In the last week of the thaw a district clerk came to the sorting office with a handcart and a printed sheet. The sheet was short. PUBLIC SACK, SECOND EDITION. ONE THOUSAND LETTERS. CONTRIBUTED.
Merta read it twice and put it under the pencil behind her ear, which was where she kept things she intended to argue with later. "They have decided a hundred is too few," she said. "With a hundred, a station can be lucky."
The small print said the rest. Each station would give a share. The sack would be bound, sealed, and used by every station. No station would see the whole sack before the test.
Low Station, which had four hundred thousand letters and fifty-one index volumes, offered six hundred. Mountain offered forty. We had counted two thousand eight hundred letters in the past year. Our share came to two hundred.
The eldest son did the arithmetic on the back of the sheet. Two hundred out of two thousand eight hundred was a thirteenth of everything we had. In exchange we would receive a sack we could not teach from, and a number we could not argue with.
"It is the only way to be measured at all," Merta said.
He did not answer. He had stopped arguing with that sentence some winters ago.
The clerk brought out a book before he brought out the sack. It was ruled in four columns: LENT BY. DATE. HOW MANY. EVER SHOWN TO A MACHINE.
The last column was ours to fill. Nobody could fill it for us.
The smallest child read the headings twice, the way she read everything, and put her finger on the fourth.
"This is the only column that matters," she said.
She took two bundles of letters and set them on the long bench, one to the left and one to the right, and did not explain for a while.
"A sack that everyone feeds is a sack that no one fails," she said at last. "Low Station's six hundred come out of its own volumes. The machine has met them. It will score high and the score will mean nothing. Not a lie. A room that has already read the exam."
Orrin arrived at eleven with his brass counter to watch the sealing. He was polite. He counted the room the way another man counts chairs.
He made us a gift: five thousand of his letters, on loan, so that our share would not thin us. "You would be measured on a bigger pile," he said. "It costs me nothing."
"Then the number would be about your room," the child said, before the eldest son had opened his mouth.
Orrin turned the counter over in his hand, twice, and put it away.
At two the clerk set the sack's lid flat on the bench and asked each station to write its name on it before anything was poured in. Writing first. Filling after. He said it was so the lid could not be swapped later. Merta said, quietly, that it was so the lid could not be forgotten later.
The eldest son signed for two hundred. Then he filled the fourth column in his own hand, without asking anyone: one hundred and forty-eight of the two hundred had gone through the hopper. Fifty-two were letters no machine in our house had ever read.
Orrin wrote six hundred in the third column and stopped at the fourth. "I will have to count," he said. He came back the next morning with five hundred and ninety-four and wrote it down. Six of his letters, it turned out, had never been read by anything, including him.
The child opened a new page in the ledger of examples. Three columns this time: LENT. SEEN. UNSEEN. She said the sack should be weighed by its last column, and that a thousand letters with nine hundred unseen was worth more than four hundred thousand with none.
At dusk SEARCH wrote a number on the slate, as she had every night since the machine left on the cart.
The child asked what it was.
SEARCH looked at her for a while. "The unseen ones," she said. "Fifty-two. In a sack of a thousand."
It was the first time anyone had asked.
Merta carried the sheet to the printer on Thursday. She came back with the proof and put it on the bench without a word. The contributions were printed in a clean column, station by station, Low Station at the top. The fourth column was not printed. It lived in the book now, in our hand, and books do not travel.
The eldest son read the proof twice. Then he wrote one line in the margin of the borrowing book, under the four headings, in pencil, so that it could be rubbed out if the district objected.
You cannot test a room with the letters it lent you.
The child read it, and did not rub it out.
House of Sparks is a serialized work of fiction. The family, the stations and the people in them are invented. The milestones they live through are not.