Harvesting wheat, and what it portends

I once read a short story by Ray Bradbury called The Scythe - each blade of wheat the narrator cut  represented a human life - I often thought of that huge wheat field, under a strange red sky - I saw in my dreams the wooden house, with its mansard roof - the blades of wheat rippled in the wind, forming unsettling patterns -

I was twelve or thirteen when I read the story - the anthology it came from was called The October Country - I bought the paperback secondhand, from a shop in Forton Road - the shop was a glorious treasure trove of junk - the proprietor crouched behind the counter - there were gas masks, old foreign coins, glinting radio valves, small towers of damp magazines - a skinny boy could dream of finding treasure there -

All of this came back to me - the story - the scent of the yellowed pages of the Ballantine paperback - the image of the wheat field - how I felt when I was reading the story - when I walked, before breakfast, down into Jane's garden -

There, just a few yards away from me, over the fence, was a field, full of wheat - not yet ripe, the green blades of wheat stirred in the warm breeze - there was a gnarled tree, blessed with new leaves, in the middle of the field - I could hear Aytin's dog, barking at a tractor -

I looked at the feathery blades of wheat, at their emerald stalks - wild grasses were mixed in with the wheat - I could see purple banners of wild sweet peas - I could hear birds singing - I was wearing a loose shirt and linen trousers -

I turned away before the patterns I saw forming had fixed their shapes - I thought of the carelessness of life, of its sweetness - I knew that if I turned around, I would see my story marked out there, in the bright green wheat -

In the evening, in another field nearby, a young boy drove a tractor, cutting the wheat - the fallen wheat lay in rows, like fallen people - I resolved that I must be brave -