The fever came up the street the way weather did.
First it was one house — a grandmother kept to her bed, two streets over. Then it was the carter's little girl, hot as a stone from the hearth. Then it was three doorways in a morning, with mothers standing in them, watching for the herb shop's shutter to lift.
The street said a wet spring bred a feverish one. Ren said only that the houses had stood damp a long time, and damp houses were hard on the old and the small. Either way, the wave had come, and the wave did not care what anyone called it.
He sold from first light. Some mornings the queue was already standing when he lifted the shutter — a father with his hat in his hands, a girl sent running with a coin knotted in a cloth. He took them in the order they stood, and the street kept the order honest for him, the way streets do.
The work of a fever wave was counter work, and it was the same work forty times over. Ask the questions. How long hot. Can she drink. Any shaking, any wandering of the mind. Weigh out the cure. Say the words that went with it, the same words, every time, because a frightened house needed the words plain.
"Three days. Brew it morning and night. If the fever is still climbing on the second day, do not wait for the third. If the sick one cannot keep water down, do not wait at all. Go up the hill, to the hospital. That is what the hill is for."
Twice in the first week, a face at the counter made him say the last part twice. Both times, the face nodded, and took the cure, and went. He wrote those two houses in the day book, street and name, so that if the street brought him word, he would know whose word it was.
Word came back from one of them on the third day, carried by a barefoot runner: the grandmother had been taken up the hill on the second day, as the counter words had said, when the fever would not turn. In the beds, the runner said. It was all the word there was. Ren wrote it beside her name, and claimed no more of it than that.
His grandmother had a saying for a wave. When everyone is sick, the shop's memory is the second medicine. He wrote the names. He kept the count on the stock board in chalk strokes, the way the whole street could read it if it wanted.
On the fourth day, the tea-stall woman came in herself, out of breath and smiling with one side of her mouth.
"My mother has appointed herself your crier," she said. "Three days of your cure, up on the fourth, ruling the house — she tells it at my stall until the queue repeats it back to her. Half the street at your shutter this morning is her sending."
Ren did not claim the credit. Fevers broke. Cures helped them break gentler, and kept the strength in while they did — that was the honest size of it, and it was what he had told her at this counter when the slate was written.
"It was her turn to mend," he said. "And the cure takes its three days whether she praises it or not."
"Tell her that," she said, "and she will send you the other half of the street."
The wave crested in the second week. Three days stood in the day book where the door had never rested — where he had eaten standing, between one weighing and the next, and the kettle had never once gone cold. At noon on those days, the tea-stall woman set a pot of tea on his counter without a word and took it back empty at night, and neither of them ever spoke of it as anything but a pot that had been in the way. The bundles of feverleaf came down from the beam one by one. The sealed pots came off the shelf in rows.
On the last morning of the wave, the fever shelf gave up its forty-third cure, and held two pots besides.
On the wave's worst nights, after the shutter fell, Ren had ground feverleaf at the back counter and sealed pots by lamplight, and set them on the shelf to be sold in the morning. The bundles had thinned as the pots emptied — the two stocks going down together, like two candles in one room — until the beam held bare twine and the shelf held two pots.
Forty-three cures. Every one of them weighed, sealed, and paid for over the counter at the board's price. Three hundred ryō, the same for the carter as for the widow as for the tea-stall woman, whose slate money had come in Friday like a promise kept.
One cure more had gone out the door, and it was not in the forty-three. The cooper's wife — the cooper being the man who made and mended the street's barrels — had taken a cure for her youngest on her slate, against her man's wages at the week's end. The slate stood by the till with her name on it, uncounted. A name on the slate was a promise, not a payment. The book kept the two things in different columns, the way his grandmother had taught him, and the count stayed true.
That evening he added the wave up in the day book, slowly, the way you add a thing you mean to stand behind.
Fever wave, late spring. Cures sold and paid: forty-three. Twelve thousand, nine hundred ryō.
On the stock board, under the chalk strokes, he wrote the state of the fever shelf, plain for the street to read: two pots. When they were gone, they were gone until new leaf could be dried and sealed — and the street would know it by the board before it learned it at the counter.
It was more money than the till had held since the winter. It sat there in stacks, and the number at the top of the page sat above it, and neither number pretended to be the other.
The agent came at the month's turn, the way he always came.
He was the wholesaler's man from Tanzaku, square-handed, with the same heavy writing that lived in the back of the account book. He took the tea the stall sent over, because refusing tea was not done. Then he set his strongbox on the counter and opened the book to the winter page, and the year's business stood between them in two columns.
The agent had heard about the roof on the road in, the way agents heard everything.
"Tarred it yourself?" he asked.
"Myself," Ren said. "The seam above the back wall."
The agent nodded at that the way a man nods at a mended fence. "The wholesaler likes a shop that sees to its own roof. It reads like a shop that means to be standing at the solstice."
"Six thousand," Ren said. "Count it with me."
He counted it out in stacks on the counter, and the agent counted it again into the box, stack by stack, neither man looking away from the other's hands. What went into the box was the same six thousand that had stood in stacks on the wood. When the last stack was in, the agent wrote on the winter page, in his square hand, under the balance that had stood there since the cold weeks.
Paid at the month's turn: six thousand. Balance: sixty-six thousand.
He pressed his seal under it. Ren signed the day book under his own copy of the same words, and the two books closed on the same numbers.
The agent looked at the fever shelf, with its two pots standing like the last teeth in a jaw.
"A good spring, for fevers," he said.
"A good spring for the shop is a bad one for the street," Ren said. "I'd take the other kind, and a slower till."
The agent shrugged the shrug of a man who carried other people's numbers for a living. "The solstice stands where it stands, Aoyama. Sixty-six is closer than seventy-two. That is all a balance ever says."
When he had gone, Ren took down the day book and wrote the new number at the top of a clean page, where he would see it every morning of the summer.
The debt: 66,000.
Outside, the market street was folding up for the night. The air through the door had changed while the agent was inside — the last cool of the spring going out of it, and the first true heat of the year standing in its place, waiting its turn at the counter. The beam over the counter hung empty of feverleaf, and would hang empty until the autumn drying. The shop would sell what it had, and the board would say what it had, and that would have to be summer enough.
Sixty-six thousand. One payment made, the way payments were made: counted twice, written down, and no smaller in the morning than the work that had earned it.
He barred the door, and banked the stove, and went up to bed.