Stan.

A car pulled into the warehouse yard and the foreman looked up from the sorting counter. He asked Stan to go behind the scales, said there were chests that needed shifting. He asked calmly, the way you'd send anyone on an errand. Stan took the first one by the handles and spent two hours moving boxes that were fine where they were.

From back there he could hear the conversation. The buyer talked about moisture and grades; the foreman answered in the voice he uses in front of outsiders, slower, with more yeses in it. When the car started up, Stan went back to the counter and picked up the pile he'd left half done.

He was fifteen. Now, when he hears an engine in the yard, he takes himself round the back before anybody tells him to.

Outside the flowering season he works nights: turning the beans, closing the conditioning chests, staying until dawn, because cured vanilla disappears if the warehouse is left on its own. He moves between the piles with the bulb off and only pulls the switch when something has to go on the sheet.

Nobody in the crew argues about who pollinates the most flowers. Stan finishes his row and doubles back to help, and anyone who comes in new gets the whole motion from him, slowly, with none of the hard part held back. If someone questions one of his rows he takes real offense. He has raised his voice once in two seasons, and that was why.

At the end of the day he crouches down with the notebook propped on his knee. He counts the rows under his breath, thumb on the paper. He writes his number. He crosses it out with two lines and puts Solofo's over it — his cousin on his mother's side, who pollinates in the same crew and is slower. He closes the notebook before he stands up.

Solofo gets paid for those rows, and with that money he buys the rice for both of them. Two seasons like this and they've never discussed it. Solofo can read that notebook perfectly well.

When the foreman asks, Stan tells him he was slow that day. Sometimes he adds something about whose name he signs things under, chin a little raised, and to the foreman it sounds like cocky street-kid talk. The notebook is swollen with damp and the bottom corner has been eaten away. Every page carries one number crossed out with two lines and another written over it.

The first time was at seventeen. He had finished forty rows in a single day, the kind of number people in the basin talk about for weeks. He sat on the drum in the yard with the notebook on his knee and wrote his own. He sat there looking at it. Then he crossed it out and put Solofo's over it.

Solofo was three meters away, washing his arms in the big drum, and saw him do it. He dried his hands on his trousers, picked up his own sheet and got on with what he was doing. That night they ate rice in his room, door open because of the heat, and neither of them brought it up.

Stan told the foreman he'd gone slow that day. The count is still there in the notebook, crossed out.

You get up to his mother's village by the road or by the paddy. As a kid he went by the paddy, mud to his ankles, because his mother took him that way and he thought it was the shortcut. One day it occurred to him to count the minutes and it came out twenty longer. He kept the count to himself.

The post is driven in at the upper crossroads, at the entrance to Ambodiangezoka, and it has stood empty since before he was born. Nobody has pulled it out. Coming up through the paddy it sits off to his right, twenty meters away. Stan goes past two or three times a month and looks straight ahead.

The last time he went into the village he was sixteen. He came up by the paddy, set the sack down on the floor of the doorway and stayed standing with one foot outside, talking from there. His mother put the plate in his hand instead of on the table, the way she always did. He ate standing up, handed the plate back and went down before it got dark.

It ended without a scene. He stopped going up, and that was that. Now they meet at the crossroads, forty minutes further down: Clarisse comes down with the sack over her shoulder, he waits for her sitting on a drum, they hand over whatever they've brought and she asks him whether he's eating. He tells her yes. At no point are the two of them sitting down at the same time.

The row leader job is handed out by the office at the end of the season, going off the sheet. Stan has been passed over last season and the one before, always for the same reason: his name turns up scattered along the margins, in between somebody else's lines, and the name at the very top belongs to someone who does less.

The second time he found out at midday, in the drying yard, back to the sun and the paper held close to his face so he could read it. He folded the sheet and put it in his trouser pocket, in with the slivers. That night he closed the notebook the same as any other night.

Out loud he says they gave it to someone else, and that's true. The other half of the sentence he keeps.

He tells whoever's carrying the sheet quietly and with no further explanation: "Put it under Solofo's name, I was slow today." He has cleared his row before the rest of them and the ones standing there know it.

