Lower Thorpe

Hester Wynne had spent eleven years recording the dying customs of rural England, and she had learned that the customs which interested her most were never the ones the parish council wanted to show her. The councils wanted to show her morris dancing and well-dressing, the safe and photogenic survivals, the ones that ended up on biscuit tins. The customs Hester wanted were the awkward ones — the ones a village still practised but had grown shy of, the ones where, if you asked too directly why, the answers thinned out and the room cooled. Those were the old ones. The biscuit-tin customs were charming. The cold-room customs were true. Lower Thorpe had a cold-room custom, and it was the reason she had driven her small car down a lane that the map gave up on halfway, into a valley so folded into the hills that she had not seen the village until she was almost in it. It was a prosperous place, and that was the first thing Hester noted in her book, because prosperity was rare in the villages she worked. Lower Thorpe was not prosperous in a modern way — no new builds, no commuters — but the old way, the deep way. The barns were full. The hedges were thick and well laid. The few dozen houses sat among fields that even Hester's untrained eye could see were extravagantly, almost unnaturally fertile, the wheat standing gold and heavy and unbroken in the August heat. The custom was the Crowning of the Corn Wife, and it happened every year on the last Sunday of August, and the woman who had written to Hester about it — a retired schoolteacher named Margaret Aldous — met her at the lane's end and walked her into the village talking the whole way, warmly, easily, the way people talk when they have decided in advance how much they are going to say. "Two hundred years," Margaret said, "and not one failed harvest. You can check the parish records, dear, they're all there. Two hundred years of full barns while half of England starved around us in the bad decades. We are very proud of it. And every August we choose a Corn Wife, the prettiest of the season's brides or the season's eldest unwed girl, and we crown her in wheat and we process her through the fields, and that is our way of saying thank you." "Thank you to whom?" Hester asked. It was the question she always asked, gently, and watched what it did. It did the thing. Margaret's easy flow caught, just for a heartbeat, like a thread snagging. "To the land," she said. "To the fields. For their kindness." And she went on, smoothly, about the wheat crown and the songs, but Hester had her pencil out now and had written in her book the small precise observation that was the whole reason she did this work: She did not say to God. In a country village, for a harvest thanksgiving, the schoolteacher did not say to God. They had reached the village green, where preparations for Sunday were already underway, and Hester saw the thing that made her stop walking. There was a frame being built at the green's edge. A tall wicker frame, человек-shaped, taller than a man, the kind of armature you might build a guy upon, or a scarecrow. But it was not being built to be a scarecrow. It was being built with a hollow in it, a woven cavity at its heart, sized — Hester's eleven years of cold rooms told her this before her mind would say it plainly — sized and shaped to hold a person standing upright. "And the Corn Wife," Hester said carefully, looking at the frame. "After she is crowned, and processed through the fields. What happens to her then? Where does she go, when the day is over?" Margaret Aldous smiled. It was a kind smile, a schoolteacher's smile, and it did not reach the cooled and careful place behind her eyes, and she said, "Why, dear. She goes to thank the fields. That's the whole of the custom. She goes into the fields, and she gives our thanks, and that is why in two hundred years Lower Thorpe has never once gone hungry." The wheat stood gold and heavy and unnaturally still in every direction, and Hester Wynne, who had come to record a dying custom, understood with a slow cold certainty that she had instead arrived in the one village in England where the old custom had never died at all — and that the last Sunday of August was four days away.