The Rag

Tilda Spoke walked at the front of the crowd with their own work lamp, lighting the road to the ninth post.

Tilda mends road-pot carts and rig wheels on the kerb, late, by that work lamp. It has a tin shade Tilda bent to throw the light down onto a wheel. In all their years on the kerb it has never once gone out.

The crowd came singing up the stretch past post after lit post. The road between them had its colours back, brown earth and grey stones and the green of the verge. Only the ninth post was still dark. Tonight it would be lit end to end.

Then, at the eighth post, the lamp they were bringing guttered and went out. The oil cart had run dry before it could fill this one.

At the ninth post Fergal Brack, the post-mender, stood waiting with a hammer and a bad arm. Fergal looked at the dark lamp, and then, without meaning to, at Tilda’s.

Tilda thought of the half-mended wheel on the kerb. Without the work lamp it would wait for daylight, and so would every wheel after it. Tilda minded that more than they would ever say.

“Take mine,” Tilda said, and held it up.

Fergal nodded. Then Fergal looked at the hook on the post, which hung wide open, and put a hand inside their coat, slowly, and brought out a folded rag. Inside it was a hook, and Tilda, who knows good iron, stopped breathing for a moment. It was straight as a spoke.

Fergal looked at it for a long while, and down the long row of lamps.

“The Sedge Posts can wait,” Fergal said, to nobody in particular. Then they took the ruined hook off the post, fitted the good one in its place, and closed it with two taps of the hammer.

“There,” Fergal said.

Tilda hung the work lamp on Fergal’s hook. The cheer started at the back and ran forward, and the light from the ninth post reached the tenth.

In the noise Tilda saw Fergal fold the empty rag in four, out of habit, and put it back in the pocket where the hook had been. Their own lamp hung on Fergal’s best hook now, and Tilda left it there.