Batten

The wind had been working under the cloth all week. Nyra and the girl had stretched a length of tarred sacking across the open side of the woodshed in the autumn, and for a while it had held, but now the lower edge lifted and slapped with every gust, and the rain found its way to the split logs behind. On the bench lay the cure for it: a thin strip of oak lath, planed square, that they called a batten. It was a slight thing, no wider than two fingers, and the girl turned it over doubtfully in her hands.

“This little strip is to beat the whole wind?” the girl asked. “It looks like it would snap if a gust leaned on it.”

Nyra said that the batten did not fight the wind by being strong. She laid the lath along the loose edge of the sacking, pressing the cloth flat against the frame, and took up a row of small tacks. “One big nail in the middle would only give the wind a corner to pry,” she said. “The batten shares the hold along its whole length, so the cloth is caught in a line and not a point. Count the tacks, a hand apart, and the wind can find no slack to lift.”

A book gathers what can be set down in a line and counted, and leaves the rest to the one who was there. Nyra could write that the woodshed was battened before the first hard rain, and that the logs stayed dry, and the count of tacks along the lath. What the page could not keep was the long even work of it, the tap of the hammer settling into a rhythm, the way the slapping cloth went quiet all at once when the last tack went home, and the girl standing back to watch the still sacking as if it had been a wild thing that was now gentled.

They swept the shed and banked the logs and left the batten holding its quiet line against the weather. The book keeps the count of the tacks, and you keep the fastening of it.