Where the Wheat Bent Low II

A Tiny WLW Novella in Jane’s Own Hand VI . The Bed I Had Made Too Narrow That night we went inside separately, as if the farm animals might gossip, though the cow had witnessed worse manners than love and the rooster, being a fool, had gone to sleep believing himself responsible for sunset. Elise washed the supper bowls while I banked the stove, and we spoke of ordinary things with unbearable care. “The beans will need picking tomorrow,” I said. “Yes.” “And the north fence must be checked.” “Yes.” “And I should take oats to the mill before Friday.” “Yes.” “You are agreeing too much.” “I am trying not to say that I can still feel your mouth on mine.” I dropped the stove iron. It struck the hearth with such a clang that the dog barked from the porch. Elise covered her mouth, but not before I saw her smile. “That was unkind,” I said. “I know.” “You are not as shy as you pretend.” “I am shy about many things.” “And not about that?” She set the bowl down and looked at me across the kitchen. “Not anymore.” The house seemed smaller than it had that morning, every wall drawn close around the knowledge of us. At the foot of the stairs she stopped. “My room is that way,” she said, nodding toward the little room off the kitchen. “Yes.” “Your room is upstairs.” “Yes.” “Do you want me to go to my room?” There are questions that open beneath a person like a well. I held the lamp between us, and its light trembled because my hand did. “I want many things,” I said. “But I want you safe more than I want any of them.” “I am safe.” “For tonight, yes.” “With you,” she said. “I am safe with you.” “Elise—” “I am not asking because I am afraid to sleep alone. I have been afraid before; this is not that.” She came one step closer. “I am asking because I want to wake beside you and know where I am.” I could hear the rainwater dripping from the eaves outside, slow and steady. “My bed is narrow,” I said, because my courage was apparently a crooked little creature that approached joy through practical objections. “Then we must be careful not to fall out.” “I snore when I am tired.” “I doubt it.” “I do.” “Then I will endure tragedy.” “I have only one good pillow.” “I am willing to negotiate.” “Elise.” Her face softened. “Yes, Jane?” I set the lamp on the stair post. “I have wanted you in that room since the first night you said my name from the other side of the door.” Her expression changed, wonder and desire and sorrow passing through it all together. “Why did you never say?” “Because wanting is not the same as being owed.” She reached for my hand. “No,” she said. “But being loved is not the same as being trapped.” I could not speak after that. We climbed the stairs together. My room looked strange to me when we entered, as though I had never seen it before: the iron bed, the quilt my mother made, the washstand, the little window facing the orchard, the chair where I folded tomorrow’s dress, the plain white walls that had listened to years of my silence and now seemed almost embarrassed to witness happiness. Elise stood by the bed and touched the quilt. “It is beautiful.” “It is old.” “So are stars.” “You are determined to make me foolish.” “No,” she said. “I think you were foolish before I arrived.” I laughed, and then she was in my arms, laughing too, and the laughter turned soft, and the softness turned to kissing, and the kissing became a language with no need to hurry. Later, when the lamp was blown out and the room lay blue with moonlight, she rested beside me in the narrow bed as if she had always known its shape, her head on my one good pillow and my arm beneath her shoulders, our feet tangled under the quilt. I had thought sharing a bed would make me think of sin, or fear, or consequence. Instead I thought of warmth. Her breath touched my collarbone. Her hand rested over my heart. Outside, the fields moved in the night wind, and I knew the wheat would bend and rise, bend and rise, as living things must. “Elise?” I whispered. “Yes?” “Are you awake?” “No.” I smiled into the dark. “Liar.” “Yes.” “Are you sorry?” She lifted her head. Even in the dimness I could see her eyes. “No,” she said. “Are you?” “No.” “Are you afraid?” “Yes.” She kissed my shoulder. “So am I.” I held her closer. “We will be afraid in the morning too,” I said. “But there will be coffee.” “I like coffee.” “You hated it yesterday.” “I have changed.” “That was quick.” “I am becoming a farm woman. We are hardy.” I laughed so quietly it hardly made a sound. After a while she said, “Jane?” “Yes?” “If I have no house, no money, no family that wants me free, no name that is safe to use—” “You have a name.” “It may bring trouble.” “Then we will answer trouble with a shotgun and bad manners.” She laughed against me, then grew quiet. “If I have nothing,” she began again, “what am I to you?” I looked toward the window, where the orchard branches crossed the moon. “You are Elise,” I said. “You are the woman who insulted my cat, failed at butter, remembered herself in pieces, kissed me in my barn, and stole my only good pillow.” “I will give the pillow back.” “No. I am making a larger point.” “Go