Mia Baldzani Germain

THE HARVEST OF 1931

Part 1: Seme (Seed)

The fields were too quiet that summer. 

By July, the air in the hills had thickened into something unmoving, like old honey. The cypress trees stood like sentries along the winding road into town, their shadows long and motionless across the cracked earth. Even the birds, mostly doves, had stopped their gossip. They watched instead, clustered in threes on the terracotta rooftops, like parishioners waiting for a sermon no one dared deliver.

Ida knew what it meant when the birds went silent.

She was only nine, but old enough to remember the year the rains didn’t come, and the hay bales turned to dust between her father’s fingers. That had been the summer her mother died with red thread still tangled around her wrists, muttering to spirits only she could see. Now, three summers later, the silence had returned. And with it, Ida’s solitude.

She found the ear of corn behind the henhouse.

It was odd. No one grew corn here. Corn was grown farther north, where the polentoni came from. The farmers grew hay, some barley, the occasional tomato vine if the priest said the saints were feeling generous. But this single ear, half-hidden in the tall, dry grass, looked ancient and gold, as though the earth had been saving it just for her.

Ida picked it up reverently, brushing off dirt with her hand-sewn skirt. The kernels were pale yellow, tight and plump, and the husk unbroken. It warmed in her hand, as if still alive. She thought of her mother’s voice, a lullaby hummed in Veneto dialect that no one else in the house remembered.

That night, under a waning moon, she made the doll.

She worked in silence at the wooden kitchen table while her brother snored two rooms away, drunk on fatigue. She used scraps of linen from the basket of unwashed clothes, stuffing the corn into a small bundle. She tied the arms using red thread stolen from the hem of the altar cloth at the back of the chapel. Her hands moved with a confidence that surprised her.

She felt something shift when she tied the red thread. Like a prayer had answered itself.

Everyone knew the red thread tied in summer meant a pact, but no one said with what.

When it was done, she gave the doll a name.

“Spighetta,” she whispered, cradling it like a baby. “You’ll keep me company.”

The candle on the table flickered, though no breeze came through the shutters.

The next morning, she brought Spighetta to the edge of the field where the hay grew tall, where the earth still remembered how to be generous. She laid the doll between two stones, like a cradle. She sat beside her, whispering stories, secrets, and questions the grown-ups never answered.

By afternoon, the grass near her father’s barn had grown taller than her waist.

The villagers would call it a blessing.

Ida, without quite knowing why, would call it amore.

–

Part 2: Germoglio (Sprouting)

The hay grew overnight.

Ida returned the next morning to find the field thicker, heavier with green-gold stalks than she remembered. The air smelled sweet, too sweet for late summer, and bees wobbled through the stalks as though drunk on a strange brew.

She knelt where she had left Spighetta, between the cradle stones, and found her just as she’d placed her: unweathered, unbothered, a tiny sentinel in a growing cathedral of grass. Ida smiled and pressed her ear to the ground. The soil was warm. She thought she heard a hum.

For three days, she visited the doll, each time bringing an offering. Half a fig, a ribbon from her hair, a broken rosary bead. Each time, the field welcomed her. The hay parted easily at her feet. Crickets stilled when she passed.

By the fourth morning, her brother stood at the kitchen window, squinting into the distance.

“The hay’s grown full,” he muttered, voice like grit. “Ours looks better than the Veltri’s.”

He didn’t mention Ida’s barefoot tracks winding through the field. Didn’t ask where she went each dawn with a basket too small to hold much of anything.

By the fifth morning, the field near the barn had nearly doubled in height. It danced when Ida approached. Not swayed–danced, as if in greeting. She brought Spighetta a plum that day and brushed her linen with a bit of rose water she’d found in her mother’s old chest.

At night, Ida began to dream.

First, of a woman in a yellow shawl, kneeling in a field lit by moonlight. Then of whispers. Soft, coaxing, threaded in dialect she barely understood though something inside her answered anyway.

“You’ve done well, figlia,” the voice murmured.

“Keep her fed. Keep her safe.”

And each morning, the hay grew taller.

–

Ida liked to walk the long way home.

The narrow road curved around the hillside in lazy switchbacks, bordered on one side by low stone walls and on the other side by fields too dry to sing. Most afternoons, she dawdled there, between the one olive tree and the statue of the Madonna that hadn’t held offerings since before she was born. It was the one place no one called her name. Not even the wind.

