The glass
12 November 1777. 24 a 0 · 22 a 0 · NW · Cloudy Tuesday the 11th had a little Snow, which was the 1st appearance of Winter
The Englishman’s garden was not a garden. It was a yard behind the house with a cabbage stalk in it, a board lying flat on the ground for no reason he could see, a woodpile under a roof of boards, and a post. The post was taller than Toussaint and had a little roof of its own, two boards nailed together like a hat. Under the hat, on the north side, where the sun never came, hung the glass.
“Don’t touch it,” the Englishman said in English. Then he said it again in French that was worse than Toussaint’s English, and Toussaint put his hands behind his back to show he’d understood both times.
It was a narrow wooden box as long as his arm, with a pane of glass for a front, hung on a nail by a brass ear. Behind the pane was a plate of silvered brass cut all over with fine lines, and up the middle of it ran a tube no thicker than a straw. A silver thread climbed the tube from a bulb at the bottom, sitting in a little brass cage, and stopped. Beside the lines were numbers, and beside some of the numbers were words. Toussaint couldn’t read the words. He knew numbers. His father sold wood by the cord and was cheated by the half cord, and a boy who could count was worth keeping in the sleigh.
“Where does it stop?” the Englishman said, and pointed. Not at the thread. At the top of it, where the silver ended and the glass went on, empty.
Toussaint leaned in, not close enough to breathe on it, because he’d seen the Englishman turn his own face aside when he looked. The thread stopped between two long lines. He counted the short lines up from the lower one. Four.
“Twenty,” the Englishman said, pointing to the lower long line without touching the pane, “and four. Twenty-four.” He said it the English way, the bigger number first, which was also the French way, so there was nothing to learn there. “Above.”
“Above,” Toussaint said.
“Above nothing.” The Englishman crouched, which he didn’t look made for, and held one finger close to the pane beside a long line much lower down, where the number was only a ring. “That is nothing. Zero. Below that, we say below. Tonight it will not be below. Tonight it will be…” He looked at the sky, which was the colour of a pewter plate and had been since the snow. “Twenty,” he said. “Twenty-two. We shall see.”
Then they went in, and the Englishman showed him the book.
It was a long narrow book, as long as a man’s forearm, ruled in red lines one way and in pale lines the other. At the top of the page, written in a hand so large and looping it looked like the writing on a deed at the notary’s, was a word Toussaint could not read and then the year, which he could. Under it were columns. The Englishman read them out with his finger: Days. Remarks. Thermometer, seven o’clock morning, nine o’clock evening. Snow, inches. Rain. Wind. Weather.
In the column under the Thermometer, on the first line, he had already written the morning: a 2, a 4, and then a small letter like a round belly with a tail, and a ring.
“a,” the Englishman said. “Above. And o, nothing. Twenty-four above nothing.” He took a fresh pen from the jar by the stove, looked at its point, and wrote in the wide column on the left, slowly, so that it took a long time and Toussaint could watch the letters come out of the pen one after another like stitches. He blotted it.
“What does it say?”
The Englishman read it to him. Tuesday the eleventh had a little snow, which was the first appearance of winter.
Toussaint looked at the window, at the yard and the cabbage stalk and the post in its hat. The snow on Tuesday had been nothing. It had lain on the boards of the woodpile until noon and then gone. His mother had said it was a fat snow, a soft one, the kind that came before the real one to make people feel foolish for being afraid of it.
“That was not winter,” he said.
The Englishman considered this with the pen still in his hand.
“It was the first appearance of it,” he said, and put the pen back in the jar.
His work was wood and water, at first. The Englishman was a purveyor, which was a word Toussaint had to ask the meaning of twice and still did not understand until he saw what it was: a man who bought things for the King’s sick soldiers and wrote down what he had bought. Blankets. Candles. Rice, oatmeal, beef, bread from the bakers in the Rue Saint-Paul. Wood, mostly. The sick were in two rented houses near the water, with a stove at each end of every room and beds between, and they burned more wood than a farm, and every cord came in on a sleigh and every sleigh was counted by the purveyor or by the boy he’d hired.
So Toussaint counted. He counted cords in the morning, and the Englishman wrote them in a different book, square, bound in brown, with columns that had nothing to do with the sky.
But at seven he went out to the post. That was the bargain they had come to in the first week without either of them saying it. The Englishman did not like the cold on his hands before he had eaten, and Toussaint did not mind it, and the glass did not care who read it as long as they didn’t breathe.
He would go out in the half-dark, because at seven in November the sun is only thinking about it, with a lantern held out at the end of his arm and turned a little away, the way he’d been shown, so that the heat of the flame would not go into the glass. He’d read where the silver stopped. He’d count the small marks from the long one below. He’d say the number in his head in French and then once more in English, in a whisper, so as not to breathe. Then he’d go in and say it aloud at the table, with above or below after it, and the Englishman would write it.
