The beans run out at a quarter past four.
Jasper sets the last one on the left-hand heap. Speckled. He sits back on the stool with his palms flat on the table, and the two mounds stand on the tray in front of him, near enough even, the left one a thumb's width taller. The fire has burned down to a red bed. The window over the hearth has gone the color of weak tea.
He slept on those hearth stones. Last night Sylvie took a blanket out of a cupboard without a word and dropped it beside the dog, and he lay on it with his jacket folded under his head and the stick buttoned into the breast pocket, and the stone came up through the wool into his hip until morning. At dawn she stepped over him to riddle the grate. She said nothing about it then. She has said little more since.
The back door opens. Cold comes along the floor ahead of her.
Sylvie crosses the room with frost melting on the shoulders of her cardigan. She stops at his elbow, lifts the tray in both hands and tilts it to the window. Her eyes travel the two heaps. One finger goes into the left mound and comes out with a bean, and she sets it on the right.
"Swirled," she says.
"I had it under the lamp."
"The lamp lies after noon." She sets the tray down. "The fiddles are done. Bart's feeding the ones who want feeding. You're not one of them."
"I know."
"Eat anyway." She reaches into her cardigan and brings out a bundle in a blue cloth and puts it on the table beside his hand. "He left that on my step this morning. He didn't say who it was for. I've decided it was for the dog."
Jasper unfolds the cloth. A heel of rye, the crust dark and split along its ridge, still holding a little of the oven in its middle. The smell of caraway comes up off it.
Biscuit lifts his head from the hearth.
Jasper tears the heel in two. He holds out the smaller half. The dog gets up, stretches his front legs out long on the stones, walks over, and takes the bread out of his fingers with his lips, careful, the way he takes everything. He carries it back to the hearth and lies down with it between his paws and does not eat it.
Jasper eats his half. The rye sits sour and dense at the back of his tongue. He chews until his jaw aches.
Sylvie takes her coat off the peg.
"Half past five," she says. "You carry it in. You sit by the door. You don't hand it to anybody."
"I remember."
"I know you remember." She winds a gray scarf twice around her throat and pins the end with the pencil from her hair, and her locs come down around her face. "I'm saying it so you hear somebody else say it. A man can talk himself out of a thing between here and the grange. It's a long lane."
***
It is a long lane.
The dusk has come down blue over the roofs, and the frost has come up through it, crackling in the ruts. Jasper walks with the dog at his knee and his left hand over the breast pocket. The stick weighs nothing. His hand keeps going to it anyway.
The chairs travel up the lane ahead of him on people's backs. A man he knows by his corduroy cap carries a rocker upside down over his shoulders, its runners curving up past his ears. Two girls share the weight of a kitchen chair between them and argue in whispers about whose turn it is to hold the legs. Garrity climbs with a ladder-back hooked over his good arm. The bandage has come off his other hand, and the new skin across his knuckles shines pink in the last of the light.
Nobody waits for Jasper. Nobody hurries ahead to get away from him, either. They walk the lane at the pace they walk it, and he walks it behind them.
At the top of the rise the green opens out on his right.
The tents stand along the creek where they stood yesterday, a dozen of them, lit from inside now, glowing orange and blue against the dark water. Delphine's cord runs from the pump to the chestnut at the height of a man's waist. Along it, on the far side, the visitors stand in a line with their hands in their pockets and their breath going up. Thirty of them. More than yesterday. Somebody has passed a word along the creek.
Under the grange eave, above the steps, the red point burns.
The grange has no other light. Every window along its side has gone white and blank. Somebody has pasted sheets of paper to the glass from the inside, edge to edge, the way a shop papers its windows before it opens. Newsprint. Unprinted. The lamplight inside comes through the paper soft and even, a long row of pale squares down the wall of the hall, and the red point above the door hangs in front of them with nothing to look at.
He knows that paper. He has carried reams of it up the stairs from her cellar.
Hettie Pruitt comes up the lane behind him with her milking stool in one fist and her goat on its rope in the other. She passes him without turning her head. At the grange steps she stops, ties the goat to the rail, and gives the rope a tug to test the knot. The goat sets its feet and stares at the red point.
"Don't you start." Hettie wags a finger at it.
She climbs the steps and goes in.
"Jasper!"
It comes from the cord. A man in a gray fleece, the one from yesterday at the corner, waves both arms over his head. A woman beside him lifts her phone.
"Is it a meeting? Are they voting? Can you tell us what it's about?"
Jasper keeps walking. Behind him, the man calls something else, and a second voice joins it, and then a third, and the words run together into a single bright noise along the creek, and the noise follows him to the steps and stops at the door.
The goat watches him climb. Its jaw works sideways.
He puts his hand on the door and pushes it open.
***
The hall smells of woodsmoke and the paste from the windows, a flour-and-water smell, sour and clean; the stove ticks in its corner. The lamps on their brackets throw their yellow circles down onto the boards, and the circles overlap where the chairs crowd in.
The ring is already half built. Chairs stand in their crooked circle on the floor, the rocker and the barber's chair with its split seat. In the middle, on its stool, lies the spoon. On the easel beside it, the slate carries a single word in Sylvie's square capitals.
