The Harvest

And oh, she begged for another rest, but weren’t the fields on knees of their own? Pleading with us to bring them succor. They had survived one of the hardest winters to ever settle into Woodcatch, and now spring had arrived, and they demanded their gift.

And wasn’t she to blame for going out there in the first place when she was younger? No childhood age excuses mischief when it leads to the genesis of a starvation. She put on her party dress and shunned her cake. Out she went with a plate of bread bathed in jams. All kinds of jams. Her mother made them fresh and the men from town would lick the glass when the last dollop had been scraped from the bottom. The fields found their sweet tooth that day. She returned to the house and when she told her father what she’d done, he’d slapped her hard and sent her to her room. The girl didn’t cry. She never cried. Teachers would bring the ruler to her wrists. Her mother would throttle her until it felt as though her teeth would be shaken straight out of her mouth. An assault from her father would not bring about her first set of tears. In her room, she heard a sound against her window. Someone had placed stalks on the ground outside. They formed a word from a language she didn’t understand. She knew they would be hungry again. She wanted to feed them. It was a kindness, wasn’t it? The hardest tenet of any faith. To feed those who desire nourishment.

Their desire brought her back out again in the night. In the mornings, her father would find eggs missing. Cured pork. Jars of pickled carrots. He didn’t suspect his daughter of such disobedience. The girl was insolent, but she had never committed her crimes in the dark. Her mouth was fresh and she knew no fear, but he didn’t see her as any kind of rebel. Several days after her thirteenth birthday, she took ill, and couldn’t make it out into the field. Her fever held firm for nearly a week, and when she recovered, her mother told her that while she had been quarantined in her room, her father had been murdered.

One of the workers had found him at dawn near the edge of a thriving patch of crops. His arms had strange symbols carved in them. The clothes he wore to bed the night before were placed next to him. And weren’t they folded neatly and with great care? Nary a grass stain on them. His tongue had been removed and one of his eyes. They found the tongue hanging from a stalk, but the eye was never recovered. Her mother relayed all this to the girl as though she were merely relating a recipe she’d heard for a cobbler. Shocked at her mother’s demeanor, she was even more put off when her mother revealed her plans to marry her father’s father. Her grandfather was one of the oldest men for miles and he coughed each day as though there was molasses coating his lungs. Her mother told her that there was no choice in the matter. A household needed a woman, and a farm needed a man. Whoever murdered her father seemed to be of no concern, but an aside was mumbled from her mother about debts and debtors and how they must have been quite the skilled deviant since her mother had not even been awoken from her sleep when her father was taken outside.

That night, she fed the fields. From the porch, her grandfather sat on his rocking chair and called her every name he could muster. And didn’t he tell her that she smelled like the musk of sin? And didn’t he threaten to tell her mother and anyone else who would listen that she was the cause of her father’s death, because she’d made love to the harvest. To the ones that had borne great fruit and the ones that had devastated. To harvests yet to come. She’d married them all, and shouldn’t she pay for it?

Walking back onto the porch, her hands covered in lamb ragout that she’d scooped out of a dutch oven and dumped directly onto the soil where her father had lost his tongue, she looked at the old man and told him that if he breathed one word of what she was doing to anyone, he’d find himself becoming a meal as well. And wasn’t food hard to come by? And wouldn’t an old man who had already served all he was going to serve to the world help to cover a night or two of meals and be a much better contributor in that way than just sitting on a porch until he could go inside and share a bed with his dead son’s widow?

And so didn’t it go on like that for years and years? Didn’t her grandfather pass away and be buried only to have people in town discover his grave dug up and his coffin empty? Wasn’t her mother cremated, which was against the woman’s wishes, and weren’t there rumors that she hadn’t been burned up at all, but rather, had her body squirreled away for some nefarious reason? And didn’t workers begin to go missing? And didn’t the young woman become a spinster who took over the farm and ran it better than any man ever could?

And weren’t the harvests bountiful? And didn’t the crops throb with life? And when you bit into them, didn’t you taste blood before you tasted anything else? Before you felt the sweetness of the corn or the saline of the squash.

And didn’t we all become used to the way the food satisfied us? And didn’t we refuse to eat from any place other than her farm? And when she grew older, and her legs seized up, didn’t we ignore how she moved herself onto the porch of her house and wouldn’t go inside? And when we found her unconscious one night in the same spot where her father had been killed all those years ago, did we ask her how she’d come to find herself out there in the field in the middle of the night? And did we fret as deeply as we should have that she was missing two fingers and part of her right ear? And when we brought her inside, in spite of her howling, and took her up to her bedroom so she could get a proper rest, didn’t we know what we were doing? Didn’t we know what would come to pass? And was that when we first heard the fields for ourselves? And why didn’t we believe them when they said they’d start with our youngest sons and work their way up? And why didn’t we find hysteria after the first one was cut in half right there among the wheat?

And when we knew that she’d have to go back down and feed them, why didn’t we offer to help her? Why did we want to see her crack her legs crawling down those stairs each night? Why did we watch as though it were a ritual? As though she had something to be ashamed of when all she’d done all those many years ago was listen to a voice that said it was hungry. Why did we force her to keep going even when she said getting out of bed again would kill her? And what did we plan to do when she wasn’t given another rest and stopped breathing on the second-to-last step with the fields still screaming and a bowl of shaved potatoes sitting right there at the door?

And didn’t we think we’d still get a good harvest after that?

And didn’t we believe we could hold off until then?