On the surface, the Grange’s history was one of promoting solidarity among farmers, for the benefit of both individual farmers and farmers as a class. Antitrust, transportation, and education laws were agitated for, cooperatives established, research promoted. There was a social side to the Grange, too. Dances, harvest suppers, lectures. It all seemed extremely innocuous today—although, of course, at the time, it had been considered quite radical and dangerous.
But through all his readings, Edward began to accumulate the feeling that this surface level of activity was not everything, was not even the most important reason for the Grange’s existence. There was something unspoken beneath the primary texts of a century ago, half a century ago, even two decades ago, something that popped up only now and then, as if it were too powerful to keep completely submerged, rearing its massive green head like the crown of an ancient thick-boled oak bursting full-grown and -leafed through the bland surface of the earth.
And the unspoken secret seemed, Edward slowly realized, to revolve around a woman—or women—known as Sally Lunn, and how she was … well, there was no word for it but worshipped.
From a privately printed, anonymously authored book titled Gleanings and Chaff: An Amateur Agriculturalist’s Experiences with the Patrons of Husbandry, 1879, whose spine was broken and pages flaking:
Sallie Lunne was present that night, for the first time since I had attended the Grange, and I was told to show all proper respect and deference to this old dame, although how she differed from any farmer’s elderly wife I could not immediately apprehend. I was told by the Grange’s Thresher that Dame Lunne was not her baptismal name, but an appellation given to the woman who filled the role of Grain Mistress, and that therefore each branch of the Grange boasted its own Mistress Lunne, simultaneously in attendance all across this broad land—nay, even the globe.
Mistress Lunne seemed a taciturn, even dull, sort, and spoke not a word during the Grange meeting itself. But afterward, when I was brought forward to be presented to her, I was forced to revise my hasty first impression.
Her exact words I do not recall, but know with a certainty that they most favorably impressed me with her strength of character and Demeter-like vitality. She seemed a veritable fount and wellspring of pastoral virtues, her high office having caused her to transcend herself, and her touch was correspondingly galvanic. It is hard to overstate her effect on those made of lesser stuff.
Even more difficult of relation is the aspect she dons during certain private Granger rituals. But I can say no more.…
One morning, prior to leaving for the city, Edward took his coffee out to the back porch. Lucy was still in the shower. Edward hadn’t told her what he was doing on campus each day; she thought, he believed, that he was working on his book.
His eyes drifted toward their vegetable garden. It was nine days since he had turned the soil with such backbreaking labor, and he hadn’t paid much attention to it in the interval.
The tomato plants were spilling over their wire cages, heavy ripe fruit bedecking their leafy sprawl. Peas were ready to pick, as was an abundance of lettuce, eggplants, cucumbers, and zucchini.
Lucy emerged, barefoot, robed, and toweling her hair. “Oh, I’m sorry—did I scare you?” she asked.
Dabbing ineffectually at his coffee-soaked shirt, Edward said, “Just clumsy, I guess.” He set his empty cup and saucer down noisily on the porch rail. Then his eyes caught on what was nailed above the back door.
Lucy followed his gaze. “It’s a sprig of touch-leaf,” she explained. “Saint John’s wort. Aren’t all those golden flowers beautiful?”
“Beautiful, yeah, they are. I guess. Why’s it there?”
“To guard against thunder, lightning, and fire. There’s a spray over the front door, too.”
Lucy regarded her husband as if waiting for him to inquire further, or contest what she had said. Edward didn’t bite. He was just waiting for what came next. Something had to come next. It was in Lucy’s eyes. They were floating in that same opalescent light as on the day the two of them had consecrated the miraculous garden.
“Saint John’s Eve is just a few days away, you know. Midsummer Night. It’s an important day for the Grange. There’ll be a lot going on. Do you think you might come?”
“I—I’ll see. Listen, I’ve got to be going now. A lot of research to finish—”
Lucy kissed him chastely good-bye. “If you call, I might be out. There’s a red tide on the coast, and we’re helping the local Grange there deal with it.”
