The town got its names back the way a sick man gets his strength—slowly, in the wrong order, and never all of it.
Old Roe woke on the third morning and knew his wife’s name.
Ruth.
He stood in the yard of the forge saying it out loud, twice, three times, like a man trying the weight of an axe before he trusts his hand to it.
Then he walked out to the plot behind the chapel and said it once more at the stone there, and came back and worked the bellows until dark, and didn’t speak to anyone the whole day.
The hunter drew.
Every morning he sat on his steps with the pad open on his knee and put down one line, or two.
It was a face coming up out of the paper.
A boy’s face.
He could draw the face now.
The name he couldn’t find, and he had stopped reaching for it.
“Some things come back last,” Nora told him.
“Or never.”
Eli’s arm was the same.
Dead from the shoulder down, the hand cool to the touch, the fingers he couldn’t close.
But some nights, lying on the pallet in the hunter’s cabin, he felt a prickling in the fingertips, like a limb far away trying to telephone him.
He could not remember why the arm had gone dead.
He remembered that it had died in the middle of the lake, and he could not remember what the lake had wanted in exchange.
The absence sat in him like the socket of a pulled tooth.
He knew the shape of what was missing.
Nothing else.
Nora had moved her camp down to the waterline, a little tent of canvas and oiled cloth fifty yards south of the stones where the glove lay buried.
She kept a fire going all night.
Every morning at first light she walked the fresh mud where the water had pulled back, and every morning she found something.
A brass button.
A bootlace, stiff with water.
A strip of gray cloth, cut neat, the kind a man’s shirt is hemmed with.
She laid each thing out on a flat rock near her fire, in a row, the way you lay out evidence or the way you lay out a dead man’s effects.
She kept a list going on the blank side of Mara’s last letter—a column of items, dated.
The sixth morning, it was a hairpin.
Bent, the silver gone black.
Nora held it a long time.
Then she set it at the end of the row and added a line to the list, and her hand shook only a little.
“The bend. She used to clamp it in her teeth while she was thinking. It’s hers, Eli.”
“Could be anyone’s.”
“It’s hers.” She said it without heat.
She had stopped arguing with the world about what things were.
“The water’s giving her back. One thing at a time.”
He looked at the row on the rock.
Buttons, lace, cloth, a pin.
A person, itemized.
He thought of the letters getting shorter.
The same hand, less and less room to stand in.
“It’s not giving,” he said.
“That water’s not that generous.”
“Then what?”
He had no answer.
He stood there with his dead hand hanging and watched the lake lie flat in the morning sun, a mile of shine, honest as glass, and the island sitting in the middle of it with the castle on top, plain to every eye in town, and he knew in his gut—as sure as he had known anything since he rode in—that the shine was a counter.
A shopkeeper’s case.
Everything in it priced.
The clerk came in at noon.
Not from the east, where the road ran.
From the west, out of the alkali flats where there was no water and no road and no reason for a man to be walking.
They saw him from a long way off, a dark upright figure in the shimmer, and the strange thing—the thing the barber was still mentioning weeks later—was that he came out of thirty miles of flats with no dust on him.
His boots were clean.
His black coat was clean.
He walked out of the grit like a man stepping out of his own front room.
He came up the main street at a walker’s pace, unhurried, a ledger book under his arm.
He raised his hat to the women on the store steps.
“Morning, ladies.”
None of them had seen him before.
All of them nodded back.
Later, comparing notes, they found that each of them had felt, for a second, that they had.
He stopped at the forge first.
Old Roe was at the anvil, straightening a hitch pin. Find the original chapter at g.com.
The stranger waited just inside the yard, hands folded on the ledger, and watched until Roe looked up.
“Amos Roe,” the stranger said.
“Your father spelled it the short way because the man at the land office in ’49 wrote it wrong, and your father was too tired to argue. You’ve kept the spelling out of spite. Rightly so.”
Old Roe set down the hitch pin.
“Who told you that?”
“You did,” the stranger said.
“Every time you sign your name and think of it.”
He went on down the street.
At the cabin he stood in the yard below the steps and looked at the sketchpad on the hunter’s knee, at the face coming up out of the paper, and the hunter saw him looking and went still.
“His name is Daniel,” the stranger said.
“You named him for your father’s partner, who died of a fever at Leavenworth. You never told the boy that. You meant to. There’s time yet to tell somebody.”
The hunter didn’t say anything.
But that afternoon he drew the mouth, and the mouth was right, and he sat with the pad in his lap until the light failed, and it was the nearest thing to peace anyone had seen in him for twelve years.
That was how the clerk bought the town.
He never asked for anything.
He only gave.
Names, dates, small histories people had lost or never knew they wanted—the maiden name of the storekeeper’s dead wife, the year the balcony broke at the hotel, who it was that carved the horses on the chapel door.
Word ran ahead of him down the street.
By four o’clock people were waiting at their gates to ask him things.
Eli watched from the saloon door with his good hand on the frame.
“He hasn’t come to you yet,” the bartender said at his shoulder.
The old man’s one clear eye was narrow.
“That bother you?”
“Yes.”
“Good,” the old man said.
“It ought to.”
The clerk came to the saloon last, at dusk.
He stepped in, took off his hat, and set the ledger down on the bar with the care of a man laying a sleeping child in a crib.
He ordered nothing.
“Eli Cole,” he said.
“You tied your horse at the post by the blacksmith’s the day you came in. Double loop. Six years you’ve tied that knot. You learned it off a mule skinner on the Pecos who called you ‘boy’ for four months because he couldn’t be bothered to learn better.”
“You weren’t there.”
“I’m there now,” the clerk said.
“That’s the same thing, in my line of work.”