Oat Wreath Arrangement

I got to the ropeway waiting hall a little before five, carrying a timber receipt in one pocket and a memo pad in the other. The memo pad wasn't mine. It had a dented spiral binding and a coffee stain on the back cover, and it had sat in my toolbox for four years. Talia Atkins had left it at the workshop in Dar es Salaam the week before our joinery exam, and I had never found a good way to mail it to anyone in Mto wa Mbu.

The hall had a high ceiling and concrete benches and a ticket booth in the corner with a shutter pulled halfway down. Along the wall-length window, buckets of oat stalks sat on the floor next to coils of twine. A woman was kneeling by the buckets, sorting stalks into bundles.

She stood up and turned around, and I recognized her right away. Talia. Twenty-nine now, hair shorter than I remembered, same steady way of looking at a person.

"Henry Lam," she said. "Nobody told me a carpenter was coming through today."

"Nobody told me the ropeway had hired someone I knew." I held up the memo pad. "I also brought you this. You left it at the workshop four years ago. It's been riding around in my toolbox ever since."

She took it and turned it over in her hands. "You carried this across the country."

"It weighs nothing."

"You carried it anyway." She smiled. "How long are you in town?"

"Three days. Timber order for a client in Karatu. I pick up the boards tomorrow morning."

"So you're free tonight." She said it like a fact, not a question. "Good. Sit down. We're braiding wreaths."

I looked at the buckets. "Wreaths. Out of oat stalks."

"Failed harvest stalks. This was a bad season, so we braid what didn't make grain into a wreath and hang it on the hall door. It marks the year we lost. Everybody in town contributes a few loops." She patted the bench next to her. "Come on. You owe me hands."

I sat down. "I owe you more than hands. You sat with me three nights straight before the joinery exam. You made me cut sixty mortises until I stopped rushing them. I passed that exam because of you."

"You passed because you stopped rushing them. I just told you to stop." She handed me a handful of stalks and a length of twine. "Soak these for a second. Wet stalks bend, dry ones snap."

We worked side by side for a while. She showed me how to fold three stalks into a loop and tuck the tail through the last loop so it held without a knot. My first one fell apart. My fourth held. She nodded at it like a teacher marking a pass.

"So how did you end up filling sandbags for a ropeway?" I asked.

"The leg weight bags need topping up every week, and I needed steady work, and it turns out I'm good at weighing things precisely." She shrugged. "It's honest work. I fill bags, they hang on the cables, the cars don't tip. What about you? Married?"

"No. You?"

"No." She looped two stalks together without looking at her hands. "Still alone, still fine about it, most days."

We kept braiding. The light through the window went from yellow to gray. Two other braiders came in, an older man and a woman who talked the whole time about her son's exams, and they filled a second bucket of loops and left around seven. Then it was just us and about forty finished loops and the sound of the cables ticking in the wind outside.

Talia set down her stalks and wiped her hands on her trousers.

"Henry, I'm going to propose something, and I want you to know up front that saying no costs you nothing. We stay classmates either way."

"All right."

"You remember the flirting. Back in the program. We were both twenty-five and neither of us did anything about it."

"I remember it," I said. "I thought about doing something about it plenty of times."

"Well. I've been thinking about what I actually want, and what I want is something small and deliberate. No penetration. Nothing but hands and mouth. One night only, no expectations afterward, no follow-up, no awkwardness at the timber yard or the ticket booth. Clear rules, both of us sober, both of us saying yes out loud first."

I looked at her. She looked back, calm, waiting.

"Why me?" I asked. "You could ask anyone in town."

"Because you're leaving in three days, so there's no entanglement. Because I've trusted you since you were twenty-five and terrible at mortises. And because you carried a memo pad across the country for four years, which tells me you don't drop things that matter to you." She turned the pad over once in her hands. "But I need the yes from you, plainly, before anything happens. And you can stop at any point, and so can I, and we both just take it."

I thought about it for maybe ten seconds, and it didn't take longer than that.

"Yes," I said. "I'm in. Same rules from my side. You say stop, I stop. I say stop, you stop."

"Good. Then we finish the wreath first. I'm not hanging a half-braided wreath on the door of a hall I'm responsible for."

So we braided in silence for another half hour. She wired the last loops onto the frame, held it up, turned it once, and hung it on the inside of the door for the morning crew to move outside. It looked decent, if I say so myself. A little lopsided on the left, but decent. (That lopsided part was mine. I own it.)

Then Talia walked to the door, shot the bolt, and pulled the shutter down over the window. The hall went dim except for one bulb over the ticket booth.

"This way," she said. "Behind the booth. There's a mat the night watchman uses.