The Cover

Nyra kept the oldest ledger on the lowest shelf, where the cover had gone the color of wet bark. The boards beneath the leather had warped over the years into a shallow curve, as though the book had learned the shape of the hands that carried it.

The girl liked to run a finger along the edge where the cover met the pages, the place where the leather had worn thin and pale. A cover was the one part of a book that the weather touched. It took the rain and the lamp smoke and the oil of many fingers, and it gave the pages underneath a dry dark place to wait.

Nyra said nothing of this, but she oiled the cover twice a year, in the week after the first frost and the week before the first planting. The leather drank the oil slowly. For a day it would look almost new, and then it would settle back into its long brown patience, a little softer, ready to hold the shape of another year.

What the cover held was not the writing. The writing lived in the pages, in the columns and the small brown numbers. The cover held only the closing of the book, the keeping of the pages pressed and flat and out of the light. It was a wall around the quiet, and nothing of the quiet itself.

The girl understood, slowly, that she would never read the cover. She could read every line inside and still know nothing of the leather, the way it had curved to the carrying, the two seasons of oil in every year. The cover was the one page of the book that held no words, and held the book together all the same.