# The Tallyman

The coffee was the good part of the morning, and Mae Halloran knew it going in. Travel mug, two sugars, out the back screen at six-forty while the grass still ran silver and Bo trotted off to claim the one fence post he'd been pissing on since the Obama administration. The Krugerrand rode in her coat pocket where it had ridden since the first hard frost, worn smooth along one edge by her thumb. Twenty bucks an ounce when Nan started this. Twenty-three hundred now. A hundred years of interest, compounding while the family slept, and Mae, forty-nine and the only one awake to count it. She did the sum every tithe-morning. It was the closest thing she had to church.

Then Bo planted all four feet at the bottom step and would not come into the yard, and church let out early.

"Move your ass, you furry coward."

He didn't move. He stood there making the low sound in his chest, the one that came maybe twice a year, ears flat, staring at the clothesline posts like they owed him money. Mae looked where the dog looked.

The stone was off the spot.

Not shifted—gone, flipped into the dead grass, and where it had always sat there was a hole. A machine hole, clean-sided, four feet down, the dirt heaped beside it the way nothing on God's brown earth heaps dirt except a man with a rented Bobcat and a reason.

The mug hit the grass. She didn't decide to drop it; her hand just quit on her. She was at the lip without remembering the walk. Down in the bottom the footlocker lid hung off its busted hinge, the ammo cans tipped and rifled, and the iron—Nan's horseshoes and the rebar and the spikes she'd bedded down there herself—shoved into a gap you could put your arm through. She counted the gold on her knees in the cold dirt with her good coat going through at the shins, and came up three bars and a roll of Eagles short.

Three bars and a roll.

"No." She said it to the hole, out loud, like the hole might talk her down. "No, no, you do not get to—"

She made herself stop, because the next thing up her throat was a scream, and Mrs. Petrisko next door already had opinions about her. Here was the thing she'd never said to a living soul, because who do you tell: under the fury there was no fear in her yet, none, just a clean, hard want to find whoever did this and break them over her knee. The fear was a freight train two miles back and closing. But kneeling in the wreck of the one job her mother trusted to her, what Mae had first was the best rage of her life, top to bottom—and then, rising off the open dirt, the smell. Old coins and turned earth, the inside of a safe that never once held anything good.

She got up. Wiped her hands down the ruined coat. And she read it as Gerry had drilled her—her mother, the warden before her—because panic was a luxury for people who didn't hold the book.

Partial. The iron was shoved, not cleared—still down there, still pinning. So the Tallyman was awake and up and walking, leashed short by the iron it couldn't abide—Nan's word for it, for the fingers that never stopped tallying. And it couldn't lay a hand on a living Halloran until it had come and squared the account with whoever kept the book; it couldn't skip a step, never could, because the count ran it and not the other way round. That was her. That bought a day. Maybe a day, and not one wasted minute in it.

Running was out, and she knew it like she knew the weight of a coin in the dark. The bargain bound the blood. Haul a Halloran to the far side of the moon and the count came along behind. You didn't run from this. You put it back—the iron closed whole and the gold square to the grain, every bar and coin it took, or you hadn't put it back at all.

Which meant the gold, which meant whoever took it, and only family had ever been told there was gold to take. The depth, the speed, the machine: somebody who swung a shovel for a living and was drowning bad enough to dig at his own blood.

The name came up her chest like bile, with a face on it she had bounced on her own knee.

"Cole." The freight train arrived. "Cole, you stupid, stupid, beautiful son of a bitch. What did you do."

Bo whined from the porch. The frost around the stone hadn't melted, full sun and all, and Mae figured it wouldn't. Not today. She went for the truck.

Cole's street was the kind the town had given up pretending about—half the houses dark, the other half hanging on by a porch rail. His truck sat out front, like always now, which told you everything about how the work was going. A kid's bike lay on its side in the yard, pink streamers limp in the dead grass. Birdie's. At school by now, thank Christ, where she couldn't hear any of this.

Mae went straight for the truck bed. Under a tarp gone stiff with frost: a shovel still wearing her own backyard, and a folded receipt from the rental lot out on Route 9. One mini-excavator. Paid cash. Yesterday.

The screen door banged.

"Mae. Hey, what're you—" Cole came down the steps in a hoodie he'd slept in, the drawstrings chewed to wet string, the grin already up, the one he wore before he picked which lie to tell. Forty-one and still reaching for the same face he'd had at nine when she caught him in the cookie tin. "Little early for—"

"Where'd you take it."

The grin held. God love him, it held. "Take what?"

