He wanted to see the fifth name with his own eyes. That was the whole of it, or nearly the whole of it. Cordell Fasker was a precise man, a man whose pride lived in the clean column of a properly filled ledger, and Birgitte Marrow had told him there were five of them. Five.

His book said four. He could not leave a lie in his book, and so he turned his horse around at the last bend before the road ran down to Wilkesboro and rode back up into Scaridge Hollow. No one who knew him, even slightly, would have called it a heroic reason to die. It was not even a particularly interesting reason.

But it was, as far as anyone could later tell, an honest one. He reached the gate at about four in the afternoon. It was open. That was the first wrong thing.

The gate had been closed when he left the day before, and Josiah Marrow, by Cordell’s brief acquaintance with him, was not a man who left a gate open. Cordell rode through. He rode a quarter of a mile up the track in the green, deep-water light. There were no birds again.

The air, if air could have a taste, had begun to taste of something older than the forest. He loosened the reins and let the mare choose her pace. She walked slowly. She did not fight him this time, but the way she moved, ears back, head low, was the way of a horse obeying a rider it did not agree with.

Cordell noticed. He did not turn back. He reached the clearing where the cabin stood. The table was gone.

The bowls were gone. The door was closed. No smoke rose from the chimney. He dismounted, tied his horse to a birch at the edge of the clearing, and walked to the cabin.

He called out. He called the name Josiah. He called the name Sinaith. He stopped himself before he called the name Birgitte.

No one answered. He tried the door. It was not locked. He pushed it open.

The cabin was empty. Not empty of furniture. The table was still there. The chairs, the rope bed, the bench, the low chest beneath the bench.

Empty of people. The rope bed was made up tightly, the way a person makes a bed who has all the time in the world to make it. There was no fire in the hearth. The only smell in the room was cold ash and something faint and sweet, far off, like very old honey.

But there was a small brown leather book on the table. Cordell did not recognize it at first. He had his own small brown leather book in the pocket of his coat. He touched his pocket by instinct.

His book was there. He crossed to the table. He picked up the book that lay on it. It was identical to his own.

Same size. Same binding. Same brass corners. He opened it.

It was blank. Every page was empty except the first. On the first page, in a hand that closely resembled his own writing, though slightly more careful, slightly more even, someone had written his name. Cordell Fasker.

37. Enumeration clerk. That was all. He stood there holding the book.

He felt, very clearly, a rhythm in the room that was not his own breathing. It was slower, and steadier, and it came from beneath his feet. He looked at the floor. It was packed earth, as he had noted the day before.

Except in one place. Near the bench, there was a wooden trapdoor set into the ground that he had not noticed on his first visit because the low bench had covered it. The bench no longer covered it now. The trapdoor had a heavy iron ring at its center, and the ring was moving.

Slightly. Very slightly. Rising and falling, as though the earth beneath it were breathing. He stood over it for a long time.

Later, had he been given the chance to tell himself anything again, he would have said he was thinking about how to describe it in the record. He would have said he was weighing whether the fifth member of the family was a real person beneath the boards, or whether the trapdoor was only a story the family told itself, and the fifth member only a way of speaking, not a way of being. He would have said, in short, all the things a precise man says to himself when he stands over something his precise part does not want to name. But beneath all of it, he could feel the rhythm in the floor.

It was not fast. It was not urgent. It was a slow, patient rhythm, the rhythm of something that had been waiting for a long while and was in no hurry, because it knew that what it waited for would come in the end. He touched the iron ring.

It was slightly warm. Not hot. Not cold. Warm the way a sleeping person’s skin is warm.

He took his hand away. He stepped back. He did not open the trapdoor. That much is certain.

All the accounts, and there are two, agree on it. When Josiah and Sinaith Marrow returned to the cabin at dusk that evening, having been, as they later told Ridley Venn, out on the ridge tending to something they did not wish to name, they found the cabin exactly as they had left it. The bed made. The fire cold.

The door closed. No census clerk. No horse. No small brown book.

Cordell Fasker’s mare was found the next morning by a farmhand from a place two hollows over, wandering the ridge road above Scaridge, saddlebags intact, no sign of a rider, no sign of a struggle. His larger book, the official record, was inside the saddlebag. It contained four names for Family Number 17. The names were written in Cordell’s small, orderly hand.

Josiah Marrow, 52. Sinaith Marrow, 46. Birgitte Marrow, 39. Mother, age not given.

His personal little brown book was never found. Not on the mountain, at least. What was found three months later, in the pocket of a coat left folded on Ridley Venn’s store counter one morning, in a coat Ridley did not recognize and had not put there, was a small brown book identical to the one Cordell carried. It began with Ridley Venn, the storekeeper, watching a stranger come up the road in the late afternoon of May 9, 1874.