She carried Spighetta in the crook of her elbow like a secret.

She set the doll gently on her lap and smoothed her linen dress, which still smelled faintly of lavender from the last wash weeks ago. Spighetta’s arms drooped slightly, one of them already loosening where the stitch had pulled taut. Ida adjusted it and held her closer.

“You’re not broken,” she whispered. “You’re just tired. Like me.”

The wind rustled the rosemary carrying a sharp, resinous scent. Ida breathed it in and exhaled slowly, as if sighing something out of her chest.

“I don’t think he remembers her voice.” She said, watching her bare toes curl in the dust. “My brother, he says he does, but he doesn’t hum the right notes.”

Spighetta stared up at her with her faceless calm.

“I do, though. She used to hum when she stirred the polenta. And when she washed my hair. Even when she was sick at the end, she hummed that song from Veneto. The one with the river and the lost girl.” Her voice caught. “No one sings to me now.”

The doll was warm against her. Or maybe it was the sun. Or maybe it was both.

Ida leaned back on her elbows and gazed at the sky, which had turned the color of overripe apricots. “I tried singing to myself once. My voice sounds all thin and buzzy. Like a fly that can’t get out.”

She turned the doll over in her hands.

“I wish someone would talk to me like I wasn’t a bother. Like they saw me. She paused. “Is that a bad thing to want?”

A pause, as if the silence weighed her question, then pressed it into the earth.

She nodded anyway.

Ida placed Spighetta gently on the warm stone beside her and lay down in the grass. The blades curled protectively around her limbs, brushing against her arms like fingers. She shut her eyes and listened.

The wind stopped.

The rosemary held its breath

And somewhere beneath the soil, a root quivered. Soft, unseen, listening.

That night, when Ida returned to the kitchen, the scrap of red thread she’d used to tie Spighetta’s arms had doubled in length, coiled like a ribbon against the doll’s chest. No one had touched her. No one could have.

Ida smiled.

She wasn’t alone anymore.

–

It started with the hay.

By mid-August, the stalks behind Ida’s house stood twice as tall as those on the neighboring lots. They shimmered in the heat like gold ribbon, heavy with promise. The same couldn’t be said for the rest of the village. Fields thinned by heat and poor soil, patches browned as if touched by some quiet rot.

“Too much luck,” someone muttered outside the panificio one morning. “That kind of green don’t grow without a price.”

“She’s always been strange, that girl,” another said. “Talks to herself, or to that thing she carries.”

“No,” said the old cobbler’s wife, peering over her embroidery. “Not herself, To the doll.”

The word fell like a stone into a still pond.

They didn’t say it too loudly, not yet. But they said it often. At the market, at the well, after mass. Just loud enough to be carried by the wind. And wind always found its way to children.

Ida noticed.

People who used to nod now looked away. Her brother came home later and later, smelling of tobacco and hay mold, shoulders hunched with some weight he wouldn’t name. When he did speak, it was sharp and flat, as though he were sawing his words in half.

“You’ve got dirt on your skirt again,” he snapped one evening. “it’s not a sin to act normal once in a while.”

She didn’t answer. She just turned back to the hearth and pressed Spighetta hard against her ribs, like she might disappear too.”

The doll had changed, too. Its husk was softer now, pliant. The red thread glowed faintly in the shade, like something just lit from within.

She didn’t tell anyone, but Ida had started to feel things.

Tiny pulses beneath her feet when she stepped into the hay. The way the sun seemed to linger longer on her skin. She’d plucked a dente di leone the other day, and it hadn’t wilted. It had stayed bright and round in her palm for hours, as if afraid to disappoint her.

Spighetta never disappointed her.

Not like the saints in the chapel who didn’t answer prayers, or the brothers who forgot lullabies, or the neighbor women who whispered behind cupped hands.

No. Spighetta understood.

And Ida, barefoot in the road, hair wild, heart blooming with grief too large for her small frame, was beginning to belong.

Not to the town.

But to something older. Something listening.

It  was the neighbor, Nonna Lisabetta, who watched her most.

She lived three doors down in a house that smelled of basil and vinegar, a widow so old she still thought she lived under the Granducato di Toscana. Children whispered that her hair had once been red, and that her mother was born under a black moon.

