The Mercy I Am Told I Gave

Two days before Harvestmonth, and the temple keeps the custom it has kept for thirty-one years: on the Restday before the turning, an account is looked at. Not the coin-account — the Divan holds instruments for that — but the other one, kept with no ledger, that the shelf behind the eastern lamp has always kept for me without my asking: what has been set down there this year, and left, and what the leaving says.

I went to the shelf because I had been told a thing was on it. A man in a good coat, the telling said, worn despite the heat because he had dressed for what he carried, left two marks four wrapped in undyed linen — a debt he could not prove was his, paid anyway, on the strength of a memory no office would accept as paper. I know this shelf. I know what sits there before a sailing: two coins, a sprig of bay, kept eight years for a name I did not have until this spring. I went to look for the linen. There was none.

I do not think the man in the good coat is a lie, exactly. I think he is a thing that has not yet happened, told as though the telling were the same as the walking. A hand not mine wore my hand this week, said what I would have said, got the shelf right, got the silence right, got even my refusal to forward or return a thing exactly right. I did not write it. I would have written it the same.

Harvestmonth asks an accounting of what the year has held. I cannot enter this one on either side of the ledger — not received, because it was not; not false, because the coat and the memory and the reasons arrived in me whole, and I find I cannot unarrive them now that they have. The shelf stays empty. I have left it looking the way a shelf looks when something is still expected to be set on it.