Nine of Them Tens

Jonas stopped the cart with a flat hand on a barrel rim. The barrel was empty and hot, and it hummed under his palm when the mule leaned into the traces and then gave up.

It was midnight in the lower ditch, no moon, and the only sky was the Conservatory's long glass up the slope, glowing low and green. They had come up from the clinic fence by lantern, past the fresh notch with the rider's stake in it, over the heap Cole had dug through, along the orchard row that stood bare as January in August. Its leaves lay ankle-deep in the dry bed. He had rung the valley out at sundown and written Pike's name for whoever came. Four had come, and a mule.

He took the hearing aids out of his shirt pocket and held them in his fist. Then he stepped ahead of Cole to the wheel and took up the bell cord. The post was fence cedar set a foot deeper than it needed, his father's rule: a bell you can knock over is a bell somebody will. His arm shook. He didn't ring.

Cole set the shovel blade down in the leaves and came level with him, palm out, not touching. He kept his face to the wheel and away from the trees. Jonas got it off the side of his mouth, most of it.

"River's up against the gate, you can hear it from here. Ring the notch, Jonas, and hand me the lace, and I'll stand at the notch and say every word of it out loud."

Abel had climbed onto the tailboard beside the broken lock with his chalk up like a boy in school.

"Mr. Pike isn't here, so somebody say it plain: do I fill at the gate tonight or go back to the Row dry, and whose name goes on the chalk?"

Pike wasn't. Last Jonas saw, he was wet to the cuffs at the outfall with a quarter of Maries dripping on his shoes, and nobody had asked the biscuits anything.

Delia stepped between the cart and the wheel, plucked the chalk out of Abel's hand, set it on the tailboard, and held the lantern up to the slate.

"Abel, the chalk stays dry till the slate's written. Jonas, the notch facing my fence gets first water, put that on the slate before you touch the cord. That's eleven beds, nine of them tens, and the orchard row can wait in line."

The groan came up through his boots, long, the river leaning on the boards. A thin sheet of water slid over the top of the headgate. It ran down the dry clay in one bright tongue and soaked the leaves an arm's length from the wheel, and the green light from the glass lay down in it. For a moment the ditch floor held a strip of glasshouse sky, narrow as a belt, rippling, every pane in it moving. Then the clay drank the edges and the strip got thinner.

He pushed the aids in one at a time. The roar came in with the bell's hum on top of it and he flinched like he'd been slapped. He let the cord go slack, wiped the slate with his sleeve, and wrote big.

CLINIC NOTCH FIRST

Cole didn't look at it. He dropped to one knee and put two fingers in the wet, other palm still out flat and empty. His voice was lower than Jonas remembered it.

"It's coming over the boards, Jonas, the clay's drinking it already. Delia's fence gets first water, write it, I'll open it that way. Then the lace."

Abel jumped down, took the chalk off the tailboard, and held it out to Delia, not to either of them.

"Delia, Jonas wrote the fence first, so does my cart fill at your fence tonight? If I chalk it, whose name do I put, yours or Mr. Pike's?"

Delia turned the chalk over once and wrote along the slate's bottom edge, pressing so hard Jonas felt it in the cord around his neck. DELIA MARSH. She tipped the slate to the lantern so Cole could read it.

"Abel, you fill at my fence, and it's my name on the chalk, Delia Marsh, eleven beds, no initials. Cole, open it the way the slate says, and I'll ring the ward's share myself if Jonas's arm gives out."

The key lay against his wrist bone on its lace. The cord hung slack in his other hand. Cole knelt in the wet with his palm open, and the water kept coming over the boards.