Chapter 37 — The Back Row
The harvest rite was the biggest thing Ironridge had done in five years, and everybody in the valley came.
They came because the eastern fields had gone from gray to gold in nine weeks and the granary was full to the rafters and there were four hundred acres of standing wheat that nobody had believed in. They came in their best clothes, which for most of them meant their least-mended ones. They came with children who had been too thin to run last spring and were now impossible to catch.
Vanessa Pierce came too, because she was permitted to, and because she had not left the Pierce house in eleven days and could not stand another hour in it.
She wore gray silk and did her hair and told herself the whole walk down that she would be fine.
The rite itself was old
