The Cabbages from the Broken Gate

The garden at the end of Mulov Street has grown cabbages through a broken gate for two winters now. Today someone finally cut them.

Praskovya Denga works the far bed with a short knife, close to the ground, one hand flat on each head before she takes it. Her granddaughter — nine, maybe ten, I don’t ask — carries them two at a time to a barrel set on the flags by the step. The girl’s arms shake a little on the third trip. She does not put a head down to rest.

They pack the barrel in layers. A course of leaves stripped from the outer heads, a fistful of coarse salt scattered even, a head set in whole, pressed down with a fist until the girl’s fist stops making a difference and Praskovya’s has to finish it. The girl watches her grandmother’s hand more than she watches her own. On the fourth head she gets the pressing wrong, too gentle, and Praskovya doesn’t tell her so. She just puts her own hand over the girl’s and presses again, together, until the give comes. The girl says nothing about it either. She does the fifth head the new way without being asked.

Rainmonth opened dry this week, the Gazette says, and the last farm carts came up from the south road yesterday, which the Bazaar takes as its own sign the season is closed. Nobody in this yard needed telling. The cabbages told them first, the way they always do — heavy heads, tight leaves, no more growing left in them.

Somewhere up the hill the Archive is said to have opened a fourteenth category this week, for a name that was given without being asked for. I don’t know what that means and the barrel doesn’t need to. It will hold through Frostmonth on salt and a flat stone weighted on top, the way it always has. The gate is still broken. No one has mentioned fixing it.