and she had not seen me enter. The teakettle steamed on the hot plate. The Constable hurried in, lifted the hinged panel, and went into the back room, and Tamar, carrying some letters, quickly followed. The door closed behind them.
“Hurry,” one of the ladies at the window was urging the other, darting glances toward the Common and digging in her purse for change. When they finally made a hasty exit, I stepped up to the window and asked Myrtil Clapp for a book of stamps. While I paid for them, the door to the back room opened and the Constable and Tamar came out. She hurriedly finished distributing the mail, turned the hot plate off under the teakettle, and followed the Constable out the door.
Myrtil set her empty teacup aside and went to the letter rack. She looked in the A-B-C box, and returned with several envelopes, which she slid under the grille. “Lots today,” she said, then turned a triangular block which read “Closed” on the inserted card. She lifted the counter panel and passed through. I looked around: the post office was deserted. I picked up my letters and began thumbing through them. A cry from outside froze my hand briefly; then, slipping the letters into my case, I hurried through the doorway.
The sunlight was blinding. When my eyes adjusted, I looked around. The street was empty. On the Common, standing in the yellow light and casting small pools of shadow on the green grass, the women waited.
“How’s your late potatoes, Asia?” Will Jones’s wife asked Asia Minerva.
“Poor, dear. They’re awful poor by now.”
“They want rain. Seems as though the corn took all the rain this year. Soaked it right up, it did. And after all that rain we had last spring.”
Asia craned her neck around the shoulder of the woman in front of her, as if anxiously straining to catch a sound. It could not take much longer.
Then it was done. One of the women called out, another pointed; they broke from the Common, running across the grass and out into the street, milling in the thoroughfare to meet the men coming from behind the barn. Asia was hugging her son, and when she held him back from her I could see the bloody marks on his face. Asia pulled him to her again, clasping him to her bosom, while the rest crowded around, talking excitedly and reaching to touch him as the men stepped up and wrung his hand. Then the group began dispersing, casting looks over their shoulders to where Missy Penrose stood, a little apart, her incredible doll dangling from one red hand.
Going to the Widow Fortune’s house, I noticed that her corn was yet unharvested. A trail of smoke was rising, not from the chimney but from somewhere behind the house.
“Did you think my skirts had caught fire?” she said, laughing, as I rounded a shed to find her bent over a bench with a row of beehives on it. Her face was protected by a net, and in one gloved hand she held a bee smoker, with a small bellows attachment. “Come along,” she said as I stepped back, “no cause for alarm. Them that call this hive home is over in yonder tree. Some dratted raccoons have been playing havoc and eating up my honeybees. I’m giving their house a fall cleanin’.”
She raised the hive at the end of the bench and scraped the insides free of wax and other material, then reset the dome in place and laid the apparatus aside. “Now all I got to do is catch that coon, then swarm the bees back, and come spring there’ll start to be plenty of honey in the pot.”
I helped her gather up her paraphernalia and carry it into the shed. While she put the things away, I noticed on a dusty shelf in the corner a row of small wooden casks, identical to the one she had presented to us. They were stoppered with pegs and lay under a caul of cobwebbing, seeming as if they had been undisturbed for many years.
She saw me looking at them, told me to come along, then hurried me from the shed. Outside, she dusted her hands and eased her back.
“Winter’s comin’-my sciatica’s kickin’ up.” She looked off at her corn, nodding in approval. “Pretty soon it’ll be all in, and another year’ll be over. Oh, yes,” she continued as we walked along the edge of the patch, “your year ends come New Year’s, but for a farmer the year’s end comes with the harvest. Harvest, then the huskin’ bee, then Kindlin’ Night, then the Harvest Home, and that’ll see us safe for another year. Bountiful harvest,” she said, sighing gratefully as she took off her work apron and folded it with precise motions. “Come and have a cup of tea.”
The kitchen was the usual potpourri of herbal fragrances. On the stove a large kettle was simmering, and she directed me to carry it to the back porch, where I set it on a table. As she covered it with a piece of cheesecloth, I saw pieces of what appeared to be the large caps of the mushrooms we had found in the woods, drained of their redness but nonetheless recognizable. On the shelf were half a dozen more little casks, newer- looking and unstoppered. When I came back into the kitchen, she had cleared away the remains of herbs and spices and the water kettle was on the fire.
She got out her tea things and set them on a tray. The cups and saucers were a handsome grayish blue, with a Chinese design; looking at the bottom, I saw they were marked “Ironstone, Made in England.” When I admired them, she said the pattern was called Amoy, and that Clem Fortune had given them to her as a wedding present. While the kettle heated, she got down her box of tea and filled the little silver tea ball. The cardboard tea container being empty, she pulled out the lining, flattened it, and spiked it on a spindle on which she saved scraps of paper; the box was relegated to another cupboard. In the Widow Fortune’s house everything was saved, everything was used.
While she carried the tea things into the parlor, I went out to the car and brought in my surprise. She was comfortably ensconced beside her hearth, and I set the large carton on the hooked rug at her feet. Changing her spectacles for the occasion, she used her shears-a pair I hadn’t seen before-to part the gummed tape and open the flaps.
“Oh, dear.” She looked from it to me and back to it, bending forward with the eager expression of a child. “Is it what I think it is?”
“What do you think it is?”
“I think a sewing machine.”
“I think you’re right.”
I lifted it out and set it on a table where she might examine it more closely. Then I showed her the array of attachments for zigzag and buttonholing and for all the other mechanical feats the machine was capable of performing. And the last-
“An automatic bobbin! I declare I thought I’d go to the grave without an automatic bobbin, surely.”
“No one should go to their grave without an automatic bobbin, surely. That’s-well, we just wanted to thank you for-”
“Here, now-here, now.” She took and held my hand, gripping it firmly between hers, then releasing it. She removed her glasses and wiped her eyes. “You’re a good man, Ned Constantine. You’re a good family. Well.” She folded her hands over her broad bosom and smiled. “Well, now, there’s an end to Fairy Belle and I can’t say as I’m sad to see her go.” She peered again at the new machine. Without her spectacles, she had that curiously naked and unfamiliar look of people who habitually wear glasses. “How d’you s’pose I’ll ever learn to run her, at my age?”
I said I believed it was not very difficult, and showed her the accompanying pamphlet of instructions and diagrams. She put her glasses back on to read, slipping her shears on their black ribbon into her lap. “Looks mighty complicated. Perhaps Beth can help me.”
I stuffed the pieces of packing material back in the carton.
“New scissors?”
She shook her head. “Lord knows, I’ve left them others over to Asia Minerva’s or somewhere when we were quilting.” She sipped her cup, eying me over the tops of her glasses, “Leave that, your tea’s gettin’ cold.” I took the chair opposite and stirred lemon and sugar in my cup.
“One-B Weber’s?”
“Ayuh. You’d like the honey better’n sugar, though.”
“Your bees make a good honey.” I stirred with my spoon. “Interesting honey.”
“How so?”
“Your mead, I mean.”
“Oh. Did you like it, then-what was in the little cask?”
“Yes-I did.”
Her face was deadpan. “I thought perhaps you might.”
“We enjoyed the show, too.”
“Show?”
