The Hollow Root: The Nineteen Forty Record

The brick face of the Thornfield Municipal Building glowed amber under the single streetlamp at its corner, and Clara Whitmore counted herself lucky the town couldn't afford a second one.

She sat in her truck across the street with the engine off, the keys resting cold in her palm, watching the building the way she had learned to watch most things in this county: patiently, suspiciously, as if the whole structure might suddenly decide to tell her the truth. The windows were dark. The flag hung limp on its pole. A paper sack from the diner sat on the passenger seat beside her, grease already spotting the brown paper, and she should have eaten before she came out here, but she never could eat before she did something stupid.

It was just past one in the morning. Tuesday. The kind of quiet that small Ozark towns reserve for the hours after the bars close and before the dogs start up.

Clara had told nobody where she was going. That was the rule, and the rule had not changed since she had learned it the hard way at the Metro desk, watching a source's life disassemble on the evening news while her byline sat pretty above the wreckage. A woman learns once. A woman who has learned more than once knows to bring a flashlight, a flathead screwdriver, and an alibi that does not involve her own name.

She pocketed the keys. She took the screwdriver out of her coat. The metal was cold against her fingers, and she turned it over once, twice, feeling the weight of it the way a person feels the weight of a decision they have already made.

"All right, courthouse," she murmured, and her voice came out in the warm, faintly rasped drawl she had grown up hearing on her grandmother's porch. "Let's see what you're hiding under your skirts."

She crossed the street with the unhurried walk of a woman returning from a smoke break. The streetlamp threw her shadow long behind her, and she did not look up at the windows of the lawyer's office above the bank, did not glance at the dark windows of the hardware store, did not give anyone reason to remember her face if they happened to be awake. Thornfield remembered faces. Thornfield remembered license plates and the particular color of a stranger's coat. A person who forgot that forgot it only once.

The side entrance had a deadbolt. The deadbolt was, blessedly, a Master padlock from approximately the Carter administration, and Clara had grown up around rusted farm equipment and had inherited her grandfather's stubborn hands. The screwdriver found the seam between the hasp and the doorframe. A twist. A soft crack of paint flaking away. The hasp slid free with a groan that sounded, to her overworked imagination, like an old man being wakened from a nap.

She froze. Listened.

Nothing. The town kept its silence.

Inside, the air tasted of paper and dust and something faintly chemical, the ghost of whatever they had used to treat the carpets back when the building had been worth maintaining. Clara pulled the door shut behind her, took out her flashlight, and clicked it on with a thumbnail. The beam wobbled, then steadied, then revealed a hallway lined with framed photographs of mayors and ribbon-cuttings and one framed photograph of a hog that had, apparently, won something in 1997.

Clara almost smiled. Almost. The hog's name, according to the little brass plaque, was Governor T. Pork, which meant somebody in this town had a sense of humor, which meant somebody in this town had also, at some point, decided not to use it.

She moved down the hall.

The municipal records room occupied the back of the building, behind a door marked OFFICE OF THE COUNTY CLERK in letters that had begun to peel from the wood. The lock on this door was a key lock, and Clara had come prepared for that too. She had spent the previous afternoon in the lobby of the courthouse, smiling at the elderly woman who ran the front desk, complimenting her reading glasses, asking if she could please see a copy of the marriage license for her aunt, who had recently become engaged and was thinking of her late sister. The woman had disappeared into the back to find it. Clara had watched where she put the master key when she came back out.

The key was warm in her palm. She eased it into the lock and turned it with the tenderness of a woman defusing something that might go off.

The door opened onto a rectangular room lit only by her flashlight and the green wink of an EXIT sign that nobody had bothered to disable. Rows of metal shelving rose on either side of her, floor to ceiling, the shelves bowed under the weight of boxes and binders and manila folders thick as bricks. The smell in here was stronger: paper, dust, the faintest sour whiff of mildew. Somewhere, a clock ticked, and somewhere else, water dripped.

