“Oh no, we can’t pick them—”
Edward decided not to mention that the landscapers would decapitate them next week.
Lucy drove them into town. She liked driving; Edward didn’t. He tried to restrain his foot from pressing an imaginary brake pedal each time she took a curve.
The car radio played softly, a pop song sung by a nasal Australian voice:
I have the moon in my bed,
I have the sun in my heart,
I have the stars at my feet.…
There was a sizable parking lot attached to the old mill. Normally vacant those few times Edward had driven by, tonight it was nearly full. Lucy found an empty slot. The cars were those models Edward associated with his parents’ generation: conservative Buicks, Oldsmobiles, Chevys.
Edward could read the bumper sticker on one, in the illumination of a streetlight:
HOWDY, STRANGER!
I’M A GRANGER!
“Corny.”
“Be nice. These aren’t academics. They’re a different kind of people from any we know.”
At the door to the mill, they were not far from the grassy banks of the stream that had once spun the wheel that had turned the grindstones in their immemorial embrace. The water flowed with a serene chuckling over weed-draped rocks and between reeds and rushes, its clean odor lying lightly on the night air.
The interior of the mill had long ago been subdivided into offices and meeting rooms. Here and there, portions of the original pegged beams showed through, like the skeleton of an old, old narrative poking its elbows through its modern dress. Everything was freshly painted and well-lit with modern fixtures. Edward and Lucy made their way down a corridor—corkboard hung with notices of farm equipment for sale, a table holding ag-school bulletins and a box full of food coupons for exchange, a forgotten pair of galoshes under the empty coat hooks—toward a room from which voices drifted.
The hall held fifty wood-slatted folding chairs, nearly all occupied. Edward and Lucy slid into a pair of empty seats at the back in what they hoped was an inconspicuous way.
Looking toward the front of the room, Edward saw a wooden dais bearing a table and seven chairs. The chairs were occupied by four old women and three old men. Each wore a yellow-and-white satin sash across their elderly chest. Their average age seemed about seventy. The woman in the middle, although remarkably unwrinkled, had to be in her nineties.…
The backdrop behind the Grange leaders was a green cloth on which was stitched a golden stalk of grain.
The meeting was already under way. One of the officers was detailing the status of the treasury in exquisitely tedious detail. Edward settled back into his chair, quite prepared to be very bored.
The next forty-five minutes didn’t disappoint him. Accounts of planned fund-raising activities, the success of a recent dance, news of crop prices, the formation of a committee to do political work for the Grange-backed candidate in the upcoming presidential election.…
Edward was just drifting off to sleep, when he was reprieved.
“This concludes the first half of tonight’s Grange meeting,” said one of the officers. “We will break for ten minutes. I must remind the general public that the second half of the meeting is closed to them.”
Chairs scraped as people got to their feet. Edward stood. One leg had gone to sleep and now prickled painfully.
“Can we go now?”
“In a minute. We want to introduce ourselves first.”
“We do?” Looking to his wife for an answer, Edward was taken aback.
Lucy’s eyes were shining, as if the boring meeting had been some kind of rapturous experience for her. She seemed drawn to the people on the stage.
Edward shrugged and accompanied her up front.
From old-fashioned wall-mounted Seeburg speakers issued barely discernible music. Edward thought he recognized the old English ballad “John Barleycorn Must Die.”
The officers had descended from the stage and now stood among the respectful crowd, softly conferring among themselves. Lucy approached the nearest, one of the men.
“Hello,” she said, extending her hand. “My name’s Lucy Pastorious, and this is my husband, Edward.”
The white-haired man shook first Lucy’s hand, then Edward’s, and introduced himself. “Calvin Culver. I’m the Grange’s Sower.”
Had that been one of the Grange tides? Edward couldn’t be sure, but he didn’t think so.
“We’re new residents of the town,” continued Lucy, “and we’re interested in joining the Grange.”
