Chapter 13 of 20For All Time

The vote to sell the Historical Society building and the ground beneath it was set for Monday, October 14th. Harriet Ainsworth had one document that might stop it, and it was written in a hand so thin and faded that Bea Chandler had not gotten through a single page of it.

Wednesday evening, Martha Jenkins stood at the coat rack in the clerk's office with her scarf already wound to her chin. "You're the last one in the building," she said. "Marcus left at four and took the whole floor with him."

"I'm going across to the Society." Harriet closed the ledger she had not been reading and squared it on the corner of her desk. "Bea has the diary under the lamp."

"The one she can't read."

"The same."

Martha worked her gloves on one at a time, which was how Harriet knew there was something else, because Martha Jenkins had never in her life put on a glove slowly. "David Sterling stopped at my desk this afternoon and asked me what the warning said."

"He voted to post it. He knows what it says."

"He asked me." Martha got the second glove on. "I told him I only type, I don't read."

"Thank you, Martha."

"Don't thank me. Go out the side door. The front sticks when it's cold, and it's going to be cold."

The walk took her along the edge of the green, past the Founder's Day banners still knotted to the light poles from September, their corners grayed and flapping. Frost was in the forecast again, and the maples along Main had gone past color into bare.

The Historical Society sat a quarter mile from the Town Hall: a former schoolhouse with tall windows, a blackboard nobody was allowed to paint over, and a cast-iron stove Bea still fed on cold evenings. She had the desk lamp angled down over a sheet of glass, a magnifying glass in her right hand, and a pencil behind her ear. Two mugs of tea had gone cold on the windowsill beside a plate of Vermont cheddar and a sleeve of saltines.

"Put your chair on the north side," Bea said. "The glare comes off the glass at this hour."

Harriet sat and opened her spiral notebook. "Where did you leave off?"

"Where I stopped being able to see." Bea slid the small book across the desk. "It's a pocket diary. He carried it in a coat."

"It's smaller than I pictured."

"They always are. Now." She laid the magnifying glass flat on the first page. "We go letter by letter. When I say a word, you write it, and if you argue with me about a word we lose the evening."

They worked through the early pages without talking. The script ran uphill in places; the long esses stood up like fence posts; and on half the leaves the ink had bled through from the other side, so that every line arrived doubled and ghosted and Bea had to tilt the glass and the lamp together until the true word separated itself from the false one.

"The ess again," Bea said.

"The long ess."

"Call it what you like, dear. It looks like an eff to me."

"It's an ess. The tail doesn't cross."

They went on. The radiator knocked twice and settled. Main Street emptied. Somewhere past the green a truck with a bad muffler headed toward the college road and did not come back, and the only sounds left in the building were the low buzz of the lamp and the scratch of Harriet's pencil.

"Here." Bea stopped. "He wrote this part larger."

"Read it."

"...my legacy, for all time."

Harriet wrote it down and looked at it. "Nothing above it?"

"A blot. And the line beneath is worse."

They moved on. Halfway through the book the pages were water-stained and the writing shrank to a crawl, and Bea held the glass steady with one hand while she turned a corner of paper with the other.

"Try this one. Lower down, where the stain starts."

"...the safeguard," Bea read, "...is rooted in the law itself, and no man's convenience may loosen it."

"Write that exactly the way you said it."

"I am writing it exactly. Stop hovering."

At the back of the room the wall phone rang.

"Historical Society."

"It's Sam. You two still at it?"

"We're still at it."

"You eat anything?"

"Not yet."

Across the table Bea turned a page and smoothed it flat.

"Then I'm bringing over a couple of turkey clubs. Doreen's charging nine dollars apiece and I'm paying, so don't start."

"Sam."

"What."

Harriet turned her back to the table and lowered her voice. "Frank still won't talk?"

"Not to me either. But he left his boring logs on the corner of his desk where any fool could read them."

"Meaning he wanted them read."

"Meaning I read them."

"Thorne's office called the store this morning, wanted to know if I stock survey stakes."

A chair creaked on Sam's end, and a door closed somewhere past him.

"Do you?"

"We do not."

Harriet hung up and went back to the table, and Bea had found the next one already, a line squeezed into the margin at the bottom of a page in a smaller hand, as though the founder had come back to it later and had run out of room.

"He added this one after."

"...my duty to my line, and my line's duty to this place."

"Line."

"His family, dear. His people."

"I know what line means. I'm thinking about the grant."

Bea looked up over the rim of the glass. "...lest the line be broken."

"Yes."

The sandwiches came and they ate standing at the table, brushing cracker crumbs off the felt mat, and Bea talked the whole time about the winter of '82 and a school register that had gone missing out of the old academy, until Harriet turned a page and she stopped talking.

Near the back of the book, past a run of blank leaves, the writing changed: larger, slower, every letter sitting straight on the line, as if he had stopped walking and found a desk.

"He means this part," Bea said. "Look how he pressed the pen."

"Go slowly."

"One word at a time." She lowered the glass, nudged it, and read: "...and let this stand as a poison pill for any man of commerce who mistakes my gift for an asset."

The lamp buzzed. Bea set the glass down on the felt mat, and neither of them said anything for a while.

"What's a poison pill, dear?"

"It's a term from business," Harriet said. "It's a pill a company swallows so that whoever takes it over gets poisoned along with it."

"In his own hand."

"With a lawyer sitting beside him, I expect."

Harriet wrote the sentence out, all of it, in the same neat clerk's hand she used for every public record that crossed her desk, and she looked at the founder's words sitting there in her own ordinary ink, on a spiral page, under a lamp, in a building he had not lived to see.

She closed the notebook over the transcribed lines and held it flat against her palm.

"Bea," she said. "Who did he think would come for it?"

Bea considered the question longer than Harriet expected her to. "Somebody he was angry at," she said at last. "You don't write a thing like that for a friend."