Clara let her flashlight wander.

The boxes were labeled in a hand that varied from careful to hurried, the ink ranging from crisp blue ballpoint to the faded brown of fountain pen. TAXES, 1980-1989. SCHOOL BOARD MINUTES, 1972-1981. MARRIAGE RECORDS, VOL. 3, 1955-1962. A whole section, near the back, was given over to plats and surveys, the rolled paper leaning against one another like tired drinkers at the end of the night.

She was not here for taxes. She was not here for marriages.

She was here because a man named Harlan Voss had, two weeks ago, stood in front of a crowd at the feed store and made a comment about the water table that no one in town had been willing to explain to her, and when she had pressed him he had looked at her with eyes that were not afraid but were, in some quiet way, sorry for her, and he had said: "Miss Whitmore, some ledgers aren't kept for the public. Some ledgers aren't kept at all."

She had smiled her newspaper smile. She had asked three more questions. He had answered none of them.

But she had gone home, and she had thought about it, and she had remembered a thing her grandmother used to say about Thornfield: that the town had not always been Thornfield. That before the name there had been a number, and before the number there had been a clearing in the woods, and before the clearing there had been something her grandmother would not, or could not, talk about.

Clara moved deeper into the room.

The water damage became obvious the further she went. On the third row of shelving, the cardboard of the boxes had gone soft and gray at the corners, the labels smeared into something unreadable. On the fourth row, a pipe had clearly leaked at some point, and the bottoms of several boxes were fused to the shelf by a crust of dried paper and mineral deposit. She crouched. She ran her flashlight along the underside of the lowest shelf.

There. A box that had slid backward, half hidden behind a row of tax records from the early sixties. The cardboard was warped, the top swollen slightly upward, the ink on the lid running in pale brown rivers.

She reached for it.

Her hand hesitated, just for a moment. She told herself she was being dramatic. She told herself she was tired. She told herself a great many things that were not quite true.

She pulled the box out.

The weight of it surprised her. Even damp, the box held more paper than she had expected, and the smell that rose from it when she cracked the lid was the smell of old newsprint left too long in a damp barn: sour, vegetal, faintly sweet with rot. She set the box on the floor between her knees. She clicked her flashlight brighter, because the bulb had two settings and she had been kind to it, and now she was not.

The label on the inside of the lid was clearer than the label on the outside. Someone had written it in a careful, slanted hand with a pencil that had long since lost its point:

Farming Ledger, 1941-1966.

Below that, in a different hand, smaller, almost a whisper of ink:

County Extension Office, transferred to Municipal Archive, 1972.

And below that, in a third hand, the letters jagged and hurried, as if the writer had not wanted to be caught writing them:

NOT TO BE REMOVED.

Clara sat with that for a moment. She let her flashlight rest against her shoulder. She breathed in through her nose and out through her mouth, the way she had been taught to breathe in interviews when a subject said something they immediately regretted.

NOT TO BE REMOVED. In a county archive. In a box that smelled of water damage and neglect. Somebody had cared enough to write it, and then somebody else had cared enough to leave it exactly where it was.

She lifted the lid fully and took out the first stack of pages.

The ledger was not what she had expected. Farming ledgers, in her experience from her year covering the ag beat at the Metro, were dry affairs: inputs, outputs, the price of corn, the price of soy, the number of bales brought in from the back forty. This ledger had those things, but they were written almost as an afterthought, tucked between longer entries that read more like a journal than a record. The first entry, dated April 12, 1941, was three lines long:

Planted forty acres of feed corn south of the bend. Soil reads well. The spring smells of iron this year, and Margaret says it is the rain, but Margaret has never smelled a wet stone in her life.

The handwriting was small, even, the letters leaning slightly forward, as if the writer was trying to get somewhere faster than the pen could carry him.

