The ledger came down on the counter with the dull thud of a thing that had been carried further than it had been meant to be carried. Roddy set it square and took his hand off it and put the hand back at his side where it belonged. The leather of the cover had gone soft at the corners from the saddlebag, and one of the brass clasps had been pried at by somebody at some point and not gotten back to true, and Roddy had spent a long time, on the road east, looking at the clasp and wondering whether the man who had done the prying had been the one his brother had killed in the yard or the one his brother had killed in the barn, and he had decided that it did not matter, the way most of the things he wondered about on that ride did not in the end matter.

The bank manager came up to the counter from the back office at his own slow pace, the way a man came up to a counter who had been told what was waiting on it and who had decided, on the walk down the short hall, that he was not going to be in any hurry about it. He was a thin man, narrow at the shoulder and narrower at the wrist, in a suit that had been pressed by somebody who took pride in the pressing. His spectacles were small and round and rode low on his nose, and he looked at Roddy first over the rims of them, and at Priscilla a half step behind Roddy’s shoulder.

“Mr. Moss,” he said.

“Sir.”

The manager turned the ledger toward himself with the back of two fingers, careful, the way a man turned a thing he did not want to put his whole hand on yet. He worked the clasp that still worked and let the cover fall open. The pages inside were the pages of a thing that had been built to be read by one office and one office only, columns of dates and route numbers and the small coded letters that stood for the express boxes and what was meant to be in them, and the manager went down the first page with the tip of one finger without touching the paper, and then turned to the second page, and then to the third, and then he closed the cover.

He did not look up at Roddy right away. He laid his palm flat on the cover and held it there a moment, the way a man laid his palm on the lid of a coffin before the lid was nailed down.

Then Roddy reached into his pocket and removed the cipher he had scratched onto a single sheet of paper from memory. The cipher he had been trained to memorize and protect at all cost.

The man reviewed it, checking it against perhaps a master cipher. When the matter appeared to be in sufficient order, he reached under the counter.

What came up out of the under-the-counter was a cloth pouch the size of two fists put together, drawn at the top with a brown cord. He set it on the polished wood between them. He pushed it across with the heel of his hand, slow, the way he had turned the ledger, and the pouch made a small sliding sound against the wax of the counter, and at the end of the slide it gave a soft heavy chink that the room heard.

Roddy looked at it.

He had not let himself think too much about what the weight would be. He had thought, on the ride down, that it would be a thing somebody handed him and that he would take it and put it in his coat and walk out, and that the walking out would be the part that mattered. Standing at the counter now he saw that the walking out was not the part. The part was the pouch. The pouch had a weight to it, in the dust between them, that was the weight of his brother’s leg under sawdust and the weight of an old man in a doorway and the weight of a fat Spaniard on a porch step, and the pouch did not know any of that and could not have known it, and the manager did not know it either, and that was, Roddy understood without quite understanding it, the way the world had decided to do its accounting.

The bank had dark wood paneling on three walls and a brass clock on the fourth above the manager’s head, and the clock had a slow steady tick that filled the room between the words men spoke in it. The air smelled of ink and of paper and of the linseed oil they had used on the counter that morning before opening, and somewhere in the back a woman was working at a ledger of her own with a steel-nibbed pen, and the small dry scratch of the pen came through the hallway at the back as a thing he could hear if he chose to hear it.

Priscilla’s hand came up and laid itself on his arm above the elbow.

She did not say anything. She did not need to. She had ridden up to the bank with him on the wagon seat that morning and she had walked in beside him and she had stood behind his shoulder while the manager came down the hall, and her hand on his arm now was the hand of a woman who had decided some time back, possibly at her own gate on a summer evening a year and some months ago, that whatever was going to be put down on a counter in front of her man she was going to be standing close enough to lay her hand on him for.

The manager cleared his throat. It was a small dry sound. It was the sound, Roddy thought, of a man getting ready to say a thing he had practiced once or twice in his office before walking down the hall.

“Mr. Moss,” he said. “The bank is in your debt. I am told the contents of this ledger would have cost a number of our sister institutions a great deal of money over the course of the next several months, had it not been recovered. I am told further that the recovery was a thing accomplished at no small cost to yourself.”

