Sect Year 5 · eleventh month · night of day 28 · the fifty-second life: the Haskett bend on the river, his eighteenth year
Five nights of rain came down on the bend. They weren’t the wild storms of the autumn, which tore the straw roof off the Tenneys’ cowshed and sent the river over the lane. This rain was steady and patient. It fell all night in fine grey threads. It fell through the grey mornings, and it soaked into the furrows until the bend looked less like a field than a basin someone had filled and forgotten.
Each dawn, before anyone on the lane was awake, Emmer went to the head of the furrow and knelt in the wet grass and pushed the hazel stick in. The first morning it stopped at the first knuckle. He pulled it out and looked at the dark stain on the wood and said nothing.
The second morning it went to the second knuckle, and the clay closed round the wood, and the water did not stand on top of the hole. It went down.
The third morning it went deeper. The fourth morning the stick was buried to the middle of his fingers, and he had to work it back and forth to get it out. The clay sucked at it with a reluctant sound and gave it up, and the hole it left filled slowly with brown water from below, not from above.
