He looked around. ‘Mowing,’ he said. Only then he realized that he had been working for more than three hours since Prodd spoke to him, and it was as if some other person had done it. He himself had been— gone in some way.
Absently he took his whetstone and began to dress the scythe. It made a sound like a pot boiling over when he moved it slowly, and like a shrew dying when he moved it fast.
Where had he known this feeling of time passing, as it were, behind his back?
He moved the stone slowly. Cooking and warmth and work. A birthday cake. A clean bed. A sense of… ‘Membership’ was not a word he possessed but that was his thought.
No, obliterated time didn’t exist in those memories. He moved the stone faster.
Death-cries in the wood. Lonely hunter and its solitary prey. The sap falls and the bear sleeps and the birds fly south, all doing it together, not because they are all members of the same thing, but only because they are all solitary things hurt by the same thing.
That was where time had passed without his awareness of it. Almost always, before he came here. That was how he had lived.
Why should it come back to him now, then?
He swept his gaze around the land, as Prodd had done, taking in the house and its imbalancing bulge, and the land, and the woods which held the farm like water in a basin. When I was alone, he thought, time passed me like that. Time passes like that now, so it must be that I am alone again.
And then he knew that he had been alone the whole time. Mrs Prodd hadn’t raised him up, not really. She had been raising up her Jack the whole time.