The bell above the general store door is brass, bolted to a curl of spring steel, and it clangs when Jasper steps through. The note is flat and loud and takes no interest in him. Marlow announced him to every room he ever entered, a murmur half a second ahead of the doors. This door waits for his hand to push it.
Heat meets his face. A woodstove ticks in the corner, its iron belly glowing the dull red of a plum, and the air smells of kerosene, wet wool, cheese rind, and apples. Bulbs hang from the rafters on cloth-wrapped cord. He stares up at the nearest one. A wire coils inside the glass and burns orange as a stove coal. Electric light. He had braced for candles.
Shelves climb the walls to the ceiling, and a ladder rides a brass rail along them. Jars of nails. Bolts of indigo and rust-red wool. Canned peaches labeled in ink that slants uphill. A row of rubber boots with their toes aimed at the door like customers in a queue. A spool of copper wire as wide as a drum. Soap cut into blocks and wrapped in waxed paper. A whole wall of seed packets, each one stamped with a purple date.
A cash register squats on the counter, black iron and nickel, its keys round as buttons. Beside it stands a refrigerator, cream-colored and round-shouldered, taller than Jasper. As he watches, it shudders, coughs, and settles into a hum.
He listens to the hum. It wobbles. It climbs when the compressor engages and sags when the compressor quits, and nobody has smoothed it out. Beneath the wobble he finds nothing else. A machine makes cold, and that is all it does.
Delphine unwinds the parrot scarf from her neck, one loop at a time, and hangs it on a hook shaped like a bent nail.
"Go ahead. Everybody does it."
"Does what?"
"Stares at the icebox." She flattens her palm against its flank, and the door rattles. "Nineteen sixty-one. Hollis has rebuilt the compressor twice. You should hear what he calls it when it sulks."
"What does he call it?"
"Betty. Don't ask me why. He won't say."
Jasper's gaze drifts to the counter. His leather bag sits beside the register with its strap coiled on top. Nobody carried it past him.
"Eamon's boy drove it over while you stood in the road with your mouth open." Delphine grins. "Cassius was tuning up. People do that. They stop and stand there."
Heat climbs Jasper's neck. "I was listening."
"That's what I said."
Biscuit pads in behind them, circles the stove twice, and drops to the floorboards with a groan that rattles his ribs. His inside-out ear flaps against the wood. Delphine steps over him without looking down, the way a person steps over a threshold.
She heaves a ledger onto the counter. It is fat as a loaf, its leather cover swollen from decades of damp, a ribbon dangling from the spine. She opens it near the back and turns it to face him.
"Guestbook," she says, and her voice drops half a register. "Every visitor since I took over the store. Eleven years."
Jasper bends over the pages. Names climb the left margin in a hundred hands. A hiker has written *"Best water I ever drank"* and underlined it twice. A child has drawn a heron, its legs too long, its beak as thick as a hammer. Someone has pressed a maple leaf flat between two pages, and the leaf has bled a brown ghost onto both.
His finger lands on an entry near the bottom. *Dale Pruitt, Sunbright Energy. Great town! Call me about panels!* A phone number follows. Somebody has gone over the number with a fat carpenter's pencil until the digits vanish under graphite.
"The solar man," Delphine says. "Bart did that. He said it was a public service."
"Did anyone call him?"
"Nobody could. We scribbled out the number, Jasper."
He laughs. The sound startles him. It comes out short, with a crack in the middle, the laugh of a man who has not used the muscle in a while.
She ruled the page herself. Three columns, drawn with a straightedge and a pencil, headed in her round capitals: NAME. FROM. WHY HERE? She holds out a pen. It is a dip pen with a steel nib, and a bottle of ink stands open at her elbow. Janie's ballpoint is in his jacket. He leaves it there.
The nib scratches. He writes *Jasper Cole* and watches the ink pool in the dip of the J. The letters lean left and then right, and the C opens wider than he intended. Under FROM he writes *The City*. His hand drifts back toward the word and adds the name of his employer, then stops, because the pen has no opinion about what comes next.
WHY HERE?
