Stan.

All it takes is a car pulling into the yard. The first time he was fifteen: the foreman asked him, with no rudeness and no explanation, to stay on the other side of the scales until the visit was over. He spent the whole time arranging chests that nobody needed arranged, hearing the buyer from back there asking about moisture and about grades. Now nobody has to ask him: he hears the engine, drops whatever he is doing and takes himself round the back.

Every page of his tally notebook carries one number crossed out with two lines and another written over it. The one underneath is his; the one on top belongs to his cousin Solofo, who works in the same crew and goes slower. He wrote the first page like that at seventeen and has not missed a day since. Solofo gets paid for those rows and buys the rice for both of them with the money. Two seasons and they have never discussed it. Outside the two of them, nobody can read it.