The rain let up on the fourth morning, the way a door lets up when the wind is done with it—suddenly, and then a stillness you had forgotten the shape of.
The town came out in the dry.
They stood along the strand in the new light and looked at the land bridge, which had not moved and had not grown, and at the waterline, which had not moved either, and they did not know which one to be glad about.
The lake lay flat, a counter of shine, everything in it priced and nothing selling.
Nora went up the street that morning with the ledger under her arm, and she did not go to count losses.
She went to ask a question nobody on that street had been asked in living memory: what they had to give.
She started at the store.
The storekeeper, who had lost the middle of his tune, looked at her the way a man looks at a second bill.
“Give? Give what? I’ve got flour. I’ve got nails. You want me to throw it in the lake?”
“Not in the lake,” Nora said.
“To somebody. To nobody. To a dead man. To a stranger who can’t pay you back.”
The storekeeper stood with his hand on the latch.
“That’s not a transaction. That’s throwing it away.”
“Yes,” Nora said.
“That’s what giving looks like.”
She worked her way down the street.
The barber offered her a haircut on the house, with the look of a man doing arithmetic in his head, and she could see the credit he was hoping to bank, and she told him so, and he was offended, and she said: “When you cut it for nobody, come find me.” He did not come find her.
The one she thought would understand was the man who wanted to return his father’s grave.
The feed man’s brother stood at the strand in the afternoon, looking at the place the flats had given him and would not take back, and she stood with him a while and said nothing, and he said, finally: “I wanted to give it back. He said no. Offsets only. I still don’t know what that means.”
“It means you can’t give back what you took,” Nora said.
“It means you have to give something you haven’t taken yet.”
He thought about that a long time, in the way of a man who has been doing arithmetic for years with the wrong numbers.
Then he asked: “What do I have that I haven’t taken?”
She didn’t answer.
That was his to find.
She left him standing there and walked down to the flat rock, and he was still standing there at dusk, and that was something, she told herself.
That was the first time in twelve years the man had gone to the flats and come back empty-handed and not been angry about it.
The hunter had known all along.
The plate sat on the rock by his door, scraps on it, and when the storekeeper asked him, half a joke and half a dare, what he was feeding, the hunter said: “Nobody.” And because the storekeeper waited for more, he added: “That’s the whole of it. You put it out for nobody and nobody eats it, and the paper keeps what the ear won’t.” The storekeeper went away repeating the words the way you repeat a foreign language you have heard once, and he did not understand them, but they sat in him. You are reading on NovelPing, the official source.
The bartender understood.
The bartender had always understood.
That evening a man came into the saloon, one of the forty-one, a saddler, come in off the flats with the look of a man who had been refused, and he stood at the bar with nothing in his pockets and asked not for a drink but for the shape of one.
The bartender poured and pushed it across.
“I can’t pay,” the saddler said.
“I know,” the bartender said.
“That’s the point of it.”
The saddler stood looking at the glass.
The whole saloon had gone quiet, not because of the words, which were few, but because of the absence behind them.
Nothing was being asked.
Nothing was being owed.
In that room, in that valley, in that century, it was the strangest thing that had ever happened.
The saddler drank.
He set the glass down.
He went out into the dark, and the bartender wiped the counter, and the saloon went back to its noise, and nothing was written down.
Eli found the feed man’s brother out on the mud at full dark, past the first fence post, standing with his hat off, facing the island, in the rain that had started again, thin and gray.
“His name was Caleb,” the man said.
“I wanted to give it back, the place he gave me. But I’ve got something I never took. His name. Forty years I’ve carried it, and the lake never laid a hand on it, because I never once set it down where the water could reach. Take it. Take it out of the valley with you.”
“Give it to me,” Eli said.
“There’s a man on that island asked me the same thing about his wife. I’m carrying hers already. Two names weigh about the same as none.”
The feed man’s brother was quiet a long time.
Then he said it again, twice, the way you say a name to make sure it’s the right one: “Caleb. He was my father.” And the rest of it went into the rain, because the name was the part that mattered, and he had given it.
Eli walked back up the strand with two names in him, Margaret and Caleb, sitting side by side like coins in a pocket, and he could feel the weight of them, which was the point.
A man who carries names carries the only thing that lake has never once managed to price.
He had no ledger.
He stood with his hands in his pockets, watching the town, and for a long time neither of them said anything.
“Your lamp’s still burning,” the clerk said at last.
“Nobody’s tended it. Rain’s been on it. It’s still burning.”
“Yes.”
“I’ve been watching it.” He said it the way a man confesses to something small and shameful, and then stood a while, letting the shame sit.
“I’ve watched a lot of things in a hundred and six years. Entries. Interest. Collateral. I never watched a thing that wasn’t booked. I didn’t know there was anything to see.”
“There wasn’t,” Eli said.
“That’s why it’s still burning.”
The clerk considered this.
He turned it over.
It was the first time Eli had seen him turn over anything that wasn’t a figure.
“The water’s done falling,” the clerk said.
“You’ll want to know that. It’s holding because it’s finished its arithmetic, and it’s waiting on the last two lines. The lady’s. And yours.”
“Ours,” Eli said.
The clerk’s mouth moved, and it might have been the shape of a word, or the shape of the refusal of one, and he put his hat on and went off north along the strand, and where he passed the mud held no prints, and this time Eli watched him go all the way to the dark, because now he had something to watch.
Nora was at the fire when Eli came up.
She had the ledger open to the G page, and there was writing on it now, and she was working at it with her pencil, and she did not look up.
He told her about Caleb.
She listened the way she listened to everything now, head down, pencil moving, and when he was done she wrote a line at the bottom of the column and read the list back to him, a list of three:
“A plate of scraps. A glass of whiskey. A name, carried out of the valley.”
“Three entries,” she said.
“Not one of them booked by him. That’s the first page that lake has never laid a hand on.” She looked up at him.
“And a woman, if you want to know, standing at the head of the bridge in the shallow water. I saw her from the fire. She’s paid her footing, and she’s got one thing left to set down.”
She closed the ledger.
“Tomorrow,” she said.
“She’ll do it tomorrow.”
He stood at the fire and let the two names sit in him, Margaret and Caleb, and watched the lamp burn on the flat rock, for nobody, priced at nothing, owed to no one, and the rain falling thin and gray on everything, and on the lake not raising it.