The answer arrives whole, in Marlow's cadence: *Professional assignment to profile a community of interest.* It sits at the front of his mouth like a mint. He does not write it. He holds the pen above the page until a bead of ink swells on the nib and falls, a black coin on the paper, an inch from the line.
He writes: *Work.*
Delphine reads it upside down. "Honest," she says. "Some people write 'curious.' Most of those are lying."
"What do the others write?"
"The others write 'lost.'" She blots his page with a square of grey paper, and the ink sinks and dulls. "Those are the true ones."
Supper happens in the room behind the store, a kitchen with a table scarred by seventy years of knives. A pot of soup rides on the back of a black stove, and the lid chatters as the steam lifts it. Delphine ladles white beans and something dark and green into a bowl the size of a hubcap and plants it in front of him. A heel of bread follows, torn from a loaf with no wrapper.
"Sylvie's," she says, nodding at the pot. "I stole a jar. Don't tell her."
"How would I tell her? I haven't met her."
"You will. Eat."
He eats. The soup tastes of smoke and bay and the faint bitterness of a leaf he cannot name. He waits for the flavor to be explained, a recommendation or a rating, or a whisper that tells him how he ought to feel about it. The waiting leaves a hollow behind his ear. He swallows another spoonful to fill it.
"Nobody told me you have power," he says.
"Nobody told you? It was in the sky when you walked in." She points her spoon up at the bulb. "Creek power. There's a turbine down by the mill; Hollis built the house around it forty years ago, give or take. The poles run up the hill to us and out to the farms."
"My editor said you have nothing that thinks."
"Mm." She tears her bread. "Depends who's doing the thinking."
"The refrigerator regulates itself. It decides when to run."
"Does it?" Delphine leans across the table, eyes bright. "Hollis showed me. Inside the cold box there's a strip made from two metals, glued flat together. One metal grows faster when it warms, so the strip curls. When it curls far enough, it pushes a switch. A child could draw it on a napkin."
"That's a decision."
"That's a bend." She sits back. "A bend doesn't ask what I ate for lunch. It never tells me I look tired and should lie down. It doesn't say what Delphine would like."
His spoon stops against the rim of the bowl.
"Does your companion do all that?" she asks.
"Marlow."
"Marlow." She turns the name over like a coin from a foreign country. "Does Marlow have a last name?"
"It's a product name."
"Huh." She chews and swallows. "And does Marlow do all that?"
"All of it. And the shirts."
"The shirts!" She hoots, and the sound bounces off the pots hanging above the stove. "Somebody picks your shirts."
"The blue reads tired on me."
She stares at him. Then she laughs until she has to set down her bread, and the laugh runs through three gears and comes out the far end as a wheeze. Jasper does not defend himself. His own mouth tugs sideways. A third bowl's worth of heat rises into his face, the pleasant kind, the heat of a joke told on him that he is allowed to share.
"Sorry," Delphine gasps. "Sorry. It's not funny. It's a little funny."
"It's a little funny."
"So where do you think the line sits?" She wipes her eyes with the heel of her hand. "I can see you wondering. You've got the face."
"I don't have a face."
"You have the face of a man doing arithmetic."
He sets down the spoon. "Fine. Where does it sit?"
"Anything that picks for you." Her fingers tick off the list against the table. "Anything that recommends. Anything that writes your letter, plays your music, paints your picture, or tells you what the patient has. A machine that runs a lathe, fine. A machine that pours water, fine. A machine that says *here's what you want*, no."
"A telephone?"
"We have one." She nods at the wall. A black rotary phone hangs there, its cord coiled to the floor in a tangle like a sleeping snake. "It reaches the diner at the crossroads and four farms. After that the line goes out into the world, and the world doesn't pick up for us much."
"And medicine?"
"Dr. Voss has a stethoscope." Delphine's eyebrows climb. "Brass."
"My editor said brass."
"Did he?" She looks delighted. "Then somebody told him something true. She polishes it on Sundays. It's the one thing she lets Biscuit watch."
At the sound of his name, the dog lifts his head from the floor beside Jasper's chair, thumps his tail once against the table leg, and sleeps again.
