Like You'd Understand, Anyway

Every day he rides his little wagon four miles each way to visit my clerk's stool and inquire about his marching orders. The last phrase is his little joke. It's not clear to me when he acquired his sense of humor. Even when the weather is inclement he presents himself, soaked and shivering, with his same crooked smile. His arms and chest have been diminished by age. “This is my son,” he tells the other clerk each day: another joke. “Who? This man?” the other clerk answers every time. There's never anyone else in our little chamber.

Sometimes I've gone to the latrine when he arrives, so he waits, silent, while the other clerk labors.

Upon hearing that I still haven't spoken to the garrison commander, he'll stand about, warming himself at our peat fire while we continue our work. Each time he speaks, he refashions his irritation into patience. “I've brought you sandals,” he might say after a while. Or, “Your mother sends regards.”

“Your bowels never worked well,” he'll commiserate if I've been gone an especially long time.

On a particularly filthy spring day dark with rain, he's in no hurry to head home. Streams of mud slurry past our door. The occasional messenger splashes by, but otherwise everyone but Wall sentries is under cover. The peat fire barely warms itself. The other clerk and I continually blow on our hands, and the papyrus cracks from the chill if one presses too hard. While I work surreptitiously on a letter to the supplymaster in Isurium, requesting that our boxes of papyrus be restored to us, my father recounts for us bits of his experiences working on the Wall. The other clerk gazes at me in silent supplication.

“We're quite a bit behind here,” I finally remind my father.

“You think this is work?” he says.

“Oh, god,” the other clerk mutters. The rain hisses down in wavering sheets.

“I'm just waiting for it to let up,” my father explains. He gazes shyly at some wet thatch. He smells faintly of potash. He reknots a rope cincture at his waist, his knuckles showing signs of the chilblains. His stance is that of someone who sees illness and hard use approaching.

“Were you really there from the very beginning?” I ask. The other clerk looks up at me from his work, his mouth open.

My father doesn't reply. He seems to be spying great sadness somewhere out in the rain.

When I point out that without that wall there'd be Britons on this very spot at this very moment, the other clerk gazes around. Water's braiding in at two corners and puddling. Someone's bucket of moldy lentils sits on a shelf. “And they'd be welcome to it,” he says.

The Wall was begun in the spring of his second year in the service, my father tells us, as the emperor's response to yet another revolt the season before. The emperor had been vexed that the Britons couldn't be kept under control. My father reminds us that it was Domitius Corbulo's adage that the pick and the shovel were the weapons with which to beat the enemy.

“What a wise, wise man was he,” the other clerk remarks wearily.

Nepos had come from a governorship of Germania Inferior. Three legions — the Second Augusta, the Sixth Victrix pia fidelis, and the Twentieth Valeria Victrix — had been summoned from their bases and organized into work parties. The complement of each had included surveyors, ditchdiggers, architects, roof tile makers, plumbers, stonecutters, lime burners, and woodcutters. My father had been assigned to the lime burners.

Three hundred men working ten hours a day in good weather extended the Wall a sixth of a mile. He worked five years, with the construction season running from April to October, since frosts interfered with the way the mortar set.

The other clerk sighs, and my father looks around for the source of the sound.

Everything was harvested locally except iron and lead for clamps and fittings. The lime came from limestone burnt on the spot in kilns at very high temperatures. The proportion of sand to lime in a good mortar mix was three to one for pit sand, two to one for river sand.

“Now I've written two to one,” the other clerk moans. He rises from his stool and crushes the square on which he's been working.

“Water for the lime and mortar was actually one of the biggest problems,” my father goes on. “It was brought in continuously in barrels piled onto gigantic oxcarts. Two entire cohorts were assigned just to the transport of water.”

The other clerk and I scratch and scratch at our tablets.

As for the timber, if oak was unavailable, then alder, birch, elm, or hazel was used.

While I work, a memory vision revisits me from after my brother's death: my father standing on my mother's wrist by way of encouraging her to explain something she'd said.