At nine on Thursday morning, a man called the station to ask whether anybody had twelve violin strings.
“For one violin?” I asked.
“For twelve,” he said, and hung up.
I wrote it down. The first rule of Lost and Found was that you did not demand an explanation before you offered to help. We had survived the war, two winters without reliable power, and a season in which the north road had been claimed by a family of goats. If a man needed twelve violin strings, he had his reasons.
The station was a former roller rink on the edge of Bracken. Someone had painted WREN over the old sign, though the R still rolled downhill when it rained. My desk sat where people used to rent skates. I could see the town square through a window filmed with tape. At ten, Councillor Lev came through the door carrying a sheet of paper and the expression he wore when someone had broken something that could not be ordered new.
“The ferry lot is closed for tomorrow’s market,” he said. “The old retaining wall has gone over.”
I took the paper. “Is anyone hurt?”
“No. They closed it before the wall fell. We’re moving everyone to the train yard.”
The ferry lot was where people from four settlements brought grain, tools, cloth, and occasionally a chicken with a name. They made the trip once a month. If they arrived to find a closed lot, most would have to turn around with their carts. Bracken needed the market; so did they.
“I’ll announce it all day.”
Lev’s expression stayed put. “Until four-thirty. Then we need the generator for the mill.”
“The market is tomorrow.”
“The grain is here today.” He set his hand on the counter, careful not to touch the microphone. “The mill’s generator failed. This is the machine that can run it. I can’t ask the bakers to wait because you want another hour on air.”
He was right about the grain. I disliked that he was right before breakfast. The generator had been lent to WREN in spring, when the station’s own power source failed. The mill had put off asking for it back until the harvest came in.
“Four-thirty,” I said. “You can carry it out yourself.”
“I was planning to.”
He went. I put the paper beside my list of lost spoons, missing boots, and violin strings. The train yard had three entrances. The west one was blocked by weeds tall as a person. The council wanted carts through the south gate, past the clock tower without hands. I had been there last week. It was a good place to trade, if everyone could find it.
At eleven I read the change twice, slowly. At eleven-ten, Hattie at Orchard Three repeated it back to me: “South gate, red water tower.”
“No. Clock tower. Brick, no hands.”
“You said water tower.”
“I did not.”
“You did last month, when the carts came for the barrels.”
She was right. I had given a different direction to the yard then. The red water tower had stood beside the west entrance until a storm took it down. I had stopped seeing it and had not stopped using it in my sentences.
“Cross out the water tower,” I said. “It’s gone.”
“You should make that part of the announcement.”
I did. At noon a caller from Hollow said there was no south gate either. He had passed the yard in winter and found it chained.
“It was open on Tuesday,” I said.
“Good. Say that too.”
By one o’clock my neat announcement had become a paragraph of corrections. I could read it. I could not be certain anyone else would repeat it without bringing back the water tower or the chain. Hattie had a little transmitter of her own. So did the twins on the ridge. They could reach places my signal missed, but they tended to finish one another’s sentences inaccurately. A market could wind up at a tower that no longer existed on a road the goats had conquered.
I asked Hattie to call back at two. I asked the twins to listen. I asked Lev to bring me the yard gatekeeper so I could hear the directions from the person who would open it. His name was Daro, and he arrived carrying a key as big as a soup ladle.
“South gate,” he said into the microphone. “Brick clock without hands. I’ll have the gate open at first light. If you see weeds higher than your cart, you’re on the west side. Don’t try to get through them.”
The twins repeated it in perfect unison, which frightened me more than their usual interruptions. Hattie repeated it with one change: “Weeds higher than your horse.”
“Cart,” Daro said.
“We don’t all have carts,” Hattie said. “Everybody knows how tall a horse is.”
He thought about it. “Then say horse.”
I wrote her version on the paper. At two-fifteen a settlement beyond the ridge called to say it had heard the twins but not me. They repeated the south gate, the clock, the weeds, and first light. At three, someone farther west repeated the same words in an accent I did not know. The message was traveling beyond the rink.
There was still no answer from Stonecut. People there rarely called unless they had a part to trade or a complaint about the price of eggs. I sent the market notice three more times. The microphone grew warm under my hand. I imagined the Stonecut traders rolling toward the ferry lot while I talked to an empty piece of air.
At four-twenty, Lev returned with two mill workers and a dolly. I held up one finger. Hattie was on the line.
“Stonecut heard,” she said. “They asked me whether the clock could be fixed before morning.”
“What did you tell them?”
“That we need it broken so they can find the gate.”
Lev smiled without meaning to. I thanked Hattie, read the notice one last time, and signed off. One of the mill workers unplugged the station’s old lamp. The room became gray, then quiet. I had expected the quiet to feel like failure. Mostly it sounded like a large room full of skates that no one had bothered to move.
The next morning I walked to the train yard. Lev was already there, arguing with Daro about where to put the grain stall. The twins had arrived with a wagon of mended pans. Hattie was selling apples from a blanket. Stonecut’s cart came through the south gate just after the sun cleared the clock tower. Its driver asked why the clock had no hands, listened to three separate explanations, and bought a bag of flour before anyone finished.
Not everyone came. Hollow’s people had chosen to wait another month. A few travelers wandered up from the ferry lot after seeing the closed gate there. Daro pointed them toward the yard. It was a market, not a miracle: someone complained about the price of salt, someone lost a mitten, and a chicken named Beatrice escaped twice.
Hattie set her small radio on the apple blanket. Voices hissed through it, farther away than Bracken. One of the twins was telling an unseen caller that the mill had flour again. Another voice asked whether anyone had twelve violin strings.
“Still?” I said.
Hattie picked up the microphone. “I’ve got eleven,” she said. “Tell me what happened to the twelfth.”
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