The Stair Meets

The Stair meets about the hedge every autumn, and the hollow hears it coming through its feet.

Boots on the back steps arrive through the ground before the air, and on Tuesday, with the poles humming, the path began to tick. Grizel, at the window, said "One," at the first pair, and "Two," at the second, and at the third, to Kit on the path below, "That is a meeting." Then chairs, with the knock of furniture that has views, and a voice, raised, being reasonable at somebody, and the word in it, twice, was "hedge."

The Above can be followed only from a way off. Across the green, or through a hedge or a window or the ground, its talk comes apart into words like anybody's, and a person with a pen can minute it. From a foot away it is too big to be words at all. It arrives as weather, a note or two at a time, and nobody has yet minuted thunder.

Grizel has fourteen of these in the book. All fourteen end in the same two words. None of them cut anything. Under each, at the foot, in her smallest hand, is one more line, which she adds every year and has never read out to anybody: "The hollow was not consulted about it."

From underneath, a meeting about the hedge is a meeting about the roof. Every fliskie in the tangle was on the twig nearest the chairs, face up, in rows, like a congregation when the sermon turns to the slates. Sorrel was highest, the thorn across her knees. Mothy was lowest, by the lantern, in case the chairs turned out to be lamps.

Pettigrew ruled from the stool. She stood up on it, collar out, and addressed the air a foot above the Stair, and ruled that the hedge was the Court's, and might not be cut without notice in the proper form, and that none had been received. The first chair scraped, and Grizel had the pen over the place where the two words go, and the reasonable voice, going up the steps, said other words instead.

"Right back, in the spring. Properly. The lot of it."

Grizel wrote "spring." She wrote it where "next year" had gone fourteen times, and drew a line under it, and then another, and the two lines went through to the next page.

Sorrel came down out of the hedge.

She did not drop, the way she does. She came down the face of the tangle by hand, with the thorn off its cord and in her fist, and it was not a tool today. She landed inside the gate and looked up the back steps, where the last boot was going in.

"I'm going up there," she said.

Nobody in the hollow has ever gone up the Stair. The steps come down. That is what steps are for, and so is rain.

"Nobody goes out," said Mungo.

Sorrel looked at him, and at the hedge over the sign, which is her house.

"Nobody's ever needed to," she said.

Mungo did not answer that. The ledger has entered it as the first reply the sign has had. When the door at the top shut she went back up into the hedge, and the thorn was not seen back on its cord.

Kit was at the gatepost, hands in the coat, a boot's length from the lantern, and through the scrape of the last chair she had heard the other voice. It was smaller than the rest, and higher, and came from up the steps and not down them, and it said something about the wee man with the lamp.

Nobody else heard it. Grizel was underlining. Kit looked up at the Stair going dark floor by floor, and at the third floor of it, and at one window there, until the last light was out. Then she came up the path to the window and said it.

"I'm going to go up," she said. "And ask."

Nobody has ever asked the Above anything. The theology has a form for receiving, and one for ruling on what was received, and one for complaint, which is Pettigrew's, and none for asking, there being nobody up there to ask, only boots. Grizel looked at her over the spectacles for the time it takes to decide whether a thing is a claim or a fact. Then she wrote it down, in the words it was said in, on a fresh page headed "Spring," and did not underline it.

The lamp is out in the wind, and has not gone off.