The Year He Stopped Selling Salt

The register was mine to keep, which meant I wrote down what the lane owed and did not write down what I thought of it. Eighth day, out loud, in the road, the way it has always been done here: name, sum, and whether it was settled. My part was the writing. Everyone else's part was standing there while it was read.

Anton Obscure paid on the eighth day like everybody else and never owed more than a week. That is not a compliment. A man who never owes anything is a man who has not asked you for anything, and after eleven years I still could not have told you the name of his mother.

What I could have told you was his salt. Four sacks a month, coarse, off Bracht's wagon, and a fifth in the autumn for the curing. He sold it on at a copper over what he paid and told anyone who asked exactly that, which is the only reason the lane trusted him with anything else.

In the spring of that year the wagon came and he took two sacks. In the summer he took none.

Bracht mentioned it to me the way men mention things they have already decided are nothing. I put it in the register, under his name, with no sum beside it, because there was no sum. Just the word salt and a date. I have been asked since why I wrote it at all, and the honest answer is that I had a line ruled and nothing to put in it.

He was buying other things. Lamp oil in quantities that made no sense for one man in one room. Chalk. Wire, the fine sort, which nobody here has any use for. Twice, a length of brass strip cut to a width he specified to the half-millimetre, and he paid what was asked without the pause a man puts in when he thinks a price is wrong.

That was the tell, if you want one. Anton always paused.