on, then.” “You are not nothing.” Her hand tightened on me. “And if I stay?” The question was so small I almost missed the fear inside it. I turned toward her. “Then tomorrow we move your shawl from the peg by the door to the peg beside mine.” “That is all?” “That is how farms begin a marriage with themselves.” Her breath caught. “Jane.” “And we put your cup on the shelf, not the table, because things on tables can be moved away.” “Jane.” “And when we plant the late beans, you choose the rows, and when the cow kicks the pail, you may curse properly, and when letters come, if letters come, we read them together, and if men come asking, we answer together, and if law comes, we learn law, and if fear comes—” “When fear comes,” she whispered. “When fear comes, we do not let it sleep between us.” She touched my face in the dark. “And the farm?” “The farm?” “Whose farm is it?” I swallowed, and all the years of saying my farm, my house, my field, my work, my loneliness rose in me and passed, not gone exactly, but no longer sovereign. “Ours,” I said. She kissed me then, not as a question, not as rescue, not as gratitude, but as a promise made in the dark by a woman who had run through rain and terror and woken in wheat to find, impossibly, a home. By morning, she had taken most of the quilt. By morning, my arm was numb. By morning, the rooster was screaming nonsense beneath the window. By morning, Elise Harrow opened her eyes in my bed, in my house, on our farm, and smiled as if the sun had risen because she had permitted it. “Good morning,” she said. I brushed hair from her cheek. “Good morning.” “Do we have work?” “Endless.” “Good.” “Good?” She stretched, winced a little, then settled closer. “If there is endless work,” she said, “then I have endless reasons to stay.” And because I had no answer large enough for that, I kissed her forehead, and we lay there a moment longer, while the day gathered itself around us and the wheat outside bent low in the wind, not broken, only bowing, only shining, only waiting to be touched by light. VII. The First Morning After I had imagined, in the private chambers of my cowardice, that joy would arrive like a storm, breaking windows, lifting roofs, making an honest ruin of every careful thing I had built to survive without it, but joy, when it came, wore Elise’s borrowed stockings and stood in my kitchen burning porridge. “I followed your instructions,” she said, looking down into the pot with grave accusation. “You did not.” “I did.” “You stirred once and then became distracted by the dog.” “He looked melancholy.” “He always looks melancholy. He is hoping pity will become bacon.” Elise glanced at the dog, who had arranged himself tragically near the stove. “Is that true?” His tail thumped once. “See?” I said. “A scoundrel.” She turned back to the pot. “The porridge has become architectural.” I peered in. “So it has.” “Can we eat it?” “With a chisel.” She bit her lip, trying not to laugh, and the sight of her there, hair loose down her back, morning light on her cheek, standing barefoot in my kitchen as though the floor had been waiting for the shape of her feet, made me ache in a way that had nothing to do with sorrow. “What?” she asked. “Nothing.” “That is not a nothing face.” “I have a nothing face?” “You have several faces. There is the fence face, the weather face, the I-am-not-lonely face, the Jane-is-about-to-say-something-kind-and-pretend-it-is-practical face—” “I regret teaching you confidence.” “You did not teach it. You watered it.” The words quieted us both. Then she crossed the kitchen, leaving the ruined porridge to its own conscience, and took my hands. “I am still here,” she said. “I see that.” “You look as if you expected me to vanish.” “I have some experience with empty rooms.” “I am not a room.” “No,” I said. “You are much harder to sweep.” She smiled, but her eyes were serious. “I woke once before dawn,” she said, “and I did not know where I was, and for a moment I was frightened, and then I heard you breathing, and I remembered.” “What did you remember?” “That I had chosen.” I looked down at our hands. “And this morning?” I asked. “This morning I choose again.” Outside, the rooster began his second sermon of the day. I drew Elise into my arms there in the kitchen, and she came without hesitation, fitting against me with a sigh that seemed to loosen the very boards beneath our feet. We stood beside the burned porridge, and the dog leaned his heavy body against our legs, and the kettle trembled toward boiling, and I thought that perhaps this was what a life was made of, not grand declarations or rescue or even kisses in barns, but one woman choosing another while breakfast failed and animals complained and the work waited without mercy. “We should eat,” I murmured into her hair. “We should.” “We should fix the north fence.” “Yes.” “We should discuss whether your legal husband, possible fiancé, or confirmed villain will come looking.” She stiffened. I kissed her temple. “Not now,” I said. “Not before coffee.” She laughed weakly. “Is that a rule?” “It is the first rule of this house.” “What is the second?” “No one apologizes for