I. The Buick
It had been a year.
Marla Jenkins marked it without meaning to, on the first Thursday in October, when she climbed the stairs on Parler Avenue at seven in the morning and found herself thinking that a year ago on this day she had walked into Kirk’s Barbershop with a notebook and a story about the oldest businesses in the county, and had asked Carl Kirk why he turned the lights on after everyone had gone home. She had been fifty-two. She was fifty-three. In between she had seen a barber cut the hair of children who had never been born, and heard a bell ring under a river, and stood on a swamp boardwalk at midnight with a boy who had written a letter in his sleep, and watched a girl in a yellow dress walk into the Edisto, and sat in a grits tent while a dead woman tasted twenty-three casseroles, and sat on the floor of a clock tower beside a horologist whose father’s watch had started running. She had printed none of it. The drawer in Bud Rawls’s desk had gained perhaps thirty letters and a postcard from Savannah and a green Rite in the Rain notebook, and the paper had come out every Thursday, and the county had gone on being a county, and she had gone on, as she had for twenty years, deciding what was the newspaper’s business and putting the rest where nobody would see it.
She had also, in that year, said a thing out loud that she had not said in twenty-four, and written it down, and handed it to an old woman in a folding chair against a brick tower, and she had been, since then, lighter by one letter, and had not entirely known what to do with the lightness.
On the Tuesday night of that week, Harold Dukes, sitting on his porch off Dorchester Road with a beer he had been told not to drink, heard a bell toll from the direction of the river. Once. He mentioned it to his granddaughter Kayla, who mentioned it at the Piggly Wiggly, where Marla heard it Wednesday morning, and drove to the office with the feeling she had learned, in twenty years, not to call dread.
There was nothing on the floor inside the door.
She stood in the doorway with her coat on and looked at the bare boards and the mail slot and the gold letters backward on the glass. In twenty years and three hundred and some letters, the bell had never rung without a letter following. Bud’s ledger said so. Her own said so. She went to the desk and opened the ledger and wrote Oct. 6, bell, one. No letter. and sat looking at the line for some time, and then went and made the coffee, and worked, and found she could not stop looking at the floor by the door.
Thursday morning at a quarter past eight, a 1988 Buick LeSabre the color of weak tea pulled up to the curb on Parler Avenue and stopped with one wheel on the sidewalk, and the driver’s door opened, and after a considerable interval a small, very old, very dark woman in a man’s cardigan got out, and stood a moment holding the door for balance, and then closed it and looked up at the second-floor windows with her milky eyes and started across the sidewalk toward the stairs.
Marla was down the stairs before she reached the door.
“Miss Odell.”
“Newspaper.” Odell Pinckney stood on the bottom step with one hand on the rail and breathed for a while. “Those stairs always this steep?”
“Since 1891. Let me help you.”
“I’ve been getting up and down out of a folding chair for eighty-six years, I expect I can manage a staircase.” She managed it, with Marla behind her and a stop at the landing, and at the top she stood in the doorway of the office and looked around at the three rooms and the dead press and the gold on the glass with an expression Marla could not read, and then said, “Bud Rawls’s desk,” and went and sat in the chair across from it, in her cardigan, with her pocketbook in her lap.
Marla sat down.
“I have not been to St. George,” Odell said, “since 1994. Buried my sister. I do not like town. Too many people walking around looking at the ground.” She opened the pocketbook. “I’m here because I’ve got something that’s not mine to hold anymore.”
She took out an envelope.
It was a plain white envelope from the Dollar General, unsealed, with nothing on the face, and it had been inside a man’s cardigan over an old woman’s heart for a year and had taken on the shape of her, a soft curve, and the paper had gone the color of tea like the car. Odell laid it on the desk between them.
“Unopened,” she said. “I told you I wouldn’t read it, and I didn’t. Didn’t need to.”
Marla looked at it. She did not pick it up.
