THE POUND BOOK

Being a Register of Everything That Wandered In and Was Not Claimed, Kept by the One Officer in This Realm Who Is Required by Statute to Decide When a Thing Has Finished Being Somebody's.

Kept at the pound behind the green by Osgar Stelling, Pound-Keeper, elected, no wage, one shilling the head recoverable from the owner and in practice recoverable from nobody.

THE OFFICE, AND THE PART OF IT NOBODY WANTS

The Pound-Keeper takes in what strays.

A beast gets out; it wanders; somebody brings it to me; I feed it and I write it down and the owner comes and pays the shilling and takes it home and calls me a robber, cheerfully, and that is the office working exactly as designed and it is a good office and I have held it nineteen years.

That is not the part this book is about.

This book is about the ones nobody comes for.

Because here is the thing the statute says, and I would ask the reader to read it twice, because it is the only sentence of its kind in the law of this kingdom:

A beast unclaimed at the expiry of the term shall be disposed of by the Pound-Keeper, and the matter shall be closed.

And the matter shall be closed.

There is no other office in this realm that is permitted to write that, let alone required to. Pennyworth cannot close an account; there is no column for it. The Committee cannot close a survey; it revises. The Chancery adjourns things without a day. Mortlake buries people and even he only enters them; the ledger goes on. This entire realm is arranged, from the top of it to the bottom, so that nothing ever finishes — and then it hands one unpaid man behind a green a book, and a term of twenty-one days, and the authority to declare that a thing has stopped being somebody's.

I have that authority. I have used it four hundred and eleven times in nineteen years.

I have not once used it on the twenty-first day.

Each entry: What Came In · Who Brought It · The Term · The Disposal. The last column is where I have done all my lying, and I am going to set that out plainly, because I am seventy next year and somebody ought to know how this office has actually been run.

1 · WHAT THE TWENTY-ONE DAYS ARE ACTUALLY FOR

What Came In. A goat. It is nearly always a goat.

The Term. Twenty-one days, by statute, from the day of impounding.

The Disposal. Claimed, day nineteen, by a man who had been away.

The Finding. The term is not for the beast. The beast is content; it is being fed for the first time in its life. The term is for the household, and twenty-one days is what somebody in Murkminster decided, a long time ago, was a reasonable period for a person to notice a goat was missing and come and find it.

Nineteen years say: it is about right for a goat and it is nowhere near right for a person in trouble. A household that has not come for its beast in three weeks is not careless. In nineteen years I have never once had a careless one. They are ill, or they are away, or they are ashamed, or they cannot find the shilling — and the last of those is far and away the commonest, and a shilling is a great deal to a household that has just also lost a goat.

2 · THE SHILLING, AND WHERE IT COMES FROM

What Came In. Everything. The shilling applies to everything.

The Disposal. Claimed, fee paid.

The Finding. That entry appears in this book four hundred and eleven times and it is not always true.

I am going to write this down once. There is a jar. It has been behind the loose brick since about my fourth year. It takes what the parish drops in it — nobody is asked and nobody is thanked and about nine people know, and one of them is the current Fen-Reeve, who has never mentioned it and who put in a half-crown after the flood.

When a household cannot find the shilling, the jar finds it, and the book says fee paid, and the beast goes home, and the household keeps the one thing this realm is stingiest with, which is not having to ask.

I am aware this is a false entry in a statutory register. I have been aware for fifteen years. I have decided that the alternative — a true book and a family a goat poorer — is the worse document.

3 · THE ONES NOBODY COMES FOR

What Came In. Two ewes, a cart-horse past work, and a dog, over the course of one winter, from three households on the same lane.

The Term. Expired. All three.

The Disposal. (see below)

The Finding. This is the entry I would show a young Pound-Keeper first.

Nobody in that lane was careless and nothing in that lane was lost. Those three households had gone under, in the same season, quietly, one after another, in the way this realm allows people to go under — and the first anybody in an official capacity knew of it was that their animals stopped being collected.

The parish knew before I did, of course; the parish always does; but the parish knew it as gossip and I knew it as three expired terms in one book on one lane, which is a different kind of knowing and is the kind you can take to a vestry.

I took it to the vestry. Something was done. Not enough, and late, and one of the three had already gone to Murkminster to look for work and has not been heard of, and I put that down here rather than leave the entry looking like a success.

The dry finding: an unclaimed beast is a household's distress signal, sent by an animal, in a form the household would never have sent itself. The pound book is the only register in this parish that records hardship without anybody having to admit to it — which is precisely why it works, and why I would fight anybody who tried to make it official.

4 · WHAT THE WATER BRINGS

What Came In. A door. A boat, half. Eleven hurdles. A gate, good, with hinges. A butter-churn, and in the flood year a complete privy, upright, and I would ask the reader to imagine my afternoon.

The Term. The statute does not provide for a privy. The statute provides for beasts. I have entered every one of these under beast because there is nowhere else in the book to put them, and no Committee has ever queried it, and I have come to enjoy the column.

The Disposal. The gate went to a household that needed a gate. The hurdles went round the parish and came back over four years, which I did not require and did not refuse. The privy was claimed, at length, by a man from Sodden Bottom, who identified it, and I did not ask how.

The dry finding: half of what a pound receives in a wet realm was never strayed. It was carried. And the question "whose is this" is a very different question from "who has lost this," and the second one is the only one worth asking, and the statute asks the first.

5 · THE DISPOSAL COLUMN, AND THE WHOLE TRUTH ABOUT IT

What Came In. Four hundred and eleven things.

The Disposal. The book says, in the statutory form: Disposed. Matter closed.

The Finding. I have disposed of very little.

Where there is a household I can find, I find it, term or no term. Where there is not, the beast goes to somebody in this parish who can use it, and I enter disposed, and I write the name of the new keeper on the inside of the back cover, where the statute does not require anything and nobody has ever thought to look.

There are two hundred and six names on that back cover.

Why? Because twice — twice in nineteen years — somebody has come back. Eleven months, in one case; four years, in the other. Away, and ill, and ashamed, in that order. And they came to the pound and asked, not expecting anything, and I turned to the back cover, and the beast was three fields away and had been well kept, and in one of those two cases it came home.

The statute says the matter shall be closed. I have closed four hundred and eleven matters and kept a back cover of two hundred and six of them, and I did it for the two.

THE POUND-KEEPER'S CLOSING NOTE

I am the only officer in the Kingdom of Sogmarsh with the power to declare a thing finished, and I have spent nineteen years finding ways not to use it.

I have thought about why, because a man behind a green in the wet has time. And it is not softness, and it is not that I disagree with the statute — the statute is right; a pound that never disposed of anything would be a farm within a year and I would be feeding four hundred beasts on one shilling a head that nobody pays.

It is this. Everywhere else in this realm, nothing ever ends, and everybody suffers from it — the account that cannot be settled, the survey that cannot conclude, the dispute adjourned without a day, the grief kept fresh in a shut-up room. I have seen what that does. I have it in this book.

And then they gave the one power of ending to a man with a goat.

So I use it carefully, and I use it late, and I write the names on the back cover — because the difference between an ending and an abandonment is only ever whether somebody wrote down where the thing went, and that costs a pencil, and the statute does not forbid it.

— O. Stelling, Pound-Keeper, nineteen years, behind the green, in the wet. There is a jar behind the loose brick. Whoever has this book next: it is not yours, and it is not the parish's, and you will know what to do with it.