Page 47 of Where the Fields Don’t Reach

“I can’t go revealing my secrets, Mr. Cox.” Hadley stepped past him into the front hall. Coffee and fried bacon hung heavy in the warm air, a stove-fire smell underneath it. He’d eaten already, most likely, but she doubted he’d turn down something sweet. “I heard you’re a sucker for a bear claw.”

“You heard right.” Martin nudged the door shut with his heel and tipped his head down the hall. “Keep on toward the kitchen. Whatever you’re after, hauling pastries out here at this hour, it must be important.”

The kitchen sat at the rear of the house, a low-ceilinged room worn soft by decades of use. Yellowed lace curtains framed a window that looked out over the dark shapes of the fields, and the linoleum had gone thin and pale in a track between the stove and the table where a thousand meals had walked it down.

Sarah’s touches were still everywhere.

The embroidered towels over the oven handle, the decorative plates ranked on a wall rack, the suncatchers stuck to the glass. A man could live in a dead woman’s kitchen a long time and not change a thing.

Hadley pulled out a chair set diagonal from the one that had to be his, the seat cushion flattened to the shape of him. She made herself comfortable. Martin slid the bakery box to the center of the table before he lowered himself down, slow and easy, the way a body moved when the mornings had started costing it something. He drew a napkin from the holder and laid it in front of her without a word. Hadley reached past it for the second cup in the tray.

“The dark roast is yours. I didn’t know how you take it, so there’s cream and sugar in the bag.”

“Black’s fine. Always has been.” Martin lifted the lid off the box, and he didn’t waste a second deciding. He went straight for the bear claw, and one bite had his eyes falling shut. “Lord, that’s fresh. Ask me anything.”

“I’m not even sure this is important, Mr. Cox.” Hadley wrapped both hands around the warm sleeve, the heat of it seeping into her palms. “But I expect you’ve heard about the professor who died over at the community college a couple of days back.”

“You mean that Mercer fella.” Martin took another bite, chewed, then washed it down with a swallow of coffee. He then took his time wiping his mouth. “I heard about it. Tragic thing. That man was obsessed with the Threshing Man, you know. Used to drive out to Whistlerun near every week in the summers, back when he’d come up from that college down in Mississippi. Before all his trouble down there. Sat right there in my kitchen more than once with a little recorder running on the table.”

“That’s part of why I’m here.” Hadley shifted in the chair, weighing how he’d take the turn she was about to make. “I was hoping to ask about Sarah. About what she might have shared with Roland Mercer concerning the Threshing Man.”

The deep lines of Martin’s face loosened at his wife’s name.

“My Sarah had a hundred of those old stories.” He took another sip of coffee now that the sugar craving had eased. “Excited as a girl, she was, that Roland wanted to hear them. She’d talk, he’d scribble, and I’d go on about my day and let the two of them at it.”

“There’s one in particular I’m hoping you might remember.” Hadley chose her words with care, wary of anything that might set tongues moving once she left. “Roland made a note about a sacrifice, but he never wrote out the rest of it. Not the ordinary kind, either. Something about the Threshing Man becoming a guardian on account of that sacrifice.”

Martin had been eyeing the other half of the bear claw. His hand stopped short of it. He drew it back upon hearing her request. Eventually, he eased against the chairback until the old wood groaned beneath him.

“I recall that one.” Martin continued to study her, but she never wavered in her gaze. “Goes against the usual stories that make the rounds.”

“Mr. Cox, I know I promised to keep Sarah’s journals safe last year. And I know some of them were with Reed the night he…”

Hadley’s throat closed around the rest of her words. Martin reached across the corner of the table and gently patted her forearm, the gesture stiff at the joints and a bit awkward.

“Nobody expected Reed to go out the way he did, dear. Nobody.” Martin drew his hand back to his coffee. “And I got some of those journals home again, the ones he didn’t have on him. That’s plenty. As for the story, do you want it the way Sarah told it, or the tidy version?”

“The way Sarah told it.”

Martin nodded once, the only right answer as far as he was concerned.

“Way back, when this was all Vinton land, the first ground they ever broke was the east fields. First to be cleared, first to be planted. And that first year, the story goes, the corn came up wrong. Withered on the stalk before it was knee-high. Wouldn’t feed a soul.” Martin’s voice dropped into a comfortable cadence, the words worn smooth from a hundred tellings in this same room. “Folks were starving by the second winter. And there was an old woman among them, older than anybody could rightly account for, who said the ground had been taken without asking. That the thing living under it wanted paying. Wanted a bride.”

A sliver of cold worked its way up the back of Hadley’s neck. She kept her hands still around the cup, not wanting him to stop.

“So, they sent a girl out into the east field. Young, unmarried. They dressed her fine and put a bag in her hands, coins and rings and every scrap of gold the settlement could scrape together, everything of worth they had between them. A dowry, you’d call it.” Martin’s gaze had drifted off her to the black window and the fields beyond it. “They sent her walking into the corn at dusk to be a wife to whatever waited inside. To pay it what it was owed. And come morning, the girl was gone. The bag was gone. But the corn?”

Martin tapped the table once with a thick finger, and his focus came back to Hadley all at once.

“The corn came in golden the next season. Fed the whole county through the winter, and every winter after, long as the Vintons held that ground.”

“Are you saying that was the first story ever told about the Threshing Man?”

“Oldest one I know of.” Martin took another sip of his coffee, as if his throat was dry from talking so long. “Back then, the Threshing Man wasn’t the thing that called young women out into the corn. The way Sarah’s people told it, once the town gave him the girl, once the debt was paid, he kept his end. Guarded the fields. Kept the harvest golden and the county fed, and he only ever took from the ones who broke faith. Went where they shouldn’t. Owed and didn’t settle.”

Martin turned the empty cup a slow quarter turn against the table.

“That’s the version that Mercer fella loved best. The Threshing Man as a guardian. Not some evil thing out there to fear.”