Edward had an impression that he and Lucy were being instantly appraised, and found not too alien. Culver seemed honestly pleased at their interest. “We’re always glad to see some young faces round here. The Grange can’t go on without new blood. I don’t think there’d be any problem about you two joining. Let me just introduce you to the rest of the sashes.”
Culver turned toward his fellow officers and named them one by one.
“This is Betty Rhinebeck, our Attendant.
“Roger Swain, our Presbyter.
“Alice Cotten, our Thresher.
“Edwin Landseer, our Plowman.
“Nancy Rook, our Sluicekeeper.”
When Edward had finished shaking the fifth papery, dry old hand and making his fifth polite hello, he was certain of one thing. None of these titles were the same as the ones he had earlier found in the encyclopedia. Was this Grange a chapter of the Patrons of Husbandry, or was it a branch of some different organization? Had the titles changed with time? Or were false ones given to the public? If the latter, it seemed a needlessly mysterious practice.…
Edward suddenly realized that there remained one officer left to be introduced: the most senior woman, who had sat in the middle of the others. It occurred to Edward now that she had been the only one to remain unspeaking throughout the meeting.
Culver shepherded Lucy with evidence of great respect up to the small, trim woman. “This is Sally Lunn, the Grain Mistress.”
Grain Mistress …? What had happened to Grange Master?
Edward watched Lucy extend her hand. The woman took it, her simultaneously old and young face broadening into a smile showcasing perfect teeth. “So pleased to meet you at last, Mrs. Pastorious,” said Sally Lunn.
Lucy’s lips were slightly parted, as if she had started to speak but had her thought processes short-circuited. Sally Lunn released Lucy’s hand, which continued to hang for a moment in midair.
Before he knew what was happening, Lucy had staggered back, and Edward had been invited forward.
“Edward,” said Sally Lunn, “my pleasure.” Then she took his hand.
His mind was somewhere deep under the earth. The rich smell of soil filled his nose, and cool clods sealed his eyes. He could blindly sense a twinned presence high above his head, calling him up. He struggled upward through the clinging loam, grew taller, taller, until he burst forth, into the ecstatic light, mingled gold and opal—
His hand and self were his own again. Somehow they were at the exit to the mill, having been escorted there by Calvin Culver.
“Sorry you folks have to leave now. But something tells me there won’t be any problem about you joining. No siree, none at all.”
* * *
Edward contemplated his breakfast. Lucy had cooked a pot of Wheatena with raisins. She had mounded a hill of the gritty golden cereal into a bowl, deposited a dollop of honey into the center of it, and splashed a moat of milk into the bowl.
The golden hill and white ring around it had Edward mesmerized, as if it were an intricate mandala containing infinite depths of meaning.
Reluctantly, he jerked his attention away from the absolutely mundane image. Picking up his spoon, he broke through the dike containing the honey, let it runnel away into the milk, a golden thread. He stirred the whole mixture up into an amorphous mess and began to eat.
The cereal tasted especially sweet this morning, the day after they had attended the Grange.
Lucy sat down at the table, picked up her spoon, and dipped it into her own cereal. “Well, what about it?”
Edward was taken aback. He hadn’t expected Lucy to beard him so soon about what they had agreed last night to postpone discussing. But he should have known, given her obvious excitement at the Grange meeting, that she would wait only the barest minimum of time.
Edward feigned ignorance. “About what?”
“Don’t be an ape. What about us joining the Grange?”
Edward looked sheepishly down into his bowl. There was no way out of it now. “I don’t think I want to.”
“Let me guess why. You’ve got no time?”
“Well, yes, there’s that.…”
“You aren’t interested in the kind of things they do and talk about?”
“I suppose you could say that.…”
“You don’t like the people? You think they’re clodhoppers?”
“Well, now, I wouldn’t go that far.…”
“You had the stuffing scared out of you by Sally Lunn?”
Edward said nothing. He looked up to find Lucy entreating him with shining eyes.
