A Month in the Country

On Sunday, the Ellerbecks invite Birkin to their annual parish picnic in town, a kind of celebration of the approaching harvest with sandwiches, dancing, and games. When they arrive back, however, they are told that young Emily Crouch died.

Days later, Birkin volunteers to go with the Ellerbecks to the nearby town of Ripon to select a new, gently-used organ for their church. When the ad-hoc committee arrives at the cavernous warehouse, young Kathy agrees to test out the floor models. She plays hymns vigorously to the point where other buyers are distracted. But the Ellerbecks, as Wesleyans, believe in full-throated worship until the dealer himself stops them: “Here stop that row. You can’t have a blasted choir practice here” (109). A bit put off by such zealotry, Birkin wanders off amid the organs for sale until he spies the Keaches, there presumably shopping for a new harmonium for their church. When the Ellerbeck committee makes its selection, Birkin stays behind in the hopes of talking with Alice. Instead, Birkin runs into an old army buddy who reveals that Moon was dishonorably discharged and spent time in the brig on charges of having sex with another man. “Poor bugger,” his buddy says. “I suppose he was born that way” (111). When Birkin returns to the church and sees Moon, he somehow thinks Moon knows he knows.

Back at work now, Birkin focuses on restoring the figures of the saved moving up into heaven. He finds them a “smug and uninteresting lot” (112). He knows he is approaching the completion of the project. He thinks back on Vinny and the short time the two of them were happy. He admits that even with her infidelities the two never actually divorced. He even tells a dubious Alice that he is okay with his wife going with another man, and, thanks to his time in Oxgodby, he can laugh about it: “If going off with him is what she needed, then why not? I am not her jailer” (114). Alice confesses that she has never fit in with the others in Oxgodby, adding that she is plain and easy to ignore. Birkin too quickly disagrees. “You are attractive” (116), Birkin says impulsively. He edges closer to her but is interrupted by the arrival of a fellow from the church. Alice departs.

The very next day, Keach shows up with Birkin’s last payment. The job is finished, he says, and he expects Birkin will be departing. Birkin does not know whether Alice has said something about their awkward interlude, but he assures Keach the job will be finished only when he says it is finished. Keach backs off, but Birkin knows the truth.

The next morning Moon shows up determined to finish what he has been hired to do: find the bones of Addie Hebron’s distant ancestor. He wants to try a divining rod, a device supposedly with powers to find buried things. Birkin is skeptical, but Moon and he head out to the pit. There, Moon taps the divining rod on the ground and then carefully listens to its tremors. At the point the divining rod stops trembling, Moon instructs Birkin to start digging. “Doesn’t it excite you,” he asks, “Digging where someone five or six hundred years ago dug?” (128). The work is tedious in the late summer heat, but Moon grows increasingly confident. Then Birkin strikes what turns out to be the lid of a burial crypt: “A carved shaft branched gracefully into whorls of stone raised upon a convex lid, at its head a hand holding the sacramental cup, a wafer poised on its rim” (125). The lid bears no name, but Moon insists they pry open the lid enough to see what is inside. The “collapsed skeleton” is remarkably intact (128). Around the neck dangling in the exposed rib cage is an expensive medallion shaped like a crescent. Moon laughs. No wonder the Hebrons could not bury him in Christian ground—dispatched on the Crusades, apparently, Piers had returned a convert to Islam. Birkin wonders about the falling man in the mural with the crescent scar; he asks if it is possible that Addie Hebron’s disgraced ancestor was none other than the painter commissioned to create the church mural.

The following day, Birkin understands the time has come to leave Oxgodby. As he packs his few belongings, Alice arrives at the church with a parting gift of apples. She asks to come up to his bell tower room—she has never visited there. The two make awkward conversation even as they edge closer: “I should have lifted an arm and taken her shoulder, turned her face and kissed her. It was that kind of day. It was why she’d come. Then everything would have been different. My life, hers.” But Birkin says and does nothing. The moment is lost.

The next morning, as Birkin prepares to head to the train station, he receives a letter—his first letter all summer. It is from his wife: “She wanted me home again…and I should be there” (133). As he passes the parsonage, he knows the Keaches are gone for the day. Nevertheless, he stops at the front door and wildly pulls on the bell. Birkin heads for the station. In the closing paragraph, Birkin admits that the summer in Oxgodby was long ago. He never returned to the town, nor did he reconnect with anyone from the town. He says, “So in memory it stays as I left it” (135).