A drill wakes him at ten past four.
It whines somewhere down the lane, bites, and stops. Then it whines again. Jasper lies on Sylvie's hearth with his cheek on his folded jacket and counts the bites. Four. A pause. Four more. Biscuit lifts his chin off Jasper's shins and points his nose at the shuttered window.
The coals have gone gray. The clock over the dry sink ticks toward the quarter hour.
A bed creaks in the back room. Bare feet find the floor.
"That'll be the first," Sylvie says through the wall.
He sits up. The stones have pressed a ridge into his hip, and the ink in the whorls of his fingertips catches on the wool of the blanket. He rubs his thumb across his forefinger. Gray comes off on gray.
She comes out in a cardigan over her nightgown with her locs loose down her back and takes the poker to the grate. A coal wakes under the iron. She lays kindling across it with her bare fingers, crosswise, the way she lays out beans to dry, and bends and blows. A flame stands up.
"Saturday," she says.
"They're putting something up."
"They're putting something up on a Saturday." She sits back on her heels. The firelight comes up under her jaw. "Saturday has things in it already. The library opens at nine. Cassius has the children at ten. Hettie sells turnips, and Hollis has Garrity's truck on his books after dinner." She leans the poker against the stones. "None of that moves for a drill."
Jasper reaches for his boots.
"If you're going out to write it down," she says, "write down the drill. Leave out what you think of the drill."
"I know."
"I know you know." She stands with one hand on the mantel, and her knees crack. "I'm saying it so you hear it in somebody else's voice. It's a long lane."
***
The lane lies blue. The east has gone thin over the ridge, and frost has come up white along every rut.
Halfway down toward Bart's, a work light on a tripod throws a cone of glare across the road. Inside the cone three men in yellow vests lift a gray pole off a flatbed and walk it upright, hand over hand. The pole climbs past the height of the eaves. At its top a steel bracket holds a black walnut with a single lens, and beside the lens burns a red point no bigger than a match head.
They drop the foot into a hole cut in the verge on the far side of the ditch. One man hugs the pole plumb. Another rams gravel around its foot with a steel bar. Thunk. Thunk. The third holds a level against the paint and calls numbers in a flat voice, and the man with the bar answers each number with another thunk.
Jasper stops at the edge of the light.
Down the lane, past the bakery, a second red point hangs in the dark. Past it, a third. Up the rise toward the green, two more. He turns. At the foot of Sylvie's lane a pole stands where yesterday a fence post leaned, frost already furring its gray paint.
Every pole stands on the road side of the ditch. Every lens points into the town.
Hollis stands in the middle of the road with a cloth tape measure.
He has the tin hook of it pinned under the toe of his boot on the crown of the road. He walks backward, paying the tape out, until he reaches the gravel at the foot of the new pole. He crouches and reads the tape against the steel. Then he takes the pencil from behind his ear and writes a number on the back of his left hand.
The man with the bar leans on it. Steam lifts off the back of his neck.
"Sixteen and a half feet, sir. County right-of-way." He jerks his chin at the truck. "Permit's in the cab, if you want to see it."
Hollis lets the tape go. It reels home across the frost with a skitter and snaps into its case.
"I don't want to see it."
"It's all legal."
"I never said it wasn't."
Hollis tucks the tape into the bib of his coveralls and walks up the lane toward his garage. Biscuit falls in at his heel for three steps and then comes back to Jasper's knee. Hollis passes within an arm's length. His eyes stay on the road ahead.
"Eleven," he says, going by. "Counting the one on the grange."
Jasper takes the notebook out of his breast pocket. The cold has thickened the ink. He breathes on the nib and writes.
4:41. Mill Lane. Poles on the county strip, 16 1/2 ft from crown (H.V., tape)., Eleven, per H.V.
He does not walk the lane to count them himself.
—
The green has grown three trucks overnight.
They stand nose to tail along the creek road below the tents, white boxes on wheels with their dishes tipped toward the ridge. Cables run from them across the frozen grass in black braids and climb a mast beside the chestnut. A white trailer sits at the end of the row with a striped awning cranked out from its side. Under the awning a gas heater the height of a lamp post burns blue at its crown, and a folding table holds a sheet of lit glass the size of a door.
