CHAPTER 23
Alistair
◆
Five oak drawers stood on the fifth-floor landing at the height of my hip, and thirty-five were waiting below.
My breath went out ahead of me and hung there in the window light.
There has been no power above the third floor since the ward closed, and no one has asked for any.
The light came up off the snow instead, through glass nobody has washed in nine years.
It was the best light in the building and it fell in the worst room in it.
I lifted the top drawer off the stack and carried it in without opening it.
Forty oak drawers, buff cards, one line of handwriting to a card, alphabetized by what frightens them.
That is what the index is, and it has been mine since I was twenty-five.
A drawer of it weighs about what a case of wine weighs.
I have carried both, and only one of the two ever made a judge return a call on a holiday.
The corridor up there does a peculiar thing with sound.
My own footstep came back off the far end a second late, so that a man walking alone in Ward C is followed all morning by a slower copy of himself.
Plaster dust lay over the boards in a fine gray skin and took the prints of my shoes.
Along the dayroom wall ran forty-one hand-painted coat hooks, one to a bed, chipped down to the pine on most of them.
I hung my coat on the nearest. I have never used the eleventh and I did not begin today.
Forty drawers, five to a trip, eight trips up and eight trips down.
That was the only arithmetic I did all day.
I had done the rest of it at four in the morning on the floor of the Ledger Room, with my back against the wall the drawers live in.
A man thinks differently on a floor. The thinking is no better.
It feels more honest, because the furniture has stopped agreeing with him.
Cecily Pryn was at the Ledger Room door when I came down for the next five, gloved, a hand truck beside her with the strap already unhooked.
“You are running the east stair,” she said. “Half the building can hear you doing it.”
“Then half the building is awake and might be useful. Where does a person find a truck at this hour?”
“The bindery.” She rolled it a foot toward me and stopped it with her boot. “It will take them to the foot of the stair and no farther. After that they are yours.”
“They were always going to be mine.” The brass holder on the front of that drawer had my own handwriting in it, from the year I turned twenty-six, and I have improved since.
She looked at me in the weatherless manner she has given forty years to, and then she said the sentence she had come up to say.
“The Ledger may destroy his own record on his own authority. Provision nine, 1911.”
“You went and looked it up.” Something in me let go a notch, and I put a hand on the truck to give it somewhere to be.
“At half past five, in case you meant to ask my permission, and in case I meant to refuse it.” Her gloves stayed on the grip of the truck. “I would have had to give it. That is all the archive has to say.”
“You could say a second thing.” The truck had a bad wheel and it turned under her hands while she held the thing level.
“I could. I have not said a second thing in forty years.” She turned the truck for me and set the strap into my hand. “I am not going to begin on a Monday.”
Julian came through the second-floor doors with his coat over his arm and took eight drawers off the stack before I could tell him the number was five.
“Five at a time,” I said. “The stack stands on the landing. It does not go down on the floor of the ward.”
“I have eight.” He said it to the drawers and not to me.
“You have a right hand that will not close and eight drawers, and the two facts are related.”
“Then the hand will carry and not close.” He brought the load up against his chest and settled the top of it under his chin. “You did not ask me to come.”
“I did not ask anyone. That is a separate animal from minding.”
He made five flights with them and set them down on the landing without a sound, which cost him more than dropping them would have.
On the third trip he told me that Rook had come out to the yard step with his left arm strapped across his chest, and had watched the load go past, and had gone back inside without saying anything to anybody.
Julian reported it plainly and did not decorate it.
After that we climbed together, out of step, so the corridor handed us back four feet instead of two. He counted nothing aloud. By the fifth trip my own copy at the end of the hall had company. In nine years I have been up there a dozen times, and always alone until today.
“He will not tell her,” Julian said.
“You are confident of that.”
“I am confident of his face when he decides a thing.” He took up the next five and started climbing. “It is the first favor that man has done you since the strongbox.”
