You leave without saying goodbye. The gate closes behind you, and the sound is a slap of iron licked clean by rain. Your hands are empty. Your pockets are empty. Your name is carved in a ledger somewhere beneath the tower, beside the count of your days. You have one letter. You have three coins. You have the ache, deep and familiar as a worn tooth. That is all. It is the same, as before, again.

The spring is warm. The lane is bright. You know every stone on this road, you, who have walked it in both directions, who have learned the grammar of its ditches and hedges. The clerk said, Go. The clerk said, Do not come back. The clerk said, The old record is closed. You did not ask him to read the name above the record. You knew. You always know.

You walk west. The wind carries the smell of flax and wet sheep. The tower behind you grows smaller with each step, yet it does not feel smaller. It is not the building. It is the pattern. You have left the same way before, in other clothes, under other weather, with the same letter folded in the same hand. The road is the road. The road is a sentence, and you are the ink.

A girl at the well watches you pass. She has a bucket and a rope. Her face is smooth as cream, and her eyes hold the flat deep shine of the water below her. She says, Where are you going? You say, West. She says, Everyone goes west. You say, Then everyone goes home. She laughs, but it is not a kind laugh. It is the sound of a stone skipping. You go on, and behind you the rope scrapes the lip of the well, and you feel the groove it makes, and you feel the years in the scraping.

You stop at the first crooked barn. You shelter where the roof leaks, where the air is dense with dust and old hay. A man sits there, among the swallows' nests and the broken plows. He is old. His eyes are pale and clear, the color of creek water. He watches the rain, then he watches you. You, he says. Again.

You say nothing. You never say anything at first. It is better not to speak. Speaking is how the time gets counted, how the days become marks, how the sentence begins again.

Do you know the story of the cinder path? he asks. No, you say. The one that runs by the willow bottoms, he says. They say a woman used to walk it. They say she carried a green glass bottle. They say the bottle held her name, and she could not read it, and she was afraid to break it.

That is not a story, you say. That is a riddle.

It is a story, he says. It is a story about a woman who could not leave the path. The path wore her out. The path used the wind to wear the color from her hair, the bend to wear the strength from her legs. She fed the path with her walking. And when the path was too long, the bottle saved her. It held the truth the path could not take.

What truth? you say.

The name, he says. A name is only a handle. The path had no need of it. The path had need of the walking only.

You stand. The rain has gone. The sun crosses the plank and lays a white board of light under the broken beam. The old man does not move. He shrugs a thin shrug. The road is hungry, he says. You feed it, or it feeds on you. There is no third way.

You feel the letter. It is still warm from your hand. It has the same weight on your heart, the small stone at the bottom of a well. You go out into the new light. You go on.

You come to the bridge, the old bridge of squared gray stone, where the river sleeps in pools. Two children squat at the arch and watch the water. They are the same children, always, the ones who do not age, the ones who watch. The boy has a sling. The girl has a chain of grass. They look at you with the flat regard of frogs. They do not speak. You provide the silence. The river provides the noise.

You cross the bridge slowly. You are looking for something. You have looked for it each time, the same way, with the same patient eyes: a groove cut in the coping, where the rope of a ferry once rubbed. It is there. It is always there. You touch it. Your finger fits the groove exactly, as if the stone had waited for the fit. The children watch. They know what you know.

Do you know how a rope makes a groove? the boy says.

With time, the girl says.

With the same hand pulling, the boy says.

You take your hand away. Your palm is pale and lined. The lines are the same as the groove. You are the rope. You have pulled the crossing. You have worn the shore into the water with your step. It is difficult to remember when it began. It is difficult to remember a day before the road.

The boy says, You are early this year. You say, I am always early. The girl says, You are always late. You say nothing. You never win against the children. They are older than the stones, and the stones are older than the tower, and the tower is older than the ledger. You go on, west, through the fields, toward the blue hills.

The blue hills are not home. Nothing is home. Home is what you have not reached yet, and you have been walking for a long time, and the reach is the sentence.

