Thursday the whiteboard in the probe locker said 4-East, in her own block letters from the night before, and under it nothing about 6-South at all. She drove to 6-South first anyway.
It was six-twenty-two by the dash clock. The window ran six to ten and 4-East was eleven minutes past the spreader bay, so she had some slack. Not much. Hold time started at the cap, not at the mouth, and nobody at intake cared how early you had been awake.
She left the wand in the truck. That was so she could not tell herself she was working.
In the dark on Wednesday the grey under the new riprap had looked like a patch. In daylight it was a road. It started at the concrete lip the county had poured in July, a hand deep where the washout had dropped the heaviest of it, and ran down the ditch bottom in low ripples, the same ripple a creek leaves in sand, only finer and the colour of a chalkboard someone had wiped with a dry rag. It thinned as it went. By the time it reached the culvert under the township road it was a skin you could have scraped off with a thumbnail. But it was still grey at the culvert.
She paced it. Thirty-eight of her paces, and her paces were short.
The county tape was in the door pocket. She pulled the end out, hooked it on a chunk of riprap at the lip, and walked it down the ditch to the culvert mouth and pinned it with her boot. Then she backed up the bank until the phone could hold the whole thing: the tape, the ripples, the orange-painted stake at the top with its work-order tag. She checked that the tag was legible on the screen before she took it.
TZ-HWY-0611. BANK RESET. CLOSED 07/22.
Closed. The riprap crew had set new rock right on top of the fines and signed it off. It was a tidy job. You could see where the loader had back-dragged the bank to grade and where someone had stood with a seeder. New dirt, fescue up three inches, a strip of erosion blanket pegged across the steepest bit. Above the bank the field was black-grey to the fence again. The rock run had gone back down in August, after the washout, on the same acres, and the logger in the spreader bay would have scored it as a fresh application against the same vintage. Illinois River 2044-46. Open, unpunched, waiting on mouths like hers to say what the rock was doing.
Some of the rock it was paying for was down here. Under a closed ticket.
She coiled the tape. At 4-East she wiped the probe on her sleeve, read the mouth, and capped the bottle at six-fifty-seven, and wrote the time on the label in grease pencil big enough that nobody could argue with it.
The hours board hung by the shop door, a long panel that had been a whiteboard before the 2033 walk-off and was now a screen with a whiteboard's frame, because the union had asked for the frame. There was still a pen on a string. People used it to initial.
When she got there at ten-forty the yellow was back over her weeks.
On Wednesday the logger had pulled it off when she refused it out loud. Today it had come back with a number next to it: WET-WEEK, CONF 0.91. The logger was sure. It had checked the rain gauge at the yard and the NRCS drone's moisture pings and her truck's ignition log, and it had found a woman who did not spread and did not sample for three weeks in a wet stretch, and it had a word for that. The yard called the yellow the commissioner's ghost, because it did the commissioner's job and nobody had ever seen it sign anything.
She did not take the pen.
She took out her phone instead and opened Tuesday's receipt. The fail line. Hollis had printed it on thermal paper at intake when the old bottle came back too stale to count, and the paper was in Brenneman's shirt pocket now, but the receipt lived in LIMS, and LIMS lines could be pushed. She held the phone flat against the reader under the board the way intake did it.
The board thought about it. Then it asked: WHICH SQUARE.
She touched the first of her three blank weeks.
It did not ask for initials. A LIMS reference never did. The yellow drained off that one square and it went grey, plain grey, the colour of a field nobody had told anything to.
SAMPLE VOID. R-HOLD. 0.0 H. FINES-WEEK ELIGIBILITY UNDER REVIEW. CHAIR COUNTERSIGN OPTIONAL.
Zero hours. Her own fault, in the county's own words. No rain in it.
She looked at it until the shop compressor kicked on behind her. It was the first honest square she had put on that board in a month and it was worth nothing. The other two weeks she left alone. She had one fail line and it was spent.
On the shop printer she printed the 6-South photo, the one with the tape and the stake. The printer made the grey look darker than it was. She put it on the chair's tray face up and wrote on a sticky note in block letters and stuck it across the bottom, where the work-order tag was.
