Chapter FourTraffic

The young man with the limp had not gone on, and the road would not stop. For three days Toll lived in the kitchen, between the two.

The brothers had gone the morning after they came, out over the saddle before the frost was off the stones, and Toll had watched them down the north path until the fall of the ground took them and then had turned back to the house with the day already on him.

At the door the elder of the two had stopped, his pack on, and looked past Toll at the young man asleep on the bench.

“He’ll be along,” he said, not quite to Toll. “When the foot’s right. Tell him we’ll look for him at the second pass.”

“I’ll tell him.”

Toll told him, when he woke. The young man nodded, and looked at the window, and said nothing at all. The young man had stayed. His ankle was not broken — Toll had looked at it that first night, kneeling on the flags with the joint held in his two hands, turning it slow while the young man’s breath caught and held, and it was a strain, the kind that wanted three or four days off it and then would be fine. He had bound it himself, the linen wound firm over the swelling and tied off at the arch the way Hetty had shown him a winter ago. So that was a reason for him to stay, and a good one, and neither of them had said anything about the fact that the ankle did not seem to be the whole of why he sat by the wall through the second day and the third and looked out the window at the people coming up the path.

There was no time to wonder about it. The road had opened fully.

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They came from both sides now.

That was the change the third day brought — the north side hardened and cleared through to its own valley, and the travellers came up from the north and the south both, met at the col, ate, slept, and went on over the saddle the other way. The house had two streams running through it instead of one. Toll learned to read the door before it opened: the bells of a pack-string carried up on the wind before the beasts themselves came into the yard, or the particular knock of a staff against the stone of the terrace, or — the one he learned to listen hardest for — the silence of someone too tired to do more than stand outside until the door was opened for them. He kept half an ear on the latch through all of it, through the stirring of the pot and the splitting of the kindling, so that the door was rarely knocked twice.

He gave water first. Always. A cup put into the hand before anything else, the tin cool from the tank and beaded on the outside, and most of them drank it before they knew they were thirsty, tipped it back and stood blinking as if the want had come on them only in the drinking. Then the fire, and a place near it where the heat could get into them, out of the shoulders first and then down; more than one of them shivered harder once they sat than they had out in the wind, as if the warmth had to find the cold before it could shift it. Then stock and bread to hold them while the soup came back to heat, and then the soup. The order did not change however many of them there were. The order was the thing that made the many of them possible, and Toll kept to it the way you keep to a handhold, not looking at it, trusting it under the fingers.

A woman came up the south side carrying a child asleep on her back, the small head lolling with each step, and Toll gave her the water first and then took the child’s weight onto a folded blanket on the bench while the woman drank with both hands around the cup, and the child slept through all of it and woke for the soup, blinking up at the roof-beams as if it had been set down in a new country.

When they went on, Toll held the child while she got the carry-cloth straight, and it was heavier than it looked, loose and warm and smelling of soup. She took it back and hitched it up and tied the ends across her chest in a knot he could not follow.

“He’ll sleep to the bottom now,” she said. “Full, he sleeps.”

“Mind his head on the lintel.”

She ducked him through.

A pair of young men came up the north side arguing about a route, the words coming through the door ahead of them.

“The high way’s a day shorter.”

“The high way’s how my uncle left two toes on this mountain.”

“Your uncle went up it in the wet.”

“My uncle went up it in a fog he could have sat out. That’s not the same as the wet.”

The first one turned in the doorway. “Keeper. Has anyone come down the high way yet?”

“Not this year,” Toll said. “Not yet.”

“There,” said the one with the uncle, as if that settled it, and the other said it settled nothing, and they took their water from him still at it.

They stopped arguing when they ate, the map of it forgotten over the bowls.

An old man came alone, very slow, resting at the door-post before he would come in, and sat for two hours by the fire and said almost nothing. When Toll brought the bowl he held it on his knees a long while before he started, the spoon standing up in it, and ate the bread first, in small pieces, all of it, and only then the soup. At the door he thanked Toll with great formality, as if Toll had done something rare.

