A Knot in the Grain (15 page)

But the shadow did not leave Pos, and he began to brood about Buttercup Hill; he thought, angrily, that there was no reason—no proper reason—that a small irregular bit of land should so resist farming. He'd have the weeds down next spring, and cut the ground up well. Ploughing methods had improved since his father's day, and the shape of the blade he used was slightly different. Pos's father and grandfather had probably only not put enough effort into clearing out the buttercup roots; buttercup roots ran everywhere, once they'd had their own way for a few seasons. He and Thwan and Med would dig and plough every last clinging rootlet out, and next year Buttercup Hill would be buttercups no longer.

But simultaneously with this thought was another, about Coral's story. It was nonsense, of course … but what if it wasn't? He'd always known that the kind of old tale that gets told around a fireside in the winter, especially late winter when everyone is restless for spring, is a product of nothing more than that restlessness—that and sometimes a need to keep a child quiet. He had known that even when he was the child, something about the tone of his mother's or father's voice; and one or two of those tales had been about Buttercup Hill. He didn't remember them very well; he'd never had children to tell them to, and he had never had much interest in things that weren't true. But the shadow whispered to him, telling him that he had gotten many things wrong in his life and that this was one of them.…

He tried to remember the last time he had walked on Buttercup Hill; he wasn't sure he ever had, except for that once, briefly, when his feet touched the bottom of the slope, to keep Coral's arm in his. His father had given up on the problem of its existence years before he was old enough to notice, and he had learned to leave it alone as he had learned to plough and plant and harvest: by doing it. Avoiding it was as ordinary and familiar to him as was the weight of a horse collar in his hand.

One afternoon he arranged to be at that end of the farm when Coral went riding, and he wandered up to the crest of the little hill after her. He thought his feet tingled as he stepped on the buttercups and their hill, and his knees went almost rubbery, but he kept on walking.

The valley was not large, and he saw Moly, Coral bent over her neck, running flat out, graceful as a deer; but the valley came to an end, and she swerved, and Coral drew her up, and in another moment they were trotting up to meet Pos. The whole had taken no more than a few minutes, and Moly had not sweated, though her nostrils showed red as she breathed. “Would you like a try?” said Coral. “Moly has lovely gaits, and a canter is much easier to sit than a trot.”

He shook his head, stroking Moly's warm shoulder absently; then he ran his hand down her leg and picked up that hoof. Moly balanced a bit awkwardly, three-legged with a person on her back, and eager as she was for more running; but she was far too well-mannered to protest, and let the hoof lie weightlessly in Pos's big hands. The shoe was yellow—yellow as gold. When Pos touched it, it felt different, not the hard proud absoluteness of cold iron. When he set the foot down and looked up at his wife, she was looking down at him with an expression he had not seen before, and he wondered what the expression on his own face was.

“It's just a shadow over the sun,” she said.

“No doubt,” he replied.

But two nights later he slipped out to the barn where the horses were kept, leaving Coral asleep. There was a three-quarters moon in a clear sky; the wheat fields were silver. He drew a long breath; he had been forgetting how much he loved even the smell of his land. It was easy to forget, sometimes, that there was love behind work; it should not be so easy. He was lucky to love his work, and he should make himself remember this if he was so lazy as to forget. He let his eyes wander over the fields, so different from those same fields by daylight. It was going to be a good harvest, better than almost any harvest he could remember. They could afford a new wagon—he and Thwan both were tired of nailing bits back on the old one—and the roof of the lower barn needed replacing, at least the half of it that faced north. His well-organized mind began to make lists, happy in the details of farming, happy in the luck of having been born to work that he loved.

He was luckier yet to have the wife he loved. But the best harvest the farm could produce would not buy her the jewels her beauty deserved, the silks in bright colors she should have to wear, the lofty rooms in the grand house her husband should have been able to offer her. He turned away from the prospect of his moonlit land and went into the barn.

