My father kept the ledger in a locked drawer, and once a month he would open it after dinner, the brass key warm from his pocket, and enter the figures in a hand so small it seemed designed to be overlooked. He never spoke the totals aloud. When the harvest was poor he grew, if anything, more courteous—holding doors, complimenting my mother's cooking, asking after the neighbors' children with a warmth that in a lesser year he could not spare. As a boy I mistook this for serenity. I thought the ledger must contain good news, and that his gentleness was its overflow. It was only after his death, when the drawer was opened and the columns lay bare, that I understood the arithmetic ran the other way. The kinder he had been, the worse the year; his courtesy was not the fruit of security but the discipline he imposed on fear, a way of refusing to let the numbers dictate the man. He had decided, I think, that his family would not learn the state of the accounts from the temperature of his manners. The ledger recorded what we had. His face was sworn to conceal it.