Spigot

The rain butt stood at the corner of the shed, brimful after a wet week, and the girl wanted a jug of water for the seedlings without tipping the whole heavy barrel onto the path. She asked Nyra how a person drew from the bottom of a thing without emptying it all at once. Nyra said that for that you wanted a spigot, a little tapering tap of hardwood, and that the fitting of it was a small lesson worth having.

Nyra bored a hole low in the stave of the butt, and the girl saw that the bit she chose was narrower than the fat end of the spigot by a good margin. “Will the water not run straight past a tap too big for its hole?” the girl asked, for it seemed to her that a plug wanted a hole its own size. Nyra answered that a hole cut to the exact size would seal at one moment only, and loosen the first time the wood swelled or shrank.

“The hole is made small on purpose,” Nyra said, turning the spigot in her hand so its gentle taper caught the light. “You bore for the narrow end to pass, and then you drive, and the wood of the butt gives a little and closes hard all the way round. The tightness is made by the driving, not by the measuring, and so it holds even as the seasons move the grain.”

She set the narrow end to the hole and drove the spigot home with the heel of her hand and a few light taps of the mallet, and the taper wedged itself fast along its whole length. Not a bead of water wept at the join. The girl turned the little tap and caught her jug full, and turned it back, and the butt held its store as though the tap had grown there from the first.

A book gathers what can be set down in a line and counted, and leaves the rest to the one who was there. Nyra said that a book too could have a thing driven into it that sealed by its fit and not by its size, held fast by the giving of the page around it. The book keeps the water, and you keep the driving of it.