Autumn came down the valley the way it comes everywhere, without a herald, and the town met it with work.
The woodpiles grew.
The mill ran late into the evening, and its sound was a sound the town had learned again to sleep through.
On the store’s porch sat a barrel of apples, the first freight to come up the road since the fog lifted, and the storekeeper let the children eat the bruised ones for nothing and charged fairly for the rest, and slept better than he had in years.
Mara’s boots had buttons now.
The woman from the wagon had been in the valley five weeks and had already taken over more of the mending than anyone had asked her to, and one evening she took Mara’s boots off the peg by the door and sewed buttons through the empty buttonholes, using buttons off her own coat, and set them back without a word about it.
Mara thanked her.
The woman said it was nothing, and it was nothing, and both of them let it stay nothing.
Mara wore the boots down to the strand and back and thought, not for the first time, that the town had begun giving things away the way other places gave directions, lightly, without looking to be repaid, and that the habit seemed to be catching.
The second stranger the road carried came up on a gray afternoon, walking, with a mule that carried his baggage and did none of his thinking.
Where the family had come slow, stopping to look at everything, he came steady and looked at nothing but the footing, the way a man looks at a road he intends to use again.
He left the mule at the rail by the store, climbed the step, and asked for the owner by his trade.
He gave his own name as Harrow, of down-country, and he said it plainly, face up, so there would be no digging for it later.
He put a folded paper on the counter and did not unfold it.
The storekeeper looked at the paper for a long moment before he touched it.
Then he opened it, and read it once, and set it down flat, and said, “My grandfather signed this.”
“His hand’s the living one,” Harrow said.
“The second name was witnessed posthumous. The debt passed the same as the store did. I can wait while you check it against your books.”
The storekeeper did not check it.
He went instead to the back room, and came back with the old ledger of the store, the one his father had kept and his grandfather before him, and opened it to a page near the bottom where a copy of the same figures sat in faded ink, carried forward year after year in a column that had outlived everyone who had opened it.
Then interest, added the way weather is added, in seasons, without opinion.
The whole of it came to a number that had too many figures for the size of the room.
By dark, half the town had found a reason to come in for apples.
They stood around the stove and listened to Harrow say what he had come to say, which was not much.
The debt was real.
He did not deny that the road had been shut when most of it was made.
He had not come to argue about the road.
He had a book to settle and a trade to practice, and the trade was carrying other people’s arithmetic until it came due.
Nora came last, and stayed standing.
“Bring your book to the church tomorrow,” she said.
“All of it. The town will look at the figures with you.”
“The figures won’t change for being looked at.”
“No,” Nora said.
“But they’ll be understood, and I don’t write down what I don’t understand.”
Harrow considered her the way he had considered the road, as a thing he might have to use twice.
He agreed to the church.
Mara spoke to him only once, by the door, while he was settling his bill for grain for the mule, which he insisted on paying for in coin, exact.
“Who set the interest?” she asked.
“The paper says so.”
“The road was shut those years. A shut road sets its own price. Whoever lent into that knew what he was lending into.”
“Maybe,” Harrow said.
He counted out the coin for the grain, one piece at a time, onto the wood.
“Arguing prices isn’t my trade. Collecting them is.”
He led the mule out to the churchyard fence, where strangers put animals in this valley, and paid the boy who watched the gate a coin for the watching, exact, and did not stay for supper that anyone offered.
Eli stayed by the stove after the others had gone, and said one thing to the storekeeper before he left.
“I watched the lake keep books for three years,” he said.
“This is the same addition. An account nobody can come and question, growing in the dark, on the strength of a road that’s shut. The lake never showed me its figures either. It just told me the total.”
The storekeeper looked at the column a while longer.
“Then I’m glad,” he said, “that this one only wants money.”
That night the storekeeper sat late with his grandfather’s ledger open and the lamp turned up, copying nothing, just looking at the column that had grown a little every year of his life without his ever having signed it.
Mara walked the strand in the dark and stood a while by the flat rock, where the lamp burned against the water.
The lake lay quiet at the line the water had settled to, keeping nothing.
It did not seem to her that the valley was afraid of the man.
It seemed to her the valley was afraid of the arithmetic.
The lake had kept books once.
Now the books had come up the road to the lake, wearing boots.