Our uncle came back from the counting house with road dust on his boots and a new habit. He no longer carried numbers in his head. He carried the sentences that made them, and he said the sentences out loud before he said the numbers, the way a man checks a ladder before he climbs it.
At the counting house he had spent a winter writing figures into other people's books. A merchant would ask how much, and he would ask what for. At first the merchants thought he was slow. By the end of the winter some of them had started to answer, and a few had started to write the answer down themselves.
Then the district printed the second table.
The first table had three columns. This one had five. CORRECT, LEFT IN THE UNSURE BOX, COST, WHAT WE DID NOT TRY, and one the printer added without asking anyone, a single line across the foot of the sheet: ASK ANY STATION FOR ITS NUMBER. The stations that had never opened a sack began to quote ours. It appeared in a letter from a valley none of us had visited, in a sentence with no bag behind it, no hundred letters, no definition on any day, only the figure and the word BEST.
The printer's boy brought the blank cards the same week: a wooden box of them, and a rubber stamp with three small windows cut into it. Three digits. The district wanted every station's number stamped in the same place and the same size, so the sheet could be read at a glance from a doorway.
Our uncle tried the back of the card first. The card was thin. The ink went through it onto the next card, and by morning the stack had become one object instead of two hundred.
It was the child who found the answer. She took the cards and cut them in half. The number stayed on the top half, where the stamp could reach it. The sentence — what we agreed to count, and the day we agreed it — went on the bottom half. She punched a hole in both, tied them together with string, and hung them along the wall of the long room, where they dried like herbs and made the house smell of glue.
Two hundred cards. It took her three evenings. Nobody asked her to do it.
On the fourth day the woman with the shopping basket came to the door.
She had read the figure on the wall of the district office and she wanted one for her stall. She had a nephew who could count, she said, and she wanted a number that would tell her whether she was doing well.
The child asked her what she sold. She asked what counted as correct when a customer left satisfied. She asked whether the stall's number would be compared with ours, and if so, against which hundred letters, and whose definition.
The woman listened to all of it. Then she said, "I did not come for a definition. I came for a number."
Our uncle was standing behind the child with a card in his hand, the bottom half already written. He did not follow her out. He stood in the doorway until the lane was empty, and then he put the card back on the wall with the others.
That evening he did something he had not done since the cold year. He opened the instance ledger and wrote on the inside cover, under the dated definition, one line in his own hand. Never hand over the top half alone.
It was not a rule about being right. It was a rule about what to carry.
The child had begun her own count before the woman was out of the lane. She dated every card, wrote beside the date the name of the station it had gone to, then left a column empty with a question mark at the top of it. When our uncle asked what she was counting now, she said, "How long a number stays true after it leaves this house."
He said he did not know.
"Then leave the column open," she said. "I will tell you when it closes."
Our mother came in from the yard with the chalk still in her hand. She looked at the wall, at the cards drying in their rows, and then down the corridor at the cold room where a sheet of graph paper was still pinned with a single line on it and two words in a hand we knew. It moves.
The child took one card down and pinned it beside the line. The line was what our cousin kept. The card was what we kept. They were not the same kind of thing, and she wanted them where she could see both at once.
"Cut the card, not the sentence," our mother said. She said it quietly, to the room, the way she used to write a number on her slate and then say nothing more about it.
The sorting room was being emptied for the spring. The machine that three valleys would share was coming to our station, because our number had been the best, and the men who came to measure the room for it did not ask who had counted the number. They measured the door. Our uncle showed them where the light fell best.
Merta sent word from the printing office, four lines, no greeting. The third edition was already at the press. There was a new column she had not been told about. She would be at the wall on the first dry morning, if anyone wanted to stand there with her.
The child tied another card. The stack was getting shorter. The wall was getting longer.
House of Sparks is a work of fiction. Its characters, the family, and the districts they live in are invented; any resemblance to real institutions or persons is unintended.