Sunday on a Thursday

Piet Ferrabee lifted the lid of the oldest vat to look, and the steam that came up smelled of Sunday supper.

Piet knew every smell in the Dye Yard: onion skins, walnut hulls, the sour green of nettles in their first week. This was something else. It was onions gone soft in a pot, and sage, and bread somewhere close by. Piet stood with the lid in both hands and breathed it in, and nearly forgot to look at the thread.

Then they hooked the test thread out on the paddle and held it up to the light.

It was green. It was nearly the green.

Round the handle of the paddle, wound tight and faded now, is a short length of thread Piet dyed one ordinary morning and has never managed since. It is the colour of a pea pod with the sun behind it. Piet has chased it for six seasons, vat after vat, and every vat came out a little off. This one was closer than any of them.

Piet’s heart went quick and light. Seven days with the lid on, that was the rule. Piet always broke it by lifting the lid to look.

The yard gate creaked, and the morning’s first walkers came through it, looking at everything. All the old road’s walkers are coming to the Grove this week, and Scout with them.

Scout stopped by the vat and sniffed. “Somebody’s doing Sunday supper on a Thursday.”

Piet looked past the drying lines at the patched tent next door. Behind it, every morning, Anouk Feld rolls slow sticks of resin and names each batch for its smell. Anouk has wanted a batch that smells like Sunday supper for as long as Piet has wanted this green.

Piet put the lid back on, quickly, and pressed it down.

“Only onions,” Piet said.

Nothing is kept back in the Grove, and the worst thing anyone can say of you there is that you counted it. Piet felt it now, standing there with both hands on the lid.

Scout wrote something down and went on toward the Terraces. The smell came out round the edges of the lid anyway, and drifted off over the drying lines toward the tent.