The visitors have come out of their tents in sleeping bags and parkas to stand along Delphine's cord. Fifty of them. More than yesterday. Their breath goes up in one low cloud over the rope. Every one of them holds a phone, and every phone faces its owner.
A woman steps out from under the awning with two paper cups.
She wears a quilted vest the gray of the poles and a headset with one cup pushed back off her ear. The walk comes clear before the face does. Renata. She drew the map in the grange, every eave marked and the fork of the chestnut.
She stops on her side of the cord and holds a cup across it.
"Oat milk, one sugar, a quarter shot extra." A smile comes and goes. "Your profile. I had the truck make it."
He takes it. The paper burns his palm. The smell comes up through the lid, and his mouth waters for it before his head catches up. Six years of mornings in a glass tower. A cup on his desk before he had thought to want one.
"We go at six," Renata says. "Alan asked me to ask you once more. In person. He says that matters to you."
She holds out her other hand. On her palm lies a gray bead the size of a pea, an earpiece with a soft rubber fin.
"Co-host. You walk the lanes. You tell them who's who. You don't have to say a word you don't want to say. The cards carry it." The bead sits between them on her open hand. "Four million preregistered in the last hour. They want the man who came back."
Biscuit sits down on Jasper's boot.
"I'm writing it down," Jasper says.
"Writing what down?"
"What happens."
"Nothing happens. That's the whole trouble with this town." She says it lightly, the way a person repeats a line she has said all night into a headset. Her fingers close over the bead. "If you change your mind, I'm under the awning."
She crosses back over the grass.
Jasper stands at the cord with the cup in his fist. Steam rises off the lid into the gray. He sets the cup on top of the post where the cord ties off and takes his hand away.
Biscuit stretches up, sniffs the lid, and sits back down.
***
At one minute to six the phones along the cord light up together.
A woman in a pink parka steps in beside him at the rope. Danielle. Her mittens hang from strings at her cuffs, and her bare fingers have gone red around the phone.
"You're not on it," she says.
"No."
"They said you might be." She tips the screen toward him. "You can watch with me. I don't mind."
He keeps his hands in his jacket pockets. His eyes go to the glass.
A title fades up in a soft cream serif over the ridge at dusk, the roofs going blue beneath it. FAIR HOLLOW LIVE. A fiddle plays under the title, a tune nobody in Fair Hollow ever played, sweet and a little sad, without a skip anywhere in it. Then a woman's voice. Warm and close, built to sit at the inside edge of the ear.
"Good morning. It's six o'clock in the last town of its kind. They don't know you're here." A breath, timed to the half second. "Let's go and see them."
The picture cuts to the lane.
It comes from the pole by Bart's. The lens runs the length of Mill Lane, the ruts silver, Bart's window a block of gold. Steam fogs the lower half of the glass. Above the fog, a broad shape lifts and lets fall.
A card slides in from the left edge with a name on it. BART. THE BAKER. A yellow tab at its corner.
In the top right corner of the glass, a white number changes. 22,418,206.
"Bart Quill has fed Fair Hollow for thirty years," the voice says. "Last night, for the first time, he fed strangers. What changed his mind? And what did he tell them behind that glass?"
Out in the lane, past the edge of the screen, the real window glows. Behind it, Bart lifts the dough and lets it fall. The slap of the dough comes up the frozen ruts late and soft.
Danielle's eyes go from the phone to the lane and back.
"It's the same," she says.
"It's half a second behind."
"How do you know that?"
He doesn't answer. Six years of feeds put the lag in him, in the same place they put the oat milk.
The card slides away. The picture holds on the window. The voice lets thirty seconds pass, and then it fills them. "Some say Bart's bread changes with his mood. If that's true, what kind of morning is he having?"
Behind the fog the dough rises and drops.
At 6:12, the picture cuts to the pole at the top of the rise. Hettie Pruitt comes up the lane with the goat on its rope and a slate under her arm. A card. HETTIE. THE GOAT LADY. She leans the slate against her fence post, kneels in the frost, and rubs out yesterday with the heel of her hand.
