Harvest

14

OW THERE ARE ONLY FOUR OF US. I hope that there are four of us. Mistress Beldam herself cannot be anywhere but near. Tonight will be her husband’s fifth in the pillory. Mr. Quill is missing still, of course. Tomorrow I will search for him, or what remains of him. My greatest wish is that I’ll discover nothing of the man — my mapmaker, my onetime greatest hope. Let’s trust that someone from the manor house went out on the night of confessions when Mr. Quill was elsewhere, on a rescue mission of his own, to warn him never to return, to let him know he is named as the master sorcerer, the witches’ ringleader; that his ill-shaped, flimsy life is swinging on a thread of gossamer, and could soon be swinging from a sturdy noose. But who might that savior have been? Not any of the sidemen, that’s for sure. Or the groom. They wouldn’t have taken the risk, they wouldn’t have cared enough. The steward, Baynham, is a possibility. His educated conscience might have troubled him. I cannot say the man is bad, from what I’ve seen. He’s just a spaniel, sluggish, loyal, obedient. As am I, so far.

I suppose some of my neighbors might have been the good Samaritans,unwittingly. That’s easy to imagine. Catching Mr. Quill on his way home late that night, they would not have resisted the opportunity to chastise him for the troubles he brought upon them, nor the chance to let him know what Mr. Baynham blurted out at the manor door before suggesting they collect faggots for a public burning at the stake: “I hear that there is witchery about. Three of your she-devils are in our custody.” I cannot, though, imagine Mr. Quill running off at that. I cannot see him scurrying away. He’s proved himself a brave, outspoken man before, unheeding of the dangers in his path, or insensible to them, an heroic innocent. Instead I see him striding even more speedily and erratically toward the manor house to have his say. He would have pulled that daughter and those women free. No, that is not the answer I am hoping for.

Master Kent, of course, was privy to those goings-on. He would have done his best to warn his chart-maker and house guest of the dangers. Who knows, he could have pulled his topcoat on over his night chemise and gone out on the hunt. He could have had the fortune to discover Mr. Quill on his way home. They would have startled each other in the lane, and then exchanged their whispers and their hugs. At the very least he might have marked a warning on a piece of chart and left it in the porch for Mr. Quill to find. But surely Master Kent would have told me if he’d helped the man escape or, at the very least, persuaded him to stay away. He knows I have become an intimate. Yet, now I think of it, something was left unspoken the morning he came into my home with all that grim news to impart. “And what occurred when Mr. Quill returned last night?” I’d asked. And Master Kent had put his hand across his mouth with some embarrassment — as if to hide a lie, perhaps — and said, “He has not come back to the house, not yet. He will have slept elsewhere …” That elsewhere takes on a better shape than it has done before. I’d only thought elsewhere was Mistress Beldam’s arms. I think now that possibly it was my master’s hint to me that our good friend was safe. Elsewhere was not within our parish bounds.

But still I’m troubled by the walking nightmares I’ve had on my way down from Clover Hill. In these, my friend is wrapped up in a vellum shift, and colorless. Or he is melting in the flames, his flesh running off his bones like candle wax. The sidemen have discovered him and made a makeshift gibbet; the sidemen have discovered him and left him bleeding on the forest floor; our pigs have finished him. Or else my neighbors catch him in their lanes. They’re not unwitting good Samaritans on this occasion. It’s late and dark. There’s no one there to witness them or to blame them for their violence. They treat him like they will treat the groom on the next afternoon. He’s kicked and bruised. He might survive, but someone has a pruning knife and Mr. Quill is coppiced and he’s pollarded. There’s not a limb remaining on his trunk. And once again the pigs have finished him.