Jasper turns the notebook over in his lap. He has not opened it since the trunk. The cover is rough against his fingers, a grainy tooth, nothing like the glass slabs he has handled all his life. He opens to the page that holds his crooked *Fair Hollow. Day 1*. Under it, in smaller letters, he writes: *Power: creek. Thermostat = strip of metal. "A bend."*
His handwriting runs downhill. He lets it.
The room above the store is a slant-ceilinged box with a bed built for a shorter man. Delphine leaves a candle in a tin holder and a lamp with a pull chain, and she waves at the lamp as though it were a pet. A quilt of faded squares covers the mattress. A washstand holds a china pitcher. Down the hall, a bathroom waits with hot water and a toilet that flushes, and Jasper stands before it for a full minute, afraid of how much he has assumed.
"Who assigned me this room?" he asked her at the foot of the stairs.
"Assigned?" She frowned. "I have a room. You need a room."
He takes the earpiece from his ear.
It leaves a groove. The cartilage has kept the shape of the pearl-grey bead for eleven years. He presses the dent with a fingertip and finds the skin there thin and tender, like the pale stripe under a ring. He sets the earpiece on the nightstand next to the candle. It rolls an inch and stops. The dead bead lies on a stranger's wood.
The lamp clicks off. The room goes black, a real black, the kind with a floor in it. No amber brightens by degrees. No ceiling remembers his sleep.
Below him, the refrigerator cycles. The hum rises, wobbles, quits. Wind drags a loose shingle against its nail. A floorboard answers the wind. Somewhere down the street a dog barks twice and stops, and Biscuit, who has claimed the porch, shifts and sighs beneath the window.
"Jasper Cole lies in a bed that is too short for him," he whispers.
The sentence drops onto the quilt and goes nowhere. No voice asks him to say again. No voice offers to play something. He tries a second line, and his tongue stalls on the verb. He has talked himself through ten thousand nights. Tonight he lies in the dark with the words unspent in his mouth.
He turns on his side. His ear presses the pillow, the bare ear, and the cotton smells of cedar and cold air. He counts the refrigerator cycles. At the ninth, the count loses him.
He wakes before the voice arrives, and the voice does not arrive at all.
Grey light fills the window. A hammer rings somewhere down the street, a patient rhythm, one stroke and a pause and a stroke, steel on steel. Woodsmoke drifts through the glass. He lies still and waits for the number. The hour. The sleep score. The calendar's complaint.
The hammer rings. The hammer is the only clock.
He does not know what time it is. He swings his feet to the floor, and the planks bite cold through his socks.
Delphine already stands at the stove when he comes down, stirring a dented enamel pot with a wooden spoon. The kitchen smells of scorched grounds and wet pine. Two mugs wait on the table.
"You slept," she says.
"I think so."
"Nobody sleeps the first night. You must have the lungs for it." She pours. The coffee comes out the color of creek mud, with grit swirling in the dregs. "No Ethiopian. I'm sorry. It's the blend that comes in a sack."
He stiffens. He never told her about the Ethiopian.
"You said Marlow picks your drinks," she says, reading his face. "I guessed Ethiopian. It's what city people drink, I hear."
He lifts the mug. The coffee is bitter and hot and cuts across his tongue like a blade, and a layer of silt coats his teeth. He winces. He swallows. The cup is a plain white thing with a chip in the rim, and he holds it in both hands, because the warmth reaches his wrists.
He waits for the four stars.
They do not come. No rating appears. A taste sits in his mouth, burnt and dark and a little sweet underneath, and it belongs to nobody but him.
He holds out the mug. Delphine pours again without a word and sets down the pot, and when she turns toward the window, her shoulders lift with something very close to a laugh.
"Come on," she says. "I'll walk you through before everybody gets underfoot."
Daylight changes the town. In the dusk Jasper saw roofs and lamplight. Now the street runs wide and plain between two lines of frame houses, white clapboard and grey shingle, each with a stack of split wood against the porch. Frost whitens the grass in the shadow of every fence. The road is hard dirt packed by boots and wheels, and it does not bend toward any one building. It runs through the town the way a river runs through a valley.
