nthWord - Adjust your Thinking. The Grazing Field

The Grazing Field (cont'nd)

With wooden sticks, she demarcated its as-yet-to-be-established boundaries, generously enclosing about half an acre of land so that the sheep, as she explained to her daughter, could graze whenever they wanted, without a shepherd.

The summer turned to autumn, the autumn to winter, the winter to spring, but the girl kept on crying, and so the wall began to take shape. But as her hands grew calloused, her tearful sobs began to soften into nearly imperceptible whimpers, a stray tear every now and again trickling down from the corner of her eye. By her second summer of putting up what the year before seemed to be a massively formidable wall, she'd stopped weeping altogether. The drawings ceased as well. Instead, the girl's loyalty shifted to the completion of the wall; already, one of its four segments stood proudly against the morning sun.

But she still refused to speak, which became a problem at school. The girl's teacher spoke with Eliza, inquiring if something had happened to disturb her daughter, offering assistance if need be.

No one in the small farming community had seen Gideon since the summer the construction of the wall began. At home he remained taciturn and glum, forever lost in the attic, seldom appearing and only at night to retrieve his dinner plate, its contents long since cold. He would take his meal back up the narrow set of stairs that led him to his dimly lit sanctum. To the teacher's inquiry Eliza took offense, grabbed her daughter by the hand and forever marched her away from a formal education. So the wall expanded at a far more rapid rate; the girl lugged the smooth dark stones one-by-one from the riverbed to the field, as the hours fell heavy to the earth, the girl's shadow shrinking in the heat of the sun then growing large again as the afternoon slowly cooled in the gloaming. By late autumn, a second segment had been erected.

On a warm afternoon that following August, Eliza watched from the window as her daughter heaved the stones up to the field, meticulously positing them in order from largest to smallest. The house was utterly quiet with only an occasional creak in the floorboards of the attic. The third segment was near completion when, without explanation,

Eliza let a dish fall from her hand, nonplussed as it smashed against the hardwood floor, and walked out the back door of the house, not once averting her gaze, to join her daughter at the wall. Her daughter was on her knees, positioning a smaller stone in place to secure a larger one above it. Eliza, too, fell to her knees, lifted a larger stone, and proffered it to her daughter, who returned her mother's wide-eyed stare in silence. The stone felt cold but oddly light in Eliza's hands. After a brief respite, the girl's head turned, as her eyes found a place on the wall for the stone and then returned to meet her mother's gray-blue eyes, now moist, as the girl had never seen before. Eliza placed the stone on the wall, as her daughter had advised. And so the wall expanded at a quicker pace.

By late autumn the fourth segment of the wall had been completed with just space enough to build a gate to enter the grazing field. Eliza and her daughter stood across from one another, studying the gap. Then Eliza disappeared into the barn and returned with a few planks of wood, a hammer, and a bucket of nails. 'Hold this,' Eliza said, and began hammering one plank to another. The banging of the hammer missed the nail and resounded loudly against the wood. Then something strange occurred. Under the noonday sun, Gideon emerged from the back door of the house, walked up to his wife and child, took the hammer from Eliza, looking deeply into her eyes, and said, 'I wasn't always a feeble man.' nth.