Mustard Fields by Barry Rachin (classic literature books .txt) 📕

The following month a 'For Sale' sign went up on the front lawn. Kimberly abandoned the property to a real estate broker and went to live with her mother.
Five years passed. The new owners were dark-skinned Hispanic, quiet unassuming people who always greeted them with a friendly wave. Maddie never heard from Kimberly, but a neighbor two streets over, who was also a fitness buff, reported that, within eight months of the final divorce decree, she married an orthodontist on the rebound, so to speak, and was living in a mini-mansion on the south shore of Boston.
Maddie had this schizoid fantasy of Kimberly Osborne power walking down the aisle while in the background, a massive pipe organ was belting out the opening fanfare to Mendelssohn’s Wedding March. The well-toned, middle-aged woman was decked out in eggshell white, just like the first time around but with one minor deviation from social decorum: in her left hand was a mug of steaming Bigelow tea drizzled with honey and a slice of lemon.
With this ring, I thee wed. Of course the former Kimberly Osborne would have to shift the cup to the other hand in order to receive the wedding band, but that was just a minor inconvenience. The woman had devoted her life to doing as little as possible. Her college degree in elementary education was probably moldering in a storage box crammed under the crawl space in her palatial new digs. She had never worked a day in her life, not even as a substitute teacher, and, in the end, everything had worked out splendidly.

   

One day in June a small bubble envelope arrived in the mail.

I found this paperback in the 'remaindered' bin at the local bookstore, and, after reading it, immediately thought of you.

All my best,

Trevor

Maddie didn’t know why the flimsy note - exactly two dozen words all taken together - upset her so, but her hands were trembling when she laid it aside and reached for the well-thumbed paperback. The Field of Mustard by A.E. Coppard.
Who the hell was A.E. Coppard?
Placing the book on her bedside table, Maddie went out to do the grocery shopping. Later that night she read the title story then drank half a bottle of Chardonnay to settle her nerves. Over the next week or so Maddie read through the other stories. Then she went back and reread The Field of Mustard. Five more times she read it.

“On a windy afternoon in November they were gathering kindling in the Black Wood, Dinah Lock, Amy Hardwick, and Rose Olliver, three sere, disvirgined women from Pollack's Cross."

What could an unsuspecting reader say about an author who opened a story with such a sentence? They were all ‘disvirgined’- Maddie included Trevor Osborne in the mix as well - by life's vicissitudes. To become disvirgined has little to do with the human anatomy; in Coppard’s grasp of the term, it meant losing one's sense of the astonishing.
Sere –such a strange word! Maddie hadn’t a clue what that meant and had to pull out her cherry red, Webster New World College Dictionary for a proper definition of dried up, shriveled, withered. Such a nice way to describe the fairer sex!
Tuesday evening Trevor called. "How did you like Mr. Coppard?"
"I liked him just fine." Maggie was thinking about Dinah Lock and her best friend Rose, two country women who had loved the same man, each in their own special way. All this took place in the textured fabric of a fairy tale fiction that felt more real than everything else. "Rufus Blackthorn, the gamekeeper… was he a good guy or a lothario?"
"No, he cherished women,” Trevor answered without hesitation. “Rufus was a decent sort."
"I thought so," Maggie replied, “but just wanted to be sure, that's all."
"Would you like to get together?" Trevor interrupted her bookish reveries.
"Yes, I'd like that very much."
"How's this weekend?" he pressed.
"Why wait? Come now."
"Even better!"

Once things were settled, the conversation about A.E. Coppard rambled doggedly on a bit longer. Maggie especially like Dusky Ruth, the tale about the traveler who slept with a bar maid but never quite got around to doing much of anything. Trevor thought Arabesque - The Mouse was far and away the best of the bunch. No writer had ever described a mother weaning her child by squirting breast milk into a sizzling hearth. And then, of course, there was the Higgler. Both agreed that the peddler's story, which opened the volume, was a masterful work of art.
The queer thought occurred to Maddie that a half hour passed and they had spoken only about make believe characters from an obscure book written in the early nineteenth century. Five long years had flown by and she hadn't thought to ask about Trevor’s children or personal affairs. "Why wait?" Maggie didn't realize that she was repeating herself. "There's no reason that you shouldn't come over now."

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Publication Date: 09-29-2010

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