Sweet Corn

By JohnSkow

HARVEST HOME by THOMAS TRYON 401 pages. Knopf. $7.95.

Tom Tryon is the movie actor (The Cardinal) who wrote The Other, a best-selling ghost story of a couple of years ago. His new chiller has nothing to do with ghosts. It is about the hideous trouble city folks can get into when they go hunting for a quaint and peaceful house in the country.

The innocents are Ned and Beth Constantine and their twelve-year-old daughter. They are nice, safe people who come into a nice, safe inheritance, which allows Ned to abandon--pfaugh!

--the Manhattan advertising dodge and set up as a painter. Since Ned is the sort of painter who celebrates sunsets, covered bridges and barns, the Constantines decide to move to the source of supply. They chance on the tiny, lost village of Cornwall Coombe, a New England hamlet that, except for electricity, martinis and the odd Oldsmobile, seems stuck in the early 19th century. The farmers there avoid newfangled machines and methods, and the rhythmic planting, growth and harvest of the corn crop through the turning seasons rules village life.

Of course there is no New England village ruled by corn, or by any other crop, in the 19th century manner. Agriculture still gets done, but only in a desultory or else a superindustrialized fashion. No matter. It suits Tryon to imagine a great green heart beating slowly beneath the earth, with every rootlet and capillary in the village pulsing to it. Where the author goes from there, though obvious enough in synopsis, is dark and intricate in the working out. His language is artfully chosen to match the slowly quickening mood of the narration. He gives Ned and Beth a 19th century primness that undermines the here and now, a teasing contrast to the unsettling suspicions the reader is beginning to entertain.

The strangeness of Cornwall Coombe seems to center on the ritualistic way in which the town's corn is planted and harvested. Every seven years a young farmer is chosen to be Harvest Lord, and he in turn chooses a Corn Maiden to preside with him over these rituals. For the seven years of his reign the Harvest Lord is honored with gifts, free labor, respect. After that, well, it's sheer happenstance, of course, but there don't seem to be any former Har vest Lords around, only an extra ordinary number of placid widows.

Ned Constantine, foolish male, has apparently never read The Golden Bough. He keeps poking into the secrets of Cornwall Coombe until the full moon at harvest time. He is in deeper trouble than he knows. "They call it the Moon of No Repentance around here," says the local matriarch. "Come harvest, you take what there is -- too late for repentance . . . there are some hereabouts who don't take kindly to a man who makes fun at our ways."

Details of Ned's downfall have no place in a review. They provide superior shivers and inevitably involve placid Mrs. Ranchwagon, Ned's mild suburban wife Beth. The beguiled reader concludes that Author Tryon should in deed turn serious, but there should be no complaint if he offers several more volumes of excellent nonsense before doing so.

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