The Kept Map

The chest was full of paper.

Lio lifted out letters tied in faded ribbon, some of them scorched brown at the edges where someone had snatched them from a fire, and sheets of close writing under broken seals. He set them on the table one by one, as carefully as eggs. At the bottom, folded flat and wrapped in silk that fell to pieces when he touched it, were two maps.

Sil came forward then, because she could not help it. She looked at Edda, and Edda nodded, and Sil lifted the two maps out and laid them side by side under the lamp and smoothed them flat.

They were maps of the same country. Edda could see that much, though she had never seen the country. A great river ran down the middle of each, with hills on either side and towns along the water. A coast ran down the left-hand edge, with a harbor. She knew that harbor. Along the margins of both, someone had written small notes in two hands, one square and upright, one quick and slanting.

She looked again. On the left-hand map the great river bent east below the middle town. On the right-hand map it bent west. On the left a road ran up from the harbor into the hills and came to a walled city from the south. On the right the same road came to the same city from the north, over a pass the other map did not show. And the walled city itself, in the same place, with the same walls, had a different name on each.

"These aren't copies," Sil said. "Look at the hachuring, the little strokes for the hills. Look at the chain-marks. Somebody walked both of these." She touched the edge of the left-hand map with one finger. "They're both good surveys. They can't both be right."

She bent to the walled city on the left and read the name under her breath. "Callow."

Lio's head came up. "Rupert read both off the stones. In the Wood, outside a gray town with its gates down."

Sil's finger crossed to the right-hand map, to the same walls in the same place, and stopped.

"Merrowby," she read.

"On the Lenn," said Taren, before he could stop himself. He said it to the tune Edda had always hummed.

"The right-hand one moved the town onto the Lenn," said Sil. "That's why there's a Merrowby lane in Thornby parish."

Bet had come to the table with the cloth still in her hands. She looked from one son to the other. "What's Merrowby?"

Neither of them told her. She looked down at the two rivers bending opposite ways, and lifted her eyes to the window, up at the dark line of the Wood above the yard.

Under the maps lay one more sheet, small and folded once. The hand on it was quick and slanting, and it was Edda's mother's. Edda unfolded it, and her mother's voice came up off the page as clearly as if she stood at Edda's shoulder with her hand at her throat.

It was three lines long. Edda read it to herself first, and her lips moved. Then she looked across the table at Lio, and read it to him aloud, in her own cracked voice, slowly, as she had once read him the weather out of the almanac.

"Lin," she read. "The left is the country as it lies, and your father and I walked every mile of it. The right is the country they ordered of us, drawn at a desk to look walked, and we would not finish it. Keep the one you live on; never make the other."

Sil took her hand off the right-hand map.

Edda folded the sheet along its old crease. Lio held out his hand for it, and she gave it to him, and he laid it on the maps, square to their edges.

"The stone at the ford," Lio said to Sil. "What's it for? Say it plain. Mother's never heard any of this."

Sil looked at Bet, and did as she was asked. She said it as she would have read a chain-line off to a clerk.

"In the West every bound in a deed begins at a stone. When a family reads its deed aloud at its stone, with enough voices behind it saying the same words, the ground comes round to the deed. I've seen a hedge walk ten yards in a night at Hollow Cross, after a reading. Nobody put a spade to it." She touched the stone on the left-hand map, where the river bent. "If Stroud reads his bound at our ford with twenty men saying it with him, the ford turns into the ford on his paper. Amberlow. Whatever it was before."

"And the people on it?" said Bet.

"Stay, if he's any sense." Sil said it straight. "Ground goes gray without people who know it."

"He showed me," said Lio. "Above Sarne. A farm they turned a family off for a debt, and gave to a man with a paper. Gray to the door in three years."

"So he wants you here, Mrs. Ashby," said Sil. "Milking. Under his name."

Bet put the cloth down on the table as if it might break.

They went to bed late, and Edda would not be helped across the yard, and then allowed herself to be. In the cottage Sil put herself to bed square and neat in Maud's box-bed, and after a while she slept.

Edda sat up in her chair by the cold hearth in her nightgown, with her shawl round her and a candle at her elbow. She took out the second sheet of Hollis's letter, the one she had not faced on the step, and read it.

You will want to know why. Our parents were keepers, who drew only ground that was walked; ordered to draw the other country, they would not, and the men with the warrant were the first of my Survey. Maud was a keeper too, and put your name under the roots where no maker could read the road out of you, and left you the tune. The road itself was broken long ago by keepers, to stop such men as mine, and I have spent ten years mending it.

She read it twice. Across the room the surveyor girl slept on, with her boots in a row.

"Keepers," Edda said under her breath, trying the word. It sat well enough on a woman who shelled peas.

She looked at the crooked heron. Hollis. She said it, and it stayed. She said her mother's three lines too, and they stayed as well.

The first of them, he had written. September. He would come down the timber track among strangers, with his bad knee and his terrible herons, into a valley that meant to burn the wood around his ears. He would come up past the saw-pit into the yard, an old man, looking for a girl of seven.

The barrels had come up from Wexley on the last Monday of August, four of them on a dray, and Edda had watched the valley split in two over them from her own step.

