Chapter 27
Nothing happens.
I want to be clear about that, because I spent three weeks braced for something and there was nothing there to be braced for.
On the twenty-ninth of January a website changed.
On the thirtieth a man came into my shop and ordered a coffee.
And then Black Harbor went back to being Black Harbor with a speed I found frankly insulting.
The Veil stays until the middle of March.
Ben Carter films the lighthouse eleven separate times because the light keeps not being right, and shoots the breakwater in a snow squall, and gets, on a Tuesday, four minutes of Wendell Marr on the subject of his grandfather’s ditty bag that Rowan later tells me is the best thing in the whole season.
Lucy helps him with some of it. Quite a lot of it, actually.
She says this is because Ben understands lenses and doesn’t make her explain why film is better for some things.
I say absolutely nothing about the fact that he has started carrying things for her that she is perfectly capable of carrying herself. I am learning restraint.
Episode four, when it eventually airs, is about the dead.
I don’t hear it until October, and neither does anybody else, but the beginning of it happens in February, because Mabel Libby comes into the Salt & Sage on a Wednesday morning with a folder.
“I have a proposal,” she says.
“No.”
“You don’t know what it is.”
“I know you.”
“Then you know I have prepared.”
She puts the folder on the counter.
The week before, Julian had taken me into the hidden room at Blackthorn House and shown me three shelves he’d cleared. Not the journals he’d originally removed and then returned.
There are whole stretches of Julian’s life that happened somewhere else.
Years in Nova Scotia and Lisbon and Bristol and a dozen other cities.
Decades when the only Black Harbor news he knew came in letters or newspapers, if it came at all.
There are other periods when he was here and wrote almost every day, followed by years when he wrote almost nothing because apparently a man can live four hundred years and still go through phases.
But the hidden room contains more than his journals.
There are account books from businesses that haven’t existed in a century.
Shipping manifests. Letters. Property records.
Old newspapers folded into packets. Church notices.
A cooper’s ledger from 1823. A box of correspondence from a family named Adams that Julian bought at an estate sale in 1908 because, according to him, “they were going to burn it.”
There are things he saved because they mattered to him and things he saved because nobody else seemed to think they mattered at all. And now he wants to give some of them away.
“Not the personal journals,” he’d said when he showed me the shelves. “Not yet. There are people in them who still have grandchildren here.”
“Okay.”
“And there are things that are mine.”
“Julian.”
“I’m explaining.”
“I know. I’m agreeing.”
That had stopped him. He’d looked at the shelves again.
“I have spent a very long time assuming that if I didn’t keep something, it would be lost.”
“Sometimes you were right.”
“Yes.” He’d touched one finger to the spine of a small brown book I knew immediately. The one he’d given me at Christmas. The one from 1809.
Mercy Rood.
“You gave me that one.”
“I know.”
“I decided to keep it here, but it’s not going anywhere else unless I say so.”
“I don’t want it to go anywhere else.”
I waited, but his hand stayed on the book.
“She should not exist only in my handwriting,” he said.
And that was how it started.
Not with one miraculous uninterrupted record of Black Harbor, because Julian wasn’t here for all of it and nobody remembers everything even when they live for centuries.
It started with a small collection of things that survived because one man kept carrying them from house to house and name to name, and with the realization that keeping them safe does not necessarily mean keeping them to himself.
Mabel’s proposal is that the Historical Society will accept selected material from an anonymous private collection.
“Anonymous,” I repeat.
“Entirely.”
“And you’re not going to ask where it came from.”
“I know where it came from.”
“Mabel.”
“I have drawn a distinction between knowing and asking that has served me very well since 2002.”
She opens the folder. She has a system. Of course she has a system.
The first material comes down the hill four folders at a time in a canvas bag, and the accession record says ANONYMOUS DONATION, PRIVATE COLLECTION.
Some of it Mabel already has copies of. Some of it fills gaps.
Some of it contradicts things she has believed for twenty-four years and makes her furious for an afternoon.
And then she starts wanting corrections.
There is a man on that hill who was standing on Water Street when some of the contents of her building happened, and Mabel Libby has decided that she is going to have some of it.
