Chương 42: Chapter 41: The Corn Road

The first snow came on Saturday morning, while Abe was walking down to his shift. It wasn't the settling kind. It came down in small dry flakes that died the moment they touched anything, and it made the whole of Calder look like a photograph somebody had shaken. Halfway down the hill his phone went. Croft. NO LESSON TODAY. THE WHOLE FAMILY IS ARRIVING FOR CHRISTMAS AND I AM REQUIRED. He'd written it like that, required, and then a second message a minute later: NEXT SATURDAY.

BRING YOUR OWN SWORD, MINE ARE ALL BEING COUNTED. Abe stood in the falling snow with Tench's question still folded up in his head, ready and nowhere to put. Then he pocketed the phone and went to work, because next Saturday was a real day and it would come. Riddell's shop, for fifty weeks of the year, had in it Riddell, Abe, and time. The Corn Road market changed that in one morning. By nine there were six people waiting at the counter.

By ten there was a line to the door, and the bell over it had given up going quiet. The weekend help was a boy named Col, from the year below, hired on Thursday. He wrapped purchases fast and neatly, added up in his head, and could not sharpen anything at all. He had tried, on his own pocketknife, in the back. Riddell had looked at the result and moved the stone out of his reach, like a man childproofing a kitchen.

"Edges to Abe," Riddell said, once, at about half past nine, and that was the shop's entire reorganization. The edges came all day. Not his own kitchen knives, done to death in a stopped yard. Other people's. A barber brought six pairs of scissors in a leather roll. He stood guard at the counter the entire time Abe worked them, holding the seventh pair like a hostage. When he left he shook Abe's hand across the counter and told Riddell to double whatever he was paying, and Riddell thanked him and did not.

A carving knife with a tip somebody had used as a screwdriver. A pair of dressmaker's shears that had been dropped so many times the blades crossed like a badly told lie. A hand plane older than Peg. A chisel with a rolled edge. A filleting knife off one of the boats, sharpened wrong for years by somebody strong, so that fixing it meant undoing another man's whole habit first. Every one of them was a different problem. Every one of them was somebody's, and wanted back by four.

Abe stood at the wheel and the stone with his sleeves up and had the best working day of his life. A woman brought in her father's folding razor and stood at the counter while Abe worked it, telling Col the whole story of it without being asked. Col wrapped it wrong twice because he was listening. Riddell charged her half of what the work was worth and told her it held its edge because the steel was better in those days, which was true, though the edge it held going out was Abe's.

By two o'clock his hands knew things about other people's tools that his own steel could never have taught him. The filleting knife's owner leaned left. The shears had been dropped by somebody impatient and picked up by somebody sorry, over and over, for years. Somewhere in the middle of the afternoon, between the plane and a hatchet, the screen lit. Sharpening · Novice Lv 7 (0 / 2, 450) He stood and looked at it with the hatchet in his hand.

Five weeks of his own edges had moved that skill nothing at all, and one Saturday of strangers' ruined ones had moved it a whole level. He heard Ada in his head, wiping her hands on her skirt, and got back to work.

"You're smiling at a hatchet," said Riddell, going past with an armful of wrapping paper.

"It's a good hatchet."

"It's a terrible hatchet. Mind your thumb." At closing, Riddell counted the drawer twice, which Abe had never seen him need to do. Then he put the day's wage in Abe's hand and added six marks on top of it.

"Market rate," he said, before Abe could open his mouth.

"You did three days of edges in one. If you thank me I'll take it back." So Abe put fourteen and six in his pocket and said nothing, loudly, and Riddell almost smiled and went back to the drawer. Col got his envelope too, and looked inside it, and looked again.

"Is it always like this?"

"Two weekends a year," said Riddell.

"The rest of the year it's like a library where things get sharpened. Go home, both of you." This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon. Peg and June came down at dusk, when the shop shut, and the three of them walked up the Corn Road together into the market. Abe had crossed that road his whole life. Six lanes of it, wide enough to land a plane on.

He'd once stood in the middle of it at night with his arms full of bread and the whole thing stopped around him. It wasn't a road tonight. Both ends were shut to traffic, and the stalls ran up the middle in two long strings of light. The snow came down through the bulbs in little dry flecks, and half of Calder was out in it with their coats done up. They went up slowly, because Peg shopped like an inspector. Half the school kitchens were out in the crowd.

Peg got stopped every forty feet by women who knew her, and talked to each one in a shorthand Abe couldn't follow. She laughed once, properly, at something a woman called Rene said out of the side of her mouth. Abe had never heard about any Rene. June had, and waved.

"Four marks for that cheese," she said, to the cheese.