And if Mr. Quill has been discovered and dispatched, why not Mistress Beldam? We’ve not found any sign of either of them for two days now. So why not Mistress Beldam too? I see her sprouting head pushed and nuzzled like a turnip on the ground, a sweet and tiny dainty for the pigs. I see her spread out with the Chart-Maker among the carcasses at Turd and Turf. But then another, likely fear envelops me, a less than sweet and dainty one, but more believable, given what we know of her already, her grief and anger at her father’s death. The woman who might well have slaughtered Willowjack, the woman who must still be looking for revenge, has run off through the sore-hocks with Mr. Quill a dozen midnight steps behind. He thinks he’s chasing her and will then have the chance to rescue her. But she is luring him. She means him to follow her. She even slows enough to give this halting man the chance to almost reach her back. Another twenty paces and she’s his, he thinks. She’s at his fingertips. If only she had longer hair instead of meager fur, he could grab hold of her. They reach the open ground where the open fire was built, the day that they arrived. They reach the corridors of trees, behind. The darkness closes in on them; it pulls on its mantle and closes out the moon. She turns and faces him. “I’ve come to warn you, sister,” Mr. Quill begins to say. He does not see the length of wood come swinging at his head. He feels only the first of fifty blows. But I feel every one of them, a thorough pounding in my head that will not end until I know if this is fantasy or truth. Tomorrow, yes, tomorrow, I will have to go to search for them, the living or the dead. But now I need to find some peace in sleep. Today has been the second hardest in my life.

Despite convention and civility, I spend the night, the first for many years, in the manor. I am its current master, after all, or at least the highest in ascendancy that still inhabits this discarded place. After me the bats can call it home. Again, I have my choice of beds, I have my choice of unmade beds. It is clear where the damaged groom has slept. He’s left a crusty tracery of blood. And then there is a dormitory of sorts: straw is spread out deeply across the boards in a chamber off the musty upper gallery above my harking master’s bed-parlor, where the sidemen passed their time — the torture room. It stinks of men and suffering.

Master Jordan himself has left his traces in his room, mostly the smell of rosewater from his casting bottle and the soiled embroidered linen smock that he was wearing when he came to shake his fist at everybody in the threshing barn and in which, I must suppose, he’s slept. I take his bed. He’s made it comfortable, or at least ordered it to be made comfortable by one of his serving men. He’s evidently turned down anything from Master Kent’s supply of chaff mattresses and rough, hap-harlot coverlets, and made instead a cushioning of carpets, cloth and arrases that he has covered with one of Lucy Kent’s old riding capes. It is not quite up to the flock that he is used to. This is hardship for the man. He’s had no spaniels sleeping at his feet or any supper tray of dainties on the side. But I am finding his bed unusually comfortable.

At first I do not recognize what Master Jordan has folded up and lately used as a pillow for his head. The room is dark. But when I put my own head down, I suspect the pillow by its texture. I can’t have ever pressed my cheek into a velvet shawl before, although I’ve dreamed of it recently. At first I think I’ve put my face on mole. I’ve caught moles, hares and rabbits in my time. I’ve felt the thick pile of them, brushed my lips and skin with them. There’s nothing living that’s more silky than a mole. But mole will never smell as good as this. Behind the slightly breaded flavor of Master Jordan and his splash of rosewater, I pick up — despite its recent washing out of blood, horse blood, perhaps, its stain of Willowjack — the warm and musty scent of her. I lift it and I turn it in the half-dark hoping to confirm it is the Beldam shawl. It seems too dull and colorless. I try to make the cloth show mauve. It will not oblige. But there are moonlit, silver threads for sure, glistening almost wetly like snail tracks. The first time I saw this in its full finery was at the ending of our feast and dance. She had it round her shoulders then, at the entrance to the barn, and she was looking Turkish underneath its weighty, lordly weave. The last time I saw the velvet cloth it was heavy with blood and thrown across a fence in the cottage lane below the Saxton derelict. “Give me her name,” my latest master demanded of me. “By all my heart, I truly do not know her name,” I’d said.

So I am satisfied that this is the woman’s shawl. I have to confess I try to sleep with it and her. I try to summon her to me by whispering into her velvet pelt. I stroke myself with it and her. I press it close up to my nose and nuzzle her. Her recovering hair would feel like this, I think. And can I say I take some strength from her? For while these lengthy hours pass, while I am sunk into these lonely furrows of the night, I think I find or dream or have delivered to me by the spirits of the shawl a sense of what I ought to do before King Edmund, as Mr. Quill and I once christened him, vassals me entirely. I wake to a chilling clarity, as if my body has been swept with frost. Frost and furrows. That’s the prompt. I know my duty now. I have to put the earth to plow. The time has come to put the earth to plow, no matter what the Jordans say. The frost will finish what the plow begins. Winter will provide the spring.