"Every morning, the town's most outspoken resident posts a message," the voice says. "What will she tell us today?"
Hettie licks the end of her chalk.
Fifty people at the cord lean toward fifty screens.
Hettie writes in her big square capitals, gets up, slaps the frost off her knees, and walks the goat away toward the creek.
TURNIPS. SATURDAY PRICE.
Somebody along the rope laughs. Somebody else asks what the Saturday price is, and nobody knows.
Jasper takes out the notebook and writes it the way Hettie wrote it.
At 6:40 the number reads nineteen million. At seven, sixteen. The voice tells the lane about the age of the chestnut, a founder's grief, a boy's secret transmitter, the Warden's eight years at the door. Under the voice the lane holds its breath and lets it go in chimney smoke. A man in a corduroy cap crosses to the woodpile behind his house, loads his arms, and goes in again. A card slides out for him with no name on it. RESIDENT.
At 7:22, eleven million.
Along the cord, phones go down into pockets. A man in a sleeping bag rolls the bag down to his knees and shuffles toward his tent. Danielle's friend announces she's going to find the toilets behind the trucks and doesn't come back.
Under the awning, Renata stands over the lit glass with both hands flat on the table. Her lips move. She presses a finger to the cup of her headset and keeps it there.
At 7:40, nine million.
"Stay with us," the voice says. "Something is building in Fair Hollow."
Down the lane, Bart comes out onto his step in his apron and pitches a basin of gray water into the ditch. It steams on the frost. He goes back in.
Jasper writes. 7:41. B.Q. emptied his basin.
***
At eight he goes up the lane to Hettie's fence, because Hettie's fence is where he stands now.
The pole across from Wren's shop rises on the far side of the ditch, a yard from where he counted slips yesterday. Its lens points across the ruts into her window, at the height of the bench.
He sets his back against the rails.
The curtain hangs open. Through the glass, Wren bends over the bench with a type case pulled out on the slant in front of her; Yesterday's form, broken up. Every letter going home to its box. Her hand dips and flicks. Dips and flicks. Each flick drops a letter into its compartment with a small dry tick he can't hear from the fence and hears anyway.
The door opens.
She comes out with a broom and sweeps her step. The dust of the shop goes over the edge in a gray fan and settles on the frost. She sweeps the corners. She sweeps the iron boot scraper by the door. Then she stands the broom against the jamb and lifts her face to the pole.
She holds on the lens a long time. The red point burns back at her.
Her head turns. Her eyes cross the ruts to the fence.
She goes in. The door stays open a hand's width.
When she comes out again, she carries a tin cup in one hand and something small in the other. She crosses the lane. Her boots break the frost in the ruts. She stops on the far side of Hettie's top rail and sets the cup on it by his elbow, and beside the cup a wooden nail brush with its bristles worn to a slant, and a gray sliver of soap.
"You said tomorrow," she says.
"I said I remembered."
"It's tomorrow." Her eyes stay on the brush. "The pump's thawed. Hettie's had her bucket."
Steam comes off the cup. It smells of smoke and something bitter: the black tea she stews on the shop stove until the spoon could stand in it.
"Wren."
"They've had my window all night," she says. She keeps her back to the pole. "I sat up and broke the frame down with the curtain open. I wanted to know if my hands would stop."
He waits.
"They didn't." She takes her hand off the rail. "Drink that before it skins."
She crosses back over the ruts and goes in. The door shuts. Through the glass, her hand goes into the case. Dips and flicks.
He drinks the tea. It scalds the roof of his mouth and goes down black and bitter, and he drinks all of it.
Then he opens the notebook. The pen hangs over the line.
8:16. W.A. swept her step. Distributing type at the bench. Curtain open.
He leaves the cup off the page. He leaves the brush, and what she said about her hands. The pen rests a long while after the last word. Then he caps it.
***
The pump stands at the foot of the green where Delphine's cord ties off, cast iron painted green once and worn black along the handle where sixty years of palms have closed on it. Below the spout sits a stone trough with a skin of ice broken open in the middle.
