It is not long before he’s whistling. His ridge and furrow channel the tune as we delve across the field. A plowman’s whistle has the strength to soften clods and break up stones. A plowman’s whistle warns the soil a blade is on its way. I am so satisfied I cannot stop myself from chattering. I’m telling him about the many, endless troubles of the week. I talk of Cecily, and Charles Kent, my boyhood friend. I tell him what a brave and decent man Mr. Quill has proved himself to be. Oxen are noble creatures, I say. They work. But sheep “from what I’ve heard”—what’s his experience? — are helpless beasts: “We’ll have to wait on them like slaves on lords, come spring. Like fools.” I can’t be sure if he is listening. He will not cease his whistling. But we both have busy lips this afternoon, and we are intimate through toil. Anything that’s shared across the backs of oxen is intimate. We make our way toward the dell, and make our way back to the top-end gate. Now our wheels are clogged with mud. I have to free them every twenty paces with a heavy kick and, when that fails, with my bare hands. The rooks and starlings pick the furrows in the damp wake of the plow.

I make my plowman stand away this afternoon when we have cleaned the blades and put the plow back in its place, and let the oxen roam off where they will. This is a task I want to finish without his help. I barrow in a bag of wheat seed for winter planting and use a casting shovel and some sacking in the corner of the field to select the heaviest grain for my baskets. I know I ought to let the strip of turned soil lay and mellow for a week or so, or at least let it be broken down by the rain, which has already begun to lay its own seed on the ground. But there’s no time. Good practice must be sacrificed. I leave Beldam’s husband resting in the corner of the remaining scrub, and sweep my seeded hands across the land, the richest of all scatterings. The farmer in me — yes, I can boast of that — knows that the best cruel nurture for this early crop is that after a week or two of growth its green ribbons are crushed by rolling. That way, the ground is firmed. The plants can take a steady grip. Wheat — like men and women — benefits from being crushed. Crushing makes it fit to stand up all the better. But there is only this afternoon for making good, for marking my revenge, my countryman’s revenge, on Edmund Jordan and his sheep. This narrow sweep of wheat will be my farewell gift. So I walk the furrow for the final time, in the strengthening drizzle, taking it as a blessing that the seed corn is being watered the instant that it leaves my palm.

It is on my way up from the dell, with perhaps little more than a hundred paces and fifty sweepings of my hand remaining, that the light begins to fail. I turn to look, beyond the hedgerows and the pyramidal oak, at the dark horizon rearing deep and solid with gray-on-purple clouds. The few remaining scraps of blue blink barely brighter than an eye. What sunlight there is hardly makes a mark upon our field, though on the wood end of our land its best surviving ray is broad and strong enough to radiate and rim the beeches’ pale bare branches, the grasping talons of the ash, and the high-veined frettings of the elms. Then it falls and slowly beams from common ground to field, as if searching for something. It is reluctant to depart. It even catches smoke pots and roofs before it lifts again to paste its silver on the clouds. For a moment, they are faced with light. Our field is black. It’s shiny, suddenly. And then the day is gone. Its candle has been snuffed, or drenched. That is the end of it.

Dusk has deepened now. If it wasn’t for the rain, I could be walking through the steep-domed, unlit chamber of a great cathedral, roofed by coal-black vaults of cloud. This downpour has not got the force to last. But for the moment it takes hold. The clouds carried too much weight before they reached this place. I can almost hear them sigh with relief as they let go their load. The furrows in our barley field are already brimming and draining off like streams in flood. The clouds intend every single seed I’ve spread to have its year’s supply of drink in one delivery. The earth turns sticky. It clings heavily to my feet, and lards my legs with every step I take. It’s hard work even walking in it now. I look up to the corner of the field, and wave at where I last saw Mistress Beldam’s husband. I call out even, although my words are washed away. But anyway I think the man has gone already. He will have had his fill of late of being out in all weathers. He will have gone into the cottages or taken shelter in the barn. For an instant I imagine him in Mistress Beldam’s arms among the field and pasture tools, among the nettles in the dark. She is getting wet and cold as she clings on to him.

I am excused, I think, for wondering if I am the only one alive this afternoon with no other living soul who wants to cling to me, no other soul who’ll let me dampen her. The day has ended and the light is snuffed. I’m left to trudge into the final evening with nobody to loop their soaking hand through mine. And no one there to lift their hats, as our traditions say they must, when brought on by chaff and damp I cannot help but sneeze, an unintended blessing for the field. But I’d be lying if I said I felt as dark and gloomy as the clouds. I think I’m thrilled in some strange way. The plowing’s done. The seed is spread. The weather is reminding me that, rain or shine, the earth abides, the land endures, the soil will persevere forever and a day. Its smell is pungent and high-seasoned. This is happiness.

15

Y PLOWMAN’S HAPPINESS DID NOT survive the night. Once it was safely dark and the storm had very nearly passed, I stepped out of Kitty Gosse’s home hoping to catch a wink of candlelight or hear the knot and knit of voices — the Beldam couple reunited thanks only to my own leniency and maybe ready now to show some gratitude. I could not imagine they’d be hard to find. They surely would have slept indoors, somewhere in our row of cottages and within earshot of my own refuge. Why would they not have slept indoors? They must have known that here was now an abandoned spot and it was safe to help themselves to any bed they found. I’d sniff them out. I would be truly neighborly, and call on them. Surely I deserved their company.

What moonlight found passage through the clouds misled me once or twice with its glints of silver catching on the puddles or in the rain damps on the roofs. I took them briefly as a sign of life. But candlelight is warmer and more intimate than any moonlight. It will not send a shiver down your spine as these cold glisters did. Orange was the color I was looking for. I ventured for fifty steps or so along the muddied lane, hoping but not quite expecting to discover the Beldams. But, even though I harked my neck and ears about as alertly as any hunting owl, I could not make out any whispered words or catch the nighttime mutter of a lovers’ busy bed.

I was both sorry and relieved to find no ducking candlelight. What would I have done if, when I discovered the glow of household flame or caught the cloying whiff of melting wax, I also heard her crying out with … let me call it gladness? I do not want to think I would have crept up like a cat outside the chicken coup and spied on them. I’d rather imagine myself as their good friend, their warmhearted visitor, wanting nothing from them but some friendliness. So I hope I would have stood a respectful distance from their door and simply called out my name, declared myself to them. “It’s only Walter, come to talk.” It’s only Walter, come to make amends. It’s only Walter, come to share your oval den of candlelight and breathe the warm air of your room. I sorely needed fellowship.