The clerk left on the day the town had agreed to call Thursday.
The interest began before he was out of sight.
It came in small denominations.
The storekeeper, who had been given his dead wife’s maiden name, opened his shutters the next morning and found he had lost the tune he whistled at that hour.
Eleven years of whistling it.
He stood with his hand on the latch, waiting for the tune the way you wait at a door for a dog that is dead, and it didn’t come, and he went in and priced the flour, and told no one.
The barber, who now knew which dead man had carved the horses on the chapel door, could not for the life of him remember the joke he had told every customer since the balcony fell.
He tried it on the blacksmith, lost the middle of it, and covered with talk of weather.
Small change.
Nobody in town called it a price.
That was how the lake had always collected—never an amount big enough to march about.
Nora called it a price.
Nora had started a second column.
She moved the list off the back of Mara’s letter into a bought ledger from the store.
She paid for it in coin, counted the coins into the storekeeper’s palm and made him count them back, that being the only kind of transaction on that shore she wholly trusted.
Left page: the water’s disbursements, dated—button, lace, cloth, hairpin, stud, ring.
Right page: the town’s—tune, joke, and whatever else surfaced.
She went door to door with her pencil like a census taker of the almost-forgotten, and people told her more than they meant to, because it was a relief to say the losses out loud to somebody who wrote them down.
“You can’t audit a lake,” the bartender told her.
“Everybody can be audited,” Nora said.
“Most of them just never met anyone with the patience.”
The old man wiped his glass.
“My mother’s people came over the mountains in a wagon train,” he said.
“There was a man on it who kept accounts like you. He drowned crossing the Platte.”
“Did he write things down?”
“Everything.”
“Then somebody knows the train existed,” Nora said, “and the Platte took his body, not his books.” She said it without looking up.
She had a suspicious nature.
It served her well.
The water kept going out.
By the end of the week the mud had a fence in it—old fence, black posts in a broken line, marching out from the shallows toward the island at an angle, like men who had set off in fair weather for somewhere and stopped mid-stride.
Nobody in town could say who had built that fence, or when the water had swallowed the land it stood on.
The hunter stood at the strand a long time looking at the posts, and then he said, to nobody in particular, that his grandfather had talked about a low-water year when you could walk partway out.
His grandfather had called it the bad year.
The water had never forgiven the land for showing that much of itself, the old man said, and had taken an extra town’s worth of memory in payment when it came back.
“Water doesn’t forgive or take,” Eli said.
“No,” the hunter agreed.
“It just finds the level.” He tapped his sketchpad against his knee, the way he did when he was holding something back.
“The level’s finding somewhere new.”
The hunter’s own interest came due that same week, and he paid it without a word, and Nora only learned of it because she kept asking.
He had Daniel’s name back, and the mouth on the page was right, and he could draw the boy whole now, every morning one line better.
What he had been let go of was the laugh.
He could remember that there had been one—loud, at the end of a joke, the kind that got dogs up off the floor—but not the sound of it, not any more, and never again.
He drew the mouth that had made it and could not hear what came out of it.
“The paper keeps what the ear won’t,” he told her, and went back to the steps, and did not call it a price either, but he took to leaving a little food out at night on the flat rock by his door, for nothing, for nobody, in a valley where nothing had ever been for nothing.
And the town, God help it, had started going out at dusk.
Not to the water.
To the flats, west, where the clerk had come from.
Small groups of them at first—two saddlers, then the feed man and his brother—walking out past the last fence with lanterns, calling into the shimmer, wanting things.
The maiden name of a grandmother.
The location of a grave.
Where a ring was lost.
Word of a son who’d gone north and stopped writing.
Standing out there in the evening heat with their hats off, asking the alkali for gifts, the way men stand in a river where gold was found once, pan after pan after pan.
Nora watched them from her fire and wrote the names of the ones who went more than twice in the right-hand column of the ledger, under a heading she didn’t show anybody.
“They’re borrowing again,” Eli said.
“They’re begging,” Nora said.
“It’s the same thing here, only sadder.”
Eli’s arm was changing with the water.
The prickling at night had become a thing with direction in it—faint, but outward, fingertips inward, like a wire being slowly reconnected from the far end. This chapter is updated first at novelping . com.
On the ninth morning after the clerk left, he sat up on the pallet and closed two fingers of the dead hand around a tin cup, and lifted it an inch, and set it down.
The hunter watched him do it and said nothing.
There was nothing to say about a debt being returned in installments that was any improvement on saying nothing.
He could have asked what the arm had cost.
The clerk had offered the itemized version, and the clerk was gone, and the question sat where it had sat for weeks, in the socket of the pulled tooth.
He found he no longer wanted the figure.
A man who audits everything ends up owning the ledger instead of the land.
Then the fog moved.
It had hung on the island’s far shore all season, gray standing smoke, with the shape inside it patient as a fence post.
On the twelfth night the fog came off the island and crossed the mud without a wind to carry it.
The town saw it go—lamplighters, a man out with a colic horse, the barber closing late.
It did not come up the street.
It came along the strand, unhurried, keeping the old shoreline the way a man keeps to the wall of a room he’s been thrown out of, and it stopped at the stones.
At the stones over the buried glove.
Eli was on the strand before he had decided to go.
He took the lantern and stood off ten yards and watched the fog stand over the cairn, and the fog was fifteen feet high and about as wide as a doorway, and inside it, at the height of a man’s chest, there was the shape of a man.
It did not move.
It did not speak.
The lake lay flat behind it, black, dotted with the lights the water had learned to counterfeit, and the fog stood over the glove the way a creditor stands over a strongbox he is too proud to open in the dark.
“You want it,” Eli said.
“Come take it.”
The fog said nothing.
But the shape inside it turned—slowly, all of a piece, the way weed turns in current—and faced him, and the lantern guttered in a wind that was not there.
“Tomorrow,” the shape said.
It was not a voice.
It was the memory of one, worn down to two syllables and the grain of them, like a seal pressed into wax so many times the wax keeps the print after the seal is lost.
Eli did not sleep after that.
He sat on the strand with the lantern and the dead hand and the tide of gray going out and out under the moon, and at dawn the fog walked back across the mud to the island, unhurried, keeping its wall, and where it had stood the stones over the glove were unmoved—every stone in its place—but the mud around them lay smoothed to a wet black shine, combed flat, the way water combs what it gives up.