The Count

Nyra sat on the low stool with the seed tin open in her lap, and the girl knelt beside the counting cloth where the beans were sorted into small grey hills. “That is forty, and these are forty more,” the girl said, pressing her finger to each hill in turn. “Eighty for the long bed, and a handful over.”

“Write the eighty,” Nyra said. “The handful we will not write, because a handful is not a number, it is a mercy. The bed will take what the bed will take.” She tilted the tin so the last seeds slid to one corner, a small dry rushing, and she did not hurry it.

The girl made the mark in the book, two strokes and a loop, and sat back on her heels. “But if I come in the spring and read eighty, I will plant eighty,” she said. “I will not know about the handful. I will not know you let the bed decide.”

“Then the book will have told you a true thing and kept a truer one,” Nyra said. “A tally is an honest animal. It counts what it is shown and nothing else. It cannot count the morning, or the give in the soil, or the way your hand grows tired and generous at the end of a row.”

The girl looked at the eighty she had written, and then at the handful still warm in her palm. “So I should write the handful too,” she said. “No,” said Nyra, and there was something close to a smile in it. “You should remember that every number has a handful beside it, and go out in the spring prepared to be generous. The book counts. You must be the mercy it cannot hold.”