Kindling Night

I should say at the start that Harmon, Vermont, is a real place, though I doubt anyone reading this has been there, and I am now certain that no one should go. It sits in a valley in the northeast corner of the state, between the Willoughby range and the Canadian border, and the only road in follows a creek called the Barrow for eleven miles from Route 5A before the trees open and you see the town: white clapboard, a Congregational church with a tin steeple, a general store, a diner called Peg’s, and beyond it all the farms spreading up the hillsides in long strips the way farms have in that part of New England since before the Revolution. Population nine hundred and change. I drove in on June 4th with my windows down because the air conditioning in my Corolla had died somewhere south of St. Johnsbury, and the first thing I noticed was the smell. Cut grass and something sweeter beneath it, like fermenting apples, though it was too early in the season for that.

The second thing I noticed was that people waved.

Not the way people wave in cities, which is to say defensively, a gesture that means I see you and am not a threat. This was different. A man on a riding mower lifted his whole arm. A woman on the porch of the general store raised her coffee cup. Two boys on bicycles — ten, maybe eleven years old — actually stopped pedaling to watch me pass, and one of them said something to the other, and they both smiled. I told myself it was a small town and I was a stranger and strangers were interesting. That was true. It was also, I would learn, insufficient.

I had come for the archive. I was — I am — a folklorist, which is an embarrassing thing to be in the twenty-first century, a profession that invites comparisons to butterfly collectors and people who transcribe birdsong. My dissertation at UVM had been on agricultural ritual persistence in northern New England, which is a fancy way of saying I studied the things small towns did at harvest time and tried to figure out where the customs came from and why they survived. Harmon had come to my attention through a footnote. Not even a proper footnote — a parenthetical aside in a 1971 paper by Eldon Marsh, a now-deceased colleague at Middlebury, who had written: “(cf. the Harmon MS, uncatalogued, which appears to document a continuous harvest observance from at least 1791 to the present day, though I was unable to examine it in person owing to the reluctance of the town clerk to permit access.)”

That parenthetical had lodged in my mind the way a seed lodges in a crack in a sidewalk. A continuous harvest observance from 1791. Two hundred and thirty-five years, if it was still going. No break for the Civil War, for the Spanish Flu, for the two World Wars, for the internet, for anything. I had written to the town clerk, a woman named Alma Pryce, and received in reply a handwritten letter on cream stationery inviting me to spend the summer cataloguing the Harmon Historical Society’s holdings, which were kept, she wrote, “in the basement of the church, where they have always been.” She offered a stipend of two thousand dollars a month and the use of a furnished apartment above the hardware store. The stipend was absurd — less than half what a visiting researcher might expect — but the apartment was free and Harmon was cheap and the archive was, if Marsh’s parenthetical was accurate, extraordinary.

The apartment was clean and small and smelled of lavender. Someone had left a pot of coffee on the counter with a note that read: “Welcome, Dr. Calloway. Cream in the fridge. — Alma.” The coffee was still hot.

I should describe Alma, because she is central to this, though I did not understand how central until very late. She was perhaps sixty-five, tall, with white hair worn in a braid and hands that were large and capable and always slightly reddened, as though she had just finished washing something. She wore no jewelry except a plain gold band. Her face was the kind you call handsome rather than pretty, with high cheekbones and deep-set eyes the color of creek water over granite. She met me the next morning at the church basement, unlocked the door with a key she wore on a chain around her neck, and led me down a flight of wooden stairs into a room that made me, for a moment, forget everything else.

The archive was magnificent. Not in the way of great research libraries, with their climate control and acid-free boxes and finding aids. Magnificent in the way of a geological stratum. It had accreted over centuries. Leather-bound ledgers from the 1790s sat on shelves beside composition notebooks from the 1940s. There were loose broadsheets, account books, church registers, hand-drawn maps, daguerreotypes in cracked cases, and — I saw this immediately and my heart rate doubled — a shelf of what appeared to be ritual calendars, thin pamphlets with hand-stitched bindings, one for each year, going back to a date I could not yet determine because Alma was talking and I was trying to listen.

