He went down to the flats at the summer's turn, the way he had gone the year before: the basket on his back, the knife at his sash, the river road in the early light.
The year before, he had gone down to read the standing leaf before the cutting, and Sana had been there before him, and they had cut together. The road had not changed. The river ran the same, low and bright between its banks.
The road's summer was on it early. A carter came down with empty barrels for the river landing, singing at his team the way men sing at animals they respect. Two women of the road villages went up toward the gate with baskets of the first plums, under cloth. The worked fields on the high side of the road stood in their rows — other people's ground, other people's hands, green and kept — and Ren read them the way he read anything: in passing, and without envy, and with the count of his own yard waiting at the road's end.
The flats had changed.
Where the rows had run the summer before — row on row of feverleaf, green to the bank — the ground stood in weeds and last year's stubble. The quick grass had it. The creeping sorrel had it. A summer's growth of things nobody had planted stood waist-high over the field, and under it the old rows showed as lines in the weeds, the way a written page shows under a spill.
Nothing had been sown. Nothing had been cut. The flats stood fallow, and the river's breath moved over them the way it moved over everything, keeping a green that belonged to no one this year.
Sana was at the field's edge, by the house rows.
The house rows were hers the way a garden is: a patch the size of the shop's yard, worked close to her door. Beans on their poles. Onions in their lines. A stand of the salve herbs, and a stand of feverleaf no longer than the shop's thin bed — tended, watered, counted, at the scale of two hands. The rows stood clean. The weeds that had the flats did not have one foot of that patch.
She worked with her left hand more than her right. Ren had watched her cut the year before, both hands quick in the leaf. Now the knife stayed in the left, and the right hand held and steadied, and its fingers were slow to close on a stem — slow, and sure once closed, and slow again to open.
She did not look up from the row.
"You came to read the leaf," she said.
"I came to read it," Ren said.
"Read it, then. It is all written." She straightened at the row's end, with the care of a woman who pays for every straightening. "The flats want four hands in the spring and two hands all the summer. I have these." She held up the two of them, the slow right, the working left. "They are not done. They are done with a field."
Ren said nothing. The book had taught him which silences were a man's to keep.
"I made the count in the spring," Sana said, "the way counts are made. A hired hand eats the leaf's price before the leaf is cut — his wage, his rice, his days of weather. And his cutting is not my cutting. A stand stripped bare is next year's sorrow, on your ground or on mine — I told you that under this sky, and it is as true of a hired knife as of a careless one. So the count said: the house rows feed the house. The flats stand. I wrote no letter about it. The ground was told, and the ground has kept it."
"It is not a sorrow," Ren said.
"It is not a sorrow. It is a count." She looked along the fallow field once, the way she had looked along her rows in other years — reading, not mourning. "The river will keep it green for whoever counts it next. Hands finish, Aoyama. I finished counting mine in the spring, and the flats heard it before you did."
They walked the flats' edge together, the length of the field, at her pace. She named what stood in the weeds the way she named anything: the old rows' lines, the corner where the ground went wet in a hard year, the bank where the carrying path came down. Every fact in its order. Nothing asked of him. Nothing offered to him. A woman showing a man a field she had decided about, so that the deciding would be a fact between them and not a rumour behind them.
At the wet corner she stopped and read the ground the way she had read it for forty years. "That corner wants draining before any seed thinks of living in it. A week's digging, with young backs. It will wait for its week. Ground is patient, Aoyama. It is hands that run out, never ground." The weeds stood over the old ditch line, green and indifferent, and the river breathed on all of it alike, the worked patch and the waste, the way weather breathes on the just and the unjust in the proverbs of old women.
At the field's far end, Ren made his own count, standing, the way the shop made counts: by parts, in order.
The yard behind the shop: fourteen rows standing, counted after the frost, two beds strong and the stone bed in its two rows — a source that gave in handfuls this year and would give more as the beds deepened, and would never give two hundred.
The market and the road: leaf by weight at the season's fair price, the price on the seller's board, bought by the shop's own rule — weighed twice, counted twice, no name on it but the season's.
The flats: nothing. Written nothing, this year — not a loss to be covered, a source that was not there, the way a well is not there in a dry field. A man did not write a sorrow where a source had been. He wrote the count that was true and let the year be built on it.
"Then you have heard my whole count," Sana said. "Yours is your affair. Say it or keep it, Aoyama — you are your grandmother's boy in that, and she kept hers till the writing."
"Mine is short," Ren said. "The year's leaf comes out of my yard, and out of bought leaf at the fair price. No leaf out of these flats. The plan stands at the top of its page as written — I do not write it smaller in advance. What the yard and the fair price sum to, the autumn will count. It will not be your leaf that closes the difference, and it will not be the storm's price either."
"Good," Sana said. "A plan kept whole and a count kept true — that is the whole of anybody's trade." She picked up her basket, the house basket, small and half full of her own rows' greens. "Come in the autumn if you want the river air. There will be nothing to cut. There will be tea."
He walked back up the river road with the empty basket on his back, lighter than he had ever carried it on that road, and the emptiness of it was a fact like any other and he let it be one.
At the shop the dusk water was waiting, and the beds took it the way the beds took everything: by rows, in order, at the dry days' pace. The strong rows stood high now, over the string. The stone bed's two rows stood in their thin company — alive, and openly less, and counted so. The salve sets stood dark and unhurried, forty-eight of forty-eight, growing at the pace roots grow.
In his absence the counter had kept its own counsel: the stall's woman had minded it for the day, the way neighbours did, and the till held the day in one lump, unnamed lines and all, a street's health taken in pennies while its keeper was elsewhere. A carter off the afternoon road had asked after leaf for his team's cracked hands and taken the salve instead, and been told the salve's terms, and gone down the street working it into his knuckles at the walk. The shop had kept its day without him, at the day's small scale, which was the scale the shop was for.
That night he wrote the flats' page, and under it the year's source, in the same hand.
The flats stand fallow this year. Sana's count, in her words: the hands finish; a hired hand eats the price before the leaf is cut; the house rows feed the house. The year's leaf: the yard's fourteen rows, and bought leaf at the fair price, as the counting comes. No other source written. The plan stands at its page's head, unwritten smaller. The list stands at eight.
He shut the book on a year that had lost its oldest source without a scene, the way years actually lose things: by a count made in the spring, at a field's edge, in a woman who had decided before he arrived.