Jasper sets the soap and the brush on the trough's lip and works the handle.
Water comes. The handle goes up and down without a sound.
He stops. He works it again. It rises and falls in silence, and water gushes into the trough, and nothing shrieks.
He bends to the pivot. Grease, fresh and yellow, packed thick around the pin and smeared down the iron in a thumb-wide stripe.
He wets his hands. The cold goes into the bones to the wrist and locks there. He soaps the brush and works the bristles across his right forefinger, around the nail, down into the whorls, and gray threads loosen out of the skin and curl away in the water. His knuckles burn red. He does the next finger.
Along the cord, a few phones come up.
On the nearest screen, at the edge of his eye, a card slides in. JASPER COLE. THE ONE WHO CAME BACK. A blue tab on the corner.
"He walked out of Fair Hollow eleven days ago," the voice says from a dozen pockets, a half second apart, so that it reaches him in a ragged chord. "What brought him back? And what is he trying to wash away?"
Somebody along the rope makes a small sound. A laugh, swallowed.
Under his breath the sentence rises, the old way, whole and ready: Jasper Cole bends over the stone trough in the first light and scrubs at the
He shuts his teeth on it. He scrubs the middle finger.
Feet crunch on the frost behind him. A bucket bangs the trough.
Hettie Pruitt stands at the pump with the goat's rope over one arm and an empty pail in her fist. She hooks the pail under the spout, takes the handle and pumps.
Silence. Water.
She stops. She pumps again, harder, with both hands. Silence. The pail fills. She lets go of the handle and bends at the waist and puts her nose an inch from the pivot pin and sniffs it.
"Who did this?"
The question carries across the green. On the porch of the gray house facing the pump, Garrity stands up out of a kitchen chair with his mug.
"I did."
"With what?"
"Axle grease. Four o'clock this morning." He comes down off the porch onto the frost, the mug steaming in his good hand, his bad hand shoved in his coat. "Before they went on."
"That pump has said its piece every morning since 1979."
"And every morning now a man in Dayton types four words and hears it." Garrity stops at the cord. The visitors along it shuffle sideways to give him room. "You were in the grange, Hettie. You heard the fellow in the quilted coat. Your pump gives its little shriek. That's what he said. He's selling it."
"It's not his to sell."
"That's what I'm saying."
"Then why'd you shut its mouth?"
"So he's got nothing to sell!"
"It's got nothing to say now, either." Hettie slaps the iron. It rings dull under her palm. "I pumped this with my mother when it came in. I'm not standing here and letting it go dumb because a man in a city liked the sound of it."
"It's the town's pump."
"Then the town decides." She jabs a finger at him. The goat jerks its head up. "You didn't ask the town. You took a tin of grease out at four in the morning like a man stealing chickens. That's deciding for us, Garrity. That's what they do."
The new pink skin across Garrity's knuckles goes white around the mug.
"Nobody'd have stood up for a pump at the ring," he says. "It's a pump."
"I'd have stood up."
Nobody along the cord breathes.
Hettie bends and scoops a handful of grit out of the frozen verge at her feet. She takes a rag out of her apron pocket, folds the grit into it, and goes at the pivot pin with both thumbs, grinding. Yellow grease comes away on the rag in streaks. She spits on the pin and grinds again. She wipes it with the clean corner. Then she straightens, takes the handle in both hands, and brings it down.
The shriek tears out of the iron. High and flat, rusted at the edges, across the green and up the lane.
Fifty people at the cord flinch together. Then they laugh. One of them claps, and two more pick it up, and a ragged applause runs along the rope.
Hettie wheels on them with the handle at the top of its stroke.
"Don't clap," she says. "It's a pump."
She brings the handle down. The pump shrieks. She fills the pail to the brim with a shriek on every stroke, unhooks it, and walks off toward her fence with the goat trotting behind and water slopping on the frost.
Garrity stands at the cord with his mug. His mouth works. He holds his eyes on the pump for a long time.
"It's flat," he says to nobody.
"It's always been flat," Hettie calls back without turning.