taking up space.” Her arms tightened around me. “And the third?” I thought about it. “The third is that if you burn breakfast, you must help scrape the pot.” “That seems fair.” “It is a stern but loving government.” She lifted her face. “Jane?” “Yes?” “May I kiss the head of government?” “Only for diplomatic reasons.” “Entirely diplomatic,” she whispered. She kissed me while the kettle boiled over. VIII. The Letter That Came Too Soon The letter came three days later, carried by a boy from town who would not meet my eyes and who handed it over as if paper might bite. “For Miss Elise Harrow,” he said. Elise was in the bean rows when he came, sleeves rolled, bonnet crooked, hands dirty, laughing at something I had said about the cow’s moral failings. At the sound of her full name, she turned, and the laughter left her so quickly it seemed never to have belonged to her. I took the letter. “Who gave you this?” “A man at the inn.” “What man?” “A gentleman.” “That is not an answer.” The boy swallowed. “He had a black coat. Silver-headed cane. He said there’d be another coin if I brought back word whether she was here.” Elise had gone white. I stepped between her and the boy before I knew I meant to. “You will take no word back.” “But he said—” “I do not care if he said he was King Solomon with a bag of gold. You will go home.” The boy looked from me to Elise and back again, then nodded. “Yes, ma’am.” “And if the gentleman asks?” “You weren’t here.” “No. Lies are delicate instruments, and you are too young to handle them.” I reached into my apron pocket and gave him a coin of my own. “You will say you delivered the letter and found no answer.” His eyes widened. “Yes, ma’am.” When he ran off down the lane, Elise remained in the beans, one hand at her throat. “Open it,” she said. “It is addressed to you.” “I cannot.” I went to her and held it out. “You do not have to read it alone.” Her fingers shook when she broke the seal. The letter was brief. Victor Bell wrote as if affection were a legal notice. He called her dear Elise, though there was no dearness in the strokes of his pen. He said she had caused distress. He said her uncle was unwell from worry. He said rash behavior could be forgiven if corrected quickly. He said he had secured proof of their engagement, and that a woman who fled protection invited scandal upon herself. At the end he wrote, I will come for you before the week is out. Elise did not cry. I wished she had. Instead she folded the letter very carefully along its original creases. “There,” she said. Her voice had gone far away. “Elise.” “I knew he would.” “We do not know what power he has.” “He has money.” “That is not the same as power.” “It often purchases it.” “Yes,” I said. “But not all of it.” She looked at me then, and there was something wild in her eyes. “You do not understand. Men like Victor do not need to own the truth if they can afford witnesses.” “Then we find our own.” “Who?” I had no answer. The farm, which had seemed large enough to shelter us from the world, shrank in that moment to a house, a barn, a few fields, and two women standing in bean rows with law and violence on the road. Elise touched my cheek. “I should go.” “No.” “If I go now, he may follow me away from you.” “No.” “Jane—” “No,” I said, and I heard the old loneliness in my voice, not pleading this time but standing like stone. “You do not run alone again.” She closed her eyes. “If he hurts you because of me—” “If he hurts me, it will be because of him.” “He will say I am promised.” “Are you?” “No.” “Then let him say it to the pigs.” Despite herself, she gave a cracked laugh. “I am serious,” I said. “I know. That is what makes you impossible.” “We will go to town tomorrow. We will speak to Mr. Ansel, who drew up my father’s deed. He is old, nosy, and hates men who wave papers without letting him read them.” “Will he help?” “He once argued with a tax collector for three hours over a fence line no one cared about. I believe he has been waiting for a nobler cause.” Elise looked toward the road. “I am afraid.” “So am I.” “Say the rule.” “What rule?” “The one about fear.” I took her hand, though dirt covered both of us. “When fear comes,” I said, “we do not let it sleep between us.” She nodded, then pressed the folded letter into my palm. “Then burn it.” “Elise?” “I have read it. I know what it says. I do not want his words in our house.” Our house. I carried the letter to the kitchen stove while she followed, and together we watched Victor Bell’s fine black handwriting curl, blacken, and vanish into ash. IX. The Man at the Gate Victor Bell arrived on Friday in a black carriage that looked absurd on my rutted lane, too polished for mud, too proud for dust, and behind it rode Elise’s uncle, Mr. Harrow, a narrow man with a narrow beard and eyes that seemed to measure every object by what price it might bring at auction. I was splitting kindling when they came. Elise was inside. The axe was in my hand. This, I thought, was convenient. Victor stepped down first. He was handsome in the manner of knives, bright and well-made and meant to cut. His coat fit him beautifully. His boots had never