The Dunwich Census

The Bureau of the Census paid four cents a head in rural districts, and nobody else would take the Dunwich route, so in January of 1920 it went to Thomas Kerrigan, who was twenty-two and had a bicycle.

The bicycle was useless past the covered bridge. He pushed it for a mile and then left it in a ditch and walked, with the ledger in an oilcloth satchel and the list of households from 1910 folded in his breast pocket. Nineteen names. Most of them had the same four surnames.

The first farm had a dog and a woman who answered every question with another question. The second had no one, only a table laid for supper with the food gone grey. At the third, an old man counted his household on his fingers, got to seven, frowned, and started again, and got to eight. Thomas wrote down eight. The old man watched him write it and looked relieved.

By afternoon the snow had started and the whippoorwills had not. Everyone in the valley had warned him about the birds: that they gathered at a deathbed and waited, and that if they caught the soul they sang all night. It was January. There should have been no whippoorwills at all. He heard them anyway, a long way off, up where the stone circles stood on the round-topped hills.

The last house on the list was not a house. It was a set of stone foundations, a chimney, and a door frame with no door. The 1910 enumerator had written beside it, in pencil, family of five, would not give names.

Thomas stood in the empty door frame with his pencil and felt foolish, and then felt something else.

"Is there anyone living here?" he said, because the form required it.

The whippoorwills stopped.

In the silence he heard a voice answer from below the foundations, from somewhere under the earth. It gave five names. They were not names he could spell. He wrote them down as well as he could, in the column for Name of each person whose place of abode on January 1, 1920, was in this family, and then he walked back to his bicycle without running, which he was proud of for the rest of his life.

The ledger went to Washington. The five names are in it still. Nobody at the Bureau has ever been able to read them aloud, although a clerk in 1952 tried, and the report says only that he was transferred at his own request.