67 - The Register

The ward was standing in the road outside the schoolhouse before the light was any good, which he had asked them not to do.

There were nine of them when he came down Fetter Street and fourteen by the time he reached the step, because that street has never kept a thing to itself for four minutes together. Marra Sull had the tin. She held it flat on both palms, the way you hold a thing you have counted twice in front of witnesses, and she had it out toward him before he was near enough to take it.

"Forty," she said.

"Forty."

"Forty and two. The two are Ames and I could not stop him."

"They are to be entered as his," Ames said, from the back.

"They are entered as yours."

Kalen put his hands in his coat and looked at the tin and did not touch it.

"That is a designation," he said. "And a man to work it."

"That is what it is for."

"Say the rest of it."

"There is no rest of it. It goes up on the board twice a year and I can read the board." She did not move the tin one inch. "You put a name on a thing and you pay somebody to go and finish it. Then it is finished. Then this street can send its children up this end of the road again."

"Whose name?"

"Rill. Anet Rill. She had the school nineteen years."

"And she is in it now," somebody said.

Kalen looked past them at the door. It had been standing open on a black room for six weeks and it was standing open now.

"Two mornings," he said.

"For what?"

"For looking."

"You looked on Tuesday."

"I stood on a step in the dark and counted a page I could not read."

"That is what looking is, with you."

"It is not." He got his collar up, because the wind at that end comes straight off the burnt ground. "Two mornings. Then, if it wants the office, I will carry that tin to the office myself. I will stand at the counter next to you while you hand it across."

"And if it does not want the office?"

"Then I will tell you what it wants instead. And you can tell me to take the forty marks anyway."

Marra Sull put the tin back under her arm, which in that street is a signature.

* * *

She came at half past the second bell on both mornings, up Fetter Street from the burnt end, at a walk, in her own coat with the buttons done up.

She scraped her boots, four strokes on each, on the iron scraper by the step, which is why the rust was worn off the top of it in one place and how the ward had known for six weeks that somebody was still coming.

Then she went in and put her hand on the desk, and opened the register at the page it was already open at, and took the pen out of the tray.

Then she went down the left-hand column with the point of it, an inch above the paper, and stopped.

Then she went back to the top and did it again, three times, always the same, always stopping in the same place. Then the pen went into the tray and she went out past him and up the road, and she did not scrape her boots on the way out, because you do not.

Eleven and a half minutes.

It was eleven and a half minutes on the Thursday as well.

Not eleven. Eleven and a half.

You read one of them by watching the whole loop and not by looking at the face. He had worked that out at nineteen days into this trade and he has been doing it every working week since. The loop is the instruction. Whatever a man is still doing on the four hundredth morning is what somebody told him to do on the first one.

She was not looking for a child.

That was the thing he had got wrong from the step on the Tuesday, and he had got it wrong for a reason that flattered him. A woman in a schoolroom with a pen in her hand ought to be looking for a child. It is the version a man builds walking down a road in the dark, and it took two mornings on a cold step to take it apart.

She was going down a column to the first box she could not fill.

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The register was ruled across the top for a week and down the side for a class, and there were forty-one names in it in her own hand, and there were marks in the boxes for the Monday and the Tuesday and about half of the Wednesday.

The works shut on a Wednesday, and everybody in Ashfall knows what day of the week the closure was, and nobody has ever been able to say why they know it.

Under the last name there was a line ruled the width of the page, with a word at the left of it and dot leaders running out from the word to nothing at all.

Account of the week.

He stood in a cold room with his hand flat on a desk and looked at that shape for a while.

She could not mark the Wednesday, and she had come up that road every morning for eight years to do it, and she could not, because she did not know. There is no draw in the whole of the Accord that gives a person back a thing they never had in the first place.

But the line at the foot of a page is not attendance.

That line is the account.

He went to the ward filing office that night and stood at the counter from the eighth bell until they put the lamps out, copying forty-one names off the ward roll onto four sheets in his own hand. It took four hours and it cost nothing, and nobody asked him what it was for.

* * *

On the Friday he was in the room before her, on the far side of the desk, with the four sheets in front of him and the register turned round.

She came up the road and scraped her boots. She came in and put her hand on the desk and opened the page and took the pen out of the tray.

Kalen said the first name before she got to the column.

"Sull, Bevin."

Nothing at all happened for about two seconds.

"Bevin Sull. On the roll. Assessed in the spring at eighty-one. He hauls sacked slag to the kilns and his mother is standing in your road out there with a tin in her hands."

The pen came down and put a mark in the box, and went back up.