"Don't." She held up the receipt and let it land on him, watched the grin come apart at the corners the way drywall goes soft in a slow leak. "Three bars and a roll of Eagles, out of the one hole on this earth I told you never to put a shovel in. Where'd it go."

"It's family money." His voice climbed. "It's the emergency gold, Mae, that's literally what it's for, and I had an emergency—you don't know what her numbers looked like, you don't know what that surgery left on me—" He dug in his back pocket and came out with it and threw it at her chest like he hated it: a pawn ticket. Carmody's, two towns over, where a proud man goes so he doesn't have to pledge across his own sister's counter. "There. There it is. I was gonna redeem it soon as the next job came through, I was gonna walk in and—"

"It's gone." She read the ticket and the bottom went out of her. Pledged, not sold—but pledged against money he'd already spent, the shark paid down, the hospital's worst already fed. No walking in. No getting it back inside a day, inside a week, inside any time she had. "You spent it the second it hit your hand, Cole."

"Then I'll figure something, I'll—"

"Listen to me." Her voice dropped into the flat one, the one she kept for handing people the bad number across the glass. "It was never emergency gold. Nan's rule isn't about money. There's a thing in that hole. Been down there a hundred years. Paud—the one who brought us over from Ireland—borrowed from it, and the family couldn't pay. So Nan buried it: iron and gold and our own ground on top. Every autumn I feed it to keep it down. You didn't take savings. You pulled the cork out of the bottle."

He laughed, one ugly bark. "Listen to yourself—"

"It collects a life." She couldn't stop now. "A life of the blood. And it comes for the youngest, every time, because the youngest ends the line. You know who that is. You drove her to her appointments in this truck." It hit him the same as it had hit her at the lip of the hole, and the whole man folded around it. The pink streamers hung still off the handlebars in the grass between them. "You dug up the thing that's coming for Birdie. To pay for keeping her alive. You saved her with one hand and dug her grave with the other, you beautiful, drowning idiot."

For a second he made no sound at all. Then he sat down right there on the cold step and put his dusty hands over his face, and the noise that came out of her baby brother was one she hadn't heard from him before. She wanted to kick him down the steps. She wanted to lie down in the road beside the bike. She crossed the yard instead and stood over him and put her hand in his hair like he was nine years old, because he was hers.

"Up." Gentle would have broken them both. "On your feet. I know how to put it back, and I can't do it without you, and we've got till dark." She hauled him up by the wrist, still stacked with Birdie's hospital bands he'd never cut off. "You're getting your kid from school, and she stays at my place tonight where I can see her. Don't drive her off anywhere—there's no anywhere. The thing follows the blood, not the address. We keep her close, and we put this back in the ground before the hour it first came due."

It came to the shop. Of course it came to the shop—where else does a debt go to be discussed. Mae had the deadbolt thrown and the sign turned to CLOSED and the GP100 on the glass under a chamois. At eleven-forty the dead buzzer lit anyway, and the cold came in under the door ahead of it, the chill that runs out in front of weather.

Then it stood on the customer side of her counter and Mae stood on hers, and that was the joke of the whole thing, the part she'd turn over later. Thirty years she'd held down this exact square of floor and told people what their dead mother's ring was really worth. Now somebody had driven out to tell her.

"Ms. Halloran." A dry, level, pleasant voice, a clerk's voice, the kind that says may I help you ten thousand times and means it about as much as a turnstile. Its fingers walked the edge of the glass—tick, tick, tick—telling off a sum she couldn't see. It had never given a name. Nan's book called it the Tallyman and it never argued the point, but a name was a thing you could hold a creditor to—and it gave nothing it wasn't already owed.

"You keep good books." It wasn't looking at her; it was looking at the shop, the wall of dead men's guitars, the case, the scale. "So few do, now. Your great-great-grandmother kept good books. I have always respected that about this account." Nan, it meant. It didn't flatter—it couldn't, this thing; the truth was the only coin it had to give.

"Glad we've got a rapport." Mae's hand sat eight inches from the chamois and she left it flat on the cold glass, because you don't reach for a thing on a creditor you can't kill; you reach when reaching buys you something. "Let's talk like professionals, then. You're owed, and I'm not arguing the account—a hundred years and a season, paid in gold, till my brother put a rental machine through your collateral last night. Default. I read the same book you do. Save us both the speech."

The ticking paused. Something in the scored-over ruin of its face might have been pleasure. "So few come to it so quickly."

"So let's get to the part where you can't have her."

"The youngest is the most complete settlement." No heat in it, a man reading a total off a slip. "It forecloses the line. It is correct."

