The down cart went on the last morning of the seed paper's month, loaded for Tanzaku with the street's spring loads — timber for the road yards, two barrels for the dye shop, a crate of the potter's ware wrapped in straw. The carter's strongbox rode under his seat, and it carried more shops' money than the herb shop's: spring was the paying season all down the street, and a road man's box, going down full and coming up with receipts, was a kind of bank that walked on four legs and answered to a name. Ren paid the house's answer before the cart's horses were harnessed, at the counter, with the quoted paper open beside the box.
He counted the money out in hundreds across the counter, and he named the parts as they crossed, the way the paper named them. Feverleaf seed, for three beds: one thousand, nine hundred. Salve seed and rooted sets, for one bed: seven hundred. The cartage of the lot, up the thaw road: two hundred and fifty. Two thousand, eight hundred and fifty, the whole of the column, to the last ryō.
He counted it a second time into the carter's strongbox, a hundred at a time. The carter — a road man with forty years of other people's money in his hands — counted it a third time as it went in, out of his own habit, and nodded once at the agreement of the counts.
"The house will send the receipt down with the next carts," he said.
"The house's paper said within the month," Ren said. "The month is kept."
The carter set his mark in the day book, beside the line, in a hand that was more mark than letters. Ren wrote the line out under it, in his square hand, so the page would read clean to anyone who ever opened it.
Seeds and beds, at the prices quoted in the house's answer: two thousand, eight hundred and fifty ryō. Paid in coin, by the down cart, within the month named. What the shop owes the house: nothing. What the house owes the shop: nothing. The account stands at nothing owed, in either direction, and this time the nothing is a beginning.
Then he counted what stayed. The shop counted what stayed as carefully as what went; a box was read from both ends or it was not read at all. Two thousand, eight hundred and fifty, in hundreds, back into the strongbox. The box had held the beds' price exactly twice, and now it held it once. The book showed both counts on the one page, and neither count argued with the other.
Outside, the carter harnessed his team and took the cart down the street at a walk, the way carts went down out of that street in spring, mud or none. The shop's money went down in his strongbox, between the loads, unremarked by anyone who watched the cart pass — and the street did watch it pass, the way it watched every cart, without knowing or needing to know what rode in it. A paper would come back up the road in its place, with the next carts, in a week or two as the road allowed. Coin went down. A receipt would come up. That was the whole shape of it, and it was a shape the shop could stand, because neither leg of it owed the other anything at all in the meantime.
That was what the beds cost in coin. The rest of their price was not in coin, and the beds collected it every day, at dawn and at dusk, without a paper.
Eight buckets a day, while the ground stayed dry: two to a bed, carried from the well at the yard's end, at first light and in the last of it. An hour of the counter's morning went into the yard. An hour of the counter's evening went the same way. The tea the stall sent over stood on the counter one morning till it went cold, and Ren drank it cold at the shutter, without complaint, and the stall's woman saw him drink it and said nothing either — the street understood spring work the way it understood winter fevers: as a season that took hours where it found them.
The beds, for their price, showed nothing yet. Dark earth. String on sticks. The salve sets stood in their row like small green punctuation, alive but not growing that anyone could swear to. The feverleaf rows were a rumour under the soil. Ren watered them the way the book had written: at dawn and at dusk, until the rows showed. He did not dig up a seed to look. A count has to wait for the thing it counts.
On the third day after the payment, the making turned to the list.
The winter's leaf was still in its life — dried in the autumn, in its month, good through the spring — and the bins held enough of it for the making in small batches, now that the door's fevers had gone down with the wave.
A cure from the making was three days in the taking and a morning in the making: the leaf weighed off the bins, steeped under a cloth, settled, strained, and set down in its vessel to stand till it was carried out. Ren made the first three cures of the year on three mornings running, the way the list would take them: one at a time, in order, each with its name already standing over it in his mind before the water boiled. Making for a name was different work from making for a shelf. A shelf forgave a slow morning. A name had a son, or a daughter, or a watch coat, waiting at the other end of it.
He took the list from under its stone and read the first name, the way the list was always read: from the top, in order, no name skipped for being nearer or dearer.
The first name was the rope-maker's widow, whose cough had settled in her chest when her fever broke, back in the heart of the wave. Her son came at dawn, before his own work. He stood at the counter while Ren told him the taking of it, plainly: the whole course, three days, morning and evening, the cup hot. The son repeated it back, the way the shop liked a course repeated. He paid the board's price in counted coin, out of a knotted cloth. Ren wrapped the cure in its paper and wrote the name and the day in the book, and drew his line through the name on the list, once, clean.
The second name was Kiku of the dye shop, who had kept her vats through the wave and come out of it with a weakness that sat down in her like a tenant. She sent her daughter at noon, with the money in her apron and a question written in her mother's hand on a scrap: whether the course would let her lift the vat poles by the month's end. Ren sent the cure back by the daughter, and the answer with it, written on the same scrap in his own hand: the course is for the weakness. The poles are the month's business, not the cure's. Lift nothing till the course is done. The daughter read it aloud at the counter to be sure of the words, and carried both away. The second name came off the list.
The third name was old Benji of the gate watch, whose winter fever had left him short on the stairs of the watch post. He came himself, at dusk, in his watch coat, and he would not be hurried. He paid in small coin, out of a purse that had been mended twice, and he counted his own money twice before he let Ren count it once, because that was his habit and the shop respected habits at its counter. He took the cure under his arm like a parcel of duty.
"Fourteen winters I have watched that gate," he said, "and this is the first time a shop has kept my name in a book and read it out in order."
"The book keeps the order," Ren said. "I only keep the book."
The third name came off the list.
That night, Ren wrote the week's page out fair, the way a page was written when it held more than one kind of truth.
The list, served from the making, in its order: three names. The list stands at eleven. The beds watered, dawn and dusk. The seed money gone down the road, and the receipt to follow it.
He set the list back under its stone at eleven names. He went out the back and gave the beds their dusk water, bucket by bucket, in the last of the light. Dark earth, and string, and forty-eight small green sets holding their row — he counted them as he watered, the way the water made him pass each one: forty-eight, all standing, none the worse for a week of his learning their thirst.
The beds had cost two thousand, eight hundred and fifty ryō, and eight buckets a day, and two hours of the counter, and they had shown, so far, exactly that much and not a leaf more. The list had come down by three. The box stood at two thousand, eight hundred and fifty.
The year was under way at its true price, and the book said so, and the book was the only one saying it.