Little Doors (12 page)

Not that nature had vanished or retreated from the back of his mind or the depths of his gut. No, that had not happened, no more than one’s heart or lungs had ceased to function, simply because they went hourly unheard.

No, what preoccupied Edward now was trying to find out what Lucy had gotten herself involved in.

What exactly was this organization known as the Grange?

Here and now, in mid-June, this question—along with its corollary, Was the Grange good or bad for his wife?—filled all of Edward’s mind. He attacked it the only way he knew how, short of confronting the Grange members themselves (something he was surprisingly reluctant to do), and that was through research.

Every morning, Edward set out for the city, leaving Lucy behind to tend to her garden. He worried about what she might be getting up to, picturing her reenacting their fructifying ritual, only with other partners. Then he would admonish himself for a fool. Lucy, despite her newfound interest in matters horticultural, was still the same woman he had always known, and she wouldn’t do that to him. Besides, any such activity would surely crush the tiny seedlings that now sprouted where Edward and Lucy had tumbled, and even the sturdier shoots of the transplanted tomatoes, and Lucy wouldn’t stand for that. The garden seemed to be her whole life lately. In the end, there was nothing Edward could or would do if she wanted to rut all day, so he dismissed it from his mind as best he could.

On the campus, moving from stack to dusty stack in the various familiar libraries where he had spent so much time—and which now seemed so alien —Edward sought answers to the meaning of the Grange and what it stood for.

He confirmed in detail the brief encyclopedia entry he had read on that day, seemingly ages gone by. The Grange, if this was indeed the same one, had been the brainchild of Oliver Hudson Kelley in 1867. (The word “grange” came from the same Latin root as “grain,” granum, and meant merely a storehouse for grain.) He dug into Kelley’s past. The man had been an immigrant, his father Irish, his mother French. There the personal trail petered out. Edward switched to the public practices of the Grange.

On the surface, the Grange’s history was one of promoting solidarity among farmers, for the benefit of both individual farmers and farmers as a class. Antitrust, transportation, and education laws were agitated for, cooperatives established, research promoted. There was a social side to the Grange, too. Dances, harvest suppers, lectures. It all seemed extremely innocuous today—although, of course, at the time, it had been considered quite radical and dangerous.

But through all his readings, Edward began to accumulate the feeling that this surface level of activity was not everything, was not even the most important reason for the Grange’s existence. There was something unspoken beneath the primary texts of a century ago, half a century ago, even two decades ago, something that popped up only now and then, as if it were too powerful to keep completely submerged, rearing its massive green head like the crown of an ancient thick-boled oak bursting full-grown and -leafed through the bland surface of the earth.

And the unspoken secret seemed, Edward slowly realized, to revolve around a woman—or women—known as Sally Lunn, and how she was … well, there was no word for it but worshipped.

From a privately printed, anonymously authored book titled
Gleanings and Chaff: An Amateur Agriculturalist’s Experiences with the Patrons of Husbandry
, 1879, whose spine was broken and pages flaking:

Sallie Lunne was present that night, for the first time since I had attended the Grange, and I was told to show all proper respect and deference to this old dame, although how she differed from any farmer’s elderly wife I could not immediately apprehend. I was told by the Grange’s Thresher that Dame Lunne was not her baptismal name, but an appellation given to the woman who filled the role of Grain Mistress, and that therefore each branch of the Grange boasted its own Mistress Lunne, simultaneously in attendance all across this broad land—nay, even the globe.

Mistress Lunne seemed a taciturn, even dull, sort, and spoke not a word during the Grange meeting itself. But afterward, when I was brought forward to be presented to her, I was forced to revise my hasty first impression.

Her exact words I do not recall, but know with a certainty that they most favorably impressed me with her strength of character and Demeter-like vitality. She seemed a veritable fount and wellspring of pastoral virtues, her high office having caused her to transcend herself, and her touch was correspondingly galvanic. It is hard to overstate her effect on those made of lesser stuff.