I am too cold and clear to sleep a moment more. So I stand up naked from my bed, pull on my boots and the abandoned Jordan smock for warmth, wrap myself inside the Beldam shawl and make my way outside. I mean, I think, to lay a trap for her. Or at least to test if she is living still, if she is walking out at night to tend her man and see on whom else she might exact continuing revenge for her father’s death. I have to say the thought of that, the thought of her out in the night with a piece of stone gripped in one hand as her mallet and a spike of metal in the other, plus the image that I already have of Mistress Beldam luring Mr. Quill into the woods and the sudden sweeping of her length of wood, the bloody compost of the forest floor, makes me as nervous of the dark as any foolish townsman ever was.

THE SKY IS CLEAR BUT IT IS TOO EARLY for the moon to have fully crested the trees. I am determined to go down to the pillory. I’ll hang the shawl close to the husband, but beyond his reach. She’ll not miss it if she comes. Even in the flattest darkness its silver threads will glint and give away its place. But now that I am shivering outdoors and reminded by the deep-brewed quiet how neighborless I am, I lose my nerve. I am not ready yet to face the husband. I don’t want to chance the black and empty lanes tonight. So I only spread the velvet shawl out on the stone bench in the manor porch, exactly where her father has been spread, though I don’t believe Mistress Beldam knows that detail. I touch its nap. I say farewell. I do not think that she will come at once.

I suppose she must have come at once. Because I’ve hardly regained Master Jordan’s bed and laid my still-bruised head along the pillow of my arms, too tense and worried for sudden sleep, when I catch sounds that must be animal. The weather and the trees are random in their calls and songs. They are not rhythmic but unarranged and stray. These padding feet and footsteps are spaced and patterned. What I can hear is something on the outside of the house, something careful, something delicate and small. I do not dare to move inside my bed. I’ll give away my sleeping place. The manor boards are loose and squeakier than mice. But by the time I’ve reached cautiously across the bed to pick up a candle holder in case I need to defend myself, should I need to hold her off, should I need to capture her, the sounds or footsteps have retired. The manor house is mine alone again. And finally I dare to sleep, though I am nervous what I’ll dream or what I’ll find when I wake up.

At dawn, I find the velvet shawl has gone. I cannot tell what that means to me because I do not know myself. Of course, it shows the woman is alive, unless some fox or badger has a taste for velvet shawls. But equally it indicates the chilling, thrilling probability that while the world around her sleeps, Mistress Beldam has been roaming like a living ghost throughout our lanes and corridors. She never sleeps. She’s haunting us. She is patrolling every part of us. And now that all my neighbors have departed, and Mr. Quill, perhaps, is sleeping with the cadavers, I am the only one who’s left for her. Last evening she must have seen my coming home, my shoulders down. She will have seen where I decided to sleep. Last night, I must suppose, she will have watched the manor house and seen me standing, fearful as a child, at the porch door, dressed in Master Jordan’s embroidered smock, every bit the gentleman, and wrapped in the beyond-her-station shawl. She will have seen me spread out her shawl on the stone porch bench. And when I closed the door on her I cannot think it rested in its place for any longer than a breath. She has been cold these last few nights. She has her purple velvet back again.

This is not what I expected when I agreed at Master Kent’s prompting to serve as a Jordan man. I thought that though I would be troubled by my compromise, I would nevertheless find it comfortable to pass a little extra time in his employ among the places I have known and loved, indeed among the places where I have been known and loved myself. It would be a luxury, in fact. I’d have some privacy in which to grieve. Some autumn peace. But, standing here this morning in the deep shade of the manor porch, looking down onto the bench’s cold and naked stone, I feel nothing but alarm, the rising, clenching fear of death. I was a fool to stay behind. I’ve had my chances to escape. I should have run down yesterday from Clover Hill and joined the pageant on its way to town. Perhaps, I should have left the village with the Carrs the other afternoon or with any other neighbors who could tolerate my company. Here’s the truth of it: I should have got out of here as soon as Cecily died. I never could prove brave or blond enough to stay.

