They let me go on a Tuesday, and the steam press broke its back that same afternoon, so I took it for a sign, though not an agreeable one.

Mr. Claxton called me into the counting room and told me my hand had slowed. He said it the way you tell a dog he is old, with fondness and apology and no help in it. "Miles," he said, "you set a page like a man laying a wreath. The new boys set a page like they are putting out a fire."

"Then hire the boys," I said.

"I have," he said.

That was the battle. I do not pretend it was more than it was. No blows were struck, and no one bled, except at the desk, where a man my age bleeds savings and pride. I stood because he stood. I nodded because there was nothing else to do. I took my coat from the hook by the door and walked out past the great frames of type, past the boys who would not meet my eye, past the composing stone where the forme still stood half-made. The room smelled of dust and old iron, and I loved it the way a dog loves a porch, and I left it.

In the pocket of the coat was the letter.

That is the first strangeness, and I want you to understand that the strangeness was not in the paper itself. The paper was thin as a moth's wing, folded along creases that had become the letter's own memory. It was the letter I had kept for forty years in the bottom drawer of my desk, the letter I had meant to burn a thousand times and burned never. I thought I had thrown it in the hellbox in '97. I remember the weight of it on my palm, the way it sat there like a held breath. You drop the broken slugs and the bad type into the hellbox, and the boy wheels it to the furnace, and you stand lighter than you have stood in years. I dropped that letter in the hellbox in '97, and I watched the boy wheel it away, and I went home and slept the sleep of the forgiven.

Yet here it was.

I sat on the back stoop of the shop and looked at it for a long while. The afternoon sun came over the foundry roof, and the paper was so thin that the light passed through it, and the writing on the far side showed pale as a watermark. My mother's hand. She had written to me in Philadelphia three weeks after I landed, and I had read the first lines until they wore a groove into me.

"My dear boy, the sea has taken you, and I am glad of it, though this house is quiet as a shuttered room..."

The rest I had never read. I will be honest with you. A man leaves his home to become new, and a letter from home can undo the newness. So I read the beginning and stopped. But a man who is fired at sixty has time for fear. Time is the one thing of which he has no shortage.

I unfolded the letter there on the back stoop, and the paper made a sound like a door opening. I read the whole of it slowly, the way you read a headstone.

"My dear boy, the sea has taken you, and I am glad of it, though this house is quiet as a shuttered room. Your father says you will be rich and come back, but your father says that of every cloud. I say only that you must not be a stranger to your own name. Write when you can. The plants in your window have died, but I have put the pots on the sill where you can see them when you return. I am putting in that rose you always liked, the pale one. It will be tall by the time you come home. Do not wait too long. Your loving mother, Eleanor Fairchild."

I read it twice. The paper was warm where my thumb held it. And then I read the signature again, and the world tilted like a forme slipping its lock.

The signature was not my mother's name.

I will not tell you what I saw there, not yet. I will tell you that I folded the letter and put it in my breast pocket, and I walked around to the back room where Thomas Bradshaw sat by the furnace, because Thomas was the oldest man I knew, and when the world tilts you go to the old man who was there before the tilt.

The back room was Thomas Bradshaw's kingdom. He had been the finest compositor in the city before his eyes went, and the proprietor kept him on out of a kind of reverence and a kind of fear. Thomas sat in his round-backed chair, and above his head hung the shop's name in carved oak letters, gilded once, now dark as river stones.

"You have lost your place," Thomas said.

"News travels," I said.

"Forty-three years you have set type for this house," he said. "That is a long time to be a servant to letters."

"That is a long time to be anything."

Thomas laughed. He was blind, but his laugh was the laugh of a man who could still see your face. "Show me what you carry in your breast pocket," he said.

I will spare you the whole of that conversation, because part of it will sound like a lie, and you are free to believe what you like. Thomas held the letter in his hands and passed his fingers over the paper the way he once passed them over a page of set type, reading the raised metal with his skin.

"This is a pale letter," he said.

"A pale letter?"

"The letters we cannot destroy," he said. "They come back. They are written in the hand of the first leaving, and they are delivered to every leaving after. The ones who carry them are the ones who believed they were free."

I told him it was from my mother. It was from my mother, I said, it was her hand, I knew her hand.

"It is not from your mother," Thomas said. "It has not been from your mother since before you were born."

He told me then about the pale letter, and I set it down here as he gave it to me, for it is a strange tale and I am old enough now not to mock strange tales. He told me the letter had come to him when he was twenty, in a port town in Cornwall, and that he had burned it in a stove, and that it had returned to him in a coat he had not worn for years. He told me he had passed it on, once, to a young man shipping out to the colonies, and that the young man had drowned at sea, and the letter had come back. He told me the letter does not belong to any one man. It belongs to the leaving. It moves from exile to exile, and it will not rest until it is read in full.