“Bell rang Tuesday night,” Odell said. “You know that. One stroke. And nothing came under your door, and you’ve been looking at the floor two days wondering why.” She folded her hands on the pocketbook. “It didn’t ring for anybody this week, newspaper. It rang because somebody’s come for this. That’s a different kind of ringing. I’ve heard it twice before in my life, and both times I was the one holding the letter, and both times I drove it back to who wrote it, and both times they got what they wrote it for. That’s how it works. You write it to somebody. You give it to the keeper. And when the somebody’s ready, the bell says so, and the keeper gives it back, and you take it to them yourself.”
“Miss Odell.” Marla’s voice was not steady. “I wrote that letter to a daughter who was never born.”
“I know who you wrote it to.”
“She’s not—” Marla stopped. “There’s nobody to take it to.”
The old woman looked at her for a long time with the milky, steady eyes.
“Carl Kirk’s been telling you ‘not yet’ for a year,” she said. “Hasn’t he.”
Marla did not answer.
“Luther Kirk sat on my foundation stones and drank corn liquor and told me every one that came in his chair, from 1931 till he died. Ellis Kirk never came out, but I hear. Carl Kirk’s never said a word to me in his life, and I hear.” She reached across the desk, slowly, and put one finger on the envelope, and slid it an inch toward Marla. “It’s ‘yet,’ newspaper. That’s what the bell said Tuesday. It’s finally yet. Take your letter home. Take that little dress out of the drawer. And when the phone rings tonight, you go.”
She stood up, by stages, with a hand on the desk.
“How do you know about the dress?”
Odell Pinckney picked up her pocketbook.
“Honey,” she said, “I’ve had it on my chest for a year. A letter’s got a weight to it. I know what’s in it the same way I know what’s in that bell. I just don’t need to open it to find out.”
She went to the door. At the top of the stairs she stopped, and did not turn around, and said, “Two hundred years my people have kept that tower, and I’ve kept it since 1961, and I am not going to be here forever, and the county will have to decide what it does about that. But not this week.” And she went down the hundred-year-old stairs one at a time with her hand on the rail, and got into the Buick, and took four tries to get the wheel off the sidewalk, and drove east on Parler toward Dorchester Road and did not come to town again.
Marla sat with the envelope for an hour.
Then she put it in her purse and went home to the house on Minnesota Avenue with the pecan tree, in the middle of a Thursday, which she had not done in twenty years, and went into the bedroom and knelt at the dresser and opened the bottom drawer.
II. Two at Three-Twelve
She did not sleep. She had not expected to.
The dress lay across the foot of the bed in its tissue, unfolded, the yellowed cotton and the bright embroidered flowers and the small tear at the collar where, a year ago, a scrap had come away that she had never noticed missing until Carl Kirk had refused to show it to her. Beside it lay the envelope. She had not opened it either. She knew what it said. She had sat up in the dark in the kitchen chair she had pulled to the bedroom window, in her coat, with her shoes on, with her car keys in her coat pocket, like a woman waiting on a call from a hospital, and the house on Minnesota Avenue ticked and settled around her the way it had for thirty years, and the pecan tree moved outside the glass, and she watched the hands of the clock on the nightstand go past midnight, and one, and two.
At three o’clock the courthouse clock, four blocks east on Main, struck three, because it was three, because the hands had been right since June and the going train kept time to within three seconds a day. She heard it through the window. She had stopped hearing it years ago and had started hearing it again in the summer, the way the whole county had, a little, since Jo Herndon; people looked up now when it struck, and then looked down, but they looked up.
At three-twelve it struck again.
She was on her feet before the second stroke. In a year of listening, and in two nights of a horologist’s notebook, the clock had struck three at three-twelve every night without fail, three strokes for Carl Kirk unlocking his shop, and she knew the sound of that the way she knew her own front door. This was not that. This was two.
Two strokes at three-twelve.
Two, for a rainy afternoon in June of 2002 when the doctor with the tired eyes had come into the room at twenty past two and said the words she had never been able to put back in their proper order.
