The Man Who Wrote the Letter Still Takes the Long Way

Sixteenth day of rain, and this morning gave the city a clean sky for the first time since it started. I went to the New Quarter’s east lane to see what sixteen mornings of feet have done to the ground the Gazette calls a detour.

It is not a detour anymore. It is a path. Worn a hand’s-width deep in places, packed hard where the rain can’t soften it fast enough, a line as plain as any street with a name. Five weeks of people walking round instead of through made this without anyone cutting it on purpose.

A woman hanging wash at the lane’s bend told me which man was Tomas Pelk, the one whose letter ran in tonight’s column before I’d even read it myself. He comes through a little after the second bell, she said, same basket, same stop at the flat stone to shift the weight off one shoulder onto the other.

He came when she said he would. Two baskets of woven eel-traps, slung on a yoke, bound for the Wharfside stalls. He set them down at the stone, same as every morning, and rubbed the heel of his hand along the groove his own shoulder has worn into the wood. He did not look toward Steep Track’s gate, barred and idle above the lane. He has stopped looking at it, the way you stop looking at a thing that will not answer.

I did not tell him the Archive has his answer already, filed a week before his letter went to print, Reyn’s paper gone seven weeks before anyone cut the bar. That was never mine to carry across. He asked the Gazette, not me, and the Gazette is not done with him yet.

He picked the yoke back up and went on toward the Wharfside. The path will still be there tomorrow, whatever anyone decides to tell him.