Covenant

The drought had worn the world down to thirst and dust. The house drew the heat of summer into its bones until the boards gave off a faint sour warmth like old breath. Even her sleep carried its barren weight. Her dreams were dry and colorless and broke apart like the soil outside. Hands clawed upward in slow, brittle motions, fingers white, uncurling like hungry roots before they crumbled. The cracks widened. Gaunt faces pressed through, gasping for water that never came. When she tried to turn away, the faces followed, their hollow eyes fixed on her.

She lay listening. Praying. Waiting. Hoping for thunder. But there had been no thunder, no rain. Only the drag of wind over baked earth and the crackle of dead weed stems.

She turned her head. Jonah lay on his back beside her, one arm flung over his eyes. In the blue half-light, his ribs stood out like narrow planks. He had been a heavy man once, solid from years of farmwork. The drought had stripped him the way it stripped the fields, taking the padding first, then reserves, working down to the core.

Some mornings, when he exhaled in his sleep, a faint scent lingered. Something like wet burlap carried up from a shuttered cellar. Lately, he let silence answer for him, his every protest worn thin. Some nights he ground his teeth until it woke her.

She watched his chest lift and fall. She wanted to reach across the narrow space between them and lay her hand against his breastbone, to feel the slow thud of his heart, to remind herself something in this house still moved with purpose. She got out of bed and as she stood, the house answered with a tired creak.

There were mornings when Jonah rose before her, but lately he had waited for her footsteps in the hall before he forced himself upright. He tried to hide it, the small falter in his movements, the way he pressed a hand to the doorframe as if steadying himself against a tide no one else could see. She felt it in the way he now looked to her, not for comfort but for direction, as though she alone might know how to bargain with a season that had turned against them. It was this silent leaning, more than the dying fields, that tightened her stomach whenever she thought of what she might have to do.

In the kitchen she took the chipped enamel cup from its hook and worked the pump handle. The arm wobbled in her grasp. The well had fallen low. Water came sluggishly, a thin thread coughing into the basin with a sound of suffocation.

The first swallow tasted of metal and clay. It settled heavy in her gut, but did not provide relief or ease the dull ache behind her eyes. It only reminded her how much of herself was water, and how little of it the clouds would surrender now.

She opened the back door. The yard lay under a glare of pale, windless air. The sky carried a color like worn cotton left too long in the sun. The lilac bush beside the steps had gone to gray sticks. Across the road, Henry Peterson's place sat unmoving, the chains of the porch swing rattling against the hot winds that sometimes raked through.

Her mother had taught her, in small unspoken ways, to read the land as if it were a living thing. Even in ordinary seasons, she would pause at the back steps before stepping into the yard, tilting her head as though listening for the earth’s mood. As a girl, Talia had mimicked the gesture without understanding it, but the memory rose now with a faint pressure, as if her mother’s hand had brushed her shoulder. The drought had scoured the world bare, yet that old instinct persisted, whispering that the earth kept its own ledger of who tended it, who betrayed it, and whom it might still choose to hear.

She went out into the yard. The grass had burned to a brittle mat. Each step gave off a faint hiss. Past the fence, the cornfield opened in dull rows, stalks stunted and yellowed, leaves curled tight as if in prayer.

She walked to the edge of the corn. The land did not speak, not in any way she could hear. She felt observed, as if the field held its breath after so many years of tending, vacant now even of the memory of better seasons.

Once, as a girl, she had followed her mother to the stone church on the hill. The building had been plain, its steeple darkened with age. The yard held leaning markers, names cut and left to their own slow erasure. Her mother had taken her to a cracked stone near the sagging fence. She traced the letters with a careful finger.

Elsbeth Ward

Her mother had not smiled. She had not repeated what the men at the feed store said—dabbler, witch, stolen calves and lightning on barn roofs. Instead she looked at the stone and said, in a voice so low Talia had to lean in to hear, that some people spoke to the land, and were heard.

The thought made her stomach knot—not witches or superstition, but the idea that the earth itself might listen and choose. That it might answer some and let others starve. The memory settled on her now like a thin weight. She went back inside.

