The Harvest

He turned to face Rachel. “That was his victory. That bloody flag. Ten minutes. He wanted me to know that before he died. He wanted me to know he wasn’t just an old man sick in bed. He was Willy Hurst, and he had saved the flag from the soldiers.”

“You never told me that before,” Rachel said.

“It was the first time I really understood this town had a history… that people had histories. A town is a living thing, Rachel. It has memories.”

“Yes,” she said.

“I can’t walk away from it. Not without trying to save it.” She nodded unhappily. “I know.”

“That’s how it is for me.” He shifted gears and drove away from the Old House, back toward the road, toward Old Quarry Park. The morning sunlight was hot through the car windows. “Now you,” he said. “I want to know how it is for you.”

Old Quarry Park was a wooded ridge ru

On one of those long-ago summer Saturdays, she had fallen and cut her forehead on the rim of the whirl-around. Matt had cleaned and bandaged the cut. She remembered his hands, huge and warm. Doctor hands. Their confident touch.

These memories had been coming back to her lately. It was part of the change.

He walked beside her from the parking lot through the trees to the picnic grounds. He was superimposed on her memory of him, an older version of himself. It seemed as if he had aged years in the last few weeks.

They sat at a wooden table at the western end of the picnic grounds where they could see through the trees to the ocean. The sun was bright and high. A couple of jays made a quarrelsome sound overhead, but the bees, a summer peril, had deserted the park altogether.

I want to know how it is for you. She was a dutiful daughter and she meant to give him an answer. But it wasn’t easy.

There was so much to say.

“Daddy, you know what Contact was like. You must remember, even if you said no. That feeling of doors opening up… of a promise of something wonderful. Of being something that doesn’t live and die but goes on, changing all the time but not stopping.”

“I remember,” he said. His face was drawn, expressionless, pale in the sunlight. “That didn’t frighten you?”

“Not when I understood what it meant. It was hard at first being so… transparent. They talk to you, but they’re talking to the inside of you. Your, I guess, soul. And your soul talks back. That’s scary. You can’t hold anything back, you can’t hide anything. But then you understand they’re not sitting in judgment, it’s not St. Peter at the Pearly Gates. They’re not even offering forgiveness, that’s not their business—their business is understanding. And then you start to realize how big they are. Big with all the growing and learning they’ve done over the centuries. Like some kind of beautiful seashell that gets more complicated and more colorful the longer you look at it, every chamber with a smaller chamber on one side and a bigger chamber on the other, all echoes and alabaster.…”

Her eyes were closed, and she realized she’d drifted into rhapsody. This Contact memory was strong. But she wasn’t accustomed to talking about it and she was probably scaring her father.

She glanced at him. His lips were drawn tight.

“I couldn’t say no,” she finished, inadequately.

“Even though it means giving up so much?”

“Giving what up?”

“Life. A normal life. A family. The way human beings have lived since they came out of the trees.”

“But I haven’t given that up. People used to say, is there marriage in heaven? Well, this isn’t exactly heaven. But I think there will still be marriage. People are people, Daddy. They’re each unique, they want different things from each other. They find partners. They fall in love. Maybe they don’t get married at the First Baptist anymore. But we’re not turning into loveless monsters.”

“It’s hard for me to know that.”

Rachel said, “I don’t know how to convince you.”

“What troubles me is that there’s a mechanism that’s altering your brain. Physically changing it. Rachel, that’s where love is. Loyalty, trust—even the way we perceive the truth. I tell myself this is all voluntary, you’re not being deceived. But I’ve seen surgeons produce bliss with an electrode in the cerebral cortex.”

“Have I changed?”

“Yes. You don’t talk the same way. Aren’t you aware of it?”

“I know about that. But me. Everything that makes me Rachel. Has that changed?”

He was silent for a long time. Finally he looked away from her, and the pain in his eyes was nearly unbearable. “I don’t know, Rache. I honestly don’t know.”

She felt herself on the verge of tears. She didn’t want to be understood.

She wanted to be held. She wanted him to wrap his arms around her, tell her it was okay, tell her he still loved her.

Voice trembling, indignant, she could only manage: “I’m not different.”

Not inside, she meant. Not where it counted.

On the day Rachel turned four years old, Matt had caught her drawing on the living room wall with her birthday crayons—big lime-green loops and whorls. The wall had been painted two weeks previously, and it must have looked to Rachel like a big blank sheet of paper.

Matt had paid for the painting the same week the car insurance came up for renewal. The household budget had bottomed out; Celeste was cooking Kraft Di

He went a little crazy when he saw the wall.

He grabbed the crayon out of her clenched fist and pushed her back. “Bad,” he said, “bad, Rachel, bad, bad!”

Her legs went out from under her. She sat down hard and her face clouded instantly.

Almost as immediately, Mart’s remorse began to flush away the anger. Rachel stammered through tears: “I’m… not… bad!”

He thought it was a cogent moral point. He also thought he wanted to shoot himself.

He picked up his daughter and held her. “You’re right, Rachel. You’re not bad. But it was a bad thing to do. Even good people do bad things sometimes. That’s what I meant to say. It’s a bad thing to draw on the wall. But you’re not bad.”

It was the way she phrased her objection in Old Quarry Park that convinced Matt he still had a daughter—at least for the time being.

I’m NOT different.

He felt those old father tears well up.

“Ah, Rache,” he said. “This is all… so confusing.”

She came around the picnic table to him. He stood up and barked his knee on the pineboard tabletop. It was an awkward ballet, but the hug went on a long time.

After a while, she went to a swing and asked him to push. A little bit of old times, Matt supposed. Maybe it was good for her to be ten years old for a few minutes. Maybe it was good for him.

He pushed her, she laughed, the sky was blue.

After that they walked the short trail that looped into the forest, but the track was muddy after all the rain. When they emerged into the sunlight, Rachel said, “We should have packed a lunch.”

“I have a better idea. Lunch at Dos Aguilas.”