“I see,” said Edward.
The car radio confirmed that one of the nuisance-making algal blooms had just been spotted that morning. Edward didn’t give it a snowball’s chance in hell of lasting more than a day.
Edward had run into a dead end investigating the Grange itself. Nowhere were the more arcane practices he suspected them of described in detail. He was forced to turn to anthropological and mythological works, notably Graves’s The Greek Myths, Frazer’s Golden Bough, and Campbell’s World Mythology.
In the Frazer, he found that the ceremony he and Lucy had participated in was old, old, old, as old as agriculture itself. Fucking in a field, by couple or community, to ensure fertility, was a ritual found from Central America to New Guinea to Central Africa to the Ukraine. Edward could now personally testify to its efficacy.
There were a hundred, a thousand other bizarre and not-so-bizarre practices connected with raising crops. An activity so central to civilization could not have failed to accumulate myriad superstitions over the millennia, contributions from every ethnic and racial group known to history. Druids, Gauls, Bantu, Aztecs, Greeks, Romans, Seminoles, Apache—Edward wallowed in the descriptions till his head reeled. Intercourse with trees, beating recalcitrant crops, supplicating the rain and sun, chastising the moon, sacrificing animals and humans—
Which of these did the Grange practice?
Sacrifice?
Human sacrifice?
Yes, Edward was suddenly convinced. He was the intended victim for the Saint John’s Eve festivities. Coinciding with the summer solstice, after which the days began to shorten and vegetation implicitly to die, the archaic holiday was marked with propitiations to distant winter. In Russia, a straw figure was drowned in a stream. The Druids burned their sacrificial king in the Midsummer bonfires. This was why Lucy had been fattening him up, like some hapless Hansel. Oh Lord, what was he going to do?
Almost blinded by tears of fear and disappointment at the treachery of his wife, Edward continued to flip uselessly through the pages of the book before him. A phrase leaped out at him: … known as soleil lune.
He backtracked.
A large, round cake was baked from the summer’s first harvest of grain and consecrated to the Sun and the Moon, twin tutelar deities of husbandry, by whose radiant beneficence the crops ripened, and by whose phases propitious times for sowing and reaping were determined. This cake was ritually broken and shared among the community. Known as soleil lune in France, this symbolic body of Ceres was, due to misunderstanding of the original phrase, called Sally Lunn in England.…
* * *
The flames soared high. Edward could see them from across the field in the night. A circle of leaping bonfires, they ringed a small wooded hill. The air was thick with their smoke, and with the richness of the Midsummer vegetation.
Lucy handled the jouncing car well on the rutted dirt road. She whistled as she drove. Edward, slumped miserably in his seat, thought he recognized again “John Barleycorn Must Die.”
In the end, he had agreed to accompany Lucy to the Grange’s ceremony. What else could he do? If Lucy wanted to get rid of him, then there was no reason for him to go on living. He had never quite realized what she meant to him until now. Only her apparent abandonment of him as a sacrifice to her new religion had showed Edward the depths of his ties to her. She had been everything that had supported him in his work, his bastion during hard times, his joy during good. If their life toget
her was at an end, he’d at least be loyal to her up to the ultimate moment, for all they had shared, even if she had betrayed him.
The car came to a stop amidst others, the same old models that had been parked outside the Grange hall. The early arrivals, Edward saw, were standing near the fires, lit with gold, partly shadowed.
Lucy levered open her door and stepped nimbly to the sweet-smelling, trodden hay grass. Edward dragged himself out of the car.
“Are you O.K., dear? Are you sure you want to be here tonight?”
Edward nodded dumbly. How could she be so appallingly blithe at his imminent demise?
They walked toward the crowd. Sally Lunn was not visible. The other six elderly officers separated themselves and approached. They were wearing their sashes and nothing else, their old carcasses somehow not pitiful or funny, but immensely dignified and potent. They carried archaic flails and scythes.