Jonah had turned onto his side, one hand hanging off the mattress, his fingers stained faint green from the alfalfa he had tried and failed to bring back. Sweat ran down his neck and into the hollows of his collarbone.

“Talia,” he said, voice muffled. “You up already?”

“I couldn’t sleep.”

“Water truck comes about ten. Peterson said last Sunday they might cut us off if the river drops more. We ought to be there early.”

“I’ll be there,” she said.

She took his flannel shirt from the peg. The fabric had thinned. In one pocket, she found the small things he carried, worthless and precious both: baler twine, a brass nail, a paper scrap with numbers rubbed to ghosts. She closed her fist around them. Her mother’s shawl lay folded on the table. She grabbed that too. Something in her gave way. Not courage. Inheritance. The land had been calling for weeks, and she understood now that silence was no longer refusal but consent. She took the shovel from the corner by the stove and went out.

Her mother had never spoken of bargains outright, but there had been moments Talia remembered now with an uneasy clarity: the way her mother paused before planting, fingertips pressed to the soil as if listening for something beneath it. She did not know what the offering should be, only that the land would know her if she approached it with her mother’s name still living in her flesh.

The barn slumped in its own shadow. Its boards had pulled from the nails. She walked the road with the shovel bumping her shoulder. Heat rose in thin shivers that made the far fencelines waver.

Mrs. Peterson stood at her gate.

“Morning, Talia,” she called. She glanced at the shovel, then the shawl. “You digging this early. Ground’s like brick.”

“Just an errand,” Talia said.

The old church had long been abandoned. The porch steps were broken. A nest of hornets hung gray under the eaves. Talia walked between the leaning stones to the far corner where the fence sagged. The cracked stone waited, a muted benediction.

Elsbeth Ward

She rested the shovel against the stone and unclasped the shawl. She then set the shovel blade at the base of the stone and drove it down with her foot.

The soil gave with a dry crack. It was harder than any earth had a right to be, but not impenetrable. She dug steadily, lifting out chunks of dirt that held together like old pottery. The sun climbed. Sweat ran down her face and gathered at the hollow of her throat. The arm that held the shovel burned. Each breath tasted of dust.

After a while, the air seemed to thicken. Something quiet came over the hill. Even the grasshoppers went still. The shadow of her own body felt a half-beat out of step with her movements. She drove the shovel down again and heard it strike. The sound was small, a dull tap, but it ran up the handle into her palms in a way that made her stomach clench. She crouched, scraped at the dirt with her hands, pushed aside clods until a pale curve came clear.

Bone.

Not rotten. Not crumbling. It lay there long and smooth as if it had been set aside yesterday instead of decades past.

She reached in with both hands and lifted it. The weight surprised her. A warmth came with it, a slow heat rising into her arms with a familiarity that unsettled her. It felt like the remembered touch of a woman her mother and grandmother both seemed to echo.

Her vision swam. She closed her eyes. In that brief dark she saw rain sweeping across a field. Not her own, or not as it was now. The soil in that vision was dark and rich. Corn stood shoulder-high and green. A woman walked there with her skirts hitched, bare feet sinking into damp earth. Her hair was unbound. Her arms were dark with water. She laughed.

The image went as quickly as it had come. The bone grew cool in her hands. She wrapped it in her mother’s shawl, tucking the ends in so no pale gleam showed, and then she rose, shoveled dirt back into the hole, and climbed back down the hill.

On the road home, she met no one. At the Peterson place, the curtains were drawn. Jonah waited at the fence, smoking a cigarette, one foot on the bottom rail.

“Where you been?”

“Walking.”

He nodded toward the bundle. “What you got there?”

“A shawl. Mama’s.”

She took the bone and the shovel and went out to the field. The corn rows ran straight, each stalk a small failure. She walked between them to the center, to the place where the earth had cracked deepest. The soil there had opened in long slits that seemed to breathe. She set the bone down and drove the shovel into the hard crust, levering up a shallow trench. Enough. She placed the bone gently into the raw cut earth, a memory returning to its keeper.

