Harvest A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

the newcomers—and also to my smarting palm; I was the onlyvillager they scorched. But they do not. They do not want to risk the truth.
    And neither, come to that, do I. Despite what I have seen myself while walking to the barn, it is unjust but sensible, I think, to let the pillory alone. The cup of hospitality is broken already. So far as I can tell, it is not likely that our visitors, once their seven days are served, will want to set up home among us anyway. We’ve not endeared ourselves to them. They’ll fold their sacking and go, the moment they’re set free. So maybe it is wise for all of us to hold our tongues for the time being and let them soak up all the blame. Seven days are neither here nor there with men like that, men who have no land or greater family, men who have no roots but are like mistletoe. Further, there is an account on which I cannot yet confer my sympathy, being absent from this morning’s scene, that says these newcomers are worthy of the pillory anyway, no matter who it was who took the fire to Master Kent’s old beams. No one forgets the two drawn bows, the impudence of telling people they’d better step away, or else.
    Nevertheless, we are certainly unnerved. Our pillory has not been used for many years. Its iron bolt key, which Master Kent keeps with a dozen others on a bronze chain somewhere in his parlor, is rusty and has broken wards. Its last frequenters were two cousins—both Saxtons, so related to my wife—who went to war among themselves about the title to a pig. That’s no small matter. I’m not making light of it. Pigs are our backyard brethren, in a way, and worth fighting for. It took half a dozen of our lads to calm them down. To pin them down, in fact. It was an entertaining afternoon. The cousins spent only a night encased, as I remember it, and by the morning they had butchered their differences. They shared the pork out, snout to tail, two trotters each, weighing everything and even dividing the liver and the heart with the care of merchants cleaving an ounce of goldor cutting a length of cloth. Ever since they have enjoyed a reputation as our favorite rascals. They have only to grunt to have us clutching at our ribs. To this day they rarely miss an opportunity to claim, usually within each other’s hearing, that standing in the pillory was not a cruel punishment, though being in their cousin’s company was. And remains so. They’d paid too great a price for pork.
    That was about ten harvests ago, during the second or third year of our master’s marriage and his freehold over us. He’s never thought it fit to put the pillory to use since then. It’s been our village cross. We’ve little else. The plot of land that was set aside for a church has nothing on it other than our too many graves, a pile of well-intended but as yet unlaid stones and, somewhere underneath the bracken, sore-hocks and willow herb, a flat foundation block. So far no one has made the time to dig a building trench, select a single flint for our church’s walls or mix a pint of mortar. We do not dare to say we count ourselves beyond the Kingdom of God. But certainly we do not press too closely to His bosom; rather, we are at His fingertips. He touches us, but only just. We work cheek to jowl with breeds that cluck and snort and moo, but never with the Father who created us and them. I’ve yet to sense Him standing at our shoulders, sickle in His hand. I’ve yet to feel Him lightening the plow. No, we dare to think and even say among ourselves, there’d be no barley if we left it to the Lord, not a single blade of it. Well, actually, there’d be no field, except a field of by-blows and weeds; the nettles and tares, the thorns and brambles He preferred when He abandoned Eden. You never find Him planting crops for us. You never find us planting weeds. But still we have to battle with His darnel and His fumiter, we have to suffer from His fleas and gnats and pests. He makes us pay the penalty