Chapter 13 A Reckoner in the Gallery

The tally came back at dawn. The overnight men of the coal company are counted at the pit head by their own ledgers and then read out the numbers by a clerk from a stool, and every man on the yard has to answer with his own name and his own band number before he goes home, because the morning count is the count that pays. "Ockham. Two eight nine one." "Here." "Dray. Two eight nine one." "Here." "Verrick. Two eight nine one." "Here, and I want the gate account opened." The yard went quiet. It was a shout from the bottom of the shaft and it carried up the shaft like a stone up a well. Ryam had his coat on one arm and his band out of his sleeve and he did not hear the count at all after that. He was thinking about the gate on the far side of the yard, open half, and how long it had been open half. The clerk on the stool had a grey band gone green and a limp that came and went with the weather. "Osred Corbett," said the clerk. "Two eight nine one." "Coal company. Nine men, one gate. Collected." "Three." The stool did not move. "Three," said the clerk. There are moments in a coal yard when a man does not say the thing he is thinking, and the only thing he says is the number, and everybody hears it, and everybody understands it, and there are no words anywhere in the world that fit what has just been said. "Nine men," the clerk said. "Nine," said Osred Corbett. The man on the stool looked down at his own knees. He had a book on his knees and the book had been on his knees for twenty-two years, and he said, "There is one more on the tally." "Nine men," said Osred Corbett. "Nine men one gate and a foreman," said the clerk. "Ten." "Ten," said the clerk. And there was a shout from the head of the yard and it was not a shout at all. It was the gate on the far side. It was open half. It was standing on the rail in the light at half past five in the morning with a hundred yards of empty track behind it and nothing on the track, and every man in the yard was looking at it. "Did you open it?" said the clerk. "No." "Open it?" "Somebody's opened it." "There is no somebodys," said the gate. "There is me." Then a voice Ryam did not know, a young voice, a voice that could not be more than nineteen years old and was absolutely level, said, from up on the wagon road where he could not see a face: "Then there is one more on the tally. And I am standing on the road with my lamp, and if there is one more on the tally then I am the one more, and my name is Coll Tumm and I am an apprentice, and I am not paid for this shift because I am not on the shift, because I am not paid for anything. And I am going to tell you, on this stool, in front of these nine men, because you asked and because I am tired of being a thing that is asked for." "You are not paid to—" "I am paid for nothing! That is the whole of my account! And you have read my band out on this stool every morning for three years, and it says two hundred and eighty-eight, and I am telling you here, out loud, with the yard listening, that I opened that gate at twenty to three this morning with a bar off the wagon road because I saw a wagon coming in light, and I opened it because there was a wagon at the bottom of the shaft and a man in it, and I did not know who, and I did not think about it, and I am telling you now." Somebody in the yard said, "He's lying." "He is not lying," said Osred Corbett. Every head in the yard turned to the old man, who was still standing at the end of the line with his book open on his knees. "He is not lying," Osred Corbett said again, "and I want the clerk to write that I said so before anything else is written, and then the clerk is to write *collected by hand* against the whole of the gate count, and after that he is to put the number down, and the number is going to be three, and there is nobody in this yard going to stop me saying it." The clerk wrote. It took him a while. The yard stood in the light and the wagon road was empty at the top of it and Coll Tumm was standing on it with a lamp in his hand and a band on his arm that said two hundred and eighty-eight, and he was shaking so hard that the light moved on the wagon tops. Then the clerk said, "Ten." "Three," said Osred Corbett. "Recorded as ten," said the clerk, and shut the book. Nobody in the yard moved. Then the men went to the carts, one at a time, and each one went without looking at the man on the stool, and Osred Corbett stood at the end of the line with his book open on his knees and watched them go and did not say anything, and Ryam understood that the old man was not watching them go, he was reading the list of their names off the tally one at a time, because that was the only thing a tally-collector knew how to do with a quiet yard. "Recorded as ten," he repeated, when he had got to the last of them. "And the ninth man was the foreman." "And the ninth man was the gate," said the clerk. "Nine is the account. Ten is the number of men. Three is the gate. The gate is not a man, sir." Osred Corbett closed the book. Then Bilbe Toft came up the wagon road with the ward's own list under her arm, and she was carrying it the way a woman carries a thing she is not meant to be carrying, with the top of it turned under, and she stopped on the road and looked at Coll Tumm with a lamp in his hand. "He was standing here," she said. "He was," Ryam said. "And the gate was open." "The gate was open." "She is the mother," Bilbe said. "Ada Toft. Second storey off the Weighhouse Steps, band at nineteen and three years on it. And the fund took eleven a month for the whole of that time, which is not eleven a month, it is four a month, and if the fund had paid four a month Ada Toft would have had her mother in a room with a roof instead of a room with a draught and a cough and a mother who cannot get up." "There is no fund," Ryam said. "There is a man in a corridor." "There is a man in a corridor and there is a room with a draught, and I am not going to argue about which one of them is the reason my mother is in that room, because I have argued about it for three years and I have lost it every time and the woman on the stool is still in the room." "Coll," she said, looking at the boy. "You are the only person in this building who opened a gate and said so. And he is a man who has never once opened a gate and said so, and he has spent twenty-two years standing on a stool reading numbers off a list that somebody else wrote, and he is the only man in this yard who said *I am not lying* in a voice that anybody here would put money on. Do you understand what that is? That is the whole of the city in one morning." ---