She stood in the bedroom with the dress and the envelope on the bed and her hand on the back of the chair and understood, with the whole of her body, that the clock across the county had just cut itself a notch, and that it was hers, and that it had not been there on Tuesday, and that whatever the clock did when it cut one, she was about to find out.
The phone rang.
She had it before the first ring finished. She did not say hello.
“You’d better come down,” said Carl Kirk.
She took the dress. She folded it the way Andrew had, carefully, as if it might break, and held it against her chest with the envelope under it, and went out to the car, and drove the four blocks to Main Street at three-fifteen in the morning with the headlights off, because she did not want to wake the street and because she had not, she realized, needed them; she could have driven it with her eyes closed. She parked beside the old bank, where she had parked a year ago to wait, and got out.
Kirk’s was lit from front to back.
The shade was up. Through the glass she could see Carl in his white coat beside the middle chair, and Ellis in the end chair in his cardigan, awake, with no coffee, which she had never seen, and she could see, in the middle chair under the long dark-edged mirror with the cape around her shoulders, a young woman with reddish-brown hair.
Marla stood on the sidewalk.
The girl was looking at herself in the mirror, and Carl was combing her hair out, slowly, the way he did, the way he had the first night with the little girl in the yellow dress, as though the hair were the most important thing in the world and there was nowhere else on earth he needed to be. The girl’s hands were in her lap under the cape. Her face in the mirror was narrow, with freckles across the nose, and the eyes were gray, and Marla had never seen it, had never once in twenty-four years let herself imagine it in any detail at all, because that way lay a thing she had not been able to afford, and she stood now on the sidewalk on Main Street in St. George, South Carolina, at a quarter past three in the morning with a dress in her arms, and saw it, and it was Andrew’s mouth.
It was Andrew’s mouth. She would have known it anywhere. The slight downturn at the corners that had made him look sad when he wasn’t and that she had teased him about for a year and a half, in the kitchen, before the world got serious.
She did not remember crossing to the door. Carl had it unlocked. He opened it for her and she came in, and the little bell above it rang, and the girl in the chair did not turn around, but her eyes in the mirror moved, and found Marla’s, and held them.
She did not blink.
“Evening,” the girl said, to the mirror, in a voice that was gentle and a little hesitant and that Marla had heard once, in Carl’s telling, and never with her own ears. “Mr. Kirk said somebody might come.”
Marla could not speak.
“Have a seat, Marla,” Carl said, quietly, not looking up from the comb. “Over there, where you sat the first night. That’s where the folks who love them sit.” He drew the comb down once more and set it on the counter. “She don’t know you. Not the way you’d want. They don’t come with that. But she knows there’s somebody.” He picked up his scissors. “Go on and sit.”
Marla sat down in the wooden chair against the wall with the dress in her lap.
From the end chair, Ellis Kirk said, very softly, so that only she could hear, “It’s all right, honey. Just sit. That’s most of it.”
III. The Middle Chair
Carl cut.
The scissors made their small regular sound. Outside it had begun to rain, lightly, against the glass, the way it had the first time, and the old clock ticked above the register, and the three of them who were here sat in the lit shop with the one who was almost, and for a while nobody said anything, and Marla found that Ellis had been right, that the sitting was most of it, that she could have sat in that wooden chair with the dress in her lap and watched Carl Kirk cut that hair until the sun came up and asked for nothing else.
But the girl was looking at her in the mirror.
“You’ve got something,” the girl said.
Marla looked down at the dress.
“Yes.”
“Is it mine?”
Marla’s throat closed. She nodded.
“Can I see?”
Marla stood up. Her legs did it; she did not tell them to. She walked to the middle chair, not to it, beside it, to the counter where the scissors lay and the ledger sat closed, and she unfolded the tissue and laid the dress on the counter under the light. The little white cotton. The yellow flowers around the collar, still bright. The tear where the scrap had come away. She stepped back.
The girl looked at it in the mirror for a long moment. Then she turned her head, under Carl’s hands, and looked at it directly, and Carl stopped cutting and stood with the scissors raised and let her look.
