ACT I

The酒馆 sat at the edge of Broken Pines like a man who had given up on his house and was waiting for the land to take it back. It was a wooden building with a porch that sagged on the left side and a sign that read simply BEAUREGARD, the letters painted so long ago that the B had flaked off and looked like an O to anyone who didn't know the family name. Inside, the air was thick with the smell of cheap whiskey and sweat and the kind of humidity that makes your clothes stick to your skin whether you are working or sitting still.

Mae Beauregard sat on a stool behind the bar—not serving, just sitting, because the bar was hers by inheritance and she was too proud to admit that inheritance meant a broken building and a broken family and a voice that could have carried her to New York if she had ever let it.

She sang on Thursday nights. That was the rule. Uncle Jed had made it the rule when he took over the酒馆 after their mother died, and Mae had kept the rule because breaking it would have meant admitting that the rule existed for her and not for the customers.

On this particular Thursday, a man sat in the corner who did not belong. He was too clean for Broken Pines, too well-dressed for a Thursday night, and he was watching Mae with the kind of attention that people usually reserve for things they have never seen before. He was maybe thirty-five, with a face that had been shaped by cities and a suit that had been cut by someone who understood the difference between expensive and tasteful.

Mae ignored him and sang. She sang a song her mother had taught her, a song that was half spiritual and half folk ballad, with a melody that went up and down like a road that refused to be straight. Her voice was not pretty. It was something better than pretty. It was honest. It was the kind of voice that made you uncomfortable because it reminded you of things you had tried to forget.

When she finished, the man clapped. Not the polite clapping of a man who claps because it is expected, but the real clapping of a man who has been moved against his will.

"Who taught you to sing like that?" he asked.

Mae looked at him. "My mother."

"Your mother is dead."

"Yes."

"Then who?"

Mae set down her glass. "My sister. Belle. She taught me everything she knew. And she learned it from Mother."

The man's face changed. He had asked a question he should not have asked. "I am sorry. I didn't mean—"

"It's fine," Mae said. "Everyone in this town knows about Belle. Or they think they know."

ACT II

The man's name was Harrison. He was from Chicago and he was a businessman, though Mae could not tell you what kind of business until he told her: timber, mostly, with some investment in railroads. He came to the酒馆 every Thursday for the next three weeks, and every Thursday he sat in the same corner and drank the same whiskey and listened to Mae sing and asked her questions about Belle.

Mae answered some of them and ignored the rest. She told him that Belle had left Broken Pines three years ago and gone to New Orleans and that she was a singer, like Mae, only better. She told him that Belle had a voice like "angel money"—a phrase Uncle Jed had used once and then never used again, as though the words themselves were contaminated.

She did not tell him that Belle had not gone to New Orleans. She did not tell him that Belle had left on a Tuesday, not a Thursday, and that she had not packed a bag, only a small satchel with a change of clothes and a photograph of their mother and a letter she had written and never sent.

She did not tell him that she knew where Belle was because she had been the one to bury the letter Belle never sent, in the ground behind the church, where the soil was soft and the weeds grew tall and nobody from town ever went.

On the fourth Thursday, Harrison didn't come. Mae sang anyway. She sang a song she had never sung before, a song that had come to her in a dream, about a woman who walked into the woods and didn't come back and her sister waited at the bar and the bar waited for her and the town waited for the waiting and nobody ever stopped waiting because stopping would have meant knowing.

After the set, an old woman came up to Mae. Mrs. Delacroix. She was seventy-five if she was a day, with skin like parchment and eyes that had seen everything Broken Pines had to show and found everything wanting.

"Child," Mrs. Delacroix said, "you shouldn't have sung that song."

Mae felt her stomach tighten. "What song?"

"The one about the woman who walks into the woods. Your mother used to sing that. Before she died. Before she sang it for the last time."

Mae said nothing.