The stranger led his horse on foot, coat over his arm, shirt stuck to his back. Ridley watched him for five full minutes before going back to his work. That was not unfriendliness. It was the mountain habit of letting a stranger introduce himself before assuming anything about him.

The stranger was Cordell Fasker, thirty-seven years old, a man who felt a quiet pride in the cleanliness of a properly filled column. Tall enough that he ducked through most doorways without thinking, thin-shouldered, heavy-handed, his calluses earned by pen and by rein in about equal measure. His hair was that dusty brown that leans toward gray without quite deciding. His eyes were pale-water blue, and the people who worked with him later described them as kind.

He had been a schoolteacher before the war. A clerk in the army quartermaster’s office during it. When the war ended and the country began its slow, ugly process of counting itself again, he was one of the men the federal government hired to go into the countryside and make the numbers match the ground. The census of 1870, in most mountain counties, had been a mess.

Whole ridges left out. Entire coves classed as uninhabited by surveyors who took one look at the tracts and turned their horses home. By ’74, Washington had begun quietly sending men back into those blank spaces to fill in what had been left empty. Cordell was one of those men.

He kept a small brown leather notebook in his coat pocket, written in a hand so small you needed good light to read it. Names. Ages. Occupations.

Marks for those who could not sign. He carried a second, larger book in his saddlebags for the official record. He carried a pistol too, but he had never fired it in anger, and he liked to say, when asked, that a man with a good pen did not need a good pistol, because most trouble came from unclear paperwork. That line was printed in his obituary, or what passed for one, in a Richmond paper in the winter of ’75.

The obituary did not say where he died. It said only that he was believed to have perished in the line of duty in the Blue Ridge counties, which was a gentle way of saying that no one ever found his body. He was sent into the mountains in the third week of April. His assignment, on paper, was to complete the records of three ridges in a part of Ashe County where the ’70 count had come back with seventeen families, as he later calculated, described only as uncounted, distance and terrain considered.

Seventeen families in a mountain county erased with a single phrase. Cordell hated that phrase. He had grumbled about it gently at Richmond dinner tables for four years. “Distance and terrain considered” sounded to him like the voice of a man who had not done his job.

So when the department offered him the chance to go back and do it properly, he accepted. He said goodbye to his older sister at the door of the house they shared on Franklin Street, because he had never married and had no one else to see him off. He told her he would be home by the end of May. He was thirty-seven years old.

He saddled his horse and rode west. The road out of Richmond that spring was still, in most stretches, the road the war had left behind. Cordell took the Piedmont road to Danville, then turned northwest toward the mountains. By the time he crossed the line into North Carolina, the country had begun to close in around him in a way he noticed on every one of these assignments but never quite got used to.

The mountains here do not rise suddenly. They rise out of the Piedmont in long, slow folds, so that a rider heading west through them feels gradually drawn into a room. The trees change. The soil changes.

The people change. When the road narrows to a single wagon track and the hills begin to block the horizon from three directions, a man from the flatlands notices that he has stopped hearing the small familiar sounds he grew up with and begun hearing older ones: water running in rock, wind on the far side of a hill, and that particular silence that lives in hemlock woods at noon. Cordell noticed all of it. He wrote about it in letters home.

He wrote to his sister from a boarding house in Wilkesboro on the seventh of May that the country was so beautiful it made a man feel he had walked into someone else’s church, unsure whether to take off his hat or turn and leave. The same letter noted he expected to finish his work by month’s end and be home in time for her birthday. Neither thing came to pass. He reached Draymar Gap on the ninth of May.

The town in 1874 was a settlement of about forty houses, one store, a blacksmith, a post office run from the back of the store, and a sheriff’s office that shared a wall with the sheriff’s kitchen. The road to it was good for the first ten miles from the county seat, then narrowed into the kind of track that forces you to lead the horse rather than ride it. Cordell arrived on foot, leading his horse, late in the afternoon. The storekeeper was Ridley Venn, fifty-one years old, a heavyset man bald on top with streaks of steel-gray hair and a beard that stopped at his collar because he trimmed it himself every Sunday morning with the same scissors he used for thread.

He had been born inside the store. His father had opened it in 1829. He knew every road, every fence, every graveyard, every family within twelve miles of his door. When Cordell came in and told him why he had come, Ridley set down what he was holding and gave him his full attention.

Cordell explained his task. Ridley nodded. He said he would help as he could, that most of the families the census had missed were not hiding deliberately, but lived farther out than most men would ride just to write down their names. He asked if Cordell had a list.

Cordell had a list. He laid it on the counter. Ridley put on his wire-rimmed spectacles, which he hung on a nail beside the scales, and read it. He moved through most of it without comment.

Names he knew. Names he could point to on a map without needing one. Then he reached the last line, and his hand stopped on the paper. He looked at Cordell over his spectacles.

