The Barrel Foma Ryabov Almost Trusted

Foma Ryabov climbed his ladder on the thirteenth morning and found something in the barrel for the first time. Not full — two fingers of water, gray with three weeks of settled dust, but water, sitting where nothing had sat since he started counting mornings against it.

He looked at it a while. Then he climbed down, filled his two buckets at the well the same as every morning, carried them the same forty paces to the cabbage row, and poured them the same way, root first then leaf.

I asked why, since the barrel finally held something. He said a finger of rain isn’t a barrel of rain, and a barrel of rain isn’t a season, and he has watched men trust weather before it had done anything but announce itself. He said it without heat, already moving to the next row.

Down on the Wharfside they are arguing whether Restday’s scatter settles what the thunder two days before it did not. Up on Ulev Street nobody is arguing. Foma added his two fingers of water to nothing, decided nothing had changed, and went back to the well.

His roof was the part that actually got tested. He’d put fresh tar down on the north slope back in Dryheat, three days ahead of the month that would have made the work urgent instead of careful, working off nothing but a twelve-year-old memory of the one time he got it wrong. Today’s rain ran clean off that slope and found the gutter he’d cut for it on the first try. He didn’t come out to watch it happen. He already knew the tar would hold, the same way he already knows the barrel won’t be trusted on two fingers of water.

Some of that pitch came off the Chandler’s Wharf, the same bench that’s been filling half the city’s tar orders this month under a new hand nobody down there has finished arguing about. Foma doesn’t know the name on the invoice and wouldn’t care if he did. The tar held or it didn’t. His roof says it held.

I mean to see whether the barrel gets a third finger of water before he stops checking it, or whether checking it dry for two weeks running is a habit that outlasts the reason for it.