There was a faint sleepy whicker from friendly Moly, who was, Coral had often said, a lapdog grown too large. The big draft horses were silent, knowing the proper schedule, knowing that it was not time for either food or work. Turney came pattering into the barn, having no notion of protecting his territory from invaders but only hoping that the sound of movement might indicate something he could herd. He waved his tail once or twice at Pos in a puzzled fashion and pattered away again.

Pos went into Bel's stall and put a hand on his shoulder; the horse's enormous head came around, but when he saw the bridle in Pos's hand, he flattened his ears and turned his head away again. Pos put his hand over his nose and gently drew him back, feeling the huge neck muscles not quite resisting. Bel was an old horse, well-trained and good-natured too, and he knew it wasn't really worth arguing with human beings. He opened his mouth for the bit with a long sigh.

Pos had chosen Bel because he had the largest feet. He had thought of taking all four workhorses, but decided against it, for reasons he did not quite look at, just as he did not quite look at what he was doing at all.

Pos had to stand on a bucket to scramble up on Bel's broad back; the horse's ears cocked back at this bizarre behavior, but he had made his minor protest in the stall and was now merely bemused. They walked slowly to Buttercup Hill, slowly up it. As Bel's feet first touched the carpet of buttercups, he raised his big head and looked around; Pos briefly had the sensation that he considered prancing. Certainly Pos had not seen him look so interested in anything but his grain bucket in many years.

He turned the horse's head back toward the barn, and as they began the downhill slope, Bel's nose dropped to its usual place, as if he were wearing a collar and pulling a plough. Before they reached the bottom, Pos dismounted and picked one of Bel's feet up. In the moonlight it was difficult to say for sure, for his shoes looked as silvery as the landscape; but under Pos's fingers they tingled, and Pos was sure he saw what he hoped to see. He fumbled for the blacksmith's bar and pincers he had brought with him.

Bel, more bemused than ever, stepped very carefully down the familiar path to the barn, anxious about his naked feet. Pos slung the heavy satchel of horseshoes down in a corner by the door, and gave Bel a quiet half-portion of grain, to make up for the interruption of his sleep—and Moly a handful of that, since she was awake and lively, putting her nose over her door and trying to seize Pos's sleeve with her lips. She ate the grain happily enough, but she still looked after Pos as if she believed she had been left out of an adventure. The other horses stirred in their drowse, thinking they heard the sound of grain being chewed, but believing they dreamed, for they knew the schedule just as Bel did.

Pos crept back to his sleeping wife, trying to feel pleased with himself and failing; even the moonlight on his beautiful crops did not cheer him, nor the cool rich earth smell in his nostrils. When he eased himself slowly back into bed, Coral turned toward him and murmured, “You're cold. Where have you been?”

“There was a noise in the stock barn,” he said, after a moment.

“Moly having adventures in her sleep,” said Coral; “you needn't worry, you know, Moly would kick up such a row trying to get any thieves to take notice of her that they'd have little chance to do any mischief. Besides stealing her, I suppose,” she added.

“It might have been a bear,” said Pos.

“Mmm,” said Coral, asleep again.

Pos overslept the next morning, something that had never happened before. It was Coral's cry of shock and terror that awoke him. She was out of bed, standing by the window, and as he sat up, and then stumbled to his feet to go to her, he saw her raise her hands from the windowsill as if she would ward something off, and back away. “The gods have cursed us!” she cried. “What have we done? What have we done? Oh, why did I marry you if it was only to bring you ruin?”

He knew, then, and half expected what he would see when he looked out of the window.

The house and barns stood in a sea of buttercups. Gone were the fields of wheat standing ready for harvest; gone were the neat paths, the fences around the pastures, the smaller tidy blocks of the vegetable garden. He saw a cow blundering unhappily through a tangle of buttercups where the thatching straw had once grown; automatically he recognized her, Flora, always the first one through the gate into fresh pasture, or the first one to find a weak place in the fencing and break through. Behind her at some little distance were Tansy and Nup; the three of them always grazed together, Tansy and Nup following where Flora led. The soft brown and cream of the cows' hair looked dim and weak against the blaze of yellow, as if the cows themselves would be overcome by buttercups, and crumble to pale ash. Pos saw nothing else moving.

