The Telling

The night the harvest hall cleared its last table, Marta stood at the door with the whole town behind her and did not tell the story of the well.

Every September the hall held the Telling. Anyone could take the floor and give the town one story it did not have yet, and the town would keep it the way it kept the bell rope and the church key: a thing held in common, oiled by use. Marta had told stories there since she was nine years old. She was nineteen now and felt forty. She had the well story. Everyone knew she had it. Her grandmother had died in March, and the story had come to Marta the way the house came to her, keys first.

The well story was the best story anyone had. It had the cold in it, and the depth, and the thing at the bottom that the grandmother had covered over with a lid and a law: *nobody draws from that well, and nobody asks why.* Sixty years the town had obeyed. The lid was the story's shape. If you told it, the lid came off. If you told it, the well was just a well.

The queue moved. The accordion man played one verse and stopped because one verse was the whole verse. The fish seller's boy told the story of the fish that came back twice, and the town laughed in the right places. Marta's name went up on the board.

She took the floor. The town leaned in.

She looked at them, all of them, the whole warm crowd that had taught her to talk by talking back, and she was glad, suddenly and completely, to be seen about to do what she was about to do.

"I'm not going to tell it," she said. "That's the telling."

Nobody moved. Somebody's chair scraped and was embarrassed about it.

"You've carried the lid with me for six months," Marta said. "You've carried it well. I'm keeping the story. Not because it's mine. Because it's better as a door than as a room." She let that stand. She was young, and she said it like someone who had already carried the water up from a deep place and set it down.

The old priest, who loved a story more than anyone, stood up first and clapped once. He was delighted. That was the terrible thing and the good thing: he was delighted. The clapping caught. It was not the clapping for a story told. It was the clapping for a gap opened on purpose, a doorway agreed to, a room the town could stand around.

The two cruelties were done by morning. First, the town took the well off the board of things that could be asked about. Not a law: a courtesy, like not asking a widow about the wedding. Second, they left the lid where it was but moved the bench to face it, so that anyone who wanted to could sit with the not-knowing, and people did, in twos and threes, the way you visit anything you love.

Marta walked home with her empty hands swinging. Behind her the hall emptied in good order, the accordion man playing his one verse again for the pleasure of stopping in the right place. The well kept its water. Nobody drew. The story held its shape in the town's mouth like a name everyone knew how to say and nobody needed to.

At the edge of the square she turned once and saw the whole town under its lamps, keeping the gap the way they kept everything else.

Then she walked on, forward, out of the story, which was hers now and would stay shut, which was how it stayed open.