The district's second letter arrived in the last week of the thaw, and it was shorter than the first. Two copies of your method, it said. One for the district, one for your valley. The station that writes it best will write it for all three. Merta read it twice, then put it behind her ear with the pencil, which is where she put things she did not want to argue about yet.
We had a method. We had written it in triplicate in the autumn, and the eldest had carried a copy to the district office on his own feet. What we did not have, the letter suggested, was a way of saying it that made it sound like the reason we were right.
Then the wagon came up the low road.
It was not a wagon of letters. It was a wagon of indexes: fifty-one bound volumes, each the width of a door, and every page a list of envelopes with the answer written in the corner. The Low Station had been reading letters for twenty-two years. They had kept all of them. Four hundred thousand, their clerk said, and he did not say it like a boast. He said it the way a man says how much coal is in the shed.
His name was Orrin. He wore a brass counter on his belt and turned it with his thumb when he was thinking. He had no rules at all. His method was one line: show it letters, and when it is wrong, move the line toward the letter it got wrong. It was the same line our cousin kept in the cold room, the same line the district had carried away on a cart in the spring.
On the common sack he scored ninety-one. We scored eighty-four.
Merta set the two cards side by side on the bench and asked the only question she ever asked. Why. Orrin turned his counter twice. We have more letters than you, he said.
The child asked how many more. He told her. She wrote the number on the slate and carried it to the window and did not speak for the rest of the afternoon.
He was not unkind about it. He said the line was crude. His own engineers had tried the folded pairs and the little boxes and the stacked layers, and once the volumes were large the line did as well as any of them, and cost less to explain. The line does not get smarter, he said. The room does.
Before he left, the child asked him a question that made him stop turning his counter. Was the sack drawn from his own volumes. He said some of it was. She wrote that down too, in the second column, and did not say what the column was for.
The district table was set up in the weigh house because the school roof still leaked. The clerk read the numbers in the order the stations were listed. Orrin's ninety-one went into the box without a date, without a price, without a second reading. Ours went in with the date in the middle of the card, the way the child had cut it, and the clerk wrote a small mark beside it that meant nothing at all, and then he wrote Orrin's name at the top of the page, which meant everything.
That night the eldest wrote the first line of the method, above the eleven rows and the seventh row and the eighth. Before anything else in this document, count your letters. Write the number at the top. If the number is small, everything below it matters. If the number is large, it may not.
You put the count above the method, the child said.
It is the method now, he said.
She looked at it for a while. We were not beaten by a better line, she said. We were beaten by more letters.
Nobody argued. Outside, the wagon tracks were already freezing into ruts that would last until spring, and the eldest stood in the doorway and looked at them the way he used to look at a rule he could not finish.
Then he said the thing that changed the winter. We can make letters, he said. Every envelope read in this valley this season belongs to somebody who cannot use it alone. If four stations keep their indexes in one room, the room is ours too.
The district will never allow it, Merta said.
Then we put it in the method, the child said, so it is not ours to hide.
SEARCH, who had said nothing all evening, picked up the chalk and wrote a number on the slate. Nobody asked what it counted. The fire took the cold off the window, and the family sat down to write a second copy of a document that had just become a different document.
House of Sparks is a work of fiction. Its families, stations and ledgers are invented; the history they stand for is real.