The plates were fitted the year the cemetery was brought within the scheme, one to a stone, flush with the granite, and each of them plays the standard version when a wrist comes within a yard of it. Nine hundred and forty stones on the seaward slope. She has three hundred and eleven left to do.
Her job has a long name on the contract and a short one at the office, where they call it walking the ground. She is a corrector. She goes stone by stone with the tablet, plays the plate, reads the epitaph cut into the granite above it, and files a discrepancy where the two do not agree.
Row 40, stone 12. The plate says: Devoted father. Fifty-one years in the fish trade. The stone says: A GOOD MAN ON THE WATER. She marks them corresponding and moves on. Most of them correspond. Nobody at the office believes this. The stones were cut by people who had to face the family afterward.
Row 40, stone 19. The plate: Beloved wife of. The stone: HERE LIES HER OWN WOMAN. She sits on the wall for a minute with that one. The discrepancy field wants a category and offers her four, with one already lit, which is the one the tablet would pick; she picks sentiment, family-supplied, which is the softest available form in which to file a lie.
There is a difficulty in the work that the contract does not mention: the plates were licensed from the estates and the stones were paid for by the families, and these are not always the same people, and when they are not, the granite tends to be the truer of the two. A stone is expensive and permanent and is chosen in the first week, when everyone is still telling the truth to each other. A plate is a subscription, and subscriptions are renewed by whoever inherits the account.
In the close rows two plates will catch her wrist at once and talk over each other, and she has learned to step back until one gives up. They do not take turns. Whichever was renewed most recently is the loudest.
Row 41, stone 3. Plate: A quiet life, quietly kept. Stone: SHE WAS NOT QUIET. Discrepancy filed. She adds a note, which nobody reads, saying that the stone appears to be a correction of something and the plate appears to be a correction of the stone.
Row 41, stone 8. Plate: silent. Battery, or lapse, or the estate stopped paying. Stone: WE WILL COME ON THURSDAYS. She checks the ground in front of it: worn, and worn in the shape of standing rather than kneeling. Corresponding, she files. It is the only entry all morning she is certain of.
Row 42, stone 1. The plate gives a name and four decades and a trade. The stone gives the same name and one line: HE PAID FOR THE CROSSING OF NINE. The family chose the arithmetic. She marks it corresponding and finds she has been standing there a while.
She does the sum, since she cannot help it. Nine crossings at what the board was asking when he died. It is more words than one man could hold. So he was buying them for other households, or he was lending, or nine people said the same word for him and it counted once. She marks it corresponding a second time, which the field does not allow, and the tablet keeps the first.
At noon the other corrector joins her on the wall. He is nineteen, has been told twice about the plates and once about the flask, and calls the stones units, which she has stopped correcting. He keeps asking whether the fourth-year cycle is the same everywhere or only here, and whether anybody checks. She eats on the wall above the seaward rows with the flask and watches the boats. From up here you can read the shape of the century in the stones: the older ones tall and narrow with a verse; then the flat ones from the bad decade, four names to a slab, no verse at all; then the plate era, when the granite went short and modest, since the plate would do the talking; and then, at the top of the slope, this year’s, where the stones have got long again and the letters are deep, and every one of them says more than it needs to. The office has noticed the trend and has an internal term for it and the term is over-inscription. The instruction is to file it as a discrepancy of degree. She has never once been told what the degree is measured against.
She has filed none. Her count for the season, on the tablet, is one hundred and six discrepancies from six hundred and twenty-nine stones. The season is the third she has walked this slope; the plates are re-read every four years, and the office calls this a cycle and the correctors call it going round again. The office average is two hundred and eighty. She has had one conversation about this with a supervisor who was kind about it and used the word thorough twice in a way that was not about being thorough.
Row 42, stone 6. Plate: Taken from us. Stone: TAKEN. She files nothing at all, and cannot afterward say why, and the field stays empty when she syncs at the gate, and nobody queries it.
Row 43, stone 11. The plate begins to speak and stops halfway through a sentence and starts again from the beginning, three times, which happens when the license is inside its grace month. The stone says: DO NOT BELIEVE THE ONE UNDERNEATH. She reads it twice. It is cut deep, in the same hand as the name, and the name has been there since before the plates. She files it as corresponding, and puts in the notes field: the stone anticipates the plate by eleven years.
At three she reaches the row she has been walking toward all week without saying so, and stands at the end of it with the tablet at her side, heels dug in, and does not go down it, and marks the row deferred, access, which is a category for a gate that will not open and not for a woman who will not walk.
Her mother’s stone is nine along. Her mother’s plate has been running for six years on a monthly debit that leaves her account on the ninth. She is the estate. There was nobody else to be it. She knows what the plate says. She wrote the copy herself in the fortnight after, out of a list of approved phrases, in a room with a screen and a kind man, and she chose she made every room easier, and it was true, and it is the truest sentence she has ever paid for.
The stone says nothing. There was no money for cutting that year. It is blank granite with a name on the base plate and a space above it, and the space has been waiting six years for a line she has not been able to choose, and every month the debit goes out for the sentence she could afford instead.
She walks back up. At the gate the tablet syncs and the day’s discrepancies go wherever they go. Behind her the slope is quiet: nine hundred and forty stones and not one plate speaking, since a plate only speaks to a wrist, and every wrist has gone home.
On the wall by the gate, where the notices are, somebody has been putting up the same handwritten card for two years, replacing it when the rain takes it: LETTERING. HONEST PRICES. NO SUBSCRIPTION. She has looked at it every working day since the spring.
Tomorrow she has three hundred and eleven stones left and one of them is nine along a row she has deferred.
At the top of the slope the two of them eat standing up, out of the wind, and the younger one does the voice of the plate that says the wrong year, and she laughs with her mouth full and has to turn away from the stones to do it, which is the rule, and is also the only rule up here she keeps for herself. She takes the card down, since she has learned that a card left on a wall is a thing you have decided to keep looking at, and puts it in her coat, where the paper goes soft against her hip on the walk down, and she does not decide anything about it, and she does not throw it away.