STICK.
Jasper stops inside the door.
Twelve people sit in the ring already. Twelve faces come up and find him in the doorway and go down again. Nobody speaks to him. Bart stands at the side table by the stove, his back to the room, laying out loaves. He does not turn.
The long bench by the door stands where it stood. Pine, gray with age, one end a little lower than the other where the floor sags. Jasper goes to the high end. He sits. The bench takes his weight with a dry creak. Biscuit lies down across his boots.
His hand goes to his pocket. He takes it away and lays it on his knee.
The ring fills around him.
Dr. Voss comes in with her bag, puts it under her chair and folds her hands on her knees. Her eyes cross the floor to the bench and rest on him. She does not nod. She studies him the way she studied his palms on the steps three weeks ago, as if something under the skin might tell her more than his face, and then she turns to the stove.
Cassius comes in with the fiddle case on his shoulder. He sets it down beside his chair and leaves it shut. Sylvie comes in behind him and goes to her place by the window. Tonight her lap holds no seed packets. She sits with her hands empty. Between her chair and Cassius's, the two seats that stood empty three weeks ago stand empty still.
Delphine comes in with her guestbook held against her chest in both arms. The mustard scarf. The red one wound around her hair. She crosses to her chair beside Bart's, sits, holds the book on her knees and does not open it. Her eyes go once to the bench and come back to the cover of the book.
Thirty chairs. Twenty-four people. He counts because his hands need work.
The door opens.
Milo comes in sideways, his shoulder first, his arms full. He carries a bundle wrapped in a horse blanket, flat and square, the size of a tray. Behind him, Hollis fills the doorway with a brown radio held against his chest, the cloth face of its speaker toward the room. A coil of black cord hangs from the back of it and swings against his thigh.
The talk in the ring stops.
Milo walks to the middle of the floor. He sets the bundle on the boards beside the spoon's stool and kneels beside it and does not unwrap it. Hollis sets the radio down on the boards beside the bundle. He straightens. He wipes his palms on the front of his coveralls, though they are clean, and walks to the straight-backed chair against the wall by the door and sits.
His chair stands six feet from the bench.
He does not turn his head.
Milo stays on his knees beside the blanket. The lamps light the side of his face. He has washed the pitch off his jaw, and the skin there has come up red from the scrubbing.
Hettie leans forward on her milking stool. "What's in the blanket?"
"Wait for the spoon," Milo says.
"I'm asking."
"I'm saying wait."
Hettie sits back with her mouth pursed.
The door opens a last time.
Wren comes in with the cold. She has her coat buttoned to the throat and her hands bare, black to the second knuckle, and her curls pinned back the way they were pinned yesterday, every one. Paste has dried in a white crust along the edge of her right thumb.
She stops inside the door.
The ring watches her. She stands with her back to it, facing the bench. Her eyes go to the high end, where he sits. Then they go down the length of the gray pine to the low end, where the floor sags.
She walks to the low end and sits.
Eight feet of bench lie between them. Biscuit lifts his head from Jasper's boots. His eyes go to Wren and come back to Jasper. He gets up and walks down the bench and lies down again in the middle of the floor in front of it, halfway between the two of them, his back to the ring, his chin on his paws.
Somebody in
the ring lets out a short breath through the nose.
Wren folds her hands in her lap.
***
Sylvie lifts her head.
"Who needs the spoon?"
Nobody moves; the stove ticks. Jasper does not count. He lets the quiet run, and it runs past six, past ten, into the long place where the room stops waiting.
Milo reaches up from his knees and takes the spoon off the stool.
He holds it in his right hand. With his left, he folds back the corner of the horse blanket, then the next corner, and the room leans in.
A machine lies in the blanket. Flat and gray, the shape of a closed book, its corners worn down to the bare metal. Strips of electrical tape hold one hinge together. Across the lid, in silver paint, in Milo's spiky hand: THYLACINE.
"It's a laptop," Milo says. "From before. Before they put a voice in them." His thumb moves on the spoon handle. "I pulled it out of a dumpster behind a school in Harlow two summers ago. The screen works. It reads the kind of stick he's got." He jerks his chin at the bench without taking his eyes off the room. "It doesn't talk, and it doesn't listen."
"How do you know it doesn't listen?" Dr. Voss asks.
"Because I took its ears out." Hollis, from his chair by the wall. He keeps his eyes on the spoon. "Microphone. The little card that finds a signal. I took them out with a pair of tweezers Tuesday night. They're in a jar on my bench. You can come look at them."
"I'd like to."
"Come tomorrow."
Milo turns the spoon in his hand. "The speaker in it's no good. It sounds like a fly in a can. Mr. Vance wired the sound out to that." He tips the spoon toward the brown radio. "So everybody can hear."
"So it's a screen," Hettie says, "in the grange."
"Yes."
"There's never been one."
"I know." Milo's ears have gone red. "That's why I'm asking. I'm not opening it unless the ring says." His eyes drop to the machine in the blanket and come up again. "I'm asking the ring if it can come in."
