Regional legend · 4 min read · Set in Marsh Road ·
The Crossing That Waits for Its Counts on Marsh Road
The pelican by the timber yard calls its green without a push and its pole shows nobody on film, and the tallies are level by morning.
- status: rumor
The pelican on Marsh Road stands where the yard gates face the swimming baths, and it is an ordinary pelican in every part that shows: pole, button, two heads of signal, the rubber cone that spins under the thumb. The borough put it up when the yard was fenced, and the borough services it twice a year, and the lamp in it is the borough lamp. What is not ordinary about it is the book-keeping on both sides of the pole, and the book-keeping is the length and breadth of the story.
The unit keeps two tallies, the same as any pelican keeps. One is the tally of green calls it makes, each one stamped in with the time. The other is the tally of pushes, each one stamped in with the time, and in the ordinary way of pelicans everywhere a push sits at the head of its green and the two tallies walk away together, push and call, the same number and no day left owing.
On Marsh Road the tallies part. Everyone who has worked the traffic office late turn has seen the reading where the calls have gone up one on the pushes — a green man come and gone at complete leisure, whole sequence, amber flashing, the crossing done — with no push stamped behind it at any previous minute of the day. The button on the pole is sound; the circuit is signed each half year; the count is the count of a button that was not pressed. And the camera on the yard corner photographs the crossing at the rate of four to the minute, and for the whole of that green man the film shows the kerb standing in its own light, both ways, empty. Not one foot at the cone. Not one coat at the edge of the frame. The staging takes its time and goes through, for nobody, while the pole holds the crossing for someone.
The parting does not last. That is the part the men will tell you if you let them, and they will tell it slowly because the numbers are the only comfort in it. The evening reading is out by one, or some nights by two, the calls up on the pushes. The morning reading — the first thing taken at six, before the sweepers, before the first bus — is level. The pushes have come in overnight, stamped at no hour anybody will stand over, and the two tallies meet, and the book for Marsh Road is served. Nine years of sheets, and every one of them has closed level by morning, whatever the kerb did or did not hold after dark.
The users of the crossing have their own manner about it, and it is not fear. The pensioners of Marsh Road do not hurry on the green. They stand first, one breath, look both ways for whoever was called, and crossing on, they step out unhurried, in case. Ivy Tarrant has given the schools their road lesson at that pole for nineteen years, and her lesson has one sentence more at Marsh Road than it has at the baths crossing: the man is never green for no one. She teaches it flat, the way arithmetic is taught, and the seniors take it flat, and nobody at the pole giggles, which the wardens of other districts notice and do not ask into.
The borough has been out four times with a pole tester and a pad, and the borough line is photocell picking up headlights off the yard road. The pads say so. The pads also say, where asked, that the fault has been wired for, metered, and watched on three separate nights, and that on the three nights it did not occur, and the fourth night it did, and the pads were folded away.
You will hear it told today on the late turn at the traffic office, over the percolator, with the sheets squared to the blotter, and by the wardens at the baths gate, who tell it shorter. The count, whatever else is said of it, has never once been left owing. What the late turn asks, quietly, with the percolator off, is the only question the sheets do not answer: it is nine years and level every morning — what happens on the Marsh Road pole, or under it, on the first night the count fails to come up to meet its calls.