No Forwarding Address - Part Three

He spread the letters under the lamp, the gray ribbon coiled on the table where he had worked it loose, and meant to read them all before morning.

He read a few. Ordinary things, in hands he knew from books, the small traffic of any life, and none of it had ever arrived. He kept setting them down and taking up the one with his own name, and setting that down too, unopened, his thumb reaching the flap and stopping. Outside, the town went about the business a town has before dawn, and for a few hours more he belonged to it.

He was still awake when the knock came, and it did not sound like a knock meant to wake anyone. It had the weight of a hand that already knew the latch.

The man on the landing wore a coat a season too heavy for the night and stood the way furniture stands, no weight carried onto one foot or the other. His age would not settle on a number. He looked at the reporter, and then past him to the letters under the lamp, and whatever he had come for he seemed to find there on the table.

"You untied it," the man said.

The reporter started to explain. The postmaster. The law coming up the road. How he had meant to hand all of it in by morning. The man let the words run out the way you let a faucet run.

"I came to see," he said, when there was nothing more. That was all of it. He looked once at the letter with the reporter's own name on the front and did not remark on it, which was worse than remarking, and then he went down the stairs the way he had come up them, without hurry. The reporter listened for a door below and did not hear one.

He never learned what the man had come to see, or whether he had seen it.

He did not go to the warm room he had been thinking of all that long night. He stood in the street below instead, and a while later the lamp in its window went out on its own, and no one came to relight it, and by then there was already somewhere else he had to be.

In the clearing by the creek the crates were going up into the bed of a truck, and the young deputy tipped the last of the undeliverable mail into a box and carried it off, and the reporter stood where he had been standing and let the years he had kept away from come up around him.

After that night his life did not go back to being his life. Something would reach him, a letter, sometimes a wire, and he would go where it sent him and set down what he saw, and for a while it felt like his own idea. He was good at being the one who could be spared. A copy desk favored a man with no family to call him home and no eye on the chair above him.

The papers closed under him, one and then another, and he moved on, and those closed too. The men he had started beside grew gray and thick through the middle. Once, at the funeral of one of them, a young man with the dead man's chin came over and said the reporter had his grandfather's look about him. The reporter said they had worked a desk together, a long time back. His grandfather, the young man said, had lived to ninety-one. The reporter agreed that it was a fine age, and stepped out into the rain before anyone by the grave could look too long at his face.

He kept out of photographs. A drawing could be wrong on purpose, but a photograph was a date a man had to carry, and he had carried too many of them into years where they made no sense, a young face in an old collar turning up unchanged in a room where everyone else had aged out of the frame.

He gave up keeping a room. A room was a thing a man came back to, and he was always being sent on. He carried the bundle with him, tied again in its gray ribbon, and the letter with his own name stayed sealed inside it, and every few winters his thumb would find the flap in the dark and stop, the way it had the first night. He never opened it.

He saw the man from the landing once in a while, across a street or at the edge of a crowd, in the coat a season too heavy, no older than he had been on the stairs. He never came near again. He never needed to.

And a paper he would outlast like all the rest sent him up a dark road under the redwoods to watch the law take a man for painting a toilet, and he counted fourteen along a fence, and came to a card table where a young deputy said the word undeliverable, and every year he had spent not thinking about the postmaster's house came up through the paper and set him down inside it again.

The deputy looked up from the box and asked if he needed to sit down. The reporter looked at the pen in his hand, and the empty page, and the streak of green dried on his cuff, and could not for a moment have said what year it was that wanted the story.

Next Part:
https://www.abctales.com/story/soulfire77/no-forwarding-address-part-four