Ren went down to the river flats before the sun, with the big basket on his back and the cold in his sleeves.
The flats lay low along the river, in the river's own weather. A band of mist stood on the water, white and still, and the ground below it kept the mist's warmth the way a held cup keeps heat. Above the flats, the village roofs were white with the hard frost, and the morning smoke went up straight. Down here the grass bent green and wet under his feet. The feverleaf stood dark and full at the year's end, a full month past the high stands' time, at its strength still.
Sana was there before him, with her knife in her hand and her own basket at her feet, her hands wrapped in cloth against the cold.
"You will buy it standing, Aoyama, and cut it yourself," she said. "My hands will hold the basket and keep the count. That is the shape of it, this year."
"That is a fair shape," Ren said.
"A basket of cut leaf, a hundred ryō. The basket is your own, and your own measure. Cut what the basket holds honest, and no more. A stand stripped bare is next year's sorrow, on your ground or on mine."
He cut the way he had been taught, on another hillside, in another month: the outer leaves, the crown spared, nothing stripped. Sana held the basket and kept the count under her breath, the way she had counted for his grandmother, in the years when the carrying was done by younger backs than either of theirs.
The stand ran the whole length of the flats, in the shelter of the bank, and it was a better stand than any the high ground had given him that autumn. The leaf came off thick and dark, with the river smell under its own smell. His hands went cold to the wrist and stayed cold, and the cold kept the leaf's strength in it, the way cold keeps anything. Basket by basket, the filled ones stood in a row at the bank's foot. The row grew the way a count grows: one true number at a time, with no number asked to be two.
Twelve baskets by the sun's climbing. He counted the price onto her cloth in hundreds — twelve hundred ryō. It came out of the stock purse that had hung by the till since the drying, its coin kept apart for salt and wax and this. She counted it off the cloth into her sash, slow, and the two counts agreed, the way counts should.
"Next year the flats may stand uncut," Sana said, tying her sash. "Hands finish, Aoyama. It is not a sorrow. It is a count."
"It stands in the book beside your name," Ren said. "The flats have fed this shop three generations. The book will say so."
"Books," Sana said, and picked up her empty basket. "You are your grandmother's boy in that, at least."
She walked up the bank with him under the first load, as far as the road, her empty basket riding light on her back. At the road she stopped. "Cut honest, sell honest, and the flats will hear of it," she said. "They hear everything down there, Aoyama. The river carries more than water."
The leaf came up to the yard in loads on his back. The road ran past the gate sheds, where the yard's cart stood idle in its place, its carter on the hill. It took him the whole morning, load by load, and by the last load the mist had burned off the river behind him and the roofs had lost their white.
The cold, dry wind that follows the hard frosts did half the racks' work for him. The leaf went onto the cords in one layer, leaf by leaf. The smudge fire burned low at the racks' end. He turned the leaf at morning and at evening, and by the week's end it snapped clean between his fingers, the way done leaf snaps.
Through the drying week, the counter did its late-autumn work in kind: salve, powder, roots, leaf by weight for the street's own winter shelves. A shed man took two salve pots for the yard's store, at the board's price — one hundred and sixty, counted. He said the yard was laying by the way the street was, against the same winter. The street was laying itself by for the cold the way the shop was, house by house. The till filled slowly again, the way a basket fills in a gathering — a handful at a time, and then, one day, a weight. Ren let it fill. The sum of it belonged to a later page.
On the third evening of the drying, a bank of cloud came up off the river with rain in its smell. Ren got the oilcloths over the racks before the first drops fell. The rain came, light and brief, and drummed on the cloths, and found nothing under them to spoil. He took the cloths off in the morning, and the leaf had not felt a drop of it.
Then the jars. Scalded, dried, filled dry and full. The wax was poured and worked round with the hot knife, in the evenings. Toma held the labels ready in their order, and read each drying week aloud off the cord as the seal set. A wrong label would have had to pass two memories — his and the boy's — before it could stand on a jar. The label tied on, with the name, the drying week, and his mark. In the day book, against the new seals, he wrote the source the way sources were written in that book. River leaf. Sana's flats. Bought standing, cut by his own hands. Twelve baskets at a hundred ryō.
Toma counted the new seals by tens, with his finger on each. At the count's end he looked up, with the face of a boy who has arrived at a number he was not told to expect.
"Forty-six," said the boy.
Ren set it in the day book under the boy's count, in the place where the reserve stood.
Seventy-four standing. Forty-six new, of the river leaf. One hundred and twenty.
That week, toward evening, the doctor came down the street on foot and stopped at the lit shop the way a man stops at a well he knows.
Andō had been called down to a house in the lower street, and he came in with the cold still on his sleeves and his bag in his hand. The back room's door stood open on the rows, and he looked in the way he had once read the night page: once, and then again.
"You have been laying by," he said.
"One hundred and twenty," Ren said. "Dried and sealed. A hard month's cover for the street, if the hard month comes."
Andō looked at the rows a while. He took down one jar — the top one, the highest standing. He turned it in his hands. He read its label aloud, the name and the week of its drying, the way a man reads a note meant for him. He set it back in its row, in its exact place.
"The hill's own stores stand thinner than that," he said. "The bench still stands without its preparer. The doctors are at the beds, and the beds fill first, and a filled bed eats a day of hands. If this winter is a hard one, Aoyama, it will be hard on the hill as well as in the street. I promise the street nothing. I am not sure the hill can promise itself a great deal more."
"Then we are two shops with our shelves counted," Ren said.
"Your carter walks the ward with a frame now," Andō said. "Slow, and swearing at the frame, which the nurses take for a good sign. He asked after the shop. I told him the shop was counting jars."
"He arrived with his papers in order," Ren said. "He would want that known."
"It was known," Andō said. "It was read."
"Keep your seals dry," Andō said, and went up the street into the dark.
No order had been asked for, and no promise had been made. A warning is a thing a man gives the way he gives weather — because he has seen the sky, and the other man has a roof to mind.
That night Ren opened the day book at the winter page and wrote the season's end of it in full.
The reserve: one hundred and twenty cures, dried and sealed, on the high shelf and the middle, the low shelf standing empty under them by the rule. The river leaf stands in forty-six of them, under Sana's name. The number at the top of this book stands at fifty-two thousand. The solstice stands ahead of the first snow. Between this page and that one: the seals, the count, and whatever the winter brings to the counter.
He left the count where the winter would find it first, at the head of the page, in his square hand.
One hundred and twenty.