Thresh

The threshing came late in the season, when the last of the grain had dried on its stalks and the girl had grown tall enough to swing the flail without stumbling. Nyra set the ledger on the bench by the barn door, where the light fell in a long pale bar across the open page. She wrote the date first, and then the weather, a dry wind out of the north, and left a space below for the count that would come once the work was done.

All morning the flails rose and fell, and the grain leapt from the husk, and the chaff drifted up into the light and hung there like something undecided. The floor grew gold with the loosened seed. Nyra and the girl worked in a rhythm that needed no counting, a rhythm older than any book, and the dust settled into the creases of their hands and the folds of their sleeves.

When the seed was gathered and measured, Nyra carried the basket to the bench and wrote the number into the waiting space. Four bushels, and a little over, from the far rows. The figure sat on the line, exact and quiet, and told the truth of the yield as far as a number can tell it.

But the ledger did not hold the ache that had settled across the shoulders of the girl, nor the way the chaff had caught the sun and turned the whole barn to a haze of drifting gold. It did not hold the smell of the broken husks, sharp and sweet at once, nor the sound of the flail finding its beat and keeping it. These things had no column and no number, and so they stayed where they had happened, in the barn and in the bodies that had done the work.

A book gathers what can be set down in a line and counted, and leaves the rest to the one who was there. Nyra closed the cover over the day and knew that the four bushels would be remembered, and that the gold haze and the rhythm and the ache would not, except by those who had stood in the barn while the light moved across the floor. She thought this a fair division, the book keeping the count and the girl keeping the rest, and she let the matter rest with the closing of the page.