The winter did not end that year. It stopped. One morning the canal was still hard, and by evening there was water lying on top of it, and Merta said the thaw had come up from the south the way news comes: slowly, then all at once.
With the thaw came the ration book. A paper booklet, the size of a hand, with one hundred slips inside and a stub behind every slip. The district sends one booklet per station per month. Every letter we label costs one slip. In the last week of the old month we had torn out forty of them for second reads, and none of us had written down what that meant.
Merta put the booklet on the bench at six, before the first van. "Read the back page," she said, and went to unlock the door.
The back page had the spring table printed on it. Six columns, and a new one at the end. WHAT IT COST. Nobody had been told it was coming. The cautious one read it twice, the way he reads anything that has been printed without him.
"They have given us a column for the price," he said.
Then he turned the page and found the district's note under it. The merged machine would go after the thaw to the station with the highest CORRECT figure. The price column was for the wall. The decision would be made from one column only.
Our youngest took the slate and did the arithmetic in chalk, and did it again, because she does not trust a first sum. Our eighty-four was bought with five slips, thirty-nine of them on letters we were already sure of. The river station's twelve errors were bought with forty. Same table. Same header. Different money.
"If we send twelve with no price," she said, "we are liars with clean handwriting."
DESCENT came in from the yard with snow on his shoulders and stood dripping by the stove, because he will not sit down in a room where something is being decided. "At the quarry we weigh the cart before we push it and we weigh it again after," he said. "The second weighing is the one that costs. Nobody puts the first weight on the board."
Then our youngest asked Merta for something none of us had asked for. She wanted one batch of letters sealed and set aside for a month, and the machine tested on them when the month was up, and tested again after another month. She wanted to know how long a number stays true. Merta looked at the booklet, then at the child. "That is more slips," she said. "Yes," said the child.
Merta tore the stub out herself. Forty. She held it up where the whole bench could see it and asked our cautious one to say out loud what the twelve had cost. He did not reach for the method sheet. He said it plainly: forty slips, two nights, and one argument about whether a second reader deserved bread. Merta wrote it on the back of the stub and pinned the stub above the bench, next to the cards.
That evening he opened the method sheet and added a ninth line, and the ink went through to the third copy. Every number we publish carries its price: slips, nights, arguments. He began to say "twelve at forty" instead of twelve. It sounded clumsy for a week. Then it sounded like the only honest way to say it.
"A number you did not pay for is a number you cannot defend," our youngest said, and he wrote that in the margin and did not ask her to sign it, because by then he had stopped pretending the margin was his.
Merta was not comforted. "They will print one number," she said. "They will take the twelve and leave the forty on the bench, and the woman with the basket will read twelve and go home happy." Nobody argued with her. She has been right about the wall before.
The thaw went on. SEARCH wrote a figure on the slate and did not explain it. RULE sat at the head of the table and carried the roof, and said nothing, as he had all winter. In the cold room at the end of the corridor the line was still pinned to the shelf, with its note: it moves.
On the first Monday of spring the district's notice came down with the mail. After the thaw, three valleys would share one machine. Each station was to submit a single number, the number it would stake the station on, with no price beside it.
Our cautious one read it in the doorway with his coat still on. Then he went to the shelf where the key had been lying since the autumn, and he took the key, and he took the card that had been hanging in front of it, and he put both of them in his coat pocket. He did not open the promise ledger that night. But he carried the key out of the house, which is not the same as leaving it.