The Straight Furrow

A neighbor stopped at the gate as the light was going, wanting to know how many baskets of plums the two households had traded across the young season. It was a figure from the new book, the one the girl kept in her own order, with the counts set down first and the weather after. Nyra stood back and let the girl reach for it.

In the old book such a number would have hidden below the day and the sky, and the reader would have had to travel down each entry to reach it. But the girl had ordered her pages by a different plan. Her thumb ran straight down the near column, where every count stood in a clean file, and she found the plums in the time it takes to draw a breath.

She read the total to the neighbor, who nodded and counted the last baskets into the barrow and went home content. The girl closed the book and set it back beside the full one on the shelf. She said nothing about the speed of it, but a small warmth showed at the corner of her mouth.

Nyra had seen it too. The next morning, when she needed to check her own count of onions put by for winter, she did not open the old book out of habit. She crossed instead to the new one and turned to the page where the counts came first, and she found her figure as quickly as the girl had found the plums.

She made her note and left the book open a moment on the table, the near column running down like a straight furrow. Then she set it back on the shelf, a little forward of the old one now, and returned to her work. The order the girl had chosen had earned its place, and Nyra let it stand.