He did not look at Roddy’s face when he said the last part. He looked at Roddy’s hands.

Roddy looked at them too, because the manager was. They were laid on the counter where he had set them after he had put the ledger down, palms down, fingers spread a little because the fingers did not entirely close the way they had used to close. The knuckles of the right hand had healed wrong from where he had put them, four times in a row, into the side of a silver-haired man’s jaw in a barn outside of Bodie. The knuckles of the left hand had a long pale scar across them from a rope. The nail of the third finger on the left had grown back the wrong color, a yellow-brown thing the color of a coffee stain, and it was never going to grow back any other color, the woman in the adobe house had told him, because of what had been done to the bed of it. Against the polished wood of the counter, the hands looked, Roddy thought, like a thing a man had brought into a place where it did not belong.

He moved them. He put them down at his sides.

“There is, in addition,” the manager said, and his eyes came up off the place where Roddy’s hands had been, “a matter the board has asked me to raise with you. A man who has demonstrated the loyalty and the discretion that you have demonstrated, sir, is a man this institution would consider itself fortunate to employ. We have a teller’s position open. The hours are regular. The work is steady. It does not require, I think I may say, any further engagement with stagecoaches, or rifles, or the long roads west.”

Roddy was quiet.

He looked at the brass clock above the manager’s head. He looked at the slow swing of the second hand.

He looked back at the pouch on the counter.

His hand came up off his side and his fingers closed around the cord at the top of the pouch, and the weight of it came up into his palm the way the lawman’s pouch had come up into the lawman’s palm a thousand miles west of here a month back, and Roddy held it a moment without putting it anywhere.

He looked over his shoulder at Priscilla.

She gave him a small nod. It was a nod that did not commit her to anything in particular and did not commit him to anything in particular either, and it was, he understood, the kindness of it.

He turned back to the manager.

“I’ll take it,” he said. His voice was the voice it had been since Bodie, low and not quite finished at the edges. “The job. I’ll take it.”

The manager nodded once. He did not smile. Roddy was grateful for the not smiling. The manager put out his thin pressed hand across the counter, and Roddy reached his own scarred one to meet it, and they shook, brief and dry, and Priscilla’s hand on his other arm gave one small squeeze and let go.

He put the pouch inside his coat against the rib where the rib still complained on cold mornings, and he buttoned the coat the rest of the way, and he walked Priscilla out of the bank into the Georgia morning.

***

Buckley’s cemetery sat on a slow rise at the end of a road that did not go anywhere else, and the wind that came across it in the late afternoon came up off the river bottom three miles out and ran through the dry grass between the headstones with a sound that was not quite a sound, a long low hush, the kind of noise a thing made when it had been making the noise so long that the noise had become part of the place. Roddy held Matilda’s small hand in his right. She was not yet six and looked up at him brightly. He held the small bundle of late wildflowers she had picked on the walk up in his left hand, and he came in through the gate at the slow walk a man took into a place where his hurry would have been an offense.

The grass in the cemetery at this time of year grew long and wild. It came up around the headstones in the wind-bent way grass came up when the man with the scythe had been giving his attention to another stretch of his work, and the headstones themselves were the headstones of a small Georgia town, some of them granite and some of them limestone and some of them only wood, and the wooden ones leaned the way wooden ones leaned in any cemetery a man cared to walk through.

Gideon’s was stone.

Roddy had cut the cross himself, with the help of a mason in town. They had cut it plain. There were no dates on it. There was only the name. They took care that the letters were even, and that was all there was. The grave underneath it was even and smooth. The grass grew strong here because the grave was an empty grave.

He stopped at the foot of it. His daughter stopped with him. She had her mother’s eyes, which was a thing Roddy noticed every morning at the breakfast table and which he was not certain he was ever going to stop noticing, and she had her uncle’s strawberry blonde hair, which he had also not stopped noticing, and which he had not yet, in five years, ever once mentioned out loud.

She let go of his hand. She crouched down at the foot of the mound and pressed her small palm flat against the dirt and held it there. She did this the way she did most things, which was without asking permission first.

She looked up at him.