“I am in your debt, keeper.”

“There’s no debt,” Toll said.

“Nevertheless,” said the old man, and bowed, a small stiff bow from the waist, and went on.

A merchant with a string of three ponies stopped only long enough to water the animals at the tank’s overflow and fill his own flask, standing in the yard the whole while with his eye on the light going off the tops, and was impatient, and did not eat. The lead pony put its whole muzzle into the overflow and blew into it, and the merchant jerked the rope, and the pony did it again.

“There’s soup,” Toll said, at the tank.

“There’s always soup, at a house. There’s not always daylight.” The man stoppered his flask. “Next year I’ll eat.”

Then he went.

They passed over. That was the truth of the col-house that Toll had learned and gone on relearning: the people passed over. The house held none of them. They came up out of one valley and went down into the other and what they had been carrying — their reasons, their hurries, their griefs, their arguments about routes — they took with them, shouldered again at the door along with the pack. The house gave them water and warmth and bread and the soup and a few hours out of the wind, and then they went, and the house did not keep them, and was not meant to.

Most of them. The young man by the wall had not gone.

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He worked from before light until after dark on each of the three days, and the work had a shape to it that he did not have to think about — wood, water, fire, pot, door, bowl, and round again — and underneath the shape the cellar-accounting ran on, the quiet second reckoning that never stopped while his hands were busy with something else.

The barley was the thing, as Hetty had said. It went into the soup to hold it, to make a bowl of it sit in a man and stay, and a bowl of soup without barley was a thinner thing that a hungry traveller would eat and be hungry again in an hour. Toll watched the level in the barley crock drop, the mark he had made on the inside coming nearer each day, and did the sum he had been doing since the first morning: this much barley, this many days, this many bowls a day, against a fortnight before Hetty came back. It did not quite work. It had not worked the first morning and it worked less each day the count climbed. He began to put a little less barley in each bowl and a little more lentil, which held the soup nearly as well and which he had more of, and he watched to see whether anyone noticed, and no one did, because no one had a yesterday’s bowl to compare it to. They had only ever had this bowl, today, and this bowl was good.

He could stretch the barley by a quarter and lose nothing a traveller could taste. More lentil, less barley, and he went on, and his back told him at the end of each day how far he had gone on — the particular ache low on the right where the pot came off the hook, the sting across two knuckles from the rough of the store door, and the stiffness that only arrived once he finally sat down to it, the way the cold arrived in the travellers.

The young man helped on the second day.

He did it without being asked, which was the way it always happened. Toll was carrying wood in from the store, three loads of it, the path between the store and the hearth one of the worn paths of his day, the cold of the store still on the billets when he set them down by the heat — and on the second load the young man got up from the bench and held the door for him, standing on the good foot, and on the third load he came out to the store himself and carried an armful in, favouring the bad ankle, and stacked it by the hearth — not quite the way Toll stacked it, the ends not squared, but close, having watched. One billet slid off the top of his armful on the way in and he let it lie rather than bend for it on the bad foot, and Toll picked it up on the next trip and put it on the pile. Toll said nothing. He did not say you don’t have to and he did not say thank you.

The young man went back to the bench after, and sat with the ankle up, and his eyes went back to the window. But he had carried the wood.

Marga came out of her corner each day and did one thing. The second day it was the washing — she stood at the basin with the water Toll had heated and washed the bowls as they came back, slow but steady, her hands red in it, and it was a help, because the bowls did not last the surge if no one washed them through the day. The third day it was the bread, the cutting of it, the loaf braced against her body and the knife drawn towards her slow and even. She did not do the whole of any task. She did the one thing and went back. Toll watched her at the basin on the second day and saw her stop twice to rest her hands on the rim of it, the knuckles standing out, and he came and took a load of wet bowls from her to dry.

“I’ve not finished,” she said.

“You’ve finished these.”

