Archived report · 4 min read · Set in Tavernier ·
The Tally of the Fourth Season
The harvest ledger at Tavernier keeps four columns of accounts every season, and the fourth is ruled, entered, carried forward, and never priced.
- filed: "with the harvest books"
- reference: "TV/FS/03"
1. This file concerns the harvest books of Tavernier Home Farm and the valuation papers returned against them at each appointed term. The books are kept in fair order by S. Quested, the tenant, and are walked twice a year by P. Snaith, valuation officer, out of Murrow. Both men are satisfied with the arrangement and have been satisfied, on the evidence of the returns, for a matter of decades. This office is not yet in a position to say the same, and has been not in a position for some years.
2. The ledger rules four columns across each season's page: Spring, Midsummer, Autumn, and a fourth headed, in the tenant's own steady hand, Latter. The fourth is ruled as the other three are ruled — acres, sheaves, cartings, days of weather taken — and the entries go into it as regularly as into any column of the book, in the same ink and kept to the same decimal. No price is ever posted in it. At the foot of the page the season is struck, and the total is set against the three priced columns only. The fourth is carried forward unpriced, marked to be priced at the return.
3. The carried tally goes forward into the fourth column of the next season and sits at its head like a figure nobody has called in. Season follows season this way, and the Latters chain back through the book link by link, each one waiting on a pricing that is set for the return and never set for a date. A page is ruled for the pricing itself. It lies deep in the book now, past the halfway mark, and its lines were ruled in the same ruling and the same sitting as every column around it. No entry has ever been made within it. No line in it has ever been ruled a second time to close it off.
4. The arithmetic is the finding this office cannot put by. Take the three priced seasons as they stand and strike the farm's year from them: till against seed, chattels against repairs, sales against the roster, rent against the bank. The farm does not balance. It runs each season to a shortfall, and the shortfall is not of a settled size but changes with the year, and each season the changed figure is of the same size exactly as the unpriced Latter of the season before, to the shilling, on every page examined. Count the fourth column in, unanswered and unpriced, and the books sit level. What the books would sit upon if the column were priced is nowhere on file. It has never been priced.
5. The tenant was asked plainly why the column goes unpriced. He said: because it is not for pricing. Asked who then takes what the fourth season grows, he looked down the book for a while and said it goes where the rest goes. The cartings of the three priced seasons carry weighbridge tickets in the Murrow mill's current stock, watermarks sound and the tally-clerk's initials matched to a man still in post. The fourth season's cartings carry tickets of a stock the mill stopped printing before the tenant was born, in a clerk's lettering that nobody now at the mill would put a name to, though the office notes they looked at it long enough to have one.
6. The valuer's return has come in uniform at every term held on file: four columns ruled, three priced, the fourth carried. This term's return came in a day early. One sentence stands at its foot in the valuer's own hand: the pricing page is no longer ruled. He does not say who has unruled it. What is meant by no longer, on a page that has never held an entry and never been closed, is not explained, and his signature below the sentence is quite steady.
7. No Writ arises. It is noted that the fourth column of the season now opening already carries its sheaves in pencil, entered ahead of the mowing, and that the count so entered has been found right every time it has been checked at all. The pricing date stands blank. Whether the blank is kept by the valuer who will not price it or by a book that will not be priced is the question this file leaves standing in the field with the stooks.