“Don’t be scared, Edward. I felt it, too. I don’t know what it was, but it was nothing to be frightened of. It was something entirely natural and good. I think maybe it was just some kind of saintliness or wisdom that comes, if you’re lucky, when you get as old as she is. Maybe it has to do with her living out here in the country all her life. Whatever it was, I liked it. It made me feel good, like I understood for the first time what the world is all about. Sometimes I don’t, you know. Sometimes, in fact, I think everyone but me knows the secret of how things work. You with all your talk about gravity, the way the plumber yelled at me that time I put the plaster down the drains— I get tired of feeling like such a big dope all the time. So I’m going to join the Grange. And that’s that.”
Edward struggled to speak. Lucy’s words had made him sad. Did she really feel like that? Was he partly responsible?
“Lucy, I want you to be happy. Do whatever you want. I’ll be glad if you join the Grange. But I just can’t. You see, when you touched that old woman’s hand you felt confirmed in everything you knew. But I felt just the opposite. I felt as if a pit of quicksand had opened up underfoot, as if the whole world I had known and accepted as solid and rational were a sham—which can’t be true. The old woman twisted my vision somehow and showed me everything in a new, unreasoning light. All the careful work I’ve put into explaining the world to myself and others was undone in a second. Maybe it was just momentary self-hypnosis. But I can’t go through that again.”
“And what,” Lucy asked, “if she was showing you the truth?”
“I think,” said Edward, “that I’d rather not accept that as a possibility.”
Lucy scraped the last of her cereal up methodically and swallowed it. “That’s fair, I guess. Will you at least help me with my kitchen garden?” She licked the bowl of her spoon sensuously like a big, lazy cat.
“Unfair tactics, and not strictly necessary. Of course I will.”
“Good. I’m going into town and look up Mr. Calvin Culver, our Sower and tell him I’m in if they’ll have me. You can work off a little of the spare tire you’re accumulating by getting the grass up from that plot I marked near the back steps.”
And with that, Lucy was gone.
Spare tire? And who had been feeding him such rich meals, as if fattening him up for a sacrifice? Was there no justice?
Edward did the breakfast dishes and went outside.
Even this early in the morning, the June sun was overpoweringly hot, a celestial bonfire. Soon Edward had his shirt off. The sharp, untried, shiny blade of the pointed shovel easily severed the ancient turf demarcated by stakes and string. Edward picked up each heavy clod by its green hair—disturbingly like a severed head—shook the moist earth from its roots, and tossed it aside. Fat and juicy flesh-colored earthworms, some truncated by his blade, wriggled away into the earth.
After some time, Edward had exposed a square of black earth some twenty feet on a side to the suns curious stare. The gaze of the deity was already turning the soil a different, lighter shade as it dried. The pile of turfs made a small warrior’s barrow.
Edward was resting on his shovel, his back glistening with sweat, when Lucy called out. “Hello! Come help me!”
Rather wearily, Edward went around to the front of the house. Lucy was struggling with some handled device sticking out of the car’s trunk.
“I rented a Rototiller,” she explained. “It’ll save us some work.”
“Us?”
“We’re a team, aren’t we?”
Edward wrestled the machine to the ground. “And your role on the team is—?”
“I’m the fructifying force.”
Edward stopped in midmotion, astonished. “‘Fructifying’? Where the hell did that come from? Good old Calvin Culver? Are you sure you don’t mean—”
“Don’t say it. You’ve got a filthy mind. Just do a good job, and you’ll get your reward.
“Oh, by the way,” she added as he wheeled the machine off, “I’m a Grange member now.”
The Rototiller, despite its noise and stink, did make the job easier. Still, there were what seemed to be thousands of stones to bend over for and pluck from the newly turned earth. In a couple of hours they formed a companion cairn to the sod barrow.
When it was over, Edward had never felt so tired in his life. Every muscle in his arms and legs and back ached. So this was the pastoral life. Ah, Arcadia! The city had never looked so fine.…
“Edward,” called Lucy from the back porch. He turned, hoping she had brought something cool for him to drink.
