Chapter 11 · Chapter 11

Saad set the ledger on the bench before the shutters came up and did not sit down.

"The key is in the drawer," he said. "The bench is yours. Write what is there."

He said it the way he said the price of ink, and then he went to the front of the shop to unbar the shutters, and that was all the ceremony there was.

I had known that bench since I was small enough to be lifted onto it. My grandfather had kept his stock in the wall of drawers behind it, and every drawer still had his hand on it — the third from the left pulled out a finger's width where he had shut it in a hurry the year he died, and nobody had ever pushed it back. I put my palm flat on the wood and pushed it back.

Then I opened the ledger at the ruled page.

The page was half in his writing and half empty. Cumin, two measures, and a note that the mountain stock was nearly gone. Anise, one. Wormwood, a little, kept dry, kept apart. Sage, in the bundle, tied. The letters thinned at the ends of his words, as if the ink were tired.

I counted badly the first time, because I counted what should have been there. Then I counted what was. I pulled out every drawer and weighed it and wrote the true figure in the margin in a smaller hand, so that the gap between the two would stand plain for anyone who cared to look at it. Two drawers held less than the page promised. One held more. It was the one that held more that kept me standing there.

"The frames on the roof are turned," I said at midday. "Two of them. The wind came from the wrong side, so I moved them out of the sun."

Maryama was at the back with the sieve. She looked up at me for a moment. "Grandfather never moved the frames," she said, which was true, and then she put the sieve down and went up to move the second one herself, which was better than arguing.

By the afternoon word had gone along the lane that the bench had someone at it, and people began to come.

An old woman with a child on her hip wanted pennyroyal, a small paper of it, and I weighed it out and folded the paper the way he used to fold it, corner into corner, and she watched my hands the whole time as though the folding were the medicine. A man from the dye yard wanted something for a burn and did not want to say so.

A boy was sent for anise and came back twice because he had lost the first paper in the lane, and I gave him the second one and told him to hold it in his fist and not his sleeve, and he went off holding it in his fist.

None of them called me anything. They said, I want, and, how much, and, is it fresh, and I answered, and the shop did what a shop does, which is to keep going.

At the hour when the light comes flat off the white walls, the baskets came down from the mountain.

A boy with a mule and three baskets, and dust on everything, and the smell coming off the baskets before the cloth was off them — thyme, and something bitter under it, and the cold smell of stone. We laid the cloths out in the passage where the shade holds longest and I sorted them with my hands and not my eyes.

Stem out. Grit out. The wormwood into its own cloth, apart from the rest, because it is a thing that will creep into whatever it is lying next to. One basket had been packed wet.

Half of it was furred at the bottom and I said so out loud, and the boy began to explain his uncle's cart and the rain at the pass, and I let him finish, and then I paid him for the good half and made him take the bad half away with him so he could show his uncle what had happened to it rather than carry my word back.

When he had gone, Saad came out with a cup and set it on the bench at my left, where I could reach it without turning, and went back to the front of the shop without saying anything about it.

Near closing a weigher from the market came in with a complaint about the last wormwood we had sold, that it had been short. I took the ledger down and turned it so he could read the ruled page and the margin beside it, and I said, "Here is the weight I found, and here is the weight he left. I did not write it. He did. If the market has a different number, bring it and I will weigh against it."

He looked at the two columns for a while. He had a thick thumb and he ran it down the page like a man reading a wall. Then he said, "This is not his hand in the margin," and I said, "No." And he said, "Then whose is it," and Saad, from the front, without lifting his head from the account he was copying, said, "Hers. The bench is hers. Bring the number here and she will weigh it."

That was the whole of it. Nobody stood up. Nobody said a word about my grandfather, or about what a woman may keep in her hands. The weigher put his thumb away and said he would bring the number, and went out, and the lane took him.

We barred the shutters at dusk. I swept, and put the lids back on, and closed the third drawer from the left, and then pulled it a finger's width open again, because it had been his and it was not mine to correct.

I carried the ledger up with the lamp and sat with it on the floor until the oil went low, copying nothing, only reading the two columns over — what the page had promised, and what the drawers had held — and the space between them, which was small, and which I had made with my own hands in one day.

It is a narrow thing to be proud of. A margin. Two figures that do not agree.

I slept, and I was not counting.