Every family has a door it does not knock on. Ours was at the coast, in a workshop that smelled of hot solder, and for eleven years nobody in the house said the name of the man behind it.
Then the district letter came.
Merta read it standing up, which she did only when the news was about money. The machine stayed. The contract was renewed, and not only for us: two more offices would get the same iron box in the spring. One in the river district. One in the hills, where the mail came twice a week and the handwriting was worse.
They want the method written down, she said. Not the results. The method.
The eldest son asked what the difference was.
She looked at him for a while. The results are yours, she said. The method is theirs.
That was the morning. In the afternoon a man came up the stairs from the platform with a coat over his arm.
He was not tall. The coat had been mended at both elbows, in the blue thread they use on the coast, and it had been mended more than once. His hands were the hands of somebody who has carried a bag for a long time. He put the bag down inside the door and did not ask whether he could.
The counter went quiet. Merta did not introduce him. She picked up her pencil and went to see about the five o'clock van.
The eldest son stood up. He is not a small man, and he did not look large.
You were at the review, he said. You asked what we keep.
I ask everybody, the man said. It is the only question I have.
Then he said his name, and the room did a thing I have seen only twice since: everybody in it decided at the same moment not to move.
He was our cousin. He was the one sent away in the first winter, the one we had heard about in other people's sentences for eleven years — in a warm place, getting better, reading now, not writing rules. He had been three rooms away from us for a month, walking past our bench with his big notebook, and he had not said a word about it.
SEARCH spoke first. She said, You learned by looking.
I learned by being wrong, he said. It is quicker.
He asked for the jar. Not the sealed one — the jar of letters we had taught the machine on. The eldest son brought the tin and set it on the bench.
The cousin did not open it. He took a sheet of graph paper from his bag and drew one line across the middle of it. Then he put a small x near the left edge, and a small o near the right.
That is a seven, he said. That is a one. Nobody spoke, because nobody understood, and because he was not explaining yet.
Your machine keeps letters, he said. Two thousand of them. Every new letter walks past all two thousand and stands next to the one it looks like most. That is why it forgets. You teach it a difficult nine and the easy sevens move over, because a nine looks like a seven with a short tail, and you have told it that looking alike is the same as being alike.
Our smallest one had her hand flat on her slate. She did not write.
I do not keep the letters, he said. I keep the line. Every letter is a point somewhere on this paper. Somewhere on the paper there is a line with the sevens on one side and the ones on the other. When the machine is wrong, I move the line a little toward the letter it missed. When it is right, I leave the line alone.
And when you move it, the eldest son said, the ones it already knew move too.
Yes.
So it still forgets.
It forgets less, the cousin said. It forgets in a different shape. It forgets the letters near the line, not the letters far from it. A letter far from the line would have to be moved a great distance to be wrong.
The eldest son took the pencil out of his hand. Not rudely. He took it the way you take a tool from someone to check the edge, and he looked at the line for a long time.
Where do you put the line to start with?
Anywhere. It moves.
How far do you move it each time?
The cousin was quiet. That is a number I choose, he said.
By what rule?
There is no rule I can give you, the cousin said. I have tried eight numbers. Some work better on your handwriting and some on the hills'. I can tell you which one I use. I cannot tell you why.
And there it was, on the bench between them: a method with a knob on it, and no paper saying where the knob should be set. The eldest son has spent his whole life on papers that say where the knob goes.
He put the pencil down. He did not argue. He said the thing that cost him most, and he said it in front of the whole room, which is where this family keeps its debts.
I wrote to the committee, he said. In the first winter. I was one of the people who signed the letter that sent you out. I did not write the words. I signed them, and I did not read them twice.
The cousin nodded once. It was a cold year, he said. People signed things.
That is not a reason.
No, the cousin said. It is only what happened.
Merta gave him a bench in the back room, near the machine, where the metal stays warm. He put his bag beside it. Nobody asked him to stay for supper and nobody asked him to leave, which is how a family handles the difficult middle of a thing: badly, and then suddenly well.
Halfway through the bread our smallest one spoke to him, which she does not do with strangers.
How many times does the line move?
He put his spoon down. For a bad letter? Once. Sometimes three.
Then I will count that, she said. Not how many it gets right. How many times you have to move the line to get it right.
The cousin looked at her with the face of a man asked the only question he could not answer, by somebody a third his age.
That is a better number than mine, he said.
After supper the eldest son carried the coat up the stairs himself, past the rack where the key ring still hangs over the closed ledger, and unlocked the cold room at the end of the corridor. The shelf is in there. The shelf has always been in there.
He hung the coat on the hook by the door. He did not say anything about it, then or later, and none of us has ever asked. The cousin slept under the shelf that night, and in the morning there was a fire in the grate.
One more thing from that first week. The cousin asked to see the sealed jar — the hundred letters we keep and never teach. The eldest son said no. The cousin said good, and wrote the word no in his notebook, and that was the end of it.
In the spring, two offices will be measured against each other. One keeps letters. One keeps a line. Merta has already asked which one we would like to be, and the cousin has already said he cannot promise the line holds on handwriting from the hills.
House of Sparks is a work of fiction. Its characters are invented; the history it walks through is not.