Who Is the Boy at the End? (Part 4)

They hung the original in the reading room in February, framed, with the strong light kept off it.

The caption underneath names nobody. It says: “Cannery workers, Belfast, about 1912. Eleven people. The names we have been given are in the book below, and so are the disagreements.”

On the shelf under the frame there is a book, open, with a pencil on a string.

About twenty people came on the Thursday evening, in coats, with coffee in paper cups, and sat on folding chairs while Rhona explained.

She read the twenty-six names out first, in the order they had arrived. Then the directory page from 1911, then the burial card from 1908, then the sister who had worked the packing line, then the letter from Adelaide. She never told anyone in the room that they had been wrong. She read the list and let them hear it: four names for one man, two families for one woman, and both families right about everything except the face.

“If I print ten names under that picture,” she said, “they’ll be true in forty years. Not because anybody checked. Because they’ll be printed, and in a town this size printing is how a thing becomes true. A caption looks like an answer. A book is only a record.”

A boy near the front asked why the boy in the photograph was standing in the row at all, if he was working.

“Because the cord was only so long,” Rhona said. “He couldn’t stand by the camera, or they would all look at him instead of the photographer, and the furthest the cord would go was the end of the row.”

That is the whole reason he is in it. Not the cannery, not a family, not the town, just the reach of a piece of rubber tubing.

The letter had his name in it. Rhona wrote it on the first page of the book, with the date the letter came, and left the wall alone.

By the end of the month there were four more names in the book. One of them had been crossed out and written again underneath in a different hand, and Rhona left both of them exactly where they were.