Even more difficult of relation is the aspect she dons during certain private Granger rituals. But I can say no more.…

One morning, prior to leaving for the city, Edward took his coffee out to the back porch. Lucy was still in the shower. Edward hadn’t told her what he was doing on campus each day; she thought, he believed, that he was working on his book.

His eyes drifted toward their vegetable garden. It was nine days since he had turned the soil with such backbreaking labor, and he hadn’t paid much attention to it in the interval.

The tomato plants were spilling over their wire cages, heavy ripe fruit bedecking their leafy sprawl. Peas were ready to pick, as was an abundance of lettuce, eggplants, cucumbers, and zucchini.

Lucy emerged, barefoot, robed, and toweling her hair. “Oh, I’m sorry—did I scare you?” she asked.

Dabbing ineffectually at his coffee-soaked shirt, Edward said, “Just clumsy, I guess.” He set his empty cup and saucer down noisily on the porch rail. Then his eyes caught on what was nailed above the back door.

Lucy followed his gaze. “It’s a sprig of touch-leaf,” she explained. “Saint John’s wort. Aren’t all those golden flowers beautiful?”

“Beautiful, yeah, they are. I guess. Why’s it there?”

“To guard against thunder, lightning, and fire. There’s a spray over the front door, too.”

Lucy regarded her husband as if waiting for him to inquire further, or contest what she had said. Edward didn’t bite. He was just waiting for what came next. Something had to come next. It was in Lucy’s eyes. They were floating in that same opalescent light as on the day the two of them had consecrated the miraculous garden.

“Saint John’s Eve is just a few days away, you know. Midsummer Night. It’s an important day for the Grange. There’ll be a lot going on. Do you think you might come?”

“I—I’ll see. Listen, I’ve got to be going now. A lot of research to finish—”

Lucy kissed him chastely good-bye. “If you call, I might be out. There’s a red tide on the coast, and we’re helping the local Grange there deal with it.”

“I see,” said Edward.

The car radio confirmed that one of the nuisance-making algal blooms had just been spotted that morning. Edward didn’t give it a snowball’s chance in hell of lasting more than a day.

Edward had run into a dead end investigating the Grange itself. Nowhere were the more arcane practices he suspected them of described in detail. He was forced to turn to anthropological and mythological works, notably Graves’s
The Greek Myths
, Frazer’s
Golden Bough
, and Campbell’s
World Mythology
.

In the Frazer, he found that the ceremony he and Lucy had participated in was old, old, old, as old as agriculture itself. Fucking in a field, by couple or community, to ensure fertility, was a ritual found from Central America to New Guinea to Central Africa to the Ukraine. Edward could now personally testify to its efficacy.

There were a hundred, a thousand other bizarre and not-so-bizarre practices connected with raising crops. An activity so central to civilization could not have failed to accumulate myriad superstitions over the millennia, contributions from every ethnic and racial group known to history. Druids, Gauls, Bantu, Aztecs, Greeks, Romans, Seminoles, Apache—Edward wallowed in the descriptions till his head reeled. Intercourse with trees, beating recalcitrant crops, supplicating the rain and sun, chastising the moon, sacrificing animals and humans—

Which of these did the Grange practice?

Sacrifice?

Human sacrifice?

Yes, Edward was suddenly convinced. He was the intended victim for the Saint John’s Eve festivities. Coinciding with the summer solstice, after which the days began to shorten and vegetation implicitly to die, the archaic holiday was marked with propitiations to distant winter. In Russia, a straw figure was drowned in a stream. The Druids burned their sacrificial king in the Midsummer bonfires. This was why Lucy had been fattening him up, like some hapless Hansel. Oh Lord, what was he going to do?

Almost blinded by tears of fear and disappointment at the treachery of his wife, Edward continued to flip uselessly through the pages of the book before him. A phrase leaped out at him: … known as
soleil lune
.

He backtracked.