It’s tempting even now to pack up and leave at once. I’m not indentured to this place, after all. I have no witnesses who’ll care if I depart ahead of time. I’ve given Master Jordan my reluctant nod. But we hardly touched when we shook hands on it. My fingers only clacked against his rings. In the end it’s not the nod or the clacking that are bound to keep me here. It’s Master Kent’s wide-stretched eyes of yesterday, and what I came to understand last night that they mean to me, what it is I have to do, what I should start, before I go, the folds and trenches I must leave behind. And so I dress, and arm myself with the old short sword with which the first Edmund Jordan is reputed to have felled a cattle thief more than thirty years ago and which, from the brown-stained point, I suspect has been used again more recently. Then I search the manor house for the master’s chain of mostly unused keys. Mistress Beldam’s husband need not serve his sentence out, so long as he agrees to help me with the plow.

I can only guess what he’s thinking as I approach the pillory. I know that he will recognize at once how uneasy and shamefaced I am. There is no hiding it. My body feels as tense and knotted as a yew. I want to smile at him, to show I mean him well and that the blood-tipped sword I’m carrying need not be a cause for alarm, so long as he does not make it so himself. But the muscles in my face are not relaxed enough. My smile of greeting is fixed and artificial. I’m feeling sick to the stomach, actually. With apprehension, I suppose. But at least I’ve had a comfortable bed for the night and nearly enough sleep and I am thinking clearly. I know how I intend to spend the day. I cannot do it on my own.

If he is feeling any fear of me, my frozen face, the sword, my troubled bustle of intent, he does not have the strength to show it. I haven’t thought how weakened he will be from staying still and doing nothing for so many days. We thought his and his father-in-law’s punishment was mild when we sent them to the pillory for only seven days. That and the snapping of their bows, the clipping of their heads. “Count yourselves as fortunate,” they were told. In other places, less hospitable than here, they might have expected a beating and a hanging. But, now that I am looking at him in the light — our past encounters have been largely in the dark — I can see how summer has sapped out of him, how he has paled, how he’s hanging drily from the cross of wood. His arms were thick and oaky when they cuffed him there. I cannot say that they have become thin exactly, but they are certainly not muscular. They’re drained of blood and energy. His wrists and throat are still bruised purple from when he has attempted to pull himself free. His eyes are hollowed out, from lack of proper sleep,perhaps. His lips are crusted; orange funguses, dry cracks. And his neck is swollen with insect bites and red with sores where he’s tried to itch them on the wood.

“I have the key,” I say to the crown of his head, blackened now with new thick growth. He will not look at me. “I’ve stolen it.” His forehead furrows. He might mean, So what? Or, Not before time. Or, My itchy neck is ready for your sword. Take off my head, and let’s be done with it.

“I’ve stolen it,” I say again. He needs to know I’m taking risks for him. “I have been instructed not to let you go until you’ve served every moment of a week. But I think you know, I’m the only friend you’ve had about these parts. I’ve never wished you any harm …” His forehead furrows for a second time: So what? “I’m free to walk away, if you prefer.”

“Do what you will.”

“What is your name?” I need to make a friend of him.

“It’s mine to keep,” he says.

I’m tempted — momentarily convulsed by the impulse, in fact — to bring the sword down sharply on his neck. He is enraging me. I do not feel I’ve earned his disrespect. Instead, I only lay it flat across his infuriating forehead, and slowly tell him with my mouth no distance from his ear what his situation is: “There’s no one else can help you now. There’s no one left excepting me. And, as you see”—I rattle them—“I am the master of the keys.”

“Say what you want from me.”

“I want a little help with farming. For a day.” This time he nods. A day of farming is a task he understands. “And there are other recompenses … for the time you’ve spent … with us.” I tell him briefly that the villagers have gone. The masters and the sidemen too. So he is free, as soon as we have finished with the field, to walk among our cottages and help himself to anything he wants. There’re animals that he can take. And winter food. And if he chooses he can fill a wagon with our produce and our implements and draw them to the nearest marketplace. “I’ll make the pair of you”—he lifts his eyes, to mark my slantwise mention of his wife—“quite rich. For just a single day of labor in my field.” My field, indeed. My true and only field. “What do you say?”

