The Initials in the Margin

The girl was turning back through the older pages when she noticed that some lines carried a small pair of letters at their end and others did not. She ran her finger down a column and counted four entries marked with the same two initials and a dozen more that stood bare. It seemed to her a careless habit, as though the keeper had grown tired of signing and simply let it go. She brought the book to Nyra and pointed at the difference.

Nyra set down the trowel and looked where the girl was pointing. “Those are not forgotten,” she said. “Read what each one says, and you will see why one is signed and the other is not.”

The girl read them slowly. The bare lines held plain things: a date, a weight of beans, the day a row was sown. The signed lines held something else. “This one says the east bed does poorly and should be left fallow next year,” she read aloud. “And this one calls the late plums the finest in memory.” She looked up. “These are the ones with the letters.”

“Because those are not the world talking, they are me talking,” Nyra said. “A weight is a weight, and any honest hand would write it the same. But whether a bed does poorly, whether a plum is the finest, that is my eye and my judgment, and a later reader deserves to know whose eye it was. So I sign it, the way you would sign a letter, to say this part is mine and you may weigh it as one person’s view.”

The girl went back through the pages with a new understanding, seeing now that the little initials were a kind of honesty and not a habit at all. A fact could stand on its own and needed no name. A judgment carried a person inside it, and hiding that person would let an opinion wear the plain clothes of a fact. She took up her own pen, and beside the first true opinion she had ever set down, she made her own two small letters.