unclaimed-recollection / 29 - First Local.md# 29. First Local > **Narrator:** Odran Maresh · **Setting:** Pinecliff, Tern, Crownward · **Act 3, Part 8** > Odran counts the days of a new routine between Pinecliff, Tern and Crownward.  I am on the evening local, on the sixth day, with the cold of Crownward still in my coat, and the man across from me has his hat on his knee and is looking at the dark going by the window as if it were a page he expects to be asked about. I shall tell it in order. I have been told that I tell things in an order that makes them sound like a charter, and I have decided to take this as a compliment. I want it understood that I did not plan the bed. That is, I planned the bed. I did not plan *tonight's* bed, or the first night's, which is where it begins. I ordered the frame the day after the yard, by the leaf at the halt, from a joiner on the Tern side whose cart goes up the line once a week, and I paid him in advance so that I should not be able to change my mind. It was plain pale timber, a hand wider than I thought reasonable and a good deal longer. It came up on the cart the day before Zdena's table, with two men and a mattress rolled in oilcloth, and Resa held the door and carried the foot of it up the three steps without being asked and without a word, and when it was in she went to the dresser in her own kitchen and came back with the blue and grey quilt, and made it up herself. "It is for guests," I said. "Mm," said Resa. That is my word. She has no business with it. I put the old frame in the coal shed, on its side, with a sack over it. I did not look at the new one again. I went out of the house the next morning with my back to it, as one leaves a room where one has said something unwise, and I took a loaf to Tern as an excuse, and what was said at Zdena's table was said plainly and I shall not repeat it. I have only to say that when we got down off the evening local at Pinecliff, in the dark, with the two satchels and the basket, I had not thought about the bed once since breakfast. I had been very careful not to. * * * It is a long walk from the halt, in the dark, for a man carrying something alive. There is a lamp on the platform and one over the post with the three bells, and they put a yellow circle on the boards and then let go of you. Sevran stopped in the circle. He did not look at the bells. I did, and the third one was flat, as it has been all my life, and I said nothing about it, and neither did he. He put his hat straight with one hand and shifted the basket on his arm. "I should like to carry it," he said. "It is mine." "I am not disputing it." "I know. I am telling you, so that you are not surprised when I do not hand it over." At the far end of the platform the kitchen door stood open with the light behind it. Resa was in the doorway, with a cloth over her shoulder and her whole attention fixed on the doorframe, as though it had made a remark. She did not come out. She did not wave. She is a woman who has run a kitchen for most of her life, and she can hold her face as still as a pan of milk, and she held it so, and it was the loudest thing I have ever seen. "Your sister," said Sevran, quietly, "is looking at that doorframe with great feeling." "She is," I said. "Come." The path goes up past the cistern and the coal shed, and there was frost already in the ruts, and our boots made a small clean sound in it. Mine on the left, his on the right. I counted us. I do not know why. It was two, and it stayed two, all the way up the hill. My house is the third. It has three steps up to the door, and a lamp over it that I leave burning because the path is bad in the dark, and I had my key out before we were close, because that is what a body does. I heard Sevran behind me going up the steps. He was counting them. I could see his lips move. He was counting them as a man does who has been told once, long ago, how many there are, and would like to find that it is still true. "Three," he said, at the top. "Three," I agreed, and opened the door. It was dark and cold, and it smelled of stone and of a stove that had been banked at six that morning by a man who had not expected to be back with company. I went in and found the match, and the lamp, and the little old light on its stool in Resa's brown knitted cosy came up on its own as it does for me, slowly and warmly, like a dog lifting its head. The room stood up out of the dark. The table under the window. The two chairs. The hook by the door. The shelf of papers in their string. And against the left wall, where the narrow frame had stood for as long as I have had the house, under the blue and grey quilt, a bed that was clearly intended for more than one person to lie in and not mind. I will say what I did. I stood very still, with the match still lit, until it burned my finger. Then I put it out and said nothing, in the voice of a man at a charter hearing. Sevran had come in behind me and put the basket on the floor. He took his hat off and held it. He looked at the room as he always does, in order, left to right, as if he were reading it, and he got to the left wall, and he stopped. He looked at the bed. He looked at me. He looked at the bed. "It is longer," he said. "The old frame was short," I said. "Was it?" "For anyone. In a general way." "I see." He turned the hat a quarter turn in his hands, which is the thing he does instead of putting a hand to his chest when he is not sure that a hand to his chest would be understood. "I have been told that I am tall." "Mm." "Thank you for the length," said Sevran. That was the whole of it. It was the exact and entire thing that was said about the bed, then or since, by either of us, and I thought it was a very good conversation and I would not alter a word. I went and looked at the stove with great attention. I could feel the back of my neck go the colour of a brick.  "There ought to be a chair," said Sevran, after a moment. "There is a chair. There are two." "There ought to be a third. At the corner." He was already going. "I know where it lives." I let him. I stood in my own kitchen and listened to a man go into the back room that I had put in order, and heard the scrape of a chair that has been in the back room since the autumn, and he came out carrying it by the top rail with a faint dust of the room's own air on its legs, and set it down at the corner of the table, where it had stood once before, for one afternoon. He tried it with his hand. He did not sit. "Zdena's conditions," he said. "May I?" "It is your fount." "It is Resa's. It is Zdena's. It is the house's, I am given to understand." He lifted the basket on to the table. "I am merely the man who tells it things." He drew the cloth off the crock. It is a squat brown stoneware pot with a chip out of the lip like a bite, and I would have known it across a field, and I had known it across a yard, once, on a sill. He carried it to the window. The sill in my house is a broad one, a stone slab as wide as my hand and a half, worn pale, and it faces east, which I had never thought about, in all my years in it, until Zdena said *a window the sun can find* and I said *the table is under the window* in a tone I was not proud of. He set the crock in the middle of it. He took the stoppered bottle from his satchel, the vessa water that Zdena had filled that afternoon and made him carry like a relic, and he gave it a measure from the cup, and put the cloth back, and stood back with his hands at his sides. "I shall tell it the day," he said. "I will go and see to the stove." "You need not. It is no secret. I am not telling it anything it will repeat." He cleared his throat, and addressed the sill. "I have moved house," said Sevran. "It is an hour of line and a hill. The man whose house it is says it has had me. I believe him. There are three steps, and a lamp, and a chair at the corner, and a hook by the door for the satchel, which I have used. There is a window the sun can find. The bed is longer." I looked at the stove. It did not help. "Zdena sends her regards," said Sevran, to the crock. "She says that you are not to be given onion. I wish to assure you that I have been given no onion to give." From under the cloth there came a small wet sound, a settling, like a man clearing his throat in a church. It is a ferment. It does that. Zdena says so, and she has kept founts longer than I have been alive, and I am prepared to believe her. Sevran said "There," softly, and nothing else. The old light on its stool brightened a degree. I noticed it, because I notice lights. I did not remark on it, because I have a rule about that, and because he was looking at it, and I did not want him to say it was anything but a lamp. We ate the end of Zdena's bread at the table, in the two chairs, with the third at the corner like a man who has come in late and does not wish to be introduced, and the crock on the sill with the dark behind it, and the frost starting to write on the glass.  When the bread was done I banked the stove and turned the oil lamp down. The old light stayed up on its stool, as it does. * * * On the first morning he was at the table by twenty to five, dressed, with his coat on and his hat on his knee and his satchel at his boot and a cup of tea beside him untouched, like a man waiting to be examined. "The early local is at ten to six," I said. "I am aware. I have read the terms." "It is twenty to five." "I did not wish to be late on the first day." He considered the cup. "It is the day that is remembered." I will say this for him. He did not say it to be amusing. He said it as a fact, in the way he says all of them, and then he looked up and saw my face, and the corner of his mouth moved, and I understood that he had known precisely how it would sound and had said it anyway. We had an hour. I made the tea again, because he had let the first go cold and was too well brought up to say so, and I stood at the stove and drank mine on my feet, as I do, and he stood at the window and told the crock the plans for the day, which were *a knot, if Idrin permits, and breakfast, which Zdena does not*. He wrapped it in its cloth. He put his hand on the lid for the length of one breath. I looked at the floor. I walked him down. I want it understood that nobody had asked me to. Idrin had said that he would ask me if Sevran were late. He had not said that I was to carry him