Regional legend · 3 min read · Set in The Northfield Valley ·
The Gates That Take Turns
The tenantry of Northfield Valley close their field gates every night, and every noon one of the ten stands open anyway, in an order nobody owns.
- status: rumor
What I have is rumor, and I will hold it to the standard of rumor, which is this: say only what is said, and say it flat. What is said in Northfield Valley, by every tenant on both banks, is that the field gates open in turns. Not loose in the wind. Not forced. Found open, at noon, latched back to the post as tidy as a gate you meant to come back to, one at a time and in strict order down the tenantry — and every hand in the valley says the same thing, which is that the gate that opened was the gate they closed.
The board numbered the gates when the culverts went in, one to ten running up the valley, and the rotation ignores nothing. Gate one, then two, then three; no skips, no doubles, no favor to weather or market day. After ten it begins at one again, so steady that Ted Mowbray at gate five — who knows his latch has a trick in it and keeps the trick to himself — gave up setting his watch by it, because the rotation does not run to the clock so much as alongside it.
The tenants are credible people. Joan Rackstraw wired her gate shut one hard January, wire and strainer, a proper job. By the next noon the wire lay beside the post, coiled, uncut, looped exactly as she takes it off, and her gate was Tuesday's, and Tuesday's it was. Nobody disputes her, and nobody says to her face that she did not close what she closed. Young Peter Aldiss, newest of the tenantry, slept two nights in the byre within sight of his gate to settle it, and got the best sleep of his year, and his gate was the one found open on the second noon. No one calls him a liar. What is said is this: you cannot close a gate in a way that stays closed on its day.
Now the paper end. The rounds man carries a sheet with two columns, FOUND and CLOSED BY, and both columns are filled, every line, every round of the year. FOUND reads closed, gate after gate, in a level hand. The closing hand is neat, unhurried, and belongs to nobody the valley can produce. So the paper and the noon do not argue, because the paper never mentions the thing the noon is finding. You cannot build a contradiction out of it, which is why the rumor stays a rumor. The sheet is not wrong. The sheet is simply not about this.
There is one more turn to it, given as it is given. Before the frost years there were eleven gates. One field came out of tenancy, the board brassed over its number, and the books run clean at ten. The rotation, so the saying goes, did not shorten. Once each round, on the day that belongs to the struck number, nothing is found open anywhere in the valley — and that noon, all the tenants agree, is the worst noon there is, because there is nothing standing open to shut behind you and nothing to check your latch against. The valley sits between counts. Every tenant I have named will tell you they do not care for arithmetic that keeps a place for a thing struck off the books.
Does somebody open them for a wager? You will get that question at every kitchen table, and you will get my answer with it, since I read the meters and carry the sheet, and the sheet and I have walked this valley eleven years. A wager runs out, or gets proud, or gets caught. This has none of those qualities. The tenants say ask the rounds man; the rounds man says ask the sheet; and the sheet, all ten lines and the blank where the eleventh used to live, says closed. So here is what I leave on your table with the cup: if every gate in the valley is closed, and one gate stands open at noon, what exactly is it that we keep signing for?