66 - The Ward Sees Him

There were nine people standing round the well-pump on Fetter Street at the seventh bell and not one of them had gone to the Assessor.

That was the part he could not get past, walking up.

It is three streets from the ward office. It is two doors from a watch box. There is a form for this and a counter for it and a man paid to sit behind the counter and take it off you.

Instead a woman had come to the strip shed at the sixth bell, stood in the doorway with her hands in her apron, and said the name of a street.

She had not asked whether he did this. She had not asked what it cost. She had said the street, and then she had waited, in a doorway, with the light behind her, until he put his coat on.

The twenty-second day of the Charter had closed at noon. It had closed at noon whatever he did, because the work was delivered on the twentieth and the paper was signed off at the ninth bell of a Monday.

He had spent the day walking to a pump.

"It has been going since the winter," the woman said.

Her name was Marra Sull, and Kalen had stood next to her at the ward board on the first of the month for four years without ever once having a conversation with her.

"Since the week of the ice. It will be a year in January."

"Going how."

"Going. That is what I am telling you. It goes."

She put her hand on the handle and worked it twice, and water came out into the trough, clean, without her putting anything into the handle at all.

"You do not pump it," she said. "It pumps."

Kalen put his hand on the standard and read it for four minutes, and then took his hand off and put it back on again, because he had not liked the answer the first time.

PATTERN: Continuance (Common)

Held in: well-pump, Fetter Street, iron and elm

Draw: Bind, slight

The work continues on the account it was begun on.

Bound at the parish charge and entered as such. E. Sull

"E. Sull," he said.

"My husband's uncle. He is forty years dead."

"He is not the account."

"No," Marra Sull said. "That is why we did not go to the office."

"Whose is it."

"Orrin Weld's."

Kalen took his hand off the standard and put it back on.

"He is at the gate," she said. "Three weeks tomorrow. There is a paper on the cooperage door and the shop has been shut since the Wednesday."

"I know where he is."

"Then you know what I am standing here about."

* * *

They told him the rest of it standing round the trough, four of them at once, the way a street tells you a thing.

"The standard cracked in the winter."

"January. It was the week of the ice."

"The parish would not pay for a new one. They put that in writing and Ames has still got the letter."

Somebody went in and got the letter. It came out folded to the size of a hand and was held up and not read, because nobody there needed it read.

"We were carrying it up from the yard on Cinder Row," said the man at the back. "Eleven hundred feet each way, and forty steps at the end of it, and I did four of those a day for nine days."

"Then Orrin came down."

"Then Orrin came down," Marra Sull said.

Kalen kept his hand on the iron.

"Say the rest of it."

"There is not any more of it. He came down from the cooperage with his knee and his tools, and he was here about two hours, and he put it back on."

"On what."

"On himself," said the man at the back. "We did not know that. We found that out in the spring off a boy who could read."

"He never said."

"He would not have," Marra Sull said. "He did the shutters on my mother's place and would not take a mark for that either, and there is a rail on the stairs at eleven that he put in, and he charged the landlord for that one, so it is not that he could not price a thing."

"Three hundred and eleven days," somebody said. "We counted after."

Kalen stood with his hand flat on the cold iron and said nothing for a while, and none of them hurried him, and the pump went on going.

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Three hundred and eleven days of a street drinking, at slight, off one man's Balance.

Four a day of arrears on a figure that had never come down. Not in a good year. Not in the year the works shut.

And it had not stopped three weeks ago. That was the part he had not liked the first time and had gone back to the iron for.

A Fifth settles the account. It says so on the paper, in the same word they print on everything: settled. The account was closed on the Wednesday and this pump had gone on drawing against it for twenty days, because a Continuance is told what it draws on and is never once told to stop.

There was one thing left in Ward Nine still treating Orrin Weld as a man with an account, and it was standing in the road with a handle on it.

It was not the whole of a thousand and forty. It was not a fortieth of it. A slight draw is a slight draw, and forty-one years of a cooperage in Ward Nine is the rest of it, and any clerk in Kentra would have told this street so in nine seconds and been right.

He was not going to say it to them. He was not going to say the other thing either, which was that he had been carrying the man's notice in his coat on the day it fell due, and had put a hand on it twice, and had thought Thursday.

"Can you stop it?" Marra Sull said.

"I can stop it in about four minutes."

"And then?"

"And then you have got no water."

"That is what the office would do."

"That is what the office would do, and the office would be entitled to." He took his hand off the standard. "It would enter the pump as unlawful drawing on a settled account, and it would be entitled to do that as well, and this street would be carrying water up from Cinder Row again by Friday."

"And you?"

"I am going to move it."

"Move it where?"

"Onto the ward."

There was a pause while eleven feet of Fetter Street worked out what that meant, and Marra Sull got there first, the way she gets to everything on that board first.

"That goes on the Levy," she said.

