When the ferryman Adel died, his widow hired the market clerk to sit in the corner during the three nights of sitting and write down what was said.
“All of it,” she told him. “I won’t remember. I want to have it.”
The clerk was a careful man. He had written contracts for thirty years, and contracts had taught him one rule above the others: write what was said, and nothing you only think was meant. So he sat in the corner with a lamp and a stack of paper. For three nights he wrote every word that reached him. He did not write who spoke. Nobody had asked him to, and on the first night the room was so full and so dim that he could not have kept up anyway. Words came from the doorway, from the bench, from behind the curtain where the women were cooking. He took them all down in one long hand, one paragraph after another.
On the fourth morning he gave her forty-one pages tied with string.
She read them that afternoon at the kitchen table, and at first she wept, because it was all there. The story of the night the river froze. The joke about the goat. Someone singing the first verse of the ferry song and stopping partway through. It was more than she would have kept. It was more than anyone would have kept.
Then she reached the middle of the second night, and she stopped.
He owed me and he knew it. I never said so to his face.
Two lines further down, with nothing between them but a sentence about the weather:
He carried my father across in the flood when nobody else would go. I have never paid him back. I don’t know how.
She read them again. Either could have come from anyone in that room. The cruelest thing anyone said in three nights and the kindest thing anyone said in three nights sat in the same handwriting, with the same weight, at the same distance from her.
She went to see the clerk.
“You didn’t write who said them.”
“No,” he said. “You asked for what was said.”
He wasn’t defending himself. He was telling her what the work had been. She could see he had never once thought of names as part of the words, the way a man who weighs grain doesn’t think of the field it grew in.
“Then I have the words and none of the people,” she said.
“Read it again,” the clerk said. “Slower. I didn’t fix anything.”
She didn’t know what he meant, but she went home and read it again.
This time she noticed what he meant. He hadn’t fixed anything. Old Benesh from upriver never said “the” in his life, and there he was on page nine: I tell him, take boat back, river is bad. He laugh at me. Nobody had made Benesh speak properly. The clerk had been too strict to tidy anything up, so Benesh came through whole, in his own grammar. Her sister-in-law counted everything, even the dead: three winters, four boats, the second boat was the good one. Her son had a habit of starting sentences with “anyway,” as if he were picking up a conversation everyone else had dropped. They were all in there. The clerk had taken out the names, and the voices had stayed in anyway.
She went through all forty-one pages with a pencil and wrote initials in the margin. By evening most of the paragraphs had a name beside them.
The kind line she placed by the third reading. I don’t know how was the miller’s daughter, who ended half her sentences admitting she didn’t know something. She wrote the initials, and something in her chest let go.
The cruel line stayed blank.
She read the sentences around it. She read it aloud in each voice she knew. It had no grammar that belonged to anyone. It was plain and short, the kind of thing anyone might say once in their life and never again. There were perhaps eleven people it could have been.
She sat with the pencil for a long time.
She could go and ask. The clerk might remember which corner it came from, or the miller’s daughter might have been sitting near enough to hear. She could take the pages from house to house and find out who her husband had owed, and how much, and what it had cost them to keep quiet at his table for however many years.
She didn’t put the pencil down, and she didn’t write anything either.
In the spring she gave the pages to her son. He read them in one night and came to breakfast with his eyes red. He asked about Benesh and the goat, and whether the second boat was really the good one. Then he turned to the middle of the second night.
“This one has no name.”
“No.”
“Do you know who it was?”
“I know who it wasn’t,” she said, and she showed him the margins. Eleven possible people had become nine, because two of them had been out at the well. That was as far as she had gone.
He looked at the blank space for a while.
“Are you going to find out?”
“I haven’t decided,” she said. “But I know which line it is. That’s more than the clerk gave me. It’s more than I’d have had if he’d written it down the way I would have, with everyone’s name and nobody’s grammar.”
The son didn’t understand that yet. He tied the string back around the pages and put them on the shelf, where they still are. Forty-one pages, every margin initialed in pencil except one.
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