Chapter 6
Six
Emotional hangovers were a thing.
Oaklin woke early the morning after the library incident with a fuzzy brain and sore body.
They’d finally managed to sleep—a lot—after an evening spent getting over the initial weirdness of laying in Granny’s old bed.
Eventually, they’d passed out, cozier than they’d been in years on a feather-stuffed mattress beneath a beautifully worked quilt.
Despite the sleep, though, they felt far from rested.
The flashbacks felt like they’d hollowed out Oaklin’s skull and refilled it with wool, leaving their mind sluggish and skittish.
The physical soreness was a surprise, at first; Lior’s healing magic had knitted any broken flesh or aching muscle.
Rather than a result of their fall to the cobblestones, the full-body aches felt like a physical processing of yesterday’s ugliness: the stress, grief, suspicion, paranoia, constant alertness, all lodged between Oaklin’s shoulder blades as a knot of unworkable tension.
The temptation to spend the entire day in bed was strong.
And yet, the room was on the eastern side of the house with a window directly facing the sunrise.
Maybe it was deliberate, to make sure the farmer sleeping within always woke with the dawn—though, truly, the roosters and guinea fowl did that well enough.
Or maybe whoever had built the house was a masochist and was still laughing from afar.
Wallowing with a pillow shoved over their head sounded not only satisfying but necessary, but the ghost’s words from the previous evening echoed in Oaklin’s mind:
You’re going to be okay, you know. Tomorrow, we start learning things that will help. The real work.
Oaklin would be okay. New life. New story. New Oaklin. But they’d have to work for it, and that meant getting up.
With the groan of a much older person, Oaklin rolled out of bed and into a moderately clean set of clothes, managing to consume their tea and scone before the ghostly drill sergeant appeared.
“You’re awake. Good,” the ghost said, sounding approving for once. “Today is your first lesson. Meet me out front.”
She disappeared, a void that was simply there one moment and gone the next, and Oaklin couldn’t even be annoyed by her brusqueness this time. Granny had their back. They took one last swallow of their tea and headed for the door.
It was time to actually farm this farm.
***
As soon as Oaklin stepped out the door, Daffodil came trotting up with a deep coughing bark of greeting. Pausing for an ear rub was mandatory, of course.
“Such a good girl, Dilly, yes you are, so good!” Oaklin cooed, reveling in velvet ears and terrible panting dog breath.
The ghost stood watching the interaction for a tense moment, hands wringing, then whirled around and started off through the fields without warning. Oaklin had to jog to catch up and hear the beginning of her lecture, Daffodil trotting at their heels.
“Most people hear springtime and think of planting seeds,” Granny began in a tight voice, her words coming fast. “And that’s absolutely true, but a good farmer and land steward knows it also means two other critical things. Do you know what they are?”
Oaklin paled. They weren’t aware there’d be a quiz.
Should they have studied? They’d really been hoping to have had some breakthrough memories of their childhood family farm by now.
Alas, Oaklin’s brain remained stubbornly indifferent to their needs.
They had plenty of frustratingly specific details, but in terms of useful information, an entire breakfast spent racking their brain had yielded less than a berry bush after a bird party.
The few unearthed memories were hazy at the edges and crystal clear right at the center, revealing gems such as measuring meticulous seed spacing, pulling weeds, and shoveling manure.
What were the specific weeds? Why the cow poop?
Oaklin’s brain felt like a hollowed-out tree full of nesting squirrels, and squirrels were no use for answering Granny’s question: What came in spring besides planting?
“Warm weather?” they ventured. “And…flowers?”
The ghost sighed her fake sigh.
“No.”
“Good try, though, right? Good effort?” Oaklin said with a grin, approximately seventy-five percent joking.
The ghost let that silence linger.
“So anyway,” she finally continued. “Spring actually means harvesting the last of the fall-planted crops, plus early foraging. You can start making a little money at the farmer’s market as early as this weekend…if you play your cards right.”
Oaklin perked up at that. “Wait, what? Really? Why didn’t you tell me earlier?”
The ghost waved a hand in a dismissive gesture.
“Knowing,” she said, echoing her mysterious awareness from the previous day. “Other things came first. Besides, one day’s delay won’t change anything. These early markets won’t make you a living, but they’ll keep you from starving.”
