Fenwick Crane's Arc

Chapter 2 of 2

By week's end Fenwick Crane had filled the stone slab. Forty names, cut deep, crowded every face of it. He traced the last groove with his thumb and found no room for one more. Travelers still came down the path. He still needed hundreds. He had a way to hold names now, but not enough stone to hold them. He searched the shore at low water. He pried loose river rocks and turned them over. Each one was too small, too round, or cracked through. A name or two, then nothing. He would spend his life dragging pebbles from the mud. Then he looked at the dock itself. He lived on it. Weathered planks ran under his feet, fog drifting between the mooring posts. The wood was wide and long. Thick posts stood at each corner, taller than a man. He knelt and pressed his river rock to a plank. It bit. A pale line showed against the gray. Wood was not stone. Rain would gray it. Boots would wear it. But a deep cut would last years, and the dock held more surface than a hundred slabs. He set to work that evening. He carved Edrin's name again into the plank nearest his bench, copying it from the slab so it would not be lost. Then he waited for the next traveler and carved her name beside it. He cut each letter deep, past the soft gray skin of the wood, into the hard grain beneath. For three days he carved. Names ran along the planks in rows. They climbed the mooring posts. He worked by the light of his lantern, bent over, his hand raw and bleeding at the knuckles. He read the names back each morning. He remembered them. The dock was becoming a ledger he walked on. On the fourth morning he stepped back to see his work, and his boot caught a fresh groove. His foot slid. He had carved the planks until they were slick with cuts. The surface he stood on was the surface he was ruining. He steadied himself on a post and looked down the dock. The names were clear. But every letter he cut weakened the wood that held him over the water. He ran his hand along a plank and felt it flex. The river waited underneath, the same river that had taken his name. He sat on his bench and counted. Perhaps three hundred names would fit across the whole dock, posts and all. Not a thousand. And by then the planks might not bear his weight. Fenwick wiped the river rock clean. He had traded a small stone for a large one, and bought room for more names. But the thing he carved was the thing he lived on. He could fill the dock. He could not stand on it and the river both. He needed something larger than his home, and something that would not sink him while he wrote.