Barrow

The barrow had one wheel and two handles, and Nyra loaded it with the last of the squashes while the girl watched. “A full barrow is not about how much you can pile on,” Nyra said. “It is about where the weight sits over the wheel.” She set a heavy squash well forward, close to the wheel, and the lighter ones behind, and lifted the handles with hardly a strain.

The girl tried to lift a barrow she had packed herself, with the biggest squashes stacked at the back near the handles, and the handles pressed down on her wrists like a scold. “It fights me,” she said. Nyra nodded and had her shift the load forward until the wheel carried the burden instead of her arms.

They wheeled a dozen loads up the path to the shed before the light went. Nyra wrote the tally in the book, the count of barrows and the weight of each, so that the whole of the day could be read back later in a straight column of figures.

“You wrote down the number,” the girl said, “but not the trick of it.” Nyra answered that this was always the way. “A book gathers what can be set down in a line and counted, and leaves the rest to the one who was there.” The balance of a loaded barrow, the small lean into the first push, the way a true wheel runs quiet over the ruts, was not a thing a figure could keep.

So the girl learned it in her hands instead, load by load, until the barrow rolled as though it wished to go. The book keeps the count of the barrows, and you keep the balancing of it.