A Debt Without Heirs

“If the law says I owe him my soul, then let the judge say so while I am standing here,” Juana said.

The clerk looked down at the papers before him. The judge had not yet entered. Juana’s hands rested flat on the table, one beside the other. She had kept them there since we came into the room, as though she meant to make certain no one mistook her for a frightened child who might be led away.

I had thought the hearing would feel grander. It was a plain room above the records office, with a long table, a stove, and shelves crowded with tied bundles. A narrow window showed a strip of the plaza. The certified copy of the covenant lay before the judge’s empty chair, its seal broken and its edges protected by a sheet of clean paper.

Vincent stood at my left. He had left his hat on, shading his face from the high window. Rafael waited behind us, his shoulders squared and his eyes fixed on the records. Antonia and Rosa sat close together. Juana had chosen the place nearest the clerk.

Tomás Vigil came through the side door carrying a thin packet. He set it apart from the covenant.

“This was among the Bell estate papers,” he said. “It is not the covenant. The judge asked that it be brought before the hearing.”

Juana glanced at me. I felt the same dread I had felt in the vault, though this packet held no red wax and no mysterious seal. It was ordinary paper, browned at the edges and folded twice.

The judge entered and took his place. He was an older man with a tired face and a careful way of looking at people, as though he preferred to learn what they had brought before deciding what they meant.

He asked Juana to state her question herself.

“Could Hiram Bell promise the lives of descendants who had not been born and had never agreed to it?” she said. “And can anyone enforce that promise against us now?”

The judge read the covenant first. He checked its signatures, the language naming Hiram Bell and Elias Vale, and the clause setting one living soul as the installment for that generation. He asked Tomás to confirm where the document had been kept and whether anyone had altered it. Tomás answered each question in his measured fashion.

Then the judge opened the other packet.

The sheet inside was a signed statement entered with the Bell estate papers. Hiram had written it in a firm hand. It described his wife’s fever and their infant daughter’s sickness. He had petitioned the creditor for their lives to be spared. In return, he had pledged the future issue of his maternal line under the terms of the separate covenant.

The words on the page blurred for a moment. I blinked and read them again.