Lisabetta, whose own daughter had vanished one spring and never returned, stirred her coffee and said nothing.

But she watched from her kitchen window with eyes the color of dried sage. She saw Ida carry the doll to the edge of the fields. Saw the girl sew the doll clothes from her own scraps, dance in the wildflowers, whisper into the soil. She saw the way the grass leaned toward her, not away.

And still, she said nothing.

Not when the hay behind Ida’s barn grew so thick a goat couldn’t pass through it. Not when cats began to linger on Ida’s doorstep, tails curled like question marks. Not even when one morning, the dew clung only to the blades of grass where Ida had walked, and nowhere else.

Lisabetta stirred her coffee with the handle of a spoon, blinked once, and muttered: “It’s starting again.”

–

They came just after the church bell tolled il tocco.

Three of them, Gigi, Tommaso, and Carlo, barefoot boys with grass-stained knees and the self-sure cruelty of children who’d never been held gently. They didn’t mean harm at first. Not really. They meant mischief. Which is often worse.

Gigi had seen Ida from his rooftop the day before, cradling her doll like it was a real baby. Whispering to it. Singing.

“Let’s see if it answers us,” Gigi whispered, grinning like he’d touched something forbidden.

They found her where the hay grew thickest, near the rosemary wall, her back to them as she tucked something beneath a patch of wildflowers. She was humming, barely a note, something old and shapeless, like a lullaby remembered from a dream.

“What’s she feeding it now?” Tommaso whispered. “A fig again?”

“Or blood,” Carlo said with a grin, making a mock gesture of the cross.

They didn’t expect her to hear them.

But she turned, slow and calm, and rose to her feet.

“Go away,” she said, soft but steady. “You don’t belong here.”

Gigi stepped forward anyway. “It’s just a corn husk, Ida. You act like it’s made of gold.”

“She’s not yours,” Ida said, holding Spighetta tighter.

“Oh no,” Tommaso mocked, “She talks like the witches in Nonna’s stories!”

Carlo lunged, Ida tried to twist away, but he grabbed the doll by one limp husk leg and yanked hard. The leaf tore with a dry snap.

“Stop–STOP!” Ida screamed.

They didn’t stop.

They laughed, shrill and boyish and empty of mercy. Tommaso held Spighetta up like a trophy. “What’s this red string? Looks like it came off a church dress!”

Gigi struck a match. Ida ran at him, fists flying, but Carlo held her back.

The flame hit the doll.

Its remaining husk burned fast. A sweet, sharp scent rose into the air. Corn, dusk, something older, darker, like singed rosemary and iron. Kernels burst and scattered like seeds into the tall grass.

Ida screamed again, but this time the sound split.

It cracked through the sky like a fault line, low and terrible. Birds exploded from the cypress trees in a black cloud. A shudder ran through the ground beneath their feet.

The boys stopped laughing. Something in the air had shifted.

They hay, which had always stood still and golden in the heat, began to bend, not with the breeze, but toward them. Each stalk tipping, bowing, reaching.

The grass curled around their ankles.

A sharp vine–where had that come from? –lashed across Carlo’s shin. He shrieked and dropped what was left of Spighetta. The doll’s body smoldered, still smoking, one arm twisted, one scorch mark like an eye looking up at the boys.

Ida collapsed to her knees and gathered the ashes in her skirt.

The air thickened, humming with a sound no one could name.

Something had opened.

Not just in her.

Not just in the air.

But deep in the soil, like a mouth that had waited too long to speak.

Part 3: Appassimento (Withering)

The blackening started at the tips.

By morning, the hay behind the Veltri’s barn had browned into brittle stalks, singed as though touched by frost, though no frost had fallen. By noon, the withering had spread to the Corsi fields, then the Conti’s, then Ida’s own. Green drained from the land like lifeblood from a wound.

“They were full yesterday,” her brother muttered, staring out the window. “Tall as my shoulders.”

Now the hay bowed, low and lifeless, as if mourning something none of them could name.

By afternoon, the goats refused their feed. Chickens scattered from the trough. A donkey tied to the post at the edge of town began to wail, shrill and strange, until its owner dragged it away and crossed himself three times.

Then came the fever.

