Shorn: Chapter 7

Melda was washing clothes by the stream when Shorn returned, the elk slung over his shoulder. She jumped to her feet with a cry. “You did it!”

Shorn dropped the animal on the ground. “If you have a rope, I will hang it up and finish cleaning it.”

Pol and Lysa came running up then, their work in the fields forgotten. “It’s huge!” Pol cried. Melda sent him running for a rope. Kit emerged from the house, little Ren toddling behind him, trying to keep up.

Shorn finished cleaning the animal, then chopped more wood while Melda cooked. Soon a hearty stew was bubbling over the fire.

The day took on a festive feel. The children yelled and laughed and ran about, sometimes actually being helpful with dinner preparations, but generally not. Lysa tried bossing her brothers around and was steadily ignored. Kit dropped a bowl of chopped vegetables. Ren got knocked over a few times by the older kids, but she didn’t cry for very long when it happened. There was too much good cheer in the air for tears.

The weather was nice, and Melda decided they would eat outside. Shorn carried the table out. Kit and Pol tried to help, but neither could lift even a corner. Kit ended up just clinging to the table leg and was carried out with the table.

Shorn went back inside to see if there was anything else he could do to help, but Melda shooed him out. “You’ve done so much already. You don’t…” Her voice caught, and she put her hand on his arm. “I can’t thank you enough. I didn’t know what I was going to do. I was starting to panic and then you showed up.” Her smile was huge and warm. “Just go sit down. We’ll eat in a little while.”

Shorn went back outside feeling very strange. There was a warmth in his chest he didn’t recognize, but he liked it. He went to the table and sat down on his stump, moving slowly, as if afraid to dislodge this new sensation.

He looked at the children running around, listened to their laughter. Melda was singing.

It struck him then. He was helping these people. Helping them in a way he’d never helped anyone before. He was feeding this family. He’d never fed anyone before. His pay had fed his wife and children, it was true, but he’d only rarely been home, and when he was, he had nothing to do with the food.

The table was set, ample portions in front of everybody. Melda held up her hand for quiet. “We give thanks first,” she said. “Thank you, Mother, for the food we are about to eat.” She smiled at Shorn. “And thank you for Shorn.”

There it was again, that odd warmth. Shorn nodded, not sure what to do or say. The kids tore into their food like wild animals.

The laughter and joy continued throughout the meal, gradually tapering off as the children’s bellies filled. Finally, Pol pushed his bowl away and said, “Oof, I’m so full. I’ll burst if I eat another bite.” He groaned loudly.

Not to be outdone, Kit flopped on the ground on his back, arms outflung. “I’m full to the top!” Soon the twins were flopping around with him, all crying out in pretend agony. Ren looked on in surprise and a little alarm.

“They’re just playing, honey,” her mother reassured her.

Melda stood up, gathering some things off the table. “It’s too bad you’re all so full, because I had a little surprise planned for dessert. I guess Shorn and Ren and I will have to eat it all.”

That got their attention. “What is it? What is it?” Kit cried as he leapt to his feet. The other two were right behind.

“We want some!”

“But you’re so full,” Melda said, trying to hide a grin. “I don’t want you to burst.”

A chorus of denials met her words. “Please, please, Mama!”

“Well, help me clear off the table, and I’ll see what I can do.”

The table was cleared with great speed. Even Ren tried to help, though she couldn’t quite manage walking and carrying a cup and her doll at the same time. She made it a couple of steps and then dropped the cup. Leaning over to get it, she dropped the doll. She picked the doll back up, but when she reached for the cup, she fell down.

A few frustrated tears followed. Lysa tried to take the cup from her, but she had a tight grip on it and refused to let it go.

A couple more times she went through this, and then she got an idea. She set the cup down and crouched beside it. Gently, she put the doll into the cup. It took her a couple of tries, but she made it back to her feet, the cup gripped in both hands. With her tongue sticking out in concentration, placing each foot ever so carefully, she made it into the house. She held the cup out to her mother. “Here, Mama.”

“Thank you, Ren. You’re such a good little helper.”

Dessert was a small crock of honey. Each child got a slice of bread with a dab of honey on it. The children watched their mother dole out the honey, for once quiet and still, each focused intently.

“Would you like some, Shorn?”

He did, but instead he said, “No. I am full.” He paused. “Almost bursting.” That brought smiles to the kids’ faces. His next words made their smiles even bigger. “It is best if they have mine.”

The kids were busy making a mess with the honey, getting it on their fingers, in their hair, when Shorn felt something take hold of the little finger on his left hand. He looked down in surprise and saw Ren standing there.

She held up her doll and said something he couldn’t understand.

“What?”

She said it again, but so quietly he still couldn’t understand.

Lysa spoke up. “She says her dolly wants to give you a kiss.”

Shorn froze, completely unsure what to do. Kit started making kissing sounds and got a smack from his sister, which just made his older brother join in.

Shorn looked at Melda who was sitting there smiling at him. “Well, go on.”

Shorn bent lower. Ren pressed the doll to his cheek, very softly. Her courage failed her then. She turned red and ran to the safety of her mother’s skirts.

Melda smiled. “That might have been the cutest thing I’ve ever seen.”

Shorn had no idea how to reply. He sat there frozen, unsure what just happened.

The kids ran off to play. Shorn started to get up, saying something about chopping wood, but Melda stayed him.

“Sit here with me for a bit. There will still be wood to chop later.”

Shorn sat back down, still feeling uncomfortable.