For three weeks he never once said below. He waited for it the way you wait for a word you’ve only heard grown people use.
5 December 1777. 8 b 0 · 6 b 0 · NW · Clear This morning at 8 O’Clock the Therm was 12 below 0
It had snowed all night, the kind of snow that comes with no wind, and in the morning the yard was the same shape it had been the night before, only rounded off. Somebody had cleared the path to the post. Somebody was Toussaint, at a quarter to seven, with a wooden shovel taller than he was.
The sky was clear. There were still stars over the river side. His breath went up past his face in one piece, and he turned his head from the box before he looked, and the silver thread was not where it had ever been.
It was below the ring.
He counted. He counted again, from the ring downward, the short lines, and the second time his lips moved and he stopped them, because he’d been told about breath. Eight. Eight lines down from nothing.
He stood there long enough that his feet began to tell him about it. He wasn’t surprised. He had felt the cold coming up through his moccasins all the way across the yard, a cold with edges.
Inside, the Englishman was at the table in his coat with the book open and the pen already wet.
“Eight,” Toussaint said. “Below.”
The Englishman looked up at him and then, which he had never done before, at the window. The window was furred white to the top with frost ferns, and there was nothing to see through it.
He wrote it down. The 8, and then the little letter for below. Toussaint watched it come out of the pen and saw, for the first time, what he’d only half seen in the November pages, where it had been all a’s. The a was a round thing that sat on the line and didn’t go anywhere. The b had a long stroke, and the stroke went up.
“Why does it go up?” he said.
“What?”
“That letter. It means below, but it goes up.”
The Englishman looked at the b as though it had been written by someone else. “That is how it’s made,” he said. “b. You make the stem, then the belly.” And then, after a while, in which he went on looking at it: “In print it’s the same. Stem up.”
“And for above, nothing goes up.”
“No,” the Englishman said. “I suppose it doesn’t.”
He blotted the line. Then he did a thing Toussaint didn’t understand at first. He stood, put on his hat and his other coat on top of his first coat, and went out through the back door into the yard, and Toussaint heard his boots on the path, and then nothing, and then the boots coming back.
It was eight o’clock. The sun was up, low and white, the colour of a coin, and it was the kind of sun that doesn’t warm anything.
The Englishman came in and closed the door and stood with his back against it.
“Twelve,” he said.
Toussaint went cold in a different way. He had read it wrong. He had stood in the snow and counted twice and moved his lips and still read it wrong, and the Englishman had gone out to see because he hadn’t believed a boy on the first morning of below, and he had been right not to.
“I counted eight,” he said. “I counted two times.”
“It was eight,” the Englishman said. “At seven. It’s twelve now.” He sat down and took his hat off and put it on the table, which he never did. “It’s gone down four degrees since you read it. With the sun up. Do you understand?”
Toussaint did not understand. Everybody knew the cold broke when the sun came up. It was the one thing about the cold that everyone knew.
“It’s what it says,” the Englishman said, and pulled the book back towards him, and dipped the pen, and in the wide column on the left, where the words went, wrote something long. He read it to Toussaint when he’d finished, the way he always did, running his finger under it so that Toussaint could see which marks were which words, though he couldn’t.
This morning at eight o’clock the thermometer was twelve below nought.
In the column for seven o’clock, the 8 stayed where it was.
“You don’t change it,” Toussaint said.
“Why would I change it? It was eight at seven.” The Englishman looked at him, and Toussaint thought that he might be about to laugh, though he’d never seen him do it. “If I changed it, it would be wrong.”
22 December 1777. 28 a 0 · 12 a 0 · NW · Cloudy This morning the Ther being exposed to a strong Current of air, it fell down to 12 b: 0
The wind started before light. Toussaint heard it in the faubourg from his bed, which was the end of the bench nearest the stove, and he could tell from the sound it made in the chimney that it was coming down the river, from the north-west, the way most of them did.
At seven the thread stood at twenty-eight. He read it twice, because the wind was pushing at his back and he had to brace himself against the post, and it was twenty-eight both times. That was warm for December. He said it at the table, twenty-eight, above, and the Englishman wrote it, and Toussaint went down to the water to count wood.
The sleighs were late. The drivers came in with their faces wrapped to the eyes and their eyebrows white, and one of them said a thing about the wind that Toussaint’s mother would have slapped him for repeating. By the time the last cord was stacked the wind had gone into Toussaint’s coat at every seam, and his fingers were too stiff to make the marks on the tally stick, so he held the count in his head and walked it back to the house like a full bucket.
