Dibber

The dibber hung by the door on its own short cord, a stub of worn ash with a rounded point, and the girl took it down to turn it over in the light.

“What is this one for,” she asked, and Nyra looked up from the bench where the seed trays waited in their row.

“For making the hole before the seed,” Nyra said. “You press the point in, you give it a small turn, and the ground opens just enough. You set the seed, you close the soil over it, and you move one step along the bed.”

The girl pressed the point against her palm and felt the dull mark it left. “The book will say how deep,” she said, and Nyra answered that the book would say an inch, or two, and the day, and the kind of seed, and nothing at all of the steady stoop of the back or the smell of the cold earth coming open or the quiet count she kept under her breath down the length of the row. A book gathers what can be set down in a line and counted, and leaves the rest to the one who was there.

So the girl hung the dibber back on its cord and wrote the depth and the date in the narrow column, and left the rest in her hands. The book keeps the depth of the hole, and you keep the turn of it.