The rain kept on.
It fell the second day without wind and without hurry, gray static from rim to rim, and the town went down in it to look at the footprints.
They went in twos and threes along the firm spine of the land bridge, careful as bank examiners, hats brimming, past the black fence and the small stranded things of the lake’s floor.
The prints ran down the middle of the ridge, small, narrow-heeled, pressed deeper than a woman of her size should have pressed, as though the walker had been carrying something the whole way.
A mile of town filed past them and nobody said her name.
Half of them had never known it.
The other half had spent it.
The prints ended at the old waterline.
Past the last of them, on the wet black band itself, stood one boot.
A woman’s boot, waterlogged, the seam burst, still laced.
She had stepped out of it and gone back down.
Nora knelt over it in the rain a long time before she would touch it, and then she carried it up the strand herself, past the cairn, and set it at the end of the row on the flat rock, past the ring and the glove, and entered it on the left page, dated.
Her hand did not shake.
That frightened Eli worse than weeping would have.
“Eleven,” she said.
“She’s in shallow water now.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning the ground under her costs more. The lake’s going out of trade and her road’s rising to meet her, and everything she has left to pay is big.” Nora shut the ledger.
“We’re close, Eli. Days, not weeks.”
The clerk came up the main street at noon.
He came through the rain clean, the water not so much missing him as declining to land, and he carried no ledger this time.
He carried a paper and a tack.
Doors opened one by one along the street to watch him pass.
At the store he pinned the paper to the doorframe, stepped back from it, and considered it the way a man considers work he is satisfied with.
The paper said, in a small even hand like weaving:
THIS OFFICE WILL CLOSE ON SETTLEMENT OF THE LAST OPEN ACCOUNT.
No signature.
No date.
The storekeeper read it to the women on the steps.
The barber read it to the saloon, twice.
Relief moved down the street like weather—a bank closing meant an end to lending, the bad years over, the water done with them at last—and it was the old bartender who stood in his doorway and said what nobody wanted heard: Find the original chapter at novelping(.)com.
“A bank that shuts its doors doesn’t mail your money back. It just shuts.”
He caught Eli’s eye over the heads of the glad ones and tipped his chin toward the back room, and Eli went in and sat, and the old man poured two glasses and pushed one across without asking.
“When it comes,” he said, “how high?”
“To its old level. All at once.”
“The church floor is six feet over the old mark. Everything south of it is under it.” He drank a little.
“Do we run?”
“Where? Their names are in this valley. Half of them couldn’t find their own children’s graves outside it.”
“Then we don’t run.” He said it without any trouble at all, the way a man says a thing he has privately settled before you arrived.
“My mother’s people crossed a continent to get to a place where the water was reasonable. It follows you, son. It’s the water that’s patient.” He pushed the bottle over.
“So we stay and we count. That woman of yours with the ledger—she’s the only bank in this valley I’d trust with my deposit.”
The storekeeper, among the gladdest, tried his morning tune on the way back inside, and lost the middle of it, and finished the closing of his shutters in silence.
Eli found the clerk at the end of the street, looking at the lake.
“How long?”
“That’s not my page anymore, Mr. Cole.” No regret in it.
Regret was not a thing he carried.
“The lady sets the pace. Every item she puts on that rock comes off her principal. When the last clears, the books balance, and balanced books close. You’ve seen a shop shut. The stock doesn’t walk out the front door. It goes somewhere.”
“High water,” Eli said.
“Fast. Once.”
“That’s the shape of it.” The clerk turned.
Under the hat his face was pleasant the way a counter is pleasant.
“I’d take it kindly if you didn’t shoot the messenger. I’m only the telling part.”
“You gave half this town your small change.”
“They signed for it. A signature is just taking. Nobody twisted an arm. Their hands came out, and my hands were full.” He put his hands in his pockets then, and for the first time in Eli’s knowledge of him he looked tired, or wore the posture of tiredness to see how it sat on him.
“A piece of trade information, since the office is closing and it hardly matters now. Nothing taken through my window goes back. I don’t do returns. Offsets only.”
“What’s an offset?”
“A thing given for nothing, set against a thing taken for something.” He said it lightly, and then stood a moment saying nothing while the rain came down between them.
“A hundred and six years of books in this valley, Mr. Cole, and not one such entry. I’d like to see the entry before I close. Call it professional curiosity. It’s the nearest thing I have to a wish.”
He went off north along the strand, and where he passed the mud held no prints.
Eli walked back the other way and stopped at the hunter’s cabin, because of the plate.
It sat on the flat rock by the door, scraps on it, out in the rain, where it had sat every night for a week.
The hunter was on his steps with the pad on his knee, drawing the mouth that had made the laugh he could no longer hear.
“Who’s it for?” Eli asked.
“Nobody.” The hunter didn’t look up.
That evening the town went out to the flats to settle.
Not to beg—the paper had changed it, and what had been appetite in the morning was dread by dusk.
They went out with their lanterns into the shimmer to ask what they owed: the feed man and his brother, two saddlers, the woman from the store steps with her shawl up over her head.
The clerk was out there receiving them, unhurried, a dark figure the lanterns made a queue of.
Eli watched from the strand and could not hear the terms, and did not need to.
The feed man’s brother came back before the rest, walking fast through the rain.
He had asked to return his gift—the place his father was buried, carried home from the flats a week before—and been refused.
He stood on the shore saying it over.
“Nothing taken back, he said. Offsets only. I asked him what an offset was, and he looked at me like I’d asked him what snow was.”
Nora heard that too.
She stood at her fire with the ledger under her coat, and after the man had gone up to town she opened the book to the page she never showed anybody, and turned it so Eli could read the heading.
COLLATERAL.
Forty-one names under it.
Everyone who had walked out to the flats more than twice.
“He called them small change,” Nora said.
“Small change is what a flood takes first. These are the ones it will reach for before it reaches for anybody.”
Eli told her then what the depositor had asked on the island.
The name, Margaret.
The story carried out of the valley before the water came back.
“Write it down,” Nora said.
“The Platte took that account-keeper’s body, not his books.” She fed the fire a stick.
“But the story can sit on paper. The town can’t sit on anything. Two payments, if her rate holds. Forty-one names on my right page and the rest of the town behind them.” She looked down the strand, at the plate of scraps on the hunter’s rock, out in the rain, for nothing, for nobody.
“Somebody in this valley has finally got to learn to give.”
Morning came gray, the rain still on.
And the wet dark band on the rocks, which had widened a knuckle every morning since the water began going out, had not widened.
It held where it was.
The first morning all season.
Some of the town read it as the end of the bad years and were glad.
The bartender stood at his door with his one clear eye on the lake and read it the other way, and said so to nobody in particular:
“It’s not holding because it’s full. It’s holding because it’s done.”