Chapter 4

During the wheat harvest, the weather could turn in a heartbeat.

The morning had been clear, but by afternoon dark clouds rolled up over the field.

I was out in the rows when I felt the wind shift wrong. One look at the sky and I started cutting faster.

But half the wheat still stood when the rain came.

A few drops first, then it came down in sheets.

I couldn't cover my head and my feet both, and I was cursing under my breath.

That was when I heard footsteps behind me. I turned and saw her running up with a sickle in hand, her hair already soaked and plastered to her face, her clothes drenched through, but she didn't slow. She went straight into the rows and started cutting.

I shouted,

"Go back, I've got it!"

She paid me no mind, head down, cutting faster than I could.

The two of us fought that rain for a good hour and more, saving everything there was left to save.

We hauled it under the eaves of the yard and stacked it, both of us soaked to the bone.

She peeled off my drenched shirt, wrung it out, and hung it over the bamboo pole.

Then she turned back to me, hair still stuck to her face, not bothering to push it aside, and just stood there looking at my hand.

"Did you cut yourself?"

Wheat stubble nicks your hands all the time. I looked down. Sure enough, two gashes across the back of my hand, not deep, the blood already thinned out by the rain.

I said,

"It's nothing. Little cuts."

She fetched a strip of cloth and wrapped my hand.

Careful hands. Wrapped it tight.

I stood there, and for some reason a thought came to me all at once.

If her husband were still alive, she'd have made him a fine wife.

The thought caught me off guard.

Then I froze for a second.

I didn't know what the freezing was about.

Whether it was the thought itself, or the small thing that came trailing right behind it,

some awkward feeling I couldn't put a name to.

A few days after the harvest ended, an old man from the village came by to drink with me.

His last name was Dickerson. I called him Quinton Dickerson.

People in the village said he and Carla's husband had grown up together, that the two families went back generations.

Quinton brought a pound of cheap loose whiskey, and the two of us sat in the yard drinking it with pickled vegetables.

He wasn't much for talking. Most of the time he just drank, now and then asking after how things were at home, and when I answered he'd nod and let it drop.

By the third bowl the drink had started to color his face.

He lifted his head and squinted at me, staring for a good long while.

It made me uneasy, and I picked up my bowl and took a sip.

Then out came the words,

"He wasn't wrong to choose you back then."

My hand stopped mid-drink.

"Choose me?"

I set the bowl down.

"Quinton, this marriage was put together by the matchmaker. What choosing did he have to do with it?"

Quinton lowered his head, took another swallow, and said nothing.

I asked again,

"Quinton, what do you mean by that?"

He shook his head, pushed the bowl aside, and stood up.

"Had too much. Just rambling. Don't read into it."

And with that he left.

Left me sitting alone in the yard, two empty bowls in front of me, most of that pound of whiskey gone.

But the drink was clean out of me now.

My head was full of that one line.

"He chose you back then."