What We Keep Back

The girl had gone down to the cool store on an errand and came back up with one of the seed pouches in her hand. She set it on the table where the firelight could reach it and loosened the string. Inside lay the beans they had saved from the summer, the largest and roundest of the whole crop, each one heavy and smooth as a river pebble. She turned them over with one finger for a while. Then she turned to Nyra. “These are the finest beans we grew,” she said. “Why do we keep the best of everything and eat the small ones ourselves?”

Nyra reached out and took up one of the beans, turning it slowly in her fingers. “You have found the hardest lesson of a lean winter,” she said. “When the shelf grows thin and the belly is loud, the best seed is the one you most want to cook. It is fat. It would feed us tonight. And that is the very reason we must not touch it.” She set the bean back down among its fellows. “We keep the finest because the finest is not this winter’s to spend. It belongs to the summer that has not come yet.”

The girl frowned a little at that. “But we are hungry now,” she said. “And the spring is so far off. What if we save the big seeds and the cold takes us before they can grow?” It was a fair question, and Nyra did not answer it quickly. She fed the fire a little higher and let the warmth rise between them before she spoke again.

“We are hungry now,” Nyra agreed. “But hunger is a poor counsellor. If we eat the best seed, we feed one evening and starve the whole year. The small seeds will keep us alive until the thaw. The great ones we bury, and come the harvest they pay us back a hundredfold.” Her voice stayed low and even. “Every gardener before us went to bed hungry past a bowl of the finest beans, so that we could sit here at all. We are eating their humble seeds tonight. We are planting their patience come spring.”

The girl was quiet for a while. She drew the string of the pouch closed again, gently, the way she might have tucked a blanket over something asleep. Then she carried it back down to the cool store herself and set it high on the shelf where the best of the harvest waited out the cold. When she came back to the fire she said she understood now why the pouch had felt so heavy in her hand, though it weighed almost nothing at all. It was not the beans that were heavy, Nyra thought, watching her go and come again. It was everything the beans had been asked to hold: not one supper, but every summer the girl had not yet lived, kept back and saved and trusted to the dark.