20. Hard Ground
Hard Ground
Hard Ground
The festival ran on past dark, the fires lit and the fiddle going and folk dancing in the square, and Kain rode home late with his saddlebags full.
He stacked the day's haul on the counter, more than he had ever carried home from a market in his life, and was asleep almost as soon as he lay down and didn't stir again until morning.
When he woke, the sun was already up and coming through the window, which hadn't happened in a long while. He wasn't one for sleeping past the dawn, and the rare time he did, it left him a step out of place with the day.
He stretched the stiffness out of his back and went through to the kitchen.
His takings from the festival still sat where he had left them on the counter. A blueberry pie from Mrs. McGrath, a handful of Elizabeth's tarts, three jars of Carol's jam, a smoked ham, a few loaves of bread, and a wedge or two of cheese.
The three jars wanted some explaining; he had tried to pay Carol for a second after she gave him the first, and instead of taking his coin she had pressed two more into his hands.
He put it all away, keeping in mind what would turn first, and made his breakfast off a cut of the ham, a chunk of cheese, and a slice of the pie.
Out in the garden, Ghost paced the edge of the rows, watching for anything that might trouble the new plants. Kain stood and watched the wolf a moment, then ran his eye over the beds.
The onions had broken the soil, their first leaves coming up thin and spear-like.
The pumpkins had sprouted, though they had barely cleared an inch.
The potatoes showed pale shoots down a long row, and the herb bed had come up uneven, thyme and oregano putting out their first leaves while the rosemary and parsley were still taking their time.
He went out to the barn and turned Roan into the small field beside it. The horse threw his head up and broke into a canter, running the length of the enclosure and back, around and around.
Kain had finished the fence before the festival, the full three-rail run Jeremiah had laid out for him, set stout enough to hold when Roan threw his weight against it.
A track was already wearing into the ground where the horse ran his circles.
Carol had been right about him; he had no patience at all for standing still.
The garden needed no water yet, so he carried his shovel to the two new plots at the end of the row, what would be Plot 9 and Plot 10. He had broken out Plot 7 and Plot 8 already and left these last two untouched, and there was no putting them off any longer.
He set the blade to the ground and started in.
Breaking out the first two had been hard work, and these were worse. He went around the same as before, prying the larger stones loose and shoving them aside, stacking them in a line along the stone fence.
The pile grew as he worked, and he reckoned he would soon have enough to make another go at the front wall.
With the stones he could see pulled clear, he set to turning the ground, driving the shovel in, turning it over, driving it in again, and the soil came up hard and grudging, the blade biting only a couple of inches at a time.
Before long it struck something solid, and he scraped the dirt back to find a smooth white face looking up at him out of the earth.
He dug around it and worked it loose, and it took a fair bit of prying before it came free, a slab near two feet long and a hand thick. It was smoother than any field stone had a right to be, the face of it almost flat under the dirt.
He turned it over once in his hands, found nothing to make of it, and set it with the rest. Then he took up the shovel and went back to the ground.
He went on striking stone every foot or two. The ground was full of them, and where there were no big ones the shovel ground against gravel and smaller chunks.
He knew he was battering the edge of the blade and there was nothing for it, so he kept on.
He dug and turned and hauled rock until the morning was gone, and it had got him only through the first layer of Plot 9, with Plot 10 not even started. He stood and looked back over the broken ground.
The note in Mark's guide said to till it once and then go over it again, the line he had set down in his own hand by the fire, so he went back to where he had begun and put the shovel in once more.
The second pass went down barely four inches, the ground still hard and full of stone no bigger than a fingernail, too small to pick out and big enough to fight him the whole way. He worked it over and over and felt it loosen by degrees, but there was a long way still to go.
So he went back to the barn and brought out the mattock.
The mattock did what the shovel couldn't. He swung it up and brought it down, and the point split the packed ground deep, and he wrenched it free and swung again.
It was harder work than the shovel and twice as useful, and his shoulders soon felt every swing of it.
Ghost lay in the old garden between the rows of tomato plants, its one eye following him from the work to the tree line and back, and but for a rabbit or two it rose to chase, it kept to that spot the whole day.
He worked the mattock the rest of the day, breaking up the last of Plot 9 and then starting in on Plot 10. He let the turning and the tilling of Plot 10 wait for the morning, wanting only to get the ground broken open while the light held.
By the time he stood up from the last of it his arms had gone to lead and his legs had little left under them, but the breaking was done, and the day had gone to evening around him.
He was filthy with sweat and dirt, so he trudged off through the trees to the swimming hole, where he sluiced the grime off himself in the cold water with no soap to speak of.
Back at the house he dripped a trail across the floor as he toweled dry, knowing it would dry soon enough, then built a fire in the hearth and set about getting himself some supper.
He had worked clean through the noon meal without noticing, and he was hollow with hunger now. He piled a plate with ham and bread spread thick with Carol's jam and a good wedge of cheese, and carried it through to sit by the fire.
The flames felt good as the night cooled, for the spring days ran warm by noon, but the dark still came on cold.
A thunk came at the back door, and Ghost let itself in. It crossed to the hearth and lay down, lifting its one eye toward Kain, and he tossed it a strip of the ham before he leaned back in the chair.
His whole body ached, and the ache sat easy on him. He finished the plate, washed up in a bucket of soapy water, and stood a while at the back door, looking out at the dark shapes of the garden and the barn and the new ground broken and waiting on the morning.
Then he shut the door and went to his bed.