53. Pulled
Pulled
The morning after the festival came on slow.
Kain's eyes opened. His stomach turned over once.
The turn wasn't a sick turn, but the kind of turn a stomach gave when it had been asked to hold more food in a day than it was built to hold, and the food was still there working its way through.
A merc's stomach didn't do well with a feast. A merc's stomach was set for what came after a day on the road, which was sometimes a bowl of stew and sometimes a piece of bread and sometimes nothing at all.
Ghost came into the room and looked up at Kain.
"I'm all right," Kain said. "Stomach's mad at me. I overpaid for the day."
The wolf cocked its head.
"I was being who they needed me to be. The plate at every table was the price."
Ghost considered that and turned and padded back out toward the hearth.
Kain swung his feet down and stood up. The kitchen had food piled on every clear surface.
Jeremiah had brought a wagon down the lane at the end of the day to cart the baskets home, and the pile was the result.
Loaves and slices and cheeses and the smoked sausages from the McGrath table and the jars of jam and the jars of pickles and a stack of small pies and a sack of apples a farmer had pressed on him at the end of the afternoon.
The pile would feed him through to the cold weather, and it would feed Ghost some of what the wolf wouldn't turn its nose up at.
He walked past the pile and out the back door without taking a piece. The garden was waiting.
The expansion plots had come on heavier than the home plot had come on at this time last year, and heavier than the home plot was coming on now.
That was the work he had laid down in Year One.
The soil along the expansion edges had been built up over the winter and the early spring with the amendments the flask's planting guide had laid out, and what Mark had said on the road south of Greyhaven about putting the manure under before the snow and not after, and what Jeremiah had said about lime where the soil was sour at the corner.
The work had gone in early and gone in deep.
The dirt under his boots was a different dirt from the dirt that had been there when he had come up the lane out of The Fist with Ghost behind him.
Year One had paid for the dirt. Year Two was the year the dirt paid back.
Kain took up the potato fork the McGraths had loaned him the morning before, and the first tuber came up the length of his hand. He held it, turned it over, weighed it. The first hill gave six. The second hill gave seven, with one as long as his forearm.
He worked down the row, and the fork went under, the hill came up, the dirt fell off, and the tubers came clean.
Most were big as a man's fist, some the size of two fists, and out of every hill, one or two were the size of a small loaf and the rest were the size of the smaller potatoes a man bought at market without remarking on the size.
Six to a hill on the bad hills, eight on the good.
He had thinned out of these rows through the season and sold the thinnings to Oren's uncle's cart along the road, but the thinnings had been the children of the rows. These were the parents.
He filled the first crate without working the second plot. He started in on the second plot and the second crate, and the dirt where his fork had been was turned and ready for what came next.
The crates were heavy when full. A loaded potato crate ran more than a hundred pounds, and a man knew what kind of pounds those were the moment he laid hand on the handle.
Kain set his back into the first one, walked it crab-fashion to the road, and set it down beside the collection box.
His ribs let him know they had been there.
The ribs were past the place where they could keep him from a load, but they weren't past the place where they had a comment to make about it.
Second crate. Same walk. Same comment from the ribs.
The collection box sat where it had sat for a season and a year and another season after that.
The box was wood-bound with iron at the corners, the lid latched, the slot cut for Sam's tally slip.
Kain dropped the latch open and set a small piece of paper inside with two crates marked on it.
Sam's wagon driver would mark in the count when he came past for the pickup, and the coin would come back in a tally at Sam's counter the next time Kain rode in. Kain set the latch back down.
「Collection: Potatoes (2 crates) marked for Sam's wagon」
The cold frame sat over the herb-bed where Kain and Carol had set it the week before.
The lid was open. The frame was a wood-and-glass box in service of the cold months not yet here, and the late-summer use of it was that it held the herb-bed in a frame that kept the rabbits out and the spring wind off the cuttings.
The plants had come on heavy at the bedside through the warm season, and Kain knelt at the edge of the frame and started the trim.
Sage. Thyme. Two kinds of mint Sam had pressed on him at planting time. Rosemary at the south end. The basil at the north end was last on the list, since the basil wouldn't make winter and the cut needed to go in before the cool nights took the leaves down.
He worked through the frame with shears Sam had loaned him out of the back of the store.
The cuttings went into a flat-bottomed basket by the side of the frame.
He sorted as he cut. Sage in its own piece of the basket.
Thyme in its own. Mints in their own. Rosemary in its own.
Basil in its own. A man could dry sage and thyme together if a man had to.
A man who had time to do the work right kept them apart and used them apart.
The cuttings filled the basket. Inside the house, he laid them out on the kitchen table, cut lengths of string off the spool Sam kept by the candles, and bound the bases of the cuttings in their kind.
Sage to sage. Thyme to thyme. He hung each bundle from a nail set into the rafter above the table.
He had set the nails in the spring with this work in mind, and the bundles hung in a row above the table.
The house took on the smell of the cuttings. Sage in the air. Thyme under the sage. Rosemary under the thyme. The mint was the thread that ran through all of it.
Ghost on the floor by the hearth sneezed once.
"You'll get used to it," Kain said. "It's the smell of the winter to come."
