Harvest Read online

  Mr. Quill is thinking now, dramatically considering. He strokes his waxy, trowel-shaped beard to our amusement. Our laughter is lusty and excessive. We watch him looking out above our heads; perhaps he’s expecting guidance from the trees, or hoping to catch sight of Mistress Beldam in her velvet shawl. Possibly our lopsided fiddler, our evenhanded judge, means to raise his hand for her and have her step inside our ring to be the Gleaning Queen. The men turn round and stare toward the woods and to where some of them at least, to my certain knowledge, hunted for her under last night’s rain and where all of them, I’d guess, have wandered in their dreams. I half expect but dread to find a complicit smile on one of their faces, the smile of some quick-thinking lad who turned a profit from the rain by finding Mistress Beldam in distress and then providing somewhere snug for both of them to pass the night.

  The judge opts sweetly for the one we least expect. He picks little Lizzie, John Carr’s niece, and one of our suspected spares. She is not five years old, a gawky girl and hardly pretty yet. But she has clearly done her best to decorate herself. She is by far the yellowest. Her happiness at being chosen is innocent and unconcealed. So Mr. Quill has made a gentle choice, avoiding older girls. She does not want to let him take her hand, however. She steps back when he draws close, a little frightened by his smile and his lopsided gait. So Master Kent takes care of her. He removes the green sash from his hat and bends down from his saddle to drop it on Lizzie Carr’s head. Her crown. She is to keep the cloth, he says. The older girls are hugely jealous now.

  Lizzie Carr’s father and her uncle, John, make a chair for the Queen by joining hands across each other’s wrists and take her to the edges of the stub. She’s not entirely sure what she’s supposed to do. She only knows she is the center of attention, not all of it well-meaning. Her own sister has already pinched and hurt her leg. She’d like either to run away and hide or to give vent to tears. But Master Kent has dismounted and come forward to help her from her chair. “Take off your slippers, go barefoot, take the first step on the field,” he whispers to her. “All you need to do is find a single grain, just one. Then we will cheer. And you will be our Queen for one whole year.” He pushes her shoulder gently, and she does what he has said, blessing the stub with her bare toes. The stalks are too tough on her feet at first, but she takes a few wincing steps, finding balder ground. And there she drops down to her knees and leans forward to search for her grain. The sash falls from her head. It is the field’s only splash of green. But Lizzie Carr does not retrieve it yet. She has found more than a grain, she’s found a complete ear, perfectly intact, as long and broad as a man’s best finger, its awns as spiky as a teasel head. She’s old enough to know how to separate out the barleycorn by running her fingers against the bristles. She blows into her palm to winnow off the flake. And now she’s holding out her hand to show her barley pearls to us. The moment is always a rousing one. Our labors are condensed to this: a dozen tokens of our bread and drink, each tucked and swaddled in the oval of a grain, and sitting on a child’s undamaged skin. What should we do but toss our hats and cheer?

  Mr. Quill is at my shoulder. He’s grateful that I’m helping him, he says. He understands that I am handicapped today but all he has in mind for me is gentle work. He will be indebted if I can walk the village bounds with him, naming everything I see. He hopes as well that I can provide a shoulder for his bag of charting tools, and later use my single hand to help prepare his color pots of paint and prepare the calfskin still drying in the dancing barn for vellum. He needs it urgently for Master Kent’s land chart. Normally, I would not wish to miss my gleaning spoils. I could expect to come away with sufficient grain for some private ale and porridge flour, as well as winter feed for George and Gorge, the pair of long, flat-sided pigs I share with John Carr and his family. But Mr. Quill proposes something more pleasing, and an opportunity when everybody else is double-bent and studying the stub to settle what has happened overnight to Mistress Beldam.

