Diary fragment · 2 min read ·
The Roll Under the Sill
A caretaker's Friday cloth turns up the register a morning before the register is typed.
- dated: "the winter rolls"
- narrator: "Bess Foley, school caretaker"
— the first of the winter rolls.
Friday is sill day, and the cloth goes under every classroom sill and comes out grey. Under the small class's sill, second room off the corridor, it brought up pencil this time: names, soft-written, small, laid where only a flat hand could reach. Their books carry fifteen on the class; the sill carried fourteen spellings, and in register order, near enough, past disputing. The pencil is the soft kind from the juniors' trays, and the letters sit level as printed, as if the writer had all night and no cold in the fingers. I put the dust in the pan and the cloth in my pocket and said nothing to myself about any of it.
— the third of the winter rolls.
I carry the register cards down from the office on the morning post run, Mondays and Fridays, and reading them is not my work, which is why I read them. The cards come off the typewriter of an afternoon and wait in the tray, and the tray was empty on the Fridays I checked. The small class's card carries two late marks and one child kept home, and the pencil under the sill carries the same two lates in the same two places, with the keep-home mark against the same name. The sill was written before the office typed the card. There is no tidier way to put it in a book.
— the ninth of the winter rolls.
I tried the other rooms. The far sill and the hall sill give nothing at all; the marks live in one classroom and nowhere else in the building. I copied the fourteen spellings into my own book, pages squared, and left room under them, and one spelling over: the fifteenth has no card behind it, sits at the head of the list, and is spelled the old way, i before the o, with a gap left for it in the line as if the list had been told to make room. I did not rub the marks out. A sill is not mine to edit, and the cloth would only ask its question again on the next Friday.
— the last of the winter rolls.
I have taken to copying on Fridays before the office types, and setting my copy beside the cards after; they have agreed morning for morning all this month, mark for mark, late for late, keep-home for keep-home. The books say fifteen and the sill says sixteen. The head signs the caretaker's book on Fridays and has never asked after my extra page, and I have never turned the page towards him. Before the winter rolls are ruled off and filed, what I find myself wanting is one plain line for my own book: the name of the class that owns the sixteenth line, the number of its room, and which bell it comes in on.