Dictated note, T. Calder

Thomas Calder, the eleventh of October, nineteen eighty-four, in the car outside the hall, engine off.

I have just come from the fourth funeral of the year and I want this down before I have tidied it in my head.

Six men carried. Seven pairs of gloves went out and seven came back. That is the twenty-first time I have counted it and the twenty-first time it has come out the same, so I am no longer counting to find out. I am counting because I have become a man who counts.

Now. There is a plain explanation and I want it on the tape before anything else, because it is very likely the true one. The box was made for seven. Boxes are made for the number the maker thought of. The society issues what is in the box and returns what is in the box, and nobody has taken a pair out of circulation in living memory because nobody throws away a serviceable pair of gloves in this parish. That is the answer. Write it down. It fits everything I have seen.

What it does not fit is the wear. The seventh pair is as worn as the other six. A spare pair that goes out and comes back untouched for forty years does not go through at the thumb. I have handled them. They have all gone through at the thumb, and at the same place, which is where the coffin edge sits.

I can hear myself. So let me be exact about the claim, which is a small one. My claim is that seven pairs of gloves show comparable wear. My claim is not that seven men carry. Six men carry. I have watched six men carry, twenty-one times, and I would say so on oath.

I asked, once, in the second year, and I asked badly. I asked the treasurer who wore the seventh pair. He looked at me the way you look at a man who has asked something impolite at a funeral, which is what I had done, and he said: they go out with the box and they come back with the box. And that was correct, and it was an answer, and it was not the answer to my question, and he knew that, and so did I, and we left it.

Here is what I will not do. I will not ask again in a way that tells them what I think I have noticed, because the moment I do, one of two things happens. Either they tidy it, and I have destroyed the thing I came to observe. Or they take it up, and I have given them a story they did not have, and in ten years an anthropologist will come and find it and think it old.

So the note ends there. The correct account of this parish is that they bury their dead well and keep their gloves in a box of seven. Everything past that is mine, not theirs, and I should be careful about whose it is.

End of the note.