She looked at him, and at the bowls in his hands, and let him, which she would not have done two springs ago. She did not tell him she was fine. She let him take the bowls.

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On the third evening the last traveller ate and slept, and the house came down to its quiet — the young man on the bench, asleep now, his bound ankle up on the blanket; the two travellers in the beds; Marga in her corner; the fire banked low and moving in itself without flame; the soup off the boil. Toll stood in the middle of it a moment and let the quiet come up around him. His feet had gone past aching into a kind of numbness he knew. There was a good tiredness and a used-up one and he could no longer always tell which was which; tonight it was some of both.

He cut bread for the morning and set the dough against the warm stone at the back of the hearth and swept the bench clean, the crumbs and the barley-dust going into his palm and into the fire, and there was, at the end of it, the small flat space at the bottom of a busy day where the work was done and the next day’s work was not yet begun. He poured two cups from the kettle, the water long off the boil now and only warm, and brought Marga hers, and sat down across from her, on the end of the bench, which he did not often do.

For a while neither of them said anything. The fire shifted, and a billet settled with a soft fall of ash. Outside the wind came up the col and moved along the wall and dropped again, feeling along the stone for a way in and not finding one. The young man’s breathing was slow and even from the bench by the wall.

“How many?” Marga said.

“Today?”

“This week.”

He thought about it. He had not added it up; he had been too far inside it to add it up. He went back through the days now — the first woman, the pair, the brothers, the trader with the wood, the eight in the morning, the woman with the child, the old man, the arguing pair, the three off the north side. He counted on the days as much as on the faces, laying them out one behind the other. He counted as well as he could.

“Eighteen,” he said. “Near enough. Maybe a few more I’ve lost.”

Marga turned her cup on the arm of the chair. “Eighteen,” she said.

“In a week.”

“In a week. Before the north was even properly open the first two days.” She looked at the fire. “I’ve wintered this col forty years and more, on and off, and I’ll tell you what I’ve not seen. I’ve not seen eighteen in a spring week. The autumn rush, the last push before the close — yes. I’ve seen worse than this in the autumn. But not in the spring. The spring’s always been thin. People wait, in the spring. They let the road settle.” She drank. “These aren’t waiting.”

Toll did not answer. There’s a lot of them coming, Hetty had said on the terrace. What was in front of the house was eighteen in a week and a barley crock that would not quite last the fortnight.

“I told Hetty to bring more,” he said.

“Good,” said Marga.

She tipped her cup and looked into it. “You’ve been cutting the barley.”

“With lentil.”

“I tasted it yesterday.”

“Could you tell?”

“I could. They can’t.” She drank. “Don’t go past a third. Past a third it goes grey in the bowl, and then they can.”

They sat a while longer. The candle burned down, the flame leaning and righting itself in the small draught that lived along the floor. Toll did not light another; the firelight was enough for sitting, and there might be a night this fortnight when he was glad of the stub. He thought about going to bed, and did not yet. The heat of the banked fire reached as far as the bench and no further, and he sat in the edge of it with the cup going cool in his hands.

Marga finished her cup and set it down and was quiet for a moment, and then she said, looking not at Toll but at the dark of the window where the kettle hung unlit and the south path lay invisible beyond it:

“Something’s changed out there.”

He let it sit. The fire ticked. The young man slept.

After a while Toll got up and banked the fire properly for the night, raking the embers close and setting the turf over them so they would hold till morning, and checked the soup and rinsed the two cups and put them up, and Marga rose from her chair and crossed the worn path to the door of her room, slower than she used to, one hand going to the table’s edge as she passed, and at the door she stopped.

“Goodnight,” she said.

“Goodnight,” said Toll.

She went in. Toll stood in the kitchen a moment with the fire low and the house breathing around him — the small sounds of it settling, the two travellers turning in the beds, the wind at the wall — and he looked once at the dark window, and then he went to his own bed.

Outside, the wind came up the col and went along the wall, and somewhere down the south path, in the dark, more of them were coming.