The greeting came down through the family worn smooth by use. My grandmother said it whenever someone sneezed, left the house, complained of a headache, or simply looked tired across the dinner table. Wæs þu hæl. She knew no other Old English and never pretended to. Her mother had said it, and her mother’s mother before that, an unbroken procession of women wishing health on people they loved in words whose grammar had long since been forgotten.
After the funeral, I found the ledger behind a loose board in her closet. The earliest pages were brittle and brown, filled with names belonging to people I knew only from gravestones and family stories. Each name had a sequence of marks beside it, along with columns of additions and subtractions extending across generations. Illnesses appeared in cramped annotations: fever, lungs, difficult birth, winter cough. Beside each recovery, somebody else’s total diminished.
The greeting was a transfer.
My grandmother had apparently spent decades balancing the family. A child’s pneumonia cost her brother three years of good health. My father’s heart attack was followed by a subtraction beside her own name so large that I finally understood why she seemed to age abruptly that winter. She never told anyone because the exchange worked best when offered freely.
At her funeral I said the words over the coffin with genuine intention for the first time. That night I woke with an unfamiliar warmth moving beneath my ribs. A week later the ledger contained a new page in handwriting recognizably mine.
I use the phrase constantly now. My children rarely get sick. A neighbor recovered unusually quickly after surgery. The cashier downstairs stopped coughing two days after I wished her well. Each kindness appears in the ledger whether I intend it as a transaction or not.
Lately my own column has become difficult to read because the numbers crowd so tightly together. My reflection has narrowed around the eyes, and my hands carry the thin, papery look my grandmother’s developed near the end. I finally understand why she made the blessing sound casual.
Affection becomes much harder to manage once you know exactly what it costs, and some forms of love are possible only when the arithmetic remains private.
©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys
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