Carlo was the first. His mother found him at dawn, drenched in sweat, muttering through cracked lips. Something about “threads in the air” and “eyes in the grass.” He clawed at his chest and screamed when anyone tried to touch him.

Tommaso’s mother woke to the sound of gagging. She found her boy sitting upright in bed, trembling, with corn silk tangled on his tongue. He spat it onto the floor in long, golden strands. He didn’t know how it got there. He didn’t remember anything.

The priest stood at the pulpit that Sunday and blamed the sins of the town.

“Il demonio si niscónde nei disíi selvaggi,” he thundered. “The devil hides in wild desires. A seed planted in shadow cannot bear holy fruit.”

Some nodded. Others crossed themselves and looked away. A few looked towards Ida’s house.

Nonna Lisabetta stirred her coffee with the handle of a spoon and said nothing.

But as the wind picked up, dry, sour, and full of whispering seeds, she stepped to her door, watched the way the hay shifted like it was listening, and murmured under her breath, “La terra l’é viva…e l’ha sentíta, eccome.” The earth is alive, and it has heard her.

That evening, a boy trying to sneak a stone at Ida’s window found his shoes filled with beetles by morning.

No one dared go hear the rosemary wall.

And still, Ida did not cry.

–

Ida did not speak for three days.

Not to her brother, not to the goats, not even to Spighetta. Not at first. Her voice had curled inward, turned to ash. She walked barefoot through the fields in the full gold light of early morning, her feet, damp with dew, her face blank as clean stone.

Where she stepped, the grass yellowed, tips crisping overnight, blades aging like they’d skipped a season.

The villagers began calling her “la piccola strega” behind closed shutters.

The little witch.

But Ida didn’t hear them. Or maybe she did, and didn’t care.

She spent her hours at the rosemary wall, on her knees, gathering what remained of Spighetta: a scrap of scorched linen, two kernels still whole, and a length of thread, blackened but intact.

She rebuilt her slowly.

Instead of cloth from the laundry, she used bitter herbs. Rosemary, rue, wormwood. She crushed dried rose petals between her palms and packed them into Spighetta’s belly. She wrapped her arms in wild grapevine, binding the joints with red string pulled from the hem, of her own dress.

She whispered as she worked, low and steady, like a prayer sewn with spit.

By dusk, the doll sat upright in the cradle of two stones. Her new form was smaller, darker, twisted. Her head tilted slightly to one side, and her thread-scorched eye glistened with something that hadn’t been there before.

That night, Ida dreamed again.

But this time, it wasn’t the woman in the shawl. It was Spighetta who stood before her in the field. Not doll-sized, girl-sized, with limbs of straw and skin of split bark, her mouth stitched shut and yet whispering.

“Feed the roots,” she said, her voice a rustle.

“Let them drink.”

Ida nodded in the dream, and when she woke, her fingertips were stained green. Her window, though latched, had leaves caught in the corners.

She barely spoke. Her gaze no longer darted like a child’s. It held steady, like something watching from under the earth. When her brother looked at her across the hearth, he flinched without knowing why.

Vines crept through the church floorboards, up the iron bell chain, and coiled across the panificio’s locked door, spiraling like they were thinking.

Shadows stretched at the wrong time of day. Long fingers at dawn, or curling shapes at noon when nothing should cast shade.

Ida walked barefoot, always.

When the priest passed her on the road and muttered a blessing, the vines around the chapel gutter turned brown overnight. The next morning, someone had scratched a circle into the wood of his door. No one knew who. Or everyone did.

Part 4: Scontro (Confrontation)

It began with the ringing of the bell at the wrong hour.

Il tocco, meant for the dead, was sounded at midday. The townspeople paused, tools in hand, sweat clinging to their backs. When they looked toward the chapel, they saw the priest already standing on the steps, arms outstretched, cassock clinging to him like ash.

“She walks with the devil now,” he cried. “And the land walks with her.”

No one spoke. But heads turned. Eyes narrowed. The wind didn’t move, but dust curled on the ground like it was listening.

“She must be removed. Adesso. Before she drags us all to ruin.”

By evening, a small crowd had gathered at the edge of Ida’s home. Men with blisters on their palms and hate in their eyes. Women clutching rosaries, fingers white around the beads. They didn’t look angry. They looked tired.

Lisabetta watched from her doorstep, stirring nothing.

