Memo's Day

"Has anybody done this before?" somebody asked at about ten o'clock. "Lit the whole path?"

"Nobody's done it," said Winky. "It's never happened."

"It has," I said.

And the yard looked at me in the particular way a yard looks at a fluff who remembers things, which is: fondly, and briefly, and then back to what they were doing.

I do not blame anybody for that. Most of what I remember is of no use to a single soul. I remember what the weather was doing on days that did not matter. I remember what somebody was wearing when they said a kind thing to me four years ago. It arrives whole, with the smell of it, and I cannot choose what stays.

It is the same drawer as the missing, which is the part fluffs do not think about. You do not get one without the other. The reason I can still hear my grandmother's voice exactly is the reason it hurts to.

So four of us went up to the Library at half past eleven.

Dreamy came and read an entirely different book for an hour and a half. Cloudy came and went off somewhere behind the eyes about halfway through, and came back with something unrelated and rather good. Puzzly came and asked the librarian three questions that I would never have thought to ask out loud, and one of those three questions was the one that found it.

A thin book of the land's old doings. And in it, a line about the night the first chief came home.

I did not need the book. I want to be honest about that. I knew. I could see that evening — I have been able to see it for years: the light going up into the hedge in all the wrong places, and Rainbow walking the last stretch by feel because the path underneath was dark.

But nobody was going to move fifty-five lanterns on my say-so, and I understand why, and I would not have moved them on somebody else's either.

At half past three I said it in the yard.

"Too high. That's what went wrong. We put them at the top of the posts and all the light went into the hedge and the path stayed dark."

Tidy went very still. "We've been hanging them at the top of the posts all day."

Every lantern on the path came down two feet, which took an hour nobody had, and which was the single most useful hour of the entire day.

Mopsy asked me afterwards how I keep all that.

"I miss things," I said. "It's the same drawer."

The lit path was the thing I wanted to look at, and I did, for a long while, from the gate, before I went in.

Because I have the other one. I have the night it went wrong, whole, still, with the wrongness of it — and now I have this one on top, and they are both in there, and they will both still be there in ten years when most of this land has forgotten what they were doing today.

That is my job, as far as I can tell. Somebody has to keep the evenings.

At Winky's I told the story of the first homecoming to four fluffs who had never heard it, twice, and the second telling was better. Beamy read the envelope out and my line was Memo — remembered why it failed last time, and Tidy caught my eye from across the room and made a face that meant I should have listened at ten o'clock, and I made a face back that meant it is fine.

It was fine. It took five hours and a book and it was still fine, because the hour was still there when we needed it.