XXX lettering on the back of a hand

I painted them the autumn I turned sixteen, with a tin of tar and a brush made from a horse's tail. My father stood below me on the scree, shouting that the lean was wrong and that a letter ought to look like a letter. I learned the strokes had to be clean enough to read through sleet and thick enough to hold in wind. He made me do the third one four times before he let it be.

That winter the Merriman brothers came up from the valley with a string of ponies and read two crosses as an invitation. My father watched them from the inn window and said nothing. They had no patience for a boy's paint, so they went up anyway, and the gully took the ponies first and then the men. The village did not blame the tar. It blamed the weather, as villages do.

Now the boulder is mine. Every October I climb with the tin and a fresh brush, scrape the lichen off the three strokes and touch them up. Below, the inn still serves cider, and the drovers still squint at the rock and ask whether it's a two or a three. I tell them the same thing my father told me. The third X was never for the weather. It was for whoever was too proud to wait.