Biscuit leads the way. He trots five yards ahead with his ear flopped, sniffing the base of each post, and checks over his shoulder to make sure the humans are keeping up.
"That's Bart's." Delphine points at the long barn-roofed building. Warm air pours through its open doors and carries yeast and woodsmoke into the street. A booming laugh rolls out from inside, followed by a clatter of tin trays. "Don't go in unless you have an hour. Or four."
"I have as long as it takes."
"Then he'll be glad to see you." She winks. "Next to him, that's Wren's."
The building beside the bakery crouches lower, its windows dark, its sign a stack of crossed black letters painted on a plank. Black has seeped into the grain of the door where hands have pushed it open for years. Jasper slows. Through the glass he makes out the shape of a heavy iron machine, a bar across it like the arm of a signal, and a wall of shallow wooden drawers.
"She prints," Delphine says. "Posters, the almanac, wedding cards. Poems. Knock first. She doesn't like it when the door opens on her."
"Noted."
He pulls out the notebook and writes *Wren. Printer. Knock.* The pen skips. He wipes the nib on his sleeve and writes it again.
They walk on. A green door with a brass plate stands beside a window crowded with potted herbs. *A. VOSS, M.D.* A card hangs from the knob: WALK IN. RING IF SHUT. He has walked through a hundred lobbies where the doors parted the moment he arrived, and he realizes he cannot remember ever having been invited to ring a bell.
Farther down, a long shed leans open on both ends, two bays wide, and a tow truck squats on a concrete apron with its hood propped. Tools hang from nails on the wall in rows, each one traced in white paint so a hand knows where to return it. The hammer rings from the back. A man's shadow swings across the floor, broad in the shoulders, and the ringing stops, and the shadow does not come forward.
"Hollis," Delphine mutters, and her voice drops. "Later."
"He doesn't want to meet me?"
"Hollis doesn't want to meet anyone. Don't take it as an opinion."
The hammer starts again. It rings a little louder than before.
Past the garage the road climbs a rise, and a small stone building crouches at the top, arched window, slate roof, a wooden sign hung from an iron hook. Someone has painted it by hand: a brown seed, a green sprout, and the words TAKE SOME. BRING SOME. A woman's silver locs show behind the glass, pinned back with a pencil. She bends over a table and does not look up.
"Sylvie," Delphine says. "She'll find you. Don't rush it."
Jasper writes it down. His wrist already aches.
They follow a path behind the seed library to a ridge where the whole valley opens. Fields climb the slope in terraces, brown and green and gold, divided by stone walls the color of old teeth. Cabbages stand in rows, their outer leaves rimed white. A greenhouse made of mismatched window panes catches the sun and throws it back in a hundred small squares. Figures move among the rows with hoes. A mule stands at the end of a furrow with its head down. Beyond the farthest terrace, a line of poles marches along the creek toward a low brick building with a tin roof.
"The mill," Delphine says. "That's your electricity."
The turbine house hums. Jasper feels the sound before he reaches the door. It travels up through the soles of his boots, a deep, level note, and under it runs the white roar of water in a pipe. Inside, a steel wheel the size of a wagon spins within an iron housing, and a belt the width of his hand loops from its shaft to a flat drum at the wall. Gauges line a panel of black slate. A needle on the nearest quivers. He bends to read it, and it tells him nothing about himself. It tells him a number and moves on.
"Don't touch the brass," Delphine says. "It bites."
He tucks his hands into his armpits.
A man stands at the far end of the room with a wrench in his fist, his back turned. Flannel, coveralls, the broad slab of a neck. He does not turn around. He seats the wrench on a valve, hauls once, and the pitch of the machine climbs half a tone and settles. Then he walks out through the back door into the weak light, and the door swings shut on its own weight.
Jasper stares at the closed door. "Was that Hollis?"
"It was."
"He didn't say hello."
"He said it. In his way." Delphine pats the housing of the turbine the way a person pats a horse. "Come on. You'll want to see the grange."
