The Thirty-First Harvest

Marta Cobb had counted thirty-one harvests since the sky went grey, and she counted the man from the Authority before he had got both boots out of his vehicle, and the count she made of him was not a good one. She was on the porch when he came up the county road, which in the old days had been a real road and was now two ruts and a memory. She had been on the porch since before light, the way she was most mornings, because at seventy-some years a body sleeps poorly and the porch was a fine place to do the not-sleeping. She had her tea, which was not tea, and she had her chair, and she had the long grey view of Ashfall County waking up under the long grey sky. The county did not count years anymore. There had been no reason to, after the sky changed. A year was a thing you measured against the sun, and the sun had not been a reliable acquaintance for three decades. So the county counted harvests instead. Thirty-one harvests since the grey. Thirty-one times the people of Ashfall had put the ash-hardy grain in the dark cold ground and coaxed it up and got it in before the cold killed it, and thirty-one times they had not, quite, starved. It was not much of a tally. It was the tally they had, and Marta was proud of it the way you are proud of a wall you built yourself and watched hold. The vehicle was the first wrong thing. Nobody in the county had fuel for a vehicle; fuel was for the Authority, far off in the cities, and the Authority did not, as a rule, spend it coming out to places like Ashfall. The county was too small to be worth the diesel. That was not an insult. That was the arrangement, and the arrangement had kept Ashfall quietly, grimly alive for thirty-one harvests: the Authority forgot them, and in exchange they were free. So a vehicle on the county road meant the Authority had remembered them, and being remembered, in Marta's long experience, was never the start of a good harvest. The man who got out of it was young, or young to her, which by now meant most of the world. He wore the grey of the Authority, a cleaner grey than the sky, and he had a folder, and Marta did not trust a man with a folder any further than she could throw the vehicle he came in. "Morning," he called, coming up toward the porch. Polite. They were always polite, the folder men. Politeness was cheap and it cost the Authority nothing. "I'm looking for whoever speaks for this settlement." "This county," Marta said. Not the settlement. It mattered, the word, and she set it down between them like a stone. "Ashfall County. And nobody speaks for it, son, because it's a county and not a dog. But folk listen to me more than most, on account of I've outlasted them, so you can say your piece to me and I'll see it gets carried." The young man looked at her, and at the porch, and at the long grey fields beyond where the thirty-first harvest stood nearly ready in the cold, and Marta watched him decide how to begin, and she watched the deciding take him a moment too long, and that was the second wrong thing, because a man with good news does not need to decide how to begin. "Ma'am," he said, "the Authority has completed a survey of the outer counties. Resource allocation, land use, population. Ashfall is — " he opened the folder, as though the folder might soften it — "Ashfall has been reclassified. The county's designation as an independent agricultural settlement has been withdrawn. As of the next cycle, the land and the people on it fall under direct administration from the regional center." Marta sat with her not-tea going cold in her hands and did the only counting that mattered now, the counting she had been doing one way or another her whole long life. She counted the harvests behind her. Thirty-one. She counted the folder in the young man's hands, and the vehicle, and the cleaner grey of his coat, and the careful way he would not quite meet her eye. "So," she said. "You've come to tell us there won't be a thirty-second." The young man did not say she was wrong. And that, Marta Cobb thought, looking out at the nearly-ready grain under the nearly-ending year, was the third wrong thing, and the only one that was going to matter.