The water had the low street before the town did.
It did not come as a wave.
It came as a level, a risen floor of dark sliding up over the strand without the sound of breaking, and the flats went under in the first of it, and the black fence, and the wrecks the draining had shown to the sky.
The store went under to its sills.
The saloon went under.
The hitching rail went under with nothing tied to it.
The half horseshoe by the blacksmith’s door went under still clanking, and then the water took the sound of it too.
The town was already on the slope.
Nora had come up the street ahead of the water with the ledger under her coat, calling the living out by name the way she called the entries, and the town moved the way a town moves when the one honest bookkeeper in the valley tells it to move.
Not one of them asked if it was real.
They had watched the water keep its own hours long enough to know a risen level when they saw one.
They climbed with what they could carry and left the rest, and the water came behind them, patient as a bill.
Eli was last.
He ran with the mud of the strand on his boots and the water taking the street behind his heels, and the slope rose under him, and the church stood on its shelf of the hill, a plain meeting house gone gray, and below its door the old stones carried a pale scar where the water had once stood, a line straight as a ruled entry, six feet under the floor the church had been built to keep.
The butcher’s boy was ahead of him with the hunter on his back, the hunter’s pad still in his hand, and the boy did not stop and did not set him down.
The barber had the saddler’s wife by the arm.
The feed man’s brother came up the slope carrying a child under each arm and his own face straight ahead.
People helped people up the last of it without being asked, the way the giving had taught them, and the water came behind them all, and nobody looked back to measure it.
Nora stood at the church door with the book open to the COLLATERAL page, and she counted them in by what they had given, the way she counted everything now.
The storekeeper, lighter.
The barber, whose paper was still up in a drowned shop.
The saddler.
The feed man’s brother, setting the children down.
The woman who had given her coat.
The two men who had forgiven out loud.
Old Roe stood inside the door with the iron horseshoe in his hands, turning it, and said nothing.
One was not there.
The other saddler had gone down to the flats before first light, to make the offer one more time—the horse, now, take the name off the page—and the water had taken the flats first, the way small change is taken first, and there was nothing to be done.
From the door they watched the horse come up the strand alone, ahead of the water, running, and the man not behind it.
Nora did not call the name.
She closed the book on the page, the way you close a page you will not be paid on.
The water climbed the slope to the scar line and stopped.
It stopped exact, the old mark, six feet below the church floor, and it held there while the town stood in the door and looked out over a lake returned to its old size.
The island stood in it, and the castle on the island, whole, collateral that had come due and found no one left to collect it.
The strand was gone.
The flats were gone.
The water lay black and still to the far hills, and the rain fell on it and did not raise it.
It was the lake’s old size again, the size the valley had been built around, the size the town had spent the whole season learning to live without.
Eli stepped out onto the step above the water.
The town watched him.
He did not look at them.
He looked out at the lake, at the place where the island stood, and he opened his mouth and told the two names into the rain.
Margaret.
Caleb.
Not loud.
The way you give a thing away, so that it is gone before you can take it back.
The rain took the names and went on, down the slope and into the water and out through the pass, to anywhere the rain falls, and the town heard them and held them.
The storekeeper took off his hat.
One of the women from the steps said Margaret again, softly, the way you test a name you mean to keep, and the town that had forgotten everything, and forgotten her first, remembered that one thing.
Nora wrote the two names at the bottom of the G page, under the plate of scraps and the glass of whiskey and the name carried out of the valley, and the page the lake had never once laid a hand on grew by two lines. Read the latest chapters at novelping . com.
And out on the water, where the fog had kept the old shoreline all season the way a man keeps to the wall of a room he has been thrown out of, there was no fog.
It had not been taken.
It had been told.
A man only drowns all the way when the last person who would have missed him forgets, and the last person who would have missed Margaret had been remembered, and the gray had no wall left to keep.
The water held at the mark the length of the naming.
Then it began to go out.
It went the way it had come, as a level, not breaking, drawing off the slope and the street and the sills and the strand, and where it went the mud stood black and new, and the flats showed themselves to the sky again, and the clerk stood on the wet strand the water had just left, in the dark coat, and where he stood the mud held no prints.
Eli came down to the edge of the dry.
They stood a long time looking at the water going out.
“You saw the entries,” Eli said.
“I saw the page.” The clerk did not turn.
“In a hundred and six years I asked to see one entry before I closed. I saw a town of them.” He was quiet a while.
“I told you once my book had never said nothing. It says nothing now. It is the first true page I have ever kept.”
“What happens to you?”
The clerk considered the question the way he had once considered a figure.
“I was the interest,” he said.
“The principal has gone out of trade. Interest without principal is only a man in a coat, and I was never that.” He put his hat on.
“The water is done, Mr. Cole. Not finished—done. What is left of it is weather. It will rain, and lie where it lies, and it will not keep books. That is the thing you will want to know.”
“And that you won’t be back.”
The clerk’s mouth moved, and it might have been the shape of a word, or the shape of the refusal of one.
“The office is closed,” he said.
“The notice had no date. It has one now.”
He walked out along the going water, into the dark of it, and the water went out around him and took him with it, and where he had stood the mud held no prints, and then the water came over even that, going out, and he was gone—the interest returned to principal, the last entry of the old book, closed.
Eli stood on the dry and watched the water go out all night.
By the first gray the strand was mud again, and the flats were bare, and the lake lay quiet at its new edge, a plain water with nothing in it priced, and the valley was quiet in a way it had not been quiet since before the book was opened.