The garden took longer to plan than the house had, which surprised me more than I expected.
I had assumed, going into that first married spring, that a kitchen garden was simple work.
Turn the soil, drop in the seed, wait.
Elizabeth proved that idea wrong inside the first hour of laying out the beds, moving along the turned earth with a certainty that made my own uncertainty plain beside it.
“Sage and thyme want the driest corner,” she told me, marking it with a stick pushed into the ground, “away from the mint, or the mint will choke out everything near it inside two summers.
My mother taught me that.” She paused there, the way she still sometimes paused on the edge of anything to do with her parents, a year and more after their deaths, though the pause was shorter now than it once had been.
“Before they died,” she said, simply, and moved to the next stake.
I followed her lead more than I set my own, and found I did not mind it in the least.
I had a head full of ideas about how things grew.
Elizabeth had watched a garden come up out of the ground with her own eyes since she was a child, and it turned out her kind of knowing beat mine handily.
To know that certain plants left the soil better for the next year’s planting was one thing.
To know which corner of one particular half-acre caught the morning sun was another thing entirely, and only one of us knew it.
“You have a strange look,” Elizabeth said, catching me watching her work instead of doing my share.
“Like a man surprised to find there is something he does not know.”
“I suppose I am,” I admitted.
“I thought I understood a great deal about how things grow.
I am only now learning how much of that was notions in my head, and how little of it was dirt under my own nails.”
“Notions,” she repeated, amused, testing the word.
“And where does a servant boy come by notions about gardening?”
“The same place I come by most things,” I said, with the old easy half-smile, though it felt less like armor now than it once had.
“I think about them a great deal more than is good for me.”
She laughed, and handed me the seed basket without another word, and we worked the rest of that morning in a comfortable quiet that I came to treasure more than almost anything else this new life had given me.
We planted the English peas first, and barley besides, enough, Elizabeth hoped, for a decent malt by the second year, since the whole colony had gone without proper beer long enough that even careful households spoke of it with something close to longing.
And behind the house, in ground Squanto himself had walked with me one afternoon and nodded over, went the corn, four kernels to a mound and a split fish beneath each, the way the whole colony had learned to do two years running now, with beans set alongside to climb the stalks as they rose, and squash spreading low between the mounds to shade out the weeds and hold the moisture in the soil.
Three sisters, Squanto called them, the three plants minding one another the way a family ought to.
I found something quietly moving in that each time I passed it.
Not because it was new to me, but because it is one thing to know that such an arrangement works, and another thing entirely to kneel in the dirt and watch it work with your own hands in the ground.
The two turned out, again and again, to be wholly different educations.
“You keep looking at that corn like it owes you money,” Giles told me once, come to help with the heavier digging.
“I am only thinking how strange it is,” I said, “that three plants which look, at a glance, to be fighting for the same ground actually do better for one another’s company than any of them would alone.”
Giles considered that, leaning on his spade.
“Sounds like most good arrangements, put that way.”
“Yes,” I said, quieter than the thought strictly needed.
“I think it does.”
The apple seedlings were my own idea, and the one part of the garden Elizabeth regarded with open, if fond, doubt.
“They will not bear for years yet,” she pointed out, watching me settle the young whips into a sheltered spot near the south wall of the house.
“You will likely see nothing from them before our own children are old enough to eat what they finally grow.”
“I know it,” I said, tamping the soil carefully around the thin, unpromising stems.
“Then why bother with them now, instead of something that will actually feed us this year?”
I sat back on my heels.
“Because someone has to plant the tree the shade falls under,” I said, “even knowing he will not be the one to sit beneath it.
I would rather begin now and have something worth tending in ten years than wait until year one feels comfortable and lose the whole ten years to the waiting.”
Elizabeth studied me a long moment, something thoughtful behind her usual dry humor.
“You think in strange lengths of time, Thomas Wright.
Longer than most men your age have any cause to.”
“I have always been that way,” I said, which was true enough to bear the weight of her look without my flinching from it.
But I caught her glancing at those thin, unremarkable saplings more than once in the weeks that followed, with an expression that was not quite doubt and not quite understanding, only the particular patience of a woman learning to live beside a man who planted for years he might never see the end of himself.
That summer settled into a gentler rhythm than any I had known since I came to this country.
Weeding at dawn before the heat came on, mending nets or tools through the worst of the afternoon sun, evenings at the shared table Brewster’s household still kept open to us most nights, though we slept now under our own thatch rather than his.
It was on one such evening, walking home in the blue light that settles over a place just before true dark, that I let the larger thoughts surface again for the first time in weeks.
Not with the urgency they had carried before the wedding.
Something calmer now, more willing to wait its turn.
There will be time enough for the rest of it, I thought, watching the smoke rise thin and straight from a dozen chimneys along the single street, each one a family that had chosen, in its own small way, to stay and build rather than turn back toward whatever safety England still meant to them.
The town that carries my name in more than some private page.
The charter won honestly, on the strength of what my family builds, and not begged as a favor from any king.
The school that teaches my grandchildren, and their grandchildren after them, to read scripture and law and everything else besides.
None of it wanted doing that day.
That day wanted weeded rows, and a roof that would hold through the next storm, and a wife who still looked at me, some evenings, as though she had only half decided whether I was entirely to be trusted.
That was enough to be getting on with.
I found Elizabeth on the doorstep when I reached the house, mending by the last of the light, and I sat beside her without quite deciding to, the way I had learned to do most things with her now, unhurried and unmanaged, simply there.
“You have that look again,” she said, not looking up.
“I know it,” I admitted.
“I promise you, it grows quieter with the years.
It only rarely goes away entirely.”
“I have mostly stopped minding it,” she said, and there was real fondness in it now, worn smooth by a year of ordinary evenings just like this one.
“So long as you keep coming home to this doorstep at the end of whatever you are building out there in your head.”
“That,” I said, taking her hand, feeling the small calluses there that matched my own now, earned and not borrowed, “I mean to keep doing for a very long time yet.”
Behind us the young apple whips stood thin and unremarkable in the fading light, giving no sign at all of the shade they would, years from now, finally learn to cast.