“We’ve never had a proper catalogue,” she said. “Folks know where things are, mostly. But it would be good to have it written down.” She paused. “For the future.”

“For the future,” I repeated, and she smiled, and the smile was warm and I believed it completely.

I worked in that basement for three weeks before I found the first thing that frightened me.

The ritual calendars were what I had come for, and I gave them priority. They were exactly what Marsh’s parenthetical had suggested: a year-by-year record of Harmon’s harvest observance, which the calendars called “Kindling Night.” The earliest I found was dated 1791, written in a crabbed hand on paper that was stiff and brown and smelled of dust and something faintly sweet, like old honey. The entry was brief:

Octbr. 14. — Kindling Night observed per custom. The valley gave well. Barley, corn, squash, three cords of maple. E. Harmon presiding. Attendance full. The fire burned clean.

That was all. I turned to 1792:

Octbr. 12. — Kindling Night. Valley gave well. Rye, corn, pumpkin, six bushels of apple. R. Pryce presiding. Attendance full. Fire burned clean.

And 1793, and 1794, and on and on, each entry nearly identical in its brevity and its formula. The valley gave well. Attendance full. The fire burned clean. The presiding name rotated among a small number of families — Harmon, Pryce, Deverell, Goss, Willard — that I recognized as the founding families listed in the church register. I catalogued eighty-seven of these calendars in the first two weeks, covering 1791 to 1877, and the formula never varied. I began to find it soothing. The valley gave well. The fire burned clean. It was like a pulse.

During those weeks, the town took me in. I do not mean this figuratively. Peg — whose diner was the real center of Harmon, as diners always are in towns that size — started keeping a booth open for me near the window, and she knew my order by the third morning: two eggs over medium, wheat toast, coffee, a side of her corned beef hash which was the best I have ever eaten and which she made from scratch every morning at four a.m. using a recipe she said her grandmother had given her. The regulars learned my name. Dale Goss, who ran the hardware store below my apartment, brought me a reading lamp from his own house when he saw me working at night. Ruth Willard, who taught third grade, stopped by the church basement with a plate of oatmeal cookies and stayed for an hour asking about my dissertation. Tom Deverell, who farmed sixty acres of the steepest land I had ever seen cultivated, invited me to a church supper where I ate pot roast and three kinds of pie and learned the names of forty people in a single evening.

They asked me questions about myself — where I had grown up (Rutland), whether I was married (divorced, two years), what my parents did (retired, both of them, my father from the post office and my mother from the school district). They listened to my answers with an attention I was not accustomed to. In the city, you share personal information defensively, parceling it out in small controlled doses. In Harmon, people listened to your whole answer and then asked a follow-up question that proved they had been listening, and the warmth of that attention was — I will say it plainly — narcotic. I had been lonely. I had not realized how lonely. Harmon showed me.

By my third week I had developed what I can only call habits. I said good morning to Dale on my way to Peg’s. I lingered over my second coffee because Pete Harmon — no relation to the town’s founder, he said, though this was obviously untrue — liked to argue about the Red Sox and I liked to let him. I walked to the church basement through the green, which was maintained with a devotion bordering on the religious, and where the same three old men sat on the same bench every afternoon playing cribbage, and they would nod at me and I would nod back, and that small ritual of mutual acknowledgment became something I needed in a way that embarrasses me to admit. On Thursdays I ate supper at Ruth Willard’s house, where she made things from her garden — tomato soup, zucchini bread, salads with lettuce so fresh it still held the cold of the soil — and we talked about books and teaching and the peculiarities of small-town life, and she never once asked me when I was leaving. Nobody in Harmon ever asked me when I was leaving. I see now that this was because they already knew.

It was on the twenty-second day that I found the Deverell marginalia.

