Chapter 6: 6 | Normal

The fell was dry. She came down the west side of it in the late afternoon with the kit riding easy and the counties opening out below her the color of work: stubble gold in the near fields, the green going tired the year's right amount, smoke standing up straight from the first chimneys of the Bridge road. In the corner of every cut field as she came down, the first sheaf of the cutting stood on its own, bound and upright, left the whole harvest by custom nobody wrote down. No office anywhere licensed the custom, and nobody had ever asked one to. The first voice she heard in the parish was Colley's, and it was not lowered. "Genna! Come and look at this fence while you're passing. Deller says the frost heaved it and I say Deller heaved it, and you'd know." She looked at the fence. The frost had heaved it. Deller took the news with dignity and Colley took it with the particular pleasure of a man who has lost an argument but gained an authority, and told her, in the same breath and the same unlowered voice, that her father was well, the boys were mostly not in prison, and the ale at the Dry Toast had been sour since Lady Day and somebody ought to see to it. Then he went back to his fence. Nobody watched her walk the rest of the road. She kept catching herself checking. The household came out of the door in an avalanche, six boys' worth, browner than the fields and each a hand taller and all of them talking, and behind the avalanche her father stood in the doorway with his pipe not lit, and let the boys spend the noise, and when she got through them…