My master has released me from his service, and no one has died for it.
This is the strange part. When a man leaves the field, it is because the plague took him, or the hunger, or he has grown too old to swing the scythe and lies down in the corner to wait for God. But my master smiles. He shakes my hand as one shakes a neighbor's.
There is bread, and a cup, and other laborers I have sweated beside for years stand about and say kind words, as though at a wedding, or a burial where the dead man is well pleased.
I look for the wound and find none. No lord has cast me out. No debt has swallowed me. They tell me I go on to another master, a better one, of my own choosing, and I confess I do not understand a bondsman who chooses. A serf belongs to the land. The land does not thank him and let him wander off.
I carry out a small box of my things. There is precious little in it. A cup I favored. A likeness of my children, done somehow without a painter's hand. That is all a man gathers in years of good and honest toil, and it is more than most.
And yet my chest aches as if for a lost harvest. I did not know a man could love the yoke. I did not know a field could hold a piece of you and keep it after you have gone.
The good Lord gives us work to fill the hours until we die.
I only wish He had told me some of it would be worth the grieving.