Sect Year 5 · eleventh month · night of day 28 · the fifty-second life: the Haskett bend on the river, his seventeenth year
Seven winters passed after the switch, and by the last of them Emmer was seventeen and taller than the men who had first taught him the furrow. He had learned the ground the way a hand learns a tool. He knew the soft spots where the share would sink to the beam. The stones that rose out of the clay after each hard frost, and the place near the headland where the river water pooled and turned the soil to grease. He had learned to read the tally board, too, though nobody had ever sat him down to teach it. He read Hob’s columns upside down on the gate post, one line at a time, and found the figures where they belonged.
The Tenneys worked the lower field above the bend, and every spring their boys ploughed it earlier than the Haskett ground. Emmer watched them from the headland. He had watched their furrows for seven winters, and he had never once seen a boy in that field walk behind a beast that would not move. They whipped their oxen forward, and the oxen went. Emmer had never found a way to do that, and he didn’t try to learn it.