"It goes on the Levy."

"How much?"

"A part of a tenth of a part of it. You will not see it on a notice and neither will I."

"But it is on it."

"It is on it," Kalen said. "I will show you the working if you want the working. I am not going to stand in this street and tell you a thing is free, because somebody has told this street a thing was free before."

"Who did?"

"Everybody who has ever put a number on that board."

Nobody argued with him. That was the part he thought about afterwards.

Marra Sull put her hand in her apron and brought out a folded sheet, worn soft along the creases the way paper goes when it lives in an apron, and did not open it.

"My boy came up in the spring," she said. "Line eighty-one. Ninety-four the wrong way before he had done a day's work in his life."

"I know the figure."

"You will not have seen his."

"I have seen forty of them and not his," Kalen said. "Bring it to the shed and I will read it out to you properly, and it will take an hour, and it will not be an hour you enjoy."

"Will it change it?"

"No."

"Then why would I bring it?"

"Because you asked me a question just now that you have been carrying for six months," he said, "and it took you four years standing next to me at that board to ask it."

* * *

It took two days.

He had the jig set up on a barrow with the roll open beside it and the whole street walking round him the entire time. He had never worked in front of people before. He found that he did not mind it, which surprised him more than anything else that week.

Two children were sent to watch him and did not go away. A man brought him a chair on the first afternoon. He did not sit in it and did not say so.

"What are you doing now?"

"Looking."

"You have been looking since the fourth bell."

"That is the job," Kalen said. "The other part takes eleven seconds and anybody could do it if they knew where to put their hand."

"Then why can nobody else do it?"

He thought about that for longer than the child had allowed for.

"Because knowing where to put your hand is the whole of it," he said, "and there is no way to be told."

The reading was the slow part, the way it always is. A Common laid in by a jobbing hand in a January, in a hurry, in the cold. Laid in deep, because a man working for nothing does not want the thing coming back on him in a year.

The moving cost him a full Bind at nineteen marks out of a Balance at minus a hundred and twenty. He did not tell anybody in the street that either.

NOTICE OF REBINDING

Continuance, Common, well-pump, Fetter Street.

Account of Weld, O., closed.

Account of Ward Nine, opened.

No service assessed. No credit due.

No credit due.

He read that twice, sitting on the edge of the trough with his hands stinging, and laughed at it, which he had not done in some weeks. Somewhere in the ward office a clerk would enter a fraction against nine thousand people, and the clerk would be right to, and a street would have water.

He wrote it up in the book that evening in Nessa's ruled columns. Date, work, hours, materials, coin, service. The last two columns read nought and nought.

Then he sat and looked at the page for a long time.

He had spent the best part of a year trying to move one number by proving that it ought to move. He had proved it. He had proved it in a room, with brass, in front of four people who never once said he was wrong, and afterwards the number went up two tenths and a man from the cooperage went to the gate.

Nobody had brought him this pump because he was right about anything. They had brought it to him because he came down off a mast and told a street the truth about a grease can.

And every one of these was an entry, in a book, in a hand nobody could argue with.

* * *

Ferrin found him at the eighth bell on the second evening and did not sit down, which meant it was not about the crew.

"There is a thing at the schoolhouse."

"What thing."

"A Rendered." Ferrin had his cap in his hands. "It comes every morning. It has been coming every morning for six weeks and the whole street has been going round the long way to the yard."

"Six weeks and nobody has said."

"Mata says the door has been shut since the closure."

"Then how is it getting in?"

"That is what I am telling you," Ferrin said. "It is not shut. It is open, because the woman opens it."

"Which woman."

"The teacher."

They walked down to the end of Fetter Street in the dark, where the schoolhouse is.

The door was standing open on a black room. Nobody had put a lamp in it in eight years. There was a bootscraper by the step with the rust worn off the top of it in one place, which is what a bootscraper looks like when somebody is still using it.

Kalen stood on the step and looked in and did not go in.

There was a register on the desk inside, open, with a week of names in it and the week not finished. He counted them from the doorway without deciding to.

Forty-one.

He was not frightened of it. He wanted to be accurate about that afterwards, in the book, because he was frightened of a great many things that year and this was not one of them. He counted because the light was bad and there was a list.

"Do we tell the office," Ferrin said.

"No."

"Then what do we do?"

"Tomorrow. In the morning, with the light." Kalen was still looking at the open door. "Tonight I want the book."

"The crew book?"

"The crew book. Every job in it. The pump, the gate winch, the load-frame, the ones that pay and the ones that do not." He put his hand on the door frame. "All of it, in her hand, in order, with the dates on it."

"That is a lot of nothing jobs."

"A completed Charter got me a line on a form," Kalen said. "Forty of these gets me the grade where nobody has to let me."

Ferrin turned the cap over once more and put it on.

"Enter the pump."

Behind them the schoolhouse door was still standing open.