What I Put in the Letter

By breakfast, I had crossed out the word *family* so many times that the paper had grown soft beneath it.

I had tried *our people*, which sounded like a prayer meeting, and *the Bells and their kin*, which sounded like a notice of sale. In the end I wrote, *I am your cousin Evelyn, and I have reason to believe our family is bound by an old bargain.* Then I stopped, with the pen lifted and a blot forming at its tip.

A bargain was too small a word. It might mean a horse traded for a winter’s work. It might mean a promise made over a glass of whiskey. It did not say that somebody in our line was owed, generation after generation, and that the collector had come to take me.

I set the pen down. My burned palm had begun to ache beneath its wrapping, though I had not used the power in it. The letter sat open on the table. The address, copied from my brother’s hand, waited on the envelope.

Vincent came in while I was looking at it. He brought the two copies he had made of the account-book entry, each folded around a sheet of clean paper.

“You have not sealed it,” he said.

“I am deciding whether to make it worse.”

He set the copies beside the inkstand. “Worse for whom?”

I looked at him. “That is what I am trying to find out.”

He pulled a chair out but did not sit until I nodded. The morning light reached the brim of his hat and stopped there. He had taken it off indoors, as he did when he wanted me to remember that he was not only the lawman who had come asking questions.

“I could tell Josiah a collector claims our line,” I said. “I could tell him the claim is disputed. I could tell him my brother kept his letter. But if I put down that the debt passes from one generation to the next, and that the last known issue is expected to pay it at twenty-one, then I am telling him he may be in danger.”

“If the collector is right,” Vincent said, “he may be in danger whether you tell him or not.”

“That is not the same as making him afraid.”

“No.” He studied the folded copies. “It is not.”

I had hoped he would say that I need not write it. I disliked him a little for leaving the choice in my hands. Then I was grateful that he did.

Mateo came in carrying a tin plate with two biscuits and a pear. He put the plate near my elbow and read the top line of the letter without leaning over it.

“Still choosing what to tell him?”

“Yes.”

“He should know what you know,” he said. “But you do not have to make him answer for it.”