Planting Day at Mucklecombe

The Sogmarsh Year — Mucklecombe, in the Light. Being the first day of the year's one great gamble, and the several reasons no almanac had thought to mention.

Planting day at Mucklecombe began, as it always began, with Pa Muckle standing in the yard at first light telling the weather what it was going to do.

"Fair," said Pa, to the sky, which was not listening. "Fair and drying, with a warm wind up from the Griddle by noon. It says so in the book." He held up the book. The book was Podd's Compleat Kalendar for the Turnip Country, three years old, and it did indeed say fair and drying, because Pa was holding his thumb over the word unless.

Bett came out with his breakfast and read the sky in the time it took her to hand him the bowl. "It'll rain by the dinner bell," she said, "and the low field's a bog to the knee, and if you plant Jeb's good corn in it you'll grow nothing but a fine crop of ducks." Bett was Goodwife Muckle on the green and at church, where she ran the parish; she was Bett in her own yard, where she ran everything else. "But you'll not be told, so I've told you, and now my conscience is clear and my porridge is going cold indoors."

"The book, Bett," said Pa, wounded.

"The book's three years dead and never once been wet," said Bett, and went in.

Now, the seed-corn. Here was the first thing the almanac had not thought to mention, which was Uncle Jeb.

Uncle Jeb had, over the winter, and entirely for the good of the family, moved the best of the seed-corn to a place of safety. The place of safety was known only to Jeb, and the reason for it was that a thing put somewhere safe could not be borrowed, spent, eaten, gambled, lent to a Tussock, or planted before Jeb had satisfied himself, over a long and reluctant morning, that planting it was truly necessary and there was no cheaper way. When Young Muckle came for the seed, Jeb met him at the barn with the particular pained expression of a man being asked for a kidney.

"The good corn," said Jeb, as though Young Muckle had proposed something coarse. "You'd not want the good corn, boy, not on a day like — " he looked at the fair, drying sky " — a day like this. No. What you want," and here his voice went soft and warm as a spread of butter, "is the thrifty corn. I've a sack of the thrifty corn put by special."

The thrifty corn was last year's sweepings, and three mice.

This might have been the whole disaster, except for the second thing the almanac had not foreseen, which was Vern Clack, trying to help.

Vern Clack had been a Murkminster clerk. He was, this Light, some months into being a Muckle instead, and he was trying so hard and so visibly to be useful that the entire holding had quietly agreed to love him for it and never, ever, let him near anything that mattered. But Fern had said, at breakfast, without looking up, that a man could learn to plant, and Vern had heard in it a commission from on high, and so when he found Young Muckle carrying two sacks and cursing, he seized the heavier one — the good corn, the real corn, the corn Jeb had at last surrendered with the air of a man watching his own funeral — and he strode off to be helpful with it, at speed, in entirely the wrong direction, toward the low field.

The low field. The bog to the knee.

By the time they caught him he had, with tremendous energy and the very best intentions, broadcast a third of the good seed-corn across the one stretch of Mucklecombe where nothing but ducks would grow, and he was standing in it to the shins, beaming, calling back, "It's marvellous soil down here! Ever so soft!"

And then, on cue, and precisely as the book had promised it would not, it began to rain.

There is a way a farm can go, at a moment like that. Pa going purple over his book; Jeb keening over his corn like a widow; Young Muckle laughing so hard he sat down in the wet; the rain coming on; the year's whole gamble sinking, seed by seed, into a duck-bog — and somewhere at the back of all of it, if you let yourself feel it, the true cold fact underneath the comedy: that this one day, got wrong, is a thin winter eight months off, and a thin winter is not funny at all to anyone who has had one.

Fern felt it. Fern always felt the cold fact under the warm day; it was why the house turned to her without ever deciding to. She came across the yard wiping her hands, took one look at the low field, one look at Vern standing hopeful and soaked and ruinous in the middle of it, and did three things.

She sent Dib and the little ones down the bank with baskets, because seed broadcast on wet ground sits on top a while before it drowns, and small quick hands can lift a deal of it back before it does. She sent Young Muckle running for the Tussocks — the Tussocks, the rival house, the hundred-year feud — because the Tussocks' high field was already turned and drilled and they had the drill and the daylight to spare, and a feud is a fine thing but nobody at Mucklecombe was going to be short at the turn for the sake of it. And she took Vern by his wet sleeve and did not scold him, which he had braced for, and would almost have preferred.

"You've a clerk's hands and a clerk's eyes," she said. "You can't plant. But you can count, and there's not a soul on this holding can tell me true how much good corn we've truly got left, because Jeb's hidden it, and Pa's guessed it, and you're the one man here who's never once lied about a number in his life."

Vern looked at her. Something went straight in him that had been bent since Murkminster.

"I can count," he said.

"I know," said Fern. "Go and be the only honest ledger in Bogmoor. It's the most useful thing you'll do all year."

So he did. And it was the strangest sight of that whole strange day: the ex-clerk of the capital, up to his shins in the Bogmoor bog, kneeling in the rain with a slate, gravely counting recovered seed-corn back into the sack grain by grain while the children fed it to him basket by basket and Jeb hovered at his shoulder weeping with relief at every full count — because a thing that is counted, to Jeb, is nearly as safe as a thing that is hidden, and here at last was a man making his corn safe in a way Jeb could understand.

The Tussocks came, and brought their drill, and their scowls, and stayed, without anyone remarking on it, until the light was gone. The good corn, most of it, went into the high field where it should have gone at first light, before the book and the thrift and the helpfulness. The low field they left to the ducks, and the ducks were very pleased. Bett fed thirty people at a table meant for twelve, and never said I told you, which everyone understood to be the loudest I told you in the history of the fen.

And the year's gamble went into the ground after all, a day muddier and a house fuller than the almanac had drawn it — because the almanac had reckoned on the weather, and the seed, and the soil, and had left out, as almanacs always leave out, the only things that ever actually got a crop into a Sogmarsh field: a girl who felt the cold fact early, a feud set down for an evening, an honest man given the one job he could do, and a great damp sprawl of people who would not, on any account, be short at the turn.

Pa stood in the yard at dusk, soaked to the skin, watching the last of the Tussocks cart away up the drove.

"Went well, I thought," said Pa. "Went very well. It says here it would." He held up the book. His thumb had slipped. It now covered the word fair, and left showing, in Podd's small determined print, the one honest word the whole day had been organised around: unless.