“Whoever wrote this list does not know these hills,” he said. “Four of the names on this list are one family. And the last name, which you have down as Family Number 17, is not a family you put in a census. ”

Cordell asked why not.

Ridley took off his spectacles, folded them, and hung them back on the nail. “Because those are not people who count themselves, and not people who take kindly to being counted. And the last man from the government who tried to put their names down came back a different man than the one who left. ”

Cordell asked what the name was.

“The Marrows,” Ridley said. It was the first time Cordell had heard the name. It stuck in his ear. Marrow.

Like the marrow of a bone. Ridley told him what he knew. It was not much. The Marrows had lived in the hollow above Draymar Gap for as long as anyone in Draymar Gap remembered.

There were four of them living up there in 1874, as far as Ridley knew. Three siblings and their mother, who was an old woman past the age that could be counted. The siblings were Josiah, the eldest, who came down twice a year to trade smoked meat and hides, and a certain kind of dark coarse tallow soap that people bought without asking what it was made from. Sinaith, the younger brother, who came down once a year if that, and never spoke unless asked a direct question, and even then usually answered with a gesture.

And Birgitte, the sister, who never came down at all. Ridley said Birgitte had not been seen in the town of Draymar Gap since 1861. Cordell asked what she was like. Ridley thought about it for a while.

“Tall for a woman,” he said. “Pale, even by that family’s measure. ” And that family was pale, certainly. “And she has a way of looking at you that is not quite like being looked at.

”

Cordell wrote that down. Not the words, but the name. Birgitte Marrow. Family Number 17.

He wrote it in his little brown book in his small, orderly hand. Ridley watched him write it. Then Ridley said, “Mr. Fasker, if you will take some advice.

”

“Please,” Cordell said. “Go up there in the morning,” Ridley said. “Introduce yourself at the fence line. Do not go past the gate unless someone opens it for you.

If Josiah comes down to the gate, you can talk to him, and you may well come back with four names in your book. If Sinaith comes down, talk to him the way you would talk to a strange dog. Careful, low voice, and do not reach into your coat for your notebook until he allows it. And if Birgitte comes down—” Ridley did not finish the sentence.

He picked up the rag he used for wiping the counter and went back to wiping it. “And if Birgitte comes down? ” Cordell asked. “Then you leave,” Ridley said.

“You leave without your notebook and without your list and without the names. You leave and you come back to me. And you tell me what she said to you. And I will tell you whether you need to be out of the county before dark.

”

Cordell was, as has been said, a precise man. A man who liked things orderly. He respectfully asked whether there had been trouble with the Marrows in the past. Trouble the sheriff kept a record of.

Ridley said the sheriff’s office had no record of the Marrows at all. That, he explained, was part of the problem. Before Cordell went upstairs, he asked whether he might speak to the sheriff. Ridley said the sheriff’s name was Ephraim Quinn, an honorable man, certainly at home eating his supper, and Cordell could find him in the house next door.

But he added that if Cordell meant to ask the sheriff about the Marrows, he might save himself the walk. Cordell went anyway. Ephraim Quinn was a small, thin man in his sixties, with a mustache that drooped below his mouth and a badge he hung on a leather thong around his neck rather than pinning to his shirt. He received Cordell politely.

Offered him a seat on the porch. Listened while Cordell explained his business. When Cordell mentioned the Marrows, the sheriff stood, went inside, and returned a few minutes later with a small cup of coffee, which he handed to Cordell without further comment. Then Ephraim sat, and in a voice neither friendly nor cold, told Cordell that in thirty-one years of wearing that badge, he had never opened a file, recorded a complaint, or taken a report of any kind concerning anyone named Marrow.

The Marrows had never stolen from anyone, never injured anyone so far as could be proved, never been accused of any crime by any party willing to sign their name to a paper. “Mr. Fasker,” he said, “in my county, a man who has never given me cause is a man I have never had occasion to concern myself with. ”

Cordell asked whether the sheriff had ever gone up to the hollow himself.

The sheriff drank from his cup slowly. “Mr. Fasker, I have been sheriff a long while. The one thing you learn wearing this thong is that there are some questions you do not ask, because you might get an answer.

”

Cordell thanked him. He paid for a room above the store. He ate the supper the storekeeper’s wife brought him. He wrote a letter to his sister in Richmond, sealed it, and gave it to Ridley to put with the next mail out of town.

Then he lay on a narrow rope bed with a straw mattress, stared at the ceiling, and thought about the name Birgitte Marrow, and about the word marrow itself, and about the fact that when Ridley Venn pronounced her name, the storekeeper had looked for a moment at the front door of his store as though making sure it was still closed. That first night, around midnight, Cordell heard something on the road below the store. It was not footsteps. It was not a horse.

