I drove to the bait shack. Mrs. Brucie was doing things in the kitchen; Jack was in the chair by the fire. He seemed not to know me at all; I suspected they must be keeping him drugged on something the Widow had concocted. He looked at me as I fumbled inside his shirt, but showed no sign of recognition. Mrs. Brucie came and stood in the doorway, watching. I pulled out the red cloth bag and tugged it open, then inserted my finger and felt. It was empty. The ring was not there. The oddly shaped bone ring that had been not the Widow’s charm but Gracie Everdeen’s engagement ring, which I had seen hanging at her throat in the doctor’s X-rays. I dropped the bag back inside Jack’s shirt. Mrs. Brucie was smiling at me, saying nothing.
The evidence gone. Jack Stump cut and stitched… by the women… because-because why? What were they trying to hide? The peddler had been silenced because he had found Gracie. Gracie had been murdered because, blighted, she had come to Harvest Home…
Harvest Home…
What happened on Harvest Home?
Suddenly I became terribly afraid. And as suddenly I felt certain that Worthy Pettinger had never left town at all.
At the Common, the street lights had been turned off, and in the dark the villagers waited expectantly for the bonfire to be lighted. I pulled my car up near the post office and went looking for Amys Penrose, stopping to stare up at the gigantic wood structure, towering thirty feet and more into the air. The doors of the firehouse were thrown wide and the beams of the engine headlights illuminated the applauding crowd as the apparatus was brought onto the turf and hoses were run to the hydrants. The ladders that had been used to build the pyramid and to set the scarecrows on it were taken to the curb and stacked, while the firemen, donning their helmets, walked around the base, moving the spectators back to a safe distance.
I found myself caught up among them, and as I backed away with the others, the firemen ran to fling burning torches onto the pile. The bonfire began in clear limpid pockets of bright flame, glowing here and there. Then, as the wood and debris gradually caught, it became an awesome sight. I stopped where I stood, watching it grow, the flames slicing their way up the outside shell, orange, yellow, red, eating away at clapboards, boxes, beams, whatever they discovered, while from the wooden heart of the pile came the roar of the conflagration.
Of its own volition, the crowd retreated from the intense heat, and into this widened breach leaped a troop of living scarecrows, an array of ragged, wildly prankish straw-clad figures, bobbing and turning, doing a crazy dance while the onlookers joined hands and began circling the blaze in a clockwise direction, forming a great urgent chain.
Scornfully I watched. It was like a grotesque sports rally, and as they passed, link after link in their human chain, I hated them, these hayseeds with their stupid dance, their stupid singing, their stupid beliefs. “The old ways”-how I despised the phrase. I moved aside as more came to break their way into the circle, which grew larger, spreading out toward the edges of the Common, moving counterclockwise now.
Then, without apparent signal, the moving circle bulged outward toward me. Hands parted, arms lifted over my head, and I was swept up into the line by two incredible straw-and-rag men, who seized my hands in an iron clasp, drawing me along with them. Their effigy heads nodded at me as I, too, was forced to participate, moving faster and faster, the great blaze spinning past my vision. Another circle appeared before me, countering my own circle, and dark heads passed before the flickering light like figures in a silent movie. I was pulled along; the circles broke and re-formed into a serpentine braid, human ropes weaving themselves together, while the fire mounted.
Within the labyrinth of movement, distinguishable faces appeared: Robert’s, Kate’s, Beth’s; and faceless details: Mr. Buxley’s clerical collar, his wife’s hat, the Widow’s bonnet, whirling, kaleidoscopic; another face, rubicund, choleric. “That’s him,” cried Irene Tatum, “that’s the one let the hogs out! Debbie seen him! He let the hogs out deliberate!” I could I feel her hands snatching at me from behind, tugging at my clothes, trying to yank me from the circle, but still the straw hands held me fast and willy-nilly I was dragged away.
The line swept out again and, like a giant amoeba, divided itself from the larger circle to form a smaller one. Someone shoved me and I was propelled into the center; wheeling, I saw fire-washed faces, peripheral and with the sheen of exertion on their brows, now bright, now dim in the leaping light, all somehow sinister. They closed in on me with menace; I could feel the press of bodies, feel their hot breath, the air being pushed from my lungs by the sheer force of their weight. Quickly they moved toward me and as quickly withdrew, as if I were the butt of some enormous joke, and all was merriment once more as they rejoined the larger circle, bringing me with them, a swirl of leaping forms, my scarecrow cronies gripping my hands as they circled the flaming heap. The rancorous hag-cry sounded again- “… let my hogs out!” — as I passed, the voice fading, becoming lost; and pull as I might I could not free myself. I gave up all resistance. They took me where they might, and the scarecrow men were laughing and nodding at me as though I were not in thrall to them, their jester faces wild, looking upward at the whirlwind of fire and smoke-See! See! — their eyes glittering with ardor as they reflected the blaze.
I looked up, too. Saw a picture. A picture no man could paint, or scarcely dream. Saw a hell of burning scarecrows: straw and sacking and button eyes, cross-poles and uprights, hats and coats all lost in flame, a holocaust of straw men, saw in the picture one higher than the rest, arms outstretched in cruciform supplication, leaning backward into the fire that icked at the tattered war tunic, the tarnished epaulettes, the cocked hat, saw the wind enfold the flames around the face as hough in a caress. “Worthy!”
The scarecrow in the field. The pigs gone mad with the scent…!
I shouted and struggled, but they held me and pulled me back as in the picture the giant structure seemed visibly to swell, to belch and heave in its last convulsive throes. Shouting with all my might, I saw it lean away from the wind, totter, tremble, and with a thunderous crash of flame and charred timber the hideous pile tumbled to earth. Still I shouted, saw people fleeing past me to safety, saw hot sparks spiraling upward in a fiery shower, saw the ashes borne like feathers on the breeze, sifting in a gray spectral snow among the tombstones in the churchyard, saw a hand raised over me, brought down on my head in a savage blow, saw the picture crack, break into fragments, saw…
Nothing.
PART FIVE: HARVEST HOME
27
I awoke from nightmare to see the fragments pieced together, then realized they were the cracks and seams of a ceiling. I was in a strange bed, in a room unfamiliar to me. My jacket was on the back of a chair, my shoes beside it. A blanket had been drawn over me. The window shades were down. My head throbbed, and when I put my hand to the back of my skull I felt pain. I looked at my watch: it had stopped at ten minutes past five-a.m. or p.m.? I leaned from the bed and pulled the shade up: the sun was high.
I had come to in a bedroom at Penance House. I was looking out at an oblique angle toward the church. The hands of the church clock read twenty minutes to twelve. Men were working on the Common, some using rakes while others shoveled burned debris onto a giant chicken-wire frame. The sifted ashes were being scooped into burlap sacks and loaded onto the back of a truck. Soon all that was left to mark the night’s events was a giant scorched circle on the grass.
I fell weakly back against the pillow, my stomach churning as the picture of the previous night reformed itself in my memory, the carnage of the fire, the scarecrow that had not been a scarecrow. I squeezed my eyes shut, grimaced. It wasn’t possible; I had imagined it. There had been no face, only a straw head. I could make myself believe it if I tried. I tried. Could not. The face remained a face-Worthy Pettinger’s face. A conspiracy of cremation.
I looked through the window again. Men were taking down the harvest symbols from the chimneys and eaves. Others had appeared at points around the Common, casually loitering. I saw no women, no children, no animals. No cars went by. The men appeared to be waiting, smoking their pipes and looking at the burned