He sets the spoon back on its stool.
Dr. Voss rises. She takes the spoon and holds it with both hands at the level of her waist.
"I left a hospital full of screens," she says. "They watched my patients for me. They watched so well I stopped watching." She turns the spoon a quarter turn. "I don't want it here. I'll sit with it here once, if the room wants it. Then I want it to leave."
She sits.
Cassius takes the spoon. He weighs it in his palm. "A fiddle was a machine once," he says. "Somebody had to bring the first one into a room full of people who sang." He sets it down.
Hettie takes it. "Does it have a goat in it?"
"Probably," Milo says.
"Then I want to see it." She puts the spoon down and folds her arms.
Garrity rises, takes the spoon, holds it against his chest a moment, saying, "Once," and puts it back.
Nobody else stands.
"Palms," Sylvie says.
Hands come down onto knees around the ring, one and then another, with a soft flat sound like dough turned onto a board. Delphine's lands on the cover of her guestbook. Bart's lands on his apron. Hettie's lands on the milking stool. Wren's, at the low end of the bench, comes down on her knee without a sound.
Dr. Voss's right hand closes. Her knuckles come down on the arm of her chair once.
The ring waits.
Jasper keeps his own hands in his lap.
Dr. Voss sits with her fist on the chair arm. Her eyes go to the machine in the blanket. Then they go to Milo, kneeling beside it with his ears red, and stay there a long time.
The fist opens.
"Once," she says. "Then it goes back in the blanket."
"Once," Milo says.
He lifts the lid.
The screen comes up gray, then white. It throws a cold square of light up into the boy's face and onto the underside of the spoon's stool, and the lamps around the ring go yellow and old beside it. Twenty-seven faces turn toward that small white square. Some of them have never sat in a room with one. Hettie's mouth comes open.
Jasper has sat in front of ten thousand of them. This one has a crack running across its lower corner like a hair on a plate.
***
"Mr. Cole carried something in," Sylvie says.
She does not look at him. She holds out one hand, palm up, toward the middle of the ring.
"Delphine. Would you."
Delphine sits a moment with the guestbook in her lap. Then she sets the book on her chair and stands and crosses the floor and takes the spoon off its stool. Three weeks ago she carried it in both palms. Tonight she carries it in one hand by the neck, the way a woman carries a ladle to a pot. She walks around Biscuit, stops in front of the bench and holds it out.
He takes it.
Her fingers come off the handle at once. She does not fold his hand around it. She goes back to her chair and picks up the book and sits with it held against her chest.
The spoon rests across his palms. The wood has gone warm and slick from her grip. The blisters at the base of his fingers have hardened to calluses in a week, and the handle lies along them without hurting.
He stands. His legs hold.
"There's a stick in my pocket," he says.
His voice comes out flat and small in the long room. He keeps it there.
"It has everything my recorder took in the three nights I sat here. Eleven hours of sound, and pictures where the camera in my pocket could see. It has the morning I stood in Wren's door. It has the six hours in the hollow with Milo." He swallows. "Everline cut its episodes from these files. Nobody at Everline watched them. A machine read them once and tagged the speakers, and they worked from the tags. A friend and I copied them out through a port under a desk. As far as I know, this is the only copy outside their building."
Nobody moves.
"Sylvie told me not to hand it to anybody. I won't." He unbuttons the flap of his breast pocket with one hand and takes out the stick. Gray plastic, the length of a finger. Its small square tooth catches the light from the screen. "I won't pick what you watch, either. I don't know what's in it that you'd want. I only know what's in it that I'd want, and I've done enough of that."
He crosses the floor. He bends and lays the stick on the stool where the spoon goes, and lays the spoon beside it.
Then he walks back to the high end of the bench and sits down.
His hands shake. He puts them between his knees and presses them there.
At the low end of the bench, Wren has not moved.
***
The quiet runs.
Then Sylvie rises from her chair by the window. She does not take the spoon. She stands with her hands at her sides.
"One each," she says. "Anybody who wants a piece of it, name one. Your own. Nobody names another person's piece. If you were in it, you can ask for it. If you weren't, you can't." She turns her head to Milo. "You'll find them."
"I can find them. He'd have the times."
"He'll give you the times. He won't choose them." She sits.
The spoon goes around.
Hollis takes it first. He holds it in his fist like a wrench.
"The doors," he says. "Whatever I said about the doors." He puts it down.
Hettie takes it. "The goat. The night they laughed about the goat." She sets it down hard.
Delphine stands with the guestbook under one arm and the spoon in her free hand. Her mouth works before anything comes out.
"Mine," she says. "Where I said not like that." She stops. "I don't remember what else I said. I want to hear what else I said."
She sits.
Cassius takes the spoon and turns it once in his fingers. "The beginning," he says. "The first night. Before anybody spoke." He sets it down.
A murmur goes around the ring. Garrity frowns.
"There's nothing at the beginning," Garrity says.
"I know," Cassius says.
Milo's turn comes. He holds the spoon on his knees. His eyes go to the bench, then drop to the boards between his knees.
"The hollow," he says. "The part about the dog."