to the platform like a satchel, and I should have thought it a poor reading of the terms, since Sevran can read a timetable. I went anyway. The halt is where the line begins, and I am told that a chain has two ends, and I had no objection to standing at one. Resa was in the kitchen door at the end of the platform, in the dark, with two rolls in a cloth, and she held them out as we came by without a word, and I took them. "Eat on the train," she said. "Zdena will want you hungry, and she is not to be given the satisfaction." "She will have the satisfaction anyway," said Sevran. "She has been told that I do not eat on trains." "Then you will eat on this one," said Resa, "to see her face," and looked at me for exactly as long as she is entitled to and no longer, and went in. The early local came in a few minutes late, as it does, with the lamps lit in its first carriage and four people in it. Sevran climbed up and took the window on the left and ate his roll, slowly, with great attention, and then folded the cloth in four and put it in his satchel to return. He had put the window down an inch. "I should like it recorded that I ate on the train," he said through the gap. "I will record it." "For the benefit of Zdena." "She will be told," I said, "by someone." The local drew out. He lifted a hand to the glass, flat, at the level of his shoulder, and I stood at the halt, in the cold, with my hands in my sleeves, until I could not see it. * * * I will give the rest of the week in the order that it came, because it did not have a shape and I do not wish to put one on it. He was on the early local every morning of it, and in Idrin's yard before the bell, and I know because nobody told me otherwise, which in my experience is how one learns that a thing has gone well. On the second morning, when the local had come in and he had climbed up and put the window down an inch, he said through the gap, quite gently, that I need not come. "I know I need not," I said. "I should like to be trusted with it, if it is permitted. I can tell you the time of every halt." He considered the frost on the rail. "And I should like, if I am late, for it to be mine. It is better, I think, if there is a man at the other end of the chain who is sure that I would not be." I said "Mm." I said it for some time. I stood on the platform with my hands in my sleeves, and the thing that went through me I will not set down, except to say that I was thirty-eight years old and I had been told a thing I did not know how to receive. Then I said that I would stand at the halt all the same, and he said that he would take that gladly, and the local went out. Resa had come up the hill on the fourth evening with a pan under a cloth and sat in the third chair and ate soup with us. She looked at the bed once, for the length of one spoonful, and said nothing at all with great precision, and then asked Sevran about the knot. * * * On the sixth morning I rode the early local with him, for the first time, because I was for Crownward and the line goes that way. He sat across from me at the window and ate his roll with great attention, and I looked at the larches going by in the grey, and it felt, I will say, like being in a place on purpose, which was a thing I had not felt for a month at a time in a long while. We came into Tern at ten to seven, in a blue cold, with the long sheds lit pale along the yard and the gantry against a sky the colour of slate. The local does its sigh at the platform. We got down. The wind took my collar and I let it. Zahir was at the end of the platform. He had come off the night shift, and it showed, in the way that he stood with one hip against a post like a man who had been propped there. He had his rust quilted vest on over the blue tunic, and a flask in one hand, and in the other, held out ahead of him in a posture of great and tender emergency, two glasses of tea. They were still hot. I could see it from the steam. He had seen the local come in from the shed and had poured them before it stopped. "I left out a third cup," he said, to Sevran, "and it was cold by the time I thought, and so I made two more. It is the first rule of an early arrival. One does not make a man stand at a platform without tea." He looked at me. "Good morning, Guide Maresh." "Zahir." "You are on the early local." "Today I am. I am for Crownward." "I am delighted," said Zahir, and gave me the glass. It was not the first glass he had handed me, and I was beginning to understand that it was a form of oath. We stood there, the three of us, in the cold, with the tea going down, and the freight bell not yet rung and the wind in the gantry. Zahir was grey about the eyes. He told Sevran, because he wanted to tell somebody, that his mother had written, that the first snow was coming, that she meant to come with it, as she always meant to, as she had said she would in the letter in the parcel, and that he had spent the whole night in a shed with twelve cells on the racks, doing the arithmetic of where a small woman might lie down in the middle of the Tern yard in winter. His father, he said, would not be coming. His father would be sending a goat. "Possibly a goat," said Zahir. "I