The Chalk on the Granary Steps

The tally-hand works a slate the size of a door, propped against the third post from the bottom of the granary steps. Not chalk on stone — a slate board, wiped each evening, because the count starts fresh every morning of the Ingathering.

The marks go in fives. Four strokes down, one across. A sack goes up the steps, a stroke goes on the slate. Nobody calls the number aloud. The stroke is the record. At the changeover bell the tally-hand walks the board down to the Weighing Hall clerk waiting at the base of the steps, and the two counts are set side by side. If they agree, the clerk initials the slate and it is wiped. If they don’t, both counts stand until someone climbs the steps again to recheck, which nobody wants to do twice in one day, under this sun.

Today the tally-hand was a woman, thick-forearmed, kerchief soaked through by the second bell. She did not stop chalking to drink water. Someone else brought the ladle to her hand and she drank without looking up, marked a stroke mid-swallow, kept the count clean. When the sacks stopped for the midday lull she sat on the bottom step and nobody sat with her. By the time the counting starts again, no one remembers to ask what she’s called.

Maro wrote this week that duskcap does more work in this city than anything off a hull, and that the plant does not change — only the hand steeping it does, and how many times the cup comes round. Tamar wrote near the same sentence, from a sickbed instead of a wharf. The slate is the same. The chalk does not change. The hand holding it, five strokes at a time through a whole Ingathering, is the part nobody enters in any ledger.