Free Joan Makes History by Kate Grenville Page B

sprouting meant life, its failure to sprout meant ruin.
    Advice was the one thing that was plentiful. There were convictions announced with the flying spittle of certitude that the precious seed must be planted only after the sun had set, or, fromanother plausible face passing along the track, only in the full heat of the sun: that it should be planted when the moon was full, or on the contrary that it would shrivel where it fell if planted under a full moon. Then there was the dung man, who in a thickness of foreign tongue explained how to mix cow dung to a paste and pack the paste into empty cow horns (where one would obtain such a quantity of cow horns in a place almost empty of cows I did not ask his passionate Slav face). They were to be buried in alignment with longitude, or meridians, or some such, and brought up under the new moon three months later. Scattered on any desert, this Russian or Rumanian gutturally insisted, this substance would make everything bloom in profusion, would ensure that every single seed would sprout, and would produce potatoes the size of a horse (or was it house?).
    Freshly dug, the earth had a dark fertile look. But after the sun—hot even in what seemed to be winter here—had been on it for an hour it was again the somewhat grey, somewhat sandy, distinctly unpromising soil I had kicked at that first day but had decided would have to do. My heart sank then at the possibility that all that heaving and grunting, that chopping and splitting and stumping and burning, had laid bare nothing but a patch of arid dirt in which any crop would wither.
    And what crop? I knew only two crops, and had seeds of one: if anything was going to grow here, it would be potatoes. I was no expert, having been too feckless back Home, too disgusted and weary to my heart of the whole business to have paid enough attention. I regretted that now, but in any case this bumpy field that had been wrestled out of the wilderness, with incorrigible holes and stumps, boulders and bald patches: this amateurish field, grey under the foreign burning sun, was so unlike the soft smoothfields of home, that lay so tame and green under cloud or tepid sun, that it was all new in any case.
    It is all new, I said to myself, but still I tried to remember a thing or two. Let the furrows march cleanly up the hill, I remembered them saying, so when it came time to furrow the grey soil I was careful to plough up and down the slope. Aye, you’ll have a good runoff there, I imagined Father saying with approval, the sodden nightmare of potato rot being in all our anxious hungry minds back there. My furrows, then, marched up and down the slope, and faced perfectly south. Ye’ll not catch me wasting time and good seed planting on a north slope, I heard Father’s voice saying, full of contempt for my ignorance.
    I was careful, then, and stood with satisfaction looking along my furrows, on the slope that faced due south. I had checked it with the compass of a passing gentleman on a horse, who had been obliging enough to tell me I should plant to the north, but I had smiled and known better.
    I did not pray over the planting of the seed: I had no wish to pray to a God who had made life one of starvation in the Old Country and of endless drudgery in the new. He was watching over those seeds, though. Ah, Joan, how wrong you were about everything you did, and how much that God of yours was caring for you, to make sure of success in spite of every mistake you made! God sent only the gentlest of rain down on my furrows, which with anything stronger would have become foaming rivulets. He sent only the mistiest most forgiving sun down on my scarce-covered seeds, which would have parched and shrivelled under anything more powerful and, although even He could not correct my folly in planting on the south slope, He had ensuredthat the slope was slight enough for sufficient sun to reach the earth.
    Every dawn found me awake, my hands clenched,