treat. Martha studied the boy’s dirty face, stricken with childish concern for her inexplicable distress, and she smiled, tugging roughly at his hair with her fingers.
“Butter,” she said, tapping his left hand. He grinned with relief and opened an empty palm to her. “Go on,” she prompted, and he quickly shoved into his mouth the bit of damp sugar that had been clenched in his right hand.
As they rolled past the now-silent figure in the stocks, the woman craned her neck to the side and stared up at Martha with accusing eyes. Rage had replaced the shame of being pilloried, and her piercing look came like a mother’s slap, and a mother’s warning. The woman’s eyes, the palest of blue and clouded with the beginnings of elder blindness, craned and looked at the wagon until it had pulled out beyond the town marker.
THE MOWING OF the common fields began upon the cresting of the sun. The entire town of Billerica had come out to harvest the green and fibrous grasses, sawing at the wind in nodding waves. Each settlement would share in its deserved portion, the largest homesteads getting the largest share of fodder for their farm stock. Well before dawn, men and women on foot and in carts, carrying scythes and rakes and pitchforks, had joined the road winding north beyond Loes Plain. They came together in banded groups, families by blood or marriage, or in camps of common-minded neighbors, eager to give or receive news and gossip of the recent births and deaths in a neighboring village, or the vagaries of trade in a marketplace that lived or died much as the people did. They spoke in quiet undertones, calling to one another in hoarse whispers, as though the sun were a living thing that could be frightened away by the sudden remonstrations and shouts of people.
Martha had chosen to walk the few miles rather than ride in the wagon with Patience and the children, her pace joyfully rapid, keeping time with Thomas’s loping stride. The air was cool on her ankles, bare from lack of stockings, and she could have walked barefoot if not for the presence of men. Will got down and ran for a time back and forth between them, teasing and chanting, “Catch me, catch me, catch me,” until Thomas grabbed him up and tossed him shrieking over one shoulder. He was carried aloft for a while, dizzy and excited to be able to see ahead to the main group of villagers moving inexorably forward. Well beyond Fox Brook on a hillock, Thomas tossed Will back into the wagon and let it roll ahead, motioning for Martha to stand for a moment alone with him. As the wagon descended the far side of the hill, Patience turned her head around to watch them thoughtfully, her eyes guarded and questioning.
Thomas pointed west to a crooked bend at the Concord River where a deep pool formed, bowered over thickly with cattails and river fronds. He said to her, “In a year’s time, that’s to be our land. Mine and John’s.”
Her throat tightened at the beauty, the possibilities, of such a place, and a desire as strong as despair twisted in her chest. The rising sun flared off an eddy on the river, and she turned to watch Thomas, the flat planes of her face catching the biased light. She had never seen a man at rest who could stand so resolutely still; the absence of movement fooled the eye into believing the tall, angular Welshman at his ease was somehow less threatening than he truly was.
He had an economy and a surety of movement to everything he accomplished, never giving more energy to a task than was required, allowing the impetus of a tool’s own forward momentum and the pull of gravity to move rock and earth. And yet, at the behest of a neighbor who had no gun for butchering, she had seen Thomas fell an ox with a hammer so forcefully that the brains of the beast had been found in its throat. For all his native strength, though, he had yet to be proclaimed best man at the reaping.
Every man in Billerica with hair on his face worked a scythe to harvest the feed grass, hoping to be the last villager standing in the newly cleared field. Most times, completed within the span of a day and half a night, the scything would have a tinge of desperate zeal to it, a kind of battle. The men would attack the grass, mowing it in ever-expanding patterns, never stopping, except for a brief swallow of water or pocket bread, until exhaustion overtook them. One by one they would drop out until one man remained alone, a corn king, a prince of reeds, upright on the ground littered with broken stalks. Made much over by women and men alike, he would be fed the best meat, given the best ale, deferred to, listened to, sought after. For three years running a townsman named Ezra Black had been proclaimed the winner. Looking at Thomas in the strengthening light, she instinctively knew that he never took the honors as he had nothing to prove to these farmers of Billerica. He simply worked to fulfill his needed allotment of grass, leaving the contest to those yeomen whose reputations, and pride, depended upon such a small and circumscribed ritual.
