The Register

The letter from the council was one page long. Nora read it twice, standing at the door of the library with the rain still on her coat.

The town had three libraries once. Now it had one, and the council had counted what that one cost. The numbers were all in the letter. If fewer than two hundred people used the building in a month, it would close in the spring, and the books would go to the city.

Nora had kept the library for half her life. She knew the sound of the door so well that she could tell, without looking up, who had come in. Seven people, most days. The same seven.

That evening she found a big old book with empty pages, tied a pen to the table by the door with a piece of string, and wrote on the first page: PLEASE SIGN YOUR NAME.

"What is it?" asked Amy, who came in every day after school to do her work, because her house was small and loud and the library was neither.

"A register," said Nora. "The council wants a number. So we will give them a number."

At the end of the first month the register held fewer than a hundred names. Nora counted them twice. Most of them were the same seven people, signing day after day, which is a kind of love, but not a number.

"It is not enough," said Amy.

"No," said Nora. "It is not."

Amy looked around the quiet room, at the books standing in their long lines, and said the thing that changed the winter. "The town does not come to the library because the library has never asked."

Nora thought about that all night.

She started with the market. On market days the men set up in the dark and stood in the cold from six. Nora opened the library early, made coffee, and left the door open. The market men came in out of the cold, drank the coffee, and looked at the walls of books the way you look at a country you have never visited. Then one of them took down a book about the sea, and sat with it until it was time to go, and signed the register on his way out.

On Saturday mornings she read to the children. The first Saturday, four came. The next Saturday there were ten, because a quiet child on a Saturday morning is worth a great deal to a tired mother, and news like that travels fast.

Two old men found the newspapers and stayed to argue about a war they both remembered differently. They came back the next day to argue some more. They signed the register every time, pressing hard with the pen, as if the name mattered. It did.

The count for the second month was one hundred and twenty. Nora put the council's letter on the table next to the register, where everyone could read it, and after that she did not have to explain anything. The town understood what the register was for. Whole families came in on Saturday afternoons and signed, one name under another, like people signing against something.

The man from the council came on a cold morning in the last week of winter. He was young, and he carried a card with his name on it and a list of questions. He counted the names in the register for a long time. Nora made him a cup of tea and let him count.

"Two hundred and six," he said at last. "You needed two hundred."

"I know what we needed," said Nora.

He closed the register and stood for a moment, looking at the room: at Amy bent over her work, at the market men's table, at the corner where the children sat on Saturdays. He looked like a man who had expected an empty building and did not know what to do with a full one.

"You will get another letter," he said. "It will be shorter than the first."

At the door he stopped. Then he came back, picked up the pen on its string, and signed his name at the bottom of the page.

"Two hundred and seven," said Amy, when the door had closed behind him.

Nora turned to a new page for the new month. The book had a great many empty pages left, and she meant to fill every one of them.