  Master Kent stands back with us, enjoying the noisy rush of gleaners, their concentrated, thorough scampering. Already many of my neighbors have gathered up a worthy gleaner’s sheaf; they hold it in their resting hands, a drooping horse’s tail of flaxen stalks, while their working hands peck and pick across the stub like hens. The master has tucked a barley ear under his hat’s remaining yellow sash, for good luck. He needs good luck. He knows my search for the woman failed. She did not seek shelter in his barn. He bashfully admits he waited for her there until “the hour was insensible,” meaning I suppose that when he finally retreated to his bed the casks of ale were empty. But he’s more troubled than can be accounted for by ale or even by the seeming disappearance of a woman who two days ago was unknown to him and only yesterday he ordered to be shorn. He was embarrassed and at first a little shamed this morning, as he rode past the pillory at a polite distance, he reports, to be yowled at so stridently and manically and with such uncivil language by the younger of the two fastened men. No, he will not repeat the words on such (again) a “noble day”: “It was as if I were the felon, in some way. The man’s a ruffian, no doubt of it. I am a callous killer, it seems, and worse. He says he’ll be revenged, and curses me. He shouted, ‘Murder, Murder!’ as I passed.” The father did not even lift his head, and that in some way was an even heavier rebuke, he says.

  It’s just as well, I suppose, that I haven’t yet succeeded in alleviating the short one’s punishment by dragging up a log or stone for him to stand on. The men are proving insolent. But Master Kent can shrug off their insults. Any doubt he’s had that they were rogues deserving of the pillory has been rudely shouted away. No, something weightier is troubling him this morning, something weightier even than the recent and costly loss of his stable and his doves. He has not looked so sunken and reduced since the day his wife, Lucy, and their infant girl both died in childbirth. I raise my eyebrows and tip my head to let him know he’s set me wondering and that I am concerned for him.

  “Come find me in my chambers, Walt, when Mr. Earle dismisses you this evening,” he says, using the familiar form of my name, unusually. “There are some matters to be shared.” He puts a single finger to his lips. He trusts me to stay silent.

  Mr. Quill is not a man who can move quickly. He’s more the hedgehog than the fox. He’s careful and he’s leisurely. He doesn’t mean to miss a thing. But his slow company is satisfying. I am required to take my time and look at everything anew. The ridge and furrow of our daily lives become less commonplace in the shadow of his scrutiny.

  “Where will you take me first?” he asks, and the question itself confers on me some pleasing status and authority. I am grateful for his thoughtfulness.

  “We inspect The Bottom, then ascend,” I suggest, smiling to myself, for The Bottom is the dank depression which we know too as Turd and Turf. It’s marshland, lower even than the brook, and so we count it safe to use not only as a charnel place for carcasses and skeletons and any animal too sick in death to be eaten but also as our open privy. It drains into itself, its own wet turf. The wooden closed latrines that we have built closer to the dwellings are more convenient, especially in the middle of the night and during winter, but many of us—though mainly men—prefer to empty bowels where Nature will take care of it, remove the stench as soon as it’s produced. Our closed latrines hang on to smell, even when the gong farmer—we take our weekly turns at being him—pegs up his nose, wraps up his mouth, picks up his shovel and barrows it away. You cannot shovel up a smell. You’ll never see a barrow-load of smell.

  As we arrive at Turd and Turf, I make our progress as noisy as I can and raise my voice, letting it carry on the echo. Anyone who has preceded us will be glad of some warning, especially as I have a recent stranger at my elbow who might not welcome the entertainment of chancing on a working arse. But I do not expect to discover anybody here, even though it is a place where on normal days there are many tasks to carry out other than squatting with a furrowed brow and hoping for some solitude. T
here’re rushes to collect for lights, ferns to pull for litter, clay to dig for bricks, peat and turves to cut for winter fuel and roofs. Today, though, I can account for all of us—well, all of us that I can name; not Mistress Beldam, though I live in hopes for her. They’re gleaning barley until noon, and then will be gathered on the threshing floors and barn as late as dusk today and every day into the hungry months until the job is done. No, Mr. Quill and I will have the margins and the commons to ourselves.