met honest work. His smile arrived before the rest of his face. “Miss Calder?” he called. I set another piece of wood upright. “Mrs. Calder.” His smile twitched. “My apologies. I understood you were widowed.” “I am not.” “Married, then?” “No.” He waited. I split the wood clean through. “Mrs. is what people call me when they want supper, directions, or forgiveness,” I said. “You may call me Jane if you behave, and Mrs. Calder if you do not.” Behind him, Mr. Harrow made a disgusted sound. Victor glanced toward the house. “I believe you are sheltering a young woman who is under my protection.” “I shelter my beans under netting and my hens from foxes. Women make their own arrangements.” “Charming.” “No.” “I beg your pardon?” “You mistook me. I am not charming.” The front door opened. Elise stepped onto the porch. She wore my sister’s brown dress, her hair braided simply, her face pale but lifted. She had wanted to stand beside me from the start; I had wanted to lock her in the pantry until the carriage left; neither of us had won entirely, which was perhaps the beginning of partnership. Victor’s expression changed when he saw her. Possession is not love, but it can imitate longing well enough to fool the careless. “Elise,” he said, softly. “Thank God.” She gripped the porch rail. “Do not use God as decoration, Mr. Bell.” I loved her so much in that moment I nearly laughed. His face hardened, then smoothed. “You have been ill.” “Yes.” “You struck your head. You are confused.” “I am less confused than I was.” “Then you understand how foolish this has become.” “I understand more than you hoped.” Mr. Harrow pushed forward. “Elise, enough of this disgrace. Come down at once.” She flinched. I saw it. Victor saw it. Worst of all, Elise knew we had seen it. Then she straightened. “No.” Her uncle’s face darkened. “No?” “No,” she repeated. “It is a small word. I am surprised you are unfamiliar with it, as I said it often enough.” Victor’s cane tapped once in the dirt. “You are overwrought. Miss Calder has clearly influenced you.” “Mrs. Calder,” I said. He ignored me. “Elise, I have the signed agreement.” “Then you have my uncle’s signature, not mine.” “You were aware of the arrangement.” “I was aware that men in my father’s library discussed selling me while pretending concern for my future.” Mr. Harrow snapped, “You ungrateful girl.” Elise descended one porch step. “I was grateful when gratitude was deserved.” Victor looked at me then, and the polish dropped from his voice. “You have no idea what you are involving yourself in.” “I rarely do,” I said. “Yet here we are.” “This woman is promised to me.” “She says she is not.” “She is confused.” “She sounds clear.” “She is vulnerable.” “Yes,” I said. “That is why I am standing here with an axe.” Silence moved through the yard. The dog, sensing either danger or theatrical opportunity, began to growl from under the porch. Victor’s eyes flicked to the axe, then back to my face. “You threaten me?” “No. I am holding a tool on my own land.” “You cannot keep her.” At that Elise came down the last step and stood beside me. “No,” she said. “She cannot keep me.” Something like triumph flashed in Victor’s face. Then Elise took my free hand. “I am staying.” The triumph vanished. “Elise,” her uncle hissed, “think what people will say.” She looked at him for a long moment. “I have thought of little else all my life,” she said. “It has brought me no happiness.” “You will be ruined.” “Then I choose my ruin.” Victor’s voice dropped. “You do not know what you are saying.” Elise’s hand trembled in mine, but she did not let go. “I know exactly what I am saying.” I heard wheels on the lane then, and turned to see another buggy approaching, slow and crooked, driven by old Mr. Ansel, whose beard was white, whose hat was older than charity, and whose dislike of hurried legal claims had indeed found its noble cause. He climbed down with a leather folder under one arm. “Am I late?” he asked. “No,” I said. “You are irritatingly on time.” “Good. I despise being useful before noon.” Victor frowned. “Who are you?” “An attorney when paid, a nuisance when inspired.” Mr. Ansel opened his folder. “Miss Harrow, you are of age?” “Yes.” “You signed no marriage contract?” “No.” “You signed no transfer of property, guardianship, or consent of engagement?” “No.” “Excellent. Mr. Bell, Mr. Harrow, unless you possess a document bearing this woman’s willing signature, witnessed and dated, you possess ambition, not law.” Victor’s face went red. Mr. Harrow began to sputter. Mr. Ansel lifted one finger. “I enjoy sputtering only after lunch.” “This is outrageous,” Victor said. “Yes,” Elise said. “It was.” He looked at her. For one frightening moment I thought he might lunge for her, and my hand tightened on the axe. But cowards, when watched by law and dogs and women with tools, often remember other appointments. “This is not finished,” he said. “No,” Elise replied. “But I am.” He stepped back as if she had struck him. The carriage left with more speed than dignity, throwing mud behind it, and Mr. Harrow, after one last poisonous look, followed. When they were gone, Elise stood very