The Burnisher

A book gathers what can be set down in a line and counted, and leaves the rest to the one who was there. Nyra set the agate burnisher on the table in the last of the afternoon, where the light from the window lay long and gold across the grain of the wood. The tool was small and smooth, a curved stone fixed into a worn wooden handle, and it had been in the house longer than the girl had been alive.

The girl asked what the stone was for, and Nyra showed her, drawing the burnisher along the gilded edge of a finished book in slow, even strokes. Under the patient pressure the dull gold woke and began to shine, as though the metal had only been waiting for a warm hand to call it up out of the dark.

The burnisher could bring the gold to a mirror. It could lay the leaf down flat and bright until the edge of the book threw back the whole window and the garden beyond it. What it could not do was add a single grain of gold that was not already laid there. The shine was only the same gold made willing, turned at last to the light.

Outside, the last of the season stood quiet in the rows, the beds put down for the year, the long work nearly set aside. Nyra thought that a book was much the same under the stone. You could not give it more than it already held. You could only coax forward what was there in the grain, and let the rest keep to the shadow where it belonged.

The girl took a turn with the burnisher, and the gold came up under her hand too, slow and sure, a small warmth answering a small warmth. When the light had gone from the window they set the stone down and left the book to cool. The book keeps the gold, and you keep the polishing of it.