The Englishman was at the table. The book was open, and in the wide column on the left, beside the day, there was writing that hadn’t been there at seven, and above it, at the start, a small mark like a star.
“What does it say?”
The Englishman read it. This morning the thermometer, being exposed to a strong current of air, fell down to twelve below.
Toussaint looked at the column where the morning went. Twenty-eight, and the little round a.
“I read twenty-eight.”
“You did. I went out at ten.” The Englishman turned the pen in his fingers. “It was twelve below at ten.”
That was forty degrees. Toussaint had never seen the thread go forty degrees. Most days it didn’t go ten.
“The wind did it?”
“It was exposed,” the Englishman said, which was not quite yes. He wrote nothing else.
After he’d given the count and seen it written in the square brown book, Toussaint went out into the yard by himself. The wind came round the post the way water comes round a stone. He didn’t go near enough to breathe on the pane. He stood beside it with his back to the river and let the wind get into him, to see. He stood there until he couldn’t tell what he was thinking about, only that his face had stopped hurting, which his mother said was the time to go in. He went in. That night the Englishman read the glass himself, and it was twelve above again, and he wrote that too.
24 December 1777. 12 b 0 · 4 b 0 · N · Clear Very little Wind, in the morning about 7 O’Clock the Glass was covered with a hoar frost so that the Mercury could not easily be seen; in cleaning the Glass in a Warm Room the Mercury rose to 30 ab 0, it was again immediately exposed to its former situation & before 8 O’Clock the Mercury fell to 12 below 0
There was no wind at all. The smoke from every chimney in the faubourg went straight up and stayed in one piece a long way before it bent, and the snow on the path squeaked under his moccasins, which it only did when it was very cold. He knew before he got to the post that it would be below. He was ready to say it.
He turned his face away and held the lantern out and looked, and there was nothing to read.
The pane was white. Not white like the house windows, with ferns on them you could see between. It was white all over, furred, fine as the hair on a moth, and when he brought the lantern nearer it sparkled and showed him nothing at all behind it. Somewhere under it was the silver thread and the lines and the ring, and he couldn’t see any of them.
He could have wiped it. He had a mitten. He stood with his hand in the mitten at his side and didn’t, because of the first day, don’t touch it, said twice. He could have guessed. It was colder than the fifth, he was nearly sure of that. The cold was in his teeth. He could have gone in and said a number, and the Englishman would have written it, and the number would have gone wherever they went.
He went in and said, “I can’t see it.”
The Englishman put down his bread. He came out in one coat, without his hat, and looked at the white pane, and said something in English that wasn’t one of the words Toussaint knew. Then he reached up and lifted the box off its nail by the brass ear, the first time Toussaint had seen it come off the post, and turned and held it out to him.
“Carry it. Two hands. Don’t knock it.”
It was lighter than he’d thought. He carried it the way he’d carry the priest’s book, flat across his two forearms, up the path and through the back door and into the kitchen, where the stove was roaring and the air was so thick with warmth it felt wet. The Englishman shut the door behind them.
“On the table.”
He set it down. The Englishman took a cloth from the rail by the stove, held it a moment to warm it, and drew it down the pane.
The white went grey and then went to water, and the water ran, and for a moment Toussaint could see the lines and the ring. Then the pane clouded over again from the edges in, as if the room had breathed on it. The Englishman wiped it again, and it clouded again, slower. The third time it stayed clear.
The silver thread was climbing.
He’d never seen it move while he watched. In six weeks it had only ever been somewhere: here in the morning, there at night, and the moving all done in the dark when nobody was looking. Now it went up the tube steadily, the way a man goes up a ladder. Past the ring. Past ten. Toussaint said the numbers under his breath as it went, dix, vingt, and forgot about breathing on it, and the Englishman didn’t stop him. Past twenty. It was still going, slower now, near thirty, when the Englishman put out his hand.
“Thirty,” he said. “Above.” He sounded like a man who’d been told the price of something.
“It hasn’t stopped.”
“It isn’t for the room,” the Englishman said. He dried the pane with the dry end of the cloth. “Out. Now.”
Toussaint picked it up the same way, two hands, and the Englishman held the door, and they went out into the cold together and he lifted it up and found the nail with the brass ear on the second try. Then they stood there, both of them, a step back, faces turned a little aside.
The pane stayed clear. The thread came down. It came down slower than it had gone up, the way a man walks home slower than he walks out. Twenty. Ten. The ring. Toussaint’s feet started telling him about it and he didn’t move them. Below the ring. The Englishman took his watch out from under his coat and looked at it and put it back.
The thread stopped. Toussaint counted from the ring. He counted twice.
“Twelve,” he said. “Below.”
