Chapter 10: Welfare

He bought the perilla seed before the doorway had finished closing behind her.

He put his palm on the stone and thought the word Shop, and the list came up on its face.

[Tower shop.]

[Red pepper seed: not sold. You have your own.]

[Tomato seed: 5 coins.]

[Radish seed: 40 coins.]

[Perilla seed: 300 coins.]

[Next seed opens at Level 5.]

He bought two, and the heap in the hollow sank by six hundred coins.

The seeds came up into his palm small and brown and round, and he knew them before the stone could tell him.

Grandma roasted the same seeds every October and took them to the mill in town to be pressed for oil.

The oil went into everything she cooked, and her kitchen smelled of it all winter.

He slept that night in the grass under the open roof, in his shirt, and coughed until the light came back.

On Sunday he picked up the saw.

The pocketknife had taken a whole day to cut one cane pole, and the saw went through one in forty strokes.

By noon he had six rafters, and he nailed them across the walls to the two old poles.

On the fourth one he had put the saw through the side of his thumb.

[Health: 55 of 100.]

He wrapped the thumb in a strip of shirt and kept sawing, because Grandpa had always said bleeding was no reason to stop.

At dusk he planted both perilla seeds against the south wall of the house, where the stone still held the day's warmth.

He carried water to them from the stream in the iron pot.

It was the first time in a month he had held anything that could carry water, and he laughed at how good it felt.

In the morning two plants stood at his chest, green and furred, with leaves as wide as his hand.

The smell of them stopped him in the doorway.

[Tower perilla. Quality: Good.]

[Growth: dusk to dawn. Keeps: 7 days.]

[Eaten: makes the eater stronger, for good.]

[First harvest of a new crop. 100 XP.]

The Tower had never said "for good" about anything he grew.

Tomatoes wore off by morning.

This one stayed.

He ate a leaf wrapped around a slice of radish, the way Grandma wrapped rice in perilla at lunch.

It did nothing for him at all, which he had expected.

What he didn't know was how a buyer would ever see it work.

A man could eat it, feel no different, and tell the Sunday news the seller was a fraud.

He thought about that all day while he laid gray slabs over the rafters, overlapping.

He left the second perilla plant standing, so it would go a night past ripe and set seed.

That night the frost came again, harder than the first time.

He woke before the light with ice in the grass of his bed and his cough gone tight and wet.

When the light came, the tomato row under its grass cover was black, and so were the radish tops.

He pulled a radish anyway.

It came out glassy and soft.

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