Up First

Nine days went by under the same ash-colored sky. The heat sat on the valley at dawn and at midnight alike, the ward's barrels came and went, and the outfall line in Ruth Lin's ledger stayed blank, because she had not yet put the rod in the pipe's mouth herself and would not write it until she had. On the ninth evening the Company's hour caught her at the lower headgate, and she started up toward the glass with what light was left.

Jonas walked her. Cole and Delia came behind, and somewhere past the wheel Solomon Pike fell in at the back, at the distance a guest keeps.

They had gone maybe fifty yards when the river slid under the headgate boards. Ruth heard it before she turned. It was a sound none of them had heard from that ditch: a long wet suck, and then ticking, dozens of small ticks at once, as the last water drew back out of the clay. She stopped and looked. The channel floor went dark and pale in patches while she watched. The wet shrank down into cracks, and each crack clicked as it opened. The yellow leaves on the bed curled up at their edges and stayed curled. Jonas, who could hear none of it, had stopped too, one boot flat on the gravel, his face turned down to it.

Then the whistle went at the glass, once, thin and early. Ruth put the rod over her shoulder and lengthened her stride. She did not wait to see who kept up.

Behind her Cole dropped back beside Jonas.

"River's under the boards, Jonas. Gate wants turning before it's all stone. Say the notch, I'll say it with you."

When she glanced back he was holding his open palm low between them, eyes on the salt-banded stones and not on the old man. Jonas closed his fingers over the boot lace knotted at his wrist and walked on past the hand. He chalked as he came and held the slate up to Ruth, not to Cole.

UP FIRST.

Cole's palm stayed out a few steps longer, as if the lace might come to it on its own.

At the stopped windmill Delia fell back until she was level with Pike, then planted herself across the gravel and held her ring of keys out between them.

"That ditch is a nine, Pike. Say it here, where they can hear you. Clinic line, signed at the ward door tonight."

On the Row a nine was a promise in chalk; it didn't say the patient would mend, only that somebody would be standing there.

Pike answered loud enough for all four of them. He would sign it, he said, as a favor to the ward and not as an order, because a favor was the ward's to be grateful for, and an order in his own hand was his to answer for alone.

Ruth thought it was the most honest thing he had said all summer, and the least use.

Delia said a favor could be taken back by morning.

Pike said so could a ward. Then he stepped around her keys and came on up the gravel at the same unhurried pace.

The panes glowed low and green over the stone lip. The torn planks lay where the clay had thrown them, and warm water ran out of the newer pipe's mouth toward the reeds. Ruth had stopped at the edge to find footing on what was left of the boards when Pike came past her shoulder and stepped onto the last one over the mouth. He folded his hands in front of him and told her, courteously, that he would not move, and the reading might be taken where he stood.

The light was going out of the sky. Ruth brought the rod down off her shoulder.

"Step off the plank, Mr. Pike, or stay on it and hold the slate. Either way I'm reading it."