The district printed the table in the last week of October and nailed it to the wall outside the district office, at the height of a tall man's chest. We walked down to read it. So did everyone else in the valley.
The printer had been given five columns and room for three. He kept CORRECT, LEFT IN THE UNSURE BOX, and COST. He dropped WHAT WE DID NOT TRY. When Merta asked him why, he said that a column of things not done was not a column. It was an opinion.
Our station stood at 84. River station stood at 79. Mountain station stood at 71. Under the three numbers the printer had set one line of type that none of us had written: BEST IN DISTRICT, 84. A table needs a top. The printer supplied one.
A woman with a shopping basket read the wall aloud to a man beside her who could not see it. Eighty-four, she said. That means eighty-four letters in a hundred come out right. She had the sentence right and the meaning wrong. In our station, on that one sack, under a definition we had written and dated, with eleven letters left in the box undeclared and five tried and failed, eighty-four was what we had agreed to count. There was no space on the wall for the rest of the sentence.
We stood there a while. People came and went. Two men argued about whether 84 was good. Neither of them had a letter in his hand.
The eldest began to correct the woman. He got as far as It depends, and then stopped, because correcting her meant explaining the sack, the definition, the eleven letters in the box, and the five we had tried and lost, and she had a basket and a bus to catch. What he said instead was: Eighty-four is what we agreed to count.
The child said the thing we still quote. A number that travels alone is a rumour.
The district clerk came out with a form and read it to the wall, because the wall was where the people were. From spring there would be one machine for three valleys, not three. It would live where the number was best. The number was best here. We should have been glad. What we felt was a coldness in the hands, the way you feel when a thing you made is used for something you did not make it for.
The clerk asked whether we had anything to add. The child asked whether the table would print the definition beside the number. He said the definition was on file. She asked whether people could read the file. He said the file was for the district. She wrote that down too, in the margin.
That evening the printer sent a proof sheet to the station for approval, the way he sent proofs to the butcher and to the school. Merta laid it on the long bench and handed the red pencil to the eldest, because the eldest was the one who signed things. He read it twice. Then he turned it over and wrote in the margin, in the same red pencil: These numbers were counted by the youngest of this house, who chose what to teach the machine and what to keep from it. I only carried the paper.
Merta looked at the margin for a long time. Then she said the sentence that closed our first life in that building. The margin does not print.
So we learned what the winter had been teaching us while we were busy counting. A number can leave a house. It cannot carry the weather it was made in. What travels is the agreement, and the agreement travels thin.
The rest happened quickly, the way endings do. The back room closed after the last post of the year, and the machine was crated for the valley where the number was best, which was ours, and no one in this house was asked to go with it. The coast workshop sent for our cousin in the first week of the frost. He packed the graph paper and the tin of pencils and left the line he had drawn pinned above the shelf in the cold room, with a note that said only: it moves. The cousins went back to the banks and the telephone offices. The counting house took the eldest on again, farther this time, three days' walk. Merta found work at the district office, where the tables are printed, and said she would watch the columns.
We were not forgotten in a dramatic way. That is not how it happens. We were forgotten the way a word is forgotten: used less, then used wrong, then not needed.
On the last night SEARCH took the slate and wrote the number three, which she had refused to write for two winters. Under it she wrote: two shut, one kept. Then she held out the chalk to the child, which she had never done.
The child wrote one more line. Still counting: one.
That was the end of the lean years, though we did not know it then. We thought it was the end of the family. What we had instead was a house with one lamp in it, and a girl at the table with a slate, counting something none of us could see yet.
House of Sparks is a work of fiction. Its families, valleys and ledgers are invented; the weather is drawn from the public history of the field.