11 The Author’s Hand
11: Ch.
11 The Author’s Hand
Bloodline Echo Through Ages — Chapter 11: The Author’s Hand
Winter came down the Marle valley in the first week of the eleventh month, and the yard stopped burning, because lime does not know the difference between seasons and the men who feed kilns do, and frozen men feed kilns badly.
The limemen went to stone-breaking, which is winter work, sitting in sheds with wedges and hammers, and Greg went with them, because a yard that keeps a boy through the burning year does not turn him out at the frost, and because winter work had a quality the burning year did not have: it left the mind free, and a free mind could build a hand.
He built it in the shed, at the end of the bench, on the back of the slate, where no one read.
The method was Samuel’s and it was harder than forging, which Greg had not expected, because forging had always felt like the difficult thing.
Forging was copying, and copying was fast, because the shape existed already and the eye walked ahead of the pen.
Authorship had no shape ahead.
Every letter had to be decided before it was made, and then made the same way the next time, and the time after that, out of nothing, from a will and a wrist, until the decisions stopped being decisions and became the hand itself.
It was like learning to walk again, at nine, on purpose, badly, in public view of no one.
The chalk mattered more than he had thought it would.
The yard sold chalk too, in the cold months, off the same benches, and the chalk came in grades the men sorted by thumb without thinking: the grey stock that crumbled, the blue-veined stock that scratched, and the white seam from the deep bench that went on smooth and wore to a round point instead of a jagged one, and cost twice the other two because it was worth twice the other two.
Greg had been writing with whatever came to hand since the valley.
He bought the white seam with his own coppers, one stick, and kept it wrapped in cloth like a tool, because a point that stays round makes a stroke that stays even, and an even stroke is easier to repeat, and repetition was the whole of the project.
It was the first time he had ever paid for a material because of how it behaved instead of what it did, and he filed the habit without naming it, the way he filed everything the school man’s ghost still taught him.
The winter set its second test through the yard’s own paper.
In the second week of the frost, Kettleman came to the shed with a bundle of stick tallies and a face like weather, and put both on the bench: the autumn’s sacks, sold and owed, forty-one names in knots and notches, and the ferry clerk at the crossing had refused to carry the tally to the mason’s trade unread.
Write it fair, the yard man said, and bring it back legible, and he put a copper on the bench and went away, and the copper was for the writing, not for the boy, because Kettleman had known for two winters that the boy could write and had never once asked the hand to do it in front of him.
Greg wrote the inventory that evening, and it was the first paid work of his life where the difficulty ran the opposite way from the Ford’s.
At the copying post the problem had been wearing a hand that was not his.
Here the problem was writing like everyone, on demand, when his own hand ached to be let out — because the yard’s paper went to the ferry, and the ferry went to the district, and a strange even hand with no history in it was exactly the kind of small oddity a string was built to notice.
So he wrote it twice.
The first pass was his hand and it was even and sure and he folded it into the box under the sleeping board, because a private hand practices on real work whenever real work is thick enough. This chapter was taken from novelping(.)com without permission.
The second pass was the yard’s idea of writing: the head breaker’s flat letters, copied off a sack-stencil, wide as a child’s, the letters of a man who shaped stone for wages and shaped words the same way.
Legible, ordinary, forgettable.
It cost him more to write badly on purpose than the copper paid, and he filed that too, the first entry in a column he did not name: the difference between a hand that cannot and a hand that will not, and the market price of choosing which one to be seen as.
Kettleman read the fair copy at the bench and grunted, which from the yard man was a testimonial, and gave the copper, and asked nothing, and the asking of nothing was its own contract: the yard would keep sending paper, and the boy would keep writing it like everyone, and neither of them would ever say what the second hand in the shed was for.
Samuel graded the pages at first light.
The pour had slowed a little in the cold, which the leech had not promised and which Greg did not trust, and the lessons came shorter now, twenty minutes instead of forty, but they came every day, and they had changed direction entirely.
Samuel no longer poured.
He read.
Greg laid the night’s page — twenty letters, thirty, built from nothing at the bench while the hammers rang — on the frost-stones between them, and Samuel read it the way he read a market: for what it told him about the writer.
“Your a closes,” he said, on a morning in the twelfth month.
“That’s new.
Last week it drifted open.”
“The chalk,” Greg said.
“The chalk helps.
It doesn’t close anything.” Samuel tapped the page with the stub of his own pencil, once.
“What closed it?”
“I decided it would.
Eleven days ago.
Now it does.”
“Mm.” The wet thing turned over, settled.
“That’s the whole lesson, then.
Faster than I taught the school man’s fair hand, and look what it cost him to teach you that.
Eleven days to bend letters into yours.” He looked out at the frost going grey toward morning.
“Write me something true on it.
Today.
Not a sample.
Not my sentences.
Something you’d sign.”
Greg thought about it through the hammers’ day, and in the evening he wrote, on the back of the slate, in the hand that was eleven weeks old and crooked and his: Greg.
Yard boy, Harl.
Paid in coppers.
Owes no one.
He did not show Samuel the last two words on purpose, and Samuel read them anyway, because Samuel read everything the way he read markets, and he said nothing about them at all, which was its own grade, and Greg understood it the way he understood grades now: the page had passed, and the price of passing was that nothing more would be said.
The column moved.
Under Days bought, the week-lines ran on, twentieth week, twenty-second, and the burn country stayed unstrung, the way a quiet thing stays quiet, and Greg filed the weeks without reading them anymore, because a column you check twice a day is a column you don’t trust, and he had known the weight of it when he spent the mark, and the knowing held.
The string moved in the fells behind them, bead by bead, and the drovers brought the names down with the news: Ashcombe strung, then the timber camps, then the Marle bridge town, each name a bead, each bead a week of wagon, and the wagon was walking north along the string the way weather walks, and you do not argue with weather.
You price it, and you put a roof on.
Under Hands owned there was still one entry.
But the hand was growing toward the word owned, and he knew the difference now the way he knew chalk grades: the school man’s fair hand was fair and everyone’s, the Ford apprentice’s hand was good and someone’s, and this one was ugly and no one’s.
In a district where a tally-man’s trade was remembering arms, ugly and no one’s was the most expensive writing on the market, and he was the only seller.
The kilns breathed again in the third month, and the yard woke, and the boy of nine with a private hand went back to the burning year, and the shed work moved to the slate’s back and then to loose paper, and the loose paper went into the box under his sleeping board, and the box was the first thing he had ever owned that had nothing in it anyone had given him.
He counted it as such.
One box.
One hand.
One debtor, north and silent.
And a man in the house with him, spending the winter he had left at the same even rate, teach on how read the markets to a boy who would need it.