Chapter 529 - 528: The Newest Grave

Chapter 529: Chapter 528: The Newest Grave

Location:Ferrow’s Rest

Date/Time:TC1856.09.20 – TC1856.09.26

The cart came up the east road at midday with two young people walking beside it and an old woman sitting in the back among the bags, and Emrys Dunmore watched it from the churchyard wall and understood that they had sent someone after all.

He had expected that. He had expected a captain, or another one of the careful young men with paste, or — on the bad nights — the woman herself again, with the number in her mouth.

What got down off the cart was seventy-one years old and swore quietly at her own knee.

"Don’t help," she said, as he came down the path. "I’ll be four minutes about it, and then I’ll be fine, and if you take my elbow I’ll be twenty minutes at it and cross."

He stopped where he was.

"You’ll be Dunmore," she said, once she was upright. "Maren Harren. I’ve come to sit in your kitchen. That’s the size of it, and I’ve said it first so you don’t spend three days waiting for the other part."

"There’s no other part."

"None. You can stop listening for it."

Emrys looked at the two young ones — technicians, by the crates they were unloading — and at the cart, and at the old woman with her hand still on the rail.

"They said nobody was coming."

"They aren’t. I’m not from them. I mean — " Maren waved a hand. "I am, obviously. They fed me and lent me the cart. But I’m not carrying a message, and I’ll not be arguing at you. I’ve got a bad leg and a thing I know how to do, and there’s a man out here doing it blind, and I’m too old to sit under a mountain being polite about it."

"Doing it blind."

"I’ll show you the difference if you make me tea. I’ve been four days in a cart. I’d sell someone’s grandchild for tea."

***

She wanted to see the graves before she’d sit down, which annoyed him, and then she went about it in a way that annoyed him more, because it was the way he would have done it.

She did not walk the rows and make a sad face. She went to the low corner where the spring line came through, crouched — badly, with a hand on a headstone for which she apologized aloud to the headstone — and put her palm flat on the turf. Then she moved four paces uphill and did it again. Then again.

"How deep’s your clay?"

"Meter and a half. More at the bottom."

"And you’ve spring water moving under the whole of it."

"After heavy weather, mostly. Less in the cold."

"Mm." She stayed down a while. "Do you know what this slope ought to look like?"

"I know what my father’s looked like."

"Say it, then."

Emrys had never said it to anybody, because there had never been anybody to say it to.

"Dips," he said. "About a foot across at the head end, most of them. You get them the first winter, and they come back every winter after, and you barrow fill up and top them off when it thaws, and it looks decent for a month." He heard his own voice go flat. "And every family that comes up here to visit sees a dip. Every one of them. That’s the thing you can’t fix. They stand there, and the ground’s told them something about how much anyone bothered."

Maren nodded slowly, still looking at the turf.

"There’s none here."

"No."

"Not one, in thirty-one years."

"There’s none here," Emrys said.

"And you thought that was drainage."

"I thought it was thirty-one years of getting better at a job."

"It was," said Maren. "And it wasn’t." She held her hand up, and he pulled her to her feet, which she permitted this time without comment. "That’s not me being clever at you. Both are true. I grew potatoes for fifty years, and I was good at potatoes, and I was also being helped, and finding out about the second didn’t take the first away from me. Took me a while to believe that. You’ll fight it for a bit, and then you’ll stop."

***

The teaching went badly for four days.

It went badly because she had no idea how to do it, which she told him at the outset, sitting in his kitchen with her hands around a cup.

"Nobody’s ever taught this," she said. "Not once, that anyone knows. So I’m going to try things, and most of them will be stupid, and I’d like you to tell me when they’re stupid rather than sitting there being polite, because polite will cost us a week."

She began with the way it had been done to her. Sit still. Reach down. Feel for the shape. That was how the boy did it, apparently, and how they had done it in the stone room under the mountain.

It produced nothing at all for two days. Emrys sat in his own kitchen with his eyes shut, feeling like a fool, and got a stiff back, and found nothing, and said so.

"Right," Maren said on the third morning. "That’s my fault. Stop."