For a moment she thought of leaving it bare. That felt wrong. She covered it, working the dry soil over it until nothing showed. Then she drew her mother’s narrow knife, the one that could peel an apple in one long ribbon. And without giving herself time to think, she opened her palm and pressed the blade across it.

Pain came quick and bright. Blood swelled along the cut, thick and slow in the heat. She crouched and turned her hand over, letting the first drops fall onto the fresh-turned earth above the bone. The soil drank it the moment it touched the ground.

Under her feet the ground shifted. It was not a tremor like distant thunder. It was a long, slow stretch that ran through the dirt into the bones of her legs. Something deep made room for itself. Something long folded began to uncurl. A sound rose, a drawn-out sigh that seemed to come from the soil itself.

Talia closed her eyes, her hand stinging. Blood continued to seep, dampening her fingers. She felt her name gather in her throat. She spoke it aloud.

“Talia Ward.”

The sound of it went out from her and laid itself over the field like a thin cloth. For an instant the heat seemed to lean toward her, attentive.

She waited, but nothing moved. The field lay mute around her, the light sliding toward afternoon in slow, indifferent strokes. She rose, her hand throbbing and wet, and walked back to the house with the feeling of something listening but not yet decided.

Inside she wrapped it in bandages before stepping outside again. The sky did not break. But the light had changed. Something gray edged in along the horizon.

Jonah called from the porch.

“Talia. You out there?”

“Yes, I’m here.”

He shaded his eyes. “You see those clouds?”

“I see something.”

He stepped off the porch, arms spread wide as if to embrace the gift, face lifted like a child. Talia watched the gray edge crawl closer and said nothing.

Word spread before the clouds arrived. Everyone on the road knew it was coming. Over the next few hours, the clouds did gather. By twilight, the first drop fell. It struck the handrail with a small tick and left a dark mark. Another followed, then more, slow at first. Neighbors drifted into the yard. Mrs. Peterson came with her apron on. Old man Morris leaned on his stick. A boy from town arrived on a bicycle shouting.

“It’s raining! It’s raining!”

Jonah stepped off the porch and lifted his face. The rain thickened and drove the dust down. Talia stood under the eave. The smell reached her. Not clean rain on hot dirt, but something with a metallic thread, like the taste of a bitten tongue. Something faint and sweet beneath it.

She stepped out and held her uninjured hand forward.

Drops landed in her palm. Clear water.

She walked to the fence.

“You feel that,” Jonah shouted, grinning.

“Yeah, I feel it.”

Water gathered in small puddles. She climbed through the fence and walked into the field. The new mud clutched her boots. The ground, so hard an hour before, gave under her weight like flesh. She crouched and laid her palm on the wet earth. The ground pressed back. Not simple resistance, but something with direction. The pulse traveled into her arm and chest. Her heart beat against it once. Behind her the farmers shouted in the downpour. Someone began an old hymn. The pooling rain in the mud between her bare knees changed. Not bright red. More like water poured over raw meat. The tint vanished as soon as she noticed it.

She rose and turned toward the house. The people in the yard were drenched, clothes clinging, faces shining. Mrs. Peterson clasped her hands.

“Look at the Lord’s mercy. He has not forgotten us.”

Talia thought of the bone wrapped in cloth beneath the soil. Her own blood drawn down into the earth. She said nothing.

As the farmers rejoiced, Talia noticed the boy from town drinking the water from his cupped hands, and when he lowered them, a faint tint of red lingered at the corners of his mouth before the rain washed it away. A large cool drop struck the back of her neck and felt, for an instant, like a thumb pressing down to see how easily the skin would bruise. By morning, she knew the corn would rise—taller, greener, but with leaves that curled like fingers, reaching for more.

Rain fell in a curtain between earth and sky. At the center of the field, the ground softened into life. The downpour whispered in a voice made of earth and marrow and the pressure of buried things. It had come. But not for them.

Talia stood and let the rain wash over her like a claim.