“Why isn’t Uncle Gideon here,” she said.

Roddy crouched down beside her. His knees popped at the movement, both of them, the right one louder than the left, and he set the wildflowers down on the dirt next to her hand, and he did not answer right away. He had thought about how he was going to answer that question for the better part of two years. He had thought about it in the mornings shaving and he had thought about it on the porch at night, and he had practiced one or two of the answers out loud to Priscilla in the kitchen, and Priscilla had been kind enough not to tell him which ones were the bad ones.

“Your uncle,” he said, “was the kind of man who was hard to keep in one place.”

She considered this. She left her palm on the dirt.

“Like the cat.”

He almost smiled. “Somethin’ like the cat. Yes.”

“Did he run off.”

“He didn’t run off. He just—” He looked at the carved letters on the cross. The light was coming low through them and putting a small shadow on the wood. “He fought in the war against the Yankees. When he came home from that war, the world in Buckley wasn’t how he’d left it. He just didn’t fit anymore. So he went a long way west, and he did somethin’ tough out there, and the place where it happened was a hard place to bring a man home from. So he stayed.”

She thought about it a while. She had a way of thinking about a thing that was not childlike at all, a steady considering of it with the small forehead furrowed and the mouth pulled to one side, and Roddy had seen Priscilla do the same thing across the kitchen table over a cup of coffee, and he had decided that some things came down through a mother’s line whether a man wanted them to or not.

“Was he brave?” she asked.

“He was the bravest person I ever knew.”

The words came up out of him plain. He had not practiced them. They came up the way a thing came up when a man had been carrying it long enough that it had worn its own channel in him, and they were out before he had time to decide whether they were the right ones, and standing in the cemetery in the late light he understood that they were.

He looked away. He looked off across the field of headstones, at the line of pines beyond the back fence, at the way the wind moved the tops of them and did not move the trunks. His jaw tightened. He let it tighten. He let it sit that way a long moment, and then he let it go.

“I wish every single day,” he said, “that you could have met him.”

She did not answer that. She did not have an answer for it. She picked up the bundle of wildflowers and laid them carefully at the foot of the cross, and she stood up, and she put her hand back in his.

He led her a little ways across the grass.

Delilah’s stone was off by itself. It had not been put near Gideon’s. Roddy had been the one to decide where it would go, and the carpenter and the man who set the stones had not asked him why, and he had not offered. It was a small marker, wood, with her name and the dates and nothing more on it.

His daughter looked at it.

“Who’s she?” she said.

“That’s a woman your uncle loved a long time ago.”

She read the name slowly, with her lips moving the way they moved when she was working through the letters in the family Bible. She got to the end of it.

“Did she love him back?”

Roddy was quiet a moment.

“I think she did,” he said. “In her own way. For a while.”

She accepted that. She accepted most things the way a child accepted them, which was without asking the second question that an adult would have asked. She looked at the dates on the stone, and the smaller number at the bottom did not mean anything to her yet, because she had not yet learned to do the arithmetic of how recent a year was.

“When did she die.”

“A year back.”

“How did she die?”

Roddy looked at the marker. The wind came across the grass and lifted a strand of hair on his daughter’s head and laid it back down.

“A man passin’ through,” he said. “A drifter. They never did find out who he was. He skipped town before the sheriff could find him.”

She thought about that. She did not seem troubled by it. The world to a five-year-old was a place where things happened that grown men did not always find out about, and that was, to her, a natural and not particularly remarkable arrangement.

“Can we go home?” she said.

“We can.”

He straightened up. The knees popped again. He took her hand, and his free hand, the right one, the one with the wrong-healed knuckles, balled itself into a fist at his side without his asking it to. He held it that way a long count. Then he made it open. He made the fingers go slack, one at a time, the way the woman in the adobe house had once taught him to make them go slack after the rope had come off, and he let the hand swing easy.

***

Priscilla was at the door before they reached the porch.

She came out onto the step with her apron still on and a folded piece of paper in her hand, and she looked at Roddy in the way a woman looked at her husband when a thing had arrived at the house that she could not place, and the look was not alarmed, exactly, but it was the look of a woman who had been turning a thing over in her hand for some part of an afternoon and had not arrived at any conclusion she trusted.

