Harvest

4

S LUCK WOULD HAVE IT, I have been assigned to be Mr. Quill’s assistant for the week. My wounded hand excuses me from hard work in the threshing barns. Master Kent insists on it. Once more he proves himself my friend. I shouldn’t try to grip tools or carry anything, he warns. Any pressure and I’ll burst the cushioning of water-whelks and blisters that are already forming at the edges of the burn. I’m not fit for laboring, “And never was,” he wants to say. (Perhaps he would employ me as his man again.) The grain can be separated from the chaff without my help for the next few days. My greater duty is to save my hand. There’re men and women both of us could name who’ve lost a limb and then their lives because a wound has not healed properly. I have to keep it cold and dry but open to the air, so that the savaged skin at the center can peel away or form a crust. At the moment it’s too swampy to dry and harden. It’s oozing liquids of the sort I’d normally expect to run out of my nose. And the pain, though not as searing as it was, is almost more than I can bear. It is unforgiving. I have not had a wink of sleep all night, well, that much of the night I spent shivering in bed and not out in the rain hunting for the sorceress. And now I walk with one hand raised and cupped in front of me. I am a beggar for the day, I’m told. My neighbors look into my palm, raise their eyebrows, wish me well, but I suspect they’re jealous of my easy occupation. Already they have labeled me Quill-Carrier-in-Chief. They think we’ll make a comic pair: the stumbler and the beggar, both damaged on the left and with only a couple of useful hands between them.

Still, I’m not so wounded that I want to avoid the gleaning field before my hands-free working day with Mr. Quill begins. Our boys have been at the edges of the stub since first light, keeping off the birds with stones, clapping-boards and slings but not stepping on the field itself. That’s not their privilege. Their dawn chorus prises us from bed and hurries us out of our cottages for an early meeting with our Queen.

Our village has been washed and muddied by the storm, but the clouds have cleared. It promises to be a steep and su

What wind there was yesterday after we dispatched the final sheaf gathered up and spread much of the lighter, finer chaff. The village has been freckled by the chaff. The service trees between our dwellings and the gleaning field are still embroidered with it and with straw, despite the rain. On the way between the harvest and the stackyard, unsecured bundles of cut barley have dropped on the verges from our wagons and our barrows, providing pickings for the ruddocks and the du

Now that we are gathered at the entry to the field, we stay and wait. With the sudden ending of our dance last night and the interruptions of the storm, we failed to nominate our Queen. Such negligence is bound to bring bad luck. We’ve never woken up before on Gleaning Day without a pretty sovereign to rule the stub. But Master Kent has said that we can settle it this morning. So all the girls and unwed lasses have put on their fineries, or more exactly borrowed firstly from their mothers’ ribbon bags or dowry chests and then from their gardens and our hedgerows, making yellow drapes and garlands for themselves from tansy, ragwort and hawkweed blooms. Some of the more ambitious ones have smeared their cheeks and forearms with a golden petal paste. They look both pestilent and regal.

We can already see Master Kent bobbing high above the hedges of the manor lane as he rides toward us on his Willowjack. He too has made an effort for the day. His best high hat, usually reserved for marriages and funerals, is sashed with two woven cloths, one lemon-yellow, one apple-green, his wife’s heirlooms. She was fond of brightness. Now we have some moments to inspect our girls and choose which one we’ll raise our voices for. Here is a chance as well to look out across and down the sloping barley field and offer thanks, not to some higher being but to the soil itself. Can it really be almost a year since we last led out our oxen and took our plows to it, fixing our eyes on the leaf-bare treetops in the dell to keep our furrows straight and true, on what I recall to be a dull and chilling day? Then once the cold had nipped the clod, we came again for harrowing, flattening ridges to provide the fine tilth that best comforts barley, picking out the surface stones. Can it really be half a year since spring, when we fixed our eyes again on those same tops to see them fattening with leaf and we spread out across the field in rows to broadcast seed, throwing our grain forward equally and to the swing of every step, spreading tiny vows with a plentiful hand? This year the first warm rains were late. The field was slow to blush with green, and what early shoots dared show themselves were shy and flimsy. We watched the barley with anxiety, first fearing drought and then, once our plants reached knee-height, praying that the sky would spare us gales.

That is our custom. We are daily nervous for the crop — though there are times, for me at least and especially at night in my cold cot, when I resent the tyra

When I first came to these vicinities I thought I’d discovered not quite paradise, but at least a fruitful opportunity — some honest freedom and some scope. Some fertile soil! I’d never known such giving land and sky. I do remember my first week, and — still my master’s serving man — walking through the commons to the forest edge and not daring to go in, but touching everything. I’d found a treasury. I know I pushed my nose against a tree and was surprised by the ancient sweetness of the bark. I know I stood and studied ants, not guessing yet what antlike labors were awaiting me. I know I picked a flower for my cap. And then I set my eyes on Cecily and saw a chance to build a future here. I wooed her by working at her elbow in her fields, attending to the hunger of her soil. My labor was an act of love. My unaccustomed muscles grew and ached for her. I put my shoulder to the plow for her. I became as tough as ash for her. I had no choice. The countryside is argumentative. It wants to pick a fight with you. It wants to dish out scars and bruises. It wants to give you roughened palms and gritty eyes. It likes to snag and tear your arms and legs on briars and on brambles every time you presume to leave the path. But this was precisely what I most liked about this village life, the way we had to press our cheeks and chests against a living, fickle world which in the place where I and Master Kent had lived before only displayed itself as casual weeds in cracks or on our market stalls where country goods were put on sale, already ripe, and magicked up from God knows where. It didn’t matter if it rained or blew all day and night in town. We pulled on caps. We slammed our doors and windows tight. The weather wasn’t any threat to us. Back then, the sun was neither enemy nor friend.