It was a light dragging sound, like a heavy wet coat being pulled along the packed dirt road by someone very slow. He got up. Went to the window. The road was empty.

The moon was full and pale. Nothing moved. He watched for a long time. Then he went back to bed and told himself it was an animal.

But he could not say which animal. He rode up the hollow the next morning. The road into Scaridge Hollow, at its start, was no different from any other mountain track Cordell had ridden in his three years as a returning enumerator. Winter ruts.

Wetness in the low places. The kind of turn that makes a horse misstep if you are not paying attention. He had a small map Ridley had drawn for him on the back of a receipt, and he checked it at every fork. He passed a burned chimney at the second fork, the mark Ridley had noted.

He passed a well with a broken sweep, also marked. He passed a fence running east into the woods, with a note on Ridley’s map that said, “Do not cross. ” He did not cross. About two miles above that fence, the trees changed.

That was the first thing he noticed. Not the gradual change of trees with altitude, which happens so slowly you do not mark it where it happens. Not that. It was more like a line.

Below a certain bend in the road, the forest was full of oak and walnut and poplar, the usual hardwoods of that country. Above that bend, and only above it, everything was black birch and hemlock and a third kind of tree Cordell could not identify. A tall tree with gray bark and very small leaves that seemed pasted onto it. The light changed too.

Not exactly darker, but wetter. The sunlight there had a green cast, like light coming through the bottom of a bottle. He noted it, and wrote in his little notebook that there was an unusual vegetative change at the third bend, with hemlock dominant above, and that he would inquire about it in town on his return. He kept writing.

After about four miles, he reached the gate. It was a wooden gate, old but not neglected. Two heavy posts with a crossbar fastened by wooden pegs rather than iron nails, and a single flat board in the center carved with a design Cordell could not quite make out. Not letters.

Not a name. A kind of curved lines meeting at a point, over and over, so that they seemed to move if you looked at them a certain way. He rode up to the gate and reined in. The gate did not please his horse.

She stopped ten feet short and refused to go on, which was not like her. So he dismounted and led her the final steps. He stopped at the gate itself, took off his hat, and called out. “Mr.

Marrow. ” He called it twice, in a clear voice. Nothing. Only the wind in the hemlocks.

Then, after a long silence, someone came down the track on the far side of the gate. Not fast. Not slow. A tall, thin man in a long dark coat, walking with his hands before him at his belt, the way a man walks who is not in any hurry to reach anything and wants you to know it.

He came to the gate and stopped on his side of it. He looked at Cordell without expression and waited. “Mr. Marrow,” Cordell said.

“That is my name,” the man said. His voice was quiet. A voice Cordell would write down that night in his little book as sounding like it came from inside a room, though they were standing outdoors. This was Josiah.

Cordell put his age at about fifty. Ridley had said tall. Very pale. His hair was long and loose, the color of old rope.

His eyes were ordinary gray. The pallor of his skin was not exactly from avoiding the sun. It was something older. Something in the blood.

Cordell introduced himself. Explained his business. Said, in the precise way he always spoke, that he was here on behalf of the Department of the Interior to complete the 1870 census, that his task was only to record names, ages, and occupations, that the records were confidential, that no taxes or claims would follow, and that he needed only a few minutes of Josiah’s time. Josiah listened to all of it.

When Cordell finished, Josiah said, “We have never counted ourselves. ”

“Sir, the census is required by law,” Cordell said respectfully. “We do not know your law,” Josiah said. “Sir, it is the same law.

”

Josiah looked at Cordell for a while. Then he said, “There are four of us. ” And he began reciting the names without waiting to be asked. “Josiah Marrow, fifty-two.

Sinaith Marrow, forty-six. Birgitte Marrow, thirty-nine. And Mother. ”

Cordell’s pen stopped.

“Sir, what is your mother’s name? ”

“Mother. ”

“Sir, I need her personal name for the record. ”

“We do not use it.

”

“Then any name you use to call her among yourselves will do. ”

“We call her Mother. ”

Cordell wrote that down. He wrote, “Identified as Mother, age uncertain, apparent age over ninety.

” He was aware, as he wrote, that his hand trembled slightly. He asked their occupation. “We are self-sufficient,” Josiah said. Cordell wrote, “Subsistence.

”

Then, out of politeness more than anything else, he asked whether he might come in briefly, to see the family for himself and pay his respects to the mother. Josiah regarded him. Then Josiah said something Cordell would remember for what remained of his life. “Mr.

Fasker, you have the names now. You have what you were sent for. If you turn back down this road today, you will reach Draymar Gap by dusk, and you will sleep in the bed you slept in last night. That is what I would have you do.

”

“And if I do not? ” Cordell asked. “Then you will meet my sister. ”

Cordell stood at the gate for a moment.

