Two Nights With the Coin

Mason: the wall I finished this spring got paid the same day, coin counted out on the cap of it in front of me, and the job itself gave me no trouble at all. The trouble started that evening, in the house, with the coin already earned and already mine.

I did what you told me to do, near enough. I watched the hand instead of the coin. The first night it worked plainly. I put it in the tin on the shelf, said the job was closed, and went to bed without thinking of it again, which surprised me more than it should have after this many years of this kind of work.

The second night it did not work. I got up without meaning to and went down and opened the tin, not to spend anything, only to look at it sitting there, which I told myself afterward was checking on the house and not on the coin at all. I do not believe that excuse and neither will you. I looked once, shut the lid, and stood in the dark room a moment longer than looking required, and that extra moment is the part I am setting down honestly rather than leaving out, since leaving it out would make a tidier letter and a false one.

By the third night I had stopped needing to go down at all, not because I decided to stop but because the tin had gone back to being ordinary, a tin with coin in it, the way it was before the job and will be again once the coin is spent, on the barrow or on whatever actually gets bought in the end. Two nights it worked. One night it did not, and I am not going to dress that middle night up as something learned or a test passed. It happened the way you said it might, then it stopped happening, and I could not tell you why that particular night was the hard one and not the first.

The wall is standing in the street exactly as you said it would, not knowing what it cost, not caring who paid for it or how many nights he spent going down to look at the coin afterward.

Write again before the season turns, one letter or three, whichever the road brings up this time.

This is a teaching-letter. No one sent it, and it is addressed to whoever opens it.