Enough

You have to understand what the four years before it were.

Not famine. We want to be accurate, because Oda was writing it down and because the Fold has never been a place that dresses itself up. Nobody starved. Two of the old ones went in the second winter and both of them were going anyway. It was the other thing, the long one, where you eat every day and you are hungry every day, and the bread has more of the wrong flour in it each season, and you stop having opinions about food because an opinion about food is a thing you can only afford when there is a choice.

The gods died and the yields went with them. Everybody's did. Sorya sent a man out to explain to us that the fifteen percent was gone and was not coming back and that we should plan accordingly, and he was polite about it, and we fed him, and he ate what we ate and did not finish it.

So that was where we were standing when the spring came.

Bick noticed first, which is the joke of the whole year and we will get to why.

He came up from the low field in April in a state, and we all thought somebody had died, and he stood in the road and told us the ground had gone strange under the spade. Not hard. Not soft. Strange. He could not put it better than that and we gave him a great deal of grief about it, because Bick has been telling us the ground is wrong every April since before some of us were born, and this was the first time he had said it in a voice that was actually worried instead of pleased.

Merren went down and put a spade in and came back up and said it was the best tilth she had ever stood on and Bick was an idiot.

They were both right, which happened a lot that year.

It came up thick.

We do not have a better word and Oda pushed us on it for about an hour and we still do not. Thick. The rows closed over early. You walk a field in June and normally you are looking at the ground between the stalks, and that year there was no ground between the stalks, there was only the crop, and when the wind came across it the whole low field moved like something breathing.

Nobody said that at the time. That is Yeva's phrasing and she only said it to Oda in the winter, and the rest of us gave her grief for being poetic.

By July we had stopped talking about the harvest in the way you talk about a harvest, which is nervously, and started talking about it in the way you talk about a bit of luck you do not want to jinx, which is not at all. Whole families went about not mentioning it. Toller took the long way around the low field for three weeks so he would not have to look at it.

The grain was too heavy.

We are not making this up and we want it in the record. He came to the meeting in August and formally complained that the grain was too heavy, on the grounds that the loaded cart had broken an axle on the mill road, which it had, and that this was going to cost him, which it did.

Somebody at the back asked whether he would prefer a lighter crop and he said yes, actually, and would not be moved, and we laughed at him until he left.

He was in the right about the axle. Two more went before the month was out and Deel had to send to Lenthil for the iron.

You will want to know about the bread. Everybody wants to know about the bread. Oda asked about it four separate times and got a different answer each time because four different people answered.

Yeva bakes for the Fold and has done for twenty-two years and she is good and we have always said so, in the way you say a thing about someone you have known that long, which is to say not often and not to her face. That year she made a loaf in the first week of September that stopped an argument.

We mean that literally. There was a dispute going about the boundary stones on the Averill side, an old one, the kind that has been passed down like furniture, and it was being had again in the yard, and Yeva came out with the first of the new flour in a loaf and cut it and handed it round, and the argument simply did not resume. Nobody decided to stop. It stopped.

It had a crust that went in three directions when you pulled it and it smelled like something you remember rather than something you are smelling, and it was sweet without being sweet, and the crumb was so open you could see through a slice held up, and Rell, who is nine, took one bite and burst into tears and could not tell anyone why.

We ate an unreasonable amount of bread that autumn. We are aware. Oda wrote down that we mentioned the bread more than we mentioned the wedding and we would like the record to show that this is not true, but we are not going to argue very hard about it.

Toller and Nis had been going to marry for three years and had not, because you do not, when there is not enough.

They married in October in the yard behind the mill, and the reason we can tell you the date is that it was decided in about four days once the count came back from the threshing floor and everyone realised at the same moment that it could simply happen.

Deel killed the pig he had been keeping opinions about. Merren's people came down from the Averill side, boundary stones and all, and the stones did not come up once. There was butter. We want to say something about the butter and we are not going to manage it, so we will only say that Nis's father, who is not a soft man, stood in the middle of the yard with a piece of bread and butter in his hand and cried about it in front of everybody, and nobody mentioned it then and nobody has mentioned it since, and everybody remembers.

Bick danced. Badly. For a long time.

He raised it privately, to two of us, on the walk back from the mill in November, so we are giving it here the way he gave it, which was quietly and without any of the performance.

He said the fields smelled of rain.

We said it had not rained since the eleventh. He said he knew that, and that he was not saying it had rained, he was saying the fields smelled of it, the way the road smells when the first drops come down on dust after a dry month, and that they had smelled of it since August, and that he had not mentioned it before because he did not want to be laughed at twice in one season.

We told him it was the mill dust. He said it was not the mill dust. We told him his nose was seventy-one years old. He said that it was, and that it had been doing this job the whole time, and then he said the thing we have all repeated since, which is that he had smelled a great many fields and had never once smelled one that was pleased with itself.

And we laughed at him. On the road, in the dark, with a good year behind us and our arms full. We laughed at him and he took it well and we walked home.

Forty-one percent above the five-year, which the five-year does not flatter, so call it a third above a good one.

We sold the surplus to Sorya at a price that was frankly insulting and took it anyway because a third above is a third above, and their factor stood in the yard and inspected the grain with the face of a man who has been sent to find a problem, and could not, and got quietly angrier about it.

He asked us what we had changed.

That is the part we keep coming back to. Merren told him the truth, which is nothing. We changed nothing. Same seed, same rotation, same three fields and the same wet corner of the fourth that has never grown anything. He did not believe her, and he wrote down that we had probably had help, which we did not, and which we found funny at the time.

We think we know what he meant by help and we want it in the record that there is none of that here and has not been since the Silence. We do our own arithmetic now. That is rather the point of the last few years.

We did it ourselves. That is what we told him and it is what we have told everyone and it is what we believe.

Easy.

That is the whole entry and it is the strangest one to write down. The winter was easy. There was enough in the loft that we stopped going up to look at it, which if you have not lived a lean year is not a thing you will understand, because going up to look at it is what you do, it is practically the season's work, and this year we simply did not.

Rell got fat. Several children got fat. Deel's dog got fat and Deel has been insufferable about it.

On the second evening, when she was nearly finished, Oda closed the book and asked us one more thing, and she asked it in the way the Saltbound ask, which is flat and without any weight on it at all, so that you do not notice for a moment that you have been asked something.

She asked whether it had happened before.

We said what do you mean, and she said a year like it, in the Fold, and had anyone's grandmother spoken of one.

And there was a bit of a pause and then Merren said actually yes, and everybody remembered at once, and there was a lot of talking over each other for a while, because Merren's grandmother did used to talk about a season when she was small where the low field came in so heavy they broke a cart, and we had all heard it a hundred times and none of us had thought of it since April.

Oda asked how long ago that would have been.

We worked it out between us, badly, with a lot of counting on fingers and two people being wrong about who was born when, and we landed somewhere around ninety years, give or take, and somebody said well then, and somebody else said we have a while yet, and everyone laughed, because if a year like this one comes round twice in two hundred you would have to call yourself fortunate.

She wrote it down. She thanked us. She was gone in the morning.