He doesn't say much and he cuts things short. He answers before you've finished the question and then stays quiet for longer than he needs to. If somebody notices something of his and says so, his hand goes to the edge of the beanie, he lets out a "you can tell" and gets on with the next chest. The crew reads it as the bad temper of a nineteen-year-old.

As for his own people, in the crew there's him and that's it. The ones from his village are scattered across the valley and hardly ever get together; the ones who know each other know each other from work. Nor is there any figure for how many of them there are: somebody from outside tried more than thirty years ago, came out with a margin so wide it was no use for anything, and that number is still being repeated. Stan tells it the way you'd say nobody has ever got round to counting.

He hasn't got a place of his own either. He has five places where they let him sleep and he rotates between them with no fixed logic: the concrete-floored room Solofo has behind his father's shop, a corner of the drying shed, the long bench in the warehouse. During flowering he stays five weeks straight in the drying shed, because at half past four you have to be on your feet.

His father, Fidèle, got him out of bed before dawn when he was eleven and took him up to a plot in flower. He put a bamboo sliver in his hand and showed him the motion: lift the rostellum, press the pollinium against the stigma, let go and move to the next one. The vanilla flower opens for a single morning and around here there is nothing to pollinate it, so it has to be married by hand, flower by flower, while it's open. Stan did fourteen that dawn and fell asleep sitting between two rows before nine.

It was Fidèle who told him where the motion came from. An enslaved twelve-year-old boy worked it out on an island to the east, in 1841, and it has been done the same way ever since. Stan repeats it in those same words to anyone who comes in new to the crew, and then gets back to his row.

He left school at twelve, halfway through the flowering, because in flowering you get paid by the flower. Nobody at home argued. He went back twice in January and those were the last times. He reads well and writes just enough, which is what a notebook needs.

At fourteen he started finishing his row before everyone else and doubling back to help. They gave him a nickname, which didn't last, and they raised his daily rate, which did. Fidèle is still at the same warehouse, on the scalding and the conditioning boxes, and he is the person Stan sees on the most days of the year. The sliver he uses is the one his father gave him: worn smooth by so much thumb and a little shorter than it was. He carries three more in his pocket, new, never used.

Before he answers a question, Stan taps whatever's in front of him three times with his middle finger: the lid of a chest, the sorting counter, the metal panel on the cart, the door frame. He goes so fast that nobody manages to count it properly, and while he does it his ears swing round toward the spot he's tapped. Before he climbs the ladder in the yard, he knocks on the rung.

Then he says which chest is badly packed. He gets it right. If they ask him how he knows, he looks at the chest as though the answer were written on the outside and says you can tell. If they press him, he says the lid sounds odd with the damp. If they press harder: "It's just that I get nervous, that's all."

For two seasons now the woman on the scales has been stacking the doubtful chests beside him, without telling him why and without changing her face. He touches them as he goes past and she sets aside the ones he touches twice.

He is terrible at the scalding. With the boilers lit and the water at a rolling boil he grades worse than someone who started yesterday, and it shows from the doorway. He blames the steam, which genuinely does bother him.

He's always chewing something. The end of a spent vanilla stem, until it's frayed; a hood drawstring; the pull on a zipper. He switches objects without noticing.

A black wool beanie bought at a stall selling clothes out of the bale, with a white skull embroidered on the front, the size of a fingernail. Fanja, his sister, stitched it in one afternoon with the white thread from the machine she sews on at the market, and she didn't ask him why he wanted a skull. He keeps it on in the steam of the scalding and at midday out in the yard. His ears stay outside it, at the sides. "Nobody touches the beanie," he says, as a joke. Nobody has touched it more than once.

The jacket came out of another bale, stiff, with one sleeve scuffed that is still scuffed. The studs on the shoulders he put in himself, one at a time, backs on the inside, with a borrowed pair of pliers. Underneath he always wears the same red-and-black plaid flannel shirt, buttoned to the top; he has another one just like it and rotates the two.

He put all of that together at sixteen and has worn it the same way ever since. He shows Fanja his hands when the soda from the scalding splits his knuckles open; she gives him something from the pharmacy and says nothing.

Today he cleared his row before anyone else. Out in the yard, crouched down, notebook on his knee, he counts under his breath with his thumb on the paper. He writes his number, crosses it out and puts Solofo's over it, and puts the notebook away before he stands up.