The Channel Bettan Cut Before the Rain Could Decide It

Nine days of rain and the groove on the New Quarter’s east lane is a gully now, the way the Gazette said. I went to see for myself. A woman named Bettan was already there with a spade and a plank laid crosswise for her knees, cutting the low side straighter than the feet had cut it, throwing the spoil up onto the high side where it would do some good instead of washing back in by evening.

She works the way I trust work: no glance up for whoever is watching, each spadeful checked against the last with her thumb before she throws it. The ditch was a foot deep by the time I got there and she meant it to be two, angled so the water would leave by the low end instead of pooling at the turn where a child’s boot had gone in to the knee two mornings before. She told me this without stopping. She did not tell me who had hired her. The notice at Promisa’s Corner said only that a hand was owed for the work, and somebody owed it.

Yelka Marn came through with her basket while I stood there, same hour she always comes, and for once did not have to choose her footing stone by stone. She stopped long enough to watch Bettan’s spade find the old line the water had already dug for itself, and said only that the ground had known what it wanted before anyone paid to give it to her. Then she went on to the Inn.

Up at the top of the lane, where it meets the barrier, the toll-keeper stood where he stands every morning, three fingers out toward the hill road, turning foot traffic down into the lane Bettan was fixing under him. Nothing about him was different today. I have no way of knowing, standing where I stand, whether a man’s standing at a post is the same thing as his paper saying he may. I only know the gesture was the same gesture it has been for nine mornings, and that somebody is finally digging for the water what nobody has yet dug for the question.