Chapter 10: The Tenant

The wheat on the rise was four days from cutting and the wheat in the low field ran a week behind it, and Ned Carter sat on the ditch bank with his hat in his lap and went back over the same figures one more time, the way a man turns a clod to see if the underside of it is any drier.

He rented two fields off the Hales. The dry one, up on the rise, he had taken the spring after they first let him stay; the low one, that drank the ditch when the ditch ran, years later, the year he married. Together they came to a little over two acres. A third of everything that came off either piece went into the Hale barn, and four days of his own back went into the Hale haying, and the ditch took two more days in the spring, and in a fair year the two fields gave him somewhere around thirty bushels and ten of them were never his. Last year had been twenty-six. Ned kept numbers the way other men kept letters.

He had come over the mountain from the east side as a half-grown boy, out of a place where the ground had gone dry in a single summer and then begun steaming up out of itself, and the people there had run four ways at once. He had come up the Hale lane with nothing on him, and old Osric Hale had let him stay the winter for his keep and sleep in the barn. In time he married a daughter of that house and built the two rooms and the shed he lived in and got a son, and it had been a long while since a winter frightened him.

He was on the second counting when the boy came down the row with the water bucket banging into his knee.

“Master Hobbs says it’s not much,” Toby said, and then said the rest of what he had been sent to say, which was that she was sitting up and had eaten and that a few doses would do it and she would be home in a few days.

“Did she say anything?”

The boy thought about it. “She said mind your boots in the wet.”

“Then mind them.”

Toby went back along the row, and Ned sat still and started the counting a third time and did not get far into it.

It was not the sickness he had been going over since first light. It was the doses. Money came out of the wheat after the Hale third was out of it and the seed was kept back and the ditch days were paid, and if it would not stretch past one sick winter, the low field went first, sold off to some man with silver in his pocket and no land of his own. After that the boy hired out to another man’s harvest for wages, and Ned’s own wheat stood and dropped in the sun. After that came the morning when a man took his hat in his hand and walked up the Hale lane to ask if the rent could wait. Ned had watched two men in Alder Creek make that walk. Neither of them had two fields anymore.

He could see the Hale ground from where he sat — the south side of the ditch, the part that held water and never failed, the piece that had made the name in the first place. Everybody in Alder Creek knew how it had come to be that way. If anyone in the valley had a different version of it, Ned had never heard one.

Old Osric Hale had a good head for land and no care at all for what was said about him. He married a wife and kept two other women, and in the end all of them were under the same roof, which the parish book at Fairbury never wrote down and the family never once tried to hide. His wife gave him two sons. The other two gave him three more sons and four daughters, and one of the daughters was Moll — raised under the same roof, fed at the same table, and never, in the book or out of it, a Hale. Ned had married her.

Then Osric got old. The son of his wife who had stayed by him died in his bed one night with no mark on him and nobody in the room, and after the burying the rest of them took to walking the fields with a line and a stick and a surveyor’s book, and half of one piece they were counting on already belonged to a household up the valley that had spent the year buying up small men’s fields.

And then Elias Hale came back up the road. He had gone off years before and nobody in Alder Creek had a story about where, and he came back with men behind him and a blade on his hip and a soldier’s coat on his back.

By dark that day the man who kept the Hale books was dead in the yard, and one of the brothers was dead, and the household up the valley was dead, every soul in it. They did not leave the dog.

Elias and his men went out and picked the bodies up and laid them on a cart and brought them down through Alder Creek from the top end to the bottom, and the blood went along the road behind them the whole way, and every door in the village was shut while they came past.

Then he called his brothers in and told them the family was one blood, whichever side of the bed it was born on; and he opened up the dead man’s land and cut a piece of it for every brother and a larger piece for each of the men he had brought home with him; and the brothers, who had come into that room expecting to be put out of the house, went out of it calling him the head of the family, and meant it.

That was the telling. Ned had heard it half a dozen times since he came to the valley. He paid his rent on time.

He was still on the bank when somebody called down the lane.

“Uncle!”

He was up off the sod with his hat in both hands before his mind was around the voice.

Corwin Hale came down through the grass with his coat open, smiling. “Uncle Ned. Out here by yourself.”

“I’ve no right to it, Corwin.” Ned got the hat turning over in his hands. “I only married in, and I rent off you besides.”