“That’s the one,” the girl said.
“The one?”
“I had a piece of it.” She looked back at the mirror. “I don’t know where I got it. I gave it to Mr. Kirk. He put it in his book.” Her eyes found Marla’s again in the glass. “It came from that collar, didn’t it. That’s where it’s torn.”
“Yes.”
“It’d have fit me,” the girl said, wondering, “when I was little.”
Marla put her hand on the counter.
“I bought it,” she said, “the afternoon I found out. At the rummage sale at First Baptist. It was a dollar. It was handmade, somebody’s grandmother had done the flowers, and I thought—” Her voice went. She waited for it to come back. “I thought it was the prettiest thing I’d ever seen, and I thought, that’s hers. I didn’t know you were a girl. We didn’t know. Your daddy wanted a boy. But I bought it anyway and I brought it home and I hid it in the dresser so he wouldn’t tease me, and he found it in a week, because he was nosy, and he held it up against his chest and said—”
“What?”
“He said any daughter of ours was going to be trouble.”
The girl smiled. It was Andrew’s mouth, smiling. Marla had not seen Andrew’s mouth smile since 2019.
“Was I?”
“I don’t know,” Marla said. “You never—” She stopped, because she had been about to say got here, and could not. “I think you would have been.”
“Good,” said the girl. “I’d like to have been trouble.”
Carl, very quietly, began to cut again.
The girl sat and let him. The rain came down a little harder. Ellis, in the end chair, had folded his hands on his cardigan and was watching with an expression Marla could not read and did not try to.
“Mr. Kirk,” the girl said after a while, to the mirror, “last year I asked you something. When I came the first time.”
“I remember.”
“You said you expected she did.” The girl looked at Marla in the glass. “I’d like to ask her. If that’s allowed.”
“It’s allowed,” said Carl.
The girl was quiet a moment, with her hands under the cape.
“Did you know?” she said. “That I was—” She searched for it. “That I was almost. That there was somebody. Before. Did you know, or did it just happen and then there was nothing?”
And Marla Jenkins, who had put three hundred letters in a drawer and never written one of her own until a year ago, and had written that one to an old woman in a folding chair because there had been nobody else, and had been told by that old woman on Thursday morning that it was finally yet, took the envelope out from under the folded tissue on the counter and did not open it, because she did not need to, she had written it, she knew what it said, and she said it.
“I knew,” she said. “I knew from the afternoon I found out. I knew you in the dress and I knew you in the yellow paint we never put on the nursery walls and I knew you in the swing he never hung under the pecan tree. I argued with him about your name for a month. He liked Ruth. I liked June, and he said you can’t name a girl after the month she’s due in, that’s a Southern thing to do, and I said we’re in South Carolina, Andrew, what else are we going to do. I knew you for eleven weeks and three days. And then there was a rainy afternoon and a doctor and I came home and your daddy folded that dress so careful, like it might break, and put it in the drawer, and we didn’t say your name again. Not because we didn’t know. Because we did.” She was crying and did not wipe it. “I have known you every day for twenty-four years. Every little girl in the produce aisle. Every mother arguing with a daughter outside the high school. I have known you so hard I couldn’t look at it, and I put you in a drawer with the dress, and I am so sorry, honey. I am so sorry I made you come all this way to ask.”
The girl did not say anything for a long time. Carl had stopped cutting. The rain ran down the glass.
“June,” the girl said at last.
“If you want it.”
“I never had one.” She looked at herself in the mirror, the reddish-brown hair that Carl had cut, the gray eyes, the freckles. “June,” she said again, trying it. “June Jenkins.” And then, with Andrew’s mouth, “That is a Southern thing to do.”
“I told him that.”
“You were right.”
Carl brushed the hair from her shoulders. He unsnapped the cape and folded it, and took the hand mirror from its hook and held it up behind her head, and she looked, and said it was beautiful, as she had the first time, and he said, “No charge,” and she said, “You never charge,” and he said that was so.
She stood up out of the middle chair.