TZ-HWY-0611 CLOSED ON TOP OF THIS. WHOSE TICKET. J.W.
Kupka was at the hot-water urn in the canteen with his crew thermos. He had been there every morning since June, ten minutes before eleven, because that was when the urn finished its cycle and the water was hottest. He had watched her through the door.
"Void," he said. "That's honest." He filled the thermos to the neck. "Void doesn't pay."
"I know."
She got an egg sandwich out of the machine. The machine asked if she wanted to log it against the fines-week meal allowance and she said no and it logged it anyway, grey, pending.
"Kupka. The week 6-South went. Was the ditch grey?"
He took his time with the lid.
"Ditch was full of water," he said. "Everything was brown. The bank just let go and the field came down with it. I stood there in the rain, what else. Then the highway crew came the next week with the rock." He screwed the lid on another quarter turn. "I wrote BANK LOSS on the board. That's all I wrote. Two words, in pen, my initials. Logger turned it into weather-hours by itself. Chair signed it, because why not, it was raining. Then the auditor came in August and found a refile with nobody's sample on it, and the line had my name."
"You wrote loss."
"I wrote loss. Board doesn't have loss. Board has hours, or rain, or blank." He looked at her square through the door, the one grey square in the yellow. "Your other two. Blank is just yellow on a delay. Fifteenth it fills them."
Janelle ate the sandwich standing up. Kupka had been through every version of this already and had come out of it with his name on a line and a thermos.
If the ditch had a ticket, she thought, then the weeks she sat on the pad watching that ditch had something to point at. Not rain. Not hours. Something that happened to the rock. And if the ditch had no ticket, she wanted somebody with a desk to say so in writing, so the next sampler did not spend a month staring at it.
"Highway's closed it," she said. "The culvert's not highway."
Kupka shrugged. "Township."
"Then I'm going to the township."
"They won't know what basalt is."
"They'll know what a loader is."
The township road district garage sat on the river road past the grain elevator, a pole barn with a salt dome behind it and one window cut into the front wall for a counter. Inside it smelled of diesel and wet salt. A route board on the wall showed the district's two loaders and one grader as little green blocks moving along a map of section roads; the route agent was planning next week, and every few seconds a block slid a day to the left or right as it reshuffled.
The clerk was Lonnie Pfaff. He had a Pekin Dragons cap and reading glasses pushed up over it.
She put the printout on the counter.
He pulled the glasses down, read the stake in the picture, and slid it back at once.
"TZ-HWY," he said. "That's county highway. Not ours. You want the county."
"County closed it." She put her finger on the corner of the picture where the culvert mouth showed, round and dark under the township road. "The culvert's yours. The grey runs to it. Thirty-eight paces."
Lonnie looked at the corner of the picture longer than he had looked at the stake. Then he sighed, the sigh of a man who had hoped to be done for the day at two, and turned to his terminal.
"Six-South culvert," he said, typing. "Here. CR-6S-0719. Culvert cleanout, week of July nineteenth. Sediment removed, four cubic yards. Hauled to spoil pile B."
"Four yards."
"Loader bucket's a yard and a quarter, so three bucket loads and change. The agent logs it off the bucket scale."
"What colour was it?"
He looked at her over the glasses.
"I write what the loader moved," he said. "Sediment. I don't write colour. The agent doesn't write colour." He nodded at the route board. "It writes class. Says here class C fill. Reuse eligible."
"Reuse for what?"
He scrolled. "Shoulder work. Spring. It's on the plan to go down on the Manito road shoulders in April." He scrolled again. "Unless the plan moves."
Four cubic yards of somebody's vintage, going down on a road shoulder as gravel, uncounted, unpunched, on a township plan that a route agent reshuffled every few seconds.
"Can I have that printed?"
Lonnie printed it. He looked at it before he handed it over, and then, because she was still standing there, he took the pen off his own counter and initialed it in the corner. L.P.