Mrs. Delacroix leaned closer. Her voice dropped to a whisper that was almost lost in the sound of whiskey being poured. "Belle didn't go to New Orleans, Mae. She never went. She left because she couldn't stay, and she couldn't leave, and so she did the only thing she could do. She went where nobody would look."

"Where?" Mae asked. The word came out small, like a child's voice.

"Out past the pines. Past the old cemetery. There's a clearing there. Small. Overgrown. But it's there."

ACT III

Mae went to the clearing at dawn. She told Uncle Jed she was going to the market. She walked past the church, past the cemetery, past the point where the road ended and the dirt path began and the dirt path ended and the woods took over.

The clearing was exactly where Mrs. Delacroix had said it would be. Small. Overgrown. A circle of trees that formed a wall around a patch of grass that had been cut recently, though by whom and when, Mae could not say.

In the center of the clearing stood a stone. Not a proper headstone—just a rough piece of granite that someone had dragged out of a field and set into the ground. There was no name on it. No dates. Just a sentence carved into the surface in handwriting that Mae recognized instantly.

Belle's handwriting.

The sentence was a line from a song. Mae knew it because Belle had sung it every night before she left, when she thought nobody was listening. Mae had been listening. She always listened.

The words on the stone were:

She sang until the woods remembered her name.

Mae sat down on the grass and put her hands on the stone and pressed her forehead against it and felt the cold seep through her skin and into her bones and she thought about Belle. She thought about the sister who had taught her to sing, who had corrected her pitch and told her when she rushed the tempo and told her to slow down when she dragged, who had said, "Your voice is a gift, Mae, but gifts are heavy and not everybody can carry them."

She thought about the letter Belle had written and never sent, buried behind the church. She thought about why Belle hadn't sent it. She thought about what the letter said.

When she stood up, she saw something at the base of the stone. A small wooden box, half-buried in the grass. She knelt and pulled it out. It was locked, but the lock was old and weak and it gave way when she pressed her thumb against it hard enough.

Inside the box was a letter. Belle's handwriting. Addressed to Mae.

Mae stood in the clearing and read the letter in the morning light and when she was done she folded it carefully and put it in her pocket and walked back to Broken Pines with the weight of it sitting in her pocket like a stone and a song at the same time.

ACT IV

Mae did not sing the next Thursday. The酒馆 was quiet without her. Uncle Jed played the radio and the customers drank and the silence that usually filled the space between Mae's songs was filled by something else—something that sounded like absence, which is not the same thing as quiet.

On Friday, Harrison came to the酒馆. He found Mae sweeping the porch and he stood beside her with a newspaper in his hand and said, "I heard about your sister."

Mae kept sweeping. "What did you hear?"

"That she's gone. That she's been gone a long time."

Mae set down the broom. "How long do you think she's been gone?"

Harrison looked at her. "I think she's been gone since the day she walked out of this town three years ago."

Mae shook her head. "No. She's been gone since the day she was born."

She went inside and locked the door and sat at the bar and took Belle's letter out of her pocket and read it one more time. It was short. It said: Mae, if you are reading this, I am dead and I am sorry I left and I am sorry I didn't leave a better reason and I am sorry I couldn't stay. The truth is, I couldn't sing anymore. Not the way you sing. Not the way Mother sang. And I couldn't bear to hear you do what I couldn't do. So I went into the woods and I sang one last time and then I stopped. Don't stop singing. Please don't stop.

Mae put the letter down and picked up the broom and swept the floor and then she unlocked the door and flipped the sign to OPEN and she went to the back room and took out the guitar that Belle had left behind and she tuned it and she sat on the stool behind the bar and she began to sing.

She sang Belle's song. She sang it to the empty chairs and the dusty bottles and the radio that had been turned off and the man from Chicago who sat in the corner and listened with his eyes closed and the old woman who stood in the doorway and listened with her eyes open.

And when she finished, the酒馆 was silent. Not the silence of absence. The silence of presence. The silence of a room full of people who had just heard something that would stay inside them for the rest of their lives.

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