Life: An Exploded Diagram Read Online Free PDF Page B

her and burning for her and yelling out mad amounts of money and then —
    And then the downstairs clock chimed the three-quarter hour, and Ruth hastened to clean her face and dress in the pleated skirt and white blouse and lace her brown shoes. Tied her hair back out of the way. Wheeled her heavy bicycle out of the shed and pedaled toward her ledgers.
    Win was no fool. She’d found the box, had nosed the Babylonian wickedness within. But she was undisturbed. She had filled her daughter with the fear of men, and there was no cosmetic that could cover that. Or that’s what she thought until George bloody Ackroyd came along.

T HE HARVEST HOLIDAY went back a long way. Centuries. When wheat and oats and barley plumped and hung their heads, schools and businesses closed. Weavers and wives and itinerants and children flocked to the fields. Pale clerks and awkward teachers went to blister their hands on pitchforks, to gather in and glean. At harvesttime, Edmund Mortimer delighted in the presence of half-forgotten members of his community in his fields. The coarse lunches and murmured courtships in the purple shade of his hedges. The tang of horse sweat, the swirls of chaff against the reddening sky.
    He could not summon enough people to the harvest of 1942, so he telephoned the army camp at Northrepps. By luck, the captain he spoke to was himself from a farming family. The following day, a three-ton army lorry jolted down the track to the first of Mortimer’s nine fields of barley. The ten volunteers in it were under the command of a sergeant of the Royal Engineers, who was awaiting a posting. His name was Ackroyd. Hedge, the steward, greeted them skeptically.
    The soldiers were all townies and clueless. But they were also cheerful and cocky and excited by this relief from routine. Within an hour, they were loudly competing at the work, pushing one another aside to lift sheaves from the binders. Their language was a horror, but their daft energy lifted the day. By noon the hazy cloud had dissipated, and Ackroyd’s men, ignorant of country niceties, had stripped to their waists, and the local girls were rolling their eyes at one another. When Hedge blew his whistle to signal the lunch break, Ackroyd and another man went to the truck and lifted out a crate of India Pale Ale. They went between the narrow shades of carts and trees, insistently distributing bottles. A sweaty young clown from the Royal Fusiliers tried to pour beer into the horses’ mouths.
    Late in the afternoon, when the teams of horses were being changed, George Ackroyd went to relieve his bladder behind the three-tonner and lingered in its shade to smoke a cigarette. He looked up into the huge and faultless sky in which crescent-winged birds circled and swooped. He blinked away memories of other birds, in another country, picking human meat from the husks of burned machines.
    A black car, a long Riley saloon, pulled up alongside the gateway to his left. Three people got out. The driver was a somber man with thinning hair who, despite the heat, wore a brown suit and a stiff collar and a striped tie. He opened the rear door and held it while a smiling older man in a blue collarless shirt emerged. The other passenger was a young woman who was wearing a belted floral-print dress. George observed the fullness of her figure and her long flame-red hair. He parked his cigarette in the corner of his mouth and sauntered after them into the field, watching the shift of her hips as she carefully placed her feet in the rutted earth.
    Hedge bustled toward them, saying heartily, “Mr. Mortimer!”
    “Herbert,” the older man said. “How goes the day?”
    “Very good, sir. Very good.” Hedge turned to the somber man. “We’re expectun a good yield, Mr. Lark, all things considered.”
    Lark sniffed, nodding.
    Mortimer surveyed the glowing field. The cut portion of it was stitched with stooks of grain aligned with military precision.
    “And how are our gallant volunteers