I was cataloguing a church ledger from 1847, a routine account of births and deaths and tithes, when I noticed that someone had written in the margins in pencil. The hand was different from the main text — smaller, more hurried, and it had the quality of a secret, the way writing looks when it is done quickly and not meant to be found. The first marginal note appeared beside a list of deaths for October:

H. Willard, aged 43. Fell from hayloft. Octbr. 15.

And in the margin, in that hurried pencil:

Not fell. Given. KN.

I turned the page. Another death, another October:

S. Goss, aged 37. Drowned in the Barrow. Octbr. 13.

Margin: Given. KN. The fire does not always burn clean.

My mouth went dry. I flipped forward, scanning for more marginalia. I found it scattered across three decades, always in October, always beside a death:

J. Harmon, aged 51. Took ill suddenly. Octbr. 16. — Margin: Given. Valley took what it required.

M. Pryce, aged 28. Found in the north field. Octbr. 14. — Margin: He did not go willing but he went. KN.

A. Deverell, aged 62. Heart gave out at supper. Octbr. 12. — Margin: Old custom satisfied. A Deverell this year and a Deverell always when the valley asks for one.

I sat in that basement with the ledger open on my lap and I could hear, from the church above me, the sound of someone playing the organ — just scales, up and down, a child practicing — and outside the window the sound of the valley doing what valleys do in late June, which is grow things, and I thought about the ritual calendars and their steady, soothing formula. The valley gave well. The fire burned clean. And then I thought about the years when the marginalia said The fire does not always burn clean, and I began to understand that “gave well” had a second meaning I had not permitted myself to consider.

I brought it to Alma.

This was a mistake, though I did not know it then. I carried the ledger up the stairs and across the green to the town clerk’s office, which occupied the front room of Alma’s own house, and I set it on her desk and showed her the marginalia and said, “Alma, what is this?”

She put on her reading glasses. She looked at the pages I had marked. She was quiet for a long time. Then she closed the ledger and placed both of her reddened hands flat upon it, as though she were pressing something down, and she said, “That is Josiah Deverell’s hand. He was the minister here from 1840 to 1863. He had — doubts.”

“Doubts about what?”

“About whether the old way was right.”

“What old way?”

She looked at me then, and her deep-set eyes were not unkind, but neither were they the eyes of the woman who had left hot coffee and a cream-stationery note in my apartment three weeks earlier. They were appraising. They were, I think now, calculating how much I could be told without being lost.

“The Kindling Night,” she said. “You’ve been reading the calendars. You know it’s old.”

“I know it goes back to 1791 at least.”

“It goes back further. The calendars start in 1791 because that’s when people here learned to write. The night itself is older than the town. Older than the English in this valley.”

“And the deaths?” I pointed at the ledger. “These people in the margins. Given, he writes. The valley took what it required.”

Alma removed her glasses. She folded them and set them on the ledger beside her hands. “Dr. Calloway,” she said. “Neil. You are a folklorist. You know that communities maintain themselves through practices that outsiders find — difficult.”

“This isn’t a maypole, Alma.”

“No,” she said. “It isn’t.”

She told me, then, some of what I wanted to know, and what she told me had the quality of a scholar’s nightmare — not the horror of what is seen, but the horror of what is deduced from a scrap of evidence, a line in a parish record, a phrase that once read aloud cannot be unheard. She told me that Kindling Night was a sacrifice. That the founding families had made a compact with the valley — she used that word, compact, as though it were a legal term, which for her I believe it was — and that the compact required, each October, a life. One life, freely given or otherwise provided, from among the founding families, in exchange for which the valley gave well. The crops grew. The livestock thrived. The winters, brutal everywhere else in the Northeast Kingdom, were survivable in Harmon. She told me this in the same tone she might have used to explain the town’s property tax rate. She told me the way you tell someone a fact.

“This is murder,” I said.

