The Returning Read Free Page B

stay.” Graceful’s voice came out all squashed through her hands.
    â€œThat your stake, then? You get up and you can stay?”
    She nodded.
    â€œHere is mine. You get up and you get a pony.”
    Graceful had lowered her hands.
    Of course Father had won. He always won. But somehow she always ended up on top, though she lost every bet they had between them, every single one.
    Graceful had called the pony Puck. He’d had a white saddle and reins, and bells strung on them—still did.
    â€œFather? Do you remember how I got Puck?”
    â€œI remember. It was your betrothal to Attling’s Oldest. Oh! You did not want to go.”
    â€œMy dears,” said Stepmother, yet she was laughing. “As long as you keep such commerce in the stable yard where it belongs.”
    Father winked at Graceful.
    Â 
    â€œSILK OR NOT, the flax should be good and soft,” Stepmother said next morning. “It’s had two score days on the grass.”
    All the women of Fenister Fort—Graceful and Stepmother, Isla (who milked the cows, gathered the eggs, churned butter, cleaned and did all around the house), Carin (who was Stepmother’s sister’s husband’s cousin), and Carin’s daughter, Posey—they hitched their skirts up to their knees, tied scarves over their hair, and walked barefoot down to the drying field. Spread on the grass were bunches of pulled flax, dried to a kind of straw. Flax became linen: Graceful’s dress was linen, and her cap and smock and top petticoat, as were Stepmother’s, as were Father’s shirt and breeks. Linen was what had built Fenister Fort. Linen was what kept it rich.
    In midsummer they had spread the flax out in Leat Side, the field that faced south and got the least sun. Week upon week the flax had lain on the grass retting—softening, wet with dew and drying with the sun; wet with dew again and the moisture off the leat. Then the whole lot had been humped uphill and spread to dry on the sunny, westerly face of the hillside.
    Now they rolled it up, Graceful and Stepmother, Isla and Carin and Posey. With their skirts showing their bare scratched calves and their scarves sticking wet to their foreheads, the women made their way in a line to the threshing shed, lugging bundle after bundle, the sun dropping white summer heat down on them.
    They ate the noon meal in the drying field. Isla sought Graceful out. “I do have a new game for you.” Showing Graceful the rhythm to clap, Isla taught her:
    Cuck Maran stands on his dungheap
Crows in the morning
Cock-a-doo
Cuck Maran he takes nine wives
High on his dungheap
Crows all the day
Cock-a-cock-a-doo
Cuck Maran does what he’s told to
Come down from your dungheap
Right now, from your dungheap
A-doo
Clap, clap

    â€œWHERE’S MY GRACEFUL?” Father’s bellow echoed clear through the threshing shed, where Graceful and Stepmother were at work. The threshing shed was really part of the barn. Here the women scutched the flax, spreading it on the scutch-tables and pounding it with wooden paddles, the scutchers, to break the flax stems.
    Father held the little seedling in one arm. “I thought you might want to put this one in, your own special mulberry.”
    â€œOh, yes!” Graceful looked to Stepmother for permission. In answer, Stepmother pulled Graceful’s headscarf straight. She and Father kissed, as they always did, any time they parted.
    Father carried a spade and Graceful the tree.
    â€œOnce upon a time, Dorn-Lannet and Fenister Fort”—he swung the spade like a sword—“were equals, part of a line of defense, and in the charge of Lords.”
    â€œFenister Fort is not in the charge of Lords now, for we are farmers!” Graceful skipped to keep up.
    â€œHumph.”
    She wondered why that was a wrong thing to say.
    â€œYou know what those Lords did, my Graceful? They fought one another, when there was no enemy to fight. Some