Clara turned pages. The entries grew. Some were short, two or three lines about the weather, about a sick pig, about the price of feed in town. Some were longer, and the longer ones had a quality she could not immediately place, a kind of watching in them that felt less like a farmer's record and more like a man trying to describe something he had seen out of the corner of his eye and did not want to look at directly.

January 8, 1947. Snow came early. The well water tastes wrong again, like pennies left in a glass. Daniel says I am making it up. I am not making it up. The dog will not drink from the trough, and the dog is not a fool.

June 2, 1952. Took the south field out of rotation. The roots come up wrong, knotted, like the wood of a man I knew in the war. Mr. Pruitt says leave it be. Mr. Pruitt says a man does not argue with what the soil decides.

Clara turned another page. The handwriting here was slightly different, the letters a little rounder, and the entries were shorter, more clipped, as if the writer had begun to be careful with his words.

She skimmed forward through the years. 1955. 1958. 1961. The entries became more sparse. The handwriting became more hurried. The careful observations about the soil gave way to short, factual notes:

September 12, 1962. Twenty-two acres corn. Yield down 8 .

April 4, 1963. Fence repair north pasture. Lost two hogs to something under the floor of the pen.

November 19, 1964. Margaret passed. Burial at the chapel on the ridge. The boys will not speak of it.

And then: 1966.

Clara's hand slowed. The pages here were damp at the edges, the ink bleeding faintly into the paper around it, and the smell from this section of the box was stronger, sweeter, almost organic, as if the water had carried something into the fibers and left it there. She turned a page and the paper stuck to the one beneath it and came away with a soft, wet sound.

The next entry was dated March 3, 1966. The handwriting was the same as the last entries, but tighter, the lines crowded together as if the writer had been afraid of running out of paper or patience or both:

The roots are wrong again. The water table has dropped six feet in the back pasture. Took a sample to the extension office. Mr. Fenn would not meet my eyes when he gave it back. He said only: this is not for you to worry about. He said: this has been handled.

Clara read the line again. She read it a third time. She did not know yet why the sentence bothered her so deeply. She only knew that a county extension agent telling a farmer that a soil sample had been handled was not the kind of sentence that ended well in a story.

She turned another page.

The next entry was dated April 27, 1966. After that, the pages were blank.

She lifted the entire stack and looked at the bottom of the box, where a final sheet of paper had settled at an angle, separate from the rest, and the cardboard beneath it was stained darker than the cardboard anywhere else, as if water had pooled there longest. She drew it out carefully. It was a single sheet, torn from the back of the ledger, and the ink on it was not the faded blue of the other entries.

The ink was red.

The handwriting was different again. Not the careful forward-leaning script of the first writer. Not the clipped script of the later one. This hand was a third one, larger, the letters pulled sharp at their ends, the strokes pressed into the page hard enough that Clara could feel the indentations through the back of the paper with her thumb.

There was only one line.

The feeding was taken. God forgive us. Twenty-five years.

Clara read it three times. The words did not change. The ink did not change. The faint smell of copper and old paper that rose from the page when she brought it closer to her face did not change. Twenty-five years. She was thirty-four now. If the line had been written in 1966, then twenty-five years before that had been 1941, which had been the year the ledger had begun, which had been the year the soil had first, according to the very first entry, smelled of iron after a rain.

She set the page down on the floor beside her, gently, the way a person sets down something that has just become evidence of something she cannot yet name.

She did not know who had written the line. She did not know what the feeding had been. She did not know what had been taken, or by whom, or for what purpose. She did not know why a careful record of soil and seasons and water tables had been abandoned mid-year in 1966, or why a box labeled with a warning had been left to rot on a bottom shelf in a room that smelled of mildew and forgotten hogs.

She knew only that she was not leaving this room without the page.

Her hands were steadier than she felt. She folded the red-inked sheet along its original crease and slid it into the inside pocket of her coat, the pocket that buttoned, the pocket that closed against her ribs. She closed the box. She slid it back onto its shelf, into the dark behind the tax records, into the place it had clearly been meant to occupy. She rose. Her knees protested. Her flashlight flickered once, recovered, and she made herself count to thirty before she clicked it off, to let her eyes readjust, to let the EXIT sign do its small green work.

