Short story · 3 min read · Set in Cliffside ·
The Steps the Cliff Pays For
The coast path steps are renewed every year at public expense, and each renewal is fixed one tread further down.
The coast path at Cliffside is maintained by the borough, and the borough's share of the work is one thing only: the steps. Not the path — the path is walked and worn and left to itself, as paths are — but the steps, forty of them, cut into the head at the point where the ground gives over from grass to danger. Renewal is annual. The stakes are set, the timber is ordered, the joiner's invoice is paid with the harbour dues out of the same pocket, and the work is done in the first dry week after the equinox, which the borough's diary calls the mending week without any further explanation.
The men who do it are the same men, and they do it in the same order, and the order is this: they set the new stair first, and then they take the old one down.
Nobody at the borough office phrases it that way in the minutes, of course. The minutes say renewed. But the joiner's plan is drawn to the new stair, and the plan is marked one tread lower than last year's, and last year's was marked one tread lower than the year's before, and the borough's file of plans goes back to the first of the month of the Misprint, plus one. Forty-one plans. Forty-one treads. The arithmetic is its own witness and the men have stopped being surprised by it, if surprise is what you would call what they did in the first years, which was to argue.
They argued it properly, with the plan department, and the plan department answered what plan departments answer, which is that each year's plan is drawn from the survey, and the survey is marked at the last sound ground, and the last sound ground is where the last sound ground is. The men took the answer away. Some of them never came back and their names went off the list cleanly, as names do; the ones who stayed learned to work the order.
On the mending week, from the top, the watcher sees the whole thing happen and cannot see anything unlawful in it. New stakes, new timber, one tread lower into the head, all fastened by a measure that is read aloud and entered. Then the removal, the old stair lifted out, beam by beam, and carried up to the firewood stack, and burned — not stored, burned, the same week, by the same men, in a fire that is lit early and watched to the end. The borough's carrier never sees a beam leave the district. The fire is the rule. It is in no standing order, and it is kept.
The rate book calls the work stabilisation, and there is one further line in the rate book, undated and unread by most, which prices the burning as a duty of the borough, at a penny a year. A penny a year has bought a watched fire for past counting, and the poundage has never once been queried.
Forty steps have gone down this way since the file began, one a year, and the head has given them each a further tread of ground in return, which is to say that the cliff pays its share too. Ask any of the men and they will say the bargain has held and that it is not their place to price the barter. But they will say, each of them, in his first year, once, when he is sure the foreman is up the line: the burn is easy to watch. It is the stair that is hard to take up, and no one has ever asked him what the sound is.
Nobody asks. To ask would be to price the change at a fixed figure, and the borough does not price the change, only the fire, at a penny, and the stair, at its length. What the head gets off the men, and what the men get off the head, no ledger carries.