This Census-Taker

14

The letter said, I will not stay here any more.

They took me to the school to show me. I’d never been inside before: I was an uphiller with no money for lessons.

Drobe stood by the classroom door like my guard and Samma stood by me, watching my mouth move. The hunter sat me in a child’s chair-desk, the furniture combined. He gave me the letter.

It said, I must go away because I am not happy on this hill. I will go away. Perhaps you will be angry I hope you will not you might be sad also. I am sad. But I will not live here any more. You do not have to tend my garden but I give it to you if you want. You will be all right in this house your father will take care of you as I have I am sorry I must go but I must I cannot remain any more. Your loving mother.

—

The teacher read the letter aloud. She saw my eyes going over the lines, she saw my panic and I think she didn’t believe I could read. When she was finished the hunter said, “So. Maybe what you saw was that. They were fighting. Then while your dad was looking for you your mum got angry and she went away. Do you think maybe that’s what you saw?”

“My father killed my mother.”

The man watched me. The schoolteacher shook the two big books she carried. “He’s allowed to confront an accuser,” she said, not to me. “That’s the law.”

“A little boy like that, though?” the hunter said. They frowned at me.

“This is your mother’s writing,” the teacher said. “Isn’t it?”

It was a big hand of sweeps and curves. Some of the letters were nearly full circles. All of them staggered up and down and around the paper’s lines.

When she taught me letters, my mother had done so with those pamphlet scraps, those cheaply printed books and stock inventories and instructions for machines. Occasionally she’d shown me ledgers and other handwritten papers from I don’t know where, in various inks and in various hands, but it was only when the teacher asked me this question that I understood that every such piece had been written by a different person, or different people, in the cases where one piece of writing was corrected and overwritten with another, as I’ve done with a few pages of the second book that I continue.

I’d seen my mother writing many times but I’d never seen her handwriting.

The letter was on thick paper in a pale blue ink that I knew she’d used but that I’d seen my father use too, to render details on his drawings of keys.

“He killed her and he put her in the hole,” I whispered. “He puts the things he kills in the hole. Sometimes he kills people and he puts them in there too.”

The officers looked at each other. “Show us,” the man said. “Show us the hole.”