The fourth landmark was a dry well known as Gretel’s Well. It marked the end of the West Sector, where the Parker family lived, and the beginning of non-farmland. The mouth of the well was paved with jade-colored tiles, and past kneeling-reach, the darkness within was utter. If you dropped a stone in there, you had to listen intently for up to ten minutes before you heard it hit the bottom. This could mean that the well was exceedingly deep, or it could mean that some acquisitive creature lived in the well and thoroughly contemplated each stone it caught before deciding it wouldn’t do and letting it go. There was no tale that anybody knew of concerning this well. The name attached to it both suggested and withheld a story, and thus was invention forbidden. Children asked parents, younger siblings asked older siblings, and all were told: No story.
There were many smaller landmarks, but the girl I’m talking about still sees the big four sometimes, when she closes her eyes. She was often sent on errands to fetch tools, pass messages, and deliver neatly wrapped parcels of the gingerbread her mother made, so she traveled with a foldup stool that she stood on to see above wheat level. When her feet touched the ground again, the girl felt a gentle pull on the soles of her feet. The wheat drew a curtain around her and promised she’d be a beauty beyond compare by the time she was unveiled. When that didn’t work, it promised her boundless wisdom. All she had to do was place her feet here, and here, where the soil was softest . . .
The girl never fell for that. She walked faster. She’d seen some plant-vertebrate combinations in the clearings, glassy gazing dormice and owls that earth had risen up around; the ground was growing them, and they looked uncomfortable, as if they’d been stretched and stuffed with straw. There was a leaf that people chewed for relief from pain, and the girl brought this leaf to the plant-vertebrate combinations when she had time; it seemed to make things a bit better for them. The extreme bitterness of the mercy leaf acts as built-in portion control, so she planted bushes of the leaf all around the captives and left them to it. She was busy running the farm alongside her father and mother. They tended the seedbeds and harvested the wheat, threshed it by hand and funneled it into sacks, then started again from the beginning. Once the wheat was threshed and in sacks, it was collected by the truckload. That was when money was handed over, but evidently not enough, as the girl and her parents were hungry almost all the time. So were the families who lived nearby and worked alongside them. Their farmstead was always behind; they’d been shown ominous regional comparison charts that highlighted this fact. The girl’s mother—her name was Margot—did what she could to get more work out of everybody; she made gingerbread for her husband and for anyone else who asked for it; there was a great deal of mercy leaf in the gingerbread, so it helped. They worked on saints’ days even though it was a sin.
The unrelenting work and the malnutrition hooped their spines; the girl would have walked along stooped over if her mother hadn’t kept whacking her every time she displayed bad posture. Margot was the only person she knew who held life to a higher standard than that available. She’d seen the rest of the country and admitted that it was mostly farms in the rural areas and sprawling factories on the outskirts of small, pristine cities. The speed requirement in the factories made risk of injury equal to that of farming, so when asked how factory work would be better than farm work, all Margot could come up with was, Fewer maggots? It was assumed that Margot had come from factory stock, that she was accustomed to being famished and exhausted, and her assertions that things could be otherwise were mere daydreams. She would’ve set her co-farmers right if they’d asked her, but nobody did, so only her husband and daughter were aware she’d been born into a wealthy family that had got rich off the barely solvent. That’s what was behind her demands to know why they toiled and toiled without profit; she knew a racket when she saw it.
Getting disowned had been something of an inevitability for Margot Leveque—her cousins took bets on the cause, and the one who bet “proposing marriage to a pauper” raked it in. Margot was ashamed of her father’s squalid opportunism, and even if she hadn’t had romantic notions about growing her own food, she’d still have fallen for her husband’s good looks, rough courtesy, and self-reliance. She felt like an ant that had somehow lassoed a mountain. Simple Simon Lee. She forsook her mansion for the fields he oversaw and soon learned that the farm was his captor and hers, unreliable units of manpower that they were. The wheat was weighed upon collection, and the rate they were paid was sharply cut if the grain weighed any less than the previous time. Week after week of throwing every single grain that could be scraped up onto that scale, and week after week they fell short. By the time Harriet was born, Margot hated Simon’s guts. Margot’s father, Zahir Leveque, had foreseen it: So you asked him to marry you? And he said yes? Hilarious. You’re going to want to go back in time and do whatever else it takes to fix that. Don’t be silly; I’m not going to do anything to either of you! You’ll reach that point all by yourself. Margot had told him he didn’t actually know her that well, but it turned out he did.
Simon Lee remained keen on Margot, who was equal parts propriety and slightly frightening candor. Simon’s bride was rural-pageant-winner pretty—fresh-faced, with a trim figure—but good luck getting her to sign on as a role model. Simon found her spectacular, and she had time for everybody but him. He picked wild flowers for her. He ran her baths and insisted she take half his food rations, rose earlier to begin Margot’s share of the work so she could sleep longer. Such was his care before, during, and long after Margot Lee’s pregnancy, and still she hated him so much she could only look at him out of the corners of her eyes. This was a state of affairs that their daughter could hardly have guessed at if she hadn’t been right there in the middle of it all. The closest Harriet can get to comprehending it is this: the circumstances of the farmstead families were dictated by a person, a theoretical person, a corporate letterhead, really. Whatever the thing or person was, it had never met them and most likely didn’t know their names or what they looked like. The Lees, Cooks, Coopers, and Parkers farmed in exchange for places where they could live together in between attempts to meet this theoretical person’s ever-varying requirements, requirements that went beyond the fantastic and left the realms of reality altogether. The theoretical person may have noticed that they were human, but if it had, that was of no importance. There’s no way you can treat people like this without earning hatred, so the least this theoretical person could do was accept the hatred that was due. But no, the farms’ owner(s) remained in the subjective distance and the Simple Simons took the blame instead. That, too, was made part of their work. The dodge was magnificent in its totality.