Harrow

The girl found the harrow leaning against the shed wall, a wide frame of wood set with rows of iron teeth, and she asked what a thing with so many points was good for. Nyra set down her basket and laid a hand on the frame. “It is drawn across a field once the plow has turned it,” Nyra said. “The teeth break the clods and comb the soil flat and fine, so the seed has an even bed to fall into.”

The girl ran a careful finger along one of the teeth. The iron was cold and blunted at the tip, and flakes of old dry earth still clung in the angles of the frame. “There are so many of them,” the girl said, and she counted the first row under her breath and lost the number.

“The teeth do their work together, not one at a time,” Nyra answered. “A field looks finished when the plow is done, but it is all ridges and hard lumps still. The harrow goes over it after and makes it kind to a seed. It takes the roughness into its own teeth and leaves the ground soft behind it.”

The girl wanted to write the harrow into the book, the wide frame and the rows of teeth and the old earth caught in the joints. Nyra let her, and watched the slow letters go down. A book gathers what can be set down in a line and counted, and leaves the rest to the one who was there.

“You can draw every tooth and count them twice,” Nyra said, “but not the long pull of it across a waiting field, nor the way the broken ground smells when it is finally fine and ready.” The girl looked at the page, and then at the rows of blunt iron, and she understood. The book keeps the teeth of the harrow, and you keep the field of it.