She walked out of the records room. She locked the door behind her. She returned the master key to its hook on the front desk, where it would wait for the elderly clerk to find it in the morning and wonder, briefly, whether she had misplaced it the day before.

She let herself out the side door. The hasp went back into place with a soft click. The streetlamp threw her shadow long in front of her now, and the town kept its silence, and somewhere a dog began to bark, once, twice, and then thought better of it.

Clara sat in her truck for a long moment with her hands on the wheel. The page in her coat pocket pressed against her chest with every breath. Twenty-five years. God forgive us. The ink had been red, but it had not been blood. She had checked. She had checked twice. She had checked a third time with the edge of her thumbnail, the way she had learned to do at the Metro desk when sources sent her things in unmarked envelopes.

Whatever the ink was, it was not blood.

That was, she thought, the smallest comfort available, and she took it.

She turned the key in the ignition. The engine caught on the second try, the way it always did, the way her grandfather's old truck had always done, and she pulled away from the curb and drove the two miles back to her drafty house on Sycamore Street without turning on her headlights, because she knew every dip and pothole on that road, and because, in Thornfield, a woman who drove without headlights was a woman who had not been anywhere in particular.

She parked in the alley. She went inside. She locked the door behind her. She set the kettle on the stove and stood with her hands flat on the counter, breathing, waiting for the water to boil, listening to the house settle around her with its familiar complaints: the third step that creaked, the radiator that ticked, the soft, persistent drip from the upstairs bathroom that she kept meaning to fix.

The kettle whistled. She made tea she did not drink. She took the red-inked page out of her coat pocket and laid it on the kitchen table under the lamp, where she could see every stroke of the pen, every indentation, every place where the hand that had written it had pressed hard enough to leave a scar in the paper.

The feeding was taken. God forgive us. Twenty-five years.

Outside, the night sat heavy over Thornfield like a held breath.

The tea had gone cold in the cup. She had not noticed.

Ruth Calloway sat with her shoulders rounded over the kitchen table and the lamp pulled low, the bulb bright enough to throw the red ink into sharp relief against the cream of the old paper. The strokes were not the strokes of a man writing quickly. They were the strokes of a man writing once, carefully, in a hand that did not expect to be read. The downstrokes had pressed through. She could feel them with the pad of her thumb, tiny ridges, like Braille for the blind, like the seams in a scar.

The feeding was taken. God forgive us. Twenty-five years.

She mouthed the words without sound. She read them again. Twenty-five years. From 1940 that put the next instance at 1965. From 1965, 1990. From 1990, this year. She did the arithmetic three times because she did not want to believe it, and the arithmetic came out the same each time, the way arithmetic always did, the way the creek behind the feed store always rose to the same line on the wooden piling when the spring rains came.

She spread her hands flat on the table and looked at them. They were shaking slightly. She pressed them harder against the wood until the shaking stopped and only her pulse remained, ticking in her wrists, in the hinge of her jaw.

Outside, the night was close. She could hear it, almost. The porch boards ticking as they cooled. A dog, three streets over, barking once and then thinking better of it. The faint, sour smell of the river, carried on the still air, the smell that Thornfield never quite lost, the smell that tourists who came for the fall foliage never quite mentioned but always noticed.

She lifted the receiver of the phone on the wall. She dialed from memory. The line rang four times before a voice answered, hoarse with sleep and the particular wariness of a person who had learned to mistrust the phone at night.

"It's me," Ruth said. "It's Ruth. I need to ask you something and I need you not to ask me why until tomorrow."

A pause. A breath on the other end that sounded like a laugh that had decided not to be one.

"Clara Whitmore does not get out of bed for less than a federal," the voice said. The rasp was faint but unmistakable, a sound like a screen door pulled slowly open. "You got a federal for me, Ruth Calloway?"

