Sect Year 8 · third month · night of day 3 · the silent life: the terrace market, his twenty-second year
The night before the wedding Tobin came up to the house with a sack of nails over one shoulder and found Ossel on a stool by the door. He scraped the old plaster from around the frame so that the new coat would take. The lamp was low. Tobin set the sack down and looked at the frame for a while, and then he ran his thumb down the wood and looked at what the thumb had found.
“I was twenty-two when I married your mother,” he said. “I wore a shirt I’d borrowed from my cousin. It was too short in the arms, and she laughed at me all through the bread.”
“Did she forgive you?”
“Every day since. It’s a long job, forgiving a shirt.” Tobin smiled at the frame and then at his son. “Keep the scraper flat. Don’t dig. The wall doesn’t owe you the depth.”
He went down the steps in the dark, and Ossel heard him whistling a short tune on the way to the lower terrace. That tune with no words in it broke off in the middle and started again, as if the man had forgotten how it ended.
