Before Pudding

Scout slid onto the bench at the Long Table for Sunday roast with the notebook open beside their plate.

Sunday roast is the best hour of Scout’s week for news. Every walker on the road comes in for it, and they all talk at once, and Scout only has to sit and write. A walker at the far end was telling anyone in reach that L33T Labs has a new chart on its board, and the line on it says the easing has stopped. Scout wrote that down.

Across the table, Fergal Brack sat with a stiff arm and a ruined hook in their lap. The hook was half rust, and a cart wheel had flattened the rest. Fergal turned it over and over and did not touch the potatoes.

“How’s the stretch?” Scout asked.

“Lit,” Fergal said. “All but the ninth.”

Then Fergal took a rag out of their coat and unwrapped it beside the salt. Inside lay the straightest hook Scout had ever seen.

“It’s for the Sedge Posts,” Fergal said. “For the night the lamps come back out there.”

“I know,” Scout said kindly. Scout has walked past Fergal checking that pocket for years.

Fergal wrapped the good hook up again, stood with the ruined one, and walked out before pudding. On a Sunday business waits for pudding, and in all those years Scout has never once seen Fergal leave before it.

Scout looked down at the notebook. The table was only getting going. In the next hour there would be a quarrel about plums, a runner back from the Meadows, and news from three Beasthoods, all of it free to anyone who sat still. Scout carries what they see. Tonight Scout could see a lot from right here.

Scout closed the notebook, went to the pudding cook, and asked for two bowls to carry out.

They walked up the avenue with a bowl in each hand and the notebook shut in a pocket. They passed every story they would miss, and minded that more than they let on. The dark stretch began at the avenue’s end. Scout stepped into it talking loudly about custard, to nobody yet.

At the ninth post Fergal was hammering the ruined hook straight on the post top, and not saying “There.”

“Pudding,” Scout said, and held one out.