A Knot in the Grain and Other Stories

by Robin McKinley

  Except for one corner. There was a squiggle in one corner, a hummock-shaped squiggle, a big hummock, with roots, like a big tree, and the roots ran into the carefully tended farm fields, like an underground ripple. This hummock was low itself, though visible enough in a terrain almost flat, and it was covered with low scrubby underbrush; and behind it was a tiny concavity of valley, a cup within its ring. Altogether the hummock, its roots, and its valley were perhaps the size of one good generous pasture for a modest herd of cows.

  This hummock refused to be cultivated. Pos had never tried, because his father and grandfather had told him it was not worth it; nothing would grow there but weeds and wildflowers. They and their father and grandfather had tried clearing and planting it, and for one season it remained barren, while the sowed seed refused to sprout, and the second season saw the wilderness return. Trees never grew there, and the scrub never took over, the way scrub usually did on neglected meadows; chiefly what the hummock was was a haven for wildflowers.

  There were wildflowers everywhere, of course, for the ground was rich and the summers long and warm. Buttercups sprang up in the little deer-browsed meadows scattered among the trees in the long level spaces beyond the farm, buttercups and daisies, the big yellow and white and yellow and brown daisies, and the tiny pale pink and white ones; and cow parsley and poppies and meadowsweet and forget-me-nots and violets and heartsease, and dandelions, dandelions could grow anywhere. All these seeded the wind and sank their tiny stubborn roots on Pos’s farm as well, where they were furrowed under or plucked up. Poppies occasionally sprang up behind the deep cut of the plough blade. But in general the wildflowers stayed beyond the confines of the farm and looked on politely, with the thorn and scrub and grasses and saplings and big old trees, and there was some of one and some of another, and the ordinary balance of uncultivated land stretched untroublingly before the eye.

  The hillock was drowned in buttercups. The occasional daisy grew there, too, and nothing would keep out dandelions; but it was the buttercups that reigned, sun-bright from early May till the end of September, their tangled stems thick as weaving. Pos had always had a faint nagging feeling about the hillock; there was something not right about it, that great hot swath of yellow, it didn’t look natural, it unsettled the eye, his eye. He felt there was something he ought to do about it—something besides the straightforward razing and planting that his forebears had proved did not work—but he had plenty to occupy him in the rest of his farm, and so he left it alone, carrying the small nagging feeling with him the best he could.

  But Coral loved the little wild hillock. The first buttercups of the year were coming out when he brought his bride to the farm; they caught her eye at once, and immediately she named it Buttercup Hill. “But they are not buttercups, you know,” she said, the first time she walked there. He had taken her all around the farm, showing her everything, even the corners of the barns where old tools lay, broken since his grandfather’s day and never thrown out, because as soon as something is thrown out, there is some bit of it that might have been salvaged and used. He took her all around his fields, even to the edge of the small wild hillock.

  He had not wanted to go any farther; he preferred to keep his feet on farmland. But the story of it intrigued her, and she would go, and he had gone with her because he had to, or lose the pleasure of her arm through his, and he was not willing to do that unnecessarily, even for a moment. He thought he could bear it for a moment or two, for the sake of keeping her at his side.

  But she looked at the ground curiously as they walked up the little slope, and pawed as a horse might at the little yellow flowers that were already blooming thick and plentiful despite the earliness of the season. And then she bent and plucked one of them up. “These aren’t buttercups, whatever your great-great-grandfather called them. Buttercups don’t grow like this, for one thing—their stems mostly run around underground, not on top in a mat—and the flowers are the wrong shape, although I give you that they’re the right size and color, and at a distance you wouldn’t guess.” She frowned at the flower she held, but in a friendly fashion, and spun its stem in her fingers. “I have no idea what they are, though. I know wildflowers pretty well, but these are new to me. Your lowlands are a strange country, dear Pos.”

  And she loved Buttercup Hill all the more as the riot of yellow gained strength in the summer heat. Pos said to her once that he did not like the unbroken fury of yellow upon that hill, and she laughed at him, and called him Old Grumbler. She said that she would make him a yellow shirt—just that buttercup yellow, to smite his dull eye—and he would wear it (she said, she would make him wear it if she had to), and he would learn about brightness and color, and that not everything had to be brown and green and grow in rows, and he would be so astonished that he would have to give up grumbling. He had laughed with her, and said that he would merely find something else to grumble about, old habits died hard. Yes, yes, she said, she was sure he could find other things to grumble about, why didn’t he begin to make a list so that she could get started quickly, thinking of ways to foil everything on it, it would give them something to do during the long winter evenings, grumbling and foiling. And that summer evening ended in making love, as many of their evenings did. But Pos’s small nagging feeling about Buttercup Hill grew no less persistent.

  There was one thing he and Coral did not do together, and that was her afternoon ride. She did not have time for it every day, but she had Moly to exercise, and she loved her young mare too, and so most days she found time. Sometimes she worked so quickly—so as not to feel she was not doing her share, she said—that Pos remonstrated with her, telling her she did not need to exhaust herself, that he did not begrudge her an hour for her horse. She teased him about this too, saying that they should buy him a riding horse, that he could come with her; but he used those hours to poke into corners, in the house, the barns, the fields, to see if there was anything he had overlooked that should not be overlooked, and heard what she was saying as teasing only. He could sit on a horse, but riding gave him no particular pleasure; none of his family had ever been riders; there was no need for a farmer to be a horse rider.