Owen had walked up the lane and stood in the dray's road with his arms folded. Crane came up behind it on his cob, and half the parish came after Crane to see. Kit Hay's father stood with the reeve, and so did the miller, and so did Joss Hobb, who said he'd sooner have a black hill above him than strangers in his bed. Ambrose Pennock stood with Owen, because it was his pasture they meant to burn from, and the Snapes stood with Owen because Will had walked that Margin since he was a boy. Nobody struck anybody. But Bet did not speak to the miller's wife for a week, and Kit Hay came to work in the timber yard in the mornings with his eyes on the ground.

"I'll not have it burned for fright," Owen said, in the end, in front of all of them.

"Then I'll not have it burned for nothing," said Crane. "The barrels stand. The day the wind goes east, I light, and you can stand in front of the torches if you like, Owen Ashby, and we'll see which of us the parish follows."

So the wind held in the west through the last of August, and every morning half of Thornby went out to look at the weathercock on the chapel, and Crane's pitch-barrels stood in a row along the top of Ambrose's pasture with their lids on. On the second of September, a Wednesday, Sil came down from the fork at noon and said there was smoke in the beeches past the gully, a day off or less. That afternoon Lio went round the valley.

Edda saw him begin. He came out of the dairy behind his mother, and Bet was wiping her hands and giving him the look she kept for a calf in the wrong field.

"Which one's yours?" he was saying. "At the ford. If you had to say one."

"I've cheese to turn."

"One stone, Mother."

Bet put her hands on her hips. "The flat one. The washing stone. I've beaten your sheets on that stone twenty-five years, and you get a wet knee whatever you do." She narrowed her eyes at him. "Why?"

"Because tomorrow I'll ask you for it. At the water, out loud. When the bell goes, you come down, and when I say your name, you say your stone."

Bet looked at him a while longer. "It rocks," she said. "You put your weight on the left." She went back into the dairy, and Edda heard her say it again in there, to the cheeses, as if she were learning it.

He crossed the yard to the saw-pit. Edda could not hear that one. She saw her son Owen straighten from the saw and listen, and look away down toward the river, and say something short. Lio came on across the cobbles to her step.

"Gran."

"I heard," said Edda. "I've no stone at that ford, love. I came into this valley at seven with no road behind me. The gray took the rest, as it takes everybody's. Maud kept house for the Lacys at Withy Farm, over the river, and I scrubbed their steps for twelve years. Jacob brought me back over that ford in a cart at nineteen, with Maud's chest on my knees. That's the nearest I've got."

"You've got the gate," said Lio.

"I'll be at it."

"Then that's yours." He sat down on the step below her, as he had sat in August with the beans, and looked out across the yard toward the lane.

"What is it you're doing?" said Edda.

He was slow to answer. He had always been slow when a thing mattered.

"Joss Hobb says he's watered his mare at that stone all his life. It wasn't there last week. He told me to tell Mother he'd come home by the Merrowby lane." He picked at a splinter in the step. "Tomorrow there'll be twenty men on horses at our ford, Gran, all saying the one thing. I can't say the ford for everybody. I tried that with a mill. But everybody's got a bit of it that's theirs. If it comes to them at the right time."

"And you're going to remind them."

"I'm going round."

He went. From her step she could see through the orchard gate to the Pennocks'. Ambrose was on his bench under the russet. Lio crouched beside it and asked. The old man took his pipe out and pointed the stem down the valley and talked a long time, and Lio waited, as he had always waited for Edda. Then Rose came over the wall like a cat and stood in front of him with her fists on her hips. Her voice carried across two yards.

"Everybody knows that! Everybody!"

Ambrose's cough of a laugh came after it. Then Lio was away down the valley road toward the smithy and the mill, and she lost him.

The rest came back to her over walls before supper, as news always came in Thornby. Nobody could make head or tail of it, and every door he knocked at had given him an answer, the miller's too, and Joss Hobb's, though they stood with the reeve. Kit Hay had gone the color of a beetroot.

Last of all Lio took the mare and rode the six miles down to Wexley, and came back in the dusk with mud to his knees.

"He'll sit," he said, at her step. "Crane. At the stone, as reeve, as if it was two men and a hedge. He'll call them by name, and they'll answer to him, not to me." He rubbed his face. "But the wind's the wind. If it goes into the east before they come, he lights the hill first, hearing or no hearing. He says a burned hill's the surest bound there is." He looked down the lane. "That's his price."

"It's a fair one," said Edda. "For a frightened man."

At dusk Lio came to her door and asked for the maps. She opened the chest for him and let him take them. He laid her mother's note on top of them, the last line uppermost, and wrapped them in the oilcloth from Hollis's letter, and tied the cord himself.

Taren came up the lane from the chapel with the key of the bell-tower in his fist, and Lio met him in the middle of the yard and put the bundle under his arm. Edda heard every word, because neither of them had ever in their lives learned to speak quietly in that yard.

"Keep that dry," said Lio. "If he comes, he's to have it at the water. Not before."

"Why me?"

"You'll be next to him." Lio nodded at the key in his brother's fist. "And that. When Brannoc comes down off the hill, not before. Then ring it till they all come."

"Ring it how?"

"Like the place is on fire."

"It might be," said Taren, and laughed, and was not laughing.

When they had gone in, Edda got up. She went past the geraniums and out across the cobbles in the half-dark to her gate. Jacob had hung it the year they married. It had a latch that stuck in wet weather, and she had been meaning to have Owen see to it for eleven years. She worked the latch up and down until it ran sweet, and stood with her hand on the top bar, and looked down the lane.

She would be at that gate when he came.