“This came,” she said. “While you were out.”

She held it out to him.

He came up onto the porch and took it. His daughter went past him through the door without being asked, the way she always went through a door. Roddy stood on the porch with Priscilla a step away from him and turned the envelope over in his hands.

It was worn at the edges. Not the wear of careless handling. The wear of distance. The address was his—the old farm of his parents now his to tend to. The address had been typed. In the upper right corner was simply the word California.

“There’s no return,” Priscilla said.

“No.”

“Just that.”

“Yes.”

He looked at the word a moment longer. Before he opened it and drew out the single folded page.

He read the first line.

He stopped.

He had read it once, and he found that he had not read it. The words had gone in and had not stayed. He read it again. The second time the words stuck and burned his chest.

Priscilla was watching him.

He felt her watching him. He could not just at that moment look up at her. He looked at the page. He read the first two words on the page for a third and then a fourth time, relishing their existence.

“Dearest brother…”

The hand was Gideon’s. He knew it the way a man knew a brother’s hand, without thinking about it. It had been steadier in their boyhood and it was less steady now, and there were two places on the page where the pen had paused longer than the pen had meant to pause, and the ink at those places had pooled the smallest bit darker, and Roddy could see, in the small darker spots, the shape of his brother sitting at a desk in a city Roddy had never been to, thinking about how to put down the next word.

Gideon was alive.

He said that he had nearly died in Bodie, but for the quick action of the sheriff, he was saved. He said that he had spent six months being nursed back to health in Bodie. No one knew his name. The sheriff had sworn the deputies and the doctor to secrecy as to his identity. He said he had ridden a stage to Sacramento as soon as he could sit on a stage, and that he had gone to San Francisco. That he had taken work, in time, as a clerk in the office of a lawyer who did not ask too many questions of a man, and that he had been at the work three years, and that he had a small room above a tailor’s shop, and that he had grown his beard out longer, and that he was, by the way the world reckoned such things, a quiet man with a quiet trade. He said that he had not written before because he had not been able to bring himself to write before, and that he could not, in that letter, explain why that had been, only that it had been, and that he hoped, in time, to explain it in person.

He said that he was sorry.

He said it once. Not twice. Gideon, Roddy thought without quite thinking it, would not have said it twice.

There were two train tickets folded inside the page.

He took them out. They were printed in the deep red of the Pacific railroad, and the dates were left blank, and the destination on each one was the depot at San Francisco, and the small print at the bottom said they were good for redemption inside the calendar year.

The letter closed with four lines.

It said that the room above the tailor’s shop was small, but that there was a boarding house at the end of the street that took families for a reasonable rate. It said that Gideon hoped, more than he had let himself hope for any other thing in some time, that they would come. It said that if they came, he would meet the train. It said finally that he’d not seen Andrew Dillon again, but heard tales of a one-armed bounty man and Gideon hoped that man had survived a snake bite.

Roddy’s hand dropped to his side.

The page came with it. The two tickets were still in his other hand. His daughter had come back out onto the porch from inside the house and was pulling at the cuff of his sleeve to tell him something about supper, and he didn’t react, so she pulled harder, and he still didn’t react, and after a moment she gave up and went back inside in the way a child gave up on a father who had gone somewhere she could not follow.

His eyes were filled with tears. He did not move to wipe them. He did not move at all.

Priscilla stepped close to him.

She took the page out of his hand. She did it gently, the way she had taken his face out of his own hands years ago at a gate at the end of another road in the dark. She held the page up to the lamplight from the window beside them and she read it, and Roddy watched her face read it, the way her eyes went down the lines, and he saw the place in the page where her face stopped, which was the same place his had stopped, and he saw the breath go out of her, and she put her free hand up over her mouth and held it there.

She read the rest of it. She did not lower the hand.

“We are going to need a third ticket,” she said.

She said it plain. She said it the way she said most things, which was the way a person said a thing that did not require any argument and was not going to be given any.

Roddy looked at her.

He nodded.

He could not, just at that moment, do anything more than nod and smile. The reaper may never come across the road that leads to Gideon Moss, and that was alright by him.

THE END