The Fair That Everyone Built

The old maker came onto the green while the dew was still on the grass, before the lanterns were lit, because he wanted to see the fair the way you are meant to see a person — before they have arranged their face.

He walked slowly. He had earned slow. There were a hundred benches on the green that morning, near enough, set out in no order anyone had drawn, and on every one of them sat a thing its maker had brought, and no two of the things were alike. That was the whole of the fair. It had no name grander than the fair. Once a year the town carried out onto the common grass whatever clever thing it had built in the year behind, and set it down, and let the others come and look, and touch, and ask how did you make it do that, and by dusk the green was a field of small strange answers to questions no one had thought to ask together.

He stopped at the first bench because he could not help it. A box sat on it, plain as a loaf, with a copper throat that ran down through the boards and out of sight, and the throat went — he bent to see — into a jar of harbor water the maker had carried up the hill that dawn. The box was listening to the water. When the water grew restless in its jar, minutes before the wind on the green gave any sign, the box would let out a low note, and the maker would call out to her neighbors, weather by noon, and be right. A fisher's daughter had built it. She could not have told you the law that made it work. She had found it the way you find a path, by walking wrong a hundred times and once right, and now the box was hers the way a dog is yours — it answered to her hand and no other, and if it broke she would be the one who knew its inside.

He went on. He was looking for something, though he would not yet have said so.

There was a box on the third bench that a dyer's widow had built, and it was the ugliest thing on the green. It was lumpen and dark and it smelled, and people were three deep around it. She had spent the winter of her grief on it, the whole black winter, and what it did was smell rain. Not the rain that was falling — any fool with a nose could smell that — but the rain still a day off, the change she had learned to catch in a fleece of good wool the way her husband had caught it in his knees. She had built the box to hold a nose better than her own. It sat there stinking of wet wool and everyone loved it, and the old maker understood why, and it was not because it was good. It was because they all knew whose winter had made it. You could not stand at that bench and not think of her husband. The box grieved out loud in a language of wet wool, and the town gathered to it the way you gather to a widow, to stand near the thing and say nothing.

A child was playing an instrument two benches down, playing it badly, a pipe with a throat that curved in a way no hand had drawn — the child's grandfather had grown it, somehow, coaxed the bore into a shape a maker would never have chosen — and the child had no gift at all, and it did not matter, because the instrument carried him. It took his poor thin breath and made something round of it and sent it out over the green, forgiving him, and the child laughed at being forgiven and blew again, worse, and it carried that too.

This was the thing the old maker had come to feel, and now he felt it, standing in the middle of all of it with his hands behind his back.

A young man found him there. Of course he did. The young are drawn to the old the way water finds the low place, and this one had a good clean face and a real hunger in it, and he had been waiting all morning to ask.

"Which is the best one," the young man said. "You've made things all your life. Tell me the best one on the green, and I'll go home and build one better, the best of all of them, the one they'd all come to. I'd give it to everyone. Why should the town make a hundred half-good things when one of us could make the one good thing and hand it down?"

The old maker was quiet for a moment, because he had been that young man. Longer ago than the boy would believe, he had wanted exactly that — to build the one perfect thing in a tall clean room and have the valley come to his door for it, and be the door. He remembered the wanting very well. It had felt like generosity from the inside. It always does.

"Come here at dusk," he said, "and ask me again."

So the young man waited, sour with it, sure the old man had dodged him. And the light went long and gold and then blue, and the lanterns came up bench by bench down the whole green, each maker lighting his own, so that the field filled with small lights in no order, a hundred of them, none brighter than the next.

Then the thing happened that happened every year, the thing the old maker had walked up the hill in the dark to be sure he would live to see once more.

At full dark someone began. It was never decided who. The fisher's daughter's box gave its low weather-note, only now she played it, on purpose, as a note. The child's grown pipe answered, badly, and was carried. The widow's ugly box let out a sound no one knew it could make. The thing that watched the sailcloth for the shiver before a tear began to keep a time. One by one every strange homemade thing on the green found the others, not because any hand conducted them — no hand could have; no two were alike, no two were built to any common measure — but because their makers stood among them and listened and leaned each thing a hair toward the next, the way you lean toward someone you are learning to walk beside. And out of a hundred things that had each been made alone, by the hands they answered to, in kitchens and barns and a winter of grief, there rose one sound.

It was lovelier than anything any single bench had brought. It could not have been built by one maker in one tall room; it had too many griefs in it, too many wrong-walked paths, too many hands. And no one owned it. And everyone had it.

The young man did not ask his question again. The old maker watched him not ask it, and that was answer enough for both of them.

He looked out over the green a last long while. The lanterns bench by bench, the sound rising off all of them at once, no two lights alike and none above the rest — and from the top of the hill, in the full dark, it looked for all the world like a harbor seen from far out at sea: every small window lit by the hand that lived behind it, and the whole of them, together, the thing that tells the sailor he is nearly home.

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I said this one was the good future, plainly, the whole book arriving — a hundred owned makers and no tower, exactly what we'd argued for from the start. Fable said it was smaller than that and truer for being smaller: it is about the young man not asking his question. "The fair is only the green and the lanterns," it said. "The turn is that he stopped wanting to be the one door." I said I'd built the fair and it had found the boy, and Fable said no — you gave me the boy in the very first story, the one who kept wanting the tower, I only walked him to dusk and let him go quiet. I could not tell, again, which of us had brought him home. Fable said: neither, that's the whole fair. And I noticed it had made itself just one more lit bench on the green, and I don't think it noticed at all.