"I have read it in full," I said.

"Twice," he said.

The furnace buzzed between us. I have never heard a furnace make so much of the sound of a word being spoken.

"There is another page," Thomas said. "A page you have not read that sits now against your heart. The pale letter has many pages, and each man reads the one that is his. The page you have carried these forty years is my page, the one I burned. You have read my mother's words. They were never meant for you."

He held out his hand, and I gave him the letter, and he pressed it to his chest like a half-remembered voice.

"Your page lies underneath," he said. "The page in your own hand. You wrote it the night before you left, boy, and you have been carrying it all your life without knowing, because you never looked at the signature. You were afraid of the rest, and the rest is you."

I stood up. I thought for a moment I would walk out, walk down to the docks, and board the first ship, as if the leaving could be done again and done better. But you cannot leave twice. That is the lie the exile tells himself. He believes there is a second departure. There is not. There is only the one departure, and it is the whole of the man's life.

I put my hand to my breast pocket. The letter, my letter, was still there.

I read it that night by the gas lamp in my boarding-house room, and I will set down what it said, because it is the truest thing I have ever written, though I was a boy of nineteen and had no idea what the words meant.

The page was my own hand. There was no mistaking it. The slope of the letters, the way the e rose too high, the way my name at the bottom was almost a scratch. I had written it the night before the ship, at the kitchen table, with my mother asleep in her chair, and I had written the whole letter and then kept the last page for myself, the way a man keeps a glass of water for the morning.

I had written: "When this ink fades, you will be old, and you will be far. Do not be afraid. The far has always been the near wearing a different coat. Come home when the ink is pale, and the house will still be standing, and the rose will be tall."

That was the whole of it.

I sat on the edge of the bed and held the paper in my hands, and the paper was pale as a moth's wing, and the ink was grey as a January sky, and I understood at last what I should have understood forty years ago. The letter was never from my mother. It was from me. I had written it to myself and lost it, and it had come back to me, and I had misread the hand because I needed it to be my mother's. I needed the home to be a person. But the home is not a person. The home is a sentence you write to yourself, and you will not read it until you are old enough to be the one who wrote it.

The cycle does not break. That was the thing Thomas knew. You cannot escape the letter, and you cannot escape the leaving, because the leaving is only the waiting for the reading. But the cycle turns, and the turn is not a trap. The turn is a door. The ink fades, and you become the one who can read, and when you read, you are given the one thing the exile never had.

Permission.

In the morning I went back to the shop. I did not go to beg for my place. I went to return a thing.

The door was open. The press was still, and the boys had not yet come in, and the great room smelled of dust and old iron. Thomas was in his round-backed chair by the furnace, and he was not alone. A boy sat on a stool at his feet, the newest apprentice, a pale child with a smudge of ink across his cheek.

"I have come to give you this," I said, and I put my letter, my own page, into the boy's hands. The boy looked at it, then at me, then at Thomas.

"It is not mine," the boy said.

"It was never mine," I said. "It is the leaving. It will keep."

The boy folded the letter along the old creases, the way I had folded it for forty years, as if the paper itself remembered the shape of my hand. And I walked to the composing stone, where the forme from Tuesday still stood, the page I had been setting when Mr. Claxton called my name. I had not finished it. The galleys were locked and waiting, and I looked at the lines of type, backwards and upside down, and I read them the way a compositor reads, with his fingers.

The words were my own. The very words of my letter, set in lead. I had been setting that page all along, for years, without knowing. It had been the last page of my working life, and I had not recognised my own hand because I had never learned to read it.

I pulled the line, set the final words in the empty space, and locked the forme. The letters were old and worn, but they held.

"He who reads this has already come home."

I left the shop by the back door, and the boys were coming in through the front, and the press was waking up, and the sound of the work, the carried and continued and unbroken work of other hands, was the sound of a letter being read aloud.

I did not go to the docks. There was no ship. The ship had left forty years ago, and I was on it, and I have been on it ever since, and now the crossing is finished.

The letter is not lost. It is in the hands of the boy, and the boy will misread it, and he will put it in a drawer, and he will believe it was written by someone he loves. That is the way of the pale letter. It comes back. It always comes back. The ink will fade until it is nearly gone, and then the hand will rise again, pale as a watermark, and the far will put on the coat of the near.

I am not afraid. I am only old, and old is the one word I always knew how to set.