He had simply seen the problem and solved it and gone home and sent Tommy the next day with food without any indication that the previous night had been anything other than a practical matter. She drove the madic into the earth and told herself it was a practical matter. Then she kept turning soil because the garden needed her more than her thoughts did. She planted onions along the east edge, spacing them with a stick she cut to the right length because Henry had taught her that spacing was the thing most home gardeners did wrong. Then carrots, then turnips, then a row of herbs along the south border.
By the time she was done, her back ached in three distinct places, and the light was gone, and she was hungry with the bone deep animal hunger of someone who has been growing another person inside them for 8 months, and burning more than they can take in. She went inside and cooked what she had and ate it sitting on the packed earth floor because she had not built furniture yet, and the cot was against the north wall, and the floor was even, and she was too tired to care about the picture this made. She looked at the walls in the lamp light, rough interior, log sealed but not finished. The single window covered in oiled paper, but the roof had held through a storm that meant business. She had proven it yesterday, standing outside in the rain, listening to the percussion of water on cedar, and finding no gaps in it, except the ones she already knew about and was already planning to fix.
The cabin was hers, and it was dry, and those were the two things that mattered tonight. She ate the last of the salt pork from Tommy's supply sack, acknowledged that it was better than anything she had been buying herself, and did not let that acknowledgement go further than it needed to. Caleb came on a Thursday. He appeared at the edge of the garden plot while she was crouching with her hands in the soil, checking the onion spacing she had done the previous week, and they both paused with the brief awkwardness of two people who have arrived at the same space by different routes, and neither was entirely expecting the other. He looked at the garden with the eye of a man who had grown things or who had watched things grown.
She could not tell which yet. I was checking the creek line, he said. The storm shifted some of the bank. I wanted to see if it affected the drainage on your property. Did it?
Not badly. There's a new gravel bar about 30 ft upstream that might redirect some flow in heavy rain, but the grade is still away from the cabin site. He paused. I should have looked at it sooner. I didn't ask you to look at it, she said.
No, he agreed. You didn't. She crouched back down and checked the row. The onion greens were already showing, vivid and definite above the dark soil, faster than she had expected. She considered this.
Then she stood back up slowly, one hand on her knee, and looked at the row from standing height. "They're coming in," Amos said. He was looking at the garden, not at her. "Yes." What did you plant?" She told him. He listened without interrupting, which she had been noticing was a characteristic of his.
When she finished, he asked a question and waited for the answer before asking the next one, which sounds like a basic courtesy, but was less universal than it should have been. "You know how to garden?" He said. "My mother did," Clara said. "Different soil, different climate, but the principles carry." Where did you grow up? Kentucky," she said.