“Listen, wife,” said the priest. “Wouldn’t it be a good plan to sow maize along the fence and round the beds?”
“Indeed it would! I like fresh maize!”
“So do I, especially when it’s roasted on the embers!”
Here was a new task! The priest surrounded himself with maize. He laughed with pleasure when he thought how pretty it would be when the maize grew up all round and shut out the briars on the fence which had begun to offend his eyes. But there is the old proverb, “Much wants more.” At the back of the house was another strip of ground, about four times the size of the bit they had cultivated. The priest could not get it out of his head. Why should this land lie fallow? Couldn’t he plant maize at the back of the house too? In the fields opposite, men were ploughing and sowing, the ground was untouched still in the village because it was the village.
Marcu Flori Cucu, the priest’s neighbour, had a plough; it was rather dilapidated, but it was a plough, and Mitru Catamush, Marcu’s neighbour, had two feeble oxen and a foundered horse. The priest, Marcu, Mitru, the oxen and the horse, worked all one day from morn till eve. The ground was ploughed up and sown with maize. From thenceforward, the priest was happier when he was at the back of the house.
It was a wonderful and beautiful bit of work—what furrows! And here and there among the furrows a blade of maize peeped out. In spite of this, the priest scratched himself once or twice, and then fairly often, behind the ear. It seemed as though something still weighed upon his mind. It was a difficult matter, which he hardly dare take in hand: the glebe lands. Up to now, they had been neglected; at present, he did not know what to do with them. He would have liked to work them himself. He would have liked to see his own men sowing them; he would have liked to take his wife there in the autumn. It was very tempting. He talked a great deal to his wife about the matter. They would need horses, a cart, a plough, a labourer, stables—they would want a quantity of things. Moreover, the priest did not understand agriculture.
However, the vegetable-beds were growing green, the maize was springing up. The priest made up his mind; he took the residue of his wife’s dowry and set to work. Marcu’s plough was good enough to start with. The priest bought one horse from Mitru; a man in the Rapitza Valley had another one; Stan Schiopu had a cart with three wheels. The priest bought it as he got a wheel from Mitru, to make up for the horse being foundered.
Cozonac, the bell-ringer, engaged himself as labourer to the priest, for his house was only a stone’s throw away. The priest drove four posts into the ground at one end of the house, two long ones and two short, and he made three sides of plaited osiers and a roof of rushes, and there was the stable all ready.
During these days, Father Trandafir had aged by about ten years; but he grew young again when he placed his wife and children in the cart, whipped up the horses, and drove off to see their ploughed land.
The villagers saw him, and shook their heads, and said once more: “The priest is the devil’s own man.”