The rain held off through the fifth morning, and Nora went up the street again.
This time there was no asking twice.
The storekeeper was on his steps, and he was not looking at her.
He was looking at the flat rock where the lamp had burned four nights without tending, still burning, and he spoke before she reached him.
“I know what you’re going to say.”
“Do you.”
“Give something I never took.” He said it the way a man repeats a debt he has been chewing on.
“I’ve been standing here three mornings trying to think what I’ve got that I never took. Flour, I took it off the wagon. Nails. Salt. The register’s all taken, every line of it. A man my age has come by everything he owns through trade, which means it’s all owed to somebody. I’ve got nothing that isn’t.”
“You had a tune,” Nora said.
The storekeeper went still.
“The morning the notice went up,” she said, “you walked back inside playing it and lost the middle of it. You’ve had that tune since your mother’s kitchen. Nobody ever paid for it. Nobody ever could. That’s not taken. That’s carried.”
He looked at her a long time, the way a man looks at a door he has meant to open and has just remembered why.
Then he went inside.
He came out an hour later and walked down the strand to the hunter’s cabin, and stood before the steps where the hunter sat with the pad on his knee, drawing the mouth he could no longer hear, and he sang.
He sang the slow part first, and while he sang he remembered the kitchen, the smoke, his mother’s hand keeping time on the table, the whole room gone forty years and carried in him like a coin in a pocket.
Then the middle, the part that had been missing since the paper went up on his doorframe, and it came back to him note by note, the way a name comes back to you in the night, and he did not stop to wonder where it had been, because it was his again and it was leaving him, and the leaving was the point.
He sang the end, and the end came out whole, and he stood in the empty air with his hat off and the tune gone out of him into the wind, and the hunter did not look up, and the hunter did not hear it, and nobody on that strand paid him for it, and that, for the first time in the storekeeper’s life, was the point.
He did not understand it.
He said so, walking back.
“He never heard it. What good was it?”
“It’s down,” Nora said.
“That’s the good.”
The barber tried that afternoon.
He had watched from his window while the storekeeper sang, and had seen the man walk back lighter than he had gone down, and the meaning of it escaped him, but he understood that something had been moved, and he had been sitting in his shop for two days with his scissors out and no one to use them on and the arithmetic turning in his head, and the arithmetic was the trouble.
He found the saddler, the one the bartender had poured for, sitting on the rail with his boots off.
“Let me cut your hair,” he said.
“It’s owed.”
The saddler looked at him.
“I can’t pay you.”
“I know,” the barber said, and the words came out of him before he could stop them, and they sat in the air between the two men, and neither of them moved, because it was the first time either of them had heard the words said by a man who meant them.
The saddler sat on the stool.
The barber cut his hair.
When it was done he did not take money, because there was none, and he did not take the owing, because there was none to take, and he stood back and looked at the shape of the head he had cut and felt a lightness in his hands he had not known in a lifetime of barbering. Read the latest chapters at novelping.com.
He went back to his shop and hung a paper in the window, in the letters of a man who did not write often:
HAIRCUTS FOR NOBODY.
NO CHARGE.
Nobody came.
The paper stayed.
The barber checked it every morning, and the checking was the point, the way the hunter’s plate was the point.
The feed man’s brother came up the strand at dusk with a saddle on his shoulder, new, oiled, the stitching deep and even, the work of two days and a man who had been refused and had thought of nothing else since.
He set it down before the saddler’s door, knocked once, and went away before the door opened.
The saddler came out and looked at it.
He looked at the stitching, at the work of his own hands that he had never once given away in twenty years.
“Who’s it for?” his wife asked.
“For nobody,” he said.
“That’s the whole of it.”
And the street began, slowly, the way a ledger opens in a good year, line by line, not all at once.
A woman who had lost her brother’s name on the flats gave a coat to a man whose coat had gone down with the dock, and would not take the thanks, and went away lighter for the giving.