Garrity laughs. It comes out of him in a wheeze, and he puts his free hand on the cord post to hold himself up, and the laugh runs on until his eyes water and his mug tips and coffee spatters on his boots.
Jasper writes it down. Since 1979. His hand wants to ask her whether it was '79 or '80. He writes 1979, because that is what she said.
Danielle has drifted down the rope to stand by the pump post. She tips her phone toward him without a word.
The number in the corner reads 14,206,551. Under the picture, a column of small words climbs the glass faster than his eyes can follow. THE PUMP. she FIXED it. is this real. HETTIE VS GARRITY. i'm crying. And over all of it, warm, half a second behind, the voice: "Tempers flare in Fair Hollow this morning as old neighbors clash over..."
shut up narrator, the column says. Then again. Then a hundred times, a gray waterfall.
***
At ten, Cassius brings the children out onto the grange steps.
Seven of them, under the red point, in coats and scarves, with fiddles in sizes from a loaf of bread up to Cassius's own. Hettie's granddaughter Nell has the second step. The two Garrity girls, who carried the kitchen chair to the ring, share the third and keep shoving each other off it. A boy of five called Ozzie sits on the bottom step with a fiddle no longer than his forearm and his bow upside down.
Cassius sits on an upturned bucket on the landing. He turns Ozzie's
bow the right way round without comment and hands it back.
"Thursday's tune," he says. "From the top. Wrong's fine."
They play. It comes out in seven pieces, seven speeds, and somewhere in the middle of it the pieces find each other and run together for four bars before the Garrity girls collide and come apart. Nell's E string squeals on the high note. She stops dead. Her face goes red to the hairline.
"Keep going," Cassius says.
She keeps going.
Jasper stands at the corner of the grange with his back to the clapboards. Biscuit has gone to lie at the foot of the steps with his chin on Ozzie's boot.
A whine comes down out of the sky.
It drops over the chestnut and hangs ten feet above the steps: a black cross with four blurred rotors and a lens slung under its belly like an egg. The children's bows stop. Seven faces tip back. Ozzie claps both hands over his ears, bow and all.
Cassius lowers his fiddle to his knee and lifts his eyes to the machine. He studies it the way he studies a child who has walked in late. The drone holds its place. Its whine fills the steps.
"What note is that?" he asks.
"It's not a note," says the older Garrity girl. "It's a bug."
"Everything's a note if it holds still long enough."
He sets the fiddle under his jaw and draws the open D, long, and lets it ring against the whine. The two sounds rub. A wobble comes out between them, wah, wah, wah, slow and sour.
"Hear it beat?" Cassius keeps the bow moving. "Two notes that won't agree."
He slides his finger a hair up the string. The wobble slows. Slows. Stops. For three seconds the fiddle and the machine sound one pitch over the steps.
"Between a D and an E flat." He lifts the bow. "Can't hold a pitch to save its life."
Nell laughs first. Then all of them, Ozzie loudest, his hands off his ears now and slapping his knees.
"Fiddlers had drones before anybody had those." Cassius points his bow at the sky. "One string under the tune. You let it ring the whole way, and the tune walks on top of it. June. Give me your low string. All of you. Low string, and hold it."
Seven bows draw seven open strings. The sound swells up off the steps, rough and wide, and Cassius plays Thursday's tune across the top of it.
Overhead the whine climbs. The machine tilts and rises over the chestnut and slides away toward the trucks.
The children keep their low strings ringing after it has gone. Nobody tells them to stop. The tune comes around a second time, and on the high note Nell's E string squeals again.
She stops. Her chin wobbles.
"Again," Cassius says.
"It was wrong."
"I know. Play it again. Same wrong."
Nell's eyes stay on him. Then she draws the bow across the E the way it went before, crooked, too much weight, and it squeals.
The Garrity girls snort.
"Again."
She does it again. It squeals. She laughs, and the laugh shakes the bow, and the squeal comes out with a hiccup in it.
"Now it's yours," Cassius says. "Now you can leave it out when you want."
She plays the phrase. It comes out clean.
