The announcements at the end were plain and short. Vernon Dahl, already in a county cell, was charged that morning with breaking and entering, attempted theft, and conspiracy to suppress evidence in a state safety investigation; the holding company's lawyers had withdrawn the gas-storage application before noon, the way a man steps back from a hole in the ice. Jesse Krell was charged beside him. Pearl's inquest file went into the record with the log, the bought testimony named in open session for what it was.
Afterward there was coffee in paper cups on the lawn, and people Marcus barely knew shook his hand and didn't seem to know what to say, and he understood that, because he didn't either.
"He heard his name in the open air," Ilsa said, on the walk home up Kestrel Hill, with the sphere warm at her throat and the courthouse noise falling away behind them. "A hundred and fourteen years, and that is all the dead ever knocked for. Somebody to say it where it counts."
"That," Marcus said, "and the door left open."
"That too," she said. "The door left open."
Chapter 27 — The Set
The thirteen spheres came up from the evidence room in a gray steel box with a seal on it, three weeks after the reading, and were laid out on the clerk's long table under the fluorescent lights in the order they'd sat in Vernon Dahl's display case — which is to say, in the order of a man arranging something he meant to complete.
Marcus had seen them once in a newspaper photograph from 1978, grainy and yellow. In person they were smaller than he expected. Marble-sized. Black iron, a little rusted at the seams on some, polished bright on two where generations of thumbs had worried them smooth. Thirteen small weights that had each, at one time, been somebody's whole religion.
"You're sure," the clerk said to Ilsa, not unkindly. He had a form. Everything in that building had a form. "The court wants it stated by someone qualified that these are the same objects described in the estate inventories. You're the only living person who's handled a genuine grief iron."
"I am the only one who would admit it in this building," Ilsa said. But she went down the line and picked each one up, and held it a moment, and set it down in exactly its place, and Marcus watched her face do something complicated at the seventh, and the eleventh.
"They're genuine," she said. "Every one. He took good care of them. That's the worst of him, if anyone's writing it down. He kept them like they mattered. They just never mattered to him the way they were supposed to."
The judge's order had come down that Monday, sixty-one pages of it, and Pearl had read the whole thing at the archive desk with her lips moving, the way she read everything that mattered. The spheres were not Dahl's. The paper trail — what there was of one, fifty years of estate sales and quiet purchases and two thefts that had been reported to sheriffs long dead — said what the town already knew: the irons had been taken, by money or by pressure or by hand, from the families they'd been cast for. Property obtained that way didn't ripen into ownership just because a rich man had kept it polished in a case for forty years. The court ordered them released: to the descendants who could be found and wanted them, and the rest to the county museum, to be held in trust.
So that was the other thing happening in the clerk's office that morning — the claiming. Earl Whitaker took his great-uncle Silas's sphere in both hands like a man receiving communion and said nothing at all. A woman down from Pittsburgh, a schoolteacher, Casimir Nowak's great-granddaughter, asked whether she was allowed to keep it in a drawer, and the clerk said she could keep it anywhere she liked, it was hers, and she cried a little and apologized and nobody minded. Four weren't claimed by anyone living who could be found, and those went into a smaller box, with tissue, for the museum.
Ilsa certified the last one and signed the form, and on the courthouse steps afterward she stood a long time with her hand at her own throat, where the fourteenth sphere hung, the master, cast first from the bell's crown.
"Yours is the only one that was never in a case," Marcus said.
"Mine is the only one that was never anyone's but the keeper's," she said. "That was the design. Thirteen for thirteen families, to hold in a house, to bury with a widow if she wanted. And one — " she turned it on its cord, "— one that did the traveling. Babka said the master is the one that knows the road. When a keeper died, the sphere went to the next hands carrying nothing but the duty. It was never meant to be kept, the way Dahl keeps things. It was meant to be carried."
"And now?"
She was quiet a moment. Down the hill, the town was doing its ordinary morning, trucks and dogs and the school bus sighing at the corner.
"Now the men are named," she said. "The file is open. The log is read. Everything the knocking ever wanted, it has." She let the sphere fall back against her skin. "I have worn this since I was seventeen years old, Marcus. I have slept in it, run in it, hidden it under floorboards and in a hollow fence post and once in a frozen creek bank wrapped in oilcloth. I do not actually know what my hands are for, if not this."
"Maybe they get to find out," he said.