"It was three in the shop on Thursday and it'll be three in the shop on Monday. All it's done since Thursday is come outside." She bought it anyway. She put it in her bag like it had won an argument. The top end of the road had no lights on it. Abe noticed that early, between stalls, and kept walking anyway. There was a stall selling wooden spoons, and Peg stopped at it for a long time and did not buy a wooden spoon. She had a drawer full of wooden spoons.

She looked at these ones the way other people look at holidays, said something rude about the price of the plain ones, and moved on with her evening visibly improved. Sefton was on a stall near the middle, selling smoked fish for his uncle, wearing an apron that went around him almost twice. He straightened up when he saw them, proud and embarrassed in the same second.

"Dolan. Twenty-three days to the board." He wrapped a piece of fish Peg was pointing at.

"My uncle says if you're this deep at eighteen he'll take you on a boat sight unseen, and I told him you get seasick, and he said everyone gets seasick."

"I don't get seasick."

"You look like you'd get seasick." He gave June the end pieces for nothing, and his uncle, further down the stall, saw him do it and let it go. Further up, Nell Mott went past them with a stall's spare trestle under one arm, carrying it like a loaf of bread. She walked it up to a woman who was still setting out candles. Nobody looked twice. That had stopped being remarkable sometime in the autumn, and Abe watched it go by and thought that was the best thing about it.

June's friend Kerry turned out to be a tall girl with paint on her hands. She talked at double speed, and she called Abe "the famous one" without any cruelty in it. Abe had heard about Kerry for two years and had never actually been shown her. He shook her hand and June looked briefly like a person whose two worlds had touched without catching fire. The two of them worked the candle stall like an audit. Kerry held candles up, and June judged them against some standard only the two of them knew.

They put every single one back. The stallholder watched it happen with the patience of a man who had raised daughters.

"We're not buying," June explained to him, kindly, on the way out.

"We're deciding."

"Come back when you've decided," the man said, and meant the opposite, and June liked him for it and said so the moment they were out of earshot. The dark came down the road faster than they walked up it. Stall by stall the bulbs took over from the sky, and the snow turned gold where the light caught it, and ordinary Calder faces went past looking better than they looked all year. They ate fries out of paper further up, standing in a row against a shut shopfront with the heat coming through the wrapping.

Peg said the price of them was robbery and ate more of them than anybody. At the top of the road, where the last stalls ran out and the light got thinner, there was a different kind of trade going on. No bulbs up there. A trestle, a scale, and a man in a good coat standing behind a row of small tins. Men came up off the late shift in ones and twos, and each one bought a tin, cracked the lid right there at the board, and set off up the hill at a half-jog.

The man in the good coat weighed a tin for a docker still in his work boots, named a number too quiet to carry, and took coins without looking at them. His eyes did the looking at other things. They went along the line, and over the crowd, and once, briefly, across Abe, and moved on. Abe slowed without meaning to.

"Essence," Peg said, not slowing at all.

"Dusk lots. Come on." He came on, but he looked back once, at the scale and the tins and the thin line of tired men. He filed it away in the part of his head that never put anything down. They walked home down the middle of the road in the last of the snow, with the stalls still lit behind them. June did the whole day back to them as they walked. The candles they had rightly refused. Kerry's opinion of everybody. Sefton's apron, twice around, which she was going to bring up at school until summer.

Peg said the girl could talk down a radio, and said it warmly, and June took it as the compliment it was. Behind them, somebody at the top end started taking a stall's lights down early, and the road got one string darker. Nobody else was leaving. Calder stayed out in the cold in its hundreds, spending what it had on a Saturday it would still be talking about in spring. Abe carried the bag.

His shoulders had done nine hours of other people's edges and the bag weighed nothing at all, and he thought about saying so and kept it to himself, because it would have sounded like showing off, and it was. The bigger thought from Friday was still down there, turning over. Tench had said the somebodies were all in families. Somewhere in that there was a way in for a boy without one, and Abe couldn't see it yet, and he knew better than to force it. Supper was the market carried home.

The fish Sefton had wrapped, the cheese that had won its argument, and bread from the good stall, because Peg said the first weekend was for living a little, and dared anybody to quote her on it. At supper June laid out her tomorrow like a general. She had business at the market, she said. The business was Nadia, and the business was forty marks of her own stuff that had been stuck in a room on Gill Street since the end of October, and tomorrow it was coming home.

Peg heard the whole plan out over her cup and ruled that they were both going, that the coat had better be all of it, and that if Nadia's mother tried to feed them they were to say yes.

"And you're coming," she told Abe.

"You're not doing anything. You can stand there and be famous at people."