The shoots came up in the last week of the month, the way spring things come when they have been made to wait for warmth: all at once, and not all at once, and with no interest in being read before they were ready.
Ren went out with the dawn water and read them standing, bucket in hand, the way he read everything that mattered to the shop: by parts, in order, and then written down.
The feverleaf had come by rows. In the two beds away from the old footing, the rows ran thick and even, green to the string on both sides, the shoots too close and too many for a count that a man could swear to. There he counted rows, and let the rows stand for the beds. Eighteen rows up of eighteen, in the three beds together.
The bed over the old footing was the thin one. There the shoots had come up far enough apart to be counted, and he counted them, row by row, on his knees in the path, with the water waiting in its buckets. First row: twenty-six. Second: twenty-one. The other four rows stood in the same thin company — a shoot, a gap, a shoot — green, and alive, and openly less than their brothers. The soil over the old wall's footing was shallow soil, a hand's depth over stone, and the bed was paying for its depth in shoots. He had known it when the spade turned around the stones. He had dug the bed there anyway, because the yard was the yard, and the count now said what the spade had said.
The salve bed was its own slow country. The forty-eight rooted sets had all leafed, every one — counted at the watering, root by root along the row: forty-eight of forty-eight, standing, their leaves small and dark and in no hurry whatsoever. The salve seed rows beside them showed in threads, thin as green stitching. That was the seed's own pace out of the ground, and the book would write the pace. It would not write a worry over it.
He read the light last, as his grandmother had taught him to read a field: by what it would give in the worst month, not the best. The sun came over the wall by the second hour and stood on all four beds by the third. The shed's shadow took the salve bed first in the late afternoon — and the salve herbs were the shade-keeping kind, and wanted no better arrangement. Whether the yard would give what the measure had promised, in the worst month, was not yet written anywhere. But the light was keeping the measure he had paced out in the spring's first week, and a kept measure was the only kind of promise the shop had ever trusted.
Then the weeds, because the weeds were the morning's second truth. The quick grass and the creeping sorrel had come up faster than anything he had planted, the way free things do. He pulled them by hand, an hour of it, root and all, working down the rows on his knees, and tossed them on the path to wither where the sun could see them. The feverleaf rows he did not touch. Nothing was picked, nothing was thinned, nothing was helped along. A handful taken now, for the pride of it, would be a row missing in the autumn. The beds' first yield was a count, and counts were this shop's first yield in everything it had ever grown.
He wrote the beds' page standing at the back room door, with the soil still on his knees.
The beds, the month's end. Feverleaf: eighteen rows up of eighteen. Two beds strong. The stone bed thin — twenty-six shoots in its first row, counted; the rest counted and thinner. The salve sets: forty-eight of forty-eight, leafing. The salve seed in threads, at the seed's pace. Weeds pulled by hand, an hour. Nothing picked.
The trial's second month was made in the day's gaps, because the mornings belonged to the beds now.
The mortar did not care what hour the arm worked, so long as the arm worked the full turning. So the powder was ground at the long table in the falls of the day — between the morning's customers and the noon, between the noon and the dusk water — in pieces, the way a coat is sewn in a house where the needle must also cook. The grinding took its full time all the same. The sieve refused what it refused, and the cloth's refusals were ground again, and the lot ran as sand runs, and its smell was the smell the standard asked of it, before a single sachet was folded. The standard did not move. The hours moved around it, and the standard let them.
Twelve sachets, weighed in pieces and weighed in whole, the two weights agreeing. Labels written, one to a sachet, complete as the rule asks. Set in the box in two rows of six, labels up.
He carried the box up the hill in the afternoon, through the road's spring traffic — a drove of the village's pigs going down to the river pens with their keeper singing at them, a beam team coming up slow, the gate's dust standing over all of it in the light. At the gate the watch waved the labelled box through on its look, the way it had learned to, and Ren noted it without triumph, the shop's way with such things, and without forgetting that a wave is not a door.
The clerk took the box at the long table by the window, where the trial paper lay open at the second month's page. He counted the sachets off against the paper, aloud: twelve. The labels went one by one under his eye, all twelve of them. This month he weighed four, at his own choosing, against the office's weights, and the weights agreed.
He wrote the month's line in the office hand and turned the paper toward Ren to read.
Trial, second month. Twelve sachets of wound powder, of the shop's standard. Labels read. Inspected at delivery. Accepted: twelve of twelve. Twenty-four of twenty-four standing under the trial.
"Twenty-four of twenty-four," the clerk said. "The trial keeps the shape of its first month. One more month closes it — and a thing that closes well has a way of being talked about in an office, above its weight." He said it the way clerks say such things, as a remark about paper, and Ren took it as one.
On the office table the month's money was counted out in hundreds, with a paper standing behind it: one thousand, four hundred and forty — twelve times the sachet's price, and the room held no other number. Ren counted it home again into the box, his count matching the office's, and the receipt, folded, went to lie with the year's in the lid.
Going out, he passed the preparation room by the corridor's way. Its door was shut today. The room behind it was the same room as the month before, scrubbed bench and dry mortars and all, and a shut door and an open one were the same fact in that corridor. Ren did not slow for either.
At the shop, the week's ordinary work was waiting on the new money the way a field waits on a cart: without opinion, and in full.
The making's bins had run down over the spring — the winter's leaf in its last weeks of life, spent as it should be spent, on the list and the door's ordinary asks. At the week's end Ren went down to the gate market and bought leaf by weight, for the making: the first gathered leaf of the new season, sold green-weight and dried at the stalls, at the stall's price, weighed twice on the stall's own scale by the seller and once on his. That was the way the shop bought anything it would have to answer for. He carried it home on his back in its sack, up the street, past his own shuttered-for-a-quarter-hour door. The bins were filled, and the back room smelled again of stock that had a future in it.
The counter did its ordinary round in those days and Ren let it: a pot of salve here, the salt by the measure there, a cure from the making for a cough that knocked at dusk — the small change of a street's health, counted by the till the way the till counted everything that was not a named line. Quietly, and in aggregate, and without a speech.
That night he wrote the month's two counts on the one page, in the same hand, and favoured neither.
The hill's trial, second month. Twelve sachets, of the shop's standard, labels read at the hill. Accepted: twelve of twelve — twenty-four of twenty-four standing under the trial. Paid at the board's price: one thousand, four hundred and forty. The box stands at four thousand, two hundred and ninety.
Under it, the yard's line.
The beds come up green. Eighteen rows. Two beds strong, one bed thin, and the thinness counted, not forgiven. Forty-eight salve sets leafing. Nothing picked, nothing promised. An hour a day to the weeds, and the water at dawn and dusk still, on the dry days.
The box had gone up by one paper's worth that month. The yard had come up by eighteen rows. The book wrote both, and the book was the only one keeping either count — which was, Ren thought, setting the book down, the way of counts at the start of their lives.