Grampy Fernside's Arc

Chapter 15 of 16

Grampy pocketed the dead husk and tried to stand. His back locked halfway. He caught himself on the edge of the bed with one hand and breathed through his teeth. The six live seeds needed shallow water twice a day and a careful thumb pressing the crumbs back around each shoot. He could not stoop. He could barely straighten. Delphine stood over him with the beetle cupped in her hands and watched him fail to rise. "Sit down," she said. "I'll get Grans." "Don't tell her about the bed." "I won't." She was already running. He shuffled to the red-capped toadstool near the shed and lowered himself onto it in stages. The pain settled into a hot band above his hips. He counted the pink and blue stones from where he sat. Six live seeds. Twelve sprouts. One husk in his pocket. One more bloom still to find, and now he could not even kneel to tend what he had. Grans came around the corner in her polka-dot apron with a linen sachet in one hand and a glass jar in the other. She did not ask what he had been doing. She set the sachet against the small of his back and tied it there with the apron string. The smell of lavender and warm oats rose off it. Then she pressed the jar into his palm. The tea inside was still warm from the sun. "Willow bark and elderflower," she said. "Drink it all. Don't sip." He drank. She went into the shed and came back with a hickory cane he had not seen since her father's time. She set it against his knee. "You've been up before dawn for a week," Grans said. "Whatever you're hiding back there can wait a morning. I'll water the sweet peas. Delphine can water your row." He looked up. "My row." "The one with the painted stones." She brushed a yellow flower straight in his beard. "I've known about it since Tuesday. I haven't looked under the cloth. I won't." He opened his mouth and closed it. Delphine crouched by the bed with the small jug and began working her way down the row, tipping a thin stream at each green hook and each blue and pink stone. Pip rode her hat. Grampy leaned on the cane and stood. The band of heat loosened. He could walk. He could not kneel, not today, maybe not tomorrow. But the six seeds would be watered, and the twelve sprouts would be tended, and the bed would hold. He had one day less to find the nineteenth bloom, and now he had a cane instead of two good knees to find it with.