"I can keep at it."

"You can, and it won’t work, because you’re doing it the way a nine-year-old and a mad old woman did it in a hole in the ground with a Keeper of something standing over us telling us to go slowly." She put her cup down. "You’re not in a hole in the ground. You’ve never once done this sitting still in your life. When does it happen?"

"When does what happen?"

"When are you working the ground? Not thinking about it. Doing it."

Emrys looked at her.

"Digging," he said.

"Then why in the world are we sitting in a kitchen?"

***

He dug.

There was no grave to open — nobody had died in nineteen days, which in Ferrow’s Rest counted as a good spell — so he cut a practice trench on the flat below the wall where he had tested fill a hundred times, and Maren sat on a stool at the edge of it with a shawl over her knees and her stick across her lap, and told him to stop thinking about anything at all.

Four of the village came out to watch, which he had neither anticipated nor enjoyed. Word had gone round that the old woman from the mountain was here about the sexton, and in a place with forty-three people left, that was the largest thing to happen since the branch left. Nella Corlin brought a stool of her own and sat on it. Nobody asked what they were doing. Nobody here had asked anyone a direct question in about two years; it had stopped being a place where the answers were good.

The two technicians set up their crates by the lychgate and were unfailingly polite and got in nobody’s way, and Emrys had watched them long enough by then to understand that they were not there for him at all. They spent their days writing down times.

He dug for an hour before it happened.

It was not a revelation. Nobody had prepared him for that part. It was a feeling he had had ten thousand times and never once looked at directly — the moment somewhere around the second foot when a spade goes in, and you know what the ground is going to do. Every digger knows it. You feel where the clay turns, where the fill will slump, where you’ll need to cut the sod wider.

He had spent thirty-one years calling that experience.

Except that this time Maren said, quietly, from her stool: "There. You just did it."

And he had not been feeling where the ground would go.

He had been telling it.

Emrys stood in a trench up to his thighs with a spade in his hands and felt the whole of his working life turn over on its axis, and said nothing for a long while.

"That’s the sensation," Maren said. "Everybody’s is different. Mine’s in my thumbs, if you want to know. Yours is that."

"How long have I been—"

"Longer than you’d like. That’s the usual answer." She pulled the shawl up. "Come out of the hole before your back goes. We’ll do it again tomorrow, and you’ll do it on purpose, and the day after that you’ll do it wrong on purpose, which is the part that actually matters, and then we’ll see."

He came out of the hole. He sat on the edge of it with his boots in the trench and his forearms on his knees, and Nella Corlin, who had watched the whole hour from her stool with no idea what she was watching, said, "All right, Emrys?"

"Fine, Nella."

"You’ve gone a color."

"It’s the digging."

"You’ve been digging since you were fifteen," she said, and picked up her stool, and went home.

He sat there until the light went. He kept thinking about his father — a decent man, a better mason than a digger, who had spent nine winters barrowing fill up that slope and topping off the dips without once complaining, and who had died believing his son had simply learned the job better than he had. Emrys had believed it too. He had let his father believe it, in the last year, because it had seemed a kind thing to let a man think about his boy.

It occurred to him, sitting in the trench, that this was the one fact of his life he had ever been given that he could not tell anybody in the village, and that he now understood something about the woman from Seven Peaks that had escaped him entirely while she sat at his table.

***

On the sixth day she asked him to stop.

"Stop what?"

"Stop holding it." Maren was at the churchyard wall, looking out over the rows. "You’ve got the feel of the doing now. I want the not-doing. Every craft’s the same — you don’t know a thing until you can turn it off."

"I don’t know how to turn it off."

"No. So we’ll do it the crude way." She nodded at the road. "Walk with me. Half a mile down and sit a while. Not thinking about the slope, not looking at it, and if I catch you doing either I’ll poke you with the stick."

He did not want to.

He noticed how strongly he did not want to, and that was the first thing that frightened him — not what came after, but the plain animal reluctance to walk half a mile down a road away from a hillside he had not in his adult life been more than an hour from.