  The path is overgrown here, and purposely neglected. It is portcullised by ivy vines, providing some seclusion for its visitors. I open up a gap for him until we’re standing at the edges of The Bottom, our feet in mud from last night’s rain but—I check—nothing less desirable. The marsh, where it’s not shaded by curtains of beech and oak, is steaming, its vapors thickened and shaped by sunbeams. The air is unusually stewed and balmy today. If it wasn’t for the flat blue sky, troubled only by the white pulses of a lifting mist, it could seem that thunderstorms are on their way. Otherwise, everything’s familiar: the dome of cattle bones, the usual ruminating pigs feasting on unhealthy pannage, the swollen carcass of another of their kind that’s died from cysts, the sinking, timbered path we use to barrow out our turves, the glint of oily water where the quagmire is deepest and the squelch is loudest, the coppiced hedge of goat-willows from which we take our sallow poles and behind which any man in need of privacy might clutch his knees and murmur to himself without an audience. There is no sign of Mistress Beldam here.

  Mr. Quill is too delighted by our tour to notice anything that does not bring him pleasure. The smell is worse than usual but, if he is aware of it, it does not bother him. He mistakes it for the unaffected countryside. He does not remark on the bones even, with their regiments of flies. He only says it is a peaceful and secluded place and “humbling” in its beauty. He is blind to all the knot and thorn of living here. He takes hold of my arm in his excitement. He’s pointing at the far side of the clearing and a swathe of longpurples, tall and at their strident best, as are the birds today, despite the nets that we have set for them. “Listen to them juking,” he says. He holds a finger up and cocks his head. A finch commands him Pay Your Rent. A thrush complains of Tax Tax Tax.

  I am a little shamed by Mr. Quill, in truth. I don’t wish to beat a drum, but there is something of myself in him, something that is being lost. I remember well my first encounter with The Bottom soon after my arrival here as Master Kent’s man. It was, I have to say, a privy trip. And it was spring. The longpurples had hardly come to blade. But there were tall-necked cowslips nodding on the banks and king-cups, fenny celandines and irises in the mire. The trees were imping with infant leaves that seemed as attentive and pert as mice ears. So I was struck and “humbled” by the beauty too, and only later by the carnal stench. I was an innocent. In that first season I tumbled into love with everything I saw. Each dawn was like a genesis; the light ascends and with the light comes life. I wanted to immerse myself in it, to implicate myself in land, to contribute to fields. What greater purpose could there be? How could I better spend my days? Nothing I had seen before had made me happier. I felt more like an angel than a beast.

  My new neighbors were amused by me, of course, my callow eagerness. For them an iris bulb was pig fodder; celandines were not a thing of beauty but a gargle for an irritated throat; and cowslips were better gathered, boiled and drunk against the palsy than stared at in the open privy.

  “Where have we buried ourselves?” Master Kent once asked in that first year. “Will nobody talk with me about anything but the fattening of grain and hogs?”

  “Beer and bacon’s all that matters here,” I said, sighing in agreement, because in those early days I feared that only those who had been cradled in this place could endure its agonies. But once I found my Cecily and put a hand to husbandry myself, I soon turned into one of them, a beer and bacon man who knew the proper value of an iris bulb. It did not take many working days before I understood that the land itself, from sod to meadow, is inflexible and stern. It is impatient, in fact. It cannot wait. There’s not a season set aside for pondering and reveries. It will not let us hesitate or rest; it does not wish us to stand back and comment on its comeliness or devise a song for it. It has no time to listen to our song. It only asks us not to tire in our hard work. It wants to see us leathery, our necks and forearms burned as black as chimney oak; it wants to leave us thinned and sinewy from work. It taxes us from dawn to dusk, and torments us at night; that is the taxing that the thrush complains about. Our great task each and every year is to defend ourselves against hunger and defeat with implements and tools. The clamor deafens us. But that is how we have to live our lives.

  So it is an affecting experience this morning—and, I’m happy to discover, more valuable than gleaning—to be reminded of my younger self by Mr. Quill’s good humor. “How should I name this place?” he asks, as we part the ivy vines again and climb to higher ground.