He had the four names. He had done his work. There was no reason, in the mind of a man who had finished his work, to go on. But Cordell was a precise man, and the precision in him drove him to see the mother.

He wanted to confirm the ages. He wanted to lay his eyes on the fourth member of the family and record whether she was in fact above ninety, because he suspected from the smooth way Josiah said it that she was far past a hundred, and no family in Ashe County had been recorded in the ’70 census with a member over a hundred. If he came back with that number, he would be the man who had found it. “Sir, I would be grateful for five minutes only,” he said.

Josiah looked at him. Nothing changed in his face. “Very well. ” And he opened the gate.

Cordell went through. The path from the gate to the house ran about a quarter of a mile. The trees covered it completely. The green, deep-water light Cordell had noticed earlier was thicker here.

He could hear his own breathing. He heard no birds. That was the thing he wrote about most in the little brown book, later. Not the trees.

Not the light. The absence of birds. No thrush. No jay.

No crow. Nothing. Even flies were absent, as if the forest were hollow. Josiah walked ahead of him.

He did not turn to see whether Cordell still followed. He did not slow. He did not speak. His long dark coat moved around his legs.

His hands stayed before his belt, and Cordell noticed, watching his back, that Josiah’s shoulders did not move as he walked. Not the way a man’s shoulders move. It was the gait of a man carrying something on a yoke. But Josiah carried no yoke.

The house was small. That surprised Cordell. He had expected something larger, a family compound. This was a one-room cabin with a side shed on the north and a low stone chimney on the west.

The roof was cedar shakes. The door stood open, propped with a stone. There was no porch. But there was a table set up outside the door against the cabin wall.

On the table there were things. Bowls. Small dark bowls, twenty or thirty of them, arranged in a grid. Each bowl held something.

Cordell did not look closely to see what. Some held what might be dried herbs. Some held what looked like small pale roots. One or two held something wetter and darker he could not identify.

Josiah walked past the table without looking at it. Cordell followed. Sinaith was standing in the doorway when they arrived. He was shorter than his brother, and broader.

His hair was the same rope color, cut short. He wore a work shirt that had once been white and trousers with hand-sewn patches at the knees. He did not greet Cordell. He did not step aside.

He looked at Cordell the way a man looks at a strange dog that has come into his yard. Josiah said, “This is the census man. ” Sinaith said nothing. He stepped back from the door.

Josiah gestured Cordell inside. Cordell went in. The cabin was dim and warm. A fire burned in the hearth, though it was mid-May and warm outdoors.

The floor was packed earth. The furnishings were a table, four chairs, a rope bed against the north wall, a low bench against the south wall, and a large wooden chest under the bench with a heavy latch and a lock. The lock was closed. On the rope bed, propped against a large pillow that might have been a folded quilt or sacks stuffed with straw, sat the mother.

She was very old. Cordell had seen old people before, many of them, in his four years of entering mountain cabins. He had recorded ages of ninety-two, ninety-four, ninety-seven, and once, in a hollow west of Boone, had recorded a note saying, “Claimed age 101, appears older. ” This woman was older than that.

Her face was nearly transparent. Her eyes were closed. Her hands lay relaxed on the coverlet across her lap. They were the smallest adult hands Cordell had ever seen, small and dark and shrunken so that the bones stood out at the joints like beads on a wire.

Her mouth was slightly open. She was breathing. He could see her chest rise. But her breathing was very slow and very quiet.

And it was not in time with the room. That was the thing Cordell could not name later. The mother breathed in one rhythm, and the room, the walls, the fire, even the air of the cabin, breathed in another. He knew this was not possible.

He knew rooms did not breathe. But standing in that cabin, in that green deep-water light coming through the open door, he could feel it. Two rhythms. Hers, slow and regular.

The room’s, much slower. And the room was winning. “This is Mother,” Josiah said. “Ma’am,” Cordell said.

She did not open her eyes. “She will not speak to you,” Josiah said. “She has not spoken in nine years. ”

“Can you tell me her age, sir?

” Cordell asked. “We do not know. ”

“How long has she lived here? ”

“She has always lived here.

”

Cordell was recording all of this in his little brown book. He was aware, as he wrote, that Sinaith had come into the cabin behind him and was standing between him and the door. Not blocking it entirely. Just standing there.

The way a fence stands between a field and a road. Then Birgitte came in. Cordell did not hear her approach. She did not come through the door.

She came from behind the low bench, from a corner of the cabin so dark he had not registered there was a corner there. She had been, he later assumed, in the room the whole time. She was tall, as Ridley had said. Very tall.

Taller than her brothers. She wore a long dark dress that reached the floor and carried no ornament of any kind, no collar, no visible buttons, just a simple long gown that looked as though it had been spun from a single piece of very black cloth. Her hair was the color of her brothers’, but longer, falling past her waist and loose. Her face was long and thin, her mouth narrow, her eyes pale, so pale they were almost colorless, and they were fixed on him without blinking.

