[Loose leaves, folded into the back of the composition book, envelope M-114. Tom McCausland's compressed hand, looser than the notebook proper. Undated; internal evidence winter 1926-27, before the March travel.]
[Leaf 1]
Mrs. Calder sent word by the boy that I should come by the office on Saturday after the counting-house closed, and bring my father's book. I had written to her twice this winter and had no answer, and I had stopped expecting one. I understand it better now. A letter asks a person to decide something on your schedule. She had her own.
I have known Mrs. Calder to say fewer words than any person in this city and every one of them load-bearing. She put a carbon paper in front of me, typewritten, Company letterhead, and she said: I typed this in June of 1908 and I have kept it since 1922 and I am tired of being the only one who knows what it weighs. Then she went and stood by the window with her back to me, which I understood to mean that whatever I did next was my own act and no part of hers.
The heading reads COMPENSATION SCHEDULE and there is a red-ink line through the whole first page, and the words WITHDRAWN PER MR. E.H. — 14/12/12.
[Leaf 2]
I had the fair copy of the four pages with me, the ones in the second cipher, that I have carried three years and could not read. My father wrote once that he meant to put those pages in front of somebody who read better than he did. It turns out the somebody was not a person. It was a carbon.
Here is the thing about my father's ciphers that I did not understand until Saturday. You do not read them. You recognize them. I could not read the four pages because I did not know what they said. The moment the carbon lay beside them I knew what they said, and then the pages read themselves.
The figures came first. A figure-shape repeated with small changes down the page in the same order as the carbon's table: master, mate, engineer, second, bosun, able seaman, fireman, trimmer, steward, boy. Where the carbon says $2,200 the cipher makes the same shape it makes nowhere else. He copied the whole table. Line by line, rank by rank, the dead men's prices in a hand nobody else on the lakes could read. And twice, at the head and at the foot, the same date-shape: once for the 8th of June, when it was prepared, and once for the 12th, when it was approved. He did not trust the rumour. He recorded the adoption.
[Leaf 3]
Below the table there is one more line in the cipher, longer, and it took me the evening because there was no crib for it. But a substitution that has given up its figures will give up its letters if you are patient, and it was Saturday, and I am always patient on Saturdays.
In June of 1908, in the open part of an older book, my father wrote: if it is not posted it is not a table, it is a rumour with figures in it.
The last ciphered line, under the table he copied, says:
I have made it a table. Let them post it now.
[Leaf 4]
For the record, because I am a newspaperman in this if nothing else: the schedule my father copied says a first mate's widow was owed two thousand two hundred dollars as a floor and not a ceiling, before dependents. My mother signed for two hundred and forty dollars on the 19th of November, 1912. The arithmetic of that is the story. The rest of it is only evidence.
I asked Mrs. Calder before I left why she had kept it fourteen years. She said Mr. Reddick told her it was a document no one asked to exist. She said: documents no one asks to exist are the only ones worth filing correctly.
I have both papers now, the carbon and the fair copy, and they read each other, which is a thing I did not know papers could do. My father kept the figures against the day someone would have the table. Mrs. Calder kept the table against the day someone would have the figures. Neither knew the other was keeping anything.
The paper has a morgue and the morgue has an envelope, and on Monday it will be heavier.