still. Then the axe slipped from my hand and landed in the dirt. She turned toward me, and I caught her just as her knees gave way, and we sank together beside the woodpile while Mr. Ansel politely pretended to admire the clouds. “I said no,” she whispered. “You did.” “I said no and the sky did not fall.” “No.” She began to laugh then, and cry, and shake, all at once. I held her tightly. “The sky,” I said, looking upward, “knows better than to misbehave on my farm.” X. What We Planted By autumn, Elise could milk the cow without insult, bake bread without apology, and curse with a fluency that would have shocked the woman I found in the wheat, though not, I think, displeased her. Victor did not return. Her uncle wrote once, declaring her dead to the family, and Elise read the letter twice, folded it neatly, and used it to light the stove. “I am becoming fond of burning correspondence,” she said. “It is one of the quiet arts.” Mr. Ansel helped her recover a small portion of her father’s money, not enough to make us grand, which suited us, but enough to mend the barn roof, buy a second good pillow, and replace the cow after ours died of old age and suspicion. We planted late beans. We planted apple saplings. We planted lavender by the porch because Elise liked the smell and because I liked watching her kneel in the dirt with sun on the back of her neck. Sometimes she still woke afraid. Sometimes I still feared that happiness, being unfamiliar, might prove temporary. Sometimes people in town looked too long at our joined errands, our shared account, the way Elise touched my sleeve when she wanted my attention, the way I carried parcels for her though she was perfectly capable of carrying them herself. Let them look. A life cannot be built around other people’s eyes. One evening, near the end of harvest, we walked the southern field where I had found her. The wheat had been cut weeks before, and the stubble shone gold under the lowering sun. Elise stood in the place where the stalks had bent around her body and said nothing for a long time. I waited. I had learned that love is sometimes speech and sometimes silence, and wisdom lies in knowing which gift is wanted. “At first,” she said, “I thought this was where my life ended.” I took her hand. “And now?” She looked toward the house, where smoke rose from the chimney and the dog slept in the yard and the rooster’s descendant, equally vain and even louder, strutted near the fence. “Now I think it is where I was returned to myself.” The wind moved over the field. I wanted to say something fine, something worthy of the moment, but I was still Jane Calder, farmer, widow of no man, wife by no church, beloved by a woman who had chosen me in daylight, and all I had was the truth. “I was so lonely before you,” I said. She turned to me. “I know.” “I had made a virtue of it.” “I know.” “I do not want to be virtuous that way again.” She smiled and touched my cheek. “Then don’t.” So I did not. I kissed her there in the field, not like the first kiss in the barn with fear around us, and not like the kisses in our narrow bed with darkness keeping watch, but openly, beneath a sky wide enough to hold all that had happened and all that might yet come. When we parted, she rested her forehead against mine. “Jane?” “Yes?” “Do you remember the first thing you said to me?” “I believe I accused you of sleeping in my wheat.” “You told me I lived here that day.” “So I did.” “How did you know?” I looked at the farmhouse, the barn, the field, the road that had brought terror and taken it away again, the porch where her shawl hung beside mine, the kitchen where her cup sat on the shelf, the bedroom where two good pillows now lay side by side. “I did not know,” I said. “I hoped.” She kissed me once more. “Then keep hoping.” And I have. I hope when rain comes hard from the west and Elise takes my hand before thunder can frighten her. I hope when winter seals us in and we read by lamplight with our feet tangled beneath the quilt. I hope when spring breaks open and the first green spears rise through the dark soil. I hope when she laughs in the yard, when she sings badly to the cow, when she burns porridge, when she corrects my accounts, when she says my name from another room and I answer because I am no longer speaking only to myself. I hope as I write this. Elise is outside now, arguing with the hens as if reason might yet enter them, and the evening light is touching everything gently, the fields, the porch, the barn roof, the window glass, my hands, this page. Once, I believed the farm was mine because I alone remained to work it. Then a woman slept wounded in my wheat, and the wheat bent low around her, and I learned that land, like the heart, may be owned in solitude but is only made holy by welcome. She is calling me now. “Jane!” I must go. There is endless work, and endless reason to stay. A Story by Germaine Corbeau - Click here for links to all Germaine Corbeau Stories! Quick 👏 Guide: 0 = I got lost! - 1-4 = Nice font... nice images. - 5-9=Read a bit. Nice try!, 10-14=Okay... Pretty good!, 15-19=I actually enjoyed this! - 20=Absolutely legendary!