A Knot in the Grain (16 page)

She was silent for a time after he had spoken, but she did not draw away as he expected. Her hands had gone around his neck while he spoke, and her head was again in the curve between his collarbone and jaw. At last she sighed and stepped back, and he dropped his hands instantly, but she just as quickly took them in her own, and looked into his face with her clear eyes and smiled. “It is very bad,” she said, “but not so bad as I expected—feared. For I do not have to leave you after all. I wish—I wish we had talked of this six months ago, for you are an escape for me, and I have never not known this, nor ignored that you are my father's age. But I was too afraid to tell you everything about me—and you have known that I did not tell you everything, and that is how this began.

“No,” she said, as he would have spoken. “No. I will not listen, for I know now what you would say, and I will not have it. We are both at fault, and we will work together to mend that fault; and after this we will tell each other—not everything, for who can tell everything even if they wished? Who can tell everything, even to oneself? Not I. But I have known there were important things I was not telling you, and we will make a vow, now, to tell each other everything we know to be important. And”—she laughed, a little, a poor sound compared with her usual laughter, but a laugh nonetheless—“and we will trust our own judgment about importance, for we have had a very hard lesson.”

She clasped their hands together tightly and said, “Promise. Promise me now, as I promise you, to tell you—tell you as much of everything as I can, and I will look into all the shadows that I can for things that need to be told, and perhaps I will even learn to ask you to help me to look for shadows. And there will be no shame between us about this, about what is important, about what shadows we fear—about those very things we most fear to tell each other. Promise.” And she shook their clasped hands.

“Coral—”

“Promise.”

And so he promised.

And then they went downstairs together, and ate a hasty breakfast, and went out to see what could be done, and to decide where to start.

Med went willingly. Pos, looking into his eyes before Med dropped his, saw something there that made him—for all the disaster around him—glad for the excuse to let him go, never having had any notion before this that such an excuse was wanted.

But Thwan would not leave. “I've known about Buttercup Hill,” he said, easily giving it the friendly name Coral had used in better times. “My father's father told stories of it too, Pos. It's a danger we live by, like a river that may flood. I can afford to work for no wages for a little while. I don't want much but work to do.” He paused, but Pos was thinking of likening Buttercup Hill to a river. Rivers did not only destroy, when they ran beyond their banks. Thwan went on, slowly: “Good work to do. And I'm too old to be finding another master. Even if one would have me, I'm used to doing things … the way of this farm.” He paused again. “I don't think what lives in Buttercup Hill means you to starve, and starving is the only thing that frightens me.”

Pos looked at his old friend half in dismay and half in delight. He had not told him why the buttercups had flooded the farm; only Coral need know that. He would find something for Thwan to do at the other end of the farm while he hammered Bel's shoes back on; Thwan would not ask for an explanation, but Pos would know he was not offering one. That easily he accepted Thwan's refusal. He had not, then, the strength to argue, there was too much else his strength was needed for more; but while he did not know it, losing that first argument with Coral had turned him to a new shape. The littleness of the change was such that it would be a long time before he knew of it. But what it meant, now, was that he could let his wife and his farmhand overrule his decision and he lose no face or authority and gain no shame from it. He did not think of this at all. He thought of starving, and of the buttercups where the vegetable garden had been; of whether cows could give milk when their only forage was buttercups. And so Thwan stayed.

And they did not starve, the three of them, because for the first deadly hard weeks Coral went out in the mornings with panniers behind Moly's saddle into the wild land beyond the farm, and gathered berries and other fruit, and dug roots and cut succulent young leaves, and brought them home, for she had had long years of feeding a larger family on almost nothing. She refused to accept any praise for this; it was harvest time in the wild too, and there was plenty to eat, and no cleverness necessary in the gathering of it. She taught Pos, who had never known, and Thwan, who had forgotten, how to set snares; and they ate rabbit and hare and ootag. Sometimes Thwan ate with them in the evenings, which he had not done before; it seemed easier, that way, to share equally, when there was only just enough. The noon meal was as it had always been, something on the back of the stove, set there to cook when Pos, and later Pos and Coral, came outdoors in the morning; except on the hottest days, when it was bread and cheese. But previously the noon meal had been eaten out of doors, under a tree, on the porch, in a corner of a field; and all three of them noticed that Thwan was now the only one who seemed still to prefer this. Both Pos and Coral spoke to him about it, but he only smiled, and they saw in the smile that he did not stay away from the house from shyness.

