The Cord

He returned the next morning with something in his hands. It was not a tool of the garden but a length of cord, coiled and smooth, the kind he spun each day from raw hemp. He had thought of it in the night, the way a man thinks of an answer long after the question is asked.

A young stem had grown too tall for its own strength and now leaned against the earth. Kneeling, he set a slender stake beside it and bound the two together with a soft turn of his cord, the knot sure and gentle, a thing his hands had made ten thousand times but never before for a living thing.

The keeper watched, and she did not stop him. When he had finished, the stem stood upright, held not by force but by patience. It was the first gift his trade had given the garden, and it seemed to belong there, as though the rope had always been waiting to become something other than rope.