Fascia

The fascia ran the length of the eave in a single long board, and Nyra climbed the ladder to lay her palm flat against it, feeling along the grain for the soft give that means rot. The autumn had been wet, and the leaves had gathered in the gutter below until the water no longer ran clear off the roof. The girl stood at the foot of the ladder and held it steady, her cheek turned up to watch. From there the board was only a dark line against the grey sky, but under the hand it was a whole country of ridges and weathered paint.

They cleared the gutter first, scooping the sodden leaves into a pail the girl passed up and down, and the smell of the wet mast rose thick around them. Where the leaves had sat longest the metal had stained, and Nyra showed her the place where the fascia had begun to darken behind it, not yet soft but asking to be watched. A board that carries the gutter carries the whole weight of the rain, she said, and a roof is only as sound as the edge that lets the water go.

When the girl came down she opened the book on her knee and set to writing what they had found. One fascia board, sound but staining at the north end, gutter cleared before the rains. She read it back, pleased with how much the three lines seemed to hold. Then she looked at the ladder and the pail and the grey of the afternoon and grew quiet.

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 not keep the cold of the rung under a wet hand, nor the smell of the leaves breaking down into earth, nor the particular long reach it took to lay a palm along a board you could not quite see. Those remained with the two of them, in the arms and the memory, where no page would ever climb. Nyra thought it no loss that the book stayed on the ground while they went up.

She coiled the ladder rope and looked a last time at the clean dark line of the eave, water beginning to run off it again in a thin and ordered thread. The fascia would carry the winter now, and the gutter would speak clearly when the rains came hard. The book keeps the length, and you keep the shedding of it.