The solstice week opened with the wave at its height, and the street still coming by day.
The shelf gave its jars the way it had given them since the snow: counted out at the counter, a name told the taking, the price on the counter, the jar into the snow under a coat. The winter list's turn came round inside the street's days, in its order, the way every list the shop had ever kept had come round. The fourth name was served fourth.
Old Fumi's niece came for the course in the week's first half, with the price counted out of a cloth that had held verse-money for fifty years. She repeated the taking back clean — the whole course, three days, morning and evening, the cup hot — and carried the jar home wrapped in her aunt's own shawl, against the cold. The fifth name, the carter's boy, was served fifth, off a cart with a lame wheel and his father's hand on his shoulder. The sixth, Ine of the candle stall, was served sixth, her daughter counting the price twice, the house's habit, which the shop at its counter always let stand.
By the solstice's eve the street had taken eighty-eight jars since the snow came. The book held every one of them in a line. No line had been skipped, and no name had been served out of its turn to hurry a day.
On the second morning of the solstice week — the morning the paper had named — Ren counted twenty-four jars off the high shelf, by tens and units, aloud, and set them in two crates of twelve, padded with straw, and carried them up the hill on a shoulder frame, at the frame's own pace. The street lay quiet under its snow.
The register office kept its low light. The keeper took the requisition out of Ren's hand — it had gone down the hill in the box, and come up again the same way — and laid it open, and set the register beside it, open at the shop's line.
The crates were opened on the table. The jars were counted out against the paper: twenty-four, under their labels. The keeper read the labels himself, in his reader's voice — the name, the drying week, the mark — and two jars, of his choosing, went to the scales, and their weights agreed with each other and with the standard the line named. Under the line in the register — under the name, and the preparations, and the shop's two conditions, standing as they had been written in the autumn — the keeper wrote the delivery in his small hand: the date, the count, the preparation, and the price at which the register had taken them.
Then the money was set on the table in hundreds and counted: twenty-four jars at the board's price, seven thousand, two hundred. Ren counted it once. The keeper counted it once. The two counts agreed, and the money went into the strongbox, and the keeper sanded the new entry and shut the register on a line that had now worked once, in jars and in coin, under the conditions it was written with.
Ren read the line once before the book shut — the name in its square capitals, the preparations named under it, the conditions under those, and now the first entry under all of them, in a hand as dry as his own. He had not been read the line. He had asked for nothing. It stood there the way a shelf stands: because it had been built to be stood on.
"It is as it was offered," he said.
"It is as it stands," the keeper said, "and now it stands with a delivery under it. That is more than most lines get in their first winter."
Ren went down the hill with the strongbox under his coat and the empty frame on his shoulder, and the snow squeaked under his boots the whole way down, and the shop's lamp was lit before him in the street's early dark.
In the week's last days the charcoal seller came with the winter's tally on a slate — old Sada's son, with his mother's way of setting a thing down square before he spoke of it.
Charcoal had gone into the shop all winter, by the week, at the regime the year before had set: the drying that the cold months still asked, the back room's stove, the water that never stopped wanting to be hot in a fever winter. The slate's weeks summed the way weeks on slates do when they have been kept honestly: two thousand, four hundred, the winter's whole charcoal, neither padded nor shaved. Ren paid it off the slate, count against count, and the slate was wiped clean with the side of the man's hand, and the line went into the day book under the winter's name.
On the solstice's own evening, Fumi's niece came down the street through the snow with empty hands.
The course had finished three days before. The fever had left her aunt the way a tide leaves a shore — she had eaten, the niece said. She had sat up. She had asked after the street, and after the shop's book, of all things: whether her name's line had been written true. It had. That night she had slept, and in the morning she had not woken, and there was no more of it than that — an old woman, at the end of a hard winter's first weeks, gone in her sleep with her name written true in a book she had never seen.
"She wrote verses for the dead all her life," the niece said. "She said the dead should have their names said right. I thought the shop should know hers is done."
Ren opened the book at the winter list's page, where the fourth name stood served in its order, and under it he wrote the winter's second line for a name that winter: the name, and the day, and the fact. The niece watched the pen move and said nothing, and when the line was ruled she nodded once, the way a person nods at a grave that has been dug straight, and went out into the snow.
Then, in the lamplight, with the street shut and the solstice standing at the year's hinge, Ren counted the snow balance.
He counted the shelf the slow way, pot by pot, the way a count is made when it will be read by other hands in other years: along the high shelf first, reading each label as it passed his hand. Then the middle, then the back of the high shelf, where the year's first making stood. Sixty-four jars. He counted them again backward, last jar to first, and got the same number.
The day book took the year's closing in the shop's own hand, line under line, and the counts were three, and they were all true.
The reserve, at the year's turning. Sealed before the first snow: one hundred and seventy-six. Given to the street in the wave's weeks: eighty-eight — among them the first six names of the winter list, served in their order, none skipped. Given to the hill against the register's line: twenty-four, delivered and paid on the morning the paper named. Standing at the solstice: sixty-four.
Of the summer month's thirty-six jars, twenty-two went out in the winter, to the street and the hill together. Fourteen stand, at the back of the high shelf, under their summer labels. Leaf lives six months. The summer month's life ends in the first weeks of the spring. They are written here as what they are: the spring's first work. Serve them first, or count them and burn them in their month, as the old spring's eighteen were counted and burned — but do not let them stand unwritten into a second season.
The rule for next year's shelf, written while the fault is still cheap: the oldest month stands at the front, and is served first, and the book says which month stands at the front — so that no jar of this shop ever again waits out its life at the back of a shelf for want of a hand's order.
The money, at the year's turning. The box stood at nine hundred and fifty at the sixth month; the seventh month brought one thousand, four hundred and forty; the register's line paid seven thousand, two hundred against its first delivery; the winter's charcoal took two thousand, four hundred. The box stands at seven thousand, one hundred and ninety — a modest sum, and less than the year passed through this shop's hands, and every ryō of it with its source written.
The winter list stands at seven names, in their order, waiting on the spring. Two names are finished in the other way this winter, and their lines stand written: Mori of the mending yard, eighth of the old list, served in the summer, and Fumi, fourth of this one, who wrote the street's verses. The book keeps them the way it keeps everyone: a name, a service, a day.
He shut the book on the year's last page. Outside, the snow stood deep and still on the street, and the lamps were coming on one by one down its length, in the hands of a boy learning his grandfather's round. Behind the shop, under their level white, the beds lay in their rows — feverleaf and salve herbs, asleep in the ground they had already paid for once — the source of next year, small and imperfect and his, waiting under the snow for a spring that had not yet been written anywhere.