This ground is not dead, she said. Only resting. There is a difference if you know how to look for it. You a farmer, too? On top of everything else?
My mother kept corn and squash both, same as most of our women did. I know dirt as well as I know a bow string. She stood, brushing her palms clean. It wants breaking up, turning over, given a reason to grow again. He watched her a moment, something turning slow in his chest.
You saying that about the garden or something else? She didn't answer right away. When she did, her eyes had gone somewhere thoughtful, somewhere careful. Perhaps I am saying it about both. They spent the better part of that morning breaking the old hard pan together, Whit with the spade, Yanaba with her bare hands where the spade couldn't reach close enough to the stakes.
The two of them working in the same wordless rhythm that had carried them through fence lines and hunts alike. By noon, the square sat turned and dark and ready, waiting on seed neither of them had thought to buy yet. A small stubborn patch of possibility sat right there in the middle of everything else that still needed answering. We'll want seed corn, Whit said, surveying the work. Next time either of us has reason to go to town Something tightened at the mention of and felt more authentic and saw it.
A small flinch quickly smoothed back over. If either of us can go to town again, she said without a rope waiting. We'll get there, he said. One turned over garden at a time. She almost smiled at that.
Let it land a little longer than usual before turning back toward the cabin. And Whit stood a moment longer at the edge of the freshly broken ground, looking at dark soil where nothing had grown in 2 years, and let himself believe, just for that one quiet morning, that some things buried long enough could still, given the right hands and the right patience, be coaxed back toward the light. 3 days after that 3 days of fence lines finished, water hauled, silence turning slowly, carefully, into something less like strangers and more like two people learning a shared language built almost entirely of small gestures. Whit found a token left on the porch rail at first light. A single arrow, unfletched at the head, tied with a thin strip of hide.
No note. No sign of who'd left it. He brought it inside, set it on the table. Yanamoto went very quiet looking at it. "You know this," Whit said.
"Not a question. My brother's mark." She picked it up, turned it slow in her hands, something caught between fear and hope moving across her face too fast for him to name either one first. "He is telling me he is near and that he is looking." "Looking for what?" "For the truth," she said. "Same as us." Whit studied the arrow, studied her, felt the ground under this whole fragile, 3-day-old arrangement shift a little further, a little deeper into something he no longer had any illusions about walking away from clean. "Then he'd better hurry," Whit said.