The Two Hundred and Eleventh Spring

I. The Height of the Mark The soil-reader came to the Vask terrace on the third morning after thaw, chalk in a tin box, an assistant to carry the ladder. Odrun stood in his doorway with Sennet beside him and watched the man measure the wet ground with a bare foot — heel to the channel, toes to the sill, the old walk, the one that could not be argued with because there was nothing in it to take hold of and argue. He paced the width of the terrace. Then he climbed the ladder and made his mark. Odrun looked at the door the way he looked at the sky before hard rain — not reading it, just knowing what it meant in his chest before his mind caught up. The new chalk line sat a hand’s width above last year’s, which had been chalk once and was a groove now, scratched permanent with his own knife the way every year’s line got scratched in once the white washed off. The door was a ladder of small cuts going down to knee-height, down to a mark his father had made when Odrun was no taller than it.…