Two men who had owed each other for nine years forgave the debts out loud, on the strand, in front of witnesses, and went home owing nothing, and found they were not lighter for it, only quieter.
The butcher’s boy, who had never taken anything in his life, gave the only thing he had, an afternoon, and spent it digging a grave for a horse that had belonged to a man who had walked into the lake, and when it was done he could not say why it had wanted doing, only that it had.
The other saddler, the one who had gone out to the flats three nights running, came to Nora at her fire that evening with a plan.
“I’ve got a good horse,” he said.
“The best in the valley. I’ll give it to the widow down by the dock and call it an offset, and then my name comes off the page, and I’m clear.”
“Who told you your name comes off the page?”
“Nobody. I’m offering it. That’s giving.”
“That’s buying.” Nora looked at him over the fire.
“You’re not giving a horse. You’re paying a debt you haven’t been billed for yet, and you want a receipt. The lake has had a hundred years of receipts. It doesn’t know what to do with one more.”
“Then what do I give?”
“I can’t tell you.” She said it without cruelty.
“If I tell you, it’s mine, and you’re just carrying it. The storekeeper found his by standing still. Go stand still.”
The saddler stood in the dark a long time, angry, and then the anger went, and he stood a while longer, and it was something, Nora told herself, the way a man stands still in this valley after a lifetime of reaching.
Whether he found anything was between him and the arithmetic.
And the clerk stood at the north end of the strand all that day, in the dry, watching.
He watched the barber cut hair for nothing and hang a paper no one would read.
He watched the saddle sit by the door.
And he stood with his hands in his pockets, and the thing in his face was not the posture of tiredness this time.
Eli came up the strand at dark and found him there.
“You’ve been watching all day.”
“Watching is what I do.” The clerk did not turn.
“I’ve watched entries for a hundred and six years. Every one of them came to my window with a hand attached. Today not one hand came to my window. Not one. And I’ve watched things leave this valley all day that I have no column for.”
“What does your book say about them?”
The clerk was quiet a long time.
“My book says nothing,” he said.
“That’s the trouble. My book has never once said nothing. There’s a page in it now, I can feel it, the way a man feels a tooth, where the entries used to be. The entries are going out faster than they come in, and I have nothing to set against them. A counter with an empty column. Do you know what that is, Mr. Cole?”
“No.”
“Neither do I.” There was a wonder in his voice Eli had never heard there.
“In a hundred and six years, that is the first thing I have been asked to count that I do not know the shape of.”
He put his hat on and went off north along the strand, and where he passed the mud held no prints, and Eli watched him go, and the lamp was still burning on the flat rock, and out on the flats, in the shallow water past the black fence, there was a figure standing that had not been there at noon.
Mara.
She stood where the bridge went down under the water, and she was not walking anywhere.
She was watching the town, the town that was giving things away, and she stood with her hands at her sides while the lights came on, one by one, along the strand.
Eli walked down to the shore.
She did not come in, and he did not go out.
“You’re watching,” he called.
“I’m listening,” she said.
“It’s been forty years since this valley made this sound. I’d forgotten what giving sounded like. It’s quieter than taking. I’d forgotten that too.”
“One payment left.”
“One.” Her gaze went to the town, to the lights, to the lamp.
“The town’s page is filling. It’ll be done before I am. Tell Nora to keep her pencil ready. When I set it down, there won’t be a lot of time.”
“How much?”
She looked down.
The water was moving now around her knees, where it had not moved in days, a slow, even push toward the shore, like a breath being taken in.
“The water’s getting ready,” she said.
“The last line is going to be a big one, Eli. I’m going to owe it everything I’ve got left, and when I do I’ll land owing nothing and owning nothing. And this town’s going to have to be done giving by then, or it’s going to be done altogether.”
She turned and walked back out along the bridge, into the dark, and the water held her up at the knees, and she did not turn around.