The treadle machine came in on a hand truck one cold morning in the middle of April, pushed up to the counter by a man of about fifty. The stove was still lit that far into the spring. It was the whole cabinet, oak gone dark with the years, a black cast-iron Singer head bolted down into the well of it, and he tipped it off the truck and set it upright by the counter with some care. It had been his mother's, he told me. He was clearing the house, and he wanted the machine running before it went out with the rest of what she had left. Then he told me what was wrong with it. "It just stopped."
I started a ticket at the counter. A treadle Singer in an oak cabinet, the gold decals worn thin at the bed, the leather belt still on the wheel. Under what the owner says is wrong I wrote what he had said and nothing of my own, because that field is his and not mine, and I put it down as he gave it to me. It just stopped. He watched the pen, and then he went out to his truck and drove off and left the machine with me.
I put the head up on the bench and took the slide plate off to see the works underneath. A machine that old runs dark inside. Sixty-odd years of oil go to varnish and every bright edge goes to grey, so that no part of such a machine stays the colour it left the factory in, and the whole of it ages at the one rate, together.
That was what made the fresh marks show. There was a bright scratch across the black japanning by the plate, silver where a screwdriver had slipped and skated off the screw, and silver meant the steel under the paint had not been open to the air long enough to grey. Weeks, at the outside, against the sixty years of everything around it.
The screw that holds the hook had been turned. It stood a little off the ring of settled dust and old oil it had kept for decades, and its slot was bright where a driver had bitten in and gone round. A screw left alone that long keeps its place and marks the place it keeps, and this one had been backed off and brought up again short of where it had always sat. That was enough on its own to throw the timing. When I turned the wheel by hand the needle came down and the hook came round to meet it, and they met wrong, and there was a bright nick on the point of the hook where the needle had struck it. The nick had no grey on it either. The hook and the needle had run clear of each other for sixty years, and then, inside the last month, they had begun to touch.
The machine had not stopped. It had been opened, and a hand that did not know the timing had moved the hook off its seat and put the needle into it, and after that it would not make a stitch. Nothing in it had failed on its own. His words were already in the ticket in front of me, under the second field, and I do not change the second field once it is written, because it is the owner's and it records what he brought me and not what I found. The reading belongs under what is actually wrong, which is the third field, and the third field is mine, and it was not going to agree with his.
The third field has one true entry and no other. That entry would call the second field wrong on the same page, in front of him, because I read a ticket back to its owner at pickup, every field of it in order. To spare the words he had given me I would have to write into it a thing the machine had not said, and there has never been an entry in my notebook the machine did not give me, and there was not going to be one now.
I could not choose what the reading was, but I could choose the words it went down in. A fault is a mechanism, and a mechanism has no person in it, so a note that reads the mechanism can leave the man out of it and still be true. Under what is actually wrong I wrote it. Out of time. The hook moved off its seat and the needle struck it, both inside the last month. Nothing failed on its own. Then I did the work and wrote what it took. Re-timed the hook to the needle. Dressed the strike off the hook point. Cleaned and oiled the works. Trued the belt. It sewed a clean straight line off the bench once it was trued, and I stood it aside for pickup.
He came for it two days later. I read him the ticket, as I do for every owner, all four fields in their order. What came in. What he had told me, in his own words, which I read back to him as they stood. What was actually wrong, the hook and the needle and the month they had gone wrong in. What it had taken to fix it. I read the third field in the same flat voice as the other three and put no one into it, and he stood at the counter and heard his own words and then the reading that followed them, and he did not say anything for a moment, and his hand went to the edge of the cabinet.
Then he tipped the hand truck back under the cabinet and wheeled it around to the door, and there he stopped. "I had it apart before I brought it in," he said. "I thought I could find what was wrong and put it right myself, and I made it worse." That was the whole of it, and it was true, and he had come to it on his own with no help from the ticket. He took the machine out to his truck, running and ready to sell, and I filed the ticket with the others that were closed.