Bung

The new cider had gone quiet in the cask at last, and Nyra came down to the cellar with a bung cut from a dry length of alder to stop it for the winter. The girl held the lamp while Nyra set the bung to the hole and found it a shade small, loose enough that a thread of damp air moved past it when she pressed her thumb there. The girl said that it would surely let the whole cask spoil before spring. Nyra turned the bung in her fingers and said that a stopper did not have to fit on the first day to fit by the third.

“If you drive it hard to make it tight now,” Nyra said, “you split the staves or you bruise the wood, and either way the keeping is spoiled.” She seated the bung with the flat of her hand only, firm but not forced, until it sat level in the mouth of the hole and no more. The girl asked how a thing that was loose could ever come to hold.

Nyra answered that the alder would take up the damp of the cider and the cellar over the coming days, and that as it took up the damp it would swell by a hair and then by another, until it filled the hole from the inside and pressed gently against every side at once. A seal made that slow way, she said, was tighter than any she could have hammered, because the wood had grown into its place rather than been beaten into it. The girl set her hand to the cask and said that she could feel nothing happening at all.

Nyra nodded and said that this was the way of it, that the holding came on so quietly no hand could catch it in the act, the same as a season turning or a loaf going firm in the crock. She said a book was stopped against the years in just this manner, that you did not clamp a season shut on the day you set it down but laid the line in loosely and let the one who returned to it swell slowly into the meaning, filling it from the inside until it held without a gap.

The book keeps the cask, and you keep the swelling of it.