The wolf sneezed once more and put its head back down on its paws.
Back in the garden.
The onions had come on well. They were ready. The tops had bent the right way at the necks, and the shoulders had pushed up out of the soil.
Kain laid the potato fork down at the side of the row.
The fork was the wrong tool for an onion.
An onion gave to a hand if a man was patient with the hand.
Squatting at the first plant, he took the base of the green at the neck.
The heel of his free hand went against the dirt next to the bulb.
A rock forward, then back, then forward again, and the soil gave around the root, and the onion came up out of the bed clean of dirt and clean of the root collar.
The rest of the dirt shook off. The bulb went down on the row.
The bulb was the size of a small fist with the thumb out. The next was bigger. The one after that was the size of a man's closed fist.
A man liked his onions, was the plain truth of it.
The flavor of an onion in a pan was the flavor that made the rest of the food the rest of the food.
Kain liked the smell of a good onion under the knife on a board.
He worked the row carefully and laid each bulb on the dirt as he went, in the line they had grown in.
He worked the row and the row beside it and the row after that.
By the time the sun was a hand higher than it had been when he started, the third crate was full of the bulbs and there were still a dozen on the dirt of the row.
Six dozen counted out by the third crate.
A dozen more not yet counted on the row.
「Field Status Report」
「Potatoes: 2 crates (~220 lbs) | Crates at collection box」
「Onions: 84 bulbs | 12 on screens for curing」
「Tomatoes: late vines reddening」
「Pumpkin (White Skeleton): ~40 lbs, on hill, clean」
「Soil Quality: Improving」
The third crate went out to the road beside the two potato crates. The last dozen went to the barn.
Jeremiah had loaned Kain three flat woven screens out of his loft the week before, knowing the time would come.
Kain stacked the screens on the cross-pieces of the barn rafters where the air moved through the gap at the roofline, and laid the dozen out in a single layer with their necks bent the same way and their roots toward the wall.
Onions cured in two to three weeks at the air rate of a barn with the doors open in the afternoon.
Curing thickened the skin, and a well-cured onion kept through the winter into the spring, and an onion not cured rotted by the new year.
Kain didn't know the trick of when a man knew the curing was done.
He would ask Jeremiah the next time Jeremiah passed on the road, and Jeremiah would know it from a glance and a press of a thumb on the skin and would say so in three words that wouldn't mean what they sounded like they meant. Until then, the air would do the work.
There was one piece of the garden left to look at.
Kain walked the line of the back beds and came to the third hill at the corner. He stopped at the edge of the hill.
The pumpkin sat in the dirt.
Forty pounds at least. Maybe more.
The skin was the pale white of a thing not bled and not stained. The creases between the ribs ran a darker line. The skin was clean of orange entirely. Not a streak. Not a patch. Pure white through every face of it.
A purebred.
Kain set his hand on the skin. The skin was cool. The ridges ran under his palm. The weight of the thing held the dirt at the base. He took his hand off.
The pumpkin would keep growing for another stretch before the festival, and the weight on it would be heavier than the weight on it now.
Kain made up his mind to log the entry at Sam's the next time he rode in.
The festival was a stretch off yet, and the registry was a slip in a ledger, and the show was later.
The slip would put his name down on the entry list so the McGraths and the Dennisons and Mrs. Hollifield and whoever else meant to enter a pumpkin would know to do their work against a man who had a forty-pound white one already on the hill.
He stood up. The cold of the skin had come off on his hand. He wiped it off on his trouser leg.
The steps of the back porch were warm where the sun had been on the boards for an hour. Kain sat down on the second step from the top and rested his forearms on his knees.
The garden had become what his work had made it.
The expansion plots were turned and ready for the next round, the herb-bed was cut back inside the cold frame, the onions were on screens in the barn, the pumpkin was on its hill, the potatoes and the onion crates were out at the road beside the box.
The tomato vines at the far end of the back beds had a last round of fruit on them coming red, which would be the work of another morning.
Year One had been the year of putting the work down. Year Two was the year the work paid back.
The Roan account at the Martinsons' was square in spirit if not yet in coin, and Will had said so in his own way at the rail the day Roan had come home with him, and the bounty for the bird had set the rest of the line straight without Kain having to ride out a coin.
The coin from this pull wouldn't go to a debt.
It would go to the spool of string on Sam's shelf, to the box of nails next to the spool, to a new set of shears in the spring, to a load of oats Roan would take into the cold months, to the year to come.
Some of it would sit at Sam's counter against the day Kain would ride out to Sarah's mother's country and put the rest of the salvage into a house that was going to stand in her village for the kids who would have walked the road the Hands had walked.
Year Three was a piece of work he didn't have to plan today.
「Income: Gryphon Bounty 30s」
Today was the day of the pull.
The dirt was under his nails. The dirt was on his trouser legs. The smell of the herbs hung above the kitchen table, and the smell of the onions cured in the barn, and the smell of the soil he had turned that morning was on the air. He sat on the step and let the smells be the smells.
Ghost came around the corner of the house and lay down a step below Kain on the path. The wolf put its head down on its paws and the one good eye stayed open on the lane.
The day was good.