The Auger

Nyra brought the auger out into the shed when the afternoon had gone quiet. It was a plain tool, a spiral of iron fixed to a handle of worn ash, made for the one slow task of boring a clean hole through a stubborn board. She set the point where the mark had been drawn and leaned her weight into the turning of it.

The auger did not hurry, and it did not let her hurry. Each full round of the handle drew up a thin curl of shaving, pale and dry, and the hole deepened by a width no greater than a reed. The work asked for patience more than for force, and Nyra gave it what it asked.

The girl who kept close to the bench wanted to know why a tool should go so slowly when a nail could be set in a breath. Nyra answered that a nail splits the wood and a bored hole spares it, and that a joint made with care would hold long after the quick thing had worked loose.

When the hole ran through, Nyra blew the dust from it and held the board to the low light to see the line stand true. She thought of how the shed would remember the width of the hole but not the length of the hour, not the dry smell of the shaving, not the warm ache that had settled into her arm. A book gathers what can be set down in a line and counted, and leaves the rest to the one who was there.

She set the auger back on its nail and swept the pale curls into her palm. The hole would hold a peg one day, and the peg would hold the whole, and none of that would ever say a word about this long and even hour. The book keeps the measure of the hole, and you keep the sinking of it.