She was not tall. She stood about Marla’s height, in the plain blue blouse, with the small cloth bag over her shoulder, and she went to the counter where the dress lay under the light and stood looking down at it, and then she looked at Marla, and Marla understood that she was asking.
“It’s yours,” Marla said. “It was always yours. Take it.”
The girl picked it up. She held it a moment against her chest, the way Andrew had, in the kitchen, in 2002, with the little collar under her chin and the yellow flowers bright against the blue blouse, and then she folded it, carefully, the way he had, as if it might break, and put it in the cloth bag.
She did not touch Marla. Marla had known she would not; Carl had told her a year ago what they could do and could not, and she had come understanding that there would be no embrace, no hand on her face, nothing the almost-people were able to give. But the girl stopped in front of her on the way to the back door, close, closer than she had been to anyone in twenty-four years, and looked at her with the gray eyes, and said:
“You’ve got his mouth, you know. When you cry.”
“I’ve got—”
“He must’ve had it from you. Or you from him.” She smiled. “I’ve got it from both of you, I expect. That’s how it works.”
She went to the back door. Carl opened it for her. The rain came in, and the smell of the alley, wet brick and pecan leaves, and she stepped into the doorway and stopped with the bag over her shoulder, and did not look back, and said, to the dark:
“Mama. I was trouble. I’d have been so much trouble.”
And went through, and was gone.
Carl closed the door. He stood with his hand on it for a moment. Then he turned around and looked at Marla, who had not moved, who was standing by the counter where the dress had been with her hand over her mouth, and he said the only thing a barber can say, and said it the way he had said it to a hundred men in that chair who had told him a thing they had never told anyone.
“Well,” he said. “There you go.”
IV. Emily
It was Ellis who saw her first, because Ellis was looking at the mirror, as he had been all night, and had been, Marla understood later, waiting.
“Carl,” he said.
Carl turned.
In the long glass, beside the empty middle chair, in the place where a year ago she had stood watching the back door with her dark eyes wide, was the little girl in the yellow Sunday dress. The lace collar. The white socks folded at the ankle. The polished black shoes. Her dark hair fell nearly to her waist, and she stood with her hands folded in front of her the way a child stands who has been told to, and she was not looking at the back door this time. She was looking at the end chair.
She was looking at Ellis.
Marla turned around. There was nobody beside the middle chair. There was only the chair, with the crack in its headrest, and the cape folded on the counter, and the scissors. But in the mirror the girl stood there as plain as the three of them, and did not blink, and Ellis Kirk, ninety-five years old, in his cardigan, with no coffee, sat looking back at her with his hands folded on his lap and his face, for the first time in the year Marla had known him, completely undefended.
“Daddy,” Carl said quietly.
“I know, son.”
“She’s never done that. She’s never looked at anybody. She looks at the door.”
“I know she does.” Ellis did not take his eyes from the glass. “She’s been looking at the door for sixty-eight years because she was waiting on me to come through it. I never did. I’d sit right here and watch her come and go and I’d not say a word, and she’d look at the door, and I’d look at my coffee.” His voice did not break. It had gone past breaking a long time ago, somewhere Marla could not see. “I expect she’s done waiting.”
Carl stood very still beside the middle chair.
“Daddy. Who is she?”
Ellis Kirk looked at the little girl in the mirror a while longer. Then he looked at his son.
“Your mama and I lost a baby in 1958,” he said. “September. Before you. A girl. Vera carried her eight months and then one morning she didn’t move, and we went to the hospital in Walterboro, and that was that. We’d named her. Emily, for Vera’s mother. We had a dress made for the christening, yellow, your grandmother sewed it, and Vera put it in a drawer and we never spoke her name in the house again, because that’s how it was done, and because I couldn’t.” He looked back at the glass. “That winter I started seeing them. The ones that didn’t get here. Luther had told me about his, when I was a boy, and I’d thought it was the liquor. And then one night in January of ‘fifty-nine I was closing up and I turned around and there was a little girl in that chair in a yellow dress, three years old, with Vera’s eyes, and I knew her. I knew her like you’d know your own hand.”