“Twelve below,” the Englishman said. It was still a little before eight. They went in.
At the table the Englishman dipped the pen and wrote, in the column for seven o’clock, a 1 and a 2 and then the letter with the stem that went up.
Toussaint looked at it. “That’s eight o’clock.”
“It’s the seven o’clock,” the Englishman said. “I couldn’t see it at seven.” He didn’t look up. He made the little star beside the line, and then, down at the bottom of the page, under all the days, where there was a space, he made another little star and began to write, very small for him, and for a long time.
Toussaint didn’t ask him to read it. He watched the pen go along the line and come back and go along again, and he thought he could tell where the thirty was, from the shape of it, though he couldn’t be sure.
That night, going to the midnight mass, the whole faubourg was out on the road with lanterns, the families walking close together in the squeaking snow and the bells going, and the cold was the kind that made the inside of his nose stick. Inside the church it was warm from all the people, and the windows ran with water by the Gloria, and he wondered, without meaning to, how high the thread would have gone.
Walking home after, at two in the morning, his mother asked him what the Englishman’s glass had said that day, because she’d heard about it from the neighbours, who had heard it from the woodcutters, that the boy went out and read a glass for the English.
“Twelve below,” he said.
“In the morning?”
“In the morning.”
29 December 1777. 6 b 0 · 6 a 0 · Snow 6 Inches · NE · Cloudy a great deal of Snow & drifting much; against the general Observation, that it never Snows when very cold
“It won’t snow,” his mother said the night before, with her back to him, banking the stove. “It’s too cold to snow.”
She said it the way she said the bread would rise, or that a red sky at night meant the wind would turn.
In the morning it was snowing so hard he couldn’t see the Englishman’s house from the end of the street.
The wind was from the other side for once, off the river from below the town, and it came carrying the snow sideways, so that it seemed to fall less than travel. The path he’d cleared the day before was gone. The woodpile was a long white hump. The post stood up out of a drift that came to its middle on one side and left it bare to the frozen ground on the other. The box had a skin of snow at the bottom corner of the pane, but the middle was clear.
The thread stood below the ring. He counted. Six.
He stayed there a while longer than he needed to, with his back to the wind and his eyes going between the thread and the snow coming past it. Six below. And snow. Both at once, and neither one minding the other.
“Six,” he said at the table. “Below. And it’s snowing.”
“I see that it’s snowing,” the Englishman said, but he didn’t write yet. He sat with the pen held over the page.
“My mother said it couldn’t.”
“Did she.”
“She said it was too cold.” Toussaint thought about how to say the next thing in English, and couldn’t, and said it in French. “Everybody says it.”
The Englishman wrote the six and the b and the ring, and then he made a small cross beside the line, not a star this time, and went down to the bottom of the page where the long writing from Christmas Eve was, and under it made the cross again and wrote a single line. He read it out.
Against the general observation, that it never snows when very cold.
“General,” Toussaint said.
“Everybody’s.”
Toussaint looked at the line for a long time. It was a short line. He’d thought, from the way the Englishman had gone about it, that it would be longer.
Later that morning the Englishman took a rule from the drawer, a flat stick marked in the same small lines as the glass, only bigger, and they went out into the yard. The snow had slowed but the wind hadn’t. Toussaint pushed the rule into the drift by the post and it went in past where the numbers stopped. He tried by the woodpile and it went in to his elbow. He tried in the lee of the house and hit the boards of the step at once.
“Which one is it?” he said.
The Englishman walked the yard with his head down like a man looking for a coin he’d dropped. He stopped by the cabbage stalk, where the snow lay flat and smooth and the wind seemed to go over without touching it, and scraped with the side of his boot until he found an edge of wood. The board. Toussaint had walked past it every morning since November.
“I swept it at nine,” the Englishman said.
Toussaint pushed the rule in until it stopped against the wood. Six. He held it with his thumb at the mark and brought it in.
“Six,” the Englishman said, and wrote it in the column for snow.
That night, at home, he told his mother. Six below, and snowing all day, and the Englishman had written it at the bottom of the page in a line by itself, against the general, which meant against everybody.
She was mending the shoulder of his coat by the stove and didn’t look up.
“Six below,” she said. “That’s not very cold.”
He opened his mouth and found that he didn’t know. He knew what six below looked like, six lines down from the ring. He didn’t know what very cold looked like. Nobody had shown him where it was on the glass.
31 December 1777. 10 a 0 · 12 a 0 · W · Cloudy River froze over at this place
For a month the river had been making a noise. He’d stopped hearing it, the way you stop hearing a mill. It was the ice, coming down from the lakes in cakes and plates and broken slabs, grinding along the shore and against itself, and sometimes in the night a crack like a musket, and under all of it the black water going by between the pieces, faster than a man could walk.
