Witness account · 3 min read · Set in Larch Hill ·
My Hand in the Night Log
The night log carries my signature on nights my wife keeps a book that says otherwise.
- reliability: disputed
- witness: "Ernest Clay, lock-keeper"
I keep the Larch Hill lock, night watch shared with Percy Lamb off the beat above mine. The log is the law of the stretch: each watch signs in, craft are counted by number, windings counted, gates and paddles set and stamped, tolls taken and balanced to the penny at the office. My hand is a plain hand, learned off my father, and I have signed with it thirty years without one query.
In March, checking a toll query, I read the month's sheet through and found my own hand set against the nights I spent at home: E. Clay, three nights of the month, stamped the third hour, the lock worked three windings a night, craft passed and entered by number, gates set, paddles shipped fair. And the tolls for that craft were taken in and paid across, so the money answers for the watch wherever the keeper stood while it was kept.
Beryl will put her name to the fact of my being in the house those nights. She sleeps light and marks her nights in the household book, fire one side and clock the other, and her marks are mine to produce. Percy Lamb will put his name the other way: he met me on the towpath at the third hour, he says, and took a mug of tea off me at the hut, and his own log carries the tea and the hour to match, entered neat as a receipt.
I carried the sheets to the office with a written objection. The office would not strike a signature: the log stands, the count balances, and signatures are not queried after the count. They gave me a disclaimer form, one line to a night, and I filled the lines, and the form went into the drawer with the originals, and the month was closed balanced, as months are closed. Nothing is missing from the log and nothing is entered on it that the money does not carry.
So the record stands as it stands: my wife's paper for one account, my colleague's paper for the other, the office stamp over both, and the tolls squared under the stamp. Both papers are signed in full and neither is struck. The hand is mine, therefore I wrote it: that does not follow, and I know it does not follow, because hands keep habits the mind keeps no ledger of. There it is, the crack in my own reading, and I set it down because the office would set it down for me if I left it out.
Beryl came with me and watched her paper filed; Lamb watched his filed the same afternoon, and went back up his beat whistling. Whoever keeps my nights on the water keeps them to the book: gates fair, numbers right, the third hour by the stamps, and the tea taken at the hut from my own mug, which Lamb describes small and hot as a man describing a kindness. If those were my nights on the water, whose was the bed I rose from at half past seven; and if they were not mine, whose footsteps came down the towpath to meet him?