They cross the yard and pass a woman splitting kindling beside a pyramid of logs. She wears a man's canvas coat with the sleeves rolled, and she swings the hatchet in a short, flat arc that never wastes a motion. Chips spray across the frozen ground. Delphine calls her name, Ruth, and the woman raises the blade in a salute without breaking her stroke.
Jasper steps forward. His pulse picks up. The old reflex fires: find the person, ask the question, get the line.
"Excuse me. Ma'am? Who's in charge here?"
Ruth drives the hatchet into the stump and leans on the handle. She is sixty, maybe, with a face like a walnut and eyes that skip over him once and land on Delphine.
"In charge of what?" she asks.
"Of Fair Hollow."
"Of the town?" She looks at the sky as if the answer were written there. "Nobody. Sylvie, if you want somebody to blame."
"Blame for what?"
"Whatever you're blaming." She shrugs and works the hatchet loose. "Ask Sylvie. She'll tell you she isn't, and she'll be right and wrong."
Delphine's shoulders shake. Jasper writes it down verbatim: *Nobody. Sylvie, if you want someone to blame.* The words look thinner on the page than they sounded in the air.
"May I ask you one more?" He lifts the pen. "Why does Fair Hollow exist?"
Ruth considers the hatchet. "Because the goats need somewhere to live," she says. "Write that down."
He writes it down.
"Is that a serious answer?"
"Goats are always serious." She swings, and a log splits clean in two. "Ask me Thursday. By Thursday I'll have thought of something better."
They leave her to her pile. Delphine hums as she walks, a tune with no discernible shape, and Jasper trails behind her with his notebook open in his hand and a cold spot growing in the middle of his chest.
A grain barn stands at the edge of the yard, its doors wide, a farmer in a patched jacket heaving sacks onto a cart. A boy of eight or nine perches on the tailgate swinging his legs. Jasper catches the man's eye and asks again. The man wipes his palms on his thighs.
"Whoever shows up," he says.
"Shows up where?"
"The grange. Thursday." He hoists another sack. "Show up, you're in charge for that night."
"And who writes down what gets decided?"
"Whoever's got a pencil."
The boy swings his legs. "Biscuit," he offers.
Jasper blinks. "What?"
"Biscuit's in charge." The boy points a solemn finger at the dog, who has parked himself in the middle of the yard with his chin in the dirt. "He decides who gets sad. Then somebody goes."
"That is not a serious answer," says the farmer.
"It is too."
Delphine covers her mouth with both hands. Her scarf shakes. Jasper stares at the page, where he has now collected *Nobody*, *Whoever shows up*, and *Biscuit*, in his own cramped script, and he understands that nobody here intends to give him a straight answer, because nobody here believes the question has one.
The grange hall stands at the head of the street, a plain wooden box with a bell tower the size of a birdhouse. Delphine hauls open the double doors. Light from the windows spills across a bare floor of wide pine planks, scuffed grey along the traffic lanes, and a woodstove stands cold at the center. Chairs fill the room: kitchen chairs, church chairs, a piano stool, a three-legged milking stool, a rocker with a cracked runner. Someone has set them in a ring. They face inward and share a single open floor, and not one of them sits higher than any other.
Jasper walks the circle. He looks for the head of the table and finds a table with a pitcher and a stack of lined paper, set against the wall, with no chair behind it. No platform. No podium. No gavel. He trails his fingers along a chair back and finds the wood worn pale where decades of hands have gripped it.
"Thursday night," Delphine says. "Seven o'clock. Anybody can come, and nearly everybody does. Anyone with something to say says it. Anyone who can't live with where we're headed stands up and says that too."
"And then?"
"And then we keep going."
"Until what?"
"Until nobody stands." She grins. "That's the whole trick. It takes forever."
He crouches beside the milking stool and runs his thumb across the seat. A pencil scratches hang along the edge, tally marks, the sort a person makes while waiting. "What if someone always stands?"
"Then we talk longer."
"How much longer?"
"There was a culvert." She settles into the rocker with her boots crossed. "Under Mill Road. It floods in spring. Half of us wanted concrete, half of us wanted stone, and Eamon wanted nothing, because he said the creek had it right the first time. Eleven weeks."