“I say you are the man who holds the sword. I say you are the master of the keys.”

I hope to be less clumsy with the keys, but I can’t tell without testing them one at a time which will shoot the lock. My hand is shaking. I have to drop the sword down on the ground, so that I can use both hands. I put my foot onto the shaft, so that he cannot snatch it up as soon as he’s released. Of course, he’s in no state to snatch at anything. He sinks down to his knees the moment that I lift off the topmost beam. I’ve freed him to collapse. I let him sit and rub his legs and arms, while I stand back deciding if it’s safe to trust the man. I think I’ve bought him with my promises of wealth. In all honesty, he could freely rub the blood back into his limbs, then club me to the ground and still be free to help himself to anything he wants, including my short sword. But there has been something in his manner that I trust. A scheming man would not have treated me with such disdain. He’d not have told me, Do what you will. A scheming man would have been more eager to offer help and quick to let me know his name. A scheming man would have lied, and he’d have made promises to break.

I take a chance and leave him recovering in the grass while I walk back along the lane toward the manor house. I mean to fetch him water and a little bread and cheese. I pick up windfalls for the man on my way back. I’m half expecting him to have fled, or armed himself with one of the churchyard stones, the sort his wife used if she murdered Willowjack, and used again on Mr. Quill last night, in dreams. But he is still sitting by the pillory. His back is resting on its shaft. His legs are stretched out across the ground that he has scuffed for the past few days. He evidently still has pins and needles in his feet and arms. He is flexing his shoulders, and in pain. But I can tell that, not so long ago, he’d been a tough and worthy man. He’s cut a bit of barley in his time. He looks much like a weary harvester, glad to have his apple, bread and cheese.

I tell him I’ll return when he has eaten and is stronger. That frown again. But this time it’s a frown that gives me confidence. The meal I’ve brought to him and he’s accepted signifies a truce. He’s broken bread with me. I do not think he’s had such hospitality from any other villager or either of the masters. I take a further chance, and put the short sword at his feet. “Defend yourself if anybody comes,” I say, though it doesn’t make any sense for me to take that risk. No one will come. No one except his wife, perhaps, or Mr. Quill, unlikely though that seems. But I’ve shown I trust him, and hold his future welfare close to me. Laying down my sword has made a comrade out of him, a fellow victim of the world. I am the scheming one, it seems. If Mistress Beldam’s watching us, and I suspect she is, she will see that I’m a friend. I even whistle as I walk away to show how confident I am in him, and her.

But as soon as I’m out of earshot I let my whistling stop. Now I am talking to myself, drawing up a list of things to do. At first it feels like any other day at summer’s end. There’s fuel to cut and stack. There’s field keeping and hedge trimming that must be done. There’re falling walls and damaged barns to fix. This is the season of repair. It also is the season of prepare, when we make ready for the coming spring. I know that I will need some oxen for my task. We have a team of four allowed to pasture on the fallow fields and in the commons. They are sweet-natured animals, despite their crescent horns and deep bullish dewlaps. They have only to rest and eat all day and contend with nothing but the flies. The one thing they have to bother them is work, and that’s sporadic hereabouts. It saves them from the butcher, though. So long as they are strong, they’ll not end up as beef or leather. We’ll not make cups out of their horns, or fashion bobbins, toys and dice out of their bones, or even boil down their hoofs for glue, until their natural deaths. Our oxen lead an easy life.

I can’t remember exactly where we have tethered them, and so I have to go from gate to gate until I catch sight of their white snout patches and the insides of their comical pink ears. Their bodies — donkey-gray and mottled — blend in with the undergrowth. There’re only two of them today. The smallest of the four. My neighbor families have taken the other two with them, first to draw their carts of family goods and then, perhaps, to trade them at the next village they reach. I rope the remaining pair, lead them on their strong, bone-weary legs down the lane and tie them at our tool barn, where they’re content to graze on fence weeds by the door. Oxen do not have the reasoning of horses and so they tend to be more pliable and patient. They’re steadier; their winter keep is cheaper too. A horse will smell the saddle in another room or hear the pulling on of riding boots and start to kick in protest. An ox won’t know he’s needed for draft work until the moment that he has to pull — and even then he can’t be bothered to protest.