He did not let himself look at that for long, because there were forty of them left on the sheet and the light was already better than it had been when he came in.

"Ovel, Ferrin. On the roll. He is seventeen. He keeps my books and he is on the far side of the ward this morning counting pins into a box."

The pen came down.

"Ames, Pella. On the roll of Ward Eleven. Entered and transferred, nine years ago last month."

Mark.

"Wick, Tal. On the roll. He is fifteen and he works for me. He is up a mast on Cinder Row this morning and he is better at it than I am."

Mark.

"Vance, Idris. On the roll. He is twenty and he went for a sailor out of Ward Four, and his mother has had two letters and cannot read either of them."

Mark.

"Ovin, Cael. On the roll. He is nineteen. He is on landing two of the tenement, keeping his mother's rooms."

He read the roll entry for every one of the forty-one, and he read them in her order, which was not alphabetical and was not by age and which he never did work out. Twenty-two of them were on the ward roll and alive, and four had gone to other wards, entered and transferred, in the way a ward accounts for a child it no longer has to feed.

It was one room in one ward in the year the works shut. There was no version of that list that did not have his own people on it.

Then he came to the eleven.

"Cass, Ilo," he said. "At the gate."

Mark.

"Toller, Bree. At the gate."

Mark.

"Roke, Anse. At the gate. Front rank, second in from the left. He has a runner's satchel over his shoulder and he has had it every evening for four years."

The pen stopped where it was, half an inch off the paper.

Kalen kept his hands flat on the desk and waited. He did not say anything to fill it. There was nothing available to say that was not worse than the quiet.

Then the pen came down and put the mark in.

He read the other eight and said where each of them was in the same words. They are the words the ward built for it and there are no better ones, and a man who invents new ones at a desk like that is doing it for himself.

Then there were four left, and he had nothing.

"Sember, Hollis," Kalen said. "Not on the roll. Not transferred. Not at the gate. I have looked twice and I cannot account for him."

He said all four of them like that, in the same order they stood in her column, and he did not soften a syllable of it, because a woman who has come up a road every morning for eight years to finish a page has not come up it to be spared.

He did not put a mark against any of the four, and he did not let her put one either, because he had his hand flat on the page.

"That is forty-one. Thirty-seven accounted and four not." He took his hand off. "That is the whole of what I have got, and I am not going to write a thing on this page that I would not swear to at a counter."

Anet Rill put the pen into the tray.

Then she closed the register, with the flat of her hand, the way you close a book you are going to open again on Monday.

Then she stopped.

He had not known what it would look like, and he had made a point on the walk down that morning of not building a picture of it beforehand. What it looked like was a woman standing at her own desk with her hand on a shut book, and then it was the same woman standing in the same place, and the difference was not in any part of her that he could have put a finger on.

He stood there for a while with the four sheets in his hand.

The ward came in at about the second bell and did the ordinary thing that a ward does with a person who has stopped, which is to shut the door and send a boy for the parish.

* * *

Marra Sull had the tin out again on the step. Kalen put both hands round hers and closed them on it.

"No."

"You have been three days."

"Three days and four hours at a counter. I have not designated anything and there is nothing here to pay a bounty on." He let go. "Put it back where it came from. All of it, in front of the people who gave it. And if Ames will not take his two back, tell him I said the school wants a lamp."

"That is forty marks."

"I can add."

"You are in arrears," she said. "Everybody on this street knows what you are."

"Everybody on this street knows what I am, and not one of you has ever put a figure on the front of it. That is more than the ward office has managed in four years."

He walked back along the top of Cinder Row in the evening and stopped at the gate the way he does every evening, on the far pavement, and went along the front rank once, right to left.

He got the whole of it in about four seconds. A woman in a slag apron. The two men who had worked the same bench and still stand the same distance apart. A boy with a runner's satchel who had a name now, and had had one all along, and had been standing eleven feet away from him at that gate for four years while Kalen looked at him for a full second every evening and called that not stopping seeing them.

In the spring he had needed a lamp held against a mast to be sure of one gantry head at half that distance, and he had not noticed the difference arriving, which is how it goes with the one row on the sheet that ever moves for him.

The paper was in the strip shed when he got back, under a stone on the bench with the day's dockets, and nobody in the yard had thought it worth mentioning.

NOTICE OF COMPLAINT

Ashgrove, Kalen. Ward Nine. Freehand.

Complaint entered by the Sedge Counting House.

That an Accord function was performed

without warrant.

Entered. Not adjudicated.

He read it twice and put it in his coat with the rest of it.

Every word of it was true.