Compass rose sketch with Genesis 31:49

Tom was the elder and the restless one. The spring he turned twenty-two he took a berth on a coaster out of Bristol, bound for places nobody in Somerset had heard of, and Will stayed behind to mind the forty old trees and their mother's temper. At the gate their mother held them both by the wrists and said the words her own mother said, The Lord watch between me and thee, when we are absent one from another, and then she let go. Tom pressed a paper into Will's hand, a compass rose he'd pricked out by lamplight with an N at the top and an S at the bottom. Keep the north way in your head, he said, and I'll find my road back by it. Then he went down the lane without looking round, because Pellows never did.

Will cut a tick into the wall beside the gate every morning after that. Four hundred and twelve ticks by harvest, lined up like the teeth of a rake. His mother said he'd go daft counting. Then one October a letter came, soaked and smelling of tar, and it said Tom had been waiting two years in a port on the far side of the world for a cargo that never came, and that he'd been counting too, on the inside of his cabin door, and had just reached the same number.

So Will went and sat under the pear tree and wept, which is the only time anybody's seen a Pellow weep, so you'll write that down. Tom walked home at the next blossom, brown as a saddle, and the two of them went to the wall and cut the last tick side by side. The scratches are still there if you know where to look. And I never let anyone prune the south side of that pear, because that's where he always said the road began.