Within the half hour they had joined the encampment of townspeople at the edge of the field, and upon the completion of the blessing by the Reverend Hastings, the men commenced the reaping. Moving in a northwesterly direction, their long-handled blades swinging in wide arcs, they opened up swaths between the long grasses. The stalks, still wet and clinging from the morning dew, lay crossed together in disordered patterns, turning hour by hour from dark green to yellowish brown. The women and children, some as young as Joanna, followed behind the men spreading and turning the grasses with rakes, gathering them into windrows to dry under the sun. Forty- odd men worked the fields, and they had cleared almost five acres when the drum rolled, calling them to pause for the noon meal of meat and bread and cold water drawn from the river.
Earlier, Patience had pushed a sharp elbow into Martha’s side, pointing out Ezra Black with her chin, remarking, “He is not yet married, cousin, and must marry soon or be thought a scandal.” She raised her eyebrows significantly, and Martha turned away before she betrayed her impatience. There had been a lustful buzzing around Ezra from the outset as first one young woman and then another found reason to drift close to him, to bring him water or to pull her cap aside to show off a small but immoderately straying curl. He was powerfully built with immense arms, thighs, and calves, but with bandy legs and a head full of dark ringlets that looked suspiciously oiled. Martha could have guessed without being shown who the cock of the hour was.
Patience pressed into Martha’s hands a large joint of meat and gave her a push in Ezra’s direction. As she approached him, he grinned widely, his squinting eyes disappearing behind the high mounds of his cheeks.
“You are Martha. Your cousin has told me of you,” he said, wiping at the sweat on his face. He crossed his arms and looked her over like a mare. “She told me you have been saving something for me.” He grinned even wider and winked his eye at her.
She blinked twice and felt the small of her back go rigid. At the setting of her face, there was a slight faltering of confidence in Ezra’s eyes, but he pointed to the joint of meat and winked again. Martha could sense the men and women watching them, waiting for an exchange of words. She handed him the meat, wiping her hands on her apron, and glanced at Thomas, who was drinking from a dipper of water, his eyes thoughtfully on Ezra.
“Well, there is no need for excitation. After all,” she said, looking down at the crease in his pants, “it is such a small joint.”
Ezra threw his head back and bellowed, gazing at her with nodding approval. “It’s not so small as you might think. Why,” he said, rubbing at the side of his nose, “there is plenty enough to feed the both of us.”
Despite her best efforts, she smiled, stifling a laugh, and after gnawing a bit of meat off the bone, he moved in closer. “You hold the rest for me for a short while. I trust it will be warmed in your lap and then I’ll claim it again. As best man.” He grinned at her and picked up his scythe as the drum rolled again, moving away with the tide of men returning to work.
The breezes which had cooled the fields that morning grew slack and then stopped blowing altogether, the sun shining uncensored in a cloudless sky, sparking off the newly sharpened edges of the working scythes. It wasn’t until the light had begun to shift beyond the forests of Chelmsford to the west that the older men, distressed by the heat, began to waver, stumble, and then quit the field, helped along by their women to places in the shade. The spent men rested, boasting of their performance in years past and guardedly laying odds on the last man standing. The women and children labored on, raking and gathering, until close to ten acres had been cocked and loaded into carts and wagons to be taken home, the farmers looking with a sharp eye to every other man’s apportioned share.
At sunset, the lowering rays painted the stalks to a golden red and soon John returned breathless and exhausted, dragging his scythe like a ruined toy behind him. His face was pinched with the heat and he wiped at his neck with a sleeve, saying, “I’m finished… cooked to a goose.” Propping himself sitting against the wagon, he doused his head and neck with the water skin, drinking deeply. Martha came to stand next to him, shielding her eyes with her hands, anxiously scanning the fields. She asked, “Is Thomas yet reaping?” When there was no answer she looked down to see John studying her, one eye squeezed shut against the sweat still pouring down his forehead.
