Washington, D.C. · June 21, 2230
Trey had been paid to deliver a gate for the restoration of free passage.
The words were painted across its upper rail. He could read them backward through the slats whenever he looked behind him, which was often. The gate overhung both sides of the cart. Every corner required an apology.
At Chapel Row, a woman stopped him with a raised palm.
“Deliveries only.”
“Excellent.”
“Deliveries here.”
Trey pointed through the closed gate at the end of her street. Beyond it, the lane continued toward a junction with Kiln Cut.
“There.”
“That's not here.”
He looked at the gate on his cart, then at hers.
“I am beginning to understand the order.”
The woman was called Dena. He knew because she had once paid him to bring a bath uphill, then made him stay while she checked whether its feet agreed on the floor. She was mending a child's coat at a table beside her front step. Three other tables stood in the lane, all occupied. One held a sleeping baby in a drawer.
Before the gate, she told him, loaded carts had come through to avoid the longer turn below the storage yards. A wheel had crushed her worktable. A driver had offered to pay for the wood.
“The coat on it was worth six times the wood.”
“Did he pay?”
“He said the street was public.”
Trey shifted his grip on the shafts.
Since the gate, children could cross between houses without somebody catching their collars. People who worked through the night could sleep in the front rooms. The street had stopped shaking long enough for a repaired window to remain repaired.
“Go around,” Dena said.
He did. It took two extra turns, a climb, and a descent over paving he disliked even without a load that wanted to become a sail.
At Kiln Cut, a man was kneeling beside a drain with a bucket of broken stone. His name was Oren. Trey had seen him in that position so often that he had begun using him as a landmark.
“Gate,” Trey announced.
Oren stood. One knee straightened more slowly than the other.
“You're late.”
“There's a gate.”
“I know. Put ours there.”
He pointed to two chalk marks across the Cut. Closing that gap would stop carts taking the loop around Chapel Row. The Row would have to open its own gate or stop receiving anything too large to carry through a house.
Oren had a drawing. In the drawing, both gates were open.
Trey studied it.
“Then why am I delivering one?”
“So we can get to that.”
A cart passed behind them. Oren pulled his bucket clear. One wheel struck the edge of the drain and knocked two newly packed stones loose.
The driver called an apology without stopping.
“That's the fourth apology today,” Oren said. “I'm trying them as aggregate.”
The households along the Cut had paid for three repairs since Chapel Row closed. The diverted carts passed their doors, their washing, their children. Oren's own table had moved indoors. Through his open window Trey could see one end of it, and beyond that a bed with hardly room between.
Trey knew the wheel that had loosened the stones. He had borrowed that cart last week.
He did not mention it.
Dena arrived while they were measuring the new gate against the chalk. She had taken the foot opening beside her own gate. A child could pass through it. A barrel could not.
“You can't close this,” she said.
“It's a street,” Oren said. “Apparently we can.”
“The Row agreed to ours.”
“The Row didn't ask the Cut.”
“Your gate will stop our food.”
“Your food has been taking pieces of my drain home.”
Trey set the shafts down. The cart rolled an inch. All three reached for it, then resumed their positions after he wedged a stone beneath the wheel.
Oren showed Dena a list of repair purchases. She showed him the pale scar across the back of her hand where the table had gone over.
Neither put away their evidence.
“Your street has room,” she said.
“Where?”
She looked past him at the washing pulled flat against a wall.
Trey took out the delivery docket. At the bottom, the purchaser was to sign for one gate, two posts, four hinge straps, and transport. Abegale had crossed out a sentence supplied by the seller: ACCESS IMPROVEMENT COMPLETE.
In its place she had written GOODS RECEIVED.
“Who's paying you?” Dena asked him.
“The people who ordered it.”
“Then of course you think it should go up.”
“I get paid if it lies down.”
Oren glanced at the docket.
“Only after I accept it.”
“Yes,” Trey said. “That is the difficult end of my independence.”
A woman appeared in Oren's doorway carrying a bowl and asked whether the table could go back outside. She had counted six carts since he left his lunch.
“Not yet,” he said.
She went inside. He watched her turn sideways past the furniture.
Dena examined the cart's width. Then the gate. Then the empty posts waiting to be set.
“Open ours for one delivery,” she said. “Yours. Take that thing through the Row and see what it does to the lane.”
Oren folded his drawing.
“One cart won't tell us about a day.”
“It will tell you about one cart.”
“And when it gets through, you say there's no problem, and we keep the rest?”
“I won't say that.”
“Put it down.”
Trey handed her the unused back of the delivery docket. She wrote: ONE LOADED PASSAGE. NO AGREEMENT ABOUT THE REST. Oren added a line beneath it: WATCH BOTH STREETS.
“Who watches?” Trey asked.
They looked at him.
“I'll be driving the gate.”
Dena fetched a neighbor to stay at the Cut and count the carts. The neighbor wanted her unfinished mending taken over in return. Dena put it on her own pile. Oren left his stones with a boy who agreed to mind the drain but not repair it.
By the time they had arranged one cart, they had found work for four people.
Dena unlocked her gate.
Trey approached the Row on foot between the shafts. Oren walked at the far end of the load, watching the overhang. Dena went ahead moving chairs. The drawer with the baby went indoors. Two women lifted a table without being asked and asked, while holding it, who had agreed to this.
“One passage,” Dena said.
“That wasn't my question.”
At the narrowest point Trey stopped. His right wheel needed the strip of paving beneath Dena's table.
She looked at it for a long moment. Then she lifted one end.
The gate passed within a finger's width of her door. Oren put his palm over a projecting hinge strap. Trey felt the load drag and stopped again.
“Go,” Oren said. “Slowly.”
From an upstairs window, someone who had been asleep said something about all their mothers.
Nobody entered it on the docket.
They made the junction without damage. At the Cut, the neighbor reported three other carts, one of which had stopped while a washerwoman fetched a fallen sheet. She had marked that separately because being decent took time too.
Oren signed for the gate. He did not sign Dena's proposal to leave his posts unplanted for a week.
“Tomorrow,” he said. “Bring the people who had to move the tables.”
“And the ones who sleep upstairs.”
“Yes.”
“And somebody who can mend a drain,” Trey said.
Oren looked at him.
Trey turned his borrowed wheel so the patch on its rim was visible.
“I know where I can get a cartload of stone.”
“Free?”
Trey considered how much of the damage belonged to that wheel and how little of the cart belonged to him.
“I can bring it. You'll have to find the stone.”
They unloaded the gate against the Cut's wall, leaving the footpath clear. Dena went back to lock hers. Oren returned to the drain. The woman brought his cold lunch outside and put it on an upturned bucket.
Trey picked up the empty shafts.
Above the gate's promise of free passage, Oren had chalked a smaller instruction for tomorrow's meeting.
BRING YOUR OWN CHAIR.
Below it, after looking toward Chapel Row, he added:
AND TAKE IT HOME AGAIN.