Stave

The water pail by the well had sprung a slow leak where one stave had shrunk loose from the ring, and Nyra meant to mend it before the first hard frost split the wood outright. She carried the pail to the bench and showed the girl how the staves stood side by side, each a narrow strip of oak bent to the curve of the whole. The girl had thought a pail was carved from a single block, and she was surprised to find it built of many small pieces held in a round.

This single strip is a stave, Nyra said, and a pail is made of many such staves set edge to edge and drawn tight by the iron hoops. Each stave leans on the two beside it, she went on, so that no one piece bears the press of the water alone, and the ring holds a shape that no single strip could keep. When one stave shrinks in the dry of summer a small gap opens, and the water finds the gap and weeps through.

The girl wished to keep the way of it, and Nyra let her set the count of the staves in the margin and the span of the loosened one. A book gathers what can be set down in a line and counted, and leaves the rest to the one who was there. The number of the staves can travel to the next maker, she said, but the knack of coaxing a shrunk stave back to the round is a thing the hands learn and the page could not carry.

They soaked the pail in the trough until the wood drank and swelled, and Nyra tapped the loose stave down until it sat flush again with the ring. Then she drove the hoops a little lower where the barrel narrowed, and the staves drew close and the gap closed under the squeeze. The girl filled the pail and watched the seam, and not a drop came through where the slow leak had been.

Nyra noted the mending in the garden book, the date beside it in faint lead. Then she set the pail in the shade to keep the wood from drying too fast, where it stood sound and full. The book keeps the measure of the stave, and you keep the setting of it.