The last field goes down at dusk on the last dry day, and everybody in the parish knows to leave the final corner standing.
Not out of laziness. Out of arrangement.
Whatever has been living in the wheat all summer has to go somewhere when the wheat comes down, and the old people will tell you it moves ahead of the blade — field to field, corner to corner, smaller and smaller — until there is one last standing patch and one last thing standing in it.
So you stop. You leave the corner. You tie what's cut into a shape and you carry it into the house and you set it above the hearth where it can watch you eat.
It stays there all winter, and in spring it goes back into the ground.
That is the whole of it. That is the arrangement.
Anyone who tells you the harvest is a happy occasion has never brought one in.
