72 - Wick's Hand

The instrument was one page, and he read it four times at the counter before he signed it, and the fourth time was not about the wording.

A third party may assume an assessed overdraw at any time before Collection.

It is in the fourth schedule, eleven lines up from the bottom, in a book chained to a counter at the ward filing office. It is free to any man in Ward Nine who can stand up in front of it. There are nine thousand on the roll in this ward and about four of them have read that page, and he knows the names of two of the four.

Four in nine thousand, and it is free.

He had gone in on the Thursday night to find out whether it existed, which is not the same thing as looking something up.

He had known the sentence was there. He knew the shape of it and the weight of it and the fact that it was true, and he could not remember one single occasion on which anybody had said it to him.

He keeps everything. He has a receipt out of a dead man's coat and a docket handed to him at a yard gate in the rain, and he can tell you what he was standing on for both.

He stood at that counter for a while afterwards, working back through four years for the hour he had heard it in.

He did not find the hour.

He put it on the list, under the strap and above the collar, and went home.

* * *

Here is what a hundred and eighty-five marks of Balance is.

It is not coin and it will not buy a loaf. It is forty-six days at four a day, which is forty-six days of a man standing still and getting worse. It is more than the gantry Charter cleared, and the gantry Charter was the best work any of them will ever do.

That is the arithmetic. It took about as long as it takes to lace a boot, and it is not the reason he signed it.

The reason is on the second page of the crew book, in the terms, in his own hand. The holder carries the paper. The crew carry nothing.

He said that out loud in the yard at the pan post in front of three men, in the spring, because a thing said at a table sounds like an offer.

A boy of fifteen heard it, and asked what the worst of it was, and was told.

He had told his sister the whole of it at the table on the Thursday night, in order, before he did any part of it, which is line one of the terms. He has been late with line one four times and he was not going to be late with it a fifth. She asked one question, which was whether the boy could refuse it. Then she said do it. Then she went and was twelve at the other end of the room for half an hour, and he let her.

Hesper was not in the office when he brought it down. He had picked the hour on purpose and he is not proud of that either.

He put the signed page in the file on the folding stool, with the week's receipt on top of it, and went out into the yard.

The Accord printed nothing at all. Not then and not since.

It does not print for a thing like that. Nobody had been hurt. Nothing had been drawn and no service had been rendered, and by every measure the Accord has applied in nine hundred years, nothing whatever had happened in that office.

Two hundred and forty-five to four hundred and thirty, between one bell and the next, in a room with nobody in it.

There is a signed page in a collector's file, and one line in Ferrin's hand in Nessa's ruled columns in the back of a crew book, and that is the whole of the record.

* * *

Halla Wick came to the yard on the Friday morning.

She came in through the gate and stood at the pan post in the middle of the yard, where everybody in the sheds could see her, which was a choice. Then she waited until Kalen came out to her, which was another one.

Doss stopped what he was doing. The two Third Hands went on stacking iron and did not look up once, which in a reclamation house is how a man is polite.

"The one that reads," she said.

"I am."

"He is fifteen."

"He is fifteen."

"He was fifteen in the spring when you put him on your paper. He was fifteen on Wednesday at the top of a ladder with forty of them under him."

She had her hands down at her sides and she kept them there.

"Say something about that."

"There is nothing to say about it that is not worse than the quiet."

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"Then say the true sentence. He tells me you make everybody say the true sentence."

Kalen stood in his own yard with three men listening and said it.

"He works the heights because he is better at it than any of us. He also works them because a boy is cheaper. I have known which of the two I was using since the spring."

Halla Wick took that without moving.

"They are saying in Fetter Street that you have paid something."

"He has paid it," Ferrin said, from the bench. "A hundred and eighty-five. It went on this morning."

"Ferrin."

"It is in the book and the book gets read out." Ferrin did not look up off the column.

Halla Wick looked at Kalen for a long moment.

"So you have bought it."

"No."

"You have paid a hundred and eighty-five marks and my son has one hand."

"I have paid a hundred and eighty-five marks and your son has one hand," Kalen said. "Those are two entries in two different books. The second does not come off the first."

"Then what is it for?"

"For the Collection he does not take."

"Say what that is."

"A Second. A week on his back and most of it comes back."

Kalen did not take his eyes off her while he said the rest of it.

"He is fifteen and he lost a hand on Wednesday. I was not having him take a Second on top of it in your front room."

"You were not having it," she said.

"No."

"That is the whole of the trouble with you, and you cannot hear it, and I am not the one to teach you."

She put her hands into her apron. She has square working hands and there was a burn across the back of the left one that was four days old, and Kalen looked at it and understood that she had been carrying things up and down a stair all week without help.