“Hey, I’ll absolutely take ‘not starving,’” Oaklin said. “Where do I start? I’m ready. Let’s do this.”
“We’ll start with the easy stuff,” she said, pointing to the barn. “There’s a big harvest basket with a pair of pruning shears hanging from a peg just inside the barn door. Grab that and let’s head to the south fields.”
Oaklin did as they were told, more energy in their step now that there was the possibility of non-starvation on the table.
They followed the ghost for several minutes with Daffodil at their side, out past the barn and through fields swaying with rye stalks.
“Cover crop” was the term their brain supplied, but sadly without any accompanying wisdom.
No matter; they would relearn that too, eventually.
A handful of cows and Oaklin’s friend Grumpy Horse grazed in a pasture off to their right, and the constant clucking of ranging chickens drifted on the breeze as they went.
Daffodil nudged them every so often as if to remind Oaklin she was there, adding her own soft noises to the soothing soundscape.
Finally, they arrived at a small field at the edge of the farm, near the border of a sprawling forest that stretched for miles beyond. The ghost stopped, and Oaklin stared at the field in disbelief.
“I had no idea there was another field all the way back here! And it’s…”
“Full of delicious spring crops, yes, and a bed of spring perennials,” the ghost said, managing to convey smugness with only tone of voice and body language.
“In this climate, I don’t normally recommend seeding things in autumn.
With vegetables, you’ll always have better germination rates by sowing in spring or starting in a greenhouse. ”
“Germination means sprouting, right?” Oaklin asked. Better to swallow their pride right from the start and make sure they truly understood. “Fewer things sprouted because the seeds had to sit there all winter?”
The ghost nodded. “Yes. But the upside of sowing seeds in the fall is that you’ll have spring crops sprouting the very second conditions are right.
It’s not usually worth the trade-off in wasted seed, and we often get surprise late frosts here, but I had a…
knowing that the farm would be worked this year and figured whoever moved in might need a jump start.
The same friend who took care of the place also planted the seeds. ”
Oaklin looked over the little field and admired the cheery fist-sized bunches of lettuce and spinach, the radishes just starting to push their shoulders through the soil, the baby kale, collards, and thin stalks of chives.
In the next field over, tiny slender stalks of asparagus poked through a heavy covering of straw, interspersed with tiny green bunches of brand-new strawberry leaves. Perennials coming back for a new year.
“I get that it’s nice to have a head start, but these still look so…small,” Oaklin said, vaguely deflated. “Can I really harvest any of this yet?”
“You can,” Granny said with confidence. “Fancy people will pay extra for baby greens, and those radishes will be grown enough in two days’ time, I’d bet.
The greens in the low tunnels behind you should be bigger, but those were a bit of an experiment.
I only have—had—just the one tunnel. The fabric is quite expensive, and finding, soaking, and bending the branches to form the hoops took quite a bit of time.
Still, cheaper than a whole greenhouse. I always wanted a greenhouse. ”
Granny’s voice went almost wistful at that last part.
Oaklin spun around, taking in the half-circle-shaped tunnel made of bent branches stuck in the ground with a long, woven wool cloth pulled over it.
They hadn’t been sure what it was on approach, but now took a peek underneath the fabric and found more greens as promised: a bit of everything growing in the dappled sun that filtered through the cloth, all of it just a little bigger than the others.
“So these sprouted sooner because the fabric kept them warmer?” Oaklin asked.
Granny nodded. “You can add bricks from your hearth at night to keep them even warmer too. Like I said, there’s not enough there to make you rich, but it’s a start. Also, you should eat some of this yourself. You can’t live on bread.”
“Oh, I definitely can. Watch me,” Oaklin said, already dreaming about some of Ryn’s herb bread for lunch.
“I don’t doubt you’ll try.”
“So the true purpose of your haunting is to lecture me about eating veggies?”
“Among other things,” the ghost said vaguely. “But honestly, have you ever eaten a vegetable you’ve grown yourself?”
Oaklin squeezed their eyes shut against the unexpected rush of sense memory the question brought—or rather, the deep sense of a void where memory should have been.
They’d been raised on fresh, homegrown produce.
They knew they had. But when they tried to remember the taste, or the faces of the people who’d served it to them…