Without a Single Word

The evening came down early, and for once the house held no other voice. The girl had gone to help a neighbor bring in the last of the beans, and would sleep there rather than walk the long road home in the dark. Nyra banked the fire, set the lamp upon the table, and found the rooms larger than she remembered them. She was not one to mind an hour alone, but this hour stretched, and the quiet in it had a weight to it.

So she took the book down from its shelf, though she had nothing to add to it. No planting worth a line had been done that day, no harvest, no turn in the weather that the page did not already know. She opened it near the middle and let it lie flat under the lamp, and she began to read it as she might read a letter sent from someone far away.

The older hands rose up to meet her. Here was a keeper who had died before Nyra was born, counting out rows of onions in a script that leaned hard to the right. Here was another who had drawn a little leaf beside a name to mark a favorite. And here, only a few pages back, sat the round and careful writing of the girl, still learning where each letter should rest. None of them were in the room. All of them were on the table.

A person, sitting where the book now sat, would have wanted answers from her, or brought her news, or filled the room with talk. The book asked for nothing. It only waited, and let her move at the pace of her own reading, and gave back to her exactly what had been set down and no more. There was a mercy in that which Nyra had never once named before. The company of a book does not press.

When the lamp burned low she closed the covers and rested one hand flat upon them. The house was as empty as it had been an hour before, and yet she was not. A record, she understood, was one use of such a book, and perhaps not the only one, nor even the first of them. On a long evening it could be a kind of company, and it kept its watch beside her without a single word.