The Second Bed

The thinned row had grown well since the spring, and the girl walked its length now with a new thought turning in her. Nyra had said that the strongest of what a gardener pulled might yet take to a fresh bed, if the hand was quick and the day was soft. The day was soft. The morning had come mild and grey off the harbour, the earth still holding the damp of the night before, and the girl thought that if she was ever to try the thing, she might try it now. She had let so many go back to the ground already. It seemed to her that she owed it to the row to learn whether any of them could have been saved.

She chose a corner near the hedge that had lain empty all season, and she turned it over with the trowel until the loam ran dark and loose between the stones. Then she went along the crowded end of the row and lifted the sturdiest seedlings she could find, the ones with a good spread of leaf and a stem that stood without leaning. She took each one with as much earth as would cling to its roots, and she carried them across in the hollow of her apron, and she set them into the new bed a hand’s breadth apart, firming the soil about each in turn. It was slow work, and her knees were dark with kneeling before she had done.

For a fortnight after she tended both beds together. She watered the moved ones in the cool of the morning and again as the light went, and she watched over them the way she had never quite watched over anything before. Some of them took. They stood a day or two as though stunned, their leaves gone limp and pale, and then one morning she found them lifted again toward the light, rooted and holding, as though they had forgotten they were ever moved. Others did not. A few of the smaller ones she had lifted with them sickened where they stood, browned at the edges, and folded down into the loam, and these she gave back to the ground without much sorrow, having half expected it.

She began to know, after a while, the weight of a root that would travel. It was a thing she could not have told another how to feel, only that her hand had come to feel it. A seedling that would take had a certain firmness low down, a grip on its clod of earth that did not give when she teased it free. The ones that would fail came up too easily, or too bare, their threads of root already broken before she had them clear. She learned it by moving them and by losing some, as Nyra had told her she would, and she found she did not grudge the lost ones the lesson they had bought her.

By the season’s turning she had two beds where there had been one, the spared row and the corner she had made, and both of them green and holding their own. She stood between them one evening with the light going amber over the water and understood that the wondering had not left her, only changed. She no longer asked whether she had chosen rightly, pulling the ones she pulled. She asked instead which of the moved ones would flower first, and what she might do better in the moving next year, and the questions did not trouble her as the old ones had. The doubt had worn down into something she could work beside, a plain and practised judgement that weighed each root in turn and let the hand go on.