Chapter 27 — Harvest of the Third Year

Aunia counted the harvest before it was cut, walking the terrace edge at first light with the sickle over her shoulder, as her mother-in-law had taught her: so many paces of standing wheat to the sheaf, so many sheaves to the hundred, so many hundreds to the modius-count that would carry them or not carry them to the next green ears. The year had been kind. The rain had come when rain should come, the channel had run all spring without one quarrel at the gates, the wheat stood thick and even and the heads hung full, and she counted it twice over, because a kind year was like a kind stranger: it proved nothing, and you watched its hands.

Twice over — and this year the two counts were not a checking of each other. The first count was the old one, the family's: bread in months, seed held back, the mill's fee, Reburrus paid out at last — the seed-debt had come down year by year, one and a half for one shrinking like a winter — the fever-man's interest met, and a margin, small, real, the first real margin since before the drought. The second count was the new one, and she did it with the same lips in the same walking, and hated it quietly and did it well, because doing it badly would not make it less true: the tenant's count. If the court said tenancy, some share of these same sheaves would go down the valley to a holder the register would establish — she did not know the figure; no one knew the figure; so she counted with the worst share she had ever heard tell of, from the Tarbessan's tenants two valleys over, and then with the kindest, and set the family's life down between those two marks and lived there, in the space between a hard rent and a bearable one, which was where the writing had lodged them now going on a year.

The waiting had its own seasons. In the spring it had been sharp — the docket was for the spring; Reburrus had said the spring; they had planted the whole vega on the strength of the spring — and then the spring had gone by, planting and shearing and the rite at the head of the water, kept in May, smaller than in other years, and no summons came, and no ruling came, and what came instead, in June, by the boy who ran words up the valley for a copper, was town talk: the commissioner himself had been put to the question at Corduba. The one who signed the tablet. Called before the proconsul to answer for the correction — for their correction, the correction their cause stood upon — and the vega had held its breath for an eight-day without admitting it was holding anything, because if the correction fell, the ghost came back, and the ghost's name over the land meant the old writing, and the old writing had the Tarbessan's net under it.

Then Reburrus came up from the July market with the rest of it, and stood at the field edge in his market clothes, and told it the way he told written things, slowly, with his finger moving under lines that were not there.

"He answered them with the registers," Reburrus said. "That is the talk under the porticoes. They put four questions on him and he laid tablets against every one, and the proconsul found the corrections good. They stand. It is over — that part is over. The writing holds." He stopped there, and Aunia, who had learned him at that hearth over thirty years, saw the next thing waiting behind his teeth and waited for it. "The causes were not called," he said. "Ours and the eight others. The court's year was used up — they used it on him, on trying the man, and the new proconsul comes in the autumn and rides his courts in the spring. The causes are carried to the new man's docket. Carried entire, the scribe told me; nothing lost; the citations hold; they keep their place in the queue." He said the scribe's words with the scribe's ease, and then he said, in his own, "Another winter, Aunia."

"Carried," said Boutius, who had come up the row with chaff in his beard and stood listening with the sickle hanging from his hand. "Like a debt."

That was the whole of what her husband said about it, that day or after, and the not-saying was the tempering she had bought at the September hearth and had not stopped paying for since. He did not talk iron anymore. He did not talk at all, on the matter; he had shut the cause inside a room of himself and posted his silence at the door of it like a dog; and he had made one law for the household, delivered the previous autumn without raising his voice, and it held: we will not speak of rent under this roof until a court says the word first. So they none of them said it, and the word sat unsaid at every meal in the place where the salt was passed, and Aunia kept the tenant's count walking the terraces alone.

Only once that summer did the old iron show, and it showed strangely, and it was over the stone.

The boy had wanted to break it. It was July, the evening of a cutting day, and they were sharpening at the terrace head, and the ghost's stone stood where it had always stood with its letters toward the channel, and the boy — eighteen now, a man's shoulders on him from the wall-work he had taken in town that winter, coin in a pot behind the hearth that everyone knew of and no one named — the boy set his whetstone down and said the town's own writing called the man void now, nothing, poured out; so what did the stone stand there for, over their upper terrace, saying its dead lie to the channel every morning; he would have it out and into the stream before dark, and their corner clean. And Boutius, who two Septembers ago had talked of channel stones moved and the pagus all of one mouth, Boutius put his hand flat on the top of the stone the way you gentle a mule, and said no.

"Let it stand," he said. "It marks our corner. It has marked our corner all your life, whoever's name they cut on it. And when the court speaks for us —" they all heard the when, and let it be, because forbidding a man hope is a thing you do only in richer years — "I want it standing here to hear it. Then we will have the mason come and cut it honest. You do not break the stone, boy. You correct it. Breaking is what they expect of us up the valley. We are a family that corrects."

She turned away in the low light and worked her whetstone a while, because there were sentences a woman did not let her husband see her face receive, and that had been the commissioner's word out of Boutius's mouth, entered there without his knowing, the way the year puts its silt in a channel.