  Coral was out riding the afternoon that he overheard the conversation between Med and Thwan.

  Coral almost always rode to Buttercup Hill and—she said—had a good gallop around the valley before turning for home, Moly trotting politely along the neat paths through the farm fields.

  It was as if Med’s words shone a great bright light in the corner of Pos’s mind where he had banished (he thought) what was only a small nagging feeling. And the new light threw shadows from thoughts he had not known were there at all; he had done more banishing than he let himself remember. Did Coral not like farm life? Had he always suspected this? Did she like the hillock for its wildness—not because it was a good place to gallop her mare but because the farm fields constricted her, made her restless? He had seen no sign of it—he thought. But—he believed in her sense of honor as he could not quite believe in her love for him. It was reasonable—reasonable—that she should want to escape from her chaotic family, her vague parents, and their dingy lives; it was more than reasonable that she should prefer an offer of marriage to an offer of dalliance.

  That did not mean that she loved him. That she wanted him and his farm.

  He could bear that, he thought, carefully, coldly. But he did not think he could bear to lose her.

  What could he offer her but stability? Stability was little enough to a young and beautiful woman; little enough after the first satisfied flush of having achieved a clever thing has worn off. He was not a wealthy man, and almost everything he earned he put back into his farm; no other way had ever occurred to him, it was what his family had always done. He remembered their conversation about the yellow shirt Coral had said she would make him; remembered it with pain, now, remembered how that evening had ended as if he had already lost her. His house—their house—was as plain as he was; where there were carp
ets on the floor they were there for warmth, not beauty; where there were cushions on the chairs they were there for comfort only, the patterns so faded he could not see them, and so old he could not remember them. The chairs themselves were square and functional—and plain—like the rooms, like the house, like the farm, like himself.

  It was that same afternoon that she said to him, “I have noticed a curious thing: Moly’s shoes turn yellow—yellow as buttercups—when we’re riding through Buttercup Hill. And horseshoe-colored again as soon as we leave.”

  He had not meant to go to meet her; his feet had taken him toward her without his conscious volition; he wanted the nearness of her, the fact of her warmth and her self, the comfort of her existence in his trouble—for all that his trouble was about her, about losing the having of her. He had looked up to the clatter of hoofs and seen her coming toward him, the mare’s mane and her braid blowing back in the wind of their motion. She stopped beside him and said, “Come up behind me. You can put your foot in the stirrup—I’ll kick this one loose.” He shook his head, still deep in unhappy reflections, the sight of her only making them more acute.

  “Oh, Pos, one of your moods of gloom? Have you been out with your measuring stick—when you could be out galloping with the wind in your face—have you discovered the wheat is half a finger’s breadth shorter than it should be at this season? Let me distract you. I have noticed a curious thing—” And she told him.

  “At first I thought I was imagining it—of course. It was a trick of the light, or pollen, or something; or even some odd characteristic of your lowland blacksmiths’ metal. But today I dismounted and picked Moly’s feet up and looked at her shoes—and they were yellow. Yellow as gold. It even felt different, those yellow horseshoes, when I touched them. Softer. And,” she went on as if the end of her tale was as interesting as the beginning, “do you know, the flower stems of your funny not-buttercups are so dense you really don’t touch the earth itself at all now? I should have been worried about Moly’s getting her feet caught, I think, earlier in the year, but I certainly don’t have to now.”

  At the word gold Pos did look up at her, and when she came to the end of her story, she leaned down and grasped his hair, close to the scalp, and tipped his head farther back. “I cannot have a conversation with you down there and me up here. If you will not come up, I will have to get down, and then Moly will feel cheated. As will I, if you don’t say something soon.”

  He could not stop himself smiling at her then, looking into her face smiling at him; he loved her so, and her presence felt like—like sunlight, and himself some slip of a seedling. “There, that’s better,” she said.

  “If I get up behind you, Moly will feel worse than cheated,” he said. “I am no lightweight.”

  “It will be good for her,” said Coral, and pulled her foot free of the stirrup. “She has not enough challenges in her life. It is why I want to teach you to ride too; Moly would like another horse to run with. Have you seen her cavorting around your old plough horses, biting their withers, trying to get them to play with her?”

  He, sitting behind her, having hauled himself awkwardly up to sit gingerly across Moly’s loins, put his arms around his wife’s slim waist, and thought, And I am the oldest plough horse of all.

  Harvest was approaching. The wheat was better than waist-high, and the thatching straw crop was as high as Thwan’s shoulder, and Thwan was half a head taller than Pos. It was a good year, and Pos should have been happy, but a shadow had fallen on him, and he could not walk out of it. Coral still rode her mare most afternoons over Buttercup Hill; once he asked her if Moly’s shoes still turned gold, and Coral said, after a little pause, that they did. “I had almost forgotten—the noticing and then telling you. It seems as ordinary as—as the sun going behind a cloud, so a great bleak shadow sweeps over you. It’s astonishing but at the same time ordinary. It’s like that. And it goes away, like that.”

  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 det
ails 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.