Spile

The cask of pressed apples had been resting in the cool of the cellar since the first cold night, and Nyra judged it ready. She fit a small wooden peg into the hole near the base, a spile, she called it, cut and whittled to let the cider draw without spilling the whole barrel at once. The girl crouched beside her with a cup, watching the pale gold thread run and catch the lamplight.

“Will you write down how much the barrel gave?” the girl asked, holding the cup steady under the slow bright stream.

Nyra nodded and reached for the cellar ledger on its shelf. “I will put the gallons in the autumn column, and the date beside them, so next year I know whether the trees were generous or thin,” Nyra said. “The number is a true thing, and it will keep. But the number is not the taste, and it never pretends to be.”

The girl drank, and her eyes went wide at the sharp sweet cold of it, and she could not find a word for the pleasure. “Then the page misses the best part,” she said, a little sorry for it. Nyra answered while she steadied the spile. “A book gathers what can be set down in a line and counted, and leaves the rest to the one who was there. The gallons travel from year to year on the page. The taste stays here, in the cup and in you, and asks nothing of the ink.”

They filled a jug for the kitchen and eased the spile back until the thread of cider slowed and stopped. The girl carried the jug up the cellar steps with both hands, careful not to spill, the cold of it against her palms. The book keeps the count of the gallons, and you keep the tasting of it.