He had gone up to that house on the Wednesday night with the boy asleep through the wall, and said the same four facts in the same order to a woman who had already heard them from her son. She had given him tea he did not want. He had come away thinking it had gone as well as a thing like that goes.

She had been up since four and had walked down two streets in the rain to tell him otherwise in front of his own crew.

"He is coming back," she said. "He told me that at four this morning, and I have not got a second son to put somewhere better."

"He is on wages from Wednesday. He never came off them."

"I know he did not," Halla Wick said. "That is not a kindness. That is a man paying for a thing he did."

She went out through the gate and up the road and did not look back at the shed.

She was right about all of it, and Kalen did not argue with one word, and he stood at the pan post for a while afterwards with the rain coming into his collar.

* * *

The days after it the three of them did four men's work and did it badly.

Doss went up the masts, because Doss goes up anything. He is not a young man and a mast is not a ramp, and by the third day he was taking three quarters of an hour on a pin where the boy had taken twenty minutes, and saying nothing whatever about it.

Ferrin kept the book and the doors and the ladder foot, and lost an hour a day to it, and did not complain either.

The burnt end job went back a week. The slag yard job went back two. A woman came to the shed door with a bound handcart and was told Monday, and took it away, and did not come back on Monday.

Ferrin ruled it off at the end of the week and turned the page round on the bench without being asked, because that is the arrangement now.

"Sixteen a week of margin in the spring. Nine this week. Six next, if the tenement pays on the day."

"It will not."

"It will not."

"Say the other book."

"Minus four hundred and thirty. Four a day on it."

"Then say the two of them in one sentence."

"No," Ferrin said. "Your sister says they do not go in one sentence. You do it four times a week."

"And what does this page say?"

"It says you have a full crew and no hole in the materials."

Ferrin put the pencil down across the column.

"It adds up on the page. I will read it out to anybody."

* * *

Wick came in on the Monday with his arm in a sling, and his mother came as far as the gate and no further.

Kalen had the jig set up on the bench with a cart drum in it, and a Common grade Bearing in the drum, slipping at one end. He had cleaned the bench off, which he never does. He had moved the lamp to the left of it, which he had thought about on the Sunday night and then done without saying anything.

"Sit down there. That is your bench now."

"I cannot hold anything."

"Neither can I," Kalen said. "Put your left hand on the drum."

The boy put his left hand on the drum.

"Now tell me where the break is."

"I have not read it."

"You have been reading it since you came through that door."

He sat down on the far side of the bench.

"Say where the break is and be wrong in front of me. That costs nothing, and nothing else in this trade is free."

Wick got it wrong twice.

He got it right on the third go, in eleven minutes, which is about four times faster than Kalen had it at fifteen and about a third of what he had privately allowed for.

He did not tell the boy any of that. There will be a morning for it and it was not going to be the first one.

He wrote it in the book instead, with the date, in four words, the way he had done it once before at the foot of a mast on a wet evening in the spring.

Wick reads the bench.

Then he turned back two pages to the terms, where the crew rule goes, and sat with the pencil over the paper for some while.

There is a version of this where he writes nothing at all.

He had it out with himself in the yard on the Friday night in the dark. It is an honest version and a man could hold it and still go to sleep.

The boy was good. The boy chose it. The road was cleared. Forty people are in a walled yard being worked out one at a time with their names written down. Three hundred households opened their doors after the sixth bell that week for the first time in eight years.

And there is no line anybody can write in a book that puts that hand back on that wrist.

Every word of that is true. He could have said the whole of it to Halla Wick at the pan post on the Friday morning.

He did not, and the reason he did not is that she would have listened to it.

He wrote it in his own hand under the date.

Nobody under seventeen on a designation.

"That was not a designation," Ferrin said, from the door. "Wednesday. There was no paper on it and there will not be for two months."

"No."

"So it does not catch Wednesday."

"No," Kalen said, and wrote a second line under the first.

Nor on anything with one of them on it.

Ferrin came over and read both lines. Then he did the thing he does, which is to work out what a sentence costs before he works out whether he agrees with it.

"That is the tenement, the slag yard, the burnt end doors and the foundry yard."

"It is."

"That is a fifth of everything we can take on."

"About a fifth."

Ferrin put his cap on and stood with his hand on the door frame.

"Enter it properly," he said. "In the terms. Not in the notes."

Kalen ruled the line and entered it in the terms, and signed under it, and put the date on it in Accord script, right to left.

Then he sat in the shed with the lamp down and the boy's four words on the page above it, and did the only arithmetic that was left to do, which was what a fifth of everything comes to over a winter.

It came to a great deal.

He wrote that down as well.