Jasper writes. 10:24. Drone over the steps. C.R. tuned to it. "Between a D and an E flat" (C.R.). Seven low strings. Nell P. squeaked the E three times on purpose, then played it clean.
At the cord, fifty phones point at the steps. Danielle holds hers over her head with both hands to see past a man's hood. Somebody claps a slow, steady count that has nothing to do with the tune, and two people near him hush him, and he stops.
***
At noon Renata finds him at Hettie's fence.
She comes up the lane on foot with the glass tablet held against her vest and her headset around her neck. A drop of clear fluid hangs from the end of her nose. She wipes it with the back of her wrist.
"Can I ask you something?"
He waits.
"Off the record."
"There isn't one," he says. "Not for you."
She takes that without a blink and turns the tablet toward him across the top rail.
A curve runs across it. A white line on black, dropping steep from the left edge, flattening at the bottom of the hollow it makes, then turning. At half past nine it turns. From there it climbs, ragged, gaining every minute, to the right edge of the glass.
"Retention," Renata says. "We bled thirteen million between six and eight. Normal for a slow open. I had the deck ready for Alan, the one that says it's normal." She taps the turn at half past nine. "Then a woman fixed a pump. Since then nobody leaves. Average watch is forty-one minutes. Forty-one." She lifts her eyes to him. "Nobody watches anything for forty-one minutes. I've had live births do twelve."
She swipes the glass. The column of small words comes up, frozen mid-climb.
turn off the narrator
turn off the narrator
is it soup night again
my uncle drives for a living he heard the goat lady on his CB last night outside paducah
what's PIECES
the fiddle guy tuned to the drone i can't
i'm going to go fix the gate i've been not fixing for two years
turn off the narrator
"Alan's in my ear every ten minutes," Renata says. "What's working. Why. Do it again. I don't know why. I need one thing I can promise him for three o'clock."
"Hollis has Garrity's truck at one."
"Is that a joke?"
"It's an oil change."
"Twenty million people are not going to watch an oil change."
Jasper says nothing. Behind him, across the ruts, a letter ticks into its box.
Renata pinches the bridge of her nose. "He wants the voice louder. He wants a lower third on the pump woman. Neighbor against neighbor. A rivalry tag, the Feud at the Pump." She stops. "That one's mine. Sorry. That's what I'd do."
He points the pen at the column on her glass. turn off the narrator.
"They'd like it off."
"She tested at ninety-one."
"Ask them."
He tips his head down the lane toward the cord.
Renata turns. Down at the rope Danielle has found her mittens and put them on. The man in the gray fleece from Dayton stands beside her with the folded sheet in his hand, the one Delphine gave him going out of Bart's last night. He holds it against his chest like a ticket.
Renata walks down to them. Jasper does not follow. From the fence he can see their faces and nothing of what they say. Danielle talks with both mittens. The man from Dayton unfolds the sheet and points to a line halfway down it, and Renata leans in, and her lips move once, reading.
She stands there a long time.
Then she lifts the headset onto her ears and walks back toward the awning with one hand pressed to the cup.
Jasper writes nothing. None of it belongs to the town.
***
Hollis rolls the garage door up at one, as he rolls it every Saturday.
The pole across the road stands square to the open bay. From the far side of the ditch its lens points straight down the length of the shop: the bench, the vise, the wall of hung tools each inside its painted outline, and Garrity's green truck parked over the pit with its hood up.
Hollis does not lift his eyes to it. He pulls on his gloves and goes down the steps into the pit.
Milo comes up the road at ten past with his hands in his jacket and a smear of pitch on his jaw. He stops at the lip of the pit.
"You said one."
"I said one, and it's ten past." Hollis's voice comes up out of the floor. "Drain pan's by the bench."
Milo fetches it. He kneels at the edge of the pit and hands it down. Then he lowers himself in after it. Their two heads go below the line of the floor, and only their voices come up.
Jasper sits on the low wall at the edge of the apron with the notebook on his knee. Biscuit lies down in the sun on the concrete and lets out a long sigh through his nose.
"Nine-sixteenths," Hollis says.
A clink. A pause.
"That's a half."
"It's what was in the drawer."
