Thumb

The account book had a soft place at the foot of every right-hand page, worn there by the press of a thumb across many winters. Nyra set the girl in front of it and turned the leaves slowly, so she could see how the paper had gone the color of weak tea, and how it had thinned until the lamp shone faintly through. A book keeps the record of the hand that keeps the book, and this one had kept the shape of a thumb long after the sums were paid.

In the garden it was the same mark, Nyra told her, only pressed into living things instead of paper. The thumb that firmed the soil over a seed, the thumb that pinched a side-shoot from the tomato, the thumb that tested a plum for the give of ripeness. None of it was written down, and yet the beds held the record of it as plainly as any ledger held a column of figures.

The girl asked whether a book could hold that kind of knowing, the knowing that lived in the ball of a thumb. Nyra thought for a while before she answered. A book can hold the name of the plum and the week that it ripened, she allowed, but it cannot hold the give of the fruit under a hand. That part has to be learned from the fruit itself.

So they did both things together through the long afternoon. They wrote the harvest into the ledger in careful rows, the weight and the date and the variety, and then they went down the row of trees so the girl could learn the other record, the one with no pages. Nyra guided the small thumb to the swell of a plum and waited until the girl felt the difference between a fruit that was ready and one that would keep a few days more.

By dusk the account book had a new line in it, and the girl had the beginning of a mark of her own forming at the pad of her thumb. One record would outlast the other, Nyra knew. The book would yellow and soften and keep its figures, and the knowing in the hand would fade when the hand was gone. Between the two of them they would hold as much of the season as anything could hold, which was never the whole of it, and was enough.