Next year, Katie would finally be of age to become an apprentice after school, and she could work at the farm if she chose, but she didn’t think she would. She didn’t like manual labor, lifting and carrying. But in September and October everyone worked at the farm, except the babies and the old people with arthritis. They didn’t have enough career farmers yet, and the harvest had to be brought in before the frost. If anyone complained—and someone always did—the adults would inevitably bring up the starving time, and out would come all of the old stories: how they had to slaughter and eat all of the dogs except the puppies; how several groups fled in the night, seeking food elsewhere, and presumably perished in the snow; how William Tear had given away his portions to others until he became so painfully thin and malnourished that he caught pneumonia and nearly died. Now they had plenty of crops, potatoes and carrots and strawberries and cabbage and squash, as well as a healthy population of chickens, cows, and sheep, and no one starved. But every fall Katie was forced to relive the starving time, all the same, and now even the thought of the harvest made her sick to her stomach.
At meeting last year, William Tear had said something Katie would never forget: that someday all of the plains would be covered with farmland, as far as the eye could see. Katie couldn’t imagine all of that wide grassland tamed into rows. She hoped the day wouldn’t come in her lifetime. She wanted the view to remain just as it was.
“Katie!”
She turned and saw Row, about a hundred yards up the path. Katie hurried to meet him, feeling something thrill inside her. Row would make the walk interesting; he always did.
“Where are you coming from?” she asked.
“The south slope. I was looking for metal.”
Katie nodded, understanding this instantly. Row was a metalworker, one of the best in town. He apprenticed in Jenna Carver’s metal shop, and people were always bringing him jewelry to fix, as well as more practical items like teakettles and knives. But repair was just Row’s job. What he really loved was making his own pieces: ornaments and bracelets, ornate fire tools, utility knives with elaborate handles, tiny statues designed to sit on tables. For Katie’s last birthday, Row had made her a little silver statue of a woman sitting beneath an oak tree. The carving on the leaves alone must have taken him days, and the statue was Katie’s most treasured possession; it sat on her bedside table, right next to her stack of books. Row was a gifted artist, but the metal he loved to craft was hard to come by in the Town. Often Row would leave, sometimes for days at a time, and go prospecting outside town, in the woods and plains. One time he had hiked north for a week and found a great forest, the edges of which had yielded an impressive amount of copper. Row longed to return to the forest, and had even asked William Tear for permission to lead an expedition northward. So far, Tear had given him no answer.
They passed the graveyard, a one-acre patch of flatland beneath a stand of pines. Its perimeter was bounded by wooden fencing, a recent development. Something had been getting into the graveyard, wolves or perhaps just raccoons; in the past few weeks, Melody Banks, who was in charge of the yard, had found several graves torn open, their contents scattered across the yard. Melody would not say whose graves, and the corpses had already been reinterred. Katie was not particularly scared of graveyards, or of corpses, but even she didn’t like the idea of animals digging into people’s graves. She had been relieved when the Town had voted at meeting to fence the place off.
“Someday,” Row said, “when I’m in charge, I’m going to dig this place up, cremate the whole lot.”
“What makes you think you’ll be in charge?” Katie asked. “Maybe I’ll be in charge.”
“Maybe both of us,” Row replied, grinning, but Katie sensed a vein of seriousness beneath that grin. She had no interest in being in charge of the Town, in handling the eight hundred duties that William Tear juggled on a daily basis. But Row’s ambitions were real. Even at fifteen, he was offended by the inefficiency of the Town, certain that he could run it better. He longed for responsibility, and Katie thought that he would be good at it; Row was a born problem solver. But so far, none of the adults in the Town seemed to have recognized this quality, and lack of recognition was a sore spot for Row.
The root of Katie’s dissatisfaction was slightly different. She loved the Town, loved the beautifully simple idea that they all took care of each other. But in the past few years, she had sometimes felt hemmed in by her community, by its very niceness, the fact that everyone was supposed to watch out for everyone else. Katie didn’t like many of her neighbors; she found them boring, or stupid, or, worst of all, hypocritical, feigning kindness because that was what was expected of them, because Tear was watching. Katie preferred honesty, even at the expense of civility. She longed to have everything out in the open.
The nicer half of herself she ascribed to Mum, who was one of William Tear’s closest advisers and a true believer and a half. Katie didn’t know who her father was; Mum liked women, not men, and Katie was almost sure that Mum had recruited some willing man to be the father, then forgotten him. Katie wasn’t fussed over her father’s identity, but she often wondered if this unseen, unknown man wasn’t the source of her dissatisfaction, of the rising tide of impatience she sensed inside, an impatience that sometimes bordered on spite.
“Wobbling again?” Row asked, and Katie chuckled.
“Not wobbling, just thinking. It doesn’t hurt.”