The second sack came back in the first week of spring, and we poured it out on the sorting-room floor, because no table in that building was a thousand letters long. It made a sound like weather.
Merta would not let anyone count until the lending book was open on the bench. Her rule was older than the district's: a number that arrives before its book is a rumour with arithmetic.
The book said what the book said. Lowland had put in six hundred letters and had shown five hundred and ninety-four of them to a machine. The mountain station had put in forty and shown twelve. We had put in two hundred and shown a hundred and forty-eight. Which left, in a sack of a thousand, two hundred and forty-six letters that no machine had ever read.
The child did the subtraction twice, then wrote the answer on the slate in the corner, small, as if it were a private matter. Nobody asked her what it was for. We had learned that much by then.
We ran the lines. It took two days and most of the labels we had left for the month. Lowland finished first, the way it always finished first; it did not so much read a letter as look it up in fifty-one volumes of door widths. Their number on the full sack was eighty-eight. Ours was eighty-one. The mountain station had seventy-four.
The district clerk copied the three numbers onto his form. The form had one line per station and no room for anything else. It was printed. Printing does not negotiate.
Then the child ran the same three lines over the two hundred and forty-six letters that nobody had ever shown a machine. Lowland: seventy-one. Ours: seventy-nine. Mountain: seventy-three.
The room went quiet in the way rooms go quiet when a table turns over. On the sack everyone had fed, the station with the most letters won. On the part of the sack nobody had used for teaching, it came last.
"Which number do we send?" the clerk asked. He was not being difficult. He had a form.
The child said both. The eldest said the form has one line. The child said then the form is wrong. Merta said nothing for a while, which was how she agreed with the child without taking the clerk's side of the table.
We sent eighty-one. Under it, on the lower half of the card, we wrote: of 246 letters never shown to any machine, 79. The clerk copied the top half and left the bottom, and the printer, we know by now, would have left it too. The card hung on the wall with its sentence intact and its sentence unread.
The district had asked for something else as well. Two copies of our method, because ours had been judged the best written the year before, and the best written station writes for all three valleys. The eldest dictated. The child held the pen. Merta read over their shoulders and made them say the awkward parts twice, out loud, which she claimed was for the copy and not for them.
Rule one, he said: count your letters. Rule two, she said: count the ones the machine has never seen, and write that number beside every number you send. He began to say that rule two would never fit on a form. She said that was rule two's entire purpose.
The method went into two envelopes, eleven lines with nine filled and two left blank on purpose, and the date pressed into the wax on both. The blank lines were her idea. A method with no room to add to it, she said, is a method that has stopped being used.
Then Orrin of Lowland, who kept a brass counter in his pocket and turned its thumb-wheel twice before he said anything, asked for the tin.
The tin. The hundred letters from last October, wax on the lid, the date pressed into it, the eldest's signature and thumbprint on the paper strip. He wanted them poured into the sack. A sack with a hundred honest letters in it, he said, would settle the whole argument by Tuesday.
The eldest said no, in front of the district clerk, which is the only way to say no so that it counts. He said: those letters are worth something only because nobody has read them. Put them in the sack and I have bought a better number with the only clean thing I own.
Then he offered the other thing, and this is the part I want written down. Submit the numbers first, he said. Seal them. Then open the tin and run all four lines over the hundred, and print what happens, even if it is worse for us.
The clerk wrote it on the back of his form, in pencil, and said he could not promise anything. Merta said that in her experience "could not promise" was the most honest sentence a district clerk ever produced, and the clerk, to his credit, wrote that down too.
Orrin did not get his hundred letters. He put the brass counter away, which we had never once seen him do, and he filled the fourth column of the book beside Lowland's six hundred: 594. The column was his to fill. Nobody in the district had asked him to fill it correctly.
That night the child stood over the sack with the slate against her hip and said the thing we had all been circling for two days. "A sack that everybody feeds is nobody's test."
SEARCH wrote underneath the child's small subtraction, in her flat hand, one line: 81 / 79. No label, no date. RULE said nothing. But he moved his chair so that he could see the slate, and for him that is a speech.
House of Sparks is a work of fiction. Its families, places and events are invented; real milestones of the field appear only as weather.