"Eleven weeks for a culvert."
"We went with stone." She nods, satisfied. "Eamon still says he's right. The creek hasn't weighed in."
He laughs again, one short, startled bark. Then he stands and tucks the notebook under his arm and presses a thumb and forefinger against the bridge of his nose, because the problem has arrived in his head and will not leave.
Alan wants a spine. Alan wants a person in a chair who can say *This is what Fair Hollow believes*, in a voice that carries and a sentence that fits a headline. Jasper has built a career on exactly that, a finder of the one quotable voice among the crowd, and the town has pulled every chair into a circle.
"Delphine."
"Mm?"
"I need a name. Somebody who speaks for the town. Whoever the public would call if they wanted to know what Fair Hollow thinks."
"Then you need about sixty names." She counts on her fingers and loses track at nine. "Sixty-three, last time Bart did a census. He gave the baby a vote."
"The baby."
"She's got opinions."
Jasper drops into one of the chairs. It is a straight-backed thing with a rush seat, and it creaks under him. He stares across the empty ring at the opposite wall, where somebody has hung a framed paper, yellow with age, in a hand he cannot read from here.
"Jasper Cole," he mutters, "sits in a hall with sixty-three leaders and no spokesman. He has come three hundred miles, and the story is a baby with a vote."
Delphine tilts her head. "Is that a habit?"
"What?"
"The talking about yourself. In the third. You did it on the road, I thought you were praying." She says it gently, with a curiosity that carries no hook. "Does it help?"
His face goes hot. For ten years the narration has had a listener, a voice that responded, *Say again?* or *Stress markers up eight percent.* Now somebody has caught him doing it in a room with no one on the other end.
"It used to," he says.
"And now?"
"It sounds like a man talking to a wall."
She studies him. The rocker ticks forward and back. "Biscuit does it," she says at last. "Talks to the wall. He doesn't use names, though. You'd be ahead."
He snorts. The tension in his shoulders loosens a notch.
Delphine stands. She crosses the ring and stops before the framed paper, and Jasper follows. Up close, the page proves to be a single sheet of rag stock, typeset in black ink, its letters slightly uneven, the ascenders sitting a hair off the line. A title heads it in capitals. FOUNDING CONSENSUS. Beneath that, a column of short paragraphs, and beneath those, a long signature of names that run off the bottom, some in ink, some in pencil, some in a single thumb-sized smudge of red clay.
He reads the first paragraph. He reads the second. They are plain. They say that a person may decide for themselves. They say that a person who cannot decide may ask a neighbor. They say that nobody here will ask a machine.
"Who wrote this?" he asks.
"Sylvie held the pen." Delphine runs a finger below the first signature. It reads *S. Okonkwo-Hart*, in a hand so square it might have been cut with a chisel. "Forty-one people signed that night. Nobody counted the votes. They counted the people who walked out."
"And how many walked out?"
"None." She lets the finger fall. "That was the point."
A knot tightens in his stomach and loosens again. The paper has the ordinary shimmer of a thing that has been handled. A coffee ring marks one corner. Somebody has tacked it to the wall with a nail through the margin, and rust has bled into the paper around the head.
He opens the notebook against his forearm. His hand hovers.
*Founding Consensus. 41 signatures. "Nobody counted the votes. They counted the people who walked out."*
The pen scratches. The line is as crooked as the rest, and he leaves it crooked.
By noon the sun has burned the frost off the fields, and the street fills. A man on a bicycle with a crate of eggs lashed to the rack. Two women hauling a wheelbarrow of squash. A knot of children in wool caps, running with a hoop, and Biscuit chasing the hoop and losing it and chasing it again. Everyone looks at Jasper. Nobody stares. The glances are quick and friendly and carry a flicker of inquiry, the glances of people who have heard a stranger is in town and wish to see whether the stranger will say hello.
He says hello. His voice comes out rough and unpracticed. A woman with a shawl returns it with a wave. A tall man in a leather apron nods. A girl of six or seven stops in the middle of the road and tells him her name is Pim, and that she lost a tooth, and shows him the gap, and runs off before he can answer.