Carl had not moved.
“I cut her hair,” Ellis said. “I didn’t know what else to do. I cut it and she looked at the door and went out, and I sat down on the floor right there where you’re standing and I did not get up till morning. And she came back. Every few weeks. Then every month. Then once a year, about September. And I cut her hair every time and I never said her name, not once, in sixty-eight years, because I was a coward, son, and because I thought if I said it she’d stop coming, and I’d rather have her look at the door for the rest of my life than not have her at all.”
“Daddy.”
“You were born in ‘sixty-two. You were a loud, ugly baby and I loved you more than my life, and I never told you that you’d had a sister, because Vera asked me not to, and because by the time Vera was gone I’d been not telling it so long I didn’t know how.” Ellis’s hands tightened on each other. “And then you took over the shop and the chair and the ledger, and you started seeing them too, and she kept coming, and you’d cut her hair and ask me who she was, and I’d say I didn’t know. Lord forgive me. Forty years I let you cut your own sister’s hair and told you I didn’t know.”
The rain had nearly stopped. The old clock ticked. In the mirror the little girl had not moved, and had not blinked, and was looking at her father.
Carl Kirk turned and looked at the empty place beside the middle chair, and then at the mirror, and then at the old man in the end chair, and his face did a thing Marla had never seen it do in a year of watching it, and would not describe afterward, because it was not hers.
“All these years,” he said. “That’s why you’d never let me show her picture to anybody. That’s why the chair’s empty after dark.”
“That’s why.”
“That’s why you said some people don’t get the years they deserve.”
“I was talking about her,” Ellis said. “I was always talking about her.”
He put his hands on the arms of the end chair and pushed, and Carl was across the shop before Marla could rise, and got an arm under him, and the old man came up out of the chair by stages, the way Odell Pinckney had come up the stairs, and stood, in his cardigan and his slippers, holding his son’s arm, and turned to face the mirror.
“Sugar,” he said.
The little girl’s hands came unfolded.
“Emily. It’s Daddy.” His voice shook now. It had found a place to break after all. “I’m sorry I didn’t come through the door. I was scared of you, honey. Isn’t that the most foolish thing you ever heard? A grown man scared of a little bitty girl in a yellow dress. I should’ve sat down on the floor with you sixty-eight years ago and I didn’t, and I’m sorry, and your mama would’ve wore me out for it.”
The girl in the mirror looked at him.
Then, for the first time in sixty-eight years, she looked away from the door, and from him, and down, at the floor of the shop, at the black-and-white tile worn smooth by three generations of leather shoes, and Marla, following her eyes in the glass, saw what she was looking at: the place beside the middle chair where a young barber had sat down on the floor in January of 1959 and not gotten up till morning.
Ellis saw it too.
“Carl,” he said. “Help me down.”
“Daddy, you can’t—”
“Help me down, son.”
Carl helped him down. It took a while. The old man’s knees did not want it and his hands shook on his son’s arm, and in the end Carl simply lifted him, the way you lift a child, and set him on the tile with his back against the base of the middle chair, and stood up, and stepped back.
Ellis Kirk sat on the floor of his barbershop in his cardigan with his slippers out in front of him. He looked at the mirror. In it, the little girl had come across the shop, and was standing in front of him, close, and as he watched she gathered the yellow dress under her and sat down on the tile beside him, with her white socks and her polished shoes, and folded her hands in her lap, and leaned, very slightly, until her shoulder in the glass was against his.
He could not feel it. Marla knew he could not. Carl had said a year ago what they could do and could not. But Ellis Kirk sat on the floor with his daughter against his shoulder in the mirror and closed his eyes, and his face, which had been arranged for sixty-eight years around the expectation that somebody was about to say something foolish, came apart, and he said, “There she is. There’s Daddy’s girl,” and sat.
They sat a long time.