"Milo," Delphine says. "You don't have to."
"They put it on a tower." His voice goes flat and quick. "Everybody in Harlow's heard me say it over the highway. Nobody here's heard what I was talking about." He sets the spoon on the stool. "I want you to hear what I was talking about."
The spoon sits. Then it lifts.
Wren holds it.
She has crossed the floor without a sound and taken it from the stool, and she stands beside it with the spoon flat across both palms, the way she carries a tray of type. The light from the screen lies along the black of her fingers.
"The shop," she says. "The third morning."
The room goes still.
Delphine's hand comes up to her throat. Bart has turned around at last from the side table and stands with a bread knife hanging from his fingers.
"Wren," Delphine says.
"It's mine." Wren keeps her eyes on the spoon. "It's my hands on that tower. I've never seen it. I'm the only person on the river who hasn't." She sets the spoon on the stool beside the stick. "I want to see what he took."
She walks back to the low end of the bench and sits.
Sylvie's hands stay empty in her lap. "Anybody else?"
Nobody else.
"Then that's the order they came in," Sylvie says. "Cassius's first. It's the earliest."
***
Jasper gives Milo the times from his notebook. He reads them out from the bench, one after another, in the order Sylvie set. He does not add anything to them.
Milo kneels over the machine and fits the stick into its side. A pinpoint of green comes on. His fingers move on the keys, slow, hunting, and the white square fills with a list of files and then with a gray band unrolling along its bottom edge.
Hollis gets up and goes to the brown radio and crouches beside it. He turns a knob on its face. The hiss comes up out of the cloth, low, the sound of the shed, and he turns another knob until the hiss sinks almost to nothing.
"Lamps," Sylvie says.
Bart goes along the wall turning them down. The yellow circles shrink on the boards. The paper over the windows goes gray. The screen glows in the middle of the ring, and the stove's red eye glows in the corner, and the faces around the ring hang in
the dark between the two lights.
Milo touches a key.
The Grange comes up on the screen.
The same Grange. The same lamps on their brackets, turned high, same crooked ring of chairs, the rocker, the barber's chair with the split seat. The picture tips a few degrees to the left; the bottom edge lies black with the lining of a jacket.
On the screen, nobody speaks.
In the hall, nobody speaks.
The radio carries the sound of the screen into the room. The stove ticking, three weeks ago. A cough. Out in the yard, through the wall, the goat. On the screen, Bart tears a roll in half and passes one half to his left without looking. Hettie takes it, and in the dark of the hall Hettie Pruitt lets out a small surprised laugh at the sight of her own hand.
Then she stops laughing.
The counter in the corner of the screen climbs. One minute. Two.
On the screen, Sylvie sits with the spoon on the stool beside her knee and her eyes going around the ring. In the hall, Sylvie sits with her hands empty in her lap. The two of them sit the same way, in the same chair, with three weeks between them.
Three minutes.
Jasper keeps his eyes on the screen. Down in the corner of the frame, his own hand comes up to his knee and his fingers drum. Four beats. They stop.
Somebody in the dark of the ring shifts. A chair complains. Then whoever it was goes still.
Four minutes.
The room on the screen sits. The room in the hall sits with it. Twenty-seven people watch thirty-one people do nothing, and nobody reaches for the machine, and nobody asks Milo to skip ahead. The goat bleats outside the screen and outside the wall at once, two goats three weeks apart, and nobody laughs.
At six minutes on the counter, Cassius reaches over to his fiddle case and lays his palm on the lid.
"There," he says.
Milo stops it.
"That's what they left out," Cassius says. "Six minutes of us deciding to start." He takes his hand off the case. "It's the best part. You can't buy it."
Nobody answers him.
***
The goat runs a minute and a half. Milo finds it at the place Jasper gives him, and on the screen Hettie stands up out of the ring with the spoon in her fist and declares that her goat has eaten nothing on anybody's step that the step did not deserve, and the ring on the screen laughs, a short, low sound that goes around the circle from face to face.
In the hall the same laugh goes around the same circle. It starts with Bart and runs left. It reaches Hettie, and Hettie laughs hardest of all, her shoulders shaking on the milking stool, and wipes her eyes with the heel of her hand.
"I said it right," she says. "I said it exactly right."
"You did," says the man in the corduroy cap.
"They didn't put that in."
"No."
"Why not? It was the funniest thing anybody said all night."
Nobody has an answer for her. She sits back. The laugh drains out of her face and leaves her mouth half open.
"Hollis," Sylvie says.
Hollis has not gone back to his chair. He crouches beside the radio with one hand on its case, his forearms bare, and the light of the screen lies across the side of his face.
"Read me what they used," he says.
He does not turn his head toward the bench. Jasper opens the notebook on his knee. His hand finds the page without looking. The two columns run down it in his slow, upright hand.
"*Shut the doors,*" Jasper says.
Hollis waits.
"That's all."
"That's all they used."
"Two words."
Hollis nods once at the screen. "Play it."
Milo plays it.