But for worry, they were all as healthy and strong as they had ever been.

Strength they needed, and stamina. The first thing they did was look out the fencing for the animals, and it was not as bad as they had expected, for the fencing was still there, under the wild weave of buttercups. It was only that—mysteriously—all the gates had been opened on the night that Pos had pulled Bel's shoes off after walking on Buttercup Hill.

More mysteriously, the beasts all ate buttercups with apparent relish. (Even Turney, who did not know that his three human beings were careful to leave something on their plates for the dog's bowl when they would have liked to eat the last scrap themselves, was seen gravely nipping the heads off buttercups, and swallowing them enthusiastically.) The cows' milk had never been so thick and rich and abundant as in the first buttercup weeks, for all that their calves were half grown and they should be beginning to dry up toward winter. Even the sheep's udders swelled, though this was at first unnoticed since unexpected, invisible under their thick curling fleeces (thicker than usual, thought Pos; must be coming up a bad winter). The horses seemed tireless, however many times they went up and down the fields pulling Pos's heaviest blade, for the buttercup roots went deep (a rare crop of poppies we'll have next year, thought Pos).

“In case you'd like to know,” said Coral, “this proves that they aren't buttercups. Real buttercups are poisonous.” (Slow-acting, thought Pos. Cumulative. The stock will all die suddenly, any time now.)

Pos taught Coral to make cheese, and after they'd had a few weeks to ripen, risked taking a few cheeses they hoped were surplus to market day in town; and these fetched prices better than their previous cheeses ever had, after Coral brought enough over from their lunch the first time to offer small sample tastes (wasteful, thought Pos). And then the three cows that had been barren in the spring dropped unsuspected calves at the very end of summer, and the calves were bigger and stronger than any Pos had seen in all his years of farming, although the mothers had found the births easy. These calves grew so quickly that Coral said to Pos that she felt that if she ever had time to stand still for a quarter hour and watch, she would see them expand. “We could ask Thwan to eat his lunch next to the cow pasture,” she suggested with a grin, “and ask if he sees anything.”

Pos shook his head. “Something not right about them,” he said. “Something grows too quickly in the beginning, gets spindly before the end, doesn't grow together right.”

When Pos took all the calves to the big harvest fair in late autumn, the youngest ones were almost as well-grown as the oldest. It was one of the youngest that fetched the best price of all, and the farmer who bought her exclaimed over the heavy straight bones and clean lines of her, how square and sturdy she was built.

Several people remarked on the slight golden cast of the coats and hoofs and eyes of those last three calves, just as other people remarked that they could pick out one of Buttercup Farm's new cheeses because it glowed as it lay among other, more ordinary fare, just as their sheep's wool, which had only looked like any wool on the sheep's backs, proved to have a faint golden tint when it was washed and spun.

Winter was a lean time nonetheless, for they had had little harvest. The wheat and straw crops were ruined, though there were vegetables left under the buttercup vines as there had been fence posts and rails under them, and so they did not starve; but they had none left over to sell, and before spring they began to wish they had sold fewer cheeses, though they had spent every penny they earned on stores for the winter, for the beasts as well as themselves, and for seed for the spring. There was nothing over even to mend the old wagon, which was at its creakiest and most fragile in cold weather.

It was a hard winter (though not as hard as Pos predicted). Snow fell, and no one had any good winter crops, and what little grew was tough and dry and frostbitten. But when the spring came and the horses drew the plough through the fresh-cut furrows one last time before setting seed, the plough seemed to fly through the earth, although its blade glinted gold rather than silver, and Bel's and Ark's flaxen manes were almost yellow. And the buttercups still twined over all the fencing, even the stair rails up to the porch around the house, and showed flowers early, as soon as the snow melted, before most other leaves were even thinking about putting in an appearance. (Pos said that the buttercups hid mending that needed to be done, and that Flora would be finding the weak places for them.)

The cows all delivered their calves safely, and none was barren, and the sheep delivered their lambs, which were mostly twins, but the grass rose up thickly enough to support any amount of milk for any number of babies, and cheese-making besides. The cheeses this year were as yellow as they had been the autumn before, and the new babies again touched with gold; and then bright chestnut Moly threw a foal, though she had not been bred that they knew, and the farm horses were all mares and geldings. The foal was as golden as a new penny, and as fleet as a bird, with legs even longer than its dam's as it grew up, and they called it Feyling, and when it was four years old, Coral rode it at the harvest fair races, and it won the gold cup.

But by then Coral was pregnant with their second child, and Merry was two and a half, and Pos had not wanted Coral to ride in the race, but she had only laughed and said that she was glad she was no more than three months along, for she did not want to weigh enough to slow Feyling down. “Not that anything could,” she added, and Pos knew that there was no point in arguing with her.

Their farm had been called Buttercup Farm from that first grim but surprising autumn, and while they had taken no joy from the name initially, they let it stand, not wishing to disturb what it was they had involuntarily set in motion, or set free, or roused, whatever it was that, as Thwan had said, did not in fact wish them to starve, and when anyone asked if they were from Buttercup Farm, they said with only a momentary pause, “Yes.” The momentary pause had disappeared by the time the year had come around to harvest again, and Thwan had come to Pos, much embarrassed, and said that he wished to marry too, and Pos had said with real feeling that he did not wish to lose him but would try to put together the money he was certainly owed, that they might make a beginning toward their own farm. And Thwan said, after a pause, in his slow way, that all they really wanted was enough to build a little house, on the edge of Buttercup Farm, if Pos and Coral would allow it, and he go on working as he had done for so long, and perhaps there would be work for his wife too; she was raised on a farm. They had met over Buttercup Farm cheeses, because people had begun to come in from the next counties to buy them, and she knew something about cheeses.

A year after Thwan married Nai, they increased their cow and sheep herds by almost a half, to keep up with the demand for their cheeses; but there they stopped it, for they were happy with their work, and the size of their farm, and each other, and they tried not to make too many plans for Merry, and for Thwan and Nai's Orly, and for the baby Coral was carrying when Feyling won the gold cup. But when they built the house for Thwan to bring Nai home to, they shook buttercup pollen over it, and the vines obligingly grew up their porch railings the next year too, but politely left room for Nai's pansies. And when Pos and Coral repainted their house, white as it had always been, they stripped the black shutters down to bare wood so they could repaint them a pale yellow, as they painted the railings around the porch the same color, and it gleamed against the darker buttercups. They had never had time, that first year, to uproot the vines that grew around their house, although Pos at least had wished to; but neither of them now would think of it (although Coral took cuttings from Nai, and planted pansies), and the vines just around the house went on bearing flowers nine or ten months of the year, an occasional yellow spangle showing even when all else was dry and brown and cold.

After Feyling won the gold cup, he was much in demand at stud, though no one knew who his father was, and no one was greedy or stupid enough to claim a stolen stud fee. And Pos learned to ride, first on the good-natured Moly and later on the less patient Feyling, and so Coral took her husband with her now on her afternoon rides, when there was time and peace for them again. But they did not ride on Buttercup Hill.

After Dhwa was born, and that spring was more glorious even than the last four springtimes had been, the four of them, Pos and Coral and Merry and Dhwa went, one night under a full moon, to walk on Buttercup Hill. They had not set foot there since Bel had walked shoeless over it; but over the years they no longer felt a chill as they passed it, and began to seek it out with their eyes, and feel as if it were a friendly presence, and to be pleased when their work took them near it.