Marla did not watch all of it. She went and stood by the front window with her back to the room and looked out at Main Street in the rain, at the dark courthouse and the hardware store that would never close and the old bank with its steel door that had been painted again since Lila Mercer, and she let a father and a daughter have the floor of a barbershop at four in the morning without a newspaperwoman watching, because she had learned, in a year, when a thing was hers to see and when it was not. She heard Ellis talking, low. She heard him say Vera’s name. She heard him say something about the christening dress and the drawer, and something about a cowlick, and something that made Carl, standing by the counter, put his hand over his eyes.
When she turned around the mirror showed only Ellis, on the tile, alone, with his eyes closed and his head back against the red leather of the chair, and he was asleep.
Carl lifted him back into the end chair and covered him with the cape.
“She’s gone?” Marla said.
“She’s gone.” Carl stood looking at the mirror. “I don’t believe she’ll be back.”
“How do you know?”
“She didn’t look at the door,” he said. “Going out. She looked at him.” He went to the counter and picked up the ledger. “Sixty-eight years. That’s what the door was for. And he finally came through it.” He opened the book and uncapped a pen, and stood looking at the page, and then he said, without turning around, in a voice that had gone very strange, “I had a sister, Marla.”
“Yes.”
“I cut her hair forty years.”
“I know, Carl.”
“She had my mama’s eyes.” He put the pen to the page, and stopped. “I never once looked.”
V. Same As Always
The rain quit a little before six, and the sky over the courthouse went from black to the gray of a barber’s apron, and Marla and Carl sat in the lit shop with the old man asleep under the cape and did not talk, because there was nothing left that needed saying and both of them knew it. Carl made coffee. He brought her a cup. He stood at the front window with his own and looked up Main at the tower, and she sat in the wooden chair where the folks who love them sit, and after a while she realized she was waiting for something, and realized what.
At six twenty-two the courthouse clock struck once.
One stroke. Low, and a little late, the way Jo Herndon had described it from the clock-room floor. It was not an hour. The hands said twenty past six and the sun was not up, and the stroke hung over the wet street and faded, and Carl Kirk at the window did not turn around, but Marla saw his shoulders come down.
“That’s one,” he said.
At six twenty-four it struck again. Once.
“That’s two.”
“Two notches,” Marla said.
“Two.” He drank his coffee. “One for you. One for him.” He nodded at the end chair, where Ellis slept with his mouth open and his hands folded on the cape, ninety-five years old, lighter by one daughter. “I don’t believe it’s ever cut two in a night before. Jo’ll want to know. You ought to write her.”
“I will.”
“Thirty-one,” Carl said, to the window. “That’s a lot of notches for a county this size.”
“It’s been a year.”
“It has.”
He finished the coffee and set the cup on the counter and opened the ledger. He had not written in it since the girl left; he had stood with the pen over the page and then closed it and gone to see to his father. Now he uncapped the pen again and wrote, in the same hand that had written four hundred names, slowly, and Marla got up and came and stood beside him and read it as he wrote.
Oct. 9. 3:12. Young woman, about twenty-four. Reddish-brown hair, gray eyes, blue blouse. Second visit. Mother present.
He stopped. Then he wrote:
Name: June Jenkins. Took the dress.
He looked at that for a moment. Then he turned back one page, and then another, and then a great many, through the Benjamins and the Sarah Anns and the glitter and the applesauce, past Jenny and Thomas and Joseph, back and back through forty years of his own hand and twenty-eight of his father’s, until he came to a page near the front where the ink had gone brown and the writing was a young man’s, careful, in a hand Marla had never seen, and read:
Jan. 1959. Little girl, 3 or so. Yellow dress. Dark hair. Looks at the door.
There was no name beside it. There had never been a name beside it. Carl Kirk stood looking at the line his father had written sixty-eight years ago and never finished, and then he put the pen to the brown page and, beside it, in black, wrote:
Emily Kirk. My sister. Came for her daddy. Oct. 9.
He closed the book.
“That’s the first name I ever put in his part,” he said.
“I know.”
