My tables—meet it is I set it down—
That one may smile and smile, and be a villain.
—Hamlet, William Shakespeare (pre-Crossing Angl.)
In her more selfish moments, Katie wished only for the harvest to be over. She hated the farm, the smell of manure, the backbreaking work of picking vegetables only to reap the reward of food that would simply be eaten. She hated manual labor. Sometimes she wished that the fields would catch on fire.
She was not alone. She seemed to hear complaints all around her, more than she had ever heard before, and most of it was directed toward the people at the top of the hill: those too old or sick to work, or parents with children too small to be left. These people were always excused from the harvest, but this year such exemptions were causing more ill feeling than usual.
Maybe Row’s right, she thought, late one afternoon, when her back was screaming and her hands blistered from lugging her basket of corn down the row. Maybe none of us are selfless enough to live here.
Row and Katie had not been assigned as harvest partners this year; Row had been stuck with Gavin on the squash patch, more than an acre away. Katie wondered if Mum had interfered to bring about this result; lately, Katie had begun to feel as though Mum were actively working to disengage her from Row, to keep them apart.
“Good luck, Mum,” Katie snarled quietly, digging into the corn plants. Her friendship with Row was very different than it had once been; Row had never admitted what he had done that night, and between them they maintained the polite fiction that Row had simply lost her in the dark. But they both knew that wasn’t so, and the knowledge had changed their friendship irrevocably. No longer did the two of them seem bound in a magic circle, inviolate by the outside world. They were still friends, but now Katie was one of many, perhaps no more special to Row than Gavin or Lear or anyone else. Sometimes that hurt, but not much. The memory of that night in the woods was too strong.
“Did you say something?” Jonathan asked, leaning around the cornstalk.
“Nothing.”
He ducked out of sight again. Katie didn’t know why they had been assigned as partners, but she could have done worse. Jonathan was a hard worker, and he didn’t disappear—as Row so often did—when it was time to lug the full baskets back toward the warehouse. For the first few days of the harvest, Katie had waited to see if Jonathan would fall into another trance, but when nothing happened, she gave up. Two years had passed since that day in the clearing, and she had kept her word, telling no one, not even Row. But she wasn’t even sure whether Jonathan remembered. He was unfailingly serious, keeping all of his attention on the task at hand. He reminded Katie of his father.
Several rows over, someone was talking to himself. Katie listened for a moment, and the words resolved themselves into a prayer. Here was another new development. Katie had never heard anyone pray in public during her childhood; there was no penalty for doing so, but William Tear discouraged it, and Tear’s disapproval had always been enough to shut down any behavior. Now Katie seemed to hear prayer constantly, and it irritated her no end. Mum was death on religion, and her views on the topic had shaped Katie’s as well. She wanted no invisible sky fathers hanging over the Town, mandating irrational behavior. She didn’t want to hear prayer around every corner.
Jonathan was listening too; he had paused in picking, cocking his head.
“—and God protect us from all demons and spirits, thieves of children, God bless us and keep us safe—”
“Shut up!” Katie shouted, louder than she had meant to. Her voice echoed over the rows, bringing silence in its wake. Jonathan peered at her around the corn plant, his eyebrows lifted.
“Sorry,” Katie muttered. “I can’t stand that.”
“They’re frightened,” Jonathan replied, snapping off another ear of corn.
“Everyone’s frightened. But not all of us are dumb enough to go looking for Jesus.”
Jonathan shook his head, and Katie felt color come to her cheeks. Even five minutes’ conversation with Jonathan was enough to reaffirm that he was a much better person than she was, kind and understanding and tolerant. Katie was seventeen now, Jonathan eighteen, but she still felt as though he were years—perhaps centuries—older.
“Don’t you think it’s dangerous?” she asked. “All of this religious nonsense springing up everywhere?”
“I don’t know,” Jonathan replied. “But I would like to know where it’s coming from. Even my father can’t find the source.”
“What about Paul Annescott? His Bible meetings get bigger all the time.”
“Annescott’s a fool. But my father says he’s not the real problem.”
“Can’t your father make it stop?”