She designs a mechanism that permits her to do this without either of them ever saying a true thing out loud. The mechanism is a list of questions.
She writes them out. I carry them up the hill in my van with the soup.
Julian writes the answers in the margins in that long slanted hand and I carry them back down.
Mabel reads them at her reading table with her glasses on and says things like, “Well. Well, that settles the Peavey business,” and files the sheet of paper in a folder marked CORRESPONDENCE—MISC.
“He’s never seen the exhibit,” I say.
“He is not required to.”
“Mabel, he told you what color the north shed was.”
“A gentleman corresponded with me about the north shed,” Mabel says primly, “and I have accepted his correction on the strength of his evident expertise. If anybody asks me who he is I shall say that I correspond with a great many people, which I do, including a man in Denmark about a hinge.”
“That’s not going to hold up.”
“It has held up since February,” says Mabel, “and I have every intention of dying with it intact.”
One Thursday she sends up a photocopy of the Historical Society’s account of the Great Fire of 1847.
The question in the margin says: Pruitt cooperage?
Julian looks at it for a long moment, then he writes:
Chandlery. The fire marshal was correct.
He stops. Then underneath that, in smaller writing, he adds:
Eli Mercer, nine years old, died behind the east row. He was the chandler’s boy. I helped carry water for six hours. If the Society has no record of him, it should.
My eyes sting, but I don’t say anything.
“I remember all of them,” he says as he puts the pen down.
“I know.”
“No.” He looks at the paper. “I don’t think you do. I remember them because for a very long time there was no one else left who did. I mistook that for a duty that could not be shared.”
I look down at Eli Mercer’s name.
“What changed?”
Julian considers that.
“I stayed in the room.”
So Eli Mercer goes down the hill, and Mabel doesn’t ask who remembered him.
She finds the fire marshal’s report she dug out in 1994, a church burial entry nobody had connected to the fire, and a newspaper notice from the following week.
By the end of February Eli Mercer exists in three places instead of one.
Mabel is unbearable about the Pruitts for days.
Theo Goodwin makes no adjustment of any kind.
None. On the sixth of February, Theo asks Julian to look at the cellar hatch.
On the twentieth it’s the ice on the north side of the building.
In March there is an entire Sunday afternoon during which the two of them take the pump apart on the floor of the back room, and Theo swears at it, and Julian does not.
At the end of it Theo says, “Well, there you are,” and gives Julian a beer he does not drink.
Half an hour later, he takes it back and pours it away without comment, which is the closest thing to a ceremony that has ever occurred in that building.
Only once does Theo do something else. It’s a Thursday in late February and they are looking at a beam in the ceiling of the front room that has been sagging in a leisurely way for as long as I can remember.
“That’s not original,” Julian says.
“How d’you know?”
Julian says, “It is not original.”
Theo Goodwin looks at the beam, and then at him, and then back at the beam.
“Huh,” he says. “All right. What was it, then?”
That’s all. That is the entire adjustment.
Julian tells him there was a fire in 1911 and the original beam was replaced afterwards. Theo says his grandfather never mentioned any fire. Julian says his grandfather wasn’t born then, and Theo says fair enough, and then they argue about the beam for twenty minutes.
I think that’s when I finally understand what I kept expecting to happen and what actually happened instead.
Julian spent so long assuming that being known meant being hunted that he never really considered the other thing that can happen when people know something strange about you. They can keep needing the pump fixed.
Harriet Coyne is a different problem. Harriet has questions, and Harriet has decided that I am the correct channel for them, and I have told her four times that I am not going to do it.
“It’s a simple question, Penny.”
“It is not a simple question.”
“I only want to know whether he sleeps in the ground. Because Eunice says the ground and I say a bed, and there’s five dollars on it.”
“Then it’s a bet, Harriet, it’s not a question—”
“It can be both,” says Harriet Coyne, with dignity.
I make a rule and I hold to it. I am not a translator.
I am not the front desk for four hundred years of frequently asked questions.
If people want to know things about Julian, they can ask Julian, who is right there, at the end of my counter, being asked things by everyone in town about roofing and shipwrecks and once, memorably, by Doris about a good wool sock pattern.