MiMaw Gertrude always said the family had been lucky since before anyone could remember, and she said it the way you’d mention weather — as a fact, not a mystery, or something owed.
The luck was specific. Wells that didn’t run dry when the neighbors’ did. A son who came home from every war her family sent one to, three wars running, unmarked. Crops that split the difference between drought years and flood years and came in fine regardless, like the land itself had made an exception.
Gertrude died at ninety-one, in her sleep, on dry ground, in a year when everyone else’s basement flooded.
It was her granddaughter, Gladys, going through the estate, who found the ledger — not a ledger exactly, older than that, goat-leather and stitched wrong by modern binding standards, written in a hand that got less careful further back, as though whoever kept it had once had all the time in the world and had learned, slowly, that they didn’t.
The first entries were names Gladys didn’t know. Then names she did, going back generations, each with a single line beside it. Well did not fail. Son returned. House stood. No explanation of why. Just an account being kept, favor by favor, the way you’d track a debt you intended, eventually, to collect.
The last entry, in Gertrude’s own careful hand, added only weeks before she died: Still here. Still owed.
Gladys understood then what her grandmother had never said outright, what none of them had ever said outright, because saying it would have made it a bargain instead of a blessing. Somewhere back before the names, before the wells, someone in her line had been kept when the water came for everyone else — kept by something that wasn’t supposed to survive the flood at all, something the flood had been for, specifically, a debt God himself had tried to settle in one clean stroke and hadn’t quite finished collecting.
The giants weren’t supposed to have descendants. That had been the point.
But mercy, once given, doesn’t always ask permission to keep being given. It just keeps a ledger, and waits, patient as geology, for someone to notice the account was never closed.
Gladys thought about the wells that never failed. The son who always came home. The dry ground under her grandmother’s house in a year of floods.
She thought: someone will have to pay this eventually. Every ledger closes.
Then she thought: not today, though.
She turned the page, looking for her own name, and found the space beside it empty — waiting, she understood now, for her to decide what she’d let it say.
Outside, it had started, very quietly, to rain.
©2012 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys