The Swept Hall

At the ford where three roads met, there was an inn kept by a woman named Marit. Her father had built it and her mother had filled it, and travelers once slept two to a bed there, singing over the soup.

Then the toll road opened upstream, and fewer came.

Marit did not take it as a sign. She took it as a call to work harder. She scrubbed the long tables until the grain stood up like ridges. She oiled the hinges and whitewashed the walls every spring. She beat the straw mattresses and turned them, though no one lay on them. Each evening she laid out clean bowls for guests.

The neighbors admired her. "Look how she keeps it," they said. "Not a cobweb."

A potter's wife stopped one rainy afternoon and stood in the doorway a long while. The hall was spotless and it was cold, and no smoke rose from the hearth, because ash made a mess.

"Where do the travelers eat?" she asked.

"They will come," said Marit. "When they do, it will be ready."

"What did they used to leave behind?"

Marit thought. "Mud," she said. "Wet cloaks on the pegs. Crumbs. Once a boy carved his name into that beam, and my father beat him for it."

She looked up at the beam. It was the only thing in the hall she had never sanded.

The potter's wife drank some water and went on in the rain.

Marit stood in the doorway until dark. Then she took the broom down from its hook, looked at it, and set it on the floor, and the bowls on the table stayed where they were.