On the last morning of the year he went down to the landing to count wood and it was quiet.
The ice had stopped. That was the only way he could think of it. It hadn’t changed, it was the same broken mess of slabs it had been the day before, heaped and tilted and jammed against each other all the way across to the islands, only now it wasn’t going anywhere. There was no black water between. A crow was walking on it, far out, picking at something.
The sleigh drivers stood at the edge in a row with their hands under their arms, looking at it as if it might start again if they looked away. One of them was his father.
“Not yet,” his father said, before Toussaint could ask. “Two weeks. Three. Then they’ll mark the road with spruce trees and we’ll go across to Longueuil for nothing, and pay a ferryman nothing, and the English will want twice the wood.” He said it without any pleasure, and then he spat, and then he looked at the river again and Toussaint saw that there was pleasure in it after all.
When he took the count up to the house, the Englishman was at the window with his back to the room. He’d been down already, early. He’d written it.
Toussaint asked him to read it, and he did, without coming to the table, from memory.
River froze over at this place.
“Why at this place?”
The Englishman turned round.
“Because I can only see this place,” he said. “At Quebec it may be open. At Sorel it may have frozen a week ago. I don’t know. I know what’s in front of the house.”
It was ten above at seven, and twelve above at nine that night, a soft grey day, almost warm. In the evening his mother sent him back into the town with a loaf for his aunt, because tomorrow was the new year and nobody went visiting empty-handed. On the way home he went the long way, past the Englishman’s house, without quite deciding to. The windows were dark at the front. He went round by the lane and looked over the woodpile, and the Englishman was in the yard, in his coat with his hat on, with a lantern held out at the end of his arm and turned a little away, at the post. It was nine o’clock, or near it. He didn’t call out. He stood by the woodpile until the lantern went back into the house, and then he went home.
14 January 1778. 26 a 0 · 2 b 0 · NW · Cloudy Depth of Snow in the Woods – 3 feet
The road across the river was marked by the twelfth, a little sooner than his father had said, with spruce trees stuck upright in the ice every fifty paces, and by the fourteenth the sleighs had worn it brown. But the Englishman’s wood didn’t come from across the river. It came from the back of the mountain, where his father and his uncles had a cutting, and on the fourteenth his father said Toussaint could come and be some use for once instead of standing about the English with his hands behind his back.
He told the Englishman the night before. The Englishman thought about it and then went to the drawer and took out the rule.
“How deep is it, in the woods?”
Toussaint didn’t know. Deep. Everybody knew it was deeper in the woods.
“Find out,” the Englishman said, and gave him the rule, and then, as Toussaint was going, “Where it’s level.”
They went up in the dark, his father and his uncle Hyacinthe in the front of the sleigh and Toussaint in the back on the chains, and the horse breathing smoke. At the edge of the cutting the snow came up to the horse’s chest, and they left it there under a blanket and went in on snowshoes.
It was a soft morning for January. The Englishman’s glass had said twenty-six above at seven, and Toussaint had read it himself before he left, and said it at the table with his coat already on. In the woods the warmth made the snow heavy on the spruce boughs, and every so often a bough would let go its load all at once, with a sound like someone sitting down hard.
He waited until his father and Hyacinthe were cutting and wouldn’t need him for a while. Then he took the rule out of his coat.
It was a foot long. He’d known that, and forgot it, and remembered it in the woods. He pushed it down into the snow at his feet and it went in, and his mitten went in after it, and his arm to the elbow, and there was nothing under it but more snow.
He stood and looked at the rule in his hand.
Then he took his knife and cut a young maple, straight, a bit taller than himself, and trimmed it, and laid the rule along it at the bottom and cut a notch at the top of the rule, and moved the rule up and cut another, and another, until the pole had four notches.
The first place he tried, under a spruce, the pole went in only to the first notch. The second place, between two stumps, it went in past the fourth and he had to pull it out with both hands. He stood with the pole and looked round the cutting, at the drifts against the windward side of every trunk and the hollows scooped out on the other side, and the snow on the boughs, and the snow that had come off the boughs, and he started to walk with his head down, slowly, the way you’d look for something you dropped.
“What’s he doing?” Hyacinthe said.
“Measuring,” his father said. He didn’t stop cutting. “For the English.”
Toussaint found a place, out in a clearing where a big pine had come down years ago and nothing had grown up yet, where the snow lay smooth from one side to the other and the wind seemed to have gone over without touching it. He pushed the pole in straight. He took his mitten off to feel for where the snow came to.
Three. Exactly on the third notch, or so close he couldn’t have said which side of it.