Delphine stops in front of the grange steps and plants her hands on her hips.
"I have a store to open," she announces. "I have been closed since the stars went out, and Agnes will talk about it at church."
"Church?"
"There's a church. You saw the spire. Sunday." She waves the thought off. "Never mind. The thing is, Jasper, I can't hold your hand for the rest of the day, and you'll want to meet people. Real ones, I mean. You want a list."
"I want a list."
"You'll have a list." She digs a stub of pencil from her coat and holds out her palm. "Give me the notebook."
He hesitates. The notebook is the only thing he has ever carried that did not carry him. Then he hands it over.
She flips to a clean page and writes with her tongue between her teeth. The pencil makes a dry, whispering sound. She writes six names, one beneath another, and beside each name a short word, and she presses so hard the paper dents.
*Wren. Press.*
*Bart. Bakery.*
*Sylvie. Seeds.*
*Dr. Voss. Green door.*
*Hollis. Garage. (Gently.)*
*Cassius. Whoever's playing.*
"Cassius is the fiddle," she says. "You'll hear him before you find him. He teaches the children. Sylvie's seeds, you saw. Wren and Bart, you've passed. Amara's the doctor. And Hollis." She taps the name. "Hollis will say no. Go anyway."
"Why go if he'll say no?"
"Because he'll notice you went."
Jasper studies the page. Six names. A town of sixty-three leaders, and she hands him six, and each of them will give him a different account.
"Where does the town keep its official statement?" he asks. "Its position. Something on paper."
"You read it." She nods at the grange hall. "Forty-one signatures and a coffee ring."
"That's from forty years ago."
"Then it's old. That's all."
"And what does the town say now?"
Delphine laughs, a bright, uncomplicated peal, and slaps his shoulder with her free hand. "Jasper. Ask them. That's the whole system. One at a time, and they'll tell you. They'll tell you different things. That's how you know it's true."
"I need to record them."
"Then ask. Each one." Her eyes narrow, friendly, shrewd. "You ask every time, mind. Whoever you talk to, you ask if you can write it down. Some will say yes. Some will say yes and mean no. You listen for the no."
"How do I listen for a no?"
"You'll know." She hands back the notebook and winds her scarf twice around her neck. "You wouldn't have asked me that, an hour ago."
She starts down the steps, and the parrots ride her shoulders into the sun. At the bottom she turns.
"Eamon's wife has pie at two," she calls. "Ask her about the culvert. She'll talk for an hour, and you'll get ten answers."
"Is that a promise?"
"It's a warning." She waves, and she is gone, her cranberry coat swinging up the street toward the store.
Jasper sits down on the top step. The wood is cold through his trousers. Biscuit climbs the stairs in four heavy hops and folds himself against Jasper's boot with a long exhale, and his chin lands on the toe of Jasper's shoe.
The notebook lies open across his knee. His own words fill the page in the margin: *Nobody.* *Whoever shows up.* *Biscuit.* *Goats are always serious.* Underneath them, in Delphine's slanting pencil, six names.
Alan wants one voice. Alan wants a spine. In the newsroom, Jasper would speak a question to the air, and a hundred answers would sort themselves into a column ranked by relevance, and the strongest quote would bloom white on the glass before he finished the sentence. He would pick one. Marlow would pick for him. By nine o'clock the story would exist.
He lifts the pen. The nib hangs above the paper. He has to supply the sentence himself, and he has to start it, and somewhere behind his sternum a small cold hand closes around the thought and refuses to give it up.
He writes: *Who decides?*
He stares at the question until the ink dries. The letters tilt, and the Q has a tail like a rat's. He does not write an answer. Down the road, a fiddle tunes, one string and then another, and finds a note, and loses it, and finds it again.
Biscuit's chin presses harder on his boot.
Jasper turns to a clean page and writes the date at the top, a day he had to ask the grange calendar to learn. Below it he draws a line, and beside the line he writes the first name on the list, and the pen scratches, and his hand, aching, does not stop.