"Town did," Etta said, and unsaddled Petra in the moonlight with the splash on the mare's left hind shining pale as spilled milk, and thought about a small cramped signature, one letter short, that had stolen eight years and was not going to get to keep them.
Chapter 13 — The Clerk
Walter Goss heard about the visits from a boy who swept the church steps, who had seen a roan mare tied behind the Widow Fenn's lilacs two nights running, and after that the courthouse office would not hold him. He walked its length with papers he did not read. He sharpened pencils to the wood. Twice he took down the 1877 brand register to check a thing he already knew by heart, and twice put it back with hands that would not quite do as they were told.
The thing in the register, under his own hand, said Marlowe, T. — string sold to Assn., 40 head, bill recorded. Neat. Lawful. Dead. It had sat there eight years behaving itself, and Walter had built a whole life on top of it — a salary, a pew, a wife who ironed his collars and believed him a careful man. All of it rested on one October night when Avery Stanton's rider had come to his back door after midnight with an unsigned bill of sale and a carpetbag, and said, Sign it the way it ought to look, Walter. The Colonel wants the paper tidy before daylight.
He had written Thomas Marlow because that was how the name sounded in his head, spelled the way he spelled all names, short and clerkly and sure. He had not even known, until the real Thomas Marlowe was three years dead, that the man had signed with an e that stood up like a hitching post. By then the money was spent, which is the way of such money. It had never once felt like enough afterward. That was the peculiar hell of it. It had not even felt like enough at the time.
He had learned about the signature by accident, in '81, pulling a deed for a boundary dispute: Thomas Marlowe's hand on a water filing from '74, the final e standing up off the page like a man waving from a train. He had stared at it until the daylight in the office failed. Then he had gone home and been pleasant at supper, and hated the pleasantness worse than the deed, because the deed had been one night and the pleasantness was every night since, a clean coat worn over rot. His wife believed him a careful man. The whole valley believed him a careful man, and careful men do not sign another man's name at midnight — that was the pillar his whole house stood on, and Josiah Fenn's widow had a book in her flour bin with a crack running straight up through the pillar.
Stanton came at dusk, without knocking, the way he came everywhere in Cedar Valley, as if doors were a courtesy he extended rather than asked. He set his hat on the deed cabinet and looked at the office with mild approval, like a man inspecting a fence he owned.
"The widow Fenn is entertaining," he said.
"She's an old woman. She gets lonely."
"She gets company with a roan mare." Stanton's voice stayed pleasant. "Walter. The county records are the truth of this valley, because men like you keep them true. If questions arise — at the fair, say, or in some lawyer's letter — the records will be consulted, and the man who keeps them will be asked to swear to them. A widow's keepsake book, if such a thing exists, is gossip in a flour bin. It will be weighed against your oath, and it will be found light."
"And if it isn't gossip?" Goss said, before he could stop himself. "If it's Josiah's own hand, every night, forty years—"
"Then it would be a forgery," Stanton said gently, "made by somebody's grieving family to trouble an honest county. Wouldn't it. Think, Walter. You've had eight years to think. Don't waste the tuition."
He put his hat back on and left the smell of his cigar in the room like a signature.
Goss stood a long while after the door closed. Then he took his keys, went down the row of shelves to the duplicate copy books — the bound clerk's copies, made fair each winter, from which the original records could be restored if fire ever took the courthouse. He lifted out the copy book for 1877. It was heavier than the day book would be, he thought. Absurd, the things a mind notices.
The stove in the corner was still warm from the day's fire. He fed the book into it a signature of pages at a time, and told himself, leaf by leaf, that he was tidying. Duplicates confused a record. A clean archive was an honest archive. The paper browned and curled and took, and the ink of forty dead men's brands rose up the flue in gray flakes over the sleeping town, and it solved nothing at all, and he knew it solved nothing, because the original register still sat upstairs spelling it sold, and Josiah Fenn's book still lay in Abigail Fenn's flour bin spelling out the truth in a dead man's fair hand.
He washed his hands at the basin when it was done, soot in the creases of his fingers like a second set of fingerprints. On a scrap of blotter, before he could reason with himself, he wrote the name the way it ought to have been written — Thomas Marlowe, the final e rearing tall — and stared at his own treacherous hand accomplishing in one second what it had failed to do in eight years of lying.