the Clarion's back room clanking like a small iron argument and Willa
standing at the stone with the affidavits in order — she was not allowed to
touch the type — reading names aloud while Nora's boy fed the sheets.
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Nora had been widowed by the war and by the newspaper both, in that order,
and had kept the Clarion alive eleven years on job printing, legal notices, and
the iron principle that a record, once printed, could not be quietly altered in a
drawer. What she printed was not an accusation. She had been a lawyer's
daughter and she printed like one: the affidavits' plain facts, in columns,
names and dates and section numbers, the true corner and the moved corner
set out side by side like two rails of a track a reader could walk down
himself. The headline was the driest thing in Kansas that week —
SETTLEMENT STATEMENTS — and beneath it the township read its own
life typeset: Johann Weiss and the spring at Miller's Ford. Alonzo Pryce and
the night of the big wind. Sarah Hennessey, not abandoned, right here. And
at the foot of the second column, in the same sober type as everything else,
which was Nora's genius and her malice both: a relinquishment filed the
twenty-third of October, 1876, in the name of a settler deceased the ninth of
that month, his death being a matter of county record.
Edwin Harrow's advertisement money — a full column of it, the Clarion's
largest single patron — vanished from the paper the same week, withdrawn
by a note on company paper so courteous it might have been a valentine.
Nora printed the Friday issue with the column left empty, a white wound
down the page, and at its head, in the smallest type the case held, a notice:
THIS SPACE IS AVAILABLE. ENQUIRE AT THE OFFICE. "He thinks a
newspaper is a horse," she said, showing Willa the proof sheet. "Starve it and
it stops. A newspaper is a well, Edwin. Everybody in this township drinks
out of it, and now everybody can see what he tried to do to the bucket." She
inked her fingers thoughtfully. "Circulation's up."
The schoolhouse burned the night after the issue came out.
It stood empty — that was established by morning from three farmsteads,
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and by God's mercy, for Willa had taught in it six years and the benches
would have told a worse story had the fire come at noon. It was seen first at
two in the morning by Marta Weiss, rising for a sick calf, who saw the glow
over the rise and knew it for a building and not a barn by its height. By the
time the township had gathered in the road — men with buckets already
understanding the buckets were for the grass and not the roof, women in
shawls, children silent in the way of country children at a disaster — the roof
was a tent of flame and the walls were falling inward one by one, politely,
like a house sitting down.
Willa stood in the road with her coat over her nightdress and her hair loose,
and she did not weep, because the part of her that would have wept was busy
inventorying. The benches her father had planed. The globe with the crack at
the equator. The spellers, the maps, the blackboard slate. And in the south
wall, behind the third stud from the stove, in a cavity she had lined with a
page of the Clarion and sealed with her own hands in March: her father's
second notebook. The western sections entire. Two more moved corners no
affidavit had yet touched. Her father's marginal notes in pencil — soft
graphite thoughts he'd never inked, doubts and names and a mileage, the
thinking of the man as distinct from his conclusions. All of it going up in the
prettiest light the township had ever made, sparks climbing into a windless
sky like the opposite of stars.
She had divided the record in March for safety, the way a prudent
householder divides seed corn between two barns, and standing in the road
she did the arithmetic of the division coldly, the way Rube would have
wanted it done. What burned was the west. What lived was the book in her
coat's oilskin, against her heart — the contested sections at issue in the
hearing, the entries around Miller's Ford, the three dead men's filings and her
46
father's hand under all of it. The case survived. Let that be written plainly,
because it was the truth and she would need the truth of it later: the case
survived, diminished, the way a man survives the loss of a hand. The hearing
would be fought with one notebook. There had been two in the world; the
world now had one, and so did she.
Nobody in the road said the word arson. Nobody had to. A schoolhouse does
not light itself at 2 a.m. in a township where every farmstead had watched it
empty at dusk, and the fire had started — the men who walked the ashes at
daylight agreed, in the tones of men delivering a verdict at a fence rail — at
the south wall, and burned inward as if it had been fed. It was not vandalism,
and it was not rage, and standing in the smoke of her schoolroom the next
afternoon, kicking a bench iron out of the ash with her toe, Willa understood
it with a clarity that felt like cold water down the spine. It was editing.
Somebody was revising the township's memory, one document at a time — a
relinquishment traced here, a corner moved there, a notebook un-written in
the night — and the revision would be complete on the day when the only
surviving account of the land was the company's. She thought of Pete
Lindqvist folding his affidavit into his own stove, and of how the company
had not even needed to burn that one; fear had subcontracted the fire. Hers
had required a visit. She chose, standing in the ash, to take that as a measure
of her worth to them.
Nora came down the road at dusk with her apron still on and a bottle of ink