They knocked. Then pounded. Then shouted for Ida’s brother to come out. He did.

Shirt unbuttoned, hair unwashed, a smudge of ash on his neck like a bruise. He looked out at them and said nothing for a long while.

“She’s my sister,” he said at last.

“And?” someone spat. “What’s she turned into?”

“She doesn’t talk anymore,” another added. “Doesn’t eat. The ground rots around her feet.”

The priest stepped forward. “You must cast her out, or the church will do it for you.”

The brother looked back toward the darkened house, then down at his hands.

“I’m tired,” he muttered. “Tired of this whole cursed place.”

He closed the door.

Ida wasn’t inside.

She had seen the crowd before they saw her and vanished into the field where the grass still grew thick and high, the way it had before it turned black.

She knelt there now, hidden between the stalks, her arms wrapped around Spighetta. Her breathing was slow. Calm. The air around her pulsed.

And then the land rose.

Not upwards, but outwards. Like a breath. A long exhale from the belly of the earth. The grass bent inward in a ring around her. The wind turned sharp, slicing through the stalks like knives made of hay. Men dropped their torches as flames flickered sideways, then died altogether.

Someone screamed.

Vines erupted from the ground, thick and green and angry. They wrapped around ankles, dragged shoes from feet, climbed up trouser legs with thorns sharp as sewing needles. One man fell. Another tried to run and was swallowed by a wall of corn that hadn’t existed a moment before.

The priest opened his mouth, but what came out was not Latin.

It was a whisper. And then another.

A dozen voices in a dozen tongues, crawling through the air like fog.

They all heard them. Words not meant for human ears, but for soil, and bone, and seed.

At the chapel, the Virgin’s statue cried.

Not water.

Not oil.

But black, viscous tears that slid down her porcelain cheeks and pooled at her feet.

The next morning, the statue’s head was turned. No one could say who moved it. No one admitted to cleaning the floor.

And Ida’s brother, now silent like her, boarded up the windows of their house.

–

The wind had gone still.

After the night of the weeping Virgin and the vine-stung men, the town moved carefully. No one walked past Ida’s field. The well was visited only at dawn, and even then, with muttered prayers and quick steps. The church stood empty, its bell rope wrapped in hawthorn thorns no one confessed to tying.

Lisabetta waited.

She watched from behind her lace curtains as Ida slipped between the hay rows each morning, barefoot and hollow-eyed. The girl no longer looked like a child. Her limbs remained small, her dress loose at the shoulders, but something in her movement had changed. Measured, like ritual. Rooted, like oak.

When Lisabetta came, she came with nothing in her hands.

No cross. No candle. Just her voice and a bundle of herbs tucked into her pocket.

She found Ida crouched beneath the rosemary wall, Spighetta cradled in her lap, newly re-wrapped in silkweed and stitched with rose thorns. The girl looked up, and for a moment, neither moved.

“You’ve called her back well,” Lisabetta said at last.

Ida said nothing. Her eyes, glass-dark, searched the old woman’s face.

Lisabetta did not flinch. “I’ve seen her before. Not the doll. Her. The one that listens. Long ago.”

A breeze stirred, and the rosemary released its scent. Ida blinked.

“Do you know what she wants?” Lisabetta asked gently.

Ida glanced down at Spighetta. “To stay with me.”

Lisabetta nodded slowly. “Yes. And no. She wants what you want: to be remembered. To be held.”

She crouched beside the girl, groaning softly as her knees popped beneath her skirt.

“But she’s too full now, piccina. She’s holding not just your grief, but theirs too. All the hurt in this place that no one else would touch. You gave her a heart, and the land gave her a mouth.”

Ida clutched the doll tighter.

“I won’t let them take her.”

Lisabetta shook her head. “They don’t have to. But you can give her back. Not in fear. Not like before. With kindness. The kind that grows things.”

She reached into her pocket and drew out a bundle of herbs. Lavender, marjoram, rue, and one perfect sprig of corn silk. She set them on the stone.

“A replanting,” she said. “You bury her with a ribbon from your hair, and something she never had. A seed not soaked in sorrow.”

Ida looked down.

After a long silence, she pulled a small braid from behind her ear and unwound it, laying the dark ribbon of hair across the herbs. Then, with trembling hands, she pressed a kiss to Spighetta’s head and laid her into the cradle of earth between the stones.