have been told not to trust the word *possibly*." I had not planned to say it. I want that on the record. I do not do such things. I stood with the glass in both hands, and I looked at the rust of his vest, and at the long blue shed with its racks, and at the cot I knew was in the corner of it with the single blanket, where he has slept for three years of *not yet*, and I heard myself say: "If she wants a bed for the snow, there are rooms to be had at Pinecliff." Zahir's glass stopped on its way up. "Rooms," he said. "I did not say how many." "At Pinecliff." "It is cold," I said, "and quiet. It is an hour on the local. The kitchen is warm. The council has been short of people for years and is glad to be asked. The air is, I am told, very good." "For a goat," said Zahir slowly. "I did not say a thing about a goat." Sevran had not moved. He was looking into his tea with a degree of concentration I have seen him give only to a knot he cannot untie. He did not look at me. He did not look at Zahir. He said, with perfect gravity, "It is a very good cup," and drank some of it. Zahir looked from one of us to the other. He did it slowly, like a man working sums that have been marked *for later*. Then he drank his own tea, in one long swallow, and set the glass on the post, and took up the flask. "I shall think about it," he said, "with the greatest seriousness. In secret." "That is all I ask." "It is not all you asked," said Zahir, "but I will take it." And the first freight bell began, in the distance, far down the long sheds, a flat iron note that goes through the cold like a hand through water, and he said "Oh," and Sevran, with a look back at me that was quite grave, went off toward Zdena's beside him, and I went to find the Saddle. That was the morning I went to Crownward. I am a man who has been putting something off, and I will say what it was, since I am in the habit of exactness. I had a share of a day rate to collect. The Guild had doubled the pay for the ten days at Halloway and the two days of travel, which Vasko had told us at the fire, and which I had thought very handsome, and I had done nothing about it for a fortnight. It is collected at the Charter Hall. The Charter Hall is off Outfitters' Row. To reach Outfitters' Row, one comes out of the Terminus. And the Terminus has a wall in it. I will be honest about that. I did not put it off because I was busy. I took the Saddle on to Crownward alone, in an empty carriage, with the hills going by under a high pale sky and no snow in it yet, though the cold was the sort that thinks about it. It is an hour. I used the hour for nothing. I looked at my hands. The Charter Hall is a long timber hall with a high roof and a floor that has been walked on by a great many boots with something to prove. There is a board down one side with the charters posted, and men reading it with their heads on one side, and a bar next door where the best berths are filled, and I did not go in. The pay desk is at the end under a window. There was a young woman behind it with a stamp, and a reader, and a face she had clearly been given to wear and was wearing well. "Halloway," I said. "Vasko's crew. Maresh. Guide, support." She found it on her leaf. She touched my cord to the reader and the pulse bead warmed against my wrist, and she looked at the date, and then at me. "This is a fortnight late," she said. "It has been a busy fortnight." "Everyone's has," said the young woman, which I thought was the most accurate remark I had heard in a month. "Twelve days at the double rate is in. The artifact share will be some months yet. You will be written to." She tapped something into the leaf, and did not hide that she was doing it. "I am noting the late collection on your file. It is not a mark. It is only a note. The Hall likes to know who comes for their pay and who has to be sent for." She stamped the slip. "Is there anything else?" "No," I said. "Thank you." I went out. I stood on Outfitters' Row in the cold and the smell of waxed canvas, and watched the carts, and there was nothing else on the street between me and where I was going, and I went. * * * The Terminus is high and cold and full of boots. I have been through it a hundred times. It does not change; it is a place built by people who do not believe in stopping. The crews stand in knots under the arches with their kit around their feet, and the boards click, and the big clock over the concourse goes on being right. The Late Board hangs on the north wall on its long chains. It is a wall of cards. They hang from small brass hooks in rows, white, each with a crew's name and a date written in a clerk's hand, and the ones that have gone past their date are red. I have never seen it without people standing in front of it. They read it the way others read the weather. A man with a rolled map case. A girl of perhaps nineteen, with a kit bag bigger than she was, who had come to find her father's card and had found it and had not yet looked away. There is a keeper at the foot of it, at a little counter, in a brown apron, with a hooked pole for the high rows and a tin tray of small cups, and he has been there, I think, for the whole of my life. I stopped