“Don’t rush me, son,” Crow said with a crooked grin. “It actually has more to do with the drifters than with Griswold per se. The crop yield was so big that farmers just couldn’t keep up, so they had to fish around for extra hands. A lot of them took on busloads of migrants from the ghettos in Philly and Trenton, and some of the others snagged up anybody who had two hands and needed a buck. A few farmers took on the drifters who usually worked for Griswold. As it chanced, that was one of the years that Griswold was not growing crops in his fields, he was just raising cattle.”
“The cattle he never sold,” said Newton.
Crow nodded. “The cattle he never sold, right. Henry Guthrie took on four or five of the drifters who had done field work before for Griswold and who were scouting around town for some shifts. Oren Morse was one of them. Now Morse—the Bone Man, as I prefer to call him—was a genuine cultural dropout. Young black guy, about twenty-five or-six. A blues-playing ex-hippie who quoted Santayana and Charles Bukowski and John Lennon. My brother Billy and I thought he was coolest thing going. We used to work side by side with him. We had lunch with him, listened to his stories about being on the dharma road like Kerouac. Even at eight I knew he was a good guy. Maybe not a pillar of any community, but he was a decent person—just a dropout from a world that he wasn’t suited for. He’d dodged the draft in 1969 and then just kept on running. This was long before the amnesty thing. He wasn’t running ’cause he was scared but because he actually thought the peace movement meant something and he didn’t want anyone to put a gun in his hand. Does that sound like a killer to you? Anyway, all through that season, through the Golden Harvest, we worked and talked and we learned a lot about dreaming and thinking from him. We all wanted to be just like him, to be that free. Then the year of the Golden Harvest came to an end and the year that followed changed everything.”
“Why? What happened?”
“Well, I suppose when you get a year like the Golden Harvest you can become soft really quickly. Everyone came out on top that year, from the farmers to the merchants to the everyday folk; that year was incredible. We all made money, we all had more than enough to eat, and I guess in some ways we all got complacent. Then the following year we had a different kind of harvest.”
“Nothing like the Golden Harvest?” asked Newton.
Crow snorted. “No sir. What came that next year was a Black Harvest.”
“A…Black Harvest? That sounds ominous. What was it?”
“Figure it out,” Crow said. “We went from one extreme to the other. Where the year before every damn seed was taking root and producing stalks and vines heavy with succulent fruit, the year of the Black Harvest was a year of blight and sickness. It started at the end of June, which is when the first wave of crops are generally harvested, and the crops that grew were thin and sparse, or swollen with disease. You’d break open a big juicy watermelon and the meat inside would be spoiled and black and crawling with maggots. The corn was so harsh and foul that even pigs wouldn’t eat it. Any person dumb enough or unlucky enough to eat the vegetables and fruits harvested that year fell sick, and soon we found that the diseases and decaying vegetation had bred some kind of virus or bacteria, or something like that—I don’t know the biology of it, all I know is that a lot of people died that year. Highest mortality rate in the history of Pine Deep, highest per capita in the state for any one town, at least in this century. It was like a plague, and it swept right through the town, from mid-July until the middle of September, and it chopped down old folks and kids, and left a lot of the adults weak and broken. Forget the farm animals—those that didn’t just drop dead in their tracks had to be slaughtered to try and keep the infection from spreading to Crestville and Black Marsh.”
Newton held up his palm. “Wait a minute…you’re describing what’s happening this year.”
Crow nodded, eyebrows arched significantly. “You should get out and meet the people, Newton. Everyone over thirty-five is talking about this being another Black Harvest year.”
“It
“No, not like before, and that’s a plus,” Val said. “Maybe it’s because we have a hospital here now, or maybe the antibiotics and drugs are better now. Who knows? Some older folks and some kids have gotten sick, but we haven’t had a real killer plague this year, thank God.” Crow reached out and gave her thigh a small squeeze.
Newton said, “Did the blight spread to other towns?”