I’ve always loved this little barn. It’s ramshackle. It never mattered if the light got in, or rats, or rain: we didn’t keep anything edible inside. We let the martins and the swallows nest in it, the robins too. We didn’t mind if nettles set up house. When I was a greenhorn here and working none too usefully with the Saxtons on the land, I used to be the one they’d send — their big, slow-witted child — to collect and return their working tools. I think they had a lot of fun with me, demanding things they knew I could not recognize by name. Bring us some seed-lips and the suffingales, they’d say. We need some hog-yokes and a beetle wedge. Even when I’d learned exactly what they meant, I’d still persevere with bringing back the least required of implements — a mold spear when they meant a cradle scythe; a weed hook when they wanted one for reaping — just for the pleasure of their laughter. And also for the pleasure of having to visit the tool barn once again.

Today, the tool barn is sweating in the heat, a heat that promises a storm. I need — we need, my volunteer and I — to get to work. The swing plow is the lighter of the two and nearest the barn door, but I know that with just two oxen instead of the usual team of four and only two pairs of hands to manage it, I need a set of wheels to support the beam at its fore end. To plow today without a set of wheels would be too difficult and punishing. I’d not get any depth of furrow. The implement would throw its weight against the stilts and handles, and nothing we could do would tame it. So, I pull the swing plow to the side, and in the slanting shafts of light, busy with the dust that I am throwing up, I find the parts of the second plow, the one with wheels. I pull them clear and start to line them up outside the barn.

I do not need to go back to the pillory for my help. He is standing with the oxen, watching me. All three of them are watching me. He must have heard the clatter of the tools, and understood that he should come. He’s ready for the labor. I cannot say he seems a happy man, but at least he looks more upright than he did this morning. And his color has improved, no longer donkey-gray and as mottled as the beasts. He’s brought the sword with him, I see. But that seems sensible. He will not offer any help until I say he should. He doesn’t even greet me. I am the elder man and might expect at least a nod. He does speak, though. “Nose before ear,” he says, without any warmth or flavor to his voice.

I stand and nod at him, surprised. How has he understood so much? It’s not a phrase I’ve heard for quite a while. Possibly he only means it plainly. He thinks I’m not a practiced countryman. He wants me to remember that when I put the plow parts together, the coulter knife that opens up the soil — the nose — must go before the share, the wider blade. And that giant’s arrowhead which cuts the furrow must go before the moldboard — the ear — that throws the ridge. Only a fool or a townsman — me, he thinks, perhaps — would attempt anything different. Without the coulter at the front, the earth will not give way. Without the moldboard at the rear, the earth will not be sufficiently turned.

But there is a greater meaning to the phrase. It is a warning — among country folk, at least — that life should be allowed to proceed in its natural and logical order. In other words, you do not eat before you cook, you do not weave before you shear, you do not attempt to light the fire until you have the kindling, and — to the point — you cannot reap your corn until you’ve plowed and sown seed. He’s obviously guessed what this day of work will be. He understands its greater meaning too: that plowing is our sacrament, our solemn oath, the way we grace and consecrate our land. Not to mark our futures in the soil before the winter comes is to say there’s no next year. I cannot admit to that. The coming spring must be defended. So, we’ll put the nose before the ear. And then we’ll plow.

“Come help me, then,” I say.

As he moves toward me, I can tell he must have been a plowman in the past, before he was a newcomer. His skew is very slightly whiffed, another country phrase. You can always spot a plowman from his uneven legs, they say: the long one’s for the furrow and the short one’s for the ridge. So I let him do the assembly work. I steady the share-beam while my new associate secures the blades, the moldboard and the yoke. And then we set off for the barley stub, a pair of willing oxen and a pair of workingmen, intending to stir and loosen soil one final time.