in front of it, where I had stood more often this autumn than I have admitted, and I want to say what I was doing the other times, now that I am able. I told myself, the first time I stood there alone, that I was knowing there was nothing to look for. That was not true. I was looking for a card with a name on it that was not the name he has. I was looking for some name a family had filed for a man who came down out of Halloway with no history at all, with a date and a street and a person who had been waiting, a card that had gone red on a long wall in a clerk's hand, that would say whose he was. I did not want it to be there. I did not want it not to be. I wanted to know whom I was to be civil to. And I stood, and I did not scan the rows, and I did not look toward the corner where the Long Side is, and I called that restraint, and it was a man holding his breath. Nobody has come. Nobody has come up the platform or written to the Guild or turned a red card. I do not say it with grief. I find, standing there, that I do not say it with anything. There is a man in my house who tells a crock about his day, and I find that I have not stopped looking, only stopped being afraid of what I would find. I found Vasko's card first. The Halloway crew. It was where it should be, third row from the top, and it was already turned, as I could see from where I stood. Face down, the plain back of it, among a hundred plain backs. You cannot tell which one. That is the whole of the custom: after, it looks like all the others. I did not look for the second card. I thought I would let it be, and I turned to go. Then the keeper, at the foot of the wall, said, "You are Maresh." I stopped. He is a stooped man with a face like the back of a spoon. He has a very mild voice. "Halloway," he said. "You are on Vasko's. I saw the roster. I was told you might come by." "By whom?" "By the instructor of record, for the trainee." He consulted a ledger on the counter, running a finger down it, like a man looking up a word. "Orek. Idrin. He was in at the start of the job, and he filed a card for the associate. A crew of one. Hallow, S. With the return date on it the same as the job." He looked up. "He asked that it be left face up for whoever turned up to turn it. He said somebody would." I could not say anything. I will give the order of what I did instead. I looked up. I looked along the fourth row from the left, with the keeper's pole beside me like a finger, and it was there. A single white card on a brass hook, among the others, with a line of clerk's writing on it that I could read from where I stood. *Hallow, S. Associate. Halloway.* A date. A second name beneath it, in the hand of a man who writes as if he were drawing a rule: *Instructor of record: Orek, I.* There was nothing on it about where he was from. There was nothing on it about anyone who was looking. It was a very small card. It was exactly as long as it had needed to be. I reached up. The wall is high, but not for a man of my height, and the cards are meant to be got at by hand. I put two fingers under the edge of it and turned it, over, from its face to its back, the way you close a book you have finished, and it caught on its small brass hook and swung once and was still. It was a plain white back among plain white backs. You could not tell which one it was. I do not know what I had expected. I had thought it would feel like something. It felt like turning a card, which is a small dry thing, a paper thing, with a very faint click at the end. Then I stood there, with my hand still up, and the whole concourse went on.  The keeper looked at me over the ledger. "That is a card turned," he said, in the plain way he says it. I have heard it said a dozen times and had never been the one it was said to. "It is the form," I said. "I know it." "Then you know what it asks." I did. When a crew turns its card, it is the custom to buy a drink for anyone still waiting beside it. It is not a great sum or a great kindness, and nobody is shamed by it. I looked along the wall. Nobody was standing beside this one. Nobody ever is, when it is a trainee's, on a hook in the fourth row. But a long way along, under the red cards, the girl with the kit bag was still where she had been when I came in, with her father's card in front of her and her hands closed on the strap of the bag, as one holds on to something that is a good deal less heavy than it looks. I asked the keeper for a cup. He took one of the small tin cups from his tray and filled it from the can, hot, with the steam going up crooked in the cold, and a smell of tea and something dark and sweet that I did not ask about. I touched my cord to his reader and paid for it, a small sum, and carried it along the wall. She looked at the cup, and then at me, with the wariness of a person who has been standing in a public place for some hours. "A card was turned," I said. "It is the custom. I am told you have been here a while." "Since the first bell." She did not take it. "It is my father's. Four days over." She said it as a fact, in the voice of someone who has said it to enough clerks. "They tell me that is not long." "It is not," I said, which is what one