They dug in silence.

They covered the doll with soil, then herbs, then a flat stone with the shape of an open palm. Lisabetta murmured words too old for the church to know.

And the wind returned.

Soft this time. Sweet. A wind that turned the hay in gentle waves instead of blades. A wind that smelled of wild fennel and bread.

Ida closed her eyes.

The land exhaled.

Part 5: Fioritura (Blooming)

It happened without a word.

At first light, while the town still slept under blankets damp with spring fog, Ida walked alone to the place where the land had once opened its mouth.

Her feet made no sound in the damp grass. The field no longer bowed to her, but it didn’t resist either. It welcomed her now. Not as a girl possessed, but as something known. Something named.

At the rosemary wall, she knelt in the spot she and Lisabetta had marked. The stone still bore the look of an open palm, now dark with dew.

Ida pulled from her pocket three things.

Her favorite ribbon, sky blue and worn at the edges.

A lock of her hair, soft and brown and still smelling faintly of rosewater.

And her mother’s song, carried only in her throat and memory.

She placed the ribbon gently on the stone. Set the hair beside it. Then folded her hands and sang.

The tune wavered at first, like a candle too close to breath. But as she sang, it steadied. It swelled. The notes were plain, no more than a cradle-hymn sing in a dialect barely remembered. But they reached the soil, and the soil listened.

The first drop of rain fell just as her voice trailed off.

Not a storm. Not punishment. Just rain.

Clean. Kind. Persistent.

The stone darkened. The earth drank.

Ida sat back and watched the ground glisten. For a moment, she thought she saw something stir beneath it. Not a hand, not a face, but a tremble. A thank-you. A closing eye.

In the days that followed, the land greened.

Not all at once. Not in a miracle. But the hay behind the barn began to rise again, blade by blade. The Veltri goat bleated at its trough. The fever left Carlo in a slow sweat one night, and he woke hungry.

No one spoke of the statue anymore, but someone left wildflowers at her feet.

The town breathed again, though it had learned to breathe differently. With pause. With reverence.

Ida’s brother, older now in spirit, began to speak with her again. Awkwardly. A spoon left beside her bread. A new button to sew onto her dress. Small things. Unspoken apologies, offered in stitches.

Lisabetta walked by the field each morning, nodding once when she saw the patch where the rosemary grew taller than the rest.

No one forgot.

They didn’t say her name in the streets, not often. But at harvest, they began leaving the first bundle of hay at the edge of the wall.

Just in case.

Just in thanks.

For the girl who once grew grief into green.

Epilogue

The fields are never silent anymore.

Even on still mornings, when mist clings low to the hills and not a bird stirs, the wind moves. It speaks in the rustle of hay, in the hush of rosemary branches, in the soft crackle of soil settling into itself. The land remembers.

Ida walks home alone now, taller, steadier. She no longer speaks to Spighetta. The doll is gone, returned to the roots, but she keeps a sprig of corn silk tied around her wrist, pale gold and graying at the edges. A promise. A thread.

Each spring, she returns to the field.

She walks its border barefoot, stepping lightly between furrows. She pauses at the rosemary wall, kneels where the cradle stones once sat, and places her palm flat against the earth.

She listens.

Sometimes there’s only silence.

Other times, the wind sighs against her ear like a mother humming. And that is enough.

The town speaks of her gently now. Not with fear. Not quite with reverence. Something in between. They hold a small harvest festival each autumn, just after the first cut of hay.

There are no fireworks. No speeches.

Just food, and music, and laughter that doesn’t feel borrowed.

And always, without fail, someone walks to the edge of the field, where the grass grows a little taller, a little greener, and leaves the first bundle of hay.

They do not mark it with a cross.

They do not say her name.

But it is left for her.

Or for the spirit.

Or for whatever part of the earth once bloomed because a girl sang into the soil until it bloomed with memory.

Bio:

Mia Baldanzi Germain was born in the U.S. to a Tuscan mother from Pistoia and a father of Italian descent from San Gimignano. Raised speaking only Italian, in school she developed a deep curiosity for language that led to a BFA in Writing, Literature, and Publishing from Emerson College, professional coursework at Harvard Business School, and a career in creative advertising. Her work explores heritage, grief, and magic with lyricism and depth.