Ruined, he thought. More years than are left in my life to regain what I've lost for us both. And he knew that the horseshoes beside the barn door were iron again.

“My darling,” said Coral, weeping, “my love, I will go away, back up to the Hills; it is I who caused this. There is a bane on my family, laid on my father's father. He thought to escape it by leaving the mountains, and I thought to escape it by marrying you; almost I did not believe in it, a fey thing, a tale for children, for I was the eldest, and it had not fallen to me, or to Moira after me, but then Del, as he grew up—no, no, I saw it immediately, when he was just a baby—Moira and I, we both knew, as Rack does, but I
would
not believe, I would make it not so, not for me, it was only a tale, an excuse for recklessness and waste, I believed loving you was enough, that the bane would not follow after a choice honestly made.…”

He barely heard her at first, for all he cared about was her distress. He would have to tell her in a moment, tell her that it was he that had ruined them, he and his greed, his dishonest greed, but for the moment he wanted her in his arms, to feel for the last time that his arms were of some use to her, some comfort.

“I could not believe that I was evil, only by having been born into the family that I was; I refused to believe in bad blood, in that kind of wickedness. I believed that you can make what you will of your life; oh, no, I did not really believe that, I did think I was doomed as my family was doomed; till I met you, and fell in love with you, that first day, I think, when I looked up from the well and you were there in that old shabby wagon with your beautiful glossy horse, you were like that yourself, old shabby clothes, but such a good face, and I knew from the way you held the reins that I trusted you—that the horse trusted you—and it was only later that I realized that I loved you. I could not believe my luck when you asked me to marry you; I'm only a girl, and knew nothing of farming, knew nothing of anything except feeding seven people on two potatoes, and horses, I knew horses, I knew that Moly was worth saving when her mother died, although the owner couldn't be bothered.

“Oh, my love,” she said, almost incoherent with weeping, “I hate to leave you, but it must have been me; whatever lives in Buttercup Hill recognized me; perhaps if I leave, they will give you your farm back.…” She was clinging to him as she never had clung, like ivy on an oak; he had been proud of her independence, that independence choosing to be his companion, to work in his fields with him so that they became their fields; and yet this had been part of what made him uneasy—part of what made him willing to listen to Med. He damned himself now, now that it was too late, for foolishness. He deserved to lose her. But she would not go thinking it was her fault.

“Hush,” he said. “It is not your fault. It is not. It is mine. No”—as she began again to speak—“you do not know. I will tell you.” But he did not speak at once, and cradled her head against his shoulder in his old knotted hand, and he did not realize that he himself was weeping till he saw the tears fall upon her hair.

“It is I,” he said at last, his voice deep with misery, “ah! I hate to tell you. It is true, you must go away, but not to save me, to save yourself.” He thought, I can give her a proper dowry if I sell Dor and Thunder; I can get along with Bel and Ark only, for I will have to let Med and Thwan go, of course. With her beauty she will be able to find another husband; and with some money she will be able to find one who will respect her.…

“Tell me,” she said, and drew her head away, and looked up at him. “Tell me,” she said, passionately.

“I cannot, if you look at me like that,” he said, closing his eyes, and now he felt the hot tears on his cheeks. He felt her move, and her hands on his face, and her lips against his chin. “I love you,” she said. “I am
glad”
—she said fiercely—“if this is not my fault, for then I need not leave you after all.”

That gave him the strength to tell her, and as he had told her nothing before, he told her all now, for he could not decide what to tell and what to hold back. So he began with Med, and of how Med's words had made him look at what he had turned away from before, that he was an old man, too old for her, and dull, a farmer, with little enough to offer her, except that her own family—here, finally, he stumbled over his words—had so much less. And he thought that perhaps if he had money enough to buy her things—the sorts of things beautiful women should have—perhaps that would be enough, that she would find it enough reason to stay with him.… He stopped himself just before he told her he could not bear to lose her, because he was going to send her away, for he had nothing at all to offer her now.