He did it again a step away, and it was three again. He cut a little mark beside the third notch with the point of his knife, so he’d have it to show, and put his mitten back on, and found that his father had stopped cutting and was leaning on his axe, watching him.
“Well?”
“Three feet.”
His father looked at the pole and at the clearing. “I could have told you that,” he said. He held his hand flat against his own leg, high on the thigh. “To here. Every year, to here. Some years to here.” He moved the hand up to his belt.
“He doesn’t know that,” Toussaint said.
“Then he could ask.”
Toussaint thought about how to say it, and said it the way the Englishman had. “He can only see the yard.”
His father looked at him for a long moment. Then he laughed, not unkindly, a short laugh with smoke in it, and went back to his tree.
They came down in the middle of the afternoon with the sleigh loaded, and the wind came round on the way, from the north-west, the way it did, and the warm went out of the day as if someone had opened a door. By the time they reached the faubourg the snow had started to squeak again. Toussaint sat on the load with the pole across his knees and his face in his collar.
The Englishman was at the table with the lamp lit. Toussaint showed him the pole and the notches and the little cut beside the third one, and told him about the spruce and the two stumps and the clearing, and the two places a step apart. He told it in French, mostly, and the Englishman nodded at the parts he understood and took the pole and turned it over and ran his thumb along the notches.
Then he wrote it in the column on the left, and read it out.
Depth of snow in the woods: three feet.
“Not at this place,” Toussaint said.
“No,” the Englishman said. “At that place.” He laid the pole along the wall by the drawer where the rule went. At nine he went out with the lantern himself, and came back, and wrote two, and the b, and the ring.
23 January 1778. 18 b 0 · 8 b 0 · NE · Cloudy Little Wind
On the nineteenth it was ten below at seven, and colder after the sun came up, and he went out again at eight without being told and came back and said so. The Englishman wrote the thermometer stood at ten below after the sun was up, and didn’t look surprised, and neither did Toussaint.
On the twentieth it went from four below in the morning to thirty above at night. On the twenty-first it was thirty-four, and the eaves dripped all day and the path to the post was slush, and the woodcutters said it was a thaw and the river would go soft and drown somebody, and it didn’t, and nobody drowned. On the twenty-second it was four below again.
On the twenty-third there was almost no wind, and a low grey sky like a lid, and when he came out of his father’s house at half past six the cold took hold of the inside of his nose and stuck it together, the way it had on the way to the midnight mass, only worse. He went up the street with his mitten over his mouth. The snow on the path didn’t squeak any more. It creaked, a sound like a dry board.
At the post he turned his face aside and held the lantern out and looked.
The pane was clear. The thread was a long way down. He had to bend his knees to be level with the top of it.
He counted from the ring. One long line down, and then the short ones past it. He counted twice. He didn’t move his lips.
Eighteen.
He stayed there with the lantern and looked at it. Eighteen lines down. Ten past the eight of the fifth, six past the twelve of Christmas Eve. The cold came through the soles of his moccasins and up into his shins and he let it.
Inside he said it. “Eighteen. Below.”
The Englishman wrote it. Then he put the pen down and got up and went out to look for himself, as he had on the fifth of December, in one coat, without his hat. He was gone longer than it took to read a number. When he came back he didn’t say anything about it. He held his hands over the stove and then sat down.
“Is that very cold?” Toussaint said.
The Englishman considered it. “It’s the coldest we’ve had,” he said.
Toussaint waited, and the Englishman looked at the stove and didn’t say any more. Nobody had written very on the brass.
At nine that night it was eight below, and he went home in the dark with the creaking under his feet. His mother was at the stove. She didn’t turn round.
“Cold today,” she said.
“Eighteen below,” he said. “At seven.”
He waited for her to tell him it wasn’t very cold. She was quiet for a while, banking the fire, and then she said, still with her back to him, “Is that a lot?”
He opened his mouth to say yes. Then he shut it again, and sat on the end of the bench nearest the stove and unlaced his moccasins.
“It’s the lowest it’s been,” he said.
4 April 1778. 32 a 0 · 32 a 0 · NE · Cloudy In some of these there was an appearance somewhat like a jet d’eau, Pieces of Ice working up in the Centre of the Pyramid or heap
February went by in numbers. He could have said them all, and sometimes, walking up the street in the dark, he did: the two below on the eighth and the fog on the tenth that came off the river before light and was gone by the time the sun found it, the thirty-nine on the twenty-sixth when the eaves ran again and nobody believed it. In the middle of March it thundered, with snow still on the ground, which his mother said she had never heard of and his father said he had, once, the year the English came.
Then on the third of April it snowed hard, big wet flakes that went to water where they landed, and at noon a man came running up from the landing shouting that the river was going.
Toussaint went down. Everyone went down. The Englishman went down in his good coat, which Toussaint had never seen him wear outside.
