The Spare in Rill’s Wagon

Juniper Bellrunner kept the score on the gate-lamp post, in chalk, at exactly the height where Rill’s ladder leaned all day and hid it. She said this was tidiness. Rill said nothing, which was what Rill said about most things.

There were two columns, J and R. R was ahead by three. Beside nearly every mark in the R column was a small question mark, also in Juniper’s hand. Juniper was honest enough to chalk every race she lost. She was nowhere near patient enough to stop arguing about them.

The race went like this. At first light Rill put her boot on the bottom rung of her ladder, and Juniper put her hand on the post. Then they went. Rill climbed to the blue gate lamp, took off its cover, wiped the glass and clicked the cover back on. Juniper ran up the street to No. 144 and rang the first of the Hollow’s 144 morning bells. If the bell rang before the click, Juniper had won. If the click came first, Juniper chalked it, put a question mark beside it, and explained to whoever was passing why that morning had been informal.

After the first bell, the round was her own business. One bell for every house, down the hill and round Beacon Court and back up along the wall, so that Lantern Hollow woke one house at a time. She timed it on a watch she wound twice a day, which was once more than it needed. This week she had come in eleven seconds slower than her best round ever. Eleven seconds is a corner taken tight and a bell rope caught on the first grab. Juniper had all eleven written down, with where she meant to find each one.

Tomorrow, she said, was the morning.

So at dusk she went up to No. 144 to give the first bell its evening look. The bell hung on an iron bracket over the door. Its rope came down the wall through a little pulley, so that a bellrunner going at a good clip could catch it without breaking stride. Juniper took the rope and pulled it a hand’s length, gently, to feel it run.

It did not run. The pulley gave one short brass squeal and stopped dead. The bell leaned an inch and stayed leaned.

Juniper always carried an oil can in her coat. She stood on the step of No. 144, which Sedge swept clean, and oiled the pulley, and worked the wheel with her thumb, and oiled it again. The wheel went half round with a noise like a gate and stuck. She oiled it a third time. By then the oil was up to her elbow and the light was going, and she could see what was wrong. Inside the wheel, the little brass sleeve the axle turned in had split along its length. The bushing was cracked.

“Twenty-two minutes on one pulley,” said Juniper to her watch. She looked at her sleeve. “And that.”

* * *

Steward Clove was at his desk by the gate, with his ring of keys beside him and a word puzzle folded beside that. Juniper came in saying, “I have four minutes,” and Clove, who had never said anything in under four minutes in his life, folded his hands and listened.

“I can help you,” he said. “There is a form for exactly this.” He found it at once, and it was long. “Request for the Repair of a Public Fixture. Corvin is due up the road a week on Thursday. I will put yours at the top of the pile.”

“It has to ring at first light.”

“Then there is a box for urgency.” He showed her. It was a small box. “I should say, in fairness, that ticking it has never yet made Corvin walk faster. The morning bells of the Hollow have rung, by my records, without a single—”

Juniper let him go for thirty seconds, which she felt was generous. While he talked she turned his word puzzle round and filled in four across. Then she said, “Is there a spare bushing anywhere in the Hollow?”

Clove looked at four across, which he had been stuck on since lunch. Then he opened his second drawer. He kept a list in there called Spare Parts, Public and Private, Voluntarily Declared, and he ran his finger down it.

“One,” he said. “Brass, small, the right size, I should think. Declared by Rill the week she packed.” He did not say how long ago that was. Everyone at the gate knew it was three years. “The location is given as ‘the bottom of the wagon.’”

“Of course it is,” said Juniper.

* * *

Rill was up her ladder at the gate lamp, with her toolbox on the cobbles underneath where anyone might fall over it.

Asking someone for a small brass part ought to be a small thing. It was a much larger thing when that someone had beaten Juniper by a second and a half on Tuesday. Juniper had chalked it, put a question mark beside it, and told Clove why.

Juniper stood at the bottom of the ladder. “That’s a good ladder,” she said.

Rill went on wiping the glass.

“Cold tonight,” said Juniper.

“Say it from there,” said Rill. “I’m not coming down till this is done.”

So Juniper said it from there: the pulley, the crack, the oil, the form, the week, the eleven seconds. She said it fast, the way she rang.

Rill clicked the cover on. Then she came down, wiped her hands and looked across at her wagon. It stood where it always stood, inside the gate, with a canvas over it and its ropes tied in the knots Rill used for things that would have to travel.

“It’s at the bottom,” said Rill.

“I know.”

“How do you know?”

“Clove has a list.”

Rill thought about that. “Course he does,” she said, and untied the first rope.

* * *

They unpacked the wagon onto its tailboard under the gate lamp, which burned blue at the heart and gold at the edge, the way the Hollow’s lamps do even at noon. Juniper started her watch when the canvas came off.

“It isn’t a race,” said Rill.

“Not yet,” said Juniper, and counted.

