The Child

The road climbed its last half day beside the young river, loud again with melt, and the pass above still held its snow. It was spring again. For the wayfarer, walking up, the first house on the road had become the last one, and there was smoke leaning from the chimney, and maps hung in the one window.

At the table under the window sat the Child who had been grinding color at the hearth a year before. The pen moved carefully along a border and came to the end of its line before the Child looked up. In the jar of pens there was one worn darker than the others, and the Child was not using it.

"I came to bring the map back marked," the wayfarer said.

"He died in the winter," the Child said. The pen was set down properly, the way the trade sets things down. "There were maps to copy, so I copied them."

The wall of scrawled sheets was as it had been, and the rack held the winter's new ones, clean and ruled, in a hand that was not the dead man's and was learning to be its own. The Child cleared the table and set out two smooth stones, and the wayfarer unrolled a year of walking between them.

The charcoal had gone gray with handling. The crossing was marked half a day upstream of its ink. The clay village had roofs the sheet had never heard of. New rows stood by the road in the orchard country. And below the harbor town, where the old man had always left blank paper, there was road, drawn rough, and a river mouth, drawn rougher, set down in winter by fingers that had been too cold to be neat.

The Child copied each mark into the winter's new sheet, asking short questions, the kind the trade asks. How far upstream. Which bank. How many roofs, or near enough. At the blank stretch the Child's pen stopped.

"He never let me draw past the harbor town," the Child said.

"He could not," the wayfarer said. "It moves. He told me to draw it when I saw it."

The Child bent close over the rough winter lines and copied them fair, clean and ruled, and the clean lines said what the cold ones had said. Then the Child sat back and looked at the whole of it, the road and the river keeping company from the pass to a sea that was drawn now, this year, as it had lain that winter.

"Is it true now?" the Child asked.

The wayfarer looked at the new sheet for a while. A year of it ached in both boots, and not one day of it was on the paper, and everything the paper said was so.

"It was true when I walked it," the wayfarer said. "The floods will move the mouth again. Someone will mark it."

The Child took up the pen and wrote the bottom line last, the way the border comes after the road, without being asked. It looked different in the new hand. It said the same: "Walk it and correct me."

The wayfarer's old sheet went up on the wall among the others, one more year of somebody's walking gone into the keeping. The Child smoothed it flat with both palms, the way the old man had spread a sheet with stones.

Toward noon a walker came down out of the saddle with wet boots and a pack gone stiff from the cold, and stood in the doorway, and asked if maps were sold here.

"Nothing else here is," the Child said.

The sheet was spread with the two stones. The questions were asked, how far, which way, and the stub of charcoal went into the roll, and the line was under the blank stretch where it had always been. At the door the walker and the wayfarer stepped around each other, one going out and one come back, and nodded, the way walkers do.

The new walker went down into the mud beside the young river. The wayfarer shouldered a lighter pack and turned up toward the saddle, the way they had first come, where there was no road and never had been. Behind the window the pen had gone back to its line.

This is a teaching-story. It happened nowhere, and it happens all the time.