The Ninth Post

Mabry Lanyard carried the last lamp up the dark stretch at dusk and stopped at the ninth post, which had no hook.

Mabry is the avenue’s dawn sweeper. They had come out as half of a walkers’ pair only because the avenue asked, and they meant to be in bed by ten, as dawn sweepers are. Mabry has one small wish for the avenue: a morning with no dropped call cards in the gutter.

A big Bull with a bucket was waiting at the bare post. It was Fergal Brack, the post-mender, and Mabry knew them by the hammer.

“Hand that here,” Fergal said, and took the lamp, and held it up in their own fist where the hook should be. “Go on home, both of you. I’ve got it.”

The other half of the pair went. Further up the stretch the oil cart squeaked by, its lamp swinging from a bright new hook, and Mabry stood on the road and looked at Fergal’s arm.

A lamp set down at the foot of a post lights a circle of dirt and nothing else. Held up, this one reached the tenth post, and the line ran unbroken all the way down the stretch. But an arm is not a hook, and Fergal’s was already starting to shake.

If Mabry stayed, there would be no sweeping at dawn. The avenue would wake up to a gutter full of call cards, the one thing Mabry has wanted gone for years.

Mabry stayed.

“We’ll take turns,” Mabry said. “An hour each. Don’t argue. I’m a sweeper, and stubborn about brooms and lamps.”

Fergal did not argue, and they took turns all night. When it was Mabry’s turn, the lamp grew heavy fast, and the pale road leaned on their knees, and the wanting to sit down was very strong. Mabry talked to keep it off, about leaves and gutters and a jar of square leaves from the Bit Side that wouldn’t go ordinary. Fergal laughed at the jar.

Near dawn Mabry thought of the avenue, and the cards blowing along the kerb with nobody there to catch them, and felt sorry for about a minute.

Then it was Mabry’s turn again. They lifted the lamp, and from the ninth post the tenth was still lit.