The Name the Page Would Hold

The dry pods rattled as the girl broke them open over the wide bowl, and the beans dropped in, most of them the pale streaked kind she had shelled since she was small. But one short row had come up other this year, its pods a deeper shade and its seeds nearly round, and those she kept in a cup off to the side. Nyra sat across from her, splitting the common pods with a thumbnail worn to the work. For a time neither of them spoke, and there was only the light fall of the seed into the bowl.

The girl turned one of the round beans in her fingers. “What do we call these?” she asked. “They are not like the others, and I have nothing to write over them in the book.” Nyra glanced at the cup and did not stop her shelling.

“You do not need a name to grow them,” Nyra said. “Put them in the ground next spring and they will come up round again, and your hands will know them from the rest with no word said over them. A name is no use out here in the rows. It never once taught a bean how to be itself.” She tipped her pod into the bowl. “But the book is another matter.”

“Give it ten years,” she went on, “and there will be a great many beans set down in these pages, and every one of them written as beans and nothing more. With no name of its own, this one you took notice of will slide back in among the rest, and whoever reads later will never know it was once held apart. The page cannot see the deeper shade the way your eye can. It keeps only what you hand it. A name is the one thread that saves this bean from being lost in the crowd of its own kind.”

The girl thought while the beans went on falling. Then she gave it a name, a plain one, after the far field where the odd row had stood. Nyra nodded and pushed the cup toward her. “Write it while it is still only ours,” she said. “A thing gets its name early or it goes without, and what goes without, the years will rub away.” So the girl opened the book and set the new name down, and there on the page the round bean stood apart at last from all the rest.