GAZETTEER · THE VALE

Tanwick's Croft

aka the chalk-line farm

A farmstead at the edge of Valenfeld's belt, split clean down the middle of the house and the fields by a chalk line neither Tanwick sibling will be the one to rub out — the corridor's standing joke about how not to settle an inheritance.

Old Tanwick died in the spring without a will worth the paper, and his two grown children — Ide, who'd worked the north field for a decade, and Rennet, who'd been off soldiering and came home the week their father took sick — could not agree on anything except that neither trusted the other to divide it fair. So they divided it themselves: a chalk line down the kitchen table, out the door, across the yard, and clean through the middle furrow of the best field, redrawn in fresh chalk every week it rains it off. Ide keeps the byre side and the good well. Rennet keeps the road side and the bigger house, which everyone agrees is the worse trade and nobody will say so to his face because he'd only dig the line deeper. It has been three years. The chalk line has outlasted two dogs, one marriage proposal (Ide's, declined by a suitor who took one look at the yard and decided the trouble wasn't worth the acreage), and at least four attempts by neighbors to mediate, all of which ended with both Tanwicks agreeing, loudly, that the mediator didn't understand and should mind their own furrow. Travelers on the corridor road slow down for the sight of it — a whole working farm run as two farms sharing a fence-line that runs through the parlor — and the Tanwicks, whatever else is wrong between them, have never once let the crop fail on either side of the chalk. Old Harrow, folk on the road say, doesn't care whose name is on the deed as long as the field gets turned, and by that measure the two of them are doing just fine.

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