Entity story · 4 min read · Set in Larch Hill ·
Where You Set It Down
On the grounds of a closed sanatorium the tenth autumn of mowing brings a field of pale hollow copies of everything that ever rested there, and one new copy of a thing that never stood there at all.
The Larch Hill sanatorium closed twenty-two years ago, and the grounds have been mowed ever since by men who were told it kept the bracken down and there was no more to it than that. Alan Doak does it now, four passes a season, and Hettie Brace brings the post down the fire lane once a month, because mail keeps coming to *The Warden, Larch Hill*, God help us, and somebody has to leave it in the rack by the gatehouse door and not ask.
After the first of the autumn rains, mushrooms fruit out of the flat grass between the walls: chalk-white, soft-shelved, with stems like cut glass, in low standing mist. If an object has rested in one place for enough years, these raise a copy of it in pale hollow relief. The copy is exact. Down to the stitching, down to the grain of the wood, down to the nickel plating. Nothing at Larch Hill has been handled by anyone in a living memory, and so nothing at Larch Hill is missing from the field: there is a bench along the west path, in white; a coat on a hook beside the boot-room door, hook and all, in white; a pair of boots in white by the step; a water butt; a hand-cart with a flat tyre. All of it fragile as a wafer. All of it hollow. All of it, on any interference, collapsing into the plainest dust, like chalk gone through an apron.
The famous one is the south wall. Bath chairs stood along the wall for years, in a line, in the patches of sun, out of the wind. The count is fifty-one. The copies rise for each of them, chair and chair, and in most of them the shape does not stop at the chair. Something sits there, in the same white, sleeves and shoulders and an unpressured stillness, worn cushions under it in soft relief. Doak stopped mowing near the south wall two seasons ago. His memo to the estates office gave as his reason *to avoid damage to the fungus*, which is true, and his verbal reason, which he gave to Hettie over her flask, is that he has been told the chairs are being kept. He will not say told by whom, or for how long, and his hands shake slightly when he says the word *kept*, which Hettie has decided is about the mist.
The first wrong one Hettie found was the churn. The sanatorium never had a churn; it had a kitchen and a lift and, in the grounds, nothing in cream or metal that ever stood in one place long enough to be remembered by anything. The copy nevertheless rose after an October rain, complete: a milk churn, white though iron-banded, with its name stencilled round the belly in a neat painted line: *T. Verrell & Sons, Dairies, Saint Verel.* Hettie photographed it front and sides, walked back to her round, and — because the post is her trade — wrote to the dairy. The reply came back in eleven days, on a Thursday, with a felt-tray stamp. The letter thanks her for the photograph. The letter says the churn stands in their yard this very morning, painted the year the present owner's father took the farm on, and is not for sale, and that the picture is a good one and has been pinned in the office. The writer is alive, the churn is standing in Saint Verel, the shell beneath the wall is standing in Larch Hill at the same time, and the ground in both places has never held the other's weather. Hettie has filed the correspondence, in her postmistress manner, and has not shown it to anyone but Doak.
Doak's own count of the field's wrong ones stands at seven. A bicycle from a county south of here. A walker-frame no one could trace at all. He keeps his own list. He has told Hettie that the copies of things that were there are residue, a plain matter of weight and years; and then he has gone quiet in the middle of saying so, both times, and not finished, and the mist has come up the fire lane between them as though called into the pause.
Hettie keeps to the gatehouse on her visits now; she reads for twenty minutes on the bench in the boot-room, which is real, and has her flask and her book, and is careful to be gone by eleven. What she cannot leave behind is arithmetic. The field holds a copy of whatever rested where it rested. It has held — from somewhere else, in season, in perfect condition — the belongings of the living, who have carried on not knowing. And so the seventh wrong one frightens her least, because the arithmetic of it is at least hers: some Friday soon there will be a white copy by the gatehouse door of a jacket she has hung on a nail there for eleven minutes a month for twenty-two years, and it will be well done, and it will be hollow, and the thing she needs to know then is not where the copy came from but where the jacket is standing while the copy is there sitting-in-its-place, and whether, when she leaves for the round, she is the one whose chair has been kept.