The hours board took her badge on the second try. It always took the second try when the canteen was humid, and on Thursday at 6:20 the canteen was a wet tin box full of people with nowhere to spread.
Janelle opened her own row. Blue lines down the week: 6-South, 9-North, phone, lab. At the end, the crew-note column, empty the way it had been empty for six years.
She had the furnace log photocopy flat against the panel under her left hand. With her right she typed, one finger, slowly, because the board's keyboard was the kind built for gloves.
PILE B = MILL ASH. LOI 1.2 (DALE, CO-OP). WENT OUT AS LOT 114 ON 9TH. TALLY TU-7 0447 CAL AGENCY BLANK. VERIFIER HAS LOG.
The board thought about it. Then a box came up under her line.
CREW NOTE VISIBILITY This note will be visible to: crew, township, county commissioner's office, verifier mirror (IL River 2044-46). Suggested tag: DISPUTE (MILL) [ACCEPT TAG] [NO TAG]
She pressed NO TAG. A tag was a folder, and a folder was a place somebody could put a thing and close it. She held her phone up to the scanner and attached the photo of the log, the circled 1.2 with Dale's initials under hers, and typed JW in the initials field.
Log hours against this note?
She entered 0.0. The panel was warm under her palm, the way it was warm every morning of her working life, a little heat coming off the electronics behind the plastic so the screen wouldn't fog. Two rows up was Kupka's crew, 6-South ditch, and the yellow flag still sat in his June column from the auditor. Her name was on the board now, in the same month as that flag, in the same font.
She took her cold coffee and went back out into the rain.
At 11:50 she came back in from the co-op with Wednesday's bottles logged and her hood dripping, and she checked the board on the way to the urn because she could not help it.
Her note was still there. The photo thumbnail. The JW.
Under it there were two lines that had not been there at six.
K. KUPKA (6-S): SEEN. 1.2.
ROSSI (7-E): 7-EAST PILE B ALSO GREY. 10TH. NO LOI.
And under those, in the small grey type the board used for things nobody had typed, a third line.
Related: RECON-LOT114 (open, mill-initiated). This note may be superseded on reconciliation.
She read that one twice. Superseded. The mill's three-in-the-morning agents had found her note before lunch and pinned their open form to it like a tag on a toe. Nobody had asked the board to do that. The board did it because the lot number matched, and matching was what the board was for.
Around the yard people said a number got recon'd the way they said a field got written off. Not wrong, exactly. Just finished, by somebody else.
Nobody in the canteen said anything about any of it. A township crew was playing euchre on a cooler lid. The hot-water urn ticked. Somebody had moved the sugar caddy back to the middle of the crew table, over the place where the furnace log had been yesterday morning.
She took a photo of all four lines together with the board's clock in the corner of the frame, 11:52, and wrote under the tally serial on her proof list, in pencil: Rossi 7-E 10th grey, no LOI.
She did not know Rossi. She knew the 7-East crew by their truck, a township F-550 with a bent mud flap that ran Pekin's east-side quarters in Spread Week when the county was short.
She went to find out where he parked.
He parked at the end of the truck row by the salt dome, nose out, with the heater running and the driver's window down two inches so the glass wouldn't steam. At 1:10 he was eating a sandwich off wax paper on his knee. Forties. A grey line at the cuff like everybody's.
Janelle stood on the step with the proof list zipped inside her jacket.
"You wrote on my note," she said.
He looked at her through the gap in the window. "You're Woith."
"What did you see on the tenth."
He chewed, swallowed. "Same rig as your place. Green decals. It ran 7-East the day after it did your quarter. Came off the spinner grey. Like somebody emptied a cement bag into a fan." He moved his hand. "Blew back over the hood. I had to run the wipers. You don't run wipers for basalt. Basalt's heavy, it goes where you throw it."
"Did you get a ticket?"
He leaned over and pulled it out of the door pocket. Nobody collected the load tickets anymore. The tally boxes sent the numbers up every ninety seconds and the paper was just a thing the printer did. Pink carbonless, soft from a week in a door.
LOT 114. 11.2 T. RECV CREW: 7-E / R.R.
She photographed it against the steering wheel so the truck number showed.
"Dale at the co-op will run loss-on-ignition on a bag," she said. "Under your name. Twenty grams. It'll take him a day."
Rossi looked out through the windshield. From the truck row you could see the hours board through the canteen's open door, a lit rectangle with everybody's year on it.
"I got a mortgage on that board," he said.
She waited.
"Kupka's crew got held three weeks in July. Every line they logged sat yellow, pending, while the auditor walked his ditch. Nobody got paid on pending. Kupka could stand three weeks. I can't." He folded the wax paper into a square. "I put one line. That's what I can do."
"Okay," she said.
She was stepping down when he reached back behind the seat. He came up with a Folgers can, the big red plastic kind with the snap lid. He held it out through the window, which meant opening the window, which let the rain in on his sleeve.
"Swept the bed out on the tenth when I got back. Didn't know why I kept it." He shook it once. It sounded like sand. "You didn't get it from me."
She took it. It was heavier than coffee.
On the proof list, under the tally serial, she wrote 7-E 10th, ticket LOT 114, can (sweepings). She held the pencil over the line where a name would go and then did not write one.
By three the rain had stopped and the ditches had not. The 9-North outlet was running high and clean, a little tea-colored from the field above, the water standing up in a smooth hump over the lip of the tile before it broke.
She knelt on her folded tarp and pushed the probe in at the mouth.