"Then the drawer's wrong. Nine-sixteenths."
Milo's head comes up, and his arm, and he leans across the floor to the bench and runs his fingers along the row of hung wrenches inside their painted outlines and takes one down and goes back into the pit.
"Hold that pan."
"I'm holding it."
"Under the plug. Not under your knees."
A grunt. A scrape of steel on concrete.
"There. Now hold it there. I'll break it loose, and you..."
"I've got it."
"Wait for me to..."
A wet, heavy glug, like a jug tipped over. Milo yelps. Something steel bangs the floor of the pit.
"I said wait!"
"You said you'd break it loose!"
"I said wait for me to break it loose!"
Hollis comes up the steps out of the pit first. Then Milo, black to the elbow on his right side, oil running in a thin stream off his fingers and spattering on the concrete, his sleeve plastered to his arm. He holds the arm out from his body as if it belongs to somebody else. A black thumbprint sits on his cheek beside the pitch.
Hollis stands at the top of the steps and holds his eyes on the boy.
Then he laughs.
It comes out of him short, a bark, and Jasper's pen stops. Then it comes again, longer, and Hollis bends with his gloved hands on his knees, and the laugh keeps coming, a dry, helpless rasp, until he has to straighten and press one hand flat against his ribs.
"It's not funny," Milo says.
"It's a little funny."
"It's not."
"It's a little funny." Hollis pulls a rag off the bench and tosses it. It lands on Milo's shoulder and hangs there. "Pan caught most of it. You'll live. Wash at the trough, and use the soap that's out there, not the snow."
Milo stalks off down the road toward the green, his arm held out, leaving a dotted black trail on the frost.
Hollis turns. His eyes find Jasper on the wall with the pen in his hand.
"You writing that down?"
"Yes."
Hollis grunts. He goes back to the bench and takes the drain plug out of his glove and turns it under the work lamp, checking the threads.
"Write I laughed."
"It's down."
Hollis sets the plug on the bench. He picks up the new filter, turns it in his hand, and holds it a while without fitting it.
"How many?" he asks.
The pole stands behind Jasper on the far side of the
ditch. He doesn't turn to it.
"You want to know?"
Hollis turns the filter.
"No," he says.
He goes back down the steps into the pit.
In an hour under the truck and over it, he does not once lift his eyes to the far side of the road. Dr. Voss walks by with her bag at a quarter to two, going toward Garrity's house, and he lifts a hand to her from the hood. Hettie walks by with the goat, and he calls after her that the turnips had better be the Saturday price he heard about; she tells him what the Saturday price is, and he says that's robbery, and she says it is. Neither one of them turns to the pole.
At 2:30 he lets the hood down. It shuts with a deep clean clap that rings off the walls of the shop.
Jasper writes. 2:31. Garrity's truck done. H.V. let the hood down.
***
At six Delphine has her table out on Bart's step again, with the egg basket and the dish towel and the ball of string and the brown tags.
The line runs down the lane past the pole. Thirty tonight. She lets them in six at a time.
"Good evening! In you come, out of that cold. Telephones in the basket. Name on the tag. You'll have them back going out, with a sheet."
A girl in a white knitted cap holds her phone up to Delphine's face, the glass toward her. On it, small, the lane, the line, the table, the back of a girl in a white knitted cap holding up her phone.
"I'm watching it," the girl says. "I'm on it right now. Look."
"Then you'll miss yourself, love." Delphine holds out a brown tag. "Name."
The girl holds the screen at arm's length, where a tiny version of herself holds up a tiny screen. She laughs once, high and startled. Then she ties the tag on and lays the phone on the dish towel and goes in with her hands in her pockets.
Delphine catches Jasper's eye over the basket.
"I had a man from the trucks in at four," she says. "A very nice young man in a gray vest. He wanted to know if I'd wear the mustard scarf tonight. The one from the first episode." She ties a tag with a hard little jerk. "He said it tests."
"What did you tell him?"
She lifts one end of tonight's scarf, a green one with orange birds on it, and lets it drop.
"Next," she says.
