SECOND BEST

A Tale of Sogmarsh — in which a child asks to be taught to win, and is taught, instead, the harder thing.

A Tale of Sogmarsh — a standalone story of the realm. Stands on its own; not part of the Reader's Edition collection.

Every child on the Haver ground wants to beat the Goose, and every year the Goose beats them, and most children learn to live with this the way you learn to live with the rain.

Not the Prowse boy. Little Wat Prowse — great-nephew to Aggie, the same mud-and-stone family, the ones who re-lay the Mire Road stepping-stones twice a year — did not want to live with it. He wanted to win. And he did the thing no child had done in a generation, which was to go to Aggie Prowse herself, the only soul in the history of the tournament ever to lead the Goose at the last firm footing, and ask her to teach him how it was done.

Aggie was old by then, and famous, and had a bench on the ground with her name on it that she found embarrassing and would not sit on. She looked at the boy a long while, in the slow Prowse way, hands flat on her knees.

And she said she would teach him. Which surprised the parish, because Aggie Prowse had never taught anyone anything about that tournament and had spent a lifetime declining to discuss it.

She taught him for three springs.

She taught him to read the wind off the west the way she read water, so he would know where the sheaf came down before it was thrown. She taught him to start out on the ground at his own stone instead of at the hedge with the others. She taught him to go through the bog to the knee and haul out and go again without breaking his line, which is the hardest thing on that field and the thing she was best at in the whole history of it.

She taught him everything she knew. And the boy was good — better, at his age, than she had been — and by the third spring he could get the sheaf up and turning before the Goose was properly in the air, and the parish began, very quietly, to wonder.

What she did not teach him, in all three springs, was the last thing. The finish. Where to carry the sheaf. She taught him every yard of that field except the final one, and when he asked about the last stretch — where do I take it, Aunt Aggie, when I've got it and I'm ahead — she only ever said, "We'll come to that."

They came to it in the boy's fourth year, on the ground, in front of eight hundred people, which is how Aggie Prowse had planned it all along, though she never said so.

The sheaf came down where the wind said it would. Wat Prowse had it up and was turning before the Goose left the ground, and he went through the bog the way she taught him, hauling and going, hauling and going, and he was ahead — ahead at the last firm footing, the second child in the whole history of the Haver ground to be there, and the crowd made a noise you could hear at Mucklecombe.

And he stopped. On the last firm footing. Sheaf up over his head. The Goose six inches off the mud beside him doing its flat contemptuous flap. And Wat Prowse stood there, ahead, with the whole tournament there for the taking, and did not know where to run — because his great-aunt had never taught him the last yard.

He looked for her in the crowd. And she was standing at her bench, the one with her name on it, the one that faces the last firm footing, and she was not shouting go. She was just looking at him. And in that long second the boy understood the whole of what she had spent three springs not saying.

He understood that she could have taught him the last yard. That there is a way to beat the rule of 1672, that a Prowse who has thought about that field as hard as Aggie had would have found it, and that she had found it, years ago, and had chosen — every year, on purpose — not to use it.

And he understood why, standing there ahead of the bird with the choice in his hands: that the parish does not need another winner. A hundred parishes have a winner. What this one has, the only one in the realm, is the ground where the best of us comes second to a bird and holds their head up — and that being the person who could have won, and let the crookedness stand, and came second on purpose so the story lives, is a prouder thing than any trophy, and the hardest thing his aunt knew, and the last thing she had left to teach him, and the only way to teach it was to let him find it here, ahead, with everyone watching.

He carried the sheaf to the near hedge. The Goose carried it to the table. The Goose won.

Wat Prowse came second, by the length of a table, the third of his family to do it, and the crowd understood what they had seen, and the noise they made was not for a defeat.

Afterward, Aggie Prowse sat down on her bench for the first and only time anyone ever saw, and the boy sat down beside her, and neither of them said much, in the Prowse way, and then Wat said he thought he could have won it.

And Aggie said, "I know you could. That's why it counts that you didn't."

And they watched the Goose refuse to look at the committee, the pair of them, for a good long while.

Anyone can be taught to win; a hundred parishes teach nothing else. The rare thing — the thing that has to be found standing on the last firm footing with the prize in your hands — is knowing when the crooked, generous, unwinnable thing is worth more than the trophy, and choosing, in front of everyone, to come second on purpose so that something better than you gets to go on living.