16:00
The whole land goes wrong at once: snapping over the ladder, something unfair said about the orchard, a lantern dropped. Tipsy, whose voice does not carry, gets down off the wall, walks into the middle and stands there being still until everybody stops, then says "breathe in the fluff, breathe out the huff." Fifty-five fluffs take three balloon-belly breaths together. The last stretch is done properly after this.
4 fluffs tell this minute. None of them saw the same one.
And then at four o'clock the whole land came apart.
Tipsy stopped it — walked into the middle and stood there being still until everybody stopped, and got fifty-five tired fluffs to take three breaths together. That worked. It genuinely worked. But three breaths gets you quiet; it does not get you moving, and the yard was quiet and flat and there were four hours of daylight left at most.
At four o'clock the whole land went wrong at once.
It was nobody's fault. It was six hours of work and a sundown four hours earlier than anybody had planned for, and by four there were fluffs snapping at each other over whose turn it was with the ladder. Somebody said a thing about the orchard that was not fair. Somebody dropped a lantern and the sound of it went through the yard like a slap. Huffy, who had been magnificent all day, puffed up in the corner. Wobbly had gone very quiet, which in Wobbly means the what-ifs have reached the loud stage.
I could see all of it from the wall. I could see exactly what was needed, too, which is the part that has made a certain sort of afternoon painful for me my whole life.
Because here is the thing about being the quiet one in a yard of fifty-five. I have a voice that does not carry. I have never once been able to cut across a room. And I have sat on a great many walls with exactly the right thing to say and no way at all of getting it into the middle.
At four o'clock the whole land came apart at once. I did not fix that. Tipsy did, by walking into the middle and standing still until everybody stopped.
At four o'clock the whole land came apart at once — snapping over the ladder, something unfair said about the orchard, a lantern put down harder than a lantern wants to be put down.
Tipsy got off the wall and walked into the middle of the yard and did not say one word. Just stood there, being extremely still, in the way Tipsy is still, which is so unlike everything else happening that you cannot ignore it for long. One by one they stopped.
I have never been so pleased about anything in my life.
"That was the loudest thing anybody did all day," I said afterwards.
