A Knot in the Grain

by Robin McKinley

  The farmer breathed a sigh. “I will look for you next market day,” he said, daring greatly, and then added nervously, “If I may.”

  “Thank you,” she said, and without any sign of awareness that she was saying something bold or over-friendly, added straightforwardly: “I will like recognizing a face in the crowds here. I am not used to so large a town.”

  The farmer worked no less hard than usual over the next weeks, but it was a fortunate thing that he had farmed so long and well that his hands and back and feet and eyes knew what to do with little help from his brain, for all he could think of was the girl he had met at the town well, and of the next time he would see her. He held to his own standards, blindly, like clinging to a rock in a storm; he had gone to town once a week for the last twenty years, and he went on going into town once a week. But he could not have stayed away, that one day each week, had his house been on fire as he set his horse trotting down the road toward the next meeting with the girl he had seen at the well.

  Her name was Coral, and she had four brothers and sisters, and a mother and father; but he barely noticed these. He did notice that he was not the only man who had noticed Coral, and that often when he found her, she was talking to young men who smiled at her as he could not, with the confidence of youth and charm, and swaggered when they walked. This made him wild, in his stiff and quiet way, but there was nothing he had any right to say or do about whom she chose to talk to; and he knew this, and held his peace. And she always had time for him, time to talk to him; the young men vanished when she turned to him, and he did not know if this was a good thing or a bad.

  Usually they met at the well, as they had the first time; at first he did not think about this, beyond straining his eyes looking for her as soon as he could begin to differentiate the smaller hump of well from the bigger humps of buildings on the road into town. But on the fourth week he was a little delayed in setting out by a loose horseshoe, and his wagon-horse was too sober an animal to respond favorably to any nonsense about hurrying once they were on their way. And when they pulled up by the well, each a bit cross and breathless with resisting the other’s will, the farmer realized that Coral was not merely there, as if perhaps she too had been delayed, but appeared to be still there, fiddling unconvincingly with a harness strap, her color a little heightened, and for the first time she seemed not completely at her ease with him. Almost she succeeded in sounding casual when she told him that after she fetched water on market days, and took the buckets home, she went on to the market itself, where she would spend most of the rest of the morning.

  This made the farmer thoughtful. He was not late again at the well for the next several weeks, but having let a week go by, to maintain the pretense of casualness, a fortnight after Coral told him about her market-day mornings, he left the stall he shared with several other local farmers when it was his turn for a break, and went purposefully looking for her. His stall was away from the central marketplace, because at this time of year it specialized in the sort of produce only other farmers were much interested in. He found her easily in the bustling square where all the townsfolk were; he found her as if she were the only thing his eyes could rest on in all the hurry and hubbub. And that she was glancing around herself, over each shoulder, restlessly, even hopefully, might only have been that she was not pleased with the greens that were heaped up in the stall before her, and was wondering if better might be had nearby.

  His own lack of imagination shocked him: How could he not have thought of doing this before? She had mentioned that she did much of the shopping for her family, that her mother was not good at it at all, although the sister next to her in age showed some promise and her brother Rack was the deadliest person she’d ever seen in pursuit of a bargain. Why had she lingered at the well, hoping to meet an old man with little conversation and no imagination?

  The week after that he met the sister next in age, Moira, and Rack, who looked at him measuringly; but it was only Coral’s opinion that mattered to him, and he greeted them politely but without much attention. The week after that he found her alone again, bending over Met’s lettuces; Met, hovering in the back of the stall, was watching her with the expression of a hawk watching a young rabbit. Without thinking about it—and so giving him the opportunity to talk himself out of it—he walked up to her and put his hand gently but inexorably under her elbow and led her away. “Even your brother Rack would have a little trouble with Met,” he explained; “the best of Met’s energy has always gone into arguing, not into farming.”

  “Thank you,” she said, looking into his eyes, her forearm resting warmly but without weight against the palm of his hand. “I did not think I liked what I was seeing and hearing, but I had not yet made up my mind. I find the people here much as I find the weather: like and unlike what I am used to, and I am not always sure I am reading the signs aright.” And she smiled at him.

  On the tenth week he asked her to marry him.

  He had not meant to ask; it was not in his conscious mind to ask. But he missed her so, those long weeks on the farm, with no one to talk to but his horses and cows and chickens and sheep, and Turney the dog, and Med and Thwan, who were good workers—he would not have had anyone who was not—but who were perhaps even less talkative than he was himself. He had not realized, before he met Coral, that he missed conversation with other human beings. He would have said he did not miss conversations with other human beings; he only missed Coral.

  He was appalled at what he had done when he heard in his own ears what his tongue had betrayed him by saying; but he was struck dumb with it, and so there was time for Coral to say, “Yes, Pos, please, I should like to marry you.”

  His mouth fell open; he shut it again. After a moment he reached out and clumsily took her hand, and she put her other hand on top of his. She looked at him, smiling a little, but the smile was hesitant. “If you did not mean it, I will let you off,” she said after a moment, when he remained mute. “It is only that I—I would like to marry you. I have been hoping you would ask me.”