It wasn’t going yet. It was thinking about it. Far out, past the islands, there was a sound like a cart going over a bridge, a long low rumbling that didn’t stop, and the road across to Longueuil, with its spruce trees, had a bend in it that hadn’t been there in the morning. By evening the spruce trees nearest the far shore had started to walk, very slowly, downstream.
On the fourth the whole of it was moving.
It didn’t move like water. It moved like a crowd. The big plates came down from above the town and met the ones that had been lying all winter against the shore, and where they met, they climbed. A slab as wide as the Englishman’s kitchen would push its edge up over another and stand there, tilted, shining wet, and then the one behind would come and push it higher, and higher, until it broke with a crack you felt in your feet. Near the shore, where the water was shallow, they piled up into heaps taller than a house. Toussaint stood with his father and the drivers on the bank, and nobody said anything for a long time.
Then he saw what one of the heaps was doing.
It was a big one, out off the end of the Rue Saint-Paul, a long way out, where there must have been a shoal. All the ice coming down hit it and went up the sides. But in the middle of it, in the top, something else was happening. Pieces of ice were coming up out of it. Not sliding up the sides. Coming up through the middle from underneath, one after another, pushed up from inside, and toppling off the top and sliding down, and another coming up behind. As if the heap were full of ice and was letting it out.
He watched it until his father said they were going, and then he went to find the Englishman.
The Englishman was further along the bank, on his own, with his hands behind his back. He’d seen it. Toussaint could tell from the way he stood that he had been looking at it a long time.
“It’s coming up from the middle,” Toussaint said.
“Yes.” The Englishman didn’t look round. “Like a jet d’eau.”
He said it in French, or nearly. Toussaint knew both words. Jet, a throw, and eau, water. Together they didn’t mean anything.
“A what?”
The Englishman looked at him then.
“In a garden,” he said. “A great man’s garden. In England, in France. They have water brought in pipes, and it comes up out of a basin, in the middle, straight up into the air, and falls back down.” He made the shape of it with one hand, up and over. “All day. For nothing. For people to look at.”
Toussaint looked at the heap. The ice came up out of the middle and fell down the sides.
“It’s ice,” he said.
“Yes,” the Englishman said. “I know.”
That evening, at the table, he wrote the four, thirty-two and thirty-two, and NE, and Cloudy. Then he turned the book round to the page on the left, the one facing the days, and wrote there instead, a long way down the page and for a long time. He read it out when he’d finished. Large and high heaps. Pieces of ice working up in the centre of the pyramid or heap. And the jet d’eau, in the middle of it.
“Why that page?”
“There’s no column for it,” the Englishman said.
On the seventh and the eighth the ice stopped and started. On the ninth it snowed again, hard, and Toussaint went down to the landing at noon and the river was open from bank to bank, black and fast, with only a few pieces going by on it, turning slowly, like things that had been forgotten. He told the Englishman. The Englishman nodded.
On the tenth, in the column on the left, beside thirty and fifty, he wrote River clear of ice.
11 April 1778. 48 a 0 · 54 a 0 · SW · Cloudy @ 3 O’Clock 68 a 0
The wind came round to the south-west and stayed there. It smelled of mud. In the yard the snow went grey and then went to holes, and the woodpile stood up out of it, and the cabbage stalk, and in the corner by the step there was a patch of bare ground with last year’s grass on it, flat and yellow, like hair under a hat.
At seven it was forty-eight. Toussaint had never said forty-eight at the table. He said it carefully.
The Englishman wrote it and then sat looking at it.
“Come back at three,” he said.
“At three?”
“In the afternoon.” He tapped the column for seven and then the column for nine. “Morning and night. Morning, it’s the coldest. Night, it’s”—he moved his hand—“on the way down. In between, nobody looks.” He put the pen in the jar. “I’d like to know how high it goes.”
So at three Toussaint came back up from the landing, with his coat open, and went out to the post.
The sun was on the yard and the box was in the shade of its hat, but the whole post was warm to the hand, and the pane was clear and dry, and the thread was a long way up. He had to tip his head back. It stood above everything he’d ever read, above the ring and the twenties and the thirties, above where it had climbed in the warm kitchen on Christmas Eve, and he counted up from the long line below it and got sixty-eight.
Beside the lines, some way below where the silver stopped, there was one of the words, and the thread had gone past it.
He had looked at the words all winter, the way you look at a sign over a shop door that you can’t read. There was one low down near thirty-two, and one in the middle, and one higher, and one high up near the top. The thread had never been near any of them except the low one, and he’d stopped thinking of them as anything but part of the brass, like the scrollwork round the edge.
He went in and said sixty-eight, above. Then: “There’s a word.”