"It's your preference, is what it is." Mae crouched, spun the dial on the floor safe by feel, and brought up the book—water-stained, Nan's hand in the front of it. The woman who'd faced this thing down the first time cleaned up the men's mess with a shovel and a ledger; every warden since lined up behind her. She didn't open it for the wording; she knew the wording cold. She opened it so the thing could watch—held up the receipt, set it on the glass between them, laid her hand flat on the cover. "Here's the part you'll hate. You can't collect on an account you haven't reconciled. Can't lift a finger till you've checked there's no nearer settlement on the table—and that's not me being slick, that's your own nature, the thing you can't not do. A binding I can close is a nearer settlement than a kid you'd have to chase across a county. Reads current. Owes you nothing. So before you touch one drop of my blood, you have to give me the closing of it. Tell me I'm wrong."

The frost on the glass climbed toward her fingers and stopped, like it was thinking it over.

"You are not wrong." It couldn't be wrong; it couldn't lie; that was the whole game, and they both knew whose game it was. "An account the count shows current cannot be collected. Not by me, not by any of us. Close the iron whole, and make the gold the measure that was taken, to the grain, and the count itself stops my hand—I could no more reach past it than miscount." The eyeless face tilted at her. "A binding you can close is nearer than a life I must chase, so I must grant you the closing of it. You have until the hour the debt first fell due—a century ago tonight, the hour your Nan refused me. Not a heartbeat past it. Not one before."

"And half-done buys me nothing." She made herself say it, made herself hear it in its mouth with no soft edge on it. "Iron shut, gold still short—"

"Is a grave still open. Reconcile it whole, Ms. Halloran, or not at all. I would rather not make a mess of your lawn." A pause she'd have sworn was courtesy. "The Cleary woman two counties over made me do hers the hard way. There's not much of that family left now."

Mae weighed the tithe coin in her pocket, thumb riding the smooth edge, running the only arithmetic that counted. Match the measure to the grain by dark, out of a float that came up a breath short of it, and gut everything she'd built to do it—and even gutted, she knew, it would land a hair shy of the mark. Which was why she crossed to the case, worked the back lock, and took out the one piece in the shop that had never been for sale: a plain gold band, pawned to herself the week the divorce closed and written up on no ticket, because a ticket is a thing you redeem and she had wanted no way back to it. Twenty years of a marriage, the closed account, the gold she'd sworn she would never spend. She dropped it in her jeans pocket without letting herself hold it and did not think about why. The old offer hung there too, the other road—a life of the blood, freely given, and the kid none the wiser. She looked at it like a turn she wasn't taking. No Halloran had fed this thing since Nan told it no to its face. Wardens kept it down; they didn't climb in the hole and pull the dirt over themselves.

"Sit tight," she told it, and stood, and shouldered the book, and slid the GP100 off the glass and into her coat. "I've got a shop to bury."

By full dark the backyard looked like a job site run by lunatics. Cole had the grave squared and deepened under a work-light clamped to the clothesline post, and the iron was laid as Mae called it—Nan's horseshoes and the cut rebar set in an arc at the lip, a line in the cold grass the thing could not step across. The pickup stood tailgate-down, its bed full of the rest of her life: the float in ammo cans and coffee tins, every rolled coin and poured bar she owned. Birdie was inside with Bo and orders to stay put. She'd argued, of course; the kid would argue with anything that wasn't already on fire.

The cold came first. Then the smell of a safe and a fresh-turned grave, and then it was simply there at the edge of the light, tall and put together almost right.

"You have an hour, Ms. Halloran." It didn't threaten, only informed. "I keep my terms to the minute. I'd see you keep yours."

"Noted." Mae had the GP100 up and a railroad spike cold in her left fist. No shot would kill it—there was no killing it—but the thing ran on counting, and a bullet was a sum it had to stop and total, a weight you could lay on a creature made of arithmetic. So she shot to move it. "Cole. Gold goes in the second I call it. Not before."

It came on. Not fast, the buried iron still leashing it, but on, drifting toward the house and the child in it, and Mae stepped into its path and fired.

The double-action pull came long and familiar under her finger. The round took it center and dragged it back half a step—lead doing what lead did, no wound on a creature like that, just so much drag on the count. She fired again, again, walking it sideways along the iron, and where it tried to cross Nan's line of horseshoes it pulled up like the air had set hard. Iron held the line. Lead bought the inches. Six gone before she'd marked the count. She swung the cylinder out and punched the ejector, six brass cases ringing bright on the patio stones, the sting of burnt powder cutting the coin-smell, and fed in six fresh by feel with the spike pinned under one arm, like Gerry had drilled her in this same yard thirty years back. Snapped shut, back on it. She herded the thing the way you'd herd a bull with a hayfork, if the fork were a century of her family saying no and the bull were owed a little girl.