  He kissed her then, so that conversation was not necessary, for he thought he still could not speak; but that first touch of her lips against his made the possibility of speech flee even further. But he thought, deep in his heart, of all the long days and evenings at the farm, working side by side, when they could talk or not as they wished; when he might be able to kiss her for no reason at all, familiarly, because he wanted to, because she was his wife, because she was there. And he smiled as he kissed her, and kissed her again.

  She stopped him as he would have kissed her a third time and said, “Wait. One thing you must know. I have no dowry; there are five of us, you know, and I’m the eldest; I know there’s none to spare now; by the time Elana grows up perhaps there will be a little to be squeezed out, although I don’t know, there may be a sixth and a seventh by then. My father earns little, and this will not change, there are only so many hours in a day, and he gets tired, and my mother … well, never mind. Moly is mine—that is my mare—and I will bring her—that is, I hope you will let me bring her; she is a dear friend, I could not bear to sell her—but she is a riding horse, and I am afraid you will think she is a silly creature to have on a farm.”

  “I do not care about your dowry,” said Pos then, finding his tongue in his need to reassure his beloved. “I love you, and that is what I care about, and my farm is big enough to support a wife—it is a family farm, it has been my family’s farm through four generations. The house has rooms enough inside, and land enough outside; it goes to waste, with me alone. Of course Moly is welcome too.” And then he said, from the fullness of his heart, “Thank you.”

  Coral sighed, and put her head on his shoulder, and then he drew her to one side where they could sit on a hay bale that was part of the rough partitions between stall and stall in the market, where they could talk quietly and ignore the world and be happy, and Pos thought he had never known anything like the contentment of Coral’s side pressed against
his, that no two people had ever fit together so comfortably as she in the curve of his arm. They stayed this way till it was time for him to go; she told him she would give the news to her family in her own way. “When … will I see you again?” he said, stammering a little, trying not to sound pathetic; would she hold him to their weekly visits, even now?

  But she smiled at him, smiled a long warm smile the like of which he had never seen on her face before, and answered, “How I have wished that your market days came oftener than once a week! And how embarrassed I have been for thinking so, you with your farm to tend, and an honest hardworking man as you are! You may see me again as soon as you like. Tomorrow?”

  And so for one week he came to the town three times. On the first visit he asked her to marry him, and on the second he was congratulated (noisily) by her family, and met her parents for the first time, a small faded father with deep lines in his face, a charming but vague mother. He noticed without noticing—for he could think of nothing clearly but his Coral—that it seemed to be Coral and the next-oldest girl, Moira, and the younger son, Rack, who knew where things were in the small drab house at the edge of town, who made the guest comfortable and laid the table for a meal. The elder son, Del, looked as faded and vague as his parents, but the baby, Elana, was as bright and sharp as her sisters. All this passed through his mind without lodging there, and he gave himself up to the celebration that grew so lively that even Del and the father laughed and moved a little more quickly.

  And on his third visit to town that week he and Coral were married, and he took her home to his farm, which she had never seen, though it was near the town; and behind the wagon, in which Coral’s small bundle of belongings rode, trotted Moly, the chestnut mare.

  Coral was a good worker; she worked as hard as Pos did himself, and seemed to think of no other life, and Pos was happier than he had ever imagined. He had long thought that happiness had nothing to do with him, and what had to do with him was work. He had thought he had been satisfied with work; and he had been, for his heart had been held in its winter, and he had imagined nothing else, certainly not the transformation that happiness brings, so that the very definitions of work and satisfaction are changed. Waking in the morning and finding Coral next to him gave him a shock of joy each day, and he got out of bed smiling, he who had been slow and grumbling in the mornings for the long years of his solitude.

  He told her this—for he found that he could tell her almost anything, that things that he had failed to find words for even to explain to himself fell into place and sense when he opened his mouth to Coral—and she teased him, saying it was only because he had never learned to eat a proper breakfast. By the time he came downstairs these mornings, shaved and dressed, she, her hair still pillow-mussed and her night-clothes still on, had made what she considered a proper breakfast: porridge with beans or lentils in it, pancakes from potatoes left of last night’s supper or chopped hash from last night’s roast. He washed up as she dressed, and they went into the fields together.

  They had gone into the fields together, naturally, without a word said on either side, from the first morning. Pos thought nothing but of the pleasure of her company, and willingly helped her in the evenings sweep the floor and get supper. He was a tidy man, and had kept house for himself for twenty years, since his mother died of grief after his father’s early death; without thinking of it, perhaps he remembered his parents, knew that he had wanted a wife again because he wanted a companion. He would have missed her if she had stayed in the house all day, as he had missed her when she was in town all week; and they worked side by side in the fields as they did laundry side by side one morning a week in the house. He did not measure her help in terms of how many rows she hoed, or whether the shelves of the house were more or less dusty than they had been before two people lived there again, but only in the deliciousness of joined lives. He could think of his first wife again for the first time since he had lost her; and he remembered her sadly, both for the life she had not lived to spend and for the life they would have had together, for she was a tenderer creature than Coral, and there had never been any possibility of her working as he worked.