On the screen, Hollis sits on the milking stool with his elbows on his knees and the spoon in both fists. *Shut the doors,* he says, and the voice comes out of the brown radio, flat and quiet into the hall, and three feet from the radio, Hollis's shoulders come up a quarter inch.
The voice keeps going.
*Shut the doors and then what? We sit in the dark and congratulate ourselves? I've been shutting doors eight years. I'm good at it. Look where it got us.* On the screen, he turns the spoon over. *I'd shut them tonight if I thought it'd hold. I don't think it'd hold.*
The ring on the screen laughs. The Hollis on the screen keeps his face flat while the corner of his mouth moves, and he hands the spoon to his right.
Milo stops it.
In the hall, nobody laughs.
Hollis crouches beside the radio. His thumb moves along the edge of its case, back and forth, the way it moves along the edge of a fender when a part has gone in true.
"Fifty-one," he says to the radio.
"Fifty-one," Jasper says.
Hollis gets up. His knees crack. He goes back to his chair by the wall and sits and folds his arms and puts his eyes on the rafters, and he leaves them there.
***
Delphine's piece runs short. On the screen she leans across Bart to pluck the spoon off his knee before it reaches her, and the ring laughs, and she waves the spoon at them, and in the hall Delphine makes a small sound into her scarf.
*I want them to come. I do. I've said it. I'll keep saying it.*
On the screen, her fingers work at the fringe. In the hall, her fingers work at the same fringe.
*But not like that. Not with things on poles. I want them to sign my book. I want them to stay for supper. A thing on a pole can't stay for supper.*
On the screen, across the circle, Wren turns in her chair.
She leans toward Delphine and puts one hand on Delphine's knee. The recorder in his pocket barely carries it. Milo's hands go to the radio, and Hollis's voice comes from the wall, low.
"Left knob. Quarter turn."
Milo turns it. The hiss climbs, and inside the hiss, Wren's voice comes up small.
*Attention can become ownership. That's all I'm afraid of. That it'll turn into something that owns us and calls it love.*
On the screen, Delphine covers Wren's hand with her own.
In the hall, Delphine has put her own hand flat on the cover of the guestbook in her lap.
Milo stops it.
"They used the first part," Jasper says from the bench. "Over a wide shot of the room. A machine lifted her voice eleven decibels so it would fill the hall."
He closes the notebook on his thumb.
Delphine stares at the frozen screen, where her own hand lies on Wren's. Her mouth stays closed. The tears come out of her eyes and run down, and she does not wipe them.
"I forgot that," she says. "I forgot you did that."
At the low end of the bench, Wren's head turns a quarter inch toward Delphine and stops.
"I remembered," Wren says.
***
The hollow comes up gray-green.
Ferns crowd the frame. The recorder pointed down from his breast pocket toward his own knees, and the picture holds a strip of fern and a slice of his trouser leg and, at the top edge, a little of the sky. Wind moves the spruce. Off to the left, out of the frame, Biscuit lets out the long sigh of a dog lying down for work.
On the floor of the hall, in the middle of the ring, Biscuit lifts his head at the sound of himself.
Then out of the radio comes a man's voice, flat and tired, with a long Kentucky vowel in it. A woman answers him. Her name is Ronda. They are talking about a dog's ear, whether the drops are working. Whether the dog should be made to take them. The dog shook her head at the drops this morning, the man says, and Ronda says, well, and the man says that was the dog's right.
The room listens to two strangers talk about a dog for four minutes.
Hettie leans forward on her stool. Garrity's mouth hangs open a little. The woman in the green shawl has her hand over her mouth.
Then, out of the ferns, Milo's voice. Younger than his voice in the hall, though it has only been three weeks.
*It's the best thing I ever heard.*
The radio carries the wind for a while.
*Nobody was selling anything. Nobody told them what to say. He sounded tired. She sounded tired. And they were both fine.*
Milo stops it.
He stays on his knees with his hands on the keys. He does not look up.
"They put that over the highway," Jasper says. "A drone over the ridge. The lights going away. A title that said *What He Hears at Night.*"
"I know what they put it over," Milo says. "Hettie's grandson showed me on his phone." He takes his hands off the keys. "I wanted you all to know it was a dog. That's all. It was two people and a dog."
"Ronda," Hettie says. "What a name."
"She was nice."
"She sounded nice."
Milo's ears have gone red again. He reaches down and scratches Biscuit behind the inside-out ear, hard, the way the dog likes it, and the dog leans into his hand.
***
"Wren," Sylvie says.
At the low end of the bench, Wren unfolds her hands.
She does not get up. She sits with her back straight, her black hands open on her knees and her eyes on the screen.
Jasper gives Milo the time. His voice catches on the second number. He gives it again.
Milo touches the key.
The screen fills with morning.
Sun comes in low through the east glass and lies across a bench in a long yellow bar. A composing stick. Two hands, black to the second knuckle, lifting a line of type. They lift it whole. They set it down whole.
Nobody in the hall breathes out.
Six seconds. He has run them more times than he can count: forty stories high from the walkway of a bridge with the wind off the water in his face, and in blue icing on the side of a cake. Never with her in the room. He cannot take his eyes off the screen to find her.