“It is an arrangement,” she said. “And it has kept this town alive for two hundred and thirty-five years while every other town in this valley has died.”

She was not wrong about that. I had driven through the other towns on Route 5A on my way in. Barton: half-empty. Westmore: a seasonal ghost. Orleans: surviving, barely, on the prison and the Walmart. But Harmon — nine hundred and change, full employment, the school still open, every farm still working. An anomaly. A place that should have died and didn’t.

“Why are you telling me this?” I asked.

“Because you found it. You were always going to find it. That’s why we invited you.”

I did not like the word invited. It had a weight it had not carried before.

“The women of the families have kept the calendar since before the ledgers,” she continued. “My mother kept it. Her mother before her. We decide the date. We prepare the fire. The men do what men do — they build and farm and argue about the Red Sox. We do what is necessary.” She said this without pride or apology. She said it the way the stone foundation of the church held up the steeple: as a structural fact.

“I am going to leave,” I said. “I am going to drive back to Burlington and I am going to call the state police.”

Alma nodded, as though I had said something she expected. “You could,” she said. “But Neil — you should know that everyone here knows you. Peg knows how you take your eggs. Dale fixed your lamp. Ruth brought you cookies. Tom had you to supper. Forty people learned your name and listened to where you came from and who your parents are and why your marriage ended. Do you understand? We know you.”

“That’s a threat.”

“It’s a description. Of what it means to be known by a community.” She paused. “And what it costs to leave one.”

I left her office. I walked back to my apartment above the hardware store. I packed my suitcase. I carried it downstairs to my Corolla and I opened the trunk and Dale Goss was standing in the doorway of the hardware store with his arms folded and he said, “Heading out?” and his voice was friendly and his face was open and I said, “I need to go back to Burlington for a few days,” and he said, “Well, drive safe. Roads are tricky past Barton after dark.” And I got in the car and I drove.

The road follows the Barrow for eleven miles to Route 5A. I have said this. What I have not said is that the road is narrow, and unpaved for the last four miles, and that the trees close over it like a tunnel, and that there is no cell service until you reach the highway. I drove those eleven miles and the valley did what it had done for two hundred and thirty-five years: it grew things. The fields were green and heavy. The light was gold. Twice I saw deer standing at the edge of the road, watching me pass with the absolute stillness of animals that have never been hunted.

I reached Route 5A. I turned south toward Burlington. I drove for two hours. I checked into a motel in Montpelier. I sat on the bed and I picked up the phone to call the state police and I could not do it.

I am a folklorist. I study the things communities do to sustain themselves. I had spent six years writing a dissertation that argued, with extensive footnotes and theoretical apparatus, that persistent agricultural rituals in northern New England served an essential social function — that they bound communities together, that they encoded practical knowledge, that they gave meaning to the brutal cycle of planting and harvest and winter and death. I had argued that these rituals mattered. That they should be preserved. That the communities that maintained them were stronger and more resilient than those that did not.

And here was Harmon. Stronger. More resilient. Maintaining its ritual with a fidelity that was, by any scholarly measure, extraordinary.

I sat in that motel room and I thought about Josiah Deverell’s hurried pencil in the margins: He did not go willing but he went. I thought about Alma’s hands flat on the ledger, pressing something down. I thought about the ritual calendars and their soothing, terrible formula. The valley gave well. The fire burned clean. I thought about the two meanings of “gave.”

Then I opened my laptop and I looked at the notes I had brought with me — I had been transcribing the marginalia, of course, because that is what scholars do — and I found a passage I had copied without fully reading it. It was from a later hand, not Josiah Deverell’s, written in the margin of a church register from 1923:

The compact is not with the families. The compact is with whoever lives in the valley. J. Deverell knew this and it is why his doubts did not save him. A man cannot doubt his way out of a geography. The valley does not distinguish between those who were born here and those who came.

