Episode 15 — The Form in Triplicate

The region did not send us an inspector. It sent us a form.

The form arrived in the last week of October, after the frost had taken the beans and Merta had started wearing two coats to the sorting office. It was one page, printed, and it came in triplicate. That told us more about the region than the questions did. Somebody up there had decided that the thing they wanted could not be sent only once.

The heading read: WHAT YOU DO, IN ORDER, SO THAT SOMEONE ELSE CAN DO IT WITHOUT YOU. Under it, eleven blank lines. Not results. Not numbers. Procedure.

"Results are yours," Merta said, laying the three copies on the long bench like cards. "Methods are theirs. Sit down. Both of you."

The cousin sat. He had been in the cold room under the shelves for eleven days by then, and the room had stopped being cold around the fourth, when the elder carried up the coal without being asked and without saying why.

The elder took the first copy and began, and I will set down honestly how it went, because it did not go well at first.

"First," he said, "we look at the letter." The child wrote: First, we look at the letter. "Second, we decide what it says." She wrote: Second, we decide what it says. "Third, if we are not sure, we look again."

Merta took the copy out of the child's hand before she finished the line. "Decide how?" she said. "Look again how? A form that says decide is not a method. It is a shrug with good posture."

The elder's jaw did the thing it did before a long silence. Then he did what he had spent two winters learning to do. He pushed the paper across the bench to the child and said, "You write it. I will talk."

So the method was written by two hands, his voice and her pen, and that is a fair description of everything that followed.

What came out, in order. Take the letter out of the tray. Do not sort by the shape of the envelope; the first week we did, and lost a hundred letters to it. Look at the whole address before the first letter; we used to start at the first letter, and the first letter lies. If the marks agree with the line, let it go. If they do not, do not guess faster, set it aside. Count what you set aside, and write the count down with the date, because a number without a date is a rumour. And once a week, open the box of letters we never taught it, and read the ones it got wrong.

That last line took him the longest. He said it four ways. The child refused three of them for being clever.

The sixth line we argued about for an hour, and it is the one worth remembering, because it is the one that made the clerk from the region put down his pencil.

The cousin's method went on the same page, in a different hand, and this caused an argument that lasted until the light went. His version was shorter and it had numbers in it. The line starts anywhere. Each mistake moves the line toward the letter that was misread. The step, how far the line moves, is a number the teacher chooses.

"How do you choose it?" the clerk asked.

"I choose it," said the cousin.

"By what rule?"

"By no rule. I try one. If it is too big, the line jumps past the letter. If it is too small, we are old before the box is empty. So I choose one in between and I keep it."

The clerk wrote that down, looked at it, and said the sentence we have quoted in this house ever since. "A method you cannot write down is a story about yourself."

The cousin did not argue. He took the pencil out of the clerk's hand, which was not a thing people did in that office, and wrote a seventh line in the space below the others: The step is chosen by the person teaching. We have no rule for choosing it. We choose it by trying, and by watching the box. Then he passed the pencil back and said, "There. Now it is written down. It is not a good rule. It is an honest one. I would rather have an honest hole than a clever filling."

The elder read the seventh line twice. He had spent his whole life in rooms where the rule came first and the number was what you did when the rule failed. Now the number came first, and the rule, when it came at all, was a rule about where rules stop.

He signed all three copies. So did the cousin. The child signed the bottom of the second page, small, and Merta did not tell her to stop.

One copy went to the region. One went downriver, to the station with the red stamps and the second machine. The third stayed on the shelf beside the packed letters, above the bottle with the wax seal.

What happened next we did not learn for a month, and it is the reason the form mattered. The river station's copy came back with their method in it, and their numbers did not match ours. They moved their line thirty times to learn one letter. We moved ours four. Neither of us was wrong. We had chosen different steps and counted different things, and now two pages that both said method could not be laid beside each other.

Merta put the two copies on the bench, one above the other, and said the sentence that opened the whole of the next year. "So. Which number is the true one?"

Nobody answered. The elder looked at the two pages the way he used to look at a letter with two postmarks. The child took her slate and, for a while, did nothing at all with it.

That night the frost came hard enough to crack the water in the shed. SEARCH went out with the slate. When she came back she had drawn the line she had refused to draw since the first winter. Under it she wrote three, not two. Nobody asked her about it. Some things arrive already counted.

We kept the triplicate form for a long time. Two of the copies are lost. The third is on the shelf above the wax, and the seventh line is still legible, which is more than can be said for most of what we wrote that year.