Epilogue: The Stream Does Not Answer

She was five days on the road and then she was home, and home did what home does, which is continue. Her father read the surety clause twice, standing at the kitchen table, in the flat morning light. Then he went out to the workshop and resoled a pair of boots that did not need it, and nobody in the household went out after him, because the household knew its own law. The margin column in the book lay full: thirty strokes, square as fence posts, blotted, faithful to the end. Nobody had ruled a thirty-first. Nobody ever mentioned the column again in her hearing, and it stayed in the book the way benchmarks stay in bridges, load-bearing and unread. The turnip went onto the kitchen shelf, unexplained, retired with honors. The town's voices stayed low around her. She had stopped expecting otherwise. They touched their caps on Ford Street, and murmured after she passed, and the verse ran on somewhere behind the mill with its new verse in it, and she bought thread and nails at the ordinary shops in the ordinary way, inside a quiet that followed her like weather. Lord Daniels took a room at the Dry Toast, awaiting amendment. The amendment was not coming, and the Dry Toast, which had never in its history quartered anything that shone, was quietly raising its prices. She went up the rise on the second morning, and came down with nothing she could enter anywhere. On the fifth evening she walked to the stream. She had no errand there. That was the strange part, the part she noticed on the way down, reading her own bearings out of habit: no line to check, no level to run, nothing to file. She was going to the water the way stock goes…