The rain came in the night and settled over the street the way a tenant settles: without asking, and for a week.
It was not a storm. A storm spends itself and goes. This was a wet week — a low grey lid on the sky, a rain that fell fine and straight and without pause worth the name, and the yard's earth gone soft to the ankle, and the back room's air thick enough to taste. The racks stood under their covers in the yard with the last of the season's leaf on them, and the leaf was not finished, and the week meant to finish it indoors or not at all.
The fifth month of the standing order filled its twelve sachets in the day's gaps, at the standard, unhurried. Ren carried the box up the hill on the week's first morning, through rain that found the seams of his coat before the gate, and the clerk received him at the long table with the standing folder open.
The labels were read in full, one by one. Six sachets were weighed at the office scales, of the clerk's choosing, from both rows. The weights agreed, six of six.
The month's money was set on the table in hundreds — one thousand, four hundred and forty — and Ren counted it into the box coin by coin, and the two counts agreed, and the receipt was folded away into the lid, with the others. The book would write the week's lines when the week had finished spending, but the first of them was already true: the box stood at four thousand, one hundred and ten.
Coming down, he stopped at the charcoal seller's yard by the gate, where the carts stood sheeted and the charcoal lay under its own roof of boards, dry in the middle of the wet.
"The back room must dry leaf all week," Ren said. "Braziers, morning and evening. Sell me the week's worth, at your board."
The seller named his figure — the price on his own board, the same to the rain as to the sun — and Ren counted out one thousand, eight hundred on the wet wood, and the seller's boy ran the sacks down the street on a hand-cart under a sheet, twice. The rain made its own count on the canvas. Charcoal had saved a wet week's lot once before, in another autumn, at the same price and from the same yard: the book kept that page too, and the year's page would lie beside it without either of them remarking on the likeness.
The third tranche of leaf came down the road the next day, on a cart that had taken two days for a one-day road, its driver wet to the bone and its load sheeted twice over. The leaf was weighed at the shop's door under the eaves, bundle by bundle, and the count of the bundles agreed with the carter's paper. Ren paid at the gate's price, the price on the board that every buyer read: one thousand, six hundred, counted twice on the counter, in the lamplight, while the rain went on with its work on the roof.
That night he wrote the week's money as far as the week had written it himself.
The fifth month stands delivered and accepted: twelve of twelve. In: one thousand, four hundred and forty. The box: four thousand, one hundred and ten. Charcoal for the drying, at the gate yard's board: one thousand, eight hundred out. The box: two thousand, three hundred and ten. The third tranche of leaf, weighed at the door: one thousand, six hundred out. The box stands at seven hundred and ten — the lowest count of the year, in the month the office opened the shop's file on the hill.
Seven hundred and ten was a count a man could hold in one hand. The book wrote it without apology and without decoration, the way it wrote every count: it was the year's truth so far, arrived at by a road of true counts, and the shelf above the counter was fuller than the box below it, which was the shape of the year the plan had made.
The leaf went onto the racks indoors — along the back room's wall, on cords strung under the eaves of the yard, anywhere the air moved — and the braziers burned at the room's two ends, morning and evening, and the leaf was turned by hand at the day's turns, his own hands and no others. The counter took what the counter took through the gaps. The rain drummed. The charcoal smoked thin and blue. The leaf dried the slow way, at the pace the wet allowed, and the making followed it off the cords in armfuls, batch from batch, the jars scalded and filled and sealed at the long table across the evenings, each label on its jar before the jar left his hand.
On the week's fourth day the count of the sealed stood at its height, and the book wrote it before the week could argue.
Sealed of the year, gross: one hundred and thirty-seven standing. Of the beds' leaf, fifty-three; of the bought leaf, eighty-four — the third tranche among them, under its month and its mark.
On the fifth morning, Ren found the grey.
Nine jars of the new tranche's batch stood in their row on the counter where the evening's sealing had left them, and along the wax edge of the first of them ran a fine grey fur, like frost on a pane. He took the jar down and turned it in the light. The second jar showed it. The third. He counted down the row the way a man counts bad news: slowly, and once only, and to the end. Nine jars showed the grey at the wax, in a row, and the rest of the row stood clean.
He opened the worst of them at the back door. The smell came up wrong — sweet and rotted at once, the smell of leaf that had gone into its jar with the wet still inside it. The tranche's leaf had taken the rain on the road and on the racks before the braziers had their week in hand, and nine jars' worth of it had been sealed with its damp folded in, and the damp had done in the dark what damp does.
He set the nine in a row by themselves, and wrote the count before he touched them again, because a loss unwritten was a loss that could be argued with later, by memory, which argues badly.
Nine cures of the bought leaf, sealed off the wet week's racks, grey at the wax by the fifth day. The leaf went in with its damp inside it. Opened, counted. To be burned, all nine. Nothing of this batch is sold, and nothing of it is given. Standing after: one hundred and twenty-eight.
He burned them in the yard, in the brazier's heart, under the eaves where the rain could not reach the fire — jar by jar, the wax first, the leaf after, counted aloud as they went in, one to nine, while the rain made its count on the yard's stones beside him. The smoke went up thin and grey into the grey, and the smell of it was the smell of a price, paid in the open, where prices belong.
The list was served in the same week, in its order, off the autumn making — the making owed the list before it owed the shelf any height, and the book kept that order without being reminded.
Masa the net-mender came first, with the river's tar still in the seams of his hands, and his course was measured out at the counter and written under his name: three days, morning and evening, the way the courses ran. He paid his three hundred at the board's price and tucked the jar inside his coat against the wet, and went down the street with his shoulders up against the year.
Tsune's son came for the second course — the basket-seller's wife, whose knees kept her from the street in the wet — and carried it home in both hands under his own coat, and the book entered her name served, second of the five, in her order.
At dusk Ren carried the third course down himself, wrapped in oilcloth, to the ferry stairs, where Yae kept the toll tally in a hut no bigger than a cupboard and had not left it in three days of rain for fear of the stairs' wet stone. She took the jar at her door and read its label by the hut's lamp, the whole of it, the way the hill read labels — and paid her three hundred out of the toll box, in tens, counted twice in the lamplight between them.
The book closed the week with its counts in a row, the way bad accounts and good ones are closed alike: to be looked at.
The list stands at two. Three names served this week, in their order, off the autumn making. The shelf stands at one hundred and twenty-eight. The box stands at seven hundred and ten. The rain stands at six days, and counting.
Outside, the rain went on into the dark, fine and straight, and the braziers' glow stood at the back room's door where the leaf still hung that had not been lost — the year's leaf, drying as slow as the wet was, in a shop that had counted its losses in the open and kept its order in the serving.