When I Forget, He Keeps

The Half Book

The church was unlocked, which meant her uncle was inside.

Maren pushed the door with the flat of her hand so it would not bang, and the smell came out at her. Candle wax. Wet stone. Mint, which he chewed so nobody would smell the cigarettes.

He was in the second pew with his coat still on and his hat on the seat beside him.

"You didn't sleep," he said, not turning around.

"I got home at six."

"You should have let me drive you down."

"You should have told me you were up on the ridge."

He picked the hat up, looked at it, put it back down. "Sit."

"I have been sitting all night."

"Then stand."

The rite book was on the lectern, open, a green ribbon across the page. She had seen that book three times a week her whole life. She had never opened it. She opened it now.

Half of it was blank.

Not cut out. Blank. Four pages with writing on them, and after the fourth, cream paper, ruled, a hundred pages of it, and nothing on any of them.

"This is the book," she said.

"That's the book."

"There's nothing in it."

"There's four pages in it." Elias stood. He stood the way a man stands when he has been awake all night and knows he has to do it again. "Four pages is what we have. It's what we have always had."

"Nine women. Two hundred years. Four pages."

"The women are in the ledger."

"Then show me the ledger."

He looked at her for a while and then went to the vestry and came back with a flat brown book under his arm, and put it on the pew between them without opening it.

"Your mother kept this," he said. "Her mother kept it before her. You don't have to look at it this morning."

Maren opened it.

Names down the left in five different hands. Dates in the middle. Down the right side, a narrow column that started out as words and gave up being words by the third page.

One winter, 1804. Four years, 1861. Eleven months, 1902. A spring, 1931.

"You wrote the price in the margin," she said. "In case somebody couldn't guess it."

"Your mother wrote that column."

"My mother wrote one winter, 1804?"

"She copied it. She copied the whole column the year she took over, because the ink was going." Elias sat down on the arm of the pew, which put his head below hers, which she noticed and did not know what to do with. "Maren. What does the fourth line say."

"You know what the fourth line says."

"Say it."

She did not say it.

"Then I'll say the part you don't know," he said. "The price is memory. You already worked that out on the hill, or you wouldn't be standing in my church at seven in the morning with your hand wrapped in a dish towel."

"Then why is it a secret."

"Because it isn't a secret. It's the only thing in that book anyone has ever written down."

She put her good hand flat on the page and turned back to the last page with names on it. Nine lines. Her mother on the bottom one, in her mother's hand, which she had watched sign a hundred school forms.

Then she saw the tenth line.

It had been written in March. Same pen, same hand as the ninth. Two words, one above the other, in block capitals so there would be no mistake about it.

MAREN VOSS.

"You knew," she said. "In March."

"I knew in January."

"And you let me walk up that hill."

"You walked up that hill because she asked you to, and you would have gone anyway." His voice did not move at all. "You're her, is the trouble. You were going to go up that hill if I locked the door and sat on the step."

She was still holding the ledger. She was aware of holding it, and of the fact that if she put it down she would start hitting things, and there was a window behind the altar.

"The basement," she said.

"Is sealed."

"There's a door in this church with a lock on it that has been there since before you were born, and I want it open."

"The basement is sealed," Elias said, "and the seal isn't mine to break. Now sit down, because the second thing is that you have already forgotten something, and you don't know it yet."

Maren stood in the aisle, with her mother's handwriting under her thumb, and started going through the last nine days from the top the way she would go through a file.

Nine days ago. The call from the home. The drive out.

Eight days ago, the funeral home, the man with the folder.

Seven days ago, the rain, the box going down on the straps.

The straps.

She had been in the rain. She had been there. She had the man's card in her coat, and she had remembered telling somebody it rained, and she could not get to the rain.

Behind her, near the back of the church, the door opened and let in the cold, and somebody with bare feet came four steps up the aisle and stopped.

"Ask him what's under the ninth line," Corvin said.