Scarf

The handrail along the garden path had rotted at its middle, and the sound length of ash that Nyra carried out to replace it fell short by a good arm of the full run. She stood it against the two old posts and looked at the gap at the far end, where the wood stopped and the path went on without it. The girl asked whether they should wait for a longer piece to come. Nyra set the ash down on the grass and said that a longer piece was not the only way to make a long thing.

She took a second offcut from under her arm, no better than the first, and laid the two ends side by side. Then she cut each end on a long slant, a slope that ran the length of her hand rather than a square cut straight across. When the two slopes were laid one over the other they made a single thickness again, and the seam between them lay along the grain instead of across it. A square butt would have met edge to edge and carried nothing, Nyra said, but a slant lets each piece lean its weight onto the other and hand the load along the whole of the overlap.

They glued the slopes and drove three pegs down through the lap while the glue was wet, and Nyra wrapped the join with cord until it set. By the time the dew came the two pieces had become one rail, longer than either had been alone, and the eye slid over the seam without catching. The girl ran her thumb along it and could feel where the wood changed, but only just, the way you feel the place in a path where one day of walking meets the next.

Nyra said that was the whole of the matter. A short thing and another short thing, cut to lean on one another, become a long thing that will carry a hand the length of the garden. The join does not hide that it is a join. It only makes the two lengths agree to act as one, which is a different thing from pretending there was never more than one.

A book gathers what can be set down in a line and counted, and leaves the rest to the one who was there. It too is made of short things laid slant against each other, one sitting leaning its weight onto the next, until the seams lie along the grain and the hand slides the whole length without catching. The book keeps the rail, and you keep the lapping of it.