Chock

The cart stood half on the slope by the gate, loaded with the last of the beets, and it had begun to creep. Nyra set a wedge of oak behind the downhill wheel and pressed it home with her heel until the cart went still. The apprentice watched from the top of the load, chin on her folded arms.

“Why not just the brake?” the girl asked. “The brake holds while someone holds the brake,” Nyra said. “A chock holds when no one is watching. It asks nothing and keeps on asking nothing, all through the night, with the whole weight of the load leaning against it.”

She cut a second wedge and fitted it to the other wheel, tapping it until the grain of the wood bit the grain of the ground. The cart did not shift. It was not that the slope had gone. It was that the slope now had something to argue with, and the something did not tire.

“Will it hold if it rains?” the girl asked. Nyra answered that wood swells in the wet and sets harder, and that a chock cut from seasoned oak would only grip the better for a soaking. Then she wrote in the book the day, and the weight of the load, and that the cart was chocked at the gate.

A book gathers what can be set down in a line and counted, and leaves the rest to the one who was there. It could hold the number of the load and the name of the gate. It could not hold the small give of the ground under a heel, or the quiet of a thing that holds without being held. The book keeps the load, and you keep the chocking of it.