He coughed into his handkerchief, and when he pulled it away there was a spot of red. He saw me looking and folded the cloth quickly. “The quarry dust gets in your lungs and stays there. 30 years of breathing stone. The stone eventually wins.”
By summer’s end, the corridor was 5 feet wide instead of 4. I had built a small storage alcove just inside the cave mouth, where the temperature stayed cool even in August. Potatoes I stored there in July were still firm in September. Onions lasted through October. The cave was keeping my food the way it kept its air: steady, patient, indifferent to the seasons raging outside.
I started selling the surplus.
The first time I brought vegetables to Mercy Crossing, Martha Pell looked at me as though I had grown a 2nd head.
“These came from your place? From the cave?”
“From the cave.”
She picked up a potato and turned it over in her hands. It was smooth and clean, no eyes sprouting, no soft spots. “It’s September. These look like they were dug last week.”
“They were dug in July.”
She stared at me. I could see her trying to work out how I was lying, what the trick was. People in Mercy Crossing knew that vegetables dug in July went soft or sprouted or rotted by September. That was simply how things were.
“I’ll give you 2 cents each for the potatoes,” she said finally. “5 cents for the onions.”
It was not charity. It was not even kindness. It was only business, and business Martha Pell understood.
I took her money and walked back to the hollow with coins in my pocket for the first time since I had arrived.
Word spread. That is how small towns work. By October, people started coming to me instead of waiting for me to come to them. Asa Klene came first. He was a widower with 3 children and a farm that was always 1 bad season from failing. He stood in my yard, hat in his hands, and asked whether it was true that I could keep vegetables fresh through the winter.
“It’s true.”
“How?”
