§tandby - The Stop He Knew

The train went on and he did not count the seats again.

He had counted them twice and got two numbers and there was no third number in him to try with. The trying had begun to cost. When he set his eye on a row of things now and went to put a number to them, a thickness came up the side of his face and sat behind his eye, and the number swam, and it was easier to look at his hands. So he looked at his hands. They lay in his lap and did not do anything. A man's hands ought to want a job. His had stopped wanting one, somewhere back along the gray, and he could not say when.

The woman with the bag had gone quiet. The man at the window said his words to the glass less often now, or Stanley heard them less. The young one by the door was not there. There had been a young one. He had stood up and asked things. Stanley held the shape of him for a moment and then the shape went, and the carriage was just the carriage, going on.

Then the door was there in the side of the carriage and it was open and the light came in.

It came in like a blow. After the gray, after the dark of his own street and the dark of the long ride, the light was too much, a yellow thicker than any light should be, poured into the doorway like hot fat out of a pan, and it got into his eyes and made the water come. He put his arm up. Past his arm there was grass, green and lit, moving a little, and a line strung between two poles with white cloths pinned to it, and the cloths were so white in the sun that to look at them hurt, a clean white that had no place in the world he had been riding through. A woman stood in the grass by the cloths. She had her sleeves up and a wooden peg in her mouth and she took the peg out and lifted her hand and gave a small bright shake of her fingers, a wave at no one, at the air, quick and done. Then she did it again, the same shake, the same quick finish, as if the first one had not happened.

A dog lay in the doorway between the bright grass and the dark train.

It was a brown dog, smooth-coated and plain. It lay with its head up and its paws out and there was no gray on its muzzle, none, a dog that had been a young dog for a long time. Its tail did not move. It looked out at the woman and the cloths, and then its eye came round, slow, and found Stanley, and held him.

Something dropped behind his ribs, cold, all at once. The big lurch. Like stepping off a kerb in the dark and the road not being where the foot was sure it would be. He did not know the dog. He had never stood in this yellow yard in his life. But the dog's eye on him opened a cold drop straight down through the middle of him and he had to put his hand on the frame of the door.

"You can lay the table," a voice said. Behind him, in the room. "They'll want their tea."

He turned into the room off the bright yard. It was a kitchen. There was a table with a cloth on it, a shiny cloth, and on the side a woman, a different woman, or the same one, he could not hold which, drying her hands. She did not look at him hard. She gave him the look you give a thing that belongs in the room.

On the side there were bowls, white, and small spoons in a heap.

His hands went to them before he thought. That was the old way of his hands, to take up a job, and it was good to have a job, the relief of it came up in him like warmth, and he gathered the spoons into his palm and went to set them round. Two places. Two bowls. And his thumb moved on the spoons to tell him how many. The old habit. The thing his hands had done all his life without his knowing. Run the thumb along, let the number rise.

The number did not rise.

He counted them. He got a number. He did not believe it and he counted them again and got a different number, and the spoons were the same spoons, lying still in his own hand, and they would not hold a number. The seats had not held one either. The dead lamp at the bottom of his street had been one second and another second and another and never the number he reached for. He stood with the spoons in his hand and counted a third time and the thickness came up the side of his face and went behind his eye and pushed, hard, and his pulse came up into his ears and beat there, fast, wrong, and the kitchen tipped a half-inch and stood still.

A man could die counting spoons. The thought came flat and certain and was gone.

The dog had come to the kitchen door. It watched his hand. It watched the spoons in his hand as the street had watched him on the step, and the woman dried her hands and waited for him to be a man laying a table, and the light off the white cloths outside came through the window and lay on the shiny table in a long hot stripe, and below the part of him that made words, the thing that wanted the thickness gone was stronger than the thing that wanted the number.

So he stopped.

He let the number go. He put the spoons down, one by each bowl, not knowing if it was right, not counting, and the thickness eased off his eye and his pulse came down and the relief of it was so sweet that he nearly sat down in it. He had given a thing up and the giving-up had been paid for, at once, in quiet. He did not know the name of the thing he had given up. He only knew his hands had done it all his life and now they would not, and that he had let them stop, and that it had felt good to let them.

Water came up in his eyes again and it was not the light this time. There was a weight in the room, low and old, a heaviness that sat on him as if he had done a wrong here once, in this bright kitchen he had never stood in, left some small thing undone that a person had needed, and he stood in the stripe of hot light with two spoons laid wrong and did not know its name either.

The dog put its head down on its paws and kept its eye on him.

Then the door was shut and there was no door, only the side of the carriage, and the gray going by, and the white cloths and the green grass and the too-much light gone as if they had never burned. He was in his seat. His hands were in his lap. They were quiet now in a way they had not been quiet before, emptied of the old reaching, and his left leg, when he went to shift it, came slow, and heavy, and did not feel entirely like his.

He looked at the gray. He did not try to count anything in it.

Somewhere the woman with the bag said, kindly, to the air, that he was getting on nicely now. The train did not slow. The light at the edge of the window stood where it stood, and Stanley sat with his still hands and the grief he could not name, and went on into it.

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