46. The Floor
The Floor
The morning came up clear and the body felt finished with hurting.
Kain rolled out of the bed and stood up the rest of the way. The left arm went up as high as the right.
The ribs gave at the bend instead of catching the way they'd given for a long string of weeks. He turned the shoulder a full slow circle and the shoulder didn't tell him anything about it.
Out in the front room Ghost was at the hearth, not at the bedroom doorway. The wolf had moved back to the old place a few days back, on its own time, without making a thing of it.
Kain hadn't made a thing of it either. Ghost chose its own corner, and coming back to the hearth was its way of telling him a piece of news without telling it.
Eggs went into the pan. The pan went onto the stove. Breakfast was breakfast.
Out the back door Ghost slipped without being looked at, and was gone before the eggs had set.
When Kain came down the back step with the plate in his good hand, the wolf was crossing back from the trees with a rabbit in its mouth. It lay down by the potatoes with the rabbit between its forepaws and went to work on it.
Kain looked at the wolf without making anything of it. "Time to work."
The potatoes had pushed up at the tops of their rows. Kain knelt at the first row with the spade in his good hand.
The spade went in and the dirt came up over the first plant in a half-moon, and the next plant, and the next, working slow along the row.
His ribs gave a small protest at the bend and then steadied to it. A man could crouch now without his side telling him the cost of every breath.
He worked the row.
A shallow trough went down the middle of the row as he went, cut a finger deep for the rain to run. Near the end of the first row, the trough wrapped around the corner and into the second row.
It was a small thing. It might do nothing. It might catch a rain that would otherwise wash out the new mounds.
There was the one way to find out about it.
Down the second row the work went the same as the first. The good hand did the spade. The bad shoulder held the steady.
The dirt smelled of cold water and old roots. Birds came down to the edge of the garden and worked at what the spade had turned up.
A crow stood on the post by the road and watched the whole thing as if he had been hired to.
By the time the last potato was hilled the sun was past the barn roof. The smell of fresh dirt was in his clothes.
Kain stood up slow and dusted the spade against the side of his trouser.
The herb bed was the next thing.
Oregano had come up tall enough to give a long stem now, where two months back it wouldn't have given a leaf. Rosemary the same. Lavender the same.
Thyme had come into its season since the last picking and stood ready. Parsley he never had much use for, and he cut it anyway because the season said so.
Jars filled at his hip as he worked the bed end to end, two stems here, a small bundle there, with the smell of the cut leaves coming up off the soil and into the warm air.
The harvest had gone bigger than the kitchen would ever take. Sam had said on the last walk into town that he'd buy the dried ones at a fair rate.
Lavender went fast off Sam's shelf. Rosemary went fast. The thyme would go too once enough of it was dry.
Whatever the kitchen didn't take would go into the tomato box for Oren and come back in copper.
At the corner of the bed he looked over what was left in the rows and what was coming on. The second tomato planting had come in. The late onions had come in.
The thinning could wait a few days more. Heat was being used by the plants.
The pumpkin vines were a different matter.
From the three hills he had set in the spring the runners had gone out across plot six and across the path and were beginning to climb the fence wire at the edge of the trees. A vine left to itself would shade out whatever was under it.
Kain went along the runners in his good hand, lifting them off the path, turning them where they'd been going wrong, laying them where they wouldn't choke out the rows.
The long ones went out into the yard. The next set ran along the fence. Cutting came later if it came at all, and cutting was always the last thing.
Three of the female flowers were open at the third hill.
Jeremiah had said in passing, the spring before, that a man could put a brush to the male flower and then to the female and the fruit would set surer than waiting on the bees.
Kain had bought a small brush at Sam's on the last walk into town and hadn't yet had three open females at the same time to use it on.
Back in the house the brush was on the kitchen shelf. He brought it out.
Male flowers stood straight up on thin stems with no fruit behind them. Females had the small swelling at the base that would be the pumpkin if everything went.
Pollen came off the male onto the brush with the smallest touch. He walked the brush to the first female, laid the pollen in, and stepped to the next, and the next.
All three got the morning's work. The brush went back into the house. The vines went where Kain had set them.
Lunch was bread and cheese and the rest of last night's stew. The bench at the back door took the shade in midday.
Ghost lay at the corner of the porch where Ghost had taken to lying when the sun was up.
When the bowl was empty Kain set it on the bench and looked at the barn.
The barn loft floor was the work of the afternoon.
Up the loft stairs the left leg gave a soft protest at the third tread and let it go by the fifth. At the top he stood and counted the boards in the pile by the gable.
Four. Then a floor. Then the loft was a loft.
He had come up here once before, a stretch of days back, when the shoulder said it was ready and the rest of him wasn't so sure.
A board had gone down. The hammer had come up. The hammer had come down.
The jolt had gone straight up the arm and into the ribs and the ribs had told him in plain language to go back down the stairs and find something else to do. He had gone back down.
Today the first board was already where the last attempt had left it. The pile by the gable was four boards of pine he had bought from Sam in the late spring, a stack he had been climbing past every time he came up here and pretended not to see.
Kain took the measure off the gap in the floor and went to the pile and laid the measure across the top board. He marked the cut with the carpenter pencil from his belt. The saw came off the peg by the door.
The saw whined and the dust came up off the board. He braced with the bad shoulder and held with the good and the board parted clean.
The first nail went in.
Hammer to nail, nail to wood, the jolt going up the arm. The jolt traveled into the ribs and stopped there.
The ribs noted it without writing him up for it.
Kain sat back on his heels a beat and waited for the ribs to file something else. They didn't.
The pain that had come up the arm settled back down the arm. The ribs had done their job. The ribs were now done with it.
So that was that.
Measure. Cut. Hammer. Board down.
The work was slower than the work had been a year before, and it was slower than the work would be a year on.
The work went.
Three boards left. Two boards. One board.
The sun was angling toward the trees by the time the last board lay where it belonged. Three nails went in clean.
The fourth nail Kain held to the wood and stopped.
How long. Since the thaw of his first spring, the loft floor had had the hole in it.
He had come down from the road with a brother's farm and a list and a year that had ended in funeral fire, and the floor of the loft had been on the list.
The list had gone through every season. The list had outlived the wolves and the wyvern and the gryphon. The loft floor had outlived everything else on the list.
The nail went in.
The hammer set down beside it.
A floor was a floor.
Kain stood up off his heels and bounced on the new boards once, and a second time, listening for any sound that wasn't the sound a good floor makes. The boards held without comment.
He walked the length of the new section, slow, then the breadth of it. The boards held under his weight without give.
He stepped to the middle of the loft and jumped.
Both feet came down planted. The ribs filed a complaint that would arrive in the morning. He didn't care.
The floor was solid. The barn was a barn.
「Repair Complete: Loft Floor (full perimeter restored)」
「Barn: Good (was: Poor)」
Down out of the loft and back into the daylight, the doorway of the barn caught him a beat.
Hay smell. Horse smell. Barn-as-a-barn smell.
Dinner was simple bread and the last of the stew and a sliced tomato off the second planting. On a thought of his own he carried the plate out and ate it on the front porch.
The chair Carol had taken on her last visit was still where she had pushed it back. He didn't move it.
Roan went back and forth in the paddock the way Roan did in the cool of the evening. The bats were already up. Insects came to the porch lamp where the warm of it was just starting to call them in.
Ghost lay on the lawn with its chin on its paws and its one good eye on the road.
The work was the same it had been all that year. Nothing set the day apart. Nothing about it was special anymore.
Everything was back to normal.
That was the point.