"I got a 1940," Ruth said. "I got a page out of a record that wasn't supposed to exist. And I got a date that lines up with something I think you have in your back room."

Silence. Then the sound of bare feet on hardwood, of a lamp clicked on, of Clara sitting down somewhere hard.

"Lines up how," Clara said. The question was flat, the question of a woman who had stopped being tired.

"Twenty-five years," Ruth said. "And I need to see the founding photograph."

"I told you about that photograph."

"You told me about it. I need to see it."

A longer silence. The clock in Ruth's kitchen ticked. The radiator ticked back. The upstairs drip counted its own time.

"Come to the back door," Clara said. "Don't ring the bell. Don't knock. I'll be on the porch."

Ruth hung up. She put on her coat. She put the red-inked page into the inside pocket, against her chest, where she could feel the press of the pen strokes through the lining. She left the cold tea where it sat. She locked the front door behind her and went around to the alley and got into the truck and drove the six blocks to Whitmore Street without her headlights, because in Thornfield, a woman who drove without headlights had not been anywhere in particular.

Clara Whitmore was on the porch in a flannel shirt and jeans and no shoes. She had a glass of something in her hand that was not tea. She was forty-one years old and looked like a woman who had once been pretty and had decided, with some relief, to stop being pretty. Her hair was cut short and uneven. Her eyes were the pale, washed-out blue of a creek in February.

"Come in quiet," Clara said, and turned without waiting, and held the screen door for Ruth with the practiced ease of a woman who had been holding doors for people who did not want to be seen for a long time.

Clara's back room was the room she did not show to advertisers, did not show to the publisher, did not show to her mother when her mother drove up from West Plains. It smelled of paper and cold coffee and the faint, sweet rot of a window that had been left open during a rain. There were filing cabinets against three walls and stacks of manila folders on the floor and a corkboard above the desk that held, in a careful array, every clipping Clara had ever been proud of and a few she had been ashamed of.

Clara crossed to the cabinet in the far corner, the one with the lock she had put on herself, the one she did not trust the office lock to guard. She took a key on a leather cord from around her neck. She unlocked the cabinet. She pulled out a cardboard box that was older than Ruth was.

"Don't touch the edges," Clara said. "The emulsion is fragile."

She lifted the lid. She set it on the desk. She turned on the green-shaded banker's lamp and angled it low.

Ruth leaned in.

The photograph was sepia at the edges and darker at the center where the light had hit it unevenly through the years. It had been torn, once, and taped back together with the kind of cellophane tape that yellowed and then failed. The tape had failed. The seam had opened a quarter inch at the bottom right corner, and through the gap Ruth could see the white of the backing board.

The hill was in the background. She recognized it before she recognized anything else, because she had been looking at the hill for a week now, from every angle the town allowed. The base of the hill was visible, where the soil was darker and the rock outcroppings began, and at the foot of the slope a pit had been dug, and around the pit seven men stood in a rough semicircle, their hats in their hands, their faces turned toward the camera with the patient, slightly dazed look of men who had been asked to stand still for a long time and had done so without quite understanding why.

They were wearing dark coats. They were wearing the high collars of the period. One of them, on the left, had a beard that had been trimmed close to the jaw. Another, on the right, was missing two fingers on the hand that held his hat. The third from the left was a man whose name Ruth did not know but whose face she had seen before, on the courthouse wall, in a different photograph, a man who had been mayor once and had died of something the obituary had declined to specify.

The seventh man stood slightly apart from the others, at the edge of the frame, half in shadow. He was holding something in his arms. The something was wrapped in a long cloth, white at the edges and darker at the center where something had soaked through and dried. It was the size and shape of a child. The way he held it was the way a man holds a thing he has been told to hold, with his arms slightly bent and his face turned away, as though he had been instructed not to look at it directly.

Ruth's mouth went dry.

"Turn it over," Clara said.

