50. Halfway
Halfway
Kain rode home from the Kettle with Sasha's stew sitting heavy under his ribs and the picture of the boy's first walk laid down behind his eyes. He slept hard that night, and when he woke up the gray was already thinning at the window, and the work was waiting on him.
The Guild's letter was on the road by now, or it would be soon, and there was no telling for sure which.
Sam had said two weeks at the earliest and three at the more likely, and Kain had no intention of running the calendar in his head every morning until the rider came up the lane with the answer.
The Guild took the time the Guild took. He had work that didn't need a letter to get done.
Ghost was at the hearth when Kain came down the stair, and at the back door when he went out, and in the corner of the garden a beat later, lying among the late tomatoes with the one good eye fixed on the road north.
The wolf had been that way for a stretch of weeks now, watching the country up there even when nothing was on it.
Kain had given up wondering whether Ghost knew something he didn't or whether the wolf had only picked up the unease off the man.
The garden looked worked. The potatoes were down the road already, gone with Oren's uncle and the cart, and the herbs cycled through their cuts on a schedule the plants themselves seemed to keep better than Kain did.
A fresh row of tomatoes was reddening on the late vines, and the green beans had thrown their first flowers at the joints of the canes, and the soil in the expansion plots was a different soil now than the one he had broken out with the mattock back in the spring.
The pumpkins were the surprise.
Of the three female flowers Kain had brushed with the male pollen back when Jeremiah had let slip how it was done, one had set.
The other two had withered on the vine and dropped without ever swelling at the base.
The one that had taken sat at the joint of the third hill at the size of a gold coin, the dead flower still clinging to the end of it like a small brown banner, and it wasn't a pumpkin yet so much as it was the start of one.
He had checked it every morning for the past week, watering on Jeremiah's schedule of every third day and keeping his hands off the young fruit so the skin wouldn't bruise.
「Field Status Report (Mid-Season)」
「Plots Active: 10 | Soil Quality: Fair → Improving」
「Pumpkin (White Skeleton): Set, fist-coin size」
「Herbs (cold frame): Sage, Thyme, Rosemary, Mint, Basil (operational)」
The autumn festival was twelve weeks off, and if the weather held and nothing came along to flatten it, the pumpkin would be the size of his fist by then and the size of a man's head a few weeks past that.
He meant to enter it. The last one had taken a streak of orange across the rind and the judges had thrown it out of the white class, and that had been the end of it. This one he wanted clean.
When the morning's work in the garden was done he went around to the side of the barn, where he had set out the lumber for the cold frame the night before.
The idea had come to him at the table with the herb jars in front of him, the cold of the coming autumn already in his head and the months stretching out ahead in the planning.
Mark had mentioned cold frames once, on a road south of Greyhaven, drawing one in the dust with the end of a stick while the company waited on a wagon-wheel to get its new spoke set.
Sun goes in and stays in, Mark had said.
Cold goes around the box and not through it.
You get another month of growing out the back end of the year, and a man with the time to build one has it ahead of a man who doesn't.
Kain had had no use for a cold frame at the time. He had use for one now.
A frame over the herb-bed in October might get him a half-harvest he wouldn't otherwise have.
The lavender wouldn't winter under glass, but the rosemary and the thyme might hold a stretch longer, and the parsley a stretch longer than that.
He had no real way to know until he tried it, and Mark had spoken with such certainty in the dust that the doubt seemed misplaced.
The glass had come from Sam at the back of the store.
A wagon out of Greyhaven had brought a load of it in for the brewery on the north side of town, and three of the lights had cracked at the corners on the road.
Garland the smith hadn't been able to use them for the brewery windows, and Sam had bought the lot at a discount, and Kain had bought four of the cracked ones at a discount on the discount.
The glass-cutter Sam had loaned him out against the return of it intact sat on the shelf in the barn alongside a pencil and a square.
Scrap lumber from last fall's loft-floor project was stacked at the side of the barn.
Uprights at two feet apiece, cross-pieces between one and three depending on the run.
Square came out, saw came out, pencil came out, and the shape of Mark's box in the dust came back to him while he had the tools in his hands to make it with.
Carol rode up the lane in the cool of the afternoon.
She swung down at the rail and went first to the paddock, where she ran her hand along Roan's neck the long way the gelding liked, and the gelding leaned into the motion the way he leaned into Carol's hands and only Carol's.
The visit to the horse had been an excuse for weeks now, and neither of them said anything about it, and Kain had begun to wonder whether either of them remembered when it had stopped being one.
She came across the yard to the side of the barn and crouched at the lumber.
"What's the project?"
"Cold frame."
She looked at the cut pieces and at the sketch he had drawn in pencil on the back side of a feed-bag.
"There are a few of these in town. The McGraths have one. Mrs. Dennison had one before the wind took it the winter before last." She tapped the sketch with a fingernail. "I've thought about building one for ours. We've never had a big enough herb-bed to make it worth the glass."
"You can help me on this one," Kain said.
"I was going to."
The work went faster with Carol on the other end of the measuring tape.
She marked the runs ahead of him with the kind of clean economical pencil-work he had only ever seen out of a person who had been doing it since she was a girl, and the marks came down true and stayed true.
The saw went through the lines without the corrections he had to make when he laid the marks himself.
He had a half-thought about wanting that skill of his own one day, and the half-thought passed.
Mark's way of saying it came back to him. A man got a thing by doing the thing until the thing was the man's.
They got the pieces cut out and laid in their places on the ground. Kain took up the square and set the first corner. The tool was a triangle of metal that someone had named a square in some old country and never bothered to rename, and he had long since stopped wondering about it.
