Harvest Home

The place wasn’t a grave; it was a bog.

Amys was watching me from above. I climbed up and stood beside him.

“Wet down there,” he commented. “Good land if they’d drain ‘er. ‘Bout run out of room up here. Don’t know where I’ll put the next one that kicks the bucket.”

“Why don’t they drain that land?”

“Wouldn’t pay. She’ll wet up like that again.”

“When it floods.”

“Ayuh.”

“Amys, what’s Justin Hooke hiding?”

“How can I tell? I ain’t Justin Hooke.”

“Grace Everdeen didn’t kill herself.”

“She didn’t?”

“No. At least not by jumping off the Lost Whistle. Justin says she dashed herself on the rocks, because the river was low that year. Only it wasn’t. There’d been a flood that spring. You said yourself that the winter before Gracie came back was a bad one. Snow five feet deep, people had to tunnel, some of your sheep died. There was a thaw, and then the river flooded. The river was high all that summer, just like this year. The drought-the Great Waste-came after Gracie died, not before. So there weren’t any rocks. Justin’s lying.” I paused, looked closely at Amys, then said, “And if it was flooded like this, you couldn’t have dug a grave for her.”

He turned away slightly, examining his horny palms.

“Amys? She’s not there, is she?”

He did not reply immediately, and when he did it was with difficulty. “No, sir.”

“You never buried her, did you?”

“Yes, sir. I did. Mr. Deming said to dig and I dug. But it was all mud, and water three inches deep in the bottom. Fast as I bailed ‘er out, water seeped in again. Only a cold man like Ewan Deming’d consign the unhappy dead to such a place. I told him it was wrong. Deming said, ‘Fill ‘er in.’ When the elders left, I pulled out the box and hid it, then filled in the hole. That night I put her on my barrow and took her where she’d be dry and safe.” He turned with a pleading look, his eyes watering. “In the name of God, don’t tell. Please- they’ll-”

“I won’t, don’t worry. What did you do with her?”

He looked once again down the slope to the grave marker, then motioned me with his head. I followed him across the Common to Penance House and out back to the barn. He took me behind it to where the sheds were, and, beyond them, the hatchway dug into the ground. Glancing over his shoulder, he crouched at the doors and undid the lock securing the chain.

Three beams set into the earth served as steps. In the musty dimness, I could make out the earthen sides of a small room lined with bare shelves where roots and vegetables had once been stored for winter use. Along the far wall, I saw a long, dark shape, shrouded by some kind of covering. Amys drew back a dusty tarpaulin and I looked down on the coffin of Gracie Everdeen.

“It’s dry as the Sahara down here,” he whispered hoarsely. “Never gets no water, never no rain nor snow. There she lies- the last of sweet Gracie.”

The pine box rested on two sawhorses, and the boards were badly warped and shrunken, so that there were wide spaces between them.

“Weren’t you afraid someone would find out she’s here?”

“Nobody comes down here. I got the only key.”

“It’s not a very big box, is it?”

“No, sir.”

“But Gracie was a tall girl, wasn’t she?”

“But pretty,” he said quickly. “Gracie was pretty as a picture.”

“I remember you said so.”

He shook out the tarpaulin, raising a cloud of dust, and I helped him redrape the box. He leaned to smooth a corner, and as he stepped back the toe of his shoe caught on a sawhorse leg, sliding it from under the coffin. The end tilted, then hit the floor with a dry, wooden impact. He bent quickly and lifted the end again, replacing it on top of the sawhorse. As he straightened the tarp again, I saw something underneath, a small pile of some substance on the floor. While I watched, it grew larger, a small cone filling out on the sides like sand in the bottom of an hourglass. I knelt, looking closer. Overhead a faint trickle still continued through a crack where the coffin boards were shrunk apart. I caught them in my palm, brought them nearer.

Corn kernels.

Small, infinitesimally shriveled seeds of corn. I moved to the head of the box, motioned Amys to the foot, and together we lifted it. Another trickle of corn fell from the bottom. We shook the box, heard inside the dry rattle as more seeds sifted down, shook it until almost all the kernels had come out, until I was utterly certain there was nothing left inside, that for fourteen years this coffin had contained not the remains of Gracie Everdeen but only a sack of corn.

Requiescat in pace, Grace Everdeen.

But where was she resting? Why the carved inscription, the monument, the false grave?

With a sketch pad open on my knee, I sat on my folding stool, drawing the pear tree under the side window at the Hooke farm. As I laid out on the page the framework of the bare branches, I was reminded of the chestnut trees in the Tuileries in Paris, whose branches are cut back every autumn to grow again in the spring. I was trying very hard to think about Paris, and about anything that might keep me from thinking of what I did not want to think about.

I had not seen either Justin or Sophie when I came, nor were any of the men I had seen on former visits working on the premises. Justin’s El Camino was parked near the barn, and there was bedding hung out to air.

I found it difficult to concentrate on my work, and presently it became even harder, for I heard voices coming from the open upstairs window.

“Don’t, Sophie. Don’t let anyone see you like this.” There was a pause, then again the low rumble of Justin’s voice as he murmured something. Then, “You love me,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Then it’s enough. For me, it’s enough. If we can have a child, it will be raised as we have wished it, and that will be enough, too.”

Her murmured response signified nothing to me.

“In the old ways,” Justin said. “Trust them. Sophie?”

“Yes.”

“Trust them.” Another pause. “And tomorrow, when we go to the Common-”

“I don’t want to go to the Common-”

“We must. We must be there for them. When the bell strikes twelve, we must be there. You will behave as is fitting. Otherwise they’ll hate you. You’ll spend the rest of your life being hated, like-”

“Don’t.” I saw a flash at the half-open window as Sophie passed. She whispered something, and I dropped my head down over my sketchbook.

Justin called, “How’s it going down there?”

“Fine.” I nodded up to him; he lowered the sash and drew the shade. Soon I could hear them in the kitchen, talking in normal tones again, amid the rattle of silverware and the clink of china. Then something fell and broke, and Sophie was crying again; I heard her running upstairs. In a moment, Justin came out the kitchen door and down the steps. I returned to my work as he crossed the drive and stood beside me; from upstairs came the sounds of Sophie’s sobbing.

Justin shoved his hands in his pockets. “Spilt milk.” He drew a long breath. “She broke the cow pitcher.” Making no comment about the drawing of the tree, he wandered a short distance away and stood at the edge of the field, looking off. He took his key ring from his pocket and jingled it, his hands clasped behind his back. He ran his fingers through his hair, then recrossed the drive.

“Well, I’ve got to get going.”

I looked up. “See you tonight?”

“Kindling Night.” He shook his head. “I don’t think we’ll be there. We’ve seen lots of Kindling Nights.” He