The Guest at the Table

A woman from the far households came to the gate near dusk with word of her own beans, how a rot had taken the low row before the early cold. Nyra listened, and thanked her, and when the woman had gone the girl reached for the pen, ready to add the news among their own rows.

“Wait,” Nyra said. “Whose eyes saw that rot? Not yours, and not mine. We can hold her telling, but we must hold it as hers.” She turned to a clean corner of the page, apart from the day’s own marks.

“A book like this is a witness,” she went on. “Most of what it keeps, we stood beside and watched grow or fail. That kind of entry answers to us. But a thing carried here by another mouth answers to that mouth, and the page should say so plainly.”

So they wrote it: the woman’s name, the low row, the rot before the cold, and a small note that this came by her word and not by their own looking. The girl saw how the borrowed telling sat a little apart, a guest given a chair but not the head of the table.

“Keep both kinds,” Nyra told her, “for both are worth the ink. Only never let them blur. A day you tended and a day you were merely told of will age into very different trust, and whoever reads after us should be able to tell at a glance which is which.”