"Now, Cole—now!"

He poured. And because the counter had wired her so she couldn't switch it off, Mae clocked every piece as it went down into the dark—the Eagles she'd rolled with her own thumbs, the bars she'd cast from forfeit wedding sets, the coffee can of dental gold, somebody's class ring, somebody's grandmother. Tens of thousands of dollars, the steadiest cash in a dying town, into the dirt by the canful while her appraiser's head tallied the ruin in real time, and she nearly laughed at the size of it. The thing pressed the line. The spike in her fist turned it. The gold climbed toward the measure.

"Short," it said.

It couldn't lie. The cans were empty, every grain of the float in the ground. Whatever ledger ran behind its scored-up face had weighed what was down there against what Cole took out, and come up short.

"By how much," Mae said, the gun still up.

"An ounce. A breath of one." Something near regret. "I cannot take less than I am owed. I cannot take more. And the hour is on your neck."

One ounce, with everything she had already in the dirt. She'd known it was coming since the counter—weighing the float against the measure, feeling it come up a breath light. The old road was still there with the knowing, the one she'd turned from in the shop: a life of the blood, freely given, the kid never the wiser. She could end it in a sentence and keep the ring. She took the ring out instead. The tithe Krugerrand from her coat, smooth as a worry-stone; the wedding band from her jeans, where it had ridden since she locked the shop—the closed account, the one she'd sworn off for good. Twenty years of a marriage and a hundred of Nan's autumns, two pieces of gold in her palm, and her hand was a scale that knew the weight without asking.

"Here's your ounce, you old fuck."

She threw them in.

The count shut like a vault door—and shut on the very minute, the hour Nan refused it a hundred years gone, down to the second. Whatever had held it let go at once—gold to the grain, iron whole around it. The Tallyman at the edge of her work-light went down into the open ground as if the dirt reached up and took it back, and the coin-smell thinned off into plain autumn night. Cole was already shovelling. Mae went to her knees and dug with her hands.

Dawn came up grey and wet, the second one she'd met without sleep. She knelt on the packed earth tamping the last of it flat with the back of the shovel, hands black to the wrists, the fieldstone dragged home over the patch where grass had never grown and now never would. Three blocks off, Halloran Loan & Pledge was worth the building and a wall of forfeited guitars and not one ounce more. She'd buried the float. She'd buried her wedding ring. The shop bought gold for a living and had none left to buy with. And the appraiser in her was already turning that impossible figure over—a gold dealer with no gold—and finding it the funniest thing in years.

Then Bo came off the porch.

He crossed the yard. The whole yard—the back third he'd refused his entire life, that no Halloran dog had ever set a paw across—straight over the cold grass, and lay down on the fieldstone in the first thin sun and sighed like a man easing into a bath.

That was what got her. Not the surviving—the dog. Mae sat back on her heels in the mud and laughed till her eyes streamed, helpless and loud, because nobody hands a warden a certificate; a warden knows she's won when the dog will cross the yard. She put a flat hand on the cold stone on her way up. "Paid in full," she told it. "Now stay down." A creditor stamping a ticket and turning the sign, not a mourner—she'd never had the patience for graveside grief and wasn't about to learn it for this.

Inside, Birdie slept sideways on the couch in the dinosaur hoodie, the plastic bravery medal still around her neck, mouth open, sleeping like she'd never heard of any of it. Mae stood over her a beat longer than she'd cop to. Then she poured two coffees and carried them to the back step, where her brother sat studying his hands, set one by him, and laid the water-stained book open across his knees.

"What's this," Cole said, rough.

"The rest of it. A hundred years of it, Nan's writing in the front." She sat, and her knees hollered, and she let them. "Time you knew what the women in this family have been doing out back while you all ran up the tab. Read. I'll fill in the parts she was too smart to write down."

It was the same as any tithe-morning, in the end: the bill came due and a Halloran paid it. The world was the one Nan had left her—Halloran men made the debts and Halloran women kept them down—and one more woman had just kept one down.

The sun cleared the fence. Bo snored on the stone. Behind them a nine-year-old with a zipper down her chest would wake up starving and loud and entirely alive, and her aunt was flat broke and filthy to the elbows, gut-laughing on a cold step over a debt put back in the ground where it belonged—and she'd do the whole thing again before breakfast, and ask for seconds.