Short story · 4 min read · Set in Wharf Street ·
The Tally of the Second Crew
A quay that works one crew by daylight keeps a second crew in the book, and the second crew's tally squares whatever the day leaves off the page.
The quay at Wharf Street keeps two crews and works one of them. The other it keeps in the book.
The day crew comes on at the six o'clock hooter, works the berth through the light, and goes off at six. Their tally fills the front half of the tally book, a ledger ruled with the days across and the men down, and by the last light of a working day the front half does not balance. It has not balanced once in the memory of anyone drawing wages on that quay. The day crew is short the way day crews are short: a quarter-hour lost at the tide's turn, a tier miscounted in the hurry of the light, weight come off the ship that never got itself onto the page.
The back half of the book is filled by the morning. It carries a second crew, plain names in the plain order, hours against each name, piece-rates under the hours, and a closing line ruled and initialled at the foot that brings the half to the square. Whatever the day crew leaves off the page, the back half has on it: the tier counted in the dark, the quarter-hour worked, the weight put down in a neat hand at the weight it truly came off at. The two halves close together every Friday. The clerk runs the line, signs the book square, and the book is square. No clerk of the quay has ever had cause to query it, and the arithmetic has never once been caught out, which on a working quay is said of no other paper in the port.
The day crew has not met the second crew. The hooter does not sound at night. The gate stays chained from the last knock-off, and the gatekeeper will tell you, unasked, that the chain has not been off since the year of the storm, and that he keeps the key in his coat and his coat in his house. The book nevertheless has the second crew clocking on at three and off at half past. The clock is kept going because it has always been kept going, and its cards for the second crew are not in the rack at three. They are in the rack at half past, punched, in sequence, and at no other hour of the day or night is a card for that crew in the rack at all.
The pay office draws the second crew's wages weekly, in cash, from the same drawer as the day crew's, and the drawer comes out even at the weekly check, which is the pay office's whole test of the world and which passes. The wage packets for the second crew are signed for in the receipt column, in a hand nobody on the quay knows and nobody on the quay has missed, and the packets go out with the rest and the column closes flat.
Last November the foreman made up his mind to see the second crew clock on. He sat in the clock porch from midnight with the office's good lamp, and he reported afterwards that nothing came through the gate, that the chain stayed on, that the river went on at its work below, and that at some minute he declined to name, being asked twice, the cards were in the rack. He handed back the clock's spare key, which the office had not known it had lent him, and he has not offered to sit again.
The quay carries it the way carried things are carried. The tonnage goes out by the draft as marked, the ships sail, the wage bill is paid once, and if the work is done twice the second doing costs the company nothing it can name. Every Friday the book closes square, with the clerk's initials under both halves and the line ruled through between them.
What the second crew squares the tally against is the one entry the book does not carry, and nobody on the quay has put that question to the page. Whether the book keeps a second crew for the quay, or the quay keeps a second crew for the book, is unsettled, and stays unsettled, while the Friday line goes through between the halves regardless and the quay works on.