The barley field has lost much of its spruce since harvesting. It takes only a few days of neglect for weeds and tares to settle in. Already there are newcomers, a tough-leafed smear of green where there was rusty gold. But still the marks my neighbors made are there to read for anyone that knows them well. That knew them well, I ought to say. The stubble has preserved their signatures. Here is our proof we brought the harvest in ourselves. I can tell where neighbor Carr and men like him — thorough, puritanical — have swept their scythes. The cut is low, the stubble short, no longer than a thumb. They haven’t missed a blade of straw, and I am sure they won’t have missed much barley either. Gleaners shouldn’t step in neighbor Carr’s unstinting wake, unless they don’t want any ale for the winter evenings. The wavy cut is Brooker Higgs’s best work. He’s always busy talking when he reaps. His head is raised. His circles are too large. The more he reaches out, the more of the corn he misses. The tallest stub, up to the knee in places, is eager children’s work, or the best that Willy Kip with his bad back can do. His portion looks as if the field was the victim of a massacre. Some horsemen came and, leaning from their saddles, felled the barley with their swords.

It seems an age since I was here with Mr. Quill and Master Kent. We’d named our Gleaning Queen and the master had said what he always says about “this noble day,” how in order of their station everyone and everything would benefit from gleaning — the families who worked so hard, the thoughtless cattle and the thankless geese, and finally the hogs. He had not said that hogs precede the oxen and the plow. He had not reminded us that this once-was barley field was set aside for winter-planted wheat. He had not promised that bread would follow beer. I remember thinking, bitterly, So our master’s dreams for us do not include another crop. Our final harvest must have come and gone. I remember Master Jordan’s words: “You’ll never need the plow again.” We’ll see.

Mistress Beldam’s husband has taken charge. I’m left to lead the animals and urge them on, flicking their pink ears. He grasps the plow handles and plants his feet into the soil, leaning back in expectation of the pull. He has to find a leverage that takes account of cattle, beam and soil, and finding it ennobles him: I’ve not seen his face so passionate up till now, or so full of consequence. He knows what plowing is. If anyone is watching — and I hope Mistress Beldam is — it will look as if he’s pulling against the oxen rather than working with them, that he’s the strongest of the three. Just for today, he’s walking on a field in heaven rather than on earth, he’s plowing up the lands of time, marking out the ridges and the furrows of a trying life. I can tell he has debts to settle of his own. Did not Mr. Quill say that these newcomers were fugitives from sheep themselves, exiles from their own commons? That would explain the man’s evident keenness to commence. We’ve broken bread together. Now he wants to break the earth with me. We’ll liberate the spirits of the soil. We’ll let the little devils breathe.

The key to plowing is to hold a steady line, to be symmetrical, a skill I never quite mastered. I point down the field at a tapered oak which stands high above the hedgerow in the dell. That is the headland we will be aiming for with our first cut, I say. I fancy that even the oxen lift their heads and take a line on it. They place it in the middle of their horns. The oak is known for being still. It will not duck its head or lean, no matter what the winds might try. An oak is trustworthy. It wants the plow to find a true, straight way, then it can preside all year over a pattern that is pleasing to its eye.

The field seems limitless from where we stand, and beyond our mastery. It would normally take twelve days to plow its stubble under, even if we had our usual team of four oxen, and twenty brawny men to help and take their turns. But we are only two, and we do not mean to make a meal of it. We mean to make only a day of it. A narrow scar is all we have in mind: a field length down, the headland turn, a field length back. We will, though, do our best to make a noble and an honest scar. It will be straight and proud if good fortune labors at our sides. The single central ridge will be a proper height, the pair of furrows deep. “This will be … to all of our advantages,” I tell my helpmate, hoping to provoke a conversation. But he stays silent. He loops the reins over his head, with a practiced hand and a fitting nonchalance, and holds them taut round his right shoulder and under his left arm. I flick the oxen. We begin. Three steps, and already we are opening a top and putting up a high-backed slice of soil.

It is not long before he’s whistling. His ridge and furrow channel the tune as we delve across the field. A plowman’s whistle has the strength to soften clods and break up stones. A plowman’s whistle warns the soil a blade is on its way. I am so satisfied I cannot stop myself from chattering. I’m telling him about the many, endless troubles of the week. I talk of Cecily, and Charles Kent, my boyhood friend. I tell him what a brave and decent man Mr. Quill has proved himself to be. Oxen are noble creatures, I say. They work. But sheep “from what I’ve heard”—what’s his experience? — are helpless beasts: “We’ll have to wait on them like slaves on lords, come spring. Like fools.” I can’t be sure if he is listening. He will not cease his whistling. But we both have busy lips this afternoon, and we are intimate through toil. Anything that’s shared across the backs of oxen is intimate. We make our way toward the dell, and make our way back to the top-end gate. Now our wheels are clogged with mud. I have to free them every twenty paces with a heavy kick and, when that fails, with my bare hands. The rooks and starlings pick the furrows in the damp wake of the plow.