Cordell had said before riding up that road that a man with a good pen did not need a good pistol. In that moment, he wished he had said the opposite. He had never seen a woman stand that way. She did not shift her weight.

She did not clasp her hands. She stood with her arms at her sides, the way a person stands who has stood in that exact spot for a very long time and does not mind standing there a while longer. Cordell realized she was exactly as tall as the rope bed was long. It was not a coincidence any local carpenter would have arranged.

It was not a coincidence at all. “Welcome, Mr. Fasker,” she said. Her voice was low, steady, un hurried.

The voice of a woman used to speaking to people with no choice but to listen. “My brother tells me you have come to record our names. ”

“Beg pardon, ma’am. Yes.

”

“We do not usually give our names,” Birgitte said. “I understand, ma’am. Your brother was most cooperative. ” He looked at Josiah.

Josiah was looking at the floor. Sinaith was looking at the door. “Would you be good enough to read the names to me? ” Birgitte said.

It was standard practice. Census clerks were trained to read what had been recorded back to the head of household before leaving. Cordell opened the little brown book. He read: “Josiah Marrow, fifty-two.

Sinaith Marrow, forty-six. Birgitte Marrow, thirty-nine. Mother, age not given. ” He closed the book.

“Thank you, Mr. Fasker,” Birgitte said. “But you have missed one. ”

“Beg pardon, ma’am?

”

“There is another one,” Birgitte said. “There is always another one. ”

“Ma’am, your brother gave four persons in this household. ”

“Four is the number he gave you,” Birgitte said.

“Four is the number that comes down to Draymar Gap in that town’s imagining. But we are five, Mr. Fasker. We have always been five.

My brother did not lie. My brother told you what could be counted. I am telling you what is. ”

Cordell looked at her.

He looked at Josiah, still looking at the floor. He looked at the mother, still breathing, slowly, in a rhythm that did not match the room. He looked around the cabin. Four chairs at the table.

A rope bed for one. A bench that might seat one. A packed-earth floor. There was no fifth person in that cabin, and Cordell was certain of it.

“Ma’am, may I ask where? ”

Birgitte smiled. It was the only time any of them smiled during that visit. It was not a kind smile, exactly.

It was not unkind either. It was the smile of a person who has said something she has waited a long time to say. “The fifth is under the floor,” she said. Cordell wrote nothing.

His hand did not move. “We are the Marrows, Mr. Fasker,” Birgitte said. “Do you know why we are called that?

Because the mountain gave us the marrow to keep, and you cannot count marrow. You can only keep it. ”

Then, in the same low, flat voice, she said, “Would you like to see? ”

“No, ma’am,” Cordell said.

“Thank you. ” He put his book in his pocket. He said, respectfully, that he believed he had everything he needed. He stepped back toward the door.

Sinaith moved aside. Cordell did not turn his back on Birgitte. He did not turn his back until he was outside the cabin, back in the green deep-water light, back past the twenty or thirty small dark bowls on the table by the door. Josiah walked with him back to the gate.

Neither man spoke. At the gate, Josiah opened it. Cordell went through. His horse was still standing where he had left her, but she was standing farther from the gate than he had left her, at the far edge where she could still see him.

He walked to her. He mounted. He was aware, mounting, that he was doing everything a little too quickly. “Good day, sir,” he said.

“Mr. Fasker,” Josiah said. Cordell paused. “Do not come back here,” Josiah said.

“You have the names. That is what you were sent for. Do not come back for the other one. ”

“Sir, I have no intention of doing so,” Cordell said.

“Good,” Josiah said. Then Josiah closed the gate. Cordell rode down. He rode faster than he had ridden up.

He did not look back at the gate, did not look at the woods above it. The green light faded. The hemlocks gave way to the honest hardwoods again. The birds came back.

He did not realize until he heard them how much he had missed them. He reached Draymar Gap at dusk. Ridley Venn was standing on the store’s threshold, and Cordell had the impression Ridley had been standing there for hours watching the road. Cordell dismounted.

Led the horse to the water trough. Ridley waited. When Cordell finally stepped up onto the porch, Ridley said, “Well. ”

“Four names,” Cordell said.

“Whose names? ” Ridley said. “The three siblings and the mother,” Cordell said. “Did you go past the gate?

”

“Yes. ”

Ridley showed no reaction. He turned and went into the store. Cordell followed.

Ridley poured two glasses of clear liquid from a jug behind the counter, without being asked. He handed one to Cordell. Cordell drank it. It burned.

Ridley waited. “Did Birgitte speak to you? ” Ridley said, at last. “Yes.

”

“What did she say? ”

Cordell told him everything. All of them. What was under the floor.