The dayroom stove is a squat iron box standing on a plate, and the flue goes up through the ceiling into the roof space.
I opened the damper and laid a fire out of the kindling crate, and it caught at once and drew hard, which is more than the building manages anywhere else.
The handle was cold when I took it the first time, and cold the next two times after that.
By the fourth it was not, and after that I used my sleeve.
The dayroom has two windows and both of them face north over the lake.
The lake was locked gray-white to the far shore, and the light off it lay across the boards in two long panels.
There was a bed frame in the corner with no mattress on it.
I set the first drawer down on the frame, because the floor was farther away than my back wanted.
I broke the first pack across my knee and laid the cards in face down. I did not read one of them. That was the rule I made on the landing and it is the only rule I kept all morning.
There was one exception, and I had lifted it out before I carried its drawer up. It rode four flights in my waistcoat pocket. I put it into the stove ahead of everything else, because a man who saves a thing for last is telling himself in advance that he might not do it.
“Odile’s card runs to nine words,” I said, “and every one of the nine is a thing that was done to her in this room. Here is the correction, for the room, and Miss Pryn may write it down or leave it. She writes a page down in a straight column and she is funnier than I am, and I am saying that in the present tense in the room where somebody stopped letting her finish.”
Julian was quiet for a moment. Then he said her name once, in the ordinary way a man says the name of a woman who is alive in Vermont and expected at lunch.
Cecily wrote nothing. She has never in forty years written a line she was not asked for.
The card took the flame at one corner and was gone in under three seconds. Buff stock burns cleaner than paper and it leaves less behind. I shut the door on it. Then I opened the door again, which was not necessary, and looked, and shut it.
The packs come apart faster under the hand than under the knee, so after the twelfth drawer I stopped using my knee.
There is a rhythm to the work: strap off, pack halved, halves quartered, quarters into the mouth of the stove, the door shut on them with the sleeve.
Somewhere inside the twenty-second drawer the sleeve was not where I had left it, and the iron took my left palm and the two middle fingers with it.
I had started the motion, so I finished the motion. It took longer than it takes to say, and the cards went in where I had meant them to go, and the door shut. Then I stood there and had a short conversation with my own arm about whose arm it was.
Julian crossed the dayroom without hurrying, which is his version of running.
“Left palm and two middle fingers. That is a burn, and there is snow on the ledge.”
“You are entirely right, and there are eighteen drawers left.”
“Both of those are true statements.”
Cecily did not look up from the stove. Julian did not move out of my light. Between the two of them they assembled one whole opinion, and neither one had to speak.
“Then we are in agreement, and I will carry the agreement with me to the next drawer.”
Cecily came around the stove and took that drawer out of my arms with her shoulder under it, and she did not ask me first, and she did not put it down.
“Sit on the bench,” she said. “Put the hand in the snow on that ledge and count to two hundred. I will tell you when you may stand up.”
I sat on the bench. The snow on the sill was old and packed and it went into the hand like a blade going in sideways, and the stove ticked, and the fire took the next quarter pack without any opinion about it.
“Say the reason out loud,” Julian said. “I would like it in this room, in your voice.”
“Would you like the reason, or would you like the arithmetic?”
“The reason.”
“He was never going to take the index from me. Taking is loud, and he has no appetite for loud.” The pain arrived properly then and I let it stand in the doorway.
“He was going to come to me with the notice already written and ask me to spend it. One man on the roll at a time, and each of them reading his own line back at him in his own handwriting. Most of that table would vote whatever a card told them to vote.”
“And the ground,” Julian said.
“The ground would be the woman who signed a page she had not read, and every card in the room would have been made to point at her. There is still a mark on her face from the lake. Do not tell her I did this.”
“She will find out. It should be from you.”
“She has not looked at me since Harrowgate.”
The fire had got past needing me and was working on its own. Cecily fed it in quarters at a steady rate, one hand, the other in her pocket. Julian had not sat down since he came in.
“That is an argument for telling her. You are using it as an argument against.”