I read that passage in a motel room in Montpelier at eleven-seventeen p.m. on June 26th and I understood three things simultaneously. The first was that the two thousand dollars a month and the free apartment and the hot coffee and the cream-stationery welcome had not been generosity. The second was that Alma’s phrase — that’s why we invited you — had not meant what I assumed it meant. The third was that I had spent twenty-two days living in the valley, sleeping in the valley, eating food the valley had grown, and that the compact, according to the 1923 annotator, did not distinguish between those who were born there and those who came.

October was four months away. The founding families — Harmon, Pryce, Deverell, Goss, Willard — had been providing the annual sacrifice for two hundred and thirty-five years. That is a long time to give your own.

I had been welcomed. I had been fed. I had been known.

I picked up the phone again. I called the state police. A dispatcher answered. I said, “I need to report —” and then I stopped, because what would I report? Pencil notations in a nineteenth-century church ledger? A town clerk who told me an unusual story about local customs? Nine hundred people who had been friendly to me?

“Sir?” the dispatcher said. “What do you need to report?”

I hung up.

I did not go back to Harmon. I drove to Burlington. I returned to my apartment, which smelled of nothing and where no one had left coffee. I wrote to Alma and told her I would not be returning to complete the cataloguing. I did not explain why. Three days later I received a reply, again on cream stationery, in her steady hand:

Dear Neil — We are sorry to hear it. The archive will be here when you are ready. As will we. You are always welcome in Harmon. Sincerely, Alma Pryce.

Beneath her signature, in smaller letters, as though added as an afterthought — though Alma Pryce was not a woman who had afterthoughts:

P.S. — October 14th this year. You are in the calendar.

I have not been back. It is now February, and the snow is deep in the Northeast Kingdom, and I tell myself that whatever happened in Harmon on October 14th happened without me, that the compact is folklore, that a parenthetical in a dead man’s paper and pencil scrawl in a church margin and a postscript on cream stationery do not constitute evidence of anything except the persistence of rural superstition, which is, after all, my area of expertise.

But I find that I cannot eat apples this winter. The smell of them — sweet, fermenting, like the air in the valley on the day I arrived — turns my stomach. And I have noticed, in recent weeks, a difficulty I cannot explain: I have begun counting things. Steps. Fence posts. The cars in the parking lot of the grocery store. I count them and I lose count and I count again and the number is never the same twice, as though the world has become slightly unreliable in its arithmetic, and I think of Alma’s postscript — you are in the calendar — and I wonder whether being in a calendar is something you can be at a distance, the way a name in a ledger is present in the ledger whether or not the person it belongs to is in the room.

The calendar said October 14th. October 14th has passed. I am still here. But I find that I am not certain — and this is the part I cannot say to anyone, the part that has made me write this account in the hope that setting it down will make it less true — I am not certain that “here” is where I think it is. The distances in Burlington feel wrong. My apartment is fourteen steps from the street, except when it is fifteen. The walk to the university takes twelve minutes, except when it takes thirteen. The numbers will not hold still. The arithmetic of my daily life has developed a wobble, a give, as though the ground beneath it is no longer fully committed to being solid, and I think of the valley, and the smell of cut grass and fermenting apples, and the way the deer stood at the road’s edge with the absolute stillness of animals that have never been hunted, and I understand now what that stillness meant. It was not the stillness of safety.

It was the stillness of patience.

I have begun, in the evenings, to reread my transcriptions of the ritual calendars. The valley gave well. The fire burned clean. I read them the way you read a prayer, or a contract, or a sentence you have been given and cannot appeal. I read them and I count the words — seven, five — and the numbers hold, at least for now, and I find that I am grateful for that, for the steadiness of the formula, for the way it says the same thing every year, which is: the arrangement continues. The compact is maintained. The valley does not distinguish.

I am a folklorist. I study the things communities do to sustain themselves. I have spent my career arguing that these things matter.

I was right. They matter very much.

I count the steps to my door. Fourteen. Fifteen. Fourteen.

I have stopped correcting the number.