She wore a circlet of daisies in her hair. And nothing else. Her body glowed white and tan as if lit from within. She stepped down the stairs with a motion like water falling. The air around her appeared to shiver. She crossed the lawn, her bare feet seeming to imprint the grass with a brighter greenness.
Edward was mesmerized. He felt hot and cold at once. Then his unknown wife, her eyes filmed with a cool light, was upon him, unbuckling his pants, finding him unsurprisingly ready, and pulling him down to the broken soil.
The earth was cool and moist beneath his knees and palms. He wondered briefly what it felt like to supine Lucy. Then there was nothing left of him to wonder.
When it was over, Edward had never felt so refreshed in his life. Every muscle in his arms and legs and back throbbed with vitality. So this was the pastoral life.…
“You don’t pay the lawn-maintenance guys this way, do you?”
Lucy wasn’t listening to him. She was looking up into the infinite sky. Edward cast his own gaze over his shoulder, and saw the moon watching them.
“Now it will blossom,” Lucy said.
That same evening, Lucy announced she was going out.
“There’s a Grange meeting tonight.”
“So soon?”
“It’s an emergency. We have to deal with the gypsy moths.”
“You mean those stupid caterpillars that are chewing up all the trees? I thought there was nothing that stopped them short of spraying. And the town council’s voted against that.”
“Sally has a plan.”
Lucy was gone till after midnight. When she crawled into their bed, beneath the down comforter the country nights still made a necessity, Edward came half-awake.
“How’d it go?” he murmured sleepily.
“Shhh, go back to sleep. I’ll tell you in the morning.”
But in the morning there was no need to ask, for the gypsy moths lay dead in heaps everywhere.
* * *
All work on his book had gone by the board. Edward found he couldn’t concentrate on what had once seemed so important to him. It wasn’t the environment that was distracting him anymore, though. At least not firsthand. He had realized with a start, soon after the wild coupling with Lucy on the garden bed, that his senses had become harmonized
to the natural world somehow, had achieved a rapprochement with the forces of sunlight and soil, leaf and limb. These forces did not make the same demands on his attention as they had when they were new to him. He found he could go about his daily life without paying much attention to the bewitching, continually varying play of light and odors around him.
Not that nature had vanished or retreated from the back of his mind or the depths of his gut. No, that had not happened, no more than one’s heart or lungs had ceased to function, simply because they went hourly unheard.
No, what preoccupied Edward now was trying to find out what Lucy had gotten herself involved in.
What exactly was this organization known as the Grange?
Here and now, in mid-June, this question—along with its corollary, Was the Grange good or bad for his wife?—filled all of Edward’s mind. He attacked it the only way he knew how, short of confronting the Grange members themselves (something he was surprisingly reluctant to do), and that was through research.
Every morning, Edward set out for the city, leaving Lucy behind to tend to her garden. He worried about what she might be getting up to, picturing her reenacting their fructifying ritual, only with other partners. Then he would admonish himself for a fool. Lucy, despite her newfound interest in matters horticultural, was still the same woman he had always known, and she wouldn’t do that to him. Besides, any such activity would surely crush the tiny seedlings that now sprouted where Edward and Lucy had tumbled, and even the sturdier shoots of the transplanted tomatoes, and Lucy wouldn’t stand for that. The garden seemed to be her whole life lately. In the end, there was nothing Edward could or would do if she wanted to rut all day, so he dismissed it from his mind as best he could.
On the campus, moving from stack to dusty stack in the various familiar libraries where he had spent so much time—and which now seemed so alien —Edward sought answers to the meaning of the Grange and what it stood for.
He confirmed in detail the brief encyclopedia entry he had read on that day, seemingly ages gone by. The Grange, if this was indeed the same one, had been the brainchild of Oliver Hudson Kelley in 1867. (The word “grange” came from the same Latin root as “grain,” granum, and meant merely a storehouse for grain.) He dug into Kelley’s past. The man had been an immigrant, his father Irish, his mother French. There the personal trail petered out. Edward switched to the public practices of the Grange.
Little Doors Page 8