“Is your husband ready?” one asked. Edward thought he recognized Roger Swain, the Presbyter.
“Yes.”
“We will escort him. You must remain behind.” Swain took Edward by the elbow. The six officers and Edward began to walk uphill.
Looking up as he ascended, Edward stared full into the beaming face of the moon. Where had it come from? A moment ago it had been nowhere in sight.… He stumbled, and was forced to drop his gaze. When he looked up again, there were only innumerable stars.
By the time he reached the top, he was winded, more from fear than physical exertion. Under the dark trees, away from the flames, he could hardly see. They stopped to let his eyes adjust. Edward thought he saw an open work structure, like a giant wicker beehive. They moved toward it.
The structure was an airy hut woven of willow withes. Sally Lunn sat cross-legged inside it, clothed in a robe. Edward could feel her presence from six feet away.
“Happy Saint John’s Eve, Edward. We’re glad you could make it.”
The other officers had faded respectfully back and left him alone with Sally Lunn.
Edward collapsed nervelessly to the earth. He thought he could hear the gentle purling of a stream or spring nearby.
“Do you know who I am now?” asked Sally Lunn.
Edward shook his head no.
“I think you do. I am the Sun and the Moon and the Earth. I am Ceres and Gaea and Demeter, Persephone and Hecate. I am the force that through the green fuse drives the flower. I am burgeoning and fecundity, blossom and fruit. Do you acknowledge this?”
Edward’s lips were very dry. “Yes,” he whispered.
“Do you know why you are here tonight?”
“Not really. But I can guess.”
“It’s because of your wife.”
“I know that much—”
“Quiet. You know nothing. Your wife is a very important person. Look at me. This body I inhabit is one of a few special ones, receptive to me. I come into it only from time to time. I am immortal. But although I can lend it a few years, this body is not immortal. In fact, it will soon go to feed the soil. This chapter of the Grange will be without their Sally Lunn. The important work they do would falter without guidance. But your wife—”
Revelation burst on Edward then, and he dared to get to his feet and interrupt. “You mean to possess her.”
“I already have.”
The officers had drifted back silently during Edward’s audience, and now stood outside the door of the hut. Sally Lunn spoke softly.
“It only remains for you, as Lucy’s husband, to marry me.”
Edwin Landseer, the Plowman, was helping Edward to remove his clothes, while Betty Rhinebeck, the Attendant, was slowly pulling the robe off Sally Lunn’s wrinkled shoulders. The Presbyter was aspersing them both with crisp water, while Alice Cotten, the Thresher, plumped up a bed of fragrant herbs and ferns. As Edward stared, Sally Lunn’s robe pooled about her waist.
She was no longer old. She was young as spring, a nymph with unmottled skin and abundant flesh, supple as a reed. Her hair was as thick as wheat in a field. She looked like Lucy and like every woman he had ever coveted. A heady perfume rose from her loins, indistinguishable from the earth.
Nancy Rook, the Sluicekeeper, was behind Sally Lunn, lowering her backward to the bracken. The goddess dug her heels into the ground and arched her back off the ground so her robe could be removed from underneath her, then finally pulled off her uplifted feet when she settled back down.
Calvin Culver, the Sower, guided Edward between her legs.
It was infinitely more intense than what Edward had experienced with Lucy in the garden. And that had been the headiest sex he had ever had.
He rose to meet the sun.
He answered the moon’s pull.
He tasted the earth.
He was a long, hot root in the soil.
He found the spring, the honeyed well on the hill, and drank deeply.
The act felt as immemorially old as the grinding of one stone against another, with the grain being crushed between.
Then he flowered whitely, like an anemone.
When it was over, he lay for a time in Sally Lunn’s arms, eyes closed. He dared not look whether she was young or old again.
“Would you die for me right now, Edward?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“I am pleased to say it won’t be necessary. But someday I might ask again.”
