The Quiet Cart

A Tale of Sogmarsh — the surly man, read wrong for ten years.

Everyone knew Silas Wain was surly. The proof was daily: you would hail him on the fen road — "Morning, Silas!" — and he would not so much as turn his head. Proud, they said. Or mean. Or too good, these days, for a civil word.

The true thing arrived late, the way the true thing does.

One winter, years back, a fever took Silas Wain's hearing and his wife inside a single month. It took his ears first. Then it turned on Merry, who had sat up nursing him through the worst of it, and did not spare her for the kindness. He came out the far side of that winter deaf, and alone, and went back to the road, because the horse still wanted feeding, and grief has to sit somewhere while you decide what to do with the rest of your life.

He could not hear the greetings. That was the whole of it. Not proud — deaf. The turned-away head was only a man watching the road because he could no longer hear the cart at his own back. And the empty place on the bench beside him, that the parish read as a man keeping himself to himself, was where Merry had sat, and he would let no one else into it, that being the last of the room she still took up in the world.

Then one market day the Muckle girl, sent to ride in with the eggs, climbed up onto the bench before anyone could stop her — into the seat — and being a child, and unbothered by a silence, took out her school slate and wrote on it, in her best hand: WHY DON'T YOU TALK.

And Silas Wain, who had not been asked a question in years, because nobody troubles a stone with questions, took the slate, and took the chalk, and wrote back.

They went the whole road passing the slate to and fro. And the parish, watching the cart go by with the two heads bent over a scrap of school slate, understood all at once the thing they had been given ten years to understand, and hadn't.

After that he took the bench-fillers who could write, and taught a few of the children his hand-signs, and was found — it turned out — not surly in the least, but funny, in a dry way, once a body gave him a way to be heard.

They had called it pride, because pride is the easy read. It is the standing sorrow of small places that the quiet man is always taken to be quiet at you. Silas Wain was only ever quiet at the fever that took his ears, and at the one seat on the bench he would not fill.