At six seconds, the hands stop. They rest flat on the bench.
*Put it away, Jasper.*
Her voice comes out of the brown radio from above the frame. Quiet. Final as a lid on a box.
The picture lurches. The floor swings up past the doorframe to the toe of his shoe on the sill, and the screen goes black.
In the dark, the recorder goes on listening.
Out of the radio comes a breath: long, from somewhere above the bench. Then the small scratch of type sliding home in a case. Then another. Then the creak of the floor as a woman shifts her weight from one foot to the other, alone in her shop, and the scratch of type again, and the soft
knock of the case drawer pushed shut.
Milo reaches for the key.
"Leave it," Wren says.
He leaves it.
The black screen runs. The radio carries her shop into the grange: the scratch and the knock. Somewhere in it, her breath catches once and goes on. Jasper sat in that doorway. He sat on her step with the camera in his pocket and the recorder running, and none of this reached him, because he had stood up and walked away down the lane composing the apology he would give her at lunch.
The counter in the corner climbs to a minute... a minute and a half.
Then the recorder runs out of her shop and into the lane, his own footsteps on the frozen ruts, and Wren says, "There."
Milo stops it.
Nobody moves.
Wren sits with her hands on her knees. Her face holds still in the light from the screen. Her eyes stay dry.
"That's what's on the tower," she says. "The first six seconds."
She does not turn toward the high end of the bench.
"The rest is mine," she says. "I didn't know anybody had it."
***
Bart turns the lamps up.
The yellow circles come back onto the boards one by one. The paper on the windows goes white again. The screen sits in the middle of the ring, small and tired-looking now, and Milo closes the lid, and the white goes out of his face.
He folds the horse blanket over the machine, one corner and then the next.
The room sits.
Jasper has his hands between his knees. He does not take them out. Down at the far end of the bench, Wren has hers on her knees. Biscuit lies in the middle of the floor between them with his chin on his paws, and his eyes go from her to him and back.
Garrity is the first to stand.
He crosses the floor and takes the spoon off the stool and holds it up in his good fist like a man holding a torch.
"Send it," he says. "All of it. Tonight."
The ring stirs.
"He's got the boy's box." Garrity jerks the spoon toward Milo. "Put it out on that. Put it out on every frequency there is. Let them hear Hollis say the whole thing. Let them see her hands stop and hear her tell him to put it away." His voice climbs. "They took us apart and sold the pieces. I say we hand them back the whole animal and make them choke on it."
"It won't carry pictures," Milo says from the floor. "Dodo. It's sound. And it doesn't reach far."
"Then get it farther."
"I can't get it farther."
"Then him." Garrity swings the spoon to the bench. "He's got friends. He's got a man with a radio in the city. He knows how they put things out. Let him put it out."
Jasper keeps his hands where they are.
He does not answer. Nobody has put the spoon in his hand.
"You don't have the spoon, Garrity," Hettie says. "You've had it long enough. You're waving it."
Garrity's eyes drop to the spoon in his fist. He lowers it. He sets it back on the stool and sits.
Hettie takes it.
"I put CLOSED on my board," she says. "I mean it. I've had a girl from Ohio in my turnips and a man from somewhere filming my goat's backside for a week. You want to send it all out, Garrity, you'll get another forty tents on the green and every one of them will want to see the goat that said the funny thing." She jabs the spoon at the papered windows. "I say we go quiet and let them get bored. They always get bored. Everybody out there is bored by Tuesday."
"They haven't been bored in three weeks," the man in the corduroy cap says.
"Then we wait four."
Hettie sets the spoon down.
Dr. Voss rises and takes it. She holds it at her waist with both hands.
"A woman came to my door on Monday with a camera in her hat," she says. "She wanted to see the room where the boy in the documentary got his stitches. There was no boy. There were no stitches. Someone made the boy up." She turns the spoon a quarter turn. "I locked the door. I've kept it locked. I see patients through the back now, by the woodpile." Her voice stays level. "I agree with Hettie. Go quiet. I'm not ashamed of it. A wound closes when you stop touching it."
She sits.
The woman in the green shawl takes the spoon next. She holds it in her lap and turns it over and over.
"My daughter called the post office in Calder," she says. "She doesn't call. She called. She left a message with the woman at the counter, and the woman wrote it down and sent it up with the mail truck." Her fingers stop on the handle. "She watched the second one. The one with the boy. She said, *Mum, is that really how it is there? Are you all right?*" The woman's mouth trembles. "I want her to hear Hollis say the whole thing. I want her to know we sat for six minutes and nobody said anything, and it was fine. I don't know how she sees it if we go quiet."
She puts the spoon down without standing.
Bart takes it.
He holds it a long time without saying anything, which nobody in the ring has ever seen him do. He stands there with flour up to the elbows and the spoon in his fist and his round face working.
"I turned my back on him yesterday," Bart says. "In my window." He does not look at the bench. "I've never turned my back on anybody in that window in thirty years. My mother never did. She'd have taken a rolling pin to me." He breathes. "I did it because I didn't know what to say, and I always know what to say. That's the thing they took. They put me in the first episode telling the goat story wrong. They cut it so I'm telling it wrong. Now I can't tell it in my own shop without somebody behind the cord saying the words along with me." He turns the spoon. "I want to tell it right. Out loud. Somewhere. I don't know where. That's all I've got. It's not much of an answer."