says, and which is true, and which I did not believe any more than she did. "May I?" She took the cup in both hands. She did not drink it. She held it as one holds the only warm thing there is. "Is yours here?" she asked, to the wall. "Somebody's. You said you turned one." "I turned one for a man who has come home," I said. "That is a different card." I did not know how I was going to finish, and I finished. "I am waiting for someone as well. I do not know who. I do not know if there is a card for him at all. I come and look from time to time, and I find that I cannot say what I am looking for, and I have decided to go on doing it anyway." I considered. "I will look for yours when I come." I do not know why I said it. I do not make promises to strangers. She did not say thank you. She nodded once, with her chin, and looked back at her father's card, and put her mouth to the cup. That was the custom, and I have found that the custom is not stupid. I left her to it. At the end of the wall I looked back along the rows, the white backs and the white faces and the few red ones, the way I have always looked at it, and for the first time I did not feel that I was holding my breath. Idrin Orek had filed a card for a man who might be waited for, and had left it face up, and had told a clerk that somebody would turn up. I do not know what Idrin knows. I have decided, for the sake of my own peace, not to ask. I know that he counts heads. I know that he said, at a table, that a chain has two ends. And I know that a man who files a card for a trainee on the first day of a job, and does not tell him, has made up his mind about something and has seen no need to mention it. I did not tell Sevran about the card, then or since. There is no reason that he should be told that it exists. He would feel obliged to thank it. * * * I was on the footbridge a little before six, when I came in on the Saddle. I had no reason to be early, and I had decided to take it seriously. The lamps were coming up one by one along the platform and the wind had gone round to the north. I stood at the middle of the bridge at the rail and looked down at the local standing on its line with its doors open and its lamps lit, two green carriages and a brake van with a stove-pipe, in an ordinary light, being an ordinary train. Idrin Orek came along the bridge from the yard side, with his coat done to the throat and a folded sheet in his hand, on his way, I supposed, to the freight office. He did not stop to say good evening. He stopped beside me and looked at the local as well. "Six days," said Idrin. "In my yard before the bell on every one of them, by a margin I find excessive." "I had gathered." "You had not. I have not said it to you." He folded the sheet once more. "I told you that if he were late I should ask you. I had a question prepared." He looked at me, level, for about as long as it takes to count a head. "I find I have no use for it." He nodded, a quarter of an inch, and went on down the stair, and I stood where I was with my hand on the rail, and found that I had nodded back. Sevran came up the stair from the yard at a quarter past six, with his satchel over his shoulder and his hat on, and stopped beside me at the rail. I think he had been counting my step, though he did not say so. "You are early," he said. "I am not late." I did not move from the rail. "I have been asked, specially, not to be." "I am very glad of it." He turned his head. "Your boots are cold." "They are in Crownward. It is a cold place." "Yes. I am told so." He looked at me for a moment, as he does, in order, left to right, as if reading me. I do not know what he found. I had not tied my face in any particular way. "Was it a good day?" "It was a day," I said. He came down the stair with me. We took the local. I handed the satchels up the step and he took the hand that was held out, because it was there, for as long as it takes to climb a step, and no longer, and we found the window seat on the left, facing, with the basket's absence between our boots, and I felt that something was a little wrong with the way I was sitting, and it was that there was nothing in my hands. The doors shut. The local drew out with its long small sigh. Tern went by, the gantry, the long shed with its pale blue lights in their racks, and behind us the chime came across the yards, four notes, falling. He gave them back, as he does, under his breath. I did not.  That is the sixth day. It is almost done. There will be a seventh, and the early local, and the third chair at the corner of the table, and a crock on a sill that has been told the day. I have not told it how the day went in Crownward, and I do not think I shall. Across from me he has put his hat back on his knee. He is watching the dark. "How was Crownward?" he asks. "Mm," I say. He is silent for the space of the first halt. Then, without turning his head, in the grave careful voice of a man who has been told a rule and been waiting for years to find it of use, he says: "That is not no." I look out at the larches going by like a row of lit lamps, and the corner of my mouth is where a smile would be, and for once in my life I am sure that it is allowed.