I make my plowman stand away this afternoon when we have cleaned the blades and put the plow back in its place, and let the oxen roam off where they will. This is a task I want to finish without his help. I barrow in a bag of wheat seed for winter planting and use a casting shovel and some sacking in the corner of the field to select the heaviest grain for my baskets. I know I ought to let the strip of turned soil lay and mellow for a week or so, or at least let it be broken down by the rain, which has already begun to lay its own seed on the ground. But there’s no time. Good practice must be sacrificed. I leave Beldam’s husband resting in the corner of the remaining scrub, and sweep my seeded hands across the land, the richest of all scatterings. The farmer in me — yes, I can boast of that — knows that the best cruel nurture for this early crop is that after a week or two of growth its green ribbons are crushed by rolling. That way, the ground is firmed. The plants can take a steady grip. Wheat — like men and women — benefits from being crushed. Crushing makes it fit to stand up all the better. But there is only this afternoon for making good, for marking my revenge, my countryman’s revenge, on Edmund Jordan and his sheep. This narrow sweep of wheat will be my farewell gift. So I walk the furrow for the final time, in the strengthening drizzle, taking it as a blessing that the seed corn is being watered the instant that it leaves my palm.

It is on my way up from the dell, with perhaps little more than a hundred paces and fifty sweepings of my hand remaining, that the light begins to fail. I turn to look, beyond the hedgerows and the pyramidal oak, at the dark horizon rearing deep and solid with gray-on-purple clouds. The few remaining scraps of blue blink barely brighter than an eye. What sunlight there is hardly makes a mark upon our field, though on the wood end of our land its best surviving ray is broad and strong enough to radiate and rim the beeches’ pale bare branches, the grasping talons of the ash, and the high-veined frettings of the elms. Then it falls and slowly beams from common ground to field, as if searching for something. It is reluctant to depart. It even catches smoke pots and roofs before it lifts again to paste its silver on the clouds. For a moment, they are faced with light. Our field is black. It’s shiny, suddenly. And then the day is gone. Its candle has been snuffed, or drenched. That is the end of it.

Dusk has deepened now. If it wasn’t for the rain, I could be walking through the steep-domed, unlit chamber of a great cathedral, roofed by coal-black vaults of cloud. This downpour has not got the force to last. But for the moment it takes hold. The clouds carried too much weight before they reached this place. I can almost hear them sigh with relief as they let go their load. The furrows in our barley field are already brimming and draining off like streams in flood. The clouds intend every single seed I’ve spread to have its year’s supply of drink in one delivery. The earth turns sticky. It clings heavily to my feet, and lards my legs with every step I take. It’s hard work even walking in it now. I look up to the corner of the field, and wave at where I last saw Mistress Beldam’s husband. I call out even, although my words are washed away. But anyway I think the man has gone already. He will have had his fill of late of being out in all weathers. He will have gone into the cottages or taken shelter in the barn. For an instant I imagine him in Mistress Beldam’s arms among the field and pasture tools, among the nettles in the dark. She is getting wet and cold as she clings on to him.

I am excused, I think, for wondering if I am the only one alive this afternoon with no other living soul who wants to cling to me, no other soul who’ll let me dampen her. The day has ended and the light is snuffed. I’m left to trudge into the final evening with nobody to loop their soaking hand through mine. And no one there to lift their hats, as our traditions say they must, when brought on by chaff and damp I cannot help but sneeze, an unintended blessing for the field. But I’d be lying if I said I felt as dark and gloomy as the clouds. I think I’m thrilled in some strange way. The plowing’s done. The seed is spread. The weather is reminding me that, rain or shine, the earth abides, the land endures, the soil will persevere forever and a day. Its smell is pungent and high-seasoned. This is happiness.