"It's an answer," Sylvie says.
Bart sets the spoon down with care, the way he sets a loaf on a rack.
***
Cassius takes it.
He holds it like a bow, bowl away from his body, and weighs it.
"A tune played back at you," he says, "is the same tune whether you want it or not. You can't argue with it. You can only play another." He sets it down.
Nobody asks him what he means. Delphine opens her mouth and closes it.
Then Delphine stands.
She has the guestbook under her arm. She takes the spoon in her other hand and walks with both into the middle of the ring, and she stops beside the stool with the closed laptop at her feet.
"Six hundred and four," she says.
The ring waits.
"Names. In eleven years. Three hundred and twelve after the clip. Four hundred and nine now." She holds up the book. "I counted last night. I've had eleven people sign it since Saturday, and every one of them asked me which page he's on." Her chin doesn't move toward the bench. "I keep it under the till now. I had to keep it under the till. Eleven years it sat on my counter for anybody, and I had to put it under the till."
She lowers the book.
"I wanted to explain us," she says. "From the start. I wanted a table by the door. You all sat in this room three weeks ago and told me why that was a fool's idea, and I went home, and I hated every one of you, and I made a pie for Hollis anyway." Her voice wobbles and holds. "And then somebody else explained us. The way they wanted. And I sat on my own step while a man in a camp chair read me what I was."
She turns to the ring.
"I still want to explain us. I'm not sorry I want it. I want to sit at a table and tell people who we are in my own voice, and I want them to hear the six minutes and Hollis's whole sentence, and I want them to see Wren's hand on my knee." She takes a breath. "I don't know how to do it without a pole. That's what I don't know. I'm asking somebody to tell me."
She puts the spoon down and goes back to her chair and sits with the book against her chest.
The quiet runs.
***
Hollis stands.
He does not take the spoon. He stands by his chair against the wall with his arms folded and his eyes on the stool where the spoon and the stick lie side by side.
"Shut the doors," he says.
Nobody laughs this time.
Hettie twists around on her milking stool. "You said yourself it wouldn't hold. We all just heard you."
"I heard me."
"Well, then."
"I know what I said." Hollis keeps his eyes on the stool. "I said it three weeks ago. I meant it. I still mean it. It won't hold." His arms stay folded. "I'm tired, Hettie. I've been holding the door eight years. I want to shut it and lean on it and not think about it for a while. I know it won't hold. I want to shut it anyway."
He sits. His right fist comes down on the arm of his chair, one rap.
The fist stays shut.
Jasper's hands press between his knees until the bones ache.
He has nothing to say. He has a great deal to say, and none of it belongs in this room in his voice. The sentence rises in him out of six years of habit, *Jasper Cole watches Hollis Vance's fist close on the chair arm and*, and he shuts his teeth on it.
At the low end of the bench, Wren gets up.
***
She takes the spoon off the stool. She holds it flat across both palms.
The stick lies on the stool beside the place where the spoon lay. Her eyes rest on it. Then they lift to the ring.
"I print what leaves this town," she says. "I said that in this room three weeks ago. I said I don't want anyone to buy us by looking." She turns the spoon a little in her hands, and the lamplight slides along the worn bowl. "They didn't buy us. They didn't have to. They took six seconds of my hands and put them on the river, and I didn't find out until a man who was there sat at Sylvie's table and told me."
Nobody in the ring shifts a foot.
"I've been angry for a week," Wren says. "I'm still angry. I'm going to be angry at that tower for a long time." Her voice holds level. "But I sat on that bench tonight and listened to my shop for a minute and a half, after he stopped watching. Nobody's ever heard that. Nobody's heard me put the type back."
She stops. Her throat moves once.
"There's one story about us out there now," she says. "Theirs. It's the only one. If we shut the doors, it stays the only one. If Garrity sends
out every second of this tonight, then it's the same story with more in it, and they'll cut that too. They'll cut it by Monday." Her chin dips toward the stick on the stool. "Leave theirs where it is. I want there to be a second one. And I want it to be ours. Our hands on it. Set by people who were in the room."
She sets the spoon down beside the stick.
"I'll print it," she says. "Whatever it is. If the ring says."
She walks back to the low end of the bench and sits. Her hands go into her lap.
Biscuit gets up from the middle of the floor. He walks to the low end of the bench and puts his chin on her knee. Wren lays one black hand on his head.
Jasper keeps his eyes off them. He keeps them on the stool.
***
Sylvie rises.
She crosses to the middle of the ring and takes up the spoon. She does not hold it out to anyone. She holds it against her chest the way she holds the cigar box, both hands over it, and her eyes travel the circle from face to face, Hettie and Garrity and Dr. Voss and Bart and Delphine and the woman in the shawl, Milo on the floor, Hollis against the wall, Wren at the low end of the bench, Cassius by the empty chairs, the stranger by the door.
