The thaw came in the first week of spring, and it came the way it always came to that street: all at once, and through everything. Water ran in the ruts. The roofs dripped past noon. In the yard behind the shop, the snow went grey at the edges and sank a finger's width a day.
The winter after the solstice had been a plain winter, and the book held it in plain lines. The wave had gone down door by door, the way it had come up. The bought charcoal had burned out its last sack, and after it the stove had burned the yard's wood — the carter's wood, brought in on a sled by a man with a cane, back in the dark of the year. The making had gone to the door all winter, cure by cure, to the fevers that still knocked. What was left of the dried leaf had been counted for that, and no more.
On the counter, under its stone, the list stood at fourteen names. Their fevers had broken with the wave. What they waited for was not rescue. It was the course owed to each of them, in the list's order, when the making could spare the leaf for it. The list had waited out the heart of a winter. It had waited out the thaw with the same patience.
On the first dry morning of spring, before he lifted the shutter, Ren set the strongbox on the counter and opened the day book at the first page after the solstice page.
A year had a first page, and a first page deserved the full count. He counted the box out in hundreds across the counter, the way the shop counted, and he named the kinds as they crossed, the way the book's small lines named them. The cures from the making, sold at the board's price through the cold weeks. The sachets. The pots. The salt, in the weeks when the cold had gone into the street's bones and every kettle in the row had wanted it. The coin had lost its kinds in the box, the way coin does. The book had kept them.
The last hundred crossed. He counted it back into the box, a hundred at a time, his voice on the hundreds, unhurried. The two counts agreed, the way two counts must before a line is written under them.
Then he wrote the year's first line, in his square hand, at the head of the clean page.
First week of spring. The box counted twice: four thousand, two hundred and sixty ryō. Against it, nothing. Above it, nothing. Last year's first page had a debt at its head. This one has a count, and the count is small, and it is the shop's own.
He blotted the line. He set the book open a moment, the way a man lets ink and thought settle together. Four thousand, two hundred and sixty. It would not have paid a sixth of the old note. It did not have to. The note was in the same book, three pages back, sealed across its face, finished travelling.
He turned back to the winter page and read the plan once, standing, the way a man reads a list of work and not a wish.
Next year's shelf: two hundred cures, dried and sealed, before the first snow. The leaf bought standing in its season, at the flats, and cut by my own hands. The racks up by midsummer. The low shelf bare, by the rule. The list served in its order, as the jars allow.
While he stood there, the season's tea came in, the way it came on the first days of every season: carried by Toma, the tea stall's boy, in both hands, with the solemnity he brought to everything the arrangement asked of him. The stall sent tea at the turning of the year, and the shop, in its turn, kept the honest hands of the blind test in the family. No money crossed. Some accounts in that street were kept in tea and in trust, and the book had a page for neither, and both were the sounder for it.
"You are counting something," Toma said, looking at the open book and the shut box beside it.
"The year," Ren said. "It comes to four thousand, two hundred and sixty."
The boy considered this with the gravity of a fellow keeper of counts. "Is that a lot?"
"It is what there is," Ren said. "That is the only kind of lot the shop deals in."
Two hundred cures needed leaf, and leaf needed ground or money, and the shop that spring had a little of one and less of the other. So the plan's first work was not the shelf. It was the yard.
Before the yard, the back room. He walked it once, the way he walked it at every turning of a season, and read the shelves the way the book read the box. The bins of leaf by weight: low, and what was in them was the autumn's drying, in its month, in its life till the spring ran out — enough for the making in small batches, and no more. The roots in their bins, with the year of their life still on them. The salve on its shelf. The powder in its sachets. The high shelf empty, where the reserve had stood, waiting for a year that had not grown a leaf yet. The middle shelf with its ordinary stock, counted and standing. The low shelf bare under them all, by the rule, the way it had stood all year.
He went out the back with the measuring cord and his stride. The ground behind the shop ran between the drying shed and the wall, a strip the sun reached by the second hour and kept till evening. He paced it off. He paced the well's distance. He stood where the beds would lie and looked at the light the way his grandmother had taught him to look at a field: for what it would give in the worst month, not the best.
The yard would hold four beds. Three for feverleaf. One for the salve herbs. He drove four sticks at the corners of the first bed and left them standing in the bare earth, a promise made of sticks.
At midday the street filled with a sound it had not made since autumn: cart bells, and wheels in mud to the axle. The first carts of the year had come up the road, now that the road would bear them. The whole street came to its doors to watch them pass, the way a street does when the world starts moving again.
The third cart stopped at the shop. Its carter climbed down with a packet in oilcloth, sealed with the wholesaler's seal, and a second, heavier load under the tarp behind him.
"The house's answer," the carter said. "And the house's goods with it. She said you would want the paper first."
Ren broke the seal at the counter. The answer was written in the house's clean clerk's hand, with the prices set out the way the house set out everything: in a column, to be read once and believed.
The house could send the seed for the beds behind the shop, and had sent it with these carts, on the strength of the letter that had gone down at midwinter. Feverleaf first, as the letter had asked. The salve herbs after. The prices stood in their column. Feverleaf seed, for three beds: one thousand, nine hundred ryō. Salve seed and rooted sets, for one bed: seven hundred. The cartage of the lot, the road being what it was in the thaw: two hundred and fifty. The whole of it: two thousand, eight hundred and fifty, to be paid down with a returning cart within the month, at the shop's own timing.
Under the column, in the same hand, one line more.
The house sends against the shop's name, the account between us standing closed. A closed account is worth a cart of trust on any road.
Ren read the paper twice. Then he went out and helped the carter carry the parcels in. They went into the back room, on the middle shelf, wrapped in oilcloth, each one labelled in the house's hand: the feverleaf seed, three beds' worth, in three parcels. The salve seed and the rooted sets, one bed's worth, in two. He set them in a row, the way stock was set in that shop: where the eye would meet them every morning until the ground was ready.
Then he entered the thing in the day book, under the count, on the year's first page.
The house's answer, come up with the first carts. Seed for the beds: feverleaf, three beds; salve herbs, one bed, seed and sets. Prices quoted on the house's paper: two thousand, eight hundred and fifty, cartage counted in. To pay within the month, by a down cart. The paper is kept with the count.
He shut the book on the page. Outside, the carts were going on up the street, bells and mud, and the street was watching them go with its doors open. In the yard behind the shop, four sticks stood in bare earth. On the counter, the list stood under its stone at fourteen names. On the middle shelf of the back room, five parcels of seed waited for the ground to give.
The year had opened the way the shop opened everything. With a count.