Scantling

The gate had sagged through the wet autumn, and Nyra meant to brace it before the first hard frost. She chose a length of pale timber from the lean to and set it across the trestles, a scantling, she named it, a piece sawn narrow and true, meant for bracing and framing rather than for burning. The girl held the far end while Nyra ran a pencil along the square, marking where the cut would fall.

A scantling was measured before it was ever cut, Nyra explained, because a brace that was a finger too short would hold nothing, and one too long would bind and split. The girl watched the numbers go down in the margin of the garden book, the length and the width and the count of the braces they would need, each figure neat in the faint grey lead.

When the girl asked why the measuring went into the book at all, Nyra set the saw aside for a moment. A book gathers what can be set down in a line and counted, and leaves the rest to the one who was there. The measure is the part that can travel, she said, so that next autumn the right timber is cut on the first try. The feel of a true brace under the hand is the part that stays, and it needs no page to hold it.

They cut the scantling along the mark and offered it up against the leaning gate, and it settled into the angle as though it had always belonged there. The girl leaned her weight on the gate and felt it hold firm where before it had swung loose and complaining. Something in the solid stillness of it pleased her more than any number in the book could.

Nyra wrote the date beside the count and closed the cover, and the two of them stood a while in the cooling light, looking at the mended gate. The book keeps the measure of the scantling, and you keep the squaring of it.