The Englishman got up and came out with him. He looked at the thread, and at the word below it, and read it out the way he read the book, with his finger, not touching the pane.
“Temperate.”
“What does it mean?”
The Englishman thought. “Not too much one way or the other,” he said. “Mild. Middling.” He moved his finger down, to the word near thirty-two. “Just freezing.” And up, past the thread, to the next. “Summer heat.” And up again, a long way, to the one at the top. “Blood heat. That’s you. Inside.”
Toussaint looked at the word near the top for a while.
“Who put them on?”
“The man who made it. In London.”
“Has he been here?”
“No,” the Englishman said.
On the twelfth, at three, it was seventy, and on the thirteenth it was seventy-two, and Toussaint went out each afternoon and read it and came in and said it, and the Englishman wrote it in the column on the left, in the place for remarks, at three o’clock, because there was no column for three o’clock either. The thread stood a little way below Summer heat. There was still snow behind the woodpile.
“It’s April,” Toussaint said, on the thirteenth.
“It’s what it says,” the Englishman said, and blotted the line.
25 April 1778. 32 a 0 · 40 a 0 · W · Clear The 26th in the morning the Thermometer was broke by accident, which put an end to further observations
He was late on the twenty-sixth. Not by much. A cart had gone off the landing road in the mud the night before and into the river, horse and all, and the horse had lived, and half the faubourg had been down there at first light to see it got out. By the time he came up the lane it was past seven, and the sun was on the yard, and the door at the back of the house was standing open.
The post was bare. The nail was there under the little hat, and nothing on it.
The box was on the kitchen table, on its back. The pane was gone, or nearly. A piece of it was still in the frame along one edge, and the rest was on the table in bits, and the Englishman was standing over it in his shirtsleeves, not touching it.
The brass plate was all right. The lines were all right, and the numbers, and the words. It was the tube that had gone, and the bulb at the bottom of it, cracked open like an egg, and the silver had come out.
It wasn’t a thread any more. It was on the boards of the table, in beads, dozens of them, from the size of a pea down to a grain of sand, and every one was perfectly round and perfectly bright, and when anyone crossed the floor they trembled. One had run to the edge of the table and stopped there, as if deciding.
Toussaint stood in the doorway.
“By accident,” the Englishman said. He didn’t say whose.
Toussaint didn’t ask. He came and stood beside him and looked at the beads. He’d never seen them up close. All winter they had been one silver line, too thin to have any shape, climbing and falling behind the glass, and now that they were out you could see what they had been all along: heavy, and round, and each one with a little window in it, and the yard in the window.
“Can it be mended?”
“Not here.” The Englishman picked up the brass plate, carefully, by its edges, and looked at the place where the tube had been. “There’s no one in this country who blows glass that fine. You’d have to send to London.” He put the plate down. “And by the time it came back, it would be summer.”
He went to the drawer for a piece of paper, and got down on one knee, and began to herd the beads onto it with the edge of a card, slowly, so that they ran together, two and two, and four, and the four into one. Toussaint knelt on the other side and did the one at the edge of the table. It ran from his fingernail like a living thing, and joined the others, and was gone into them.
When they had them all, or all they could find, the Englishman folded the paper and put it in the drawer with the rule.
Then he sat at the table and opened the book.
The twenty-fifth was the last line on the page. Thirty-two and forty, west, clear. Below it there was a space, and a ruled line, and then more lines, ruled and empty, all the way to the bottom of the page, ready for the rest of April.
The Englishman didn’t write anything there. He turned the book round to the page on the left, where the ice was, and under the ice, very small for him, he wrote a line. Toussaint didn’t ask him to read it. The Englishman read it anyway.
The twenty-sixth in the morning the thermometer was broke by accident, which put an end to further observations.
He blotted it and sat back.
“Further,” Toussaint said.
“Any more.”
Toussaint looked at the empty lines on the right-hand page. The twenty-sixth, the twenty-seventh, to the end of the month.
“It’s still doing it,” he said. “Out there.”
“Yes,” the Englishman said.
The next morning he was at the post at seven. He didn’t decide to be. He woke in the dark at the end of the bench and was halfway up the street before he remembered, and then he went on anyway, because he was halfway.
The yard was grey and wet, and smelled of mud and woodsmoke. The nail stood out from the post under the little hat.
He turned his face aside before he looked.
Note. William Barr was real: purveyor to the British army hospitals in Canada during the American war. His register for the winter of 1777–78 was sent to the Royal Society and never printed. Every heading here is a row from it (MA/206/8), copied as he wrote it, and the numbers in the text come from the same pages (transcription). Toussaint, his family, and everything anyone says are invented. The register never says who held the lantern.