Chương 2: Green Hollow

Joe had been born as the second son of a farming family. His father, Mike, was a thirty-year-old honest farmer, while his mother, Lily, was twenty-eight. His grandparents, Joseph and Pam, were both around sixty, although neither could give their exact birthday with much confidence. Simon, Joe's older brother, was three years older and a loud boy, while Mary, the youngest, had been born when Joe was almost two and had been crying nonstop ever since. Both of his siblings seemed like troublemakers.

Seven people lived beneath one roof. In Joe's previous life, the house would have been considered poor. In Green Hollow, it was respectable. The walls were built from timber packed with clay and straw. A thatched roof covered the house, patched in several places but still sound enough that only particularly heavy rain found its way through. The central hearth provided heat and cooking, with smoke escaping through a vent in the roof, although enough remained behind to darken the rafters permanently.

They owned six narrow strips of farmland south of the village, a small kitchen garden, five chickens and one pig. The pig received an unreasonable amount of Lily's attention that Joe never could compete with. Joe eventually understood why. It represented months of feed, future meat and something that could be traded if the household urgently needed money. The chicken dying was irritating. The pig dying could become a serious problem. Adults rarely explained such things to him directly anyway.

But, people spoke freely around young children. Afterall, what do these ignorant brats know? Joe heard arguments about seed grain while Mike repaired tools. He listened to Pam and Lily discuss which household had borrowed food after the previous winter. Marriages, harvests, debts and taxes were discussed openly around him, usually with far more detail than anyone would have offered if they knew how carefully he was listening. Gradually, Joe understood his family's basic position.

They were not wealthy, but neither were they among the poorest families in Green Hollow. They usually had enough food, but a bad harvest would hurt. Two bad harvests could become dangerous. Mike was Joseph and Pam's only surviving child. Some of the older villagers still called him Miracle Mike, although rarely when he was close enough to hear. Pam had lost a pregnancy before him. Other children were born but had not survived infancy. Mike came when she was around thirty and, most importantly, lived.

No other child survived after him. That tragedy had produced one economic advantage. Around Green Hollow, land was normally divided among surviving sons when they formed households of their own. Joseph had never been wealthy, but because Mike had no brothers, the family's six strips remained together. Six strips were not enough. They were still considerably better than three, or two or one. Joe understood why Lily had considered Mike a reasonable husband.

Pam occasionally claimed Lily had once been the prettiest girl in the eastern part of Green Hollow.

"You should have seen her at sixteen," Pam said one afternoon while sorting beans.

"Half the boys suddenly found important reasons to walk past her father's house. One of them used to carry the same basket past there twice a day as if nobody noticed." Lily continued repairing the shirt without looking up.

"Mother."

"What?" Stolen story; please report.

"You didn't even live near my father's house."

"I heard about it."

"From whom?" Pam paused, apparently searching her memory.

"Why do you need that much details? Its confidential." Joe almost laughed. Pam had a remarkable ability to produce detailed stories while becoming vague the moment anyone asked where the details came from. Lily had dark hair and features slightly different from many families in Green Hollow. Her mother's family had apparently come from farther south. Whatever attention Lily had received as a young woman, she eventually chose Mike.

He had land, no brothers fighting over it, living parents who could still work and a reputation for being steady. He did not gamble, he did not drink heavily, and he worked. In Joe's previous life, marrying for such reasons might have sounded unromantic. Here, it sounded practical. Lily had chosen a household where her children were likely to eat and where her husband was unlikely to gamble away the harvest. Green Hollow itself was poor without being ugly.

The village sat in a broad valley surrounded by wooded hills. A river carved along the eastern edge before flowing south toward Blackwood Town. Spring covered the slopes with small flowers. Summer turned valley deep green. In autumn, the northern woods became red and gold while the fields faded toward brown. Winter occasionally buried everything beneath snow. The river was clear enough in calmer areas that Joe could see stones along the bottom.

On sunny days it reflected the sky so cleanly that the water looked blue from a distance. Green Hollow smelled of soil, smoke, animals, growing plants and occasionally things Joe preferred not to identify. There were no engines, no traffic and no constant mechanical noise. The nights were even more different. Joe remembered looking at stars in his previous life, but he had never seen anything like Green Hollow's sky. Thousands appeared on clear nights.

A pale band crossed from one side of the sky to the other, while several brighter stars showed faint colors even to the naked eye. Sometimes Joe remained outside simply looking upward until Lily called him back inside. Nobody else considered the sight remarkable. For them, it was simply the night sky. A little more than seventy households made up Green Hollow. Most sat along one packed-earth road that seemed to alternate between dust and mud depending on the weather.

The village center contained the elder's compound, the communal grain store, a smithy and several larger houses. Behind the elder's compound stood a fenced training ground. The richest household belonged to the village elder. Even that house would have seemed modest in Joe's previous life, but its roof was well maintained, the fence was solid, and two windows contained actual glass. Joe stared at them the first time he noticed. Glass existed. More importantly, almost nobody had it. That told him considerably more.

Green Hollow had no permanent market. Families traded among themselves or waited for someone making the journey to Blackwood. Salt cost money. Iron cost money. Good cloth cost money. Books were worse. Almost nobody in Joe's household could properly read. Joseph knew several marks used for grain and livestock. Mike understood basic numbers used in trade. Lily recognized a handful of common written words. None of them could read a letter. Joe's previous literacy did not help much.

The spoken language of this world had become natural during infancy, but the writing system had not. Its symbols looked nothing like English. Joe found that frustrating, although it was only one example of a larger problem with his old knowledge. He knew electricity existed but could not build a generator. He understood what engines were but could not manufacture one. He knew antibiotics could save lives but did not know how to safely produce them.

He remembered the finished products of modern civilization much better than the thousands of processes required to create them. That did not make his old knowledge useless. Sanitation, arithmetic, organization and record-keeping can be pretty useful. Right? Joe had spent most of his adult life working inside an organization. He understood schedules, paperwork, budgets, incentives and how easily small inefficiencies accumulated when nobody took responsibility for them.

Those skills were considerably less exciting than inventing an engine. They were also skills he possessed. For the moment, however, none of them mattered as much as understanding how this world worked. Joe helped around the house when he could, although his contribution remained appropriately small. An adult memory did not produce adult strength. He gathered eggs, scattered feed for the chickens, sorted vegetables, pulled easy weeds around the kitchen garden and brought Pam things when her knees hurt.

He carried kindling three or four pieces at a time. He could also sweep. Technically. Pam handed him a broom made from bundled twigs one morning. Joe carefully worked across the floor, trying to push the dirt toward the doorway. When he finished, most of it had simply relocated to another part of the room. Pam inspected his work for several seconds.

"Looks much cleaner. A born worker!" Joe looked at the floor, then at her.

"Grandma."

"Yes?"

"You are lying." Pam laughed until she started coughing.