Episode 16 — The Common Sack

The sacks came in the last week of October, three of them, each with a lead seal and a number stamped into the lead. One for our station. One for the river station. One for the hill station. A hundred letters in each, Merta said. The same hundred. The same order. She put all three on the long bench and would not let anyone open them.

The man who brought them was from the district office. He carried a pasteboard card with ten ruled lines and empty boxes, and he explained the arrangement the way a man explains something he did not invent and does not entirely approve of. The district was tired of tables it could not read. From this season, every station would be measured on one sack of letters, and the result would go on one printed sheet, all stations side by side, in one column each.

The eldest asked the only question that mattered. What counts as a correct read? The first line of the card said CORRECT and nothing else. If the town is right and the street is wrong, is that correct? The clerk said that was the station's business, not his. It was the worst answer he could have given us, because it meant the definition was ours, and a thing that is ours is a thing that can be argued with.

We argued with it that night, at the table, with the lamp turned low to save oil. Our cousin, who keeps the line, said the line did not know about streets. A letter was on one side of it or the other, and that was the whole of what he had. The smallest child said a letter left in the UNSURE box is neither right nor wrong. If the sheet has no column for those, she said, then every station will put its unsure letters wherever the number looks better, and the sheet will measure handwriting, not reading.

The eldest wrote eleven lines of definition and crossed out six. Our mother came to the doorway with a shawl around her shoulders. Are you counting the letters, she asked, or the agreement? He said he was counting the letters. Then you will get a number about the agreement, she said, and went back to the cold room.

Merta laid the three cards side by side on the bench and made each of us say out loud what he counted. Our cousin counted letters and not fields. The eldest counted an address only when the house number could be read at all; the rest he set aside. Merta counted a letter as handled if it had left the bench by five. Three cards, three different things, and all three headed CORRECT. Then the sheet will be a lie in three handwritings, Merta said, and the clerk wrote nothing down, which told us he had already thought of it.

The smallest child took the pencil. The eldest pushed it across the bench without being asked, which was becoming a habit in our family. She wrote two lines at the bottom of the card. The first said LEFT IN THE UNSURE BOX. The second said WHAT WE DID NOT TRY. Count what we refused to decide, she said, and count what nobody attempted. Otherwise the sheet pays a station to attempt as little as it can get away with, and the station that tries the hardest letters will look the worst.

The clerk said the printed sheet had no room for two more columns. Merta said, then print a wider sheet. She had stood at that bench for nineteen years and had never once asked the district for anything, and the clerk wrote that down too.

So we agreed a definition in the end. A read was correct only when the number and the street were both right. A letter the machine would not answer went into the unsure column. A letter nobody had tried went into the last column. Our cousin signed first. The eldest signed second. The child signed last, and hers was the hand that had changed the card, which the clerk noticed and did not say.

We opened the three sacks the next morning, all at once, so that no station could hear another station's number before it had its own. Our station read eighty-four of the hundred correctly, left eleven in the unsure column, and was wrong on five. The hill station read seventy-one, left nineteen unsure, and was wrong on ten. The river station read seventy-nine, and its unsure column was empty. Merta looked at that empty column for a while and said nothing, which was her way of saying something.

On the inside cover of the examples ledger the eldest wrote a line and signed it, and then, because he is our father's son and cannot leave a page without a date, he wrote the date beside it. A number is an agreement about what we agree to ignore. An agreement can be argued with and it can be renegotiated, and a renegotiation should carry the day it was made.

The clerk rolled the three cards into his case and told us the sheet would be printed every season and posted in the district office where anyone could read it. Next season, he said, there will be another column. What for, the eldest asked. Cost, the clerk said. Coal, hours, labels. A number that does not care how it was made. Our cousin looked at his line and said nothing at all.

Two stations in the north had already closed for the winter and sent their sacks south unopened. Our mother wrote 3 on the slate that night, and beside it, small, 2 shut.