They went. They sat on a wall by the old mill and Maren talked about potatoes with what he later understood was deliberate tedium, and he thought about potatoes, and after a while he stopped noticing the pull.

They came back at dusk.

He saw it from the gate.

The newest grave was at the top of the eastern row — a woman named Cass Rell who had gone eleven days back, whose stone was still uncut. The turf on it had lain flat that morning. Emrys had walked past it at first light, and it had lain flat, because it was always flat, because everything up here was always flat.

There was a dip in it now. A hand’s width across at the head end. Two fingers deep.

He stood at the gate a long time.

"Six hours," Maren said behind him, very quietly. "That’s all that was."

"It’s the newest."

"It’ll be the newest that goes first. Loose fill, no root through it yet." She came up beside him. "The old ones will hold longer. Weeks, maybe. Months. I don’t know, and I’ll not pretend to."

"Say the rest."

"You’re sure?"

"Say the rest."

Maren was quiet a moment. Then:

"You’ve been holding four hundred graves flat for thirty-one years and never knew you were doing it, which means you’ve never once known how to keep doing it," she said. "It’s been running off you like heat off a stone. That’s fine while you’re here and well and walking it every day. It’s fine right up until the day you’re not." She let it sit. "You’re in your fifties. You’ve buried a village. There’s nobody in Ferrow’s Rest under sixty except the Pell boy, and he’s leaving when the roads dry. What happens to this hillside the winter you take sick?"

Emrys did not answer.

"That’s not me arguing at you," Maren said. "I promised I wouldn’t, and I won’t. It’s the thing that’s true, and you asked."

***

He filled the dip that night, by lamp, because he could not stand to leave it.

It took twenty minutes, and his hands knew every part of the work, and it was the first occasion in three decades he had needed to do it on that slope. He tamped it, and cut the sod back over, and knelt there afterward with his hands on his knees.

Four hundred and six.

Thirty-one children. Cass Rell, eleven days gone, stone uncut. Eleven more waiting for the hard weather.

He had told the woman from Seven Peaks that the difference between then and now was need, not principle, and he had been right, and he was still right. Nothing about that had changed. Nobody had come for Ferrow’s Rest, and nobody would have come for Ferrow’s Rest, and he was not going to be talked out of knowing it.

But nobody was asking him to leave now. That was all that had changed, and it was not nothing.

He thought about the version of the next thirty years where he went on exactly as he was — good at his job, helped and unaware of it — and then one winter got a cough that did not clear, and four hundred and six people began to sink, one at a time, newest first, while whoever was left in this village stood at the gate and watched the ground tell them how much anyone had bothered.

He went back to the house.

Maren was still up, because she slept badly, which he had noticed and not mentioned.

"I’ll learn it," Emrys said.

She looked at him over the cup.

"Not for your mountain," he said. "I want that clear, and I’d want it written down if there’s anyone up there who writes things down. Not for the thing under the ground and not for whatever it is she’s afraid of. I’ll not be a piece on that board — she can come and ask me again when she’s got something she can actually describe, and I might say yes then and I might not." He set his hands on the back of the chair. "But I’m not having them sink. That’s mine. That’s the reason entirely, and it won’t turn into a bigger one because you’re patient with me."

"I’d not want it to," Maren said.

"No?"

"Reasons you can hold in one hand last longer." She drank some tea. "The big ones burn off in about a year. I’ve watched it happen. Yours will still be up that hill when everybody’s forgotten what they were frightened of."

Emrys pulled the chair out and sat down.

"Then teach me the not-doing properly," he said. "I need to know how far I can go and how long it holds. That’s what I want first. Everything else is after."

"That’s the right one to want." Maren set the cup down and rubbed her knee, and looked, for a moment, both extremely pleased with herself and extremely tired. "Tomorrow. And Dunmore — those two young ones with the crates. They’ll want to know whether you’ve felt anything odd this week that wasn’t the ground. A boy’s voice. A laugh. Anything that came from nowhere."

"Why?"

"Because there’s a nine-year-old four days west of here," said Maren, "and I’ve been feeling him since about the second night, and I would like very much to know whether it goes both ways."