He looked down, biting his lip. He was hungry for her, and she knew it. All week he had avoided her embrace, hoarding his pent-up energies for the planting; it would help ensure a bountiful crop. But now the sight of her moving another pace closer and bending toward the earth, deliberately thrusting out her hips, so aroused him that he had to turn his face away or he'd have cried out. Savagely he plunged his staff into the furrowed ground and gave it a violent twist; several leaves were shaken off and lost in the darkness. If only he hadn't made that vow… He thought of her round body, the softness of her skin beneath the rough dress, and wondered, as he rejoined the ranks of the men, if he dared hoist that dress and enter her tonight, with all the corn seed not yet sown.
Nudging the woman beside her, Deborah nodded toward her husband. 'Did you see the way Sarr was looking at me?' she said in a low, husky voice. 'As soon as you folks leave, I swear he's going to take me right here in this field!'
The image was a scandalous one, but credible nonetheless. They burst into delighted laughter.
Poroth heard the laughter, but not what had provoked it. 'Like a pack of spoony schoolgirls,' Rupert Lindt had said, and he'd been right. How deliriously innocent they were, Deborah no less than the rest. And how shocked they'd be if he told them the truth about what they'd done tonight.
'Hide thee, haste thee,
Gillycorn Hill… '
He had stumbled upon it, quite by accident, in German class; a book in the college library, confirming his suspicions, had hinted at still darker things, older than the pyramids, older than recorded history. He'd read of pre-Christian nature worship and how, each spring, tribesmen had once sacrificed their gods in human form. The rest he'd figured out for himself. Beneath his neighbors' sober-sided piety he had glimpsed the painted face of the savage; behind this evening's quaint observance he had seen a blood-stained altar and a figure stretched naked upon it like a five-pointed star. He had witnessed the ritual slashing of the throat, the rending of the limbs; while his friends enjoyed their moonlit meal, he'd had a vision of frenzied hands tearing at a thing without a head, while, just beyond the firelight, children fought greedily over what looked like a face. Though their flood now bore a deceptive modern name, it had formerly been known as Gottin bread, symbol of what they'd once devoured – the flesh of the Goddess incarnate, her hair the garland that now crowned his staff.
'If Mole don't taste thee,
Worm he will.'
All such goings-on, of course, were safely in the past; there was no harm in them today. Perhaps he'd read more history than the rest of the Brethren, and perhaps he'd seen more deeply tonight, but his faith remained as strong as it had always been. The origin of everything was dark, no doubt, but blood spilled long ago had long since dried. Time, he knew, made all deeds respectable; some people even ate their god each Sunday. For him all gods and goddesses were one, aspects of an all-encompassing Divine; and after tonight's sacrament, followed by his mother's benediction, he walked with the confidence of one who'd been truly blessed.
Behind him, appropriately, the women had reached the final, optimistic verse of their chant:
'Fly thee, fleet thee,
Gillycorn Hill… '
Forcing his thoughts from the altar, the naked victim, the memory of his wife, he raised his voice with theirs in an exuberant shout:
' If Worm don't eat thee,
I will!'
There was a sudden splintering of wood. The point of his staff struck something hard and wriggling. From the earth before him rose an angry sound like fat sizzling on a fire, and something thrashed convulsively, almost wresting his staff from his grasp. An ear of brittle corn snapped off and fell silently at his feet. In the distance one of the cats leaped up and went streaking across the lawn.
Lifting the staff, he squinted closely at its tip, but the moon was almost gone and he could see nothing. The wood felt cracked and pitted near the end; it was sticky to the touch, and oddly cold.
His stomach now unsettled, he pressed the staff once more into the ground, turning it against the clean soil. He said nothing to any of the others, and by the time the third acre was planted he had driven the incident from his mind.
It was then that it happened. The hour was late; the crickets still sang, but the lightning bugs were dimmed, and the moon had long since disappeared behind the scrub pines to the west. Suddenly, by the faraway blaze, a child cried out in dismay.
She was standing over the bag of seed, pointing to something at her feet. Soon she had been joined by a group of the older men.' 'Tis nothing!' one of them called hoarsely. He waved the laborers back to the field, but Poroth and his wife continued hurrying toward the fire. In its light, amid a milling crowd of children and elders, they saw the seed bag lying on its side, looking slightly more shrunken than they'd remembered it. Gaping from the bottom was a small circular hole through which spilled a steady stream of corn seed.
' 'Tis nothing,' repeated the old man. 'We'll get it all.' Around him his comrades were already gathering up the individual kernels that lay scattered in the grass.
But what none of them spoke of was the other hole they had seen and quickly covered over – a hole that, before the bag rolled on its side, had lain just below the first, twisting sinuously into the earth.
Carol was sorry when at last they reached the front steps of her building, where tattered aspidistra struggled against cellophane bags and candy wrappers in two soot-covered boxes on either side of the doorway. The place, which till now had seemed a haven, somewhere she could actually afford, suddenly looked very shabby to her; she was glad it was night and that the nearest streetlamp was several houses away. Freirs acted as if he didn't notice, but she was afraid he was only being polite. He had to be richer than he pre- tended, she was certain of it, one of those self-confident New York Jewish boys who'd grown up with all the advantages and didn't realize how lucky they were. Or if he wasn't rich, he was at least generously supplied with money and would soon be relaxing in the country while she'd still be here working all summer. For their entire walk together she'd been acutely aware, with every block they passed, that he'd be leaving the city on Sunday; and though she reminded herself that the day had been an extraordinarily good one -blessed, practically – she couldn't help feeling that, at the same time, God was being curiously crueclass="underline" no sooner had she met someone she might truly fall in love with than he was being taken away from her.
Freirs himself, she'd noticed, had begun to grow inexplicably jumpy as their walk drew to an end. He'd become skittish as a greyhound, in fact, seeing shapes in every shadow, certain they were being followed, and some of his tension had rubbed off on her. Only a few yards from her house he had frozen without warning in his tracks and seized her arm, yanking her back as if before a chasm and gesturing wordlessly at a thing the size of a pea pod that had scuttled across their path. Carol had let out a little cry before she'd realized it was only a waterbug. How in the world was a person like this going to get along in the country?
She paused at the bottom of the steps, not sure whether to ask him up for coffee or to say goodbye. 'Well, Jeremy,' she said, 'it sounds like you're in for a great summer. I envy you, I really do. I just hope you'll give me a call when you get back to the city.'
'Hell, we can do better than that. How about coming out to visit me sometime? It would do you good, get you away from the dusty old books and little old men. You could come out for the weekend' -his confidence seemed to slip – 'or else just for the day, whatever you like.'