"Pile B's behind the salt dome," he said. "Mind the dog. He's fine, he just wants to see your hands."
The dog was a heeler with one blue eye. She showed him her hands and he lost interest.
Pile B was mostly road grit and old gravel, piled higher than the truck, with a loader track up one face. Last week someone had cut into the side of it to load a truck for a washout on the south road, and the cut had left a clean wall. About halfway up the wall there was a band.
It was a forearm thick. Finer than the grit around it, and darker, and laid in ripples that had been flattened by the bucket but not erased. She had looked at the same ripples for thirty-eight paces that morning.
She took the second empty tin out of her jacket and filled it from the band with the tin's own lid, and wrote on it in grease pencil: PILE B / CR-6S-0719. Then she held Lonnie's printout up against the cut face, next to the band, and took the photo so that both were in it: the paper with his initials and the grey.
Four cubic yards. Her father had driven lime trucks. She knew what four yards of rock looked like on a truck bed and what it cost to put on a field, and she knew that somewhere a ledger had been paid for every one of those yards as carbon going into the ground.
It was five past three when she got back to the hours board. The shop was emptying for shift change. The yellow on her last two weeks had ticked up to CONF 0.93.
She did not tap the fail line again. It was spent. She held Lonnie's printout flat under the reader instead.
She did not know if the board would take paper. It had been a whiteboard once, after all. The reader whined for a long second over the township's form, Lonnie's initials, the work-order code, and then the board asked her what it had asked her that morning.
WHICH SQUARE.
She touched the second blank week.
It did not go grey. It did not go yellow. It went a colour she had never seen on the board in all her years at the yard, a flat brown, like the ditch had been in June.
OFF-FIELD LOSS. REF CR-6S-0719. 0.0 H. TONNAGE QUERY SENT TO VINTAGE IL RIVER 2044-46.
Zero hours again.
But it said loss. The board did have loss. It had always had it, she thought, somewhere in a menu no sampler had ever been sent down, and Kupka had written the word in pen in June and the logger had not been able to read pen. A sentence was sitting in the board in brown now that had not been there that morning: the spread had gone into a ditch, and the ditch had gone onto a pile, and the vintage that paid for the spread would have to say whether it still counted those tonnes.
A minute later the square grew a second, smaller line, which meant the vintage's verifier had answered. Not a person. The Isometric verifier for IL River 2044-46 ran as an agent that read every punch from every mouth in the basin and did not sleep.
QUERY RECEIVED. RESPONSE WINDOW 30 DAYS.
Thirty days. The board closed on the fifteenth. The clinic billed on the fifteenth. Her kid's sinus chart drew against the yard's hours on a fines-week code, which the county funded per approved yard hour, and the hours were whatever the board said they were on the fifteenth, and that was a week off. The verifier would answer some time in November, about rock. Nobody at the clinic would be asking about rock.
She stood there with the pen on its string brushing her wrist and did the arithmetic she did not want to do. Two honest squares at zero. One blank, which Kupka said was yellow on a delay. If she let the yellow have the third one it would pay something, weather-hours at the wet-week rate, and her kid's November visits would go through without a hold. If she did not, there would be a hold.
She did not take the pen.
The third week she had no paper for. She had sat in the truck that week with the old bottle in her jacket and watched the ruts, and nothing had happened to the rock that she could point at. That week was hers. She did not know yet what you called that on a board.
She went to the chair's tray. The photo was still there with her sticky note. Brenneman had not been back. She put the two tins down on top of the photo, side by side: 6-S DITCH FINES from Wednesday, PILE B / CR-6S-0719 from today. Same grey. Same ripple, if you tipped them to the light. She slid Lonnie's printout under them so his initials stuck out.
Then she went to the locker and wrote tomorrow's mouth on the whiteboard, 2-West, and under it, smaller: 6-S IS A LOSS, NOT A MOUTH. ASK THE CHAIR.
The wand went back on its hook dry. On the way out she passed the board again. The brown square was still brown. Under it the verifier's line had added a day counter, 29 D 23 H, and it was counting down.