Wainscot

Nyra ran a hand along the low wooden paneling that lined the bottom of the storeroom wall, where the wood met the cold plaster above. The wainscot rose only to the height of a chair back, a plain skirt of boards fitted edge to edge, darkened by years of hands and shoulders and the scrape of passing crates. Above it the plaster stayed pale and unmarked, clean as the day it was laid.

She had seen walls without such boarding, and she knew how they fared. The plaster at the bottom took every knock of a boot, every drag of a sack, every lean of a tired back, until it crumbled and powdered and showed the lath beneath. The wainscot took all of that wear in the place of the plaster, and asked only to be wiped down now and then. It was the part of the wall that was meant to be marked, so that the rest could stay whole.

Nyra thought a plain account was built the same way. The low register of a sentence, the plain words that set down the day and counted the rows and named the weather, took the handling of every reader. Those were the words that bore the scuffs of use, read and reread, leaned upon, worn smooth. They stood at the bottom and took the wear so that the finer thing above them could stay unmarked.

For there was always a finer thing above, a meaning kept up in the pale plaster where no hand reached. A book gathers what can be set down in a line and counted, and leaves the rest to the one who was there. The plain lower words held the daily weight, and the quiet meaning rode above them, clean and out of reach, kept by the one who had lived the day the words only counted.

The girl crouched to look at the join where board met floor, and ran a thumb along a long pale scratch in the wood. Nyra did not stop her. The scratch belonged there, for it was the wainscot doing the work, taking the mark so the wall need not. The book keeps the wall, and you keep the lining of it.