By the middle of summer, the heat stood in the market street like a tenant who would not leave.
It stood in the doorway at noon. It stood on the roofs, where the gate-warehouse carpenters were re-timbering the great sheds by the west gate before the autumn rains. It stood on the road from Tanzaku, where the stone carts came up slow, and the carters walked beside their horses with their shirts open and their hats dripping.
A carter came into the shop for salve, with his hands split by rope and sun. While Ren wrapped the pot, the man talked, the way men at a counter do.
"Two of the shed crew sat down in the shade yesterday and could not get up again," he said. "Not drunk. Not lazy. Sat down, and the strength was just — gone out of them. They drink water by the bucket at that gate. Does them no good that I can see."
Ren had seen the shape of it before, in summers at this counter. A man sweating all day poured the salt out of himself, drip by drip, onto the road. Plain water put back only the water. What was lost stayed lost, and by the third day the strongest back on the crew was a tired one.
Water alone was half a remedy. He had known it for years. He had never made the other half into a thing a man could buy.
That afternoon, after the shutter hour, he made it.
Salt first — the shop's curing salt, the salt he kept for drawing damp out of roots. A level spoon of it to a crock of water, no more: the body wanted its salt back, but a drink a man spat out was a remedy for nobody. Then sourleaf, the tart summer leaf from the test cabinet, enough to make the water welcome. Then cool mint, a handful, bruised — bruised meaning crushed a little, so the leaf gives up its smell — so the mouth felt cool even when the water was not.
He drank a cup himself, standing in the heat of the shop, and waited, and drank another. The first mix was too salt at the back of the tongue. He wrote that down. The second wanted more leaf. He wrote that down too. By the third crock, the drink went down like something a man would ask for twice.
He wrote the mix in the recipe book, on a new page, with the measures doubled — once from the crock he had made, and once for the crock he meant to make every day of the hot season.
The next morning, the board by the door had a new line, in his chalk hand, under his grandmother's prices.
Salt drink for the heat: ten ryō the cup.
The first day, Ren carried the gate crock down himself, at the second bell, and showed the shed foreman the measures — the spoon, the leaf, the mint — and chalked them on the shed's tally board, where any man could check the mix against the writing.
"It stays this," he told the foreman. "Not stronger on a hot day. Not weaker on a slow one. The measure is the measure."
The foreman drank first, in front of his crew, and wiped his mouth. "Tastes like the shade side of a wall," he said. "They'll drink it."
After that first day, the gate crock was Toma's road.
Two crocks went out each day. One stood on the counter, under a wet cloth. The second, at the second bell — the bell that marked the middle of the day — Toma carried down to the gate sheds on a shoulder pole, the way water-carriers carried, and sold it there by the cup to the carpenters and the carters, and came back with the coins tied in a rag and the count kept true.
On the hottest day of that week, Ren asked him the count when he came in, red as a boiled shrimp and pleased with himself.
"Thirty cups by the second bell," Toma said. "The foreman keeps the measure where the crew can see it. Nobody waits to be told."
Thirty men a day, drinking salt back into themselves before the weakness could take them. It was not a medicine, and Ren never called it one at the sheds or at the counter. It was what the road took out, put back. That was all. That was enough.
On the second day, a carter asked for his cup double-salted, for the road. Ren shook his head and poured the measure as written.
"The spoon is the spoon," he said. "More salt than the measure makes a man thirstier than the road does. You want the road's work undone. Not doubled."
The carter drank the true cup and went, and asked for no other kind again.
On the third day of the crocks, the shop's curing salt ran out, and Ren went to the market in the cool of the morning and bought a sack of salt from the salt-seller, and paid his price, and wrote it in the day book under the drink's own page.
Salt, one sack: two hundred ryō.
The old carter went down on the fifth day.
He was a stone-hauler, grey as his own beard, who had bought salve at this counter for years. The boy from the sheds came running up the street with the word — the old man had sat down between the shafts of his cart, at the height of the heat, and his talk had gone wandering, and he was calling the foreman by his dead brother's name.
Ren sent Toma up the hill to the hospital before he had finished kneeling. A runner first. Then the work.
The old man's skin was hot and dry as a stone in the sun. No sweat stood on him at all, and that was the worst sign of it — a body that had stopped answering the heat. Ren got him into the shed's shade. He loosened the shirt. He laid cloths wet from the well on the man's neck and wrists, and wet them again as they warmed, and set a shed boy fanning him with a shutter slat.
He gave him no drink. A wandering mind swallows wrong, and a man could drown on a cup of kindness. Shade, water on the skin, air moving — that was the holding work, the work that kept a man whole until the real work could reach him. Ren chalked the time on the shed's tally board: the midday bell — and under it, in plain words, the state of him. Hot. Dry. Mind wandering.
Four shed men carried him up the hill on a plank door, with Ren's chalked card tied to the door's edge, where the hospital's hands would find it before they found anything else.
The young carpenter fell three days later.
He was twenty, maybe, a roof man on the low beam of the second shed — no higher than a man's shoulder off the ground. The dizziness took him all at once, the way it did, and he went off the beam sideways and struck his head on a timber end as he fell.
The shed boy came for Ren at a run, and by the time Ren reached the sheds, the crew had done the right wrong thing: they had sat him up and were holding a cup to his mouth, and he was pushing at it with a hand that did not know where it was.
"Down," Ren said. "Flat, in the shade. Nothing to drink."
A cut scalp bled the way scalp cuts did — a great show of blood for a small hurt, most times. But the boy answered the wrong day when Ren asked him, and a hurt inside the head was beyond every plant in the shop, and beyond the shop's whole art. What was his was the holding work. He kept the boy flat and still. He pressed a clean cloth to the cut and held the pressure steady. He kept the crew's hands off him and the sun off him, and he chalked the card with the time and the fall and the height of the beam, plain as the first card.
He went up the hill on a door like the old man, with the card tied where the right hands would find it.
Two men in four days, sent up the hill with their times written. Ren entered both in the day book that night, under the drink's count, in the same hand as everything else in the book.
Sent to the hospital: the stone-hauler, midday bell, mind wandering. The young carpenter, afternoon, fell from the low beam, answers wrong. Notes with both.
The hospital's runner came down the next morning and stopped at the counter with word.
"Both in the beds," he said. "The old one drank broth this morning and cursed the cook, so the beds say he'll do. The young one sleeps. Your cards are kept with the men."
Ren wrote the word in the book, under the entries, and no more than the word. In the beds was where the hospital's work began. It was not his to finish their stories at his counter.
That evening, the sourleaf bundle over the counter hung thin — thinner than the season had left to run. He chalked a note on the stock board, to order more leaf at the market before the road men drank him dry.
Thirty cups a day stood at the top of the drink's page in the day book, and under it the other count, the one that mattered more.
Two sent up the hill, with their times written.
He hung the shutter against the heat, and the heat, patient as rent, waited outside for morning.