Gudgeon

The garden shutter had begun to drop and scrape the sill whenever the wind caught it, and Nyra meant to set it true before the autumn gales. She showed the girl the gudgeon, the iron eye fixed fast in the frame, and the pintle that dropped into it so the shutter could swing. “One half stays still and gives the turning a place to happen,” Nyra said, lifting the shutter free of its worn socket.

“If the gudgeon never moves, how can it be the thing that lets the shutter swing?” the girl asked, turning the loose pin over in her fingers. Nyra wiped the old grease from the eye and held it to the light to see if the ring had worn thin.

“It moves nothing, and yet nothing turns without it,” Nyra answered. “The pin does the swinging, but only because the eye holds it to one steady place. I will note the mending in the garden book, the date and the one eye regreased. A book gathers what can be set down in a line and counted, and leaves the rest to the one who was there.”

The girl fitted the pin back down into the greased eye and swung the shutter gently to and fro. “Then why write the eye down, when it is the whole shutter that keeps out the rain?” she asked. “Because the page can hold that the gudgeon was set right,” Nyra said. “It cannot hold the way the shutter hangs easy now, or the small quiet of a thing that no longer scrapes the sill.”

They hung the shutter true and swung it once to be sure, and it moved without complaint upon its steady eye. The girl rested a hand on the frame and felt the whole shutter ride light upon the one fixed gudgeon. The book keeps the place of the gudgeon, and you keep the hanging of it.