Inside, the room steams. Bart has pushed his tables together again under the lamp and spread the split sacks. The pot tonight holds barley and onion. Jasper takes the low stool by the flour bin and opens the notebook on his knee.
Sylvie tells the six about the pot in her hand in the city kitchen. She tells it in a different order from last night. She opens with the bus breaking down at the bottom of the rise and walks backward to the kitchen, and stops in a different place, and Jasper writes, Same story. Started at the bus, Stopped at the beans.
Halfway through it, a sharp smell crosses the room. Char.
Bart's head jerks up from the table. He swears under his breath, a word his mother would have taken the rolling pin to him for, and wrenches the oven door open. Smoke rolls out under the lamp. He draws the peel out with three round loaves on it, and the near one has gone black across its whole top, a crust like a burnt hillside.
The six visitors go quiet over it.
Bart considers it. Flour sifts off his forearms.
Then he sets it on the board in the middle of the table and cracks it open with his two thumbs. Steam pours up out of the white heart of it. He tears off the black lid and tosses it to the floor, where Biscuit stops it with his chin.
"This one's from listening," Bart says. He pushes the board toward the six. "I was listening to her and not the oven. Eat that. That's what it tastes like when Sylvie talks."
A woman at the far end laughs with her hand over her mouth. The man beside her laughs into his soup. Sylvie keeps her face straight for two seconds, then her shoulders go; she lowers her eyes to the cigar box and shakes her head.
Jasper writes. 6:52. Bread burned (B.Q., listening). "That's what it tastes like when Sylvie talks."
The six tear the burnt loaf to pieces and eat it all.
***
When he comes out at half past eight the lane has gone black and hard with cold, and the stars stand thick over the ridge.
At the cord Danielle sits on the frost with a sleeping bag around her shoulders and her phone in both hands. Its glow lights her face from below.
"She's gone," she says.
"Who?"
"The voice. They turned her off. At seven-twelve." Danielle holds the phone up to him. "It's just the window now."
On the glass, Bart's window. Fogged gold to the top. Behind the fog, seven people bend and straighten around a table, and Bart moves between them with a ladle. No card. No voice. From the phone, faint, the clink of spoons on crockery, half a second behind the clink that comes down the lane through the real glass.
The number in the corner reads 33,816,040.
Under the picture, the column climbs. Slower now. He can read it.
I made soup
tearing my bread like he said
my grandmother had a pump like that
he burned it lol
I made soup too. barley. I never make anything.
goodnight bakery
"Two hours of a window," Danielle says. "I've been sitting here two hours."
"Why?"
She thinks about it. Her breath goes up white in the glow.
"I don't know," she says. "Nobody's trying to make me feel anything."
Jasper does not write it. It is hers.
***
At twenty to ten he walks back up the lane toward Sylvie's.
The dish truck at the foot of Mill Lane idles on the verge with its engine running for the heat. In the cab, a man sleeps with his head against the window, his breath ringing the glass. On the dash the small screen glows.
It shows the lane from the pole across from Delphine's shop. The porch, swept bare. The card in the door, turned to its blank side. On the top step, a scruffy dog lies curled with his nose under his tail, one ear folded the wrong way, his side going up and down.
Biscuit. He left the bakery at nine without a word to anyone and went where he wanted.
The number under the picture reads 41,227,903.
Below it, the column scrolls. One phrase, over and over, in a hundred hands.
goodnight biscuit
goodnight biscuit
goodnight biscuit
Up the lane, across the ruts, a lamp burns in Wren's window. While he stands there, her hand comes up into the light and draws the curtain across. It is half past nine. She draws it every night at half past nine. On the little screen on the dash, a half second behind, her window goes dark too.
On top of the cord post at the foot of the green, the paper cup sits where he left it at a quarter past five. The coffee inside has frozen solid under a skin of white.
Jasper stands in the road and takes out the notebook. The cold has thickened the ink again. He breathes on the nib.
9:41. W.A. drew her curtain. Dog asleep on D.O.'s step, Lane dark.
He holds the pen over the page. On the dash the number turns over, and over again.
He leaves it off. He closes the book and puts it in his breast pocket and walks on up the lane in the dark.