Rill handed things down, and Juniper counted each one out loud onto the tailboard. A coil of rope. A kettle. A tin cup that hung on a nail inside the lid. A coat. A blanket rolled in oilcloth. A road map, rolled up tight and tied with a length of lamp wick, soft at the edges from being untied and tied again. A spare lamp glass in straw, which chimed once when Rill set it down. A good many other useful things, all counted. Then three pairs of Linnet’s socks, one pair still with the price string on.

“You’ve never worn these,” said Juniper.

“They’re for the road,” said Rill.

“Seventeen,” said Juniper. “Eighteen. Nineteen.”

Then a whetstone, a hat and a box of nails. At the very bottom, in a corner where a boot would not find it, was a twist of brown paper. On it, in Rill’s square hand, it said for the first thing that breaks.

“Twenty-three,” said Juniper. “Six minutes twelve.”

Rill turned the paper over in her fingers. “I thought it’d be a wheel,” she said. “Out past the bridge somewhere.”

“And nothing’s broken? In three years?”

“It hasn’t been anywhere,” said Rill. She unwrapped the paper, and there was the bushing, brass and new and exactly right.

She carried her ladder from the gate post up the street to No. 144. With the ladder gone, the score was there on the post for anybody to read: two columns and a crowd of question marks. Rill looked at it on her way past.

“There’s a question mark by every one of mine.”

“Those are disputed.”

“All of them?”

“Each one separately,” said Juniper. “For different reasons.”

Rill went up, unpinned the pulley and brought it back to the tailboard. She cleared a space between the kettle and the socks and knocked out the cracked bushing with a drift and a small hammer. Then she tapped the new one in.

“You’re tapping it too hard,” said Juniper.

“I’m tapping it once.”

“Too hard, once.”

Rill went up again to hang the pulley back. Juniper held the ladder and told her the rope went over the wheel.

“It goes under,” said Rill.

“It went over this morning.”

“It went over this morning, and that’s why it rubbed. Hold the ladder.”

Juniper held the ladder.

Nobody rings a morning bell at night, or the whole Hollow gets up and puts the kettle on. So Rill reached out and closed her fist round the bell’s clapper, and Juniper ran the rope. The wheel went all the way round without a sound. Juniper ran it four more times and timed every pull, and every pull was the same.

Rill came down holding the old bushing, split along its side. “Well,” she said. “Glad it got used.”

Then they packed the wagon back up. Juniper did most of it, because she had counted everything out and knew the order backwards, which was the order it needed. Rill held the socks a moment before they went in. The map went in. The glass chimed once. Rill tied the ropes in her knots for things that would have to travel.

“Eleven minutes three,” said Juniper.

“It took me two days the first time,” said Rill.

“Well,” said Juniper, “you didn’t have anybody counting.”

She put the twist of brown paper in her coat pocket. Rill saw her do it and did not ask for it back. Then Rill leaned her ladder against the gate post again, and the score went out of sight.

* * *

At first light Rill put her boot on the bottom rung and Juniper put her hand on the post, and they went.

The rope at No. 144 ran so easily that Juniper nearly pulled it twice. The first bell rang out clean over the gate. A second later, down at the post, came the click of the lamp cover going on.

“One,” said Rill, from the top of the ladder.

Juniper did not stop, because there was nothing to argue about and 143 bells still to ring. She took the corners tight. She caught every rope on the first grab. She came back up along the wall four seconds under her best round ever, and she told anyone who would listen, Rill included, that the new bushing had been worth at least two of them.

Then she chalked her mark on the post. Rill moved the ladder so she could. Underneath it, smaller and with no question mark at all, Juniper wrote 1 bushing owed (R).

* * *

Corvin came up the road a week on Thursday, as Clove had said, with a pack of mended kettles and one lamp that now also boiled an egg, though nobody had asked it to. Juniper was waiting at the gate. Corvin had a brass bushing of the right size. Corvin offered to cut a groove in it so it would hold its own oil, and to fit a little whistle that would sound when it wanted more.

“Just the bushing,” said Juniper.

“Then it only does the one thing,” said Corvin, as if this were a pity, and sold it to her anyway.

That evening, while Rill was down the hill, Juniper wrapped the new bushing in the same twist of brown paper, with the same words on the outside. Then she unpacked Rill’s wagon, all twenty-three things, and packed it again with the spare at the bottom, in the corner where a boot would not find it.

Nine minutes forty.

It had taken Rill two days the first time. But Rill had been deciding, and Juniper only had to remember.

She tied the ropes in Rill’s knots, all except the last knot on each, which she tied her own way, because it was faster. Then she drew a neat line through 1 bushing owed (R) and went home.

Rill came back up the hill with her ladder over her shoulder. She stopped by her wagon and looked at the ropes, and at the last knot on each, and at the line through the chalk on the post. She said nothing at all, and she did not retie them.

Next morning she beat Juniper by a full second, fair and square, by Juniper’s own watch.

Juniper chalked it, because she is honest. She put a question mark beside it, because she is Juniper. And she told Clove on her way past that the race had been informal.

The wagon still stands inside the gate, packed to the last sock, with its ropes in Rill’s knots, mostly. The spare is at the very bottom, where Juniper put it, ready for the first thing that breaks, wherever Rill happens to be when it does.