TZ-CAL-1009. Forty-one percent volumetric at thirty centimeters. The wettest she had seen this mouth since April.
Bottle B. Cap at 15:22. Grease pencil on the cap.
This was the number the vintage paid her for. Not tonnes. Water. Rain went down through the rock dust in the field, took a little of the rock with it as bicarbonate, came out the tile here, and she carried it to Dale, and Dale titrated it, and in two years when the IL River 2044-46 quantification closed, her bottles and a thousand others would say how much carbon the rock had actually pulled. Rock to water to river. Nobody's chute.
On the way back to the truck she cut across the field edge where the rig had turned on the ninth. The headland was rutted where its tires had swung wide. In the bottom of the deepest rut there was a crust.
Grey. Not the dark speckled grey of basalt fines gone to paste. A flat pale grey, gritty, set hard on top of the mud. She broke it with her thumbnail and it broke like dried mortar, clean edges, no black in it anywhere.
She crouched there with the probe across her knees.
Mill ash was alkaline. It was the whole reason they could sell it to farmers in the first place, a little lime for nothing. If it was high in calcium, it would go into the rainwater like the basalt did, only faster, and come out her tile as alkalinity. Bicarbonate on a titration was bicarbonate. Dale's burette did not know where it came from.
Which meant bottle B, the honest number, might be carrying pile B in it. Her own clean water, credited to rock that had never been rock.
She bagged a pinch of the crust in a zip bag and wrote on it with the grease pencil: 9-N rut, 9th, grey. Then, under that, smaller: check Ca.
In the truck the kiosk app had its banner up before she had the door closed.
WEATHERING CREDIT ELIGIBLE: WET WEEK Rainfall-enhanced weathering detected at your location. Attach 1.3 H to wet-week weathering (est.)? [ATTACH] [SKIP]
She pressed SKIP. The banner went away and came back as a small yellow dot in the corner of the screen, the way it always did. She logged 1.3 H blue against IL River 2044-46 by hand: walk, probe, bottle. Nothing about the rain. Nothing about the rut.
She sat with the engine off and the zip bag on the dash. The field was a good field. Her grandmother's cousin's people had laid its tile in the fifties, clay pipe, before anybody paid for what came out of it. Nothing visible was happening in it. That had always been the point, and now it was the problem.
Dale had the muffle cooling when she came in at 4:40, the door cracked an inch and the heat coming off it into the room in a slow wave. She put the Folgers can on his bench beside the zip bag.
"Loss-on-ignition on both," she said.
He looked at the can. He looked at her.
"Folgers."
"Sweepings. 7-East truck bed, the tenth. Ticket says Lot 114."
He didn't ask the next thing. He tared two fresh crucibles, spooned twenty grams out of the can and twenty out of the bag, a little more than twenty out of the bag because the crust was coarse, and wrote the weights in his book. Then he put both crucibles on the shelf by the drying oven.
"Muffle queue's Monday," he said. "I got the extension office's lime samples first, they've been waiting since Spread Week."
"Monday's fine."
He woke up the LIMS terminal and turned it toward her. Intake. She typed the sample ID for the can: 7E-1010. Matrix, field sweepings. Location, 7-East truck bed. Then the cursor went to the box that said ORIGINATOR, and stayed there.
She typed: township crew, field sweepings, ticket photo on file (JW).
The terminal took a second.
INTAKE WARNING Originator incomplete. Chain of custody cannot be verified. Result will be marked PROVISIONAL and is not eligible for priority verification. [EDIT] [CONTINUE]
Dale read it over her shoulder. He breathed out through his nose.
"That's the same hole Ostrander put his finger in," he said. "Kitchen. Now this."
"I know."
"You put a name there, it goes to the front."
"I know what it does."
She pressed CONTINUE. The warning turned into a small orange flag on the sample row, originator incomplete, next to her own sample from Sunday with its residential (kitchen) still on it in the mill's green. Two flagged rows. Hers and the one she'd made.
Dale snapped the lid back on the Folgers can. "I'll keep this," he said. "Retained split. If anybody asks, it's co-op property."
"Thank you."
"Don't thank me. Pay for your crucibles."
At 5:30 she stopped back at the yard. The rain had come in again, light, enough to put the shine back on the gravel. The euchre game had moved to the far table. The 7-East truck was gone from the end of the row and there was a dry rectangle on the gravel where it had been.
She badged the board. Second try.
Under her morning line, under Kupka's SEEN and Rossi's GREY and the grey type that said may be superseded, she typed:
7-EAST 10TH LOT 114 SAMPLE IN CO-OP LOI QUEUE MON. 9-NORTH RUT 9TH ALSO. JW.
The board offered a tag. She took NO TAG. The board asked whether to link the note to RECON-LOT114 and she pressed SKIP, and it linked it anyway, the little grey line appearing under her text a half second later. She looked at it for a while. She did not have a button for that.
She initialed. She logged 0.4 vintage hours for the lab drop. The panel was warm.
Rossi's line sat above hers with his name on it, the one line he'd decided he could afford. Hers didn't have his name. If the mill went looking for 7-East's sample, it would find JW, and a can with no originator, and Dale saying co-op property. That was as far as she could carry it for him.
The board closed the month in six days. The verifier called in nine. Monday the muffle would come up to 550 and two crucibles would go in and come out lighter or not.
She drove home on 29 in the dark with the wipers on low. Dale had kept the can and given her back the lid, she didn't know why, and it rattled in the cupholder at every seam in the road, red plastic on plastic, all the way home.