At the end of the day, you come to the village with the red roof, the village with the long street that bends like a hook. The keeper's cottage stands at the bend, with a yellow lamp in the window and a stile of two white steps. You have come here before. You have never gone past the stile. The pattern decrees it. The road decrees it. You stand at the bottom of the white steps, and the lamp swells, and the shadows hang like cloth.

She comes out. She is not old. She has the dark, heavy hair that you have known forever, the narrow face, the deep-set eyes the color of wet slate. She wears a blue dress, the blue of the early dusk no one can name. She looks at you. Her look is a mirror in which your face is always the same.

Get up, she says.

I am not allowed the steps, you say.

There is no such rule, she says. There is only the rule you carry inside you. Put it down and come in.

I cannot put it down, you say. I am the man who does not come in.

You are the man who stands at the stile and says the same words.

I have no other words.

Then I will give you other ones, she says.

Here is the thing you have never understood: she is the one who is free. She is the one who has not taken the road. Her feet are firm on the stone. Her hands are open. She has not worn a path. She has made a garden, a lean-to roof, a latch that does not need a key. She is the one who knows the letter. She has read it. She has read it aloud, in the lamp, with the wind shut out, and the fire speaking its single orange syllable.

Your name is a net, she says.

Is that what the letter says? you say.

The letter says your name and your age and your crime, she says. But the letter is not the truth. The letter is the keeper's ledger. It counts the days. Let me tell you the truth: your name is a net, and you are the fish, and you have been swimming in the same dark water since the beginning because the fin believes in the net.

You want to speak. You open your mouth. The smell of rain on the new steps comes up, and the road behind you is a black line, and the road ahead of you is a black line, and you feel the groove in your finger, the rope-worn scar, the endless haul. You say:

What is the way out?

There is no way out, she says. There is only a way on. The way on is the same road. You will not leave it. But you may stop pulling.

Stop pulling, you say. It is a word you do not know. It is a word without a mark in the ledger.

Lie down in the road, she says. Let the road walk over you. Let the wind take the letter. Let the gate close, finally, behind you. You do not have to reach the tower. You do not have to enter the gate. You have to stop counting.

Then what remains? you say.

The path remains, she says. The path is all that remains. And the path does not need your feet to be a path.

You stand at the bottom of the stile for a long while. The lamp gilds her hair. The dusk goes violet. Somewhere behind you, two children stand on the dark line of the road, holding hands, watching you with their old, still faces.

Come, she says. It is the same word as always. It is a new word, now. This is the once. This is the time when the pattern gives way. No one will hold it against you.

No, you say. And it is the word you have never said. I am not coming in.

Then what will you do?

You look down at your hands. They are old hands. They are the hands of a man who has held a rope and a stone and a letter. They are the hands of a man who has held the rain and the lantern and the child's small weight, carried across a distance too long to name. You open the letter. It says the name. It says the age. It says the crime. You fold it again. You put it in her hand.

Read it, you say.

She reads it. Her lips move. Her eyes hold no surprise. She has always known. You see, in the turning of her face, the recognition moving across her like moon across a field. She is you. She is the one who stood at the other end, who waited, who will wait, who has the same groove in her palm and the same hunger and the same pattern in her bones.

Ah, she says. The small word, the whole grief.

I was not coming to be saved, you say.

Then why?

You look at her, and the lantern moves, and the truth goes through you, plain and entire: there is no coming home. Home is a word that follows the road like a shadow, and the shadow is the road, and the road is you. That is the net. That is the sentence. The sentence is not for a crime. The sentence is the walking.

For the company, you say.

You turn from the stile. You go back along the road the way you came, west now, into the blue dark. The gate is not closed behind you. You are not going to the gate. The gate has been replaced by the road, and the road has been replaced by the moving line of your body, and your body by the worn groove, and the groove by the memory of the rope.

The children wait at the bridge. They say nothing. You say nothing. You pass them, and the river keeps its steady speech, and the sound is the sound of the time that does not count.

You have put down the letter. You have put down the words. This time, you do not count the days. This time, you do not count the steps. The lamp at the stile goes small behind you, and the tower is not ahead, and the gate is not ahead, and the sentence is the road.

The road is the road. The road is the road. The road is the road.