A large, round cake was baked from the summer’s first harvest of grain and consecrated to the Sun and the Moon, twin tutelar deities of husbandry, by whose radiant beneficence the crops ripened, and by whose phases propitious times for sowing and reaping were determined. This cake was ritually broken and shared among the community. Known as
soleil lune
in France, this symbolic body of Ceres was, due to misunderstanding of the original phrase, called Sally Lunn in England.…

* * *

The flames soared high. Edward could see them from across the field in the night. A circle of leaping bonfires, they ringed a small wooded hill. The air was thick with their smoke, and with the richness of the Midsummer vegetation.

Lucy handled the jouncing car well on the rutted dirt road. She whistled as she drove. Edward, slumped miserably in his seat, thought he recognized again “John Barleycorn Must Die.”

In the end, he had agreed to accompany Lucy to the Grange’s ceremony. What else could he do? If Lucy wanted to get rid of him, then there was no reason for him to go on living. He had never quite realized what she meant to him until now. Only her apparent abandonment of him as a sacrifice to her new religion had showed Edward the depths of his ties to her. She had been everything that had supported him in his work, his bastion during hard times, his joy during good. If their life together was at an end, he’d at least be loyal to her up to the ultimate moment, for all they had shared, even if she had betrayed him.

The car came to a stop amidst others, the same old models that had been parked outside the Grange hall. The early arrivals, Edward saw, were standing near the fires, lit with gold, partly shadowed.

Lucy levered open her door and stepped nimbly to the sweet-smelling, trodden hay grass. Edward dragged himself out of the car.

“Are you O.K., dear? Are you sure you want to be here tonight?”

Edward nodded dumbly. How could she be so appallingly blithe at his imminent demise?

They walked toward the crowd. Sally Lunn was not visible. The other six elderly officers separated themselves and approached. They were wearing their sashes and nothing else, their old carcasses somehow not pitiful or funny, but immensely dignified and potent. They carried archaic flails and scythes.

“Is your husband ready?” one asked. Edward thought he recognized Roger Swain, the Presbyter.

“Yes.”

“We will escort him. You must remain behind.” Swain took Edward by the elbow. The six officers and Edward began to walk uphill.

Looking up as he ascended, Edward stared full into the beaming face of the moon. Where had it come from? A moment ago it had been nowhere in sight.… He stumbled, and was forced to drop his gaze. When he looked up again, there were only innumerable stars.

By the time he reached the top, he was winded, more from fear than physical exertion. Under the dark trees, away from the flames, he could hardly see. They stopped to let his eyes adjust. Edward thought he saw an open work structure, like a giant wicker beehive. They moved toward it.

The structure was an airy hut woven of willow withes. Sally Lunn sat cross-legged inside it, clothed in a robe. Edward could feel her presence from six feet away.

“Happy Saint John’s Eve, Edward. We’re glad you could make it.”

The other officers had faded respectfully back and left him alone with Sally Lunn.

Edward collapsed nervelessly to the earth. He thought he could hear the gentle purling of a stream or spring nearby.

“Do you know who I am now?” asked Sally Lunn.

Edward shook his head no.

“I think you do. I am the Sun and the Moon and the Earth. I am Ceres and Gaea and Demeter, Persephone and Hecate. I am the force that through the green fuse drives the flower. I am burgeoning and fecundity, blossom and fruit. Do you acknowledge this?”

Edward’s lips were very dry. “Yes,” he whispered.

“Do you know why you are here tonight?”

“Not really. But I can guess.”

“It’s because of your wife.”

“I know that much—”

“Quiet. You know nothing. Your wife is a very important person. Look at me. This body I inhabit is one of a few special ones, receptive to me. I come into it only from time to time. I am immortal. But although I can lend it a few years, this body is not immortal. In fact, it will soon go to feed the soil. This chapter of the Grange will be without their Sally Lunn. The important work they do would falter without guidance. But your wife—”