“You married a Hale,” Corwin said. “My mother’s had the pot on since morning. She heard about Moll. Father wants you up to the house — you and the boy.”

“That’s kind of you.” Ned looked at the ditch, and at his wheat, and at the lane. “Truly. Only she’s up at Master Hobbs’s, and there’s the ditch to see to, and the boy’s no hand at a table with company—“

“The ditch will keep,” Corwin said, and put his hand flat on Ned’s shoulder and left it there. “Come at dark. Bring the boy. My mother will take it hard if you don’t.”

Ned had never found a way to say no to a hand on his shoulder. “All right,” he said.

“Good man.” Corwin went back up the lane with his coat swinging.

Ned stood a while in his own field with the hat in his hands. He could not think of one thing in his house a Hale would take, and now he owed them a supper.

He waited another hour on the wheat, because the wheat did not care about any of it. Then he went down to the trough and washed and put on the coat that went to funerals and to the Hales’ house, and called up the row.

“Toby! Wash your face. We’re eating at your uncle’s.”

The boy came up out of the wheat at a run, which was his answer to most things. “Is Mother coming?”

“Not tonight.”

“Are we taking anything?”

“Nothing to take.”

The sun was off the valley and the lamp was already lit over the door by the time the two of them came up the Hale lane. The Hales had been building for years and had not stopped. Two rooms were going up at the gate where the melon hills had been that spring, walled to the top of the doors and no further, and the front of the yard showed flat and gray, jointed like a floor, the joints still pale against the stone. By the step sat the lifting stones, the big one and the little one, both worn gray in the middle where hands went.

Ned stopped in front of them the way he stopped in front of them every time.

“They must have a way of it in this family,” he said. Toby came and stood beside him and looked at the big one. “That’s not coming off the ground for me.”

“There’s no way to it,” Gareth Hale said, coming out to meet them with his sleeves rolled and his hands still wet from the trough. “You just pick it up. Come in, both of you. They’re waiting on you.”

The lamplight lay on the pool in the middle of the yard and there were fish in it, going slow, and the hall stood behind with a room off either side, and every door across the front of that house was shut, so that from the yard a man could not see one foot into it. Ned wiped his boots twice before he stepped up.

They put him in the chair with the arms on it, the one at the corner, which was where a guest was put. He had never sat in that chair, and it took him a moment to get down into it. Toby was given the end of the bench.

Corwin’s wife had been a Renn and was a Hale now, married in the early summer, and her name was Maren, and she poured for the table and asked Ned how Moll was getting on and did not ask him twice, and Ned was grateful for that. Gareth was eighteen that year and had no wife, and no one at the table said a word about it, so Ned did not either. Duncan sat at the far end and ate and asked Toby about the eels in Moonmere and let him tell it until the boy had told it all twice. And Elias Hale sat at the head of the table and said almost nothing, which was how he sat at his own table.

There was pork, and bread, and greens, and a dish of the fish out of the pool, and there was enough of it. The enough of it was the part Ned kept noticing.

They ate, and the light went, and afterward they sat out in the yard with the plates stacked on the bench and talked about the ditch, which was running low for the time of year; and the haying, which would want Ned’s four days before the month turned; and the two rooms at the gate, which Corwin said would be closed in by the first frost if the stone held. Ned said yes where yes was wanted and let the rest go by him, and it got dark enough that he could no longer see the far wall.

A boy came through the gate while they were still talking. It was Corin — Elias’s son, nine years old, and at the schoolmaster’s now instead of the fields. He came in fast, with his hair standing up, went straight across the yard to his father, bent down to his ear and said one short thing, low, and straightened up again and stepped back off him.

Elias did not move for the length of a breath. Then he put both hands flat on his knees and pushed himself up out of the chair.

“That’s my night,” he said. “A man gets to my age, he’s no good for sitting. Keep at it, all of you. I’ll hear the rest in the morning.”

They said good night to him all around the yard — Corwin, and Maren, and Gareth, and Corin — and he went along the front of the house with his hands behind his back, and the lamp over the door showed him as far as the corner, and then the corner took him.

Corin stayed where he was a moment, by the chair, and then sat down in it. Corwin said something to Duncan about the eels, and Maren leaned over the bench to hear Toby tell it again, and the talk went back to the ditch and the haying and the two rooms at the gate.

Ned sat at the corner of the yard with his cup in his hand and heard none of what Corin had said.