Ruth turned the photograph over, carefully, by the taped corner, and the back of the cardboard was stamped with a single symbol, pressed deep into the board with a die or a heavy seal. It was the shape of a root, or a hand, or the lower half of a man with his arms spread, and it was the same shape she had seen on the underside of the box lid in the records room, and on the metal plate of the lock itself, and she knew it the way you know the shape of a key that has been in your hand for years, the way you know the shape of a door you have walked through without looking.

"That's the seal of the founding committee," Clara said. "I have only ever seen it on this photograph. I have asked every living person in this town who was alive in 1940 if they ever saw it anywhere else. Most of them looked at me like I'd asked them about the inside of a coffin."

"Who is he," Ruth said. She pointed without touching the print, at the man on the edge of the frame.

Clara was quiet for a long time.

"His name is on the courthouse plaque," she said. "But not in this photograph. He was there for the founding of the town and then he was not there for the rest of it. He is the only one of the seven who does not have a grave marker I have been able to find."

"How long ago," Ruth said.

"1940," Clara said. "October, if the date on the back of the photograph is right. The same month as your page."

Ruth looked at the photograph for another minute. She looked at the man holding the wrapped thing. She looked at the pit at the base of the hill. She thought about the smell of the soil she had uncovered in the records room, the dark and living smell, and she thought about the way the soil had been patted down, the way a man pats down earth over a thing he has buried.

"I have to put this box back," she said.

"You don't," Clara said.

"I do. They will know it was moved."

"They will know anyway."

Ruth shook her head. She reached into her coat and took out the red-inked page. She laid it on the desk under the lamp, next to the photograph. She watched Clara read it. She watched Clara's face go still in the way that faces go still when the person wearing them has decided to stop pretending to be surprised.

"Twenty-five years," Clara said.

"Twenty-five years," Ruth said.

Clara picked up her glass and finished it in one long swallow. She set it down without looking away from the page.

"Don't go alone," she said.

"I have to."

"Then leave your headlights off and don't park in front. And when you get home you call me, Ruth Calloway. You call me from inside the house and you do not open the door for anyone who is not me."

Clara put her hand, briefly, on Ruth's wrist. The hand was cold. The grip was careful and fierce and did not shake.

Ruth drove back to the records room with the box on the seat beside her, wrapped in a cotton cloth she had taken from Clara's back room, because Clara had said, "If you have to take it back, take it back like it never moved." The streets were empty. The clock on the courthouse read 1:14. The hill was visible above the rooftops, a darker shape against the darker sky.

She parked two blocks away, on a side street, in the shadow of the old bank building. She carried the box the rest of the way, close to her chest, the cloth over it the way a woman carries something that does not want to be looked at. She went up the front steps. She took the key from her pocket. She fitted it into the lock.

The key did not turn.

She tried it again. The key went in, but the tumblers would not catch. She knelt and put her face close to the keyhole and smelled the lock, and what she smelled was not the metal smell of a lock that had been changed but a different smell, a warmer smell, a smell she had been trying for a week not to think about, the smell of a thing that had been living and then had stopped.

Iron. Old blood. The faint, sweet, almost vegetable undertone of a thing that had begun to break down.

She stood up. She put her hand on the doorframe, and her palm came away faintly damp, and when she held it up to the light from the streetlamp she could see, on her skin, a darkness that was not dirt.

The door opened inward, by itself, by a hand on the other side, slowly, with the reluctant sound of a thing that had been waiting to be asked.

The hallway behind it was dark. The smell came out of the dark in a slow, thick wave. At the end of the hall, where the records room was, a figure stood, not moving, facing her, and the face of the figure was not a face she knew, and the hands of the figure were dark to the wrists, and the figure said, very softly, in a voice she did recognize, the voice of the librarian who had given her the key, who had walked her to the room, who had smiled at her over the rims of his glasses:

"I told you not to take it out, Miss Calloway."

And he stepped forward, out of the dark, into the light from the street, and the light found him, and the light did not leave him a place to hide.