Regional legend · 4 min read · Set in Glen Sorrow ·
Why They Weigh the Floodwater
Every year after the thaw the glen weighs its floodwater on the barley scales, and the figure is sent down to the mill and entered as due.
- status: rumor
Nobody at the head of the glen will tell you why the place is called Sorrow. They will tell you it is not the reason you have already thought of. Then they will tell you about the weighing, because that is the reason they keep.
The weighing is on the first Monday after the thaw, in the granary at the top of the valley. The granary keeps the great balance that weighs the barley at harvest, and on that one Monday the beam is swung empty and wiped down, the seed is out of the hopper, and the flood comes in. The floodwater of the glen is weighed, once a year, on grain scales, to the pint and then to the hundredweight, and no one in the glen has ever suggested any other way.
They are particular about it, and the particulars are the bother. The gauge pails live under the granary floor, sixteen to the hundredweight, stamped G.S., and however often they are scalded they go on smelling of seed. The weigher is a paid post. Harold Tice held the seat for thirty-one years and in all that time never once asked the question newcomers ask, which is how a flood is got into pails. The glen asks it for him, every year, in exactly that tone, and every year the pails come back from the mark stone in the wheel-race full to the brim, in the standing water, with no wet boots to show for it anywhere on the yard.
The figure goes down to the mill the same day. The clerk, Alma Pusey, writes it fair on the mill's own form under the printed heading DUE, and the sheet is folded once and carried down the valley in the coat pocket of whoever holds the post, and at the mill it is entered in the daybook, and the wheel's allowance of water for the season is set by it. The mill has never once asked for the water itself. It has only ever asked for the figure. The old covenant that begins every version of this tale says plainly why: the glen owes its water to the mill by weight, so many hundredweight by the season, dated from the year the race was cut through the valley floor, and the flood is the glen paying, once a year, what the glen has raised.
What is not explained is the arithmetic. The figure does not follow the weather. Wet winters and dry ones, a thaw that took three hedges and a footbridge, a spring that never wet the stones twice, the weight comes out within a pail of the same figure every year, and the glen has stopped pretending otherwise in company. Tice used to lay last year's sheet on the beam-case before he began, to give the thaw a chance to differ. It never took the chance by more than a pail either way.
The one time it differed was the one time it mattered. In a dry spring in Tice's own time the entry came short, by a pail and a half, and whether the fault was his, the pails', or the water's was never settled. Within the week the sheet came back from the mill with SHORT stamped corner-wise across the DUE. By Whitsun the glen had made the difference good: every well on the valley floor rose overnight to a hand below its brim, every one of them to the same height, and no rain had fallen and the wind had not turned, and the water just stood there in all those wells at once, filed and waiting, until the figure was corrected. The correction was entered the same night, in the same hand that had faulted it, and no more was ever said. Nothing is ever said. That is the price of the word SHORT.
Some in the glen hold that the scales weigh what the flood carries down, grit and gravel and the valley's own skin, and that the mill is buying the place back a hundredweight at a time. Others hold that a flood is a payment waiting for a scale, and the glen is only first in the queue. The weighers tell it where it has always been told, on weighing mornings, walking the beam's shadow back up to the granary with the empty pails — and the question they leave set on the beam-case for the rest of the year, unpriced and unanswered, is when the glen has paid its water down to the last hundredweight, who holds the debt then?