Carol picked up the hammer. Her hand drove the nail home in two strokes, and Kain held the next joint at the right angle, and the hammer came down again, and the next joint held.
Two strokes. Two strokes. Two strokes. The rhythm of the work was a rhythm she set, and he didn't have to be the one keeping it.
They got the first ring of joints in with one nail at each.
The square came back through, the small twist on the long side got corrected, and the second round of nails went in.
The frame stood on its corners at the end of it with the four uprights true to one another and the four cross-pieces lying square at the bottom.
Half a cold frame, ready for the glass.
Carol set the hammer down and stood up to stretch.
"What were you going to do for dinner?"
"Hadn't got that far."
"Men." She shook her head. "You'd run on a strip of jerky and a tomato if you thought you could."
"I probably would. With a piece of bread if there was bread."
"There's bread. I brought it."
"Then I was always going to be all right," Kain said, and almost smiled at it.
Carol gave him the half-laugh she gave him these days, the one that ran a beat and stopped, and went to the porch where she had set the basket down on the way to the paddock.
She brought it inside and laid the loaf out on the kitchen table next to a small wrapped piece of ham and a knife, and the knife went into Kain's hand without her saying anything about it.
"Slice that. Two thick to a man."
The skillet came down off the rack and the butter went into the skillet, and Carol moved through the kitchen the careful way a woman moved through a kitchen that wasn't hers, putting things back where she had found them.
The ham went into the butter and started to brown.
She cracked two eggs into the pan a beat after the ham, and then she went to the small spice tin Kain kept on the counter, opened it, took the measure of what was in it, and took down salt and pepper and sage. A pinch of sugar went in last.
Kain raised an eyebrow at the sugar.
"Sugar."
"A pinch. Not enough to taste as sweet. Enough to know it's there. My mother's trick. The first recipe I learned off her." She said it.
Kain finished slicing the bread without looking up at her. He laid the four slices on the board. The ham and the egg came out of the pan in two pieces, and each piece went between two slices of bread.
"Outside."
"Outside," Carol agreed, and carried the plates out to the porch.
Two chairs on the porch. The sun coming down the long slow way it came down at the end of a summer day in Tillamore.
The plates on their knees, and the pickles Carol had brought up a few visits back in a small jar between them, and Ghost at the corner of the porch with its chin on its paws and the one eye on the road. They ate without talking for a stretch.
Jeremiah went past on the road on his way home from the Kettle and lifted a hand, and Kain and Carol both lifted a hand back.
A pair of merchants of one stripe or another went past after Jeremiah and neither of them looked up at the porch.
The sun got lower, and the light on the porch went the color of a good brass kettle.
The sandwich was the best Kain had eaten in some time, and he said so.
"Anything tastes good after a day in the dirt," Carol said. She had eaten hers in eight bites and set the plate on the boards beside her chair. "My father used to say the dirt was the only spice that worked on every meal."
"He'd have got along with Mark."
"He'd have got along with anybody who had a use for a shovel.
" She turned the look on him then. "I'll be heading on after this.
My father's been saying he doesn't want me out after dark anymore.
I told him I'm not a girl of twelve, and he gave me a look that said he'd heard the news and it hadn't changed his mind any. "
She let that sit a beat.
"You wouldn't know anything about that."
Kain let his head fall a beat. The evening had been the kind of evening a man wanted to keep. The part of him that wanted to keep it had its turn at the front of his mouth and lost it to the part of him that knew Carol the way Carol had been knowing him.
"There's a piece of something."
"You'll tell me."
"I'll tell you what I can. The honest of it is more of what I don't know than what I do. There's a thing out in the country that wasn't there before the spring. Sam and your father and I are working on it. We'll know more when the Guild writes back."
"The Guild."
"The regional office in Greyhaven. Sam sent a letter when we knew enough to send one."
Carol sat with it a beat.
"You haven't told me more because you don't want me afraid of it."
"I haven't told you more because I don't know more. If I knew more I'd weigh up the telling against the not telling. As it stands the not telling was the only thing I had to give."
"I don't scare easy," Carol said.
"I know it."
She looked at him a long beat, and the light on the porch had gone the color of an old penny, and somewhere in the trees a crow called once and went quiet.
"Don't think of me as a thing to be kept clear of the bad weather, Kain."
"I don't. If I did I wouldn't have told you the piece of it I just told you. I'd have told you everything was fine and put a smile on it."
"You wouldn't have got the smile right."
"I wouldn't."
The half-laugh came again, short, looking out at the field and not at him.
She stood up and gathered the plates and went back into the kitchen, and came out a beat later with the basket on her arm. At the top of the porch steps she stopped. Her mouth opened on a thing. The thing held in her throat. The thing didn't come out. The mouth closed on it.
"Tomorrow," she said instead.
"Tomorrow."
She went down the steps to the rail and up onto the mare and rode out the lane at the easy walk a woman rode out at when the ride was one she had done a hundred times and the place she was riding to was the place her father was keeping a lamp on for her in the kitchen window.
Kain stayed on the porch until the bend in the road took her out of sight.
The cold frame stood at the side of the barn half-built and waited.
He went out to it once the light had thinned past working, put the tools in the toolbag and the toolbag on its peg in the barn, and went back inside.
Ghost came in behind him and went to the hearth, and the fire was banked low, and the kitchen smelled of butter and ham and the pinch of sugar that wasn't enough to taste as sweet.
He sat at the table and worked through the sketch one more time, marking where the second ring of cross-pieces would set and where the glass would land and where the hinge would catch when it came time to put the lid on.
The line of the pencil was a steady line.
Tomorrow would come. The Guild's letter would come or it wouldn't. The pumpkin would swell or it wouldn't. The cold frame would finish on its own time.
He set the pencil down and went to bed.