The Greywater Gazette
Monday Arrives on Schedule; the Town Meets It; the Box Holds Thirteen and Nobody Needs Anything From It Today
On the morning of Monday, November the seventeenth, Greywater Falls opened for business in the ordinary way: Doreen Halloway's lights came on at six, the hardware's coffee pot was on by six-fifty, and the Kettle's sign flipped to OPEN at seven-fifteen, which is the sequence the town has always kept and which returned, this morning, to being simply the sequence the town keeps, without annotation, without ceremony, without the particular quality of noticing that has attended every small ordinary thing for the past six weeks. The frost was hard and the square was glazed and by eight o'clock there were four sets of footprints in it going four different directions, which is what footprints in a glazed square are supposed to look like, and this editor stood at the Gazette window and found the ordinary distribution of footprints to be, unexpectedly, the most beautiful thing she had seen all month.
Calloway was at the Kettle at eight with the library's acquisition ledger — the 2009 one, the interrupted one — open on the counter beside her eggs, and she had a pencil and was making notes in the margin in a hand that Marigold described, later, as 'very librarian,' which is to say precise and small and clearly accustomed to fitting a great deal of meaning into very little space. Gerald Pith arrived at eight-seventeen, saw the ledger, and sat down two stools over and looked at it with the expression of a man who has been waiting for the next task to present itself and is quietly pleased to find it already seated and ordering breakfast. By nine o'clock they had agreed on a working arrangement for Wednesday mornings. Marigold kept the coffee coming and did not write anything on her wrist, which means she has found a method for holding the important things that does not require her skin as a notepad, and this editor considers that a resolution of a kind.
T. Aldercott was at the Gazette at ten with the typewriter case and a small paper bag from Halloway's — two Standings, unrequested — which she set on the corner of the layout table before she opened the case, and which communicated, in the grammar of provisions left in working rooms, that she has been here long enough to know how this editor's mornings go and has elected to do something about it. She typed until noon. The worktable held the sound of it the way the worktable holds everything: without comment, without interpretation, simply present. At noon she read back what she had typed, and then she folded it and looked at the lost-and-found box — not the searching look, not the relieved look, but a third look that this editor had not seen before and did not have a name for until she wrote it in the second notebook this evening: the look of a person who has received what they came for and is deciding, calmly, what to do next.
At dusk the returned gathered at the ice-line. The hum lasted two minutes and fifteen seconds. It was shorter than yesterday, and cleaner, and when it ended it ended the way a sentence ends when everything in it has been said — not trailing, not interrupted, but complete. Toby Fern recorded the duration and the temperature and the clarity and added nothing else, because there was nothing else to add. Agnes Crewe's light was on. The cups were on the table in the cottage nearest the water, as this editor knows because Agnes's door was open when she passed on the way back from the shore, and Agnes was sitting in her chair by the east-facing window with her tea, and she looked up and met this editor's eye, and she did not say anything, and this editor did not say anything, and this is, this editor has come to understand, the closest this town gets to a formal conclusion: two women in the cold dusk, the box on its shelf, the hum finished, the cups on the table, and the lake going quietly about whatever the lake goes quietly about when it is done with us for the season, which is the same thing it always does, which is simply to be the lake, patient and full and cold and ours.
From Around the Falls
Calloway and Gerald Pith Agree on a Wednesday Arrangement; the 2009 Ledger Has an Obvious Starting Point; Marigold Did Not Need to Be Asked About the Coffee
Calloway and Gerald Pith will resume the library catalogue from the interrupted Wednesday in March 2009, beginning this coming Wednesday at nine a.m. Pith told this reporter the interruption point is clear from the ink — 'You can see where the pen lifted,' he said, with the precision he deploys when a detail has been bothering him pleasantly for some time. Calloway said she expects the gap to be manageable. The coffee will be from the Kettle; Marigold has already been informed and has already said yes.
Doreen Halloway Opens Monday with Ten Standings; Serves Ten; Reports the Count Correct and the Morning Unremarkable in the Best Possible Sense
Halloway's Bakery opened at six a.m. with ten Standings on the rack, and by nine-thirty all ten had been served, and the plate with the blue border was empty and clean and in its place on the front shelf. Doreen Halloway told this reporter: 'Ten is right for a Monday. Now. The week has a sensible feeling to it.' She is wearing the good apron. She intends to wear it all week. She did not say why. The why is the apron's business.
Hank Mossley Notes the South-Window Draft Has Quieted; Does Not File a Report; Reports It Here Instead
Hank Mossley told this reporter, at nine a.m., that the draft from the sealed south window at Mossley Hardware — first noted approximately ten days ago, origin unknown — appeared this morning to have stopped. 'Could be the cold sealing the frame,' he said. 'Could be something else.' He stacked the rock-salt bags and did not continue. This reporter did not ask him to continue. The frame is sealed. The draft is gone. These are facts, and facts in Greywater Falls have learned to stand without explanation, because explanations here have a tendency to raise more questions than they settle, and it is a Monday, and everyone has things to do.
Letters to the Editor
“The cups are on the table. The tea was hot. The window faces east and the ice was very bright this morning when the sun came through it and I sat in my chair and watched it and thought: yes. That is the word. Yes. You do not need me to explain what it is yes to. You have been living in it all season. — A. Crewe, age 91, who has been here before and expects to be here again, and finds both prospects agreeable.”
“I closed the volume. Twenty-four entries. I don't know what the category is yet but I know I'll know it when the next thing needs one. Agnes says that's how categories work — you don't build them until you have more than one thing that needs to go inside. I think she's right. She usually is, even when she sounds like she's talking about something else. The rowboat is settled. The shadow is correct. I'll start a new notebook when there's something to start it for. — T. Fern, Lake Watch, Vol. 1, closed.”