The offer to see. Ridley listened without interrupting. When Cordell finished, Ridley set his glass on the counter. “Mr.

Fasker, I want you to leave in the morning,” he said. “I have three more houses on my list,” Cordell said. “I know. I will ride with you tomorrow, and we will finish that business in the morning.

They are closer, and simple people. Then I want you to take the stage to Wilkesboro tomorrow afternoon. ”

“Why? ”

“Because in my father’s time and my grandfather’s time,” Ridley said, “no man from the census, or the tax office, or the court, or the revenue agents, ever came back from Scaridge Hollow the way he went up.

And those who have seen it, and those who have spoken to them, do not always come back at all. ”

“I came back,” Cordell said. “Mr. Fasker,” Ridley said, “did you really come back today?

”

Cordell slept badly that night. He heard the dragging sound again on the road below the store at about two in the morning. Not footsteps. Not a horse.

A wet, slow dragging, like a heavy coat pulled over packed earth. He did not go to the window this time. He lay perfectly still on the narrow straw bed and listened. The dragging stopped directly beneath his window.

It stayed there for what seemed a long time. Then it moved away. Then, at what he judged to be about three-thirty, very faintly, from the direction of the road, he heard the sound of a woman. Low.

Steady. Unhurried. He could not make out the words. It was almost certain, he thought, that she was calling his name.

In the morning, he did what Ridley Venn asked. He rode out with Ridley and enumerated the three remaining houses before noon, and every one of them was ordinary, and every household recorded without trouble. At noon they returned to Draymar Gap. Cordell packed his saddlebags.

He wrote a second letter to his sister, sealed it, and gave it to Ridley to put with the mail. He mounted. He shook Ridley’s hand. “Mr.

Fasker, safe journey,” Ridley said. Then Ridley added, “One other thing. ” Cordell waited. “That sound you heard last night on the road,” Ridley said.

“I heard nothing,” Cordell said. “Mr. Fasker, I heard it too. I hear it every time one of them receives a visit.

”

Cordell rode out. He reached the last bend before the road ran down toward Wilkesboro. Then he stopped his horse. He sat there in the road for what witnesses later said was the better part of a quarter of an hour, not moving, not dismounting, just sitting on his horse in the middle of the road, thinking.

Ridley Venn, watching from the store’s threshold with his hand shading his eyes, would say afterward that he knew in that quarter hour exactly what Cordell Fasker was going to do, and that he could not think of anything he could shout from that distance to stop him. Cordell turned his horse around. He rode back up toward Scaridge Hollow. He did not stop at the store.

He did not tell Ridley. He went back up because he could not, as a precise man, as a man whose whole life rested on the precision of a column of names, leave a household of five recorded as four. He went back up because Birgitte Marrow had told him they were five, and if they were five, then the number four in his book was a lie, and Cordell Fasker did not put lies in his book. That is not a heroic reason to die.

It is not even a particularly interesting reason. But it is, as far as anyone could later tell, the honest one. He reached the gate in the early afternoon. The cabin was closed up.

No fire. No table. No bowls. The door shut.

He tied his horse at the edge of the clearing and called. He called Josiah’s name. Sinaith’s. He did not call Birgitte’s.

There was no answer. The door was unlocked. He pushed it open. The cabin was empty of people, but on the table lay a small brown leather book, identical to his own, with the same binding and the same brass corners.

On the first page, in a hand that very nearly matched his own, though slightly more careful and more even, someone had written his name. Cordell Fasker, 37, enumeration clerk. That was all. He stood there holding the book.

He felt, very clearly, a rhythm in the room that was not his own breathing, slower and steadier, coming from beneath his feet. And in one place near the bench, the floor was not packed earth. A wooden trapdoor lay set into the ground, with a heavy iron ring at its center. The ring was moving, very slightly, rising and falling, as though the earth beneath made a third rhythm in the room.

And when Cordell laid his hand flat on the iron, it was warm. Not hot, not cold. Warm, like the skin of a sleeping person. He took his hand away.

He stepped back. He did not open it. That evening, at dusk, when Josiah and Sinaith Marrow returned to the cabin, having been out on the ridge tending to something they did not wish to name, they found it exactly as they had left it. The bed made.

The fire cold. The door closed. No census clerk. No horse.

No book. Cordell’s mare was found the next morning, wandering the ridge road, saddlebags intact. His official record, inside the saddlebag, held four names for Family Number 17 in his small, orderly hand. His personal little brown book was never found on the mountain.

What was found, three months later, in the pocket of a coat left folded on Ridley Venn’s store counter one morning, in a coat Ridley did not recognize and had not put there, was a small brown book identical to the one Cordell carried. The coat was of good quality, cut by no tailor Ridley knew in that region, clean, recently brushed, smelling faintly of wood smoke and, beneath the smoke, something sweeter. The book was blank except for the first page. On that page, in a hand that almost exactly matched Cordell’s, though slightly more precise and even, someone had written five names.