“I never get a chance to just sit, you know?” Melda looked around the little farm. “There’s always so much that needs doing, and it never ends. It’s important to take some time to appreciate it all. You never know how long you’ll have anything. It can all disappear so fast.”

Shorn remembered how busy he’d always been, back on Themor. Those rare times when he wasn’t on an assignment somewhere and was actually home, he still was rarely at home. There were always meetings to attend, training to do, young warriors to oversee. He hardly saw his wife, who had her own busy schedule to attend to.

“You haven’t spent much time around children, have you?”

“I have not.” He’d spent very little time with his son, and then the boy joined the Khiroz when he turned five, and he rarely saw him at all. When his son was ten, Shorn was badly injured in an attack. Afterwards, he was forced to convalesce at home for some months. At no time did his son come home to see him.

“That’s sad. Children are such a joy. Nothing has ever brought me the joy they do. They’re so full of energy and life. Did you never marry then?”

“I was married.”

“But no children.”

“We had children. A son and a daughter. But I spent very little time with them.” Except during the time he was injured. He spent a lot of time with his daughter then. But the memory of that time hurt too much to touch. He had to push it away.

Shorn stood up abruptly. “There is much to do.” He walked away before she could speak again.

 

During the next two days they finished plowing all the fields. It got a little easier as Shorn got used to the work, but he was still sore every day.

“Farming is hard,” he told Melda. “I had no idea.”

Melda laughed. “That’s the thing about farming. It’s hard work. And the work is never done. There’s always more to do. Lots more.”

Shorn thought of his icy home. “There are no farms where I come from.”

“How can there be no farms? How do people eat?”

“It is very cold. We take the food we need from others.”

She made an irritated sound. “You sound like a tax collector. We—my husband, Lorn, and I—left the kingdom of Merinoth for just that reason. The tax collectors took nearly everything every year. We could barely survive. We came out here, far from the king’s reach, to get away from that.” Her mouth had thinned down to a line. “It’s wrong, that’s what it is. No one should have to fear their children won’t have enough to eat.”

“I agree.”

“Is that why you left your home?”

“No. It was something I never thought of,” Shorn admitted. “I did not question it. We were stronger, so we took what we wanted from those who were weaker. I understood it as the way things were. It was not until I came here, and met Netra, that I began to question these things."

“Who is Netra?”

That was not a question with an easy answer. Netra had saved him. When he had nothing left to live for, she showed him a different way. He owed so much to her.

“She is…my friend.”

“She sounds like a special person.”

“She is.”

“What happened?”

Shorn looked away. “I had to leave Qarath.”

“Why?”

“I do not know for sure. There is something inside me. A darkness.”

“And that’s why you’re out here? You’re trying to find answers?”

“Yes.”

She put her hand on his arm. “I hope you find them.”

“I do as well.”

“You’re welcome to stay here as long as you like.”

He gave her a startled look. “You mean this?”

“I do. You’re a great help. The children like you. You need a home, and we need help. Sounds like it works for both of us.”

Shorn pondered this. “Yes. It does.”

 

Over the next weeks, Shorn found out just how much work farming was. The weeds came up faster than the crops. He spent so much time weeding that by the end of the day his back felt like it was on fire. He had to rub his lower back before he could stand the whole way. The children heard him groaning and had a good laugh at his expense.

When it did not rain for a whole week, the fields had to be watered by hand. The water had to be fetched from the stream, and the buckets were not big enough to hold much. The handle broke on one of them while Shorn was carrying it. The other sprang a leak. He spent half a day fixing them. And then the handle broke again right away. The new plug for the other popped out shortly thereafter. Shorn had to resist the urge to smash both buckets against a rock.

“Lorn had plans to dig a well beside the house,” Melda said. “He wanted to do it last summer, but there was always so much work.”

So Shorn began to dig a well. It wasn’t easy. The ground was rocky. The only shovel was far too small. He snapped the handle the first day. Fortunately, Lorn had been preparing a new handle, so Shorn didn’t have to start from scratch. But it still took him far too long to finish shaping it, and the new handle was lumpy and unattractive, at least to Shorn’s eye.

He couldn’t work on the well too often. There was too much else to do. The hole in the barn roof had to be repaired. When he tried to crawl out on the roof to fix it, he fell through and made the hole worse. Melda scolded him for being careless.

“You shouldn’t be crawling up there. Did you forget how big you are? Send one of the twins. They helped their father last year.”

Eventually, the hole was fixed, but he still got wet two nights later when it rained. Shorn moved the pile of hay to a drier corner in the morning.

A fox got into the chicken pen one night and made off with a hen. Shorn spent the next day patching the hole the fox had made and reinforcing the fence. Then he spent that night awake, sitting in the shadows with knife in hand, waiting for the fox to return. Which it didn’t. But he was sleepy enough the next day that he cut his leg with the axe while chopping wood. It wasn’t a deep cut, but it could have been.

Eventually, their meat ran low. The children had helped stretch their food by scavenging in the forest, but this early in the season there just wasn’t much. Shorn gave it some thought and then sought out Melda.

“The bow is too small for me. I do not think I can use it for hunting.”

“What about making a larger bow?”

“It is possible, but I think it will take too long. There is much that goes into making a bow, and I do not even know what kind of wood to use. I am thinking a spear would serve well. They are much easier to make.”

“You need wood that is straight and long enough.” She thought for a moment. “There is a stand of lodge pole pines. You should be able to make a spear from one of those.”

“Then it is decided. Where are these trees?”

“I’ll send Kit with you. He knows where they are.”