  So the months passed, and the seed went into the ground and began to come up first as tiny green pinpricks and then as stout green stalks, and calves and chicks and lambs were born and ran around as young things do, and Turney shepherded everyone carefully and soberly whether they wanted to be shepherded or not. And Pos discovered that there were, in fact, two holes in the close weave of his happiness.

  He saw the first as a result of overhearing a conversation between Med and Thwan.

  He had merely assumed some increase in his plans for his farm with Coral’s coming, and had never thought of or suggested to Med and Thwan any end of the work they did for him. When he found out what Coral could do and wanted to do, he would know how to plan properly for next year; this year would come as it came. That this was unlike him he knew, but his joy in his new wife made him misjudge just how out of character it was, and how it might look to the men who had worked with him for over a decade. If he thought about their reaction to Coral at all, he dismissed it by thinking that she was none of their business, and further, he did not believe either of them to be spiteful.

  “—don’t like it,” Med was saying.

  “We can hope for the best till we know the worst,” Thwan replied, shortly, as if he wished the conversation at an end.

  “She only married him to get away from her family, know this,” Med went on, with a curious passion in his voice. “Five of them and a shiftless mother, and the father works only as much as he must. She’ll weary of farm life soon enough.”

  “We don’t know that,” said Thwan. “She’s a good worker.”

  “She is now,” said Med. “She’s only just come, thinking to be happy with her bargain.”

  “She’s that pretty,” said Thwan. “She need not have married Pos. She might have had half the young men in town.”

  “None of the young men have holdings half so grand as Pos’s farm,” said Med. “She’s a wandering gnast’s daughter; the young men who make up to her are not likely to offer anything near as good as marriage and land. Her family’s moved on already, did you know that? Her father didn’t even finish his last job. Unloaded her and got out of town. They’ll have left debts that Pos’ll have to pay. You wait and see.”

  “Stop it,” said Thwan.

  “And her out in the fields every day, so he can see her, looking over her shoulder to be sure he’s watching, seeing what a good wife he’s got, showing off, getting her hands dirty, as if that makes her a farmer,” said Med, as if he couldn’t stop.

  “She need not be like her family, and that be no part of the reason why she took Pos, and fond of him she is, I believe,” said Thwan, “and the sweat runs down her face as it does ours, and I’ve seen blisters on her hands. That’s the last of it, Med, I say, and I will listen to no more.”

  Pos had come into the barn to speak to Thwan, but had stopped upon hearing their voices, the old reflex of silence coming back to him unthinking; or perhaps it was surprise at surprising them at so unusual an occupation as conversation; or perhaps it was only courtesy, not to interrupt what did not include him. At Thwan’s final statement he turned and left, without letting them know of his presence, telling himself that it was that he wished not to embarrass them, Med particularly, who was only being loyal to a master (Pos told himself) he also considered a friend, telling himself that he would not think further about what they had said.

  But he did think of it; he could not help himself. When he reached out, in the early morning, to stroke Coral’s cheek to wake her—for it was always he who opened his eyes first—he saw his old gnarled hand against her smooth young skin, and sometimes he could not bear it, and drew back without touching her, and spoke her name instead. These moments did not—had not—lingered in his memory, or so he believed, because always she turned, still half asleep, and put an arm around his
neck to pull his face down to hers that she might kiss him; that was what he remembered. But those moments he had chosen to forget rushed back to him upon Med’s words, those moments in the early morning and many others, for suddenly there were many others, and he stood still again, having broken his promise not to think about what he had heard before he even had left the barn, and drew his breath as if it hurt him.

  The second thing had not troubled him until the first gave him the opportunity his fears had been seeking to break out of their dungeons and torment him.

  His farm had been his father’s farm, and his father’s, and his before him. His family seemed to have farming in its blood, for the farm had done well for four generations, from that first great-grandfather who knew where to take up the first spadeful of earth to begin a farm; and each son had been as eager as the father to tend the good land. Each generation had pushed the wild country back a little, claiming a little more pasture and cropland from wilderness, though each generation knew the wilderness was there, just beyond their last fences, leaning over the last furrowed rows, short-lived thorn and bramble and the shadows of oaks hundreds of years old. This did not trouble the farmers; the wild land was the wild land, and they had their farm, and one was one and the other was the other.

  Pos’s farm was roughly a square. The land here was almost flat, and since there was plenty of water, there was no reason to follow one line over another, and so as each farmer laid out his extra field, he tended to measure from the center, where the farmhouse and barns were (the house was a little nearer one edge of the square, where what had become the road to what had become the town was). The fields were not perfectly regular; there was a little contour to the ground that was worth following. But the lines were still quite recognizably close to straight.