The Shutter That Did Not Open

Two doors up from the well, on Mulov Street, a woman keeps a magpie.

Every morning after first bell it comes to her sill. She gives it a thread of dyed wool, an offcut from the Dye Quarter, the kind the workshops throw into the gutter. It gives her something back — a bent pin, once a fish-scale, once a child’s milk-tooth. She keeps what it brings in a shallow dish. She has never sold any of it. She does not explain the dish to anyone who asks, and people have stopped asking.

Since the water went down and the heat came back hard, the children have taken to watching. They gather under Elber Nast’s awning across the way, in the strip of shade his barrels make, and wait for the bird the way they used to wait for the rain to start again. They do not talk while they wait. I have watched them do it three mornings now.

This morning there were more of them, and they were there before the second bell instead of after it, and the woman’s shutter was still closed.

I asked Elber, who was already at his hoops, whether he had seen her. He said he saw her lamp go out at the usual hour last night and nothing since, and went back to his work, because a cooper with an open door has no more claim on a closed one than a boy with a fish-scale has on the bird that brought it.

At the well someone was saying a man had spoken against the Archivist loud enough to be repeated twice by the time it reached Mulov Street. I did not stay for that account. I stayed for the shutter.

It had not opened by the time I left.