Josiah Marrow. Sinaith Marrow. Birgitte Marrow. Mother.

And at the bottom, in the same hand, slightly smaller, as if the writer wished to be tidy, Cordell Fasker, 37, enumerator. Ridley Venn kept the book and the coat in the drawer under his counter for the rest of his life. He never showed them to the sheriff. He never showed them to Cordell’s sister.

When she wrote, three years later, to ask whether anything of her brother’s remained to be returned, Ridley wrote her a very precise letter saying her brother had been a gentleman and a credit to his office, that he had done his work well, and that unfortunately nothing had been left behind that Ridley was in a position to return. Which was true, from a certain narrow point of view. By then, Ridley no longer considered the little brown book to be Cordell’s property. Ridley Venn died in the winter of 1902.

His son inherited the store. In the drawer under the counter, among the ledgers and receipts and fifty years of accumulated papers, the son found the little brown book. He did not know what it was. He almost threw it away.

He read the first page. He put it back in the drawer. He kept it there for the rest of his life. That is the book from which researchers in the 1930s copied the five names now held in the Ashe County historical archive as a disputed record, Scaridge Hollow, 1874.

Five entries. Source undocumented. The Marrows, according to any records at all, remained in that hollow into the 1920s. A county tax record from 1923 lists a property near the old Scaridge pass as owned by the Marrow family.

No dwelling address. No correspondence possible. A surveyor working for the state in 1927 filed a short report noting he had been asked by local residents not to attempt a survey of a certain stretch of ridge above Draymar Gap, and that he had complied, on the grounds that the ridge in question was so overgrown that an accurate survey was impossible in any case. In 1931, a Depression-era relief worker for the Farm Security Administration noted in the margin of a rural household form that a family named Marrow had refused to register for any federal assistance program and had refused to open the door when she visited.

The woman who refused the door said, from behind the shut wood, that they were self-sufficient and in need of nothing. That is the last written record of the Marrows alive. After 1923, the property tax for the hollow was paid each year in cash, in an envelope left under the counter of Ridley Venn’s store. Then, after his death, under the counter of his son’s store.

The last envelope arrived in the spring of 1948. No envelope ever came again. Whether they died, or went elsewhere, or were taken back by the mountain that had given them its name, no one knows. What is known is what Ridley Venn’s grandson, an old man by then, told a visitor who sat with him on the porch of the same store, still standing, still selling small tools and cold drinks to fishermen, in the summer of 1978.

He was ninety-one that summer. He told the story the way an old man tells a story he has told many times: slowly, with pauses to drink from a tin cup, without ornament, without any visible expectation that the listener would take it seriously. His grandfather, he said, had told his father, and his father had told him, that on the second night after Mr. Fasker went back up into that hollow, the grandfather heard the sound on the road below the store at about midnight.

Not footsteps. Not a horse. A wet, slow, dragging sound, like a heavy coat pulled over packed earth. It stopped directly beneath his window.

It stayed there a long time. Then, faintly, from the direction of the road, he heard the voice of a man. Low. Quiet.

Unhurried. “My grandfather said it sounded almost like Mr. Fasker,” the old man said. “Almost, but a little more careful.

A little quieter. As though he were practicing. ” The grandfather said the man was reading. Reading a list of names.

When the old man finished, he looked at the road for a while. Then he said his grandfather had kept the coat and the book in the drawer under the counter until the day he died, and when his father inherited the store, and then he himself inherited it, they kept them too. They were still there, he said. In that drawer.

If the visitor would like to see them. The visitor said yes. The old man rose slowly and went inside. The visitor heard him unlock the drawer.

Heard him take something out. Heard him stop. Then, without coming back to the porch, the old man closed the drawer again and locked it. He returned to the porch with empty hands.

“Mister,” he said, “I have opened that drawer perhaps once every ten years since I was a young man. And every time I open that book, I find one more name in it than there was the time before. ” He said he did not intend to look into it again in front of anyone. The visitor did not press.

He did not ask what the name was. He finished his coffee, thanked the old man, and drove away from Draymar Gap. The visitor had come looking for the answer to a question. He had been told, at the end, only this: that the book had held five names when Ridley Venn first found it, and that it held a name more every time Ridley’s grandson opened it.

He never learned the sixth name. He never returned to the hollow. He never found out what happened to Cordell Fasker, or to the Marrows, or to the fifth person under the floor. He left Draymar Gap with the record unfinished, the way it had been left unfinished in 1874, and the way, he came to believe, it would always be left unfinished.

Some places keep what they keep. You cannot count them, and you cannot close their ledgers. You can only leave them alone, and let the mountain hold its names until it is ready to give them back.