A Knot In The Grain by Robin Mckinley

Author:Robin Mckinley
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2012-01-16T21:22:34+00:00

Buttercups

There was an old farmer who married a young wife. He had been married once be—

fore, in his own youth, but his wife had died of a fever after they had been together only a year. In his grief the farmer forgot about all other human creatures and set himself only to his farm; and because there was both strength and fire in him, his farm bloomed and blossomed, and he himself did not know that his heart held its winter about it.

But all winters end, and the farmer’s heart was secretly warm within its winter, and one day it melted: at the sight of a young girl at the town well. The girl was nothing like his first wife; it was not memories she aroused, but something new. Some green spring woke in him in a moment, and yet he had had no warning of it. He thought that he felt no different than he had for twenty years; that the coldness under his breastbone was an old scar, with nothing living and stirring beneath it; that some things only came once in a man’s life.

And yet it was not the girl herself that had first caught his eye, but her horse. He was driving in to market as he did at this time every week, from spring through autumn, and his road lay past the town well, where there were very often people. Sometimes there were people he knew, and he would speak to them as he passed; for he seldom paused. But this day the well was almost deserted, and his eye swept over it and made to go on, but for the curve of a chestnut neck and the prance of chestnut forelegs. A beautiful young mare, he thought, looking at her appreciatively, with a sparkle to her and a kind eye. And then his eye was distracted, and then caught firmly, by a long chestnut braid of human hair falling over a human shoulder, as the girl bent to reach her brimming bucket. And she glanced up at the sound of the farmer’s wagon wheels, and their eyes met, and she smiled.

He could not think of anything but how he would see her again. He was a polite man, and he knew nothing of this girl; he knew he should not have stopped or spoken, but he did both. He had enough sense remaining to him not to ask bluntly and immediately what her name was and where she lived; but he was unaccustomed to making conversation at any time, the use of speech was reserved for weather, crops, prices, and occasionally health; and he was confused and distressed by his own wish to speak to this girl he knew nothing of, but that she was as beautiful in her way as her mare, and had as kind an eye. Awkwardly he offered what he might have said to an acquaintance he had no immediate business with, that it was a fine morning, wasn’t it,

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