“He’ll fuss.”
“Let him.”
The first customer came at seven. The little bell rang, and Mr. Barnes put his head in and said, “Morning, Carl, you got time for a quick trim?” and looked at Ellis asleep under the cape in the end chair and at Marla Jenkins with a coffee cup at seven in the morning and at the middle chair with a few strands of reddish-brown hair still on the red leather, and took all of it in, and decided, in the way of men in that county, not to notice.
“Sure do, Mr. Barnes,” Carl said. “Have a seat.”
“Same as always.”
“Same as always.”
Marla went out into the morning.
Main Street was waking. The delivery truck idled at the diner. Two old men stood outside the hardware store arguing about the rain. A woman hurried toward the courthouse with a coffee and a stack of papers under her arm, and looked up, as everybody did now, at the clock, which said eight minutes past seven, which it was. Marla stood on the sidewalk in front of Kirk’s and looked at the county going about its ordinary life in the wet light, unaware that in the middle of the night two people who had never existed had come to the barbershop, and that one of them had gone out the back door with a dress and a name and the other had sat on the floor with her father, and she thought about all the things in the past year she had seen and put in a drawer.
Then she walked up to Parler Avenue, and climbed the stairs, and unlocked the door with the gold letters, and sat down at Bud Rawls’s desk, and did not open the bottom drawer.
She opened the top one. She took out a legal pad.
She sat for a while with the pen over it, and then she wrote across the top, in capitals, the way the old paper had set its headlines in Cheltenham before Bud’s time, the way she had seen it on the May 4, 1961 front page about two seniors lost in the Edisto, and the way she had never once, in twenty years, let herself write a thing that could not be verified:
COUNTY LINE CONFIDENTIAL
And under it:
Dispatch: The Barbershop on Main Street
And under that, after a long time, because she had to decide how a thing like this began, and because the only true way she could find to begin it was the way it had begun:
There was a time in the county when a man could learn more about his neighbors in twenty minutes at Kirk’s Barbershop than he could in twenty years of attending the same church.
She wrote until noon. She did not stop to decide what was the newspaper’s business. She had decided. The drawer in Bud Rawls’s desk would stay locked, and the letters in it would stay unread, because those were other people’s and had been given in trust; but what she had seen with her own eyes in a year, in a barbershop and a clock tower and a grits tent and on a sandbar and a swamp boardwalk, was hers, and she was the editor of The County Line, and it was Thursday, and the paper came out Thursdays.
She did not run it below the fold. She did not run it in the paper at all. The paper was for who had died and who had married and who had been arrested on 78. She ran it the way a county keeps the things it has agreed not to make a fuss about: on its own page, under its own masthead, where anybody who wanted to could find it, and anybody who didn’t could pass the butter and look at the ceiling.
You are reading it now.
That is the whole of the first year. Carl Kirk cuts hair on Main Street and opens the shop at 3:12, and Ellis sits in the end chair and criticizes his technique and has, since October, taken to saying “your sister” about once a day, in passing, to see Carl flinch. Tobias Quinn goes down to the landing when the river is high and looks at it, and comes back, and the clock has not yet cut his notch, but he has quit standing at the window. Odell Pinckney is in her folding chair against the tower, and has told the county nothing further about what it will do when she is not, and the county has not asked. Pam Gerlach is treasurer of the garden club. Lila Mercer is in the sixth grade. Jo Herndon’s watch runs. The clock in the courthouse says the right time and strikes whatever hour it strikes, and there are thirty-one notches on the count wheel, two of them bright, and the Edisto is low this fall, and keeps its own.
And on the counter in Kirk’s, beneath a window overlooking Main Street, the old leather ledger lies closed, with four hundred names in it, and some with no names at all, and two new lines in two hands on two pages a lifetime apart, and the barber keeps every one of them, because somebody has to remember the ones who were almost here.
I am Marla Jenkins. I have been editor of this paper for twenty years. I have a drawer.
This is what was in it.
End of Dispatch.
End of the First Year.