The elder failed through the summer the way a lamp fails, not all at once, and with returns of brightness that were worse than the dimming.

He came out to the fields every cutting day, because no one had found the courage or the cruelty to tell him not to, and he sat under the fig his own hands had planted the year of Boutius's birth, in the round shade, with a cup of water-and-vinegar by him, and he watched the work with his hands on his knees. He did not ask about the cause anymore. All winter he had asked — is there word, is there word from the town — and sometime in the spring the asking had stopped, and Aunia could not say which was heavier to carry past, the question or its absence. Now his mind slipped its years the way a beast slips a stake in soft ground, quietly, wandering near. He asked her once, at midday, whether the assessors had come yet — this year's assessors; he was waiting on them; he had his declaration ready, he said, tapping the breast of his tunic where there was nothing; a man wanted his holding sworn while the swearing was cheap. She brought him his cup and said the assessors were not come, which was true, and he nodded, satisfied, a man with his papers in order, and watched his grandson bind sheaves on land the register said might be no one's, and was content.

And once, at the end of a long still evening, he counted the carts, because she asked him to. It had come to her watching him fret at the edge of the work, his lips moving, his tallies wandering and knotting — the man who had taught her husband and her husband's mother the whole counting-craft of that hearth, losing a number the way you lose a name, hunting it, finding another year's number instead. So she set him where the carts turned at the threshing floor and asked him to keep the tale of the loads, because the family trusted no one else to do it, which was a lie built entirely out of the truth; and he kept it. Small numbers stayed with him yet. He sat on the stool through the amber and the dusk with a pebble moving in his fingers for each load, and gave her the count at dark — nine, and it was nine — and went in to his supper upright, a man who had done his office; and Aunia stood a moment on the swept floor understanding that she now kept two counts of everything because the family's living register was failing leaf by leaf in the light of day, while the town's wax one, that had done them all the harm, lay young and cold and permanent in a rack in Corduba, waiting its turn to speak. Memory was the register once, he had told them; memory and the neighbors' knowing. She was watching what that register was worth when the years called its entries in.

The boy asked his asking at the season's end, on the threshing floor, when the grain was in the jars and the chaff was stacked and the year's work stood done around them in the smell of dust and evening: let him go down to the port for the winter. Not forever — he laid it out the way he had heard men lay things out at the fair, point and point and point, and he had them in order: wall-work was done, the town owed nothing till spring; at the port a strong back earned wages all winter, Rufus's brother would speak for him at the warehouses; and — this was the new point, the one the year had given him, and he made it looking at neither of them — if the court said rent, rent would want coin, and the land made bread but the port made coin, and a family with a foot in each was a family the writing could not knock down with one blow. He was not wrong. That was what Aunia did to every speech at that hearth, weighed it, and the weighing said: not wrong. It was the same speech he had made at seventeen with the tablet new on the shelf, and it was not the same speech; that one had been a boy running; this one was a man building; and the difference was a year of watching his elders wait, and it had made a port man of him at their own fire without one foot leaving the vega.

Boutius looked at the jars a long time. His law held — the word rent had been said, but the court had not said it first, only his son bargaining with the shape of it — and she watched him decide not to count that as breakage, which was itself a kind of aging. "After the sowing," he said at last. "You'll see the seed in first. Then go down till the pruning." And to the floor, not to the boy: "Wages are wages. It is not leaving." No one at the threshing floor believed the last of it, the boy least of all; and no one said so; the household had learned, this year of the writing, to let each other keep the entries that made the days workable.

Aunia said her own part later, in the dark of the sleeping-room, to the roof: one winter. She had held him back one winter — she did not say from what — and she gave the winter its reason for the roof to hear, coin against the rent-that-might-be, and kept the true reason where she kept the heaviest coin, unspent: that she could not yet count what the house would be with him out of it, and she never spent what she had not counted.

The tablet stayed on the shelf by the salt. It had been there ten months now, folded on its cords, dusted around on baking days like the lamp and the shears; the notice, the thirty days, the three courses, all of it long since answered, entered, superseded — dead writing by any use she could name. She kept it anyway. You did not burn what had brothers. And some evenings, banking the fire, with the men asleep and the grain in the jars and the margin counted and the winter counted and the two rents counted, the hard one and the kind one, she would look at it there in the shadow of the salt box and hold the whole year in her two hands at once, the way you held a full jar coming down the ladder, not because the jar was the year but because dropping was dropping:

The harvest was in. It was good. She could not say whose.

And far down the water, in a city she would die without seeing, a leaf of wax in a rack knew — or would know, when men found the day for it; and the shape of every life at this hearth, the boy's winter and the man's law and the old one's pebbles and her own two counts, hung folded on the cords of it; and there was nothing to be done at this fire tonight but what she did: she banked it well, and set the water on for morning, and slept with her arithmetic, all of it correct, all of it waiting, like everything in that valley, on the turning of a leaf.