Work Song - Ivan Doig [35]
“Who?” Sandison eyed me. “You? You mean you can handle books that don’t have mile-long words in them?”
“Assuredly.”
“Are you telling me you’re a certified accountant?”
“Mmm, certified perhaps is too confining a term. As you might imagine, standards are different from here to there. But along the way in life, I’ve had considerable experience with ledgers.”
Sandison dropped into his desk chair, his weight sending it wheeling toward me. “Morgan? You just said you’re not an accountant. What the hell then do you do with these ledgers you’re talking about?”
“Oh, mend them. From the inside out.” From his furrowed look, I could tell Sandison was not satisfied with that reply. “Let me put it this way, Sandy. Numbers are simply a language I happen to understand—Latin, numeracy, both have certain principles, fundamental in themselves. Surely you know the story of the bookkeeper and the desk drawer? No? Allow me. Every morning, a certain bookkeeper would come into the office of the firm, hang up his hat and coat, seat himself at his desk, pull out a drawer and look in it for a few seconds, shut it, and only then turn to his work. For forty years this went on—the same drawer, opened and shut, every morning. Finally came the day he retired, and the minute he left the office for the last time, the rest of the office staff crowded around his desk and one of them slowly opened that drawer. In it was a single sheet of paper. On it was written: ‘Debits go on the left, credits on the right.’ ”
Sandison did not find my little tale as entertaining as I had hoped. “The long and short of it is,” came his rumble, “you claim you know how to balance the books.”
I nodded. “To the last penny, if it comes to that.”
He sat there and frowned for some time. He could be intent as a fiend when he was mulling a matter. “All right,” he grudgingly granted at last, “you probably can’t make any more mess of the arithmetic than I have. You’re in charge of the damn bookkeeping. Come over here and start getting acquainted with the ledgers.”
I walked on air back to the boardinghouse at the end of that day. The one fundamental principle of bookkeeping that had always stood out to me was that if you know how and where the money flows, you are hard to get rid of.
6
Live it up while you can, Mister Man About Town,
Because what you gonna do when the rent comes roun’?
Whistling it softly to myself, I contradicted the catchy popular tune by counting out my rent money as usual, that subsequent week, as I came down a few minutes early for supper. Grace was not there to take it. The table was not yet set. This was a new experience; generally the Faraday Boarding House ran like a seven-day clock.
I peeked in the kitchen, to find supper uncooked but Grace steaming.
“Make yourself useful, please,” she said testily, bent low to the opened oven. “Yell up to the others that supper will be a while yet. This bird refuses to get done.”
In double defiance—pale and dry—the latest turkey lay there in the roaster, and after calling upstairs to Hoop and Griff to hold on to their appetites, I returned to the kitchen, rolling up my sleeves. “If I might suggest, it is time to baste the beast.”
“Baste,” Grace said, with a fry cook’s doubtfulness.
“Allow me.” Crouching where she had been, I spooned the turkey’s drippings over the breast and drumsticks, then stoked up the kitchen stove with a couple of pitchy sticks of wood. “There, now, the meal has no choice but to cook.”
No sooner had I said so than the floor did a little dance. Silver-ware jingled, and Grace steadied a cream pitcher. After a moment, she dismissed the latest shake of everything. “That could have been worse.”
“Grace,” I let out along with my breath, “I will gladly take your word for that.” I doubted I could ever get used to dynamite going off beneath the house.
Pushing a rather fetching flaxen wisp of hair off her