After a quiet interval, he somehow knew he was expected to get up and redon his clothes, so he did. The sashes came to lead him back downhill. He looked over his shoulder once, like Orpheus. The hut was empty.
The fires were dying down, the people dispersing. He found Lucy. Her hair was crazy, and her shirt hung out of her pants.
Driving back home, he was too baffled at being alive to be able to talk.
But in bed, holding the wife he had never known, whom he had so recently remarried, he found his voice and asked, “What I did tonight—it doesn’t bother you?”
Sleepily, Lucy said, “But why should it, dear? She was only me.”
SLEEP IS WHERE YOU FIND IT
[co-written with Marc Laidlaw]
1
Sunday Morning in Manhattan
Down in the Lincoln Tunnel, alone with his headlamps and the dashboard’s glow, he hears a voice and thinks for one second that it’s the police dispatcher. “Tonight’s the night,” it says, a tiny little voice.
Weegee scowls to himself and answers back, “What do you know? Tonight’s always the night.”
But the radio is mute; really. Under the river there’s hardly even static. He looks around and discovers a girl fading in like another station, her own signal getting stronger and brighter as he nears the end of the tunnel. For a lingering moment she’s nothing but a silvery glow condensing out of darkness, pure potential, and then suddenly she’s flesh, sitting half-naked on the fabric-covered seat, her grimy right elbow on the passenger’s armrest.
Not bad, Weegee thinks to himself. The Darkroom’s being nice to me tonight.
He’s used to far worse, and it’s hard not to squirm when he thinks of all the things that have appeared next to him on other occasions, messing up the seat covers. The Mob hits that insist on talking with half their faces blown away; the weary-looking accident victims, stanching bloody noses; the roasts, with their skin so crisp and blackened that it crackles as they reach out wistfully for a puff off his cigar. Why they hound him, Weegee doesn’t know. It’s as if they consider him responsible somehow. But then this whole nighttime city, and everyone in it, has a haunted look.
It’s a relief not to share his car with something that makes him want to puke or scream or bawl his eyes out; but even so, Weegee has made it a matter of principle not to speak to the spooks. With the worst of them, he stops at the mouth of the tunnel and makes them get out and walk … or crawl. But tonight—well, he’s tempted. Strongly tempted.
The kid must be about twelve. Glossy black hair pulled back with a Li’l Orphan Annie clip to reveal the delicate whorls of one perfect ear.
Rosy lips and dark eyes, slightly Spic or Portagee features. She wears only a black skirt and incredibly filthy white bobby sox. In her lap, she’s got a gray tiger kitten gripped so tightly by its throat that the creature can’t even mew.
Her adolescent breasts are obviously new as a Brooklyn dawn and twice as pretty—not to mention almost as rare a sight to Weegee. The nipples are pink as frosting flowers on a birthday cake, so pink—
Weegee tears his eyes off the girl’s chest and puts them back on the road. The end of the Lincoln Tunnel has appeared ahead, although out there is only another order of darkness.
Now he recognizes her, remembers where he caught her. He hasn’t thought of her in … how long? It was a sweltering summer night, and leaning from his tenement window you could see, all up and down the side of the building, whole families out sleeping on their fire escapes. He’d spotted her by the faint light from the street, the oldest of nearly a dozen kids sprawled on the bars below. A brief flash from his camera, the secret glow of infrared, and he pulled back inside to develop the image and study it in secret. He could still remember the voyeur’s thrill on discovering that she was almost naked, an innocent bud cloistered in the safe darkness, never knowing he’d been watching. He had never been quite sure how he felt about that. That’s why she’s come for him, isn’t it?
She’s an unresolved tension, a fragment of undigested guilt, in her way more troubling than the corpses.
He has seen girls her age hooking, sure. The places he goes, you see everything after a while. But in his mind, in his photographs, he’d always thought of the girl as kept safe somehow, fixed in that innocent moment, protected not only by the other children but by his photography, as if the infrared flash were an angel’s halo hanging over her.
Little Doors Page 9
