mark read, “Deceased-Return to Sender.” The letter was sealed.
“May I open it?” Mrs. O’Byrne paused, then said that after fourteen years, and with Gracie gone, it wasn’t like prying into a person’s things. I took out my penknife, slit the envelope, and drew out the single sheet of paper. Holding it close to the light, I read the handwriting, wild, infirm, distraught:
There was no signature. I read the lines again, then gave the page to Mrs. O’Byrne, and bent to examine the other contents of the carton. When Mrs. O’Byrne had done reading, she refolded the letter and slipped it in the envelope.
“Well, there’s the answer-wouldn’t you say? He’d gotten her pregnant. She was going to have a baby-wasn’t that it? And after bein’ engaged to her, he decided he wanted the other one. A ring he gave her, too.’’
I was examining the shoes. “She still wore his ring?”
“Not on her finger-around her neck, on a little chain, like a locket.”
“Why not on her finger?”
“She couldn’t. It wouldn’t fit.”
I returned the shoes to the box-large, heavy shoes. “Gracie must have been a big girl.”
“Like a horse. But not strong like a horse is.”
“Would you say she was delicate?”
She glanced at the shoes in the box. “Not with feet like them. But delicate in her constitution, yes. She was weak as all getout. She did the housework, but she’d get awful tired. I felt so sorry for her, the way she lagged. Just docile and quiet, and wanting to sleep all the time. Not an ounce of energy. I expect it was the morning sickness.”
I remembered how tired Beth had been before Kate’s birth. Still, Gracie had not long before been shinnying flagpoles and wrestling Roger Penrose to the ground. I picked up one of the gloves, looked at it, and asked her to put it on. She slipped her hand in and held it up; the glove fingers drooped over the ends of her own. I returned it to the box along with the pocket-book and letter, then put the carton back and went upstairs.
I thanked her and left, mulling over the contents of the letter.
Driving back over the Lost Whistle, I pulled up on the Cornwall side, got out, and walked back under the portal, peering through the open latticework. Twelve or so feet below, the placid river ran under the bridge in a slowly moving current, and I could see a school of brown-colored fish gliding in the depths. On both sides, the bank eased down to the water in a gently sloping, sandy stretch. I wondered from which point along the bridge Gracie Everdeen had thrown herself, and indeed how she had managed to kill herself at all, the drop being, to my eye, insignificant.
I thought over what I knew: Amys said Roger had ridden across the bridge the night before the husking bee. The husking bee took place on the night of the Corn Play, the beginning of Harvest Home. Gracie had died two nights after Harvest Home. If she was pregnant, Roger must have met her sometime earlier that summer, sometime when neither Mrs. Lake nor Mrs. O’Byrne had been watching. Then she went to Harvest Home and accused Roger. Leaving, she returned- where? Mrs. O’Byrne had stated that she went away without her things and never came back. But Irene Tatum hadn’t found the body until two days later. Where had Gracie stayed before she jumped from the bridge? Had she been alone during her last hours alive?
I drove away, my mind both mystified and intrigued by the tragic girl, until my attention was diverted as I heard radio music blaring from the Tatum house: Sonny and Cher singing “I Got You, Babe”; rock and roll in Cornwall Coombe. Stirring her smoking soap kettle, Irene hollered over to the cornfield where some of the children were hauling down the old scarecrow and bringing it up to the house.
Making ready for Kindling Night. Now, all along the way, I noticed how the fields had been emptied of their straw-and-corn watchers, the scarecrows the Widow had done up for the various farmers. I pulled in at the Hooke farm, and talked with Sophie for a while. When Justin came from the barn I posed him by the flowering pear tree, as I had seen him when he planted it. When I began sketching him, Sophie came and asked if she might watch, and I said fine; since my student days, when I used to draw on the subways, people looking over my shoulder had never bothered me.
When some task took her back to the house, I continued working, listening to Justin. He was his usual affable self until I brought up the subject of Worthy Pettinger and the scene in church several weeks earlier. Justin’s sunny face had a way of clouding over when his thoughts were disturbed, and now it became thunderclouds on Mount Olympus.
Worthy, he said angrily, breaking his pose and turning his face away, was a young fool. His sin was double: not only had he refused the honor of the village by renouncing the role of the Young Lord, he had also damned the crops. Though this harvest would not be affected, who knew what the following year would bring? Again Justin spoke of drought and pestilence, and when he turned his face back, I could see the whole history of ancient superstition and fear written there.
Some of the responsibility he took upon his own shoulders. He had known Worthy was dissatisfied, had known he was unhappy and discontented. He, Justin, should have taken more pains; it was his responsibility as Harvest Lord to see to it that Worthy came ‘round before the terrible and furious conclusion, one that was regarded to be as unfortunate as the Grace Everdeen episode.
I took up my bamboo pen again and Justin resumed his pose. “About Gracie-how was she a disruptive influence at Harvest Home?”
“She came-that was enough.”
I tried another tack. “I don’t think Grace Everdeen killed herself. Or if she did, she didn’t do it by jumping off the Lost Whistle.”
“Why?”
“Because a ten-year-old child couldn’t drown in that water, if she could swim a stroke. It’s not more than fifteen feet from the railing to the river, and if a person was determined to commit suicide that’s not what you’d call a guaranteed result.”
“River’s high this year.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning that when Gracie killed herself the river was low. Not much water but lots of rocks along there. They’re smooth, but they’re hard. Hit one of them from fifteen feet and I guess you’ve got a guarantee.”
I guessed I had, and that Gracie had, too. “How long ago was that? When Gracie-”
“Fourteen years,” he replied quickly.
“How do you recall it so exactly?”
“If you’d lived here, you’d recall it too. Not a villager that doesn’t, who was alive then. It was the year before the last Great Waste.”
The last Great Waste. Which somehow in the minds of Cornwall Coombe lay at the hands of Gracie Everdeen. It became more tantalizing, a village mystery whose solution I more and more felt the urge to discover. What had Gracie’s blighted love affair had to do with the blighting of the corn crop thirteen years ago?
I sketched awhile in silence, then said to Justin, “If Sophie wants a painting of you while you’re Harvest Lord, you should have worn your costume.”
Justin laughed. “I’d feel silly standing out here wearing that costume.”
“The one with the corn leaves?”