  “No name,” I say. “A marsh. A marsh. What should we call a marsh? We’re dull. We have our names for animals but, no, not for the marsh.” I prefer not to have him spoil his charts with The Bottom, or Turd and Turf, or even the Charnel House.

  “The Blossom Marsh, perhaps,” he says.

  “Yes, scratch that down.”

  We continue at our snail-like pace, beating the bounds of the village. I lead Mr. Quill along the same route we follow every spring as a community, when we take annual stock of what we have in hand and what we hope to have in bud or shoot. That’s when we bump our children’s heads against the boundary stones, so that they’ll not forget where they and all of us belong, and we challenge them to eat the grass they’re kneeling on and taste the fodder with the mouths of cattle. Normally this would be our day for reconciling grievances but in company and in the open air, where grievances cannot be aired except with moderation and a placid voice. I can predict already what will be grouched about next year, if next year ever comes. One of the Higgs women, let’s say, will want her family stints increased. Now that they have another mouth to feed at home, she’ll feel they should be granted rights to common graze a further pig or, failing that, some extra geese. Thomas Rogers’s mother will complain that the laystalls where we throw our cooking waste for composting are too close to her cottage; she has to suffer all our kitchen smells and endure everybody’s flies. “We have to put up with your piping son,” we’ll say. An older man as usual will repeat the enduring grumble—with not as easy a voice as he supposes—that the Derby twins for all their youth and energy are too often late to field and then too early to depart. But this coming spring there will not be the usual coo-coo-coo about the master’s thieving doves: “They take our grain; he takes their eggs; we see no benefit.”

  Today this beating of the bounds is not a stock-taking and I will not be forcing Mr. Quill onto the ground to bump his head against our boundary stones or require him to chew on grass. He does not see the parish with the dutiful eyes of a laborer or cottager. He does not want to hear our grievances or have me list the details of our working lives. He does not note that someone needs to drag the tangleweed off our pond if we hope to tempt some mallard to our traps, or what grand oak is now so frail and honeycombed that over winter it has lost its crown and bared its once proud head in preparation for our axes, or which land we ought to set aside next year for turbary and which we ought to save, so that the peat and turf can fatten and recuperate, or where the best reeds are for our thatching, or where the best supply of wood for firing can be found, or what walls and fences need attending to and which of us might do that job the best.

  He does want, though, to stand in his yellow trim of ribbons and mark the detail and the beauty of each view. He’s keen for me to name the plants. He makes a note of them and sometimes plucks a leaf or flower for pressing in his book, his personal “Natural History.” It seems that listing them is his way of knowing them. I can easily put a name to all the herbs we discover on our way: the herbs for medici
nes, the herbs intended only for our beasts, the killing herbs, the devil’s herbs, the herbs reserved for those already dead, the drunkard’s herbs, the herbs with magic properties. I even name some of the weeds for him, though sometimes I invent the words. There ought to be a plant called purgatory. And another one called fletch. I point out prickly eringes, whose roots, he ought to know, can be prepared into a love potion. I show him burdock leaves, for wrapping butter in. And almond leaves for keeping moths away from clothes. He thinks I am the wisest man.

  I suspect he is unimpressed by our local place-names, however. He’d like me to put bright names to them, so that he can mark them down in ink, together with their measured angles and their shapes. But they’re only workaday. “East Field,” I tell him. “West Field, South Field. John Carr’s flax garth. The Higgses’ goose pen. Hazel Wood. The Turbary. The Warren.” We give directions in our titles, I explain, or we name a family, or we say what’s growing there. We are plain and do not try to complicate our lives.

  “I have a pair of pigs called George and Gorge,” I say finally. “And Mr. Kent calls his horse Willowjack, even though she’s a mare, a Jill and not a Jack.” Those are the best names I can offer him. We do not even have a title for the village. It is just The Village. And it’s surrounded by The Land, I add. Even Master Kent’s freeholds and muniments do not provide a name. We’re written down only as The Jordan Estate or The Property of Edmund Jordan, gentleman. “He is deceased.”