"Fifty-one years ago," she says, "a few of us left a city."
Nobody stirs.
"We were frightened. We'd been frightened for years before we left." She turns the spoon a quarter turn against her chest. "We left because every morning we woke up and something had already decided what kind of morning it would be; What we'd eat, what we'd think about the news before we'd read it. We had stopped choosing. We hadn't noticed we'd stopped. I noticed one day when I couldn't remember the last thing I'd decided on my own." Her eyes go to the papered windows. "I'd lost someone. I couldn't decide how to grieve. I stood in my kitchen and waited for something to tell me."
The stove ticks.
"So we came up here and chose. Every year since. We chose this ring. We chose the spoon. We chose to sit six minutes before anybody talks, and we chose to take three hours to decide nothing, because three hours to decide nothing is three hours we spent deciding." She lowers the spoon. "That was all we ever had, the choosing. I never wanted a town. I wanted a place where people still made up their own minds, slowly, out loud, in front of each other."
She turns to Hollis.
"If we shut the doors because Mr. Croft frightened us, Mr. Croft chose it. We'd be sitting in the dark because he put us there."
She turns to Garrity.
"If we send out every second tonight, in his shape, as fast as we can, because we're angry, then the anger chose it. And he knows how to cut anger. He's good at it."
She turns to the stool, where the stick lies.
"And if we let Mr. Cole take this back out and make it into something better, then Mr. Cole chose it." She does not turn toward the bench. "He's already said he won't. I believe him. I'd like that on the record."
Jasper's thumb stops on the spine of the notebook.
"So I have one question," Sylvie says. "It's Wren's question. She asked it better than I can." She holds the spoon out into the middle of the ring, flat, over the stool. "Will Fair Hollow tell its own story? Ourselves. In our own hands. Knowing they'll be watching while we do it, and knowing nobody out there will thank us for going slow."
She lays the spoon down on the stool beside the stick.
"How is for tomorrow. Tonight I'm asking whether."
She goes back to her chair by the window and sits and folds her hands.
"Palms," she says.
***
The first hand comes down before she has finished the word.
Wren's. At the low end of the bench, flat on her knee, without a sound. Her other hand stays on the dog's head.
Then Delphine's, on the cover of the guestbook. Hard. The book jumps on her knees.
Then Bart's, on his apron, with a puff of flour. Then the woman in the green shawl. Then Cassius, his palm on the lid of the fiddle case. Then Milo, from the floor, his hand flat on the horse blanket over the folded machine.
Garrity sits with his fist on his knee. His jaw moves. His eyes go to the stick, then to Wren. His fingers uncurl one at a time and lie flat.
Hettie's hand comes down on the milking stool. "Slow," she says. "I want it on the record: I said slow."
"It's on the record," Sylvie says.
Dr. Voss's hands stay folded on her bag. The ring waits for her. She sits with her eyes on the closed blanket on the floor. Then she unfolds her hands and lays her right palm on her knee.
"Not in my clinic," she says.
"Not in your clinic," Sylvie says.
Palms come down around the ring. A soft flat sound, dough on a board, again and again. The two girls who carried the kitchen chair, both at once, giggling at the noise it makes. Faces Jasper knows and faces he has never learned the names of. Twenty-five. Twenty-six.
He keeps his hands between his knees.
It isn't his. It was never his. He sits at the high end of the bench with the notebook on his thigh and his hands pressed together, and the palms land around him, one after another.
One fist stays shut.
Hollis sits against the wall with his right hand closed on the arm of his chair. His eyes stay on the rafters. The ring waits. Nobody turns to him. Nobody asks. The stove ticks, and outside the papered windows somebody along the cord calls out a name, and the goat answers.
A minute.
Two.
Biscuit lifts his chin off Wren's knee.
He walks across the floor, around the stool, past the closed blanket, and sits down against Hollis's boot with his back to the room.
Hollis lowers his eyes from the rafters. He studies the dog for a long time.
Then the fist opens.
It hangs over the arm of the chair, open, the fingers loose and the grease dark in the creases of the knuckles, and then it lowers onto the dog's head and stays there.
"I won't carry it," Hollis says to the dog. "I won't stand in it, either."
Sylvie's eyes rest on the hand.
"Is that what that is?"
"That's what it is."
"Hollis stands aside," Sylvie says. She says it the way she says the names of seeds. "Twenty-six palms. Hollis aside."
The quiet holds.
Then she reaches across from her chair, takes the stick off the stool, and turns it over once in her fingers. She leans to her left and puts it into the second drawer of the long cabinet behind the council table, the drawer that bites. It catches on the runner. She shoves it shut with the heel of her hand.
"It's the town's," she says. "It stays in the town."
She sits back.
"Then Fair Hollow tells it," Sylvie says. "Ourselves."
Delphine has both hands over her face. Bart has turned back to the side table and stands with his back to the room, his shoulders going up and down. At the low end of the bench, Wren keeps her palm flat on her knee, and the light from the lamps lies along the black of her fingers.
Jasper sits at the high end with his hands pressed together between his knees, and leaves them there.