Harvest Georgina Harding (the gingerbread man read aloud .TXT) 📖

needed the two tractors to pull it out. It was a waste of precious dry time. They pulled it out, and got going, and had just managed to finish the field they were on and set up on the next one before a fine rain came spitting down from the sky, at first no more than pinpricks of cool out of the sultry air. They went for the headland, trusting to their luck. Once the headland was done, the field cut all around its circumference, there would at least be room for the wind to enter and dry out the heart of the crop. They worked without pause. They could see that it was worse for others. In the sky to the south they could see the darker grey spill of a heavy shower elsewhere. They kept going as long as they could, until the rain was measurable and the stalks too damp. The next day they held off, and the next one they went out again, and it continued on like that through towards the end of August. They worked in snatches, going for what crop they could take. What was left in the fields flattened further with each storm and grew dark with the wet.

They were in the kitchen having breakfast when Richard came in.

Here, look at this. Richard placed a head of wheat in her hand. Among the grains was what appeared to be another grain, only black and elongated and misshapen, like a dried mouse dropping but attached to the stalk.

What is it?

It’s ergot.

It looks evil, she said.

Nothing evil. Just a fungus.

What does it mean?

It means, I’ll have trouble selling the wheat. It’s a bugger, that’s all.

Let me see, said Jonathan.

This, too, he could not bear about farming, the way that a problem could strike, quite out of your control. His brother had come in and made the air in the kitchen heavy with this problem that was in no way of his own making.

Can you do anything about it? he asked.

Stupid question. Richard just threw him a look.

All the same, even at a time like this, there was something he envied. There was something so solid, real, about Richard and his work. Where Richard was concerned, when things went wrong his failures took material form, even when they were so small as an infected grain.

What was a photograph beside that? Only a notion. A stain on light-sensitive paper. Give it too much light and it disappears. And a photographer, making a living as some artsy photographer; that seemed fantasy. Childish, in this world of men.

Even his brother’s physical presence seemed more real and purposeful than his own, his tall figure that dominated the room and made the women look at him. If he were to take a photograph of that, it would show: the domestic scene, the big handsome man entering from the outside, in motion, his fair hair caught in the shaft of light into which he walked, the seated women looking up; a second man, smaller, dark, seated away towards the edge of the frame, no more than an observer.

Richard pulled back a chair and took up the mug of tea his mother offered. He wasn’t going to waste words. He had told them all that it was necessary to tell. The frustration of this moment and of all this harvest was there in his face and in the scrape of the chair. Kumiko examined the infected grain a moment more and then put the head of wheat down, fastidiously, on the cloth beside her plate.

He felt a sudden regret that he had brought her here, into his past, perhaps that he had come back at all. You would have thought that some years away would have changed things; that their relative positions would have altered when he returned. But here he was again, holding back, watching. Not their fault, but his own. No one had made him sit in this particular chair but he was sitting in the same chair where he had always sat, on the far side of the table, closest to the window. So often he had turned the chair just a little when he sat here, leant his elbow on the table and looked out through the window instead of into the room.

And he was doing that now, looking out at the familiar view, the cobbles, a portion of the yard beyond which the new barns weren’t visible, the old stables, the cars parked there – it was the cars that changed more than anything, that would have fixed the date to any picture or memory of that view – hearing his mother saying with a touch of brightness, Just sit down a minute, exactly as he must have heard her say it a thousand times before. I’m sure it’s not all lost. I’m sure it won’t be that bad, just wait, sit down, I’ll pour you a cup of tea.

His mother knew as well as he did that if Richard was angry, he had to act. Do something. Take the anger and use it to fuel some other action. That was what he had always done. Don’t think about it any more, just do something. Go outside. Get on your bike. Climb a tree. Throw a stone. Break pots. Smash your mother’s greenhouse. They did that once when something was wrong. Richard’s idea – not that it was ever spoken, but only done. Richard had led him there and begun it. He didn’t even know if Richard had thought the thought before the first pot hit the ground. And he had followed because he did. Because he too understood what was wrong and because smashing things seemed to right it, the sound, the shattering terracotta, the spilled black soil.

This problem was nothing compared with that other one. This was a material problem from Richard’s material world. And not so very terrible, when it came down to it. Action was simple. You scraped