A post-office window is the best seat there is for learning a town, dear. You sit behind the glass and sooner or later everybody comes to you, and you learn them by what they mail and how they mail it, without ever opening a thing that is not yours. I stood at mine thirty years and eleven months. There was a man who came to me for his registered mail, and I will keep his name to myself, because his name is a thing that crossed my window, and what crosses my window I do not carry around town.
Registered mail is not the kind you leave in a box, it has to be signed for, every piece, so once a month or near it he came to the window and put his name in the delivery book and took his letter home. Same return address in the corner every time, a town two states off, near the same weight on my scale. For a good many years there was nothing about it to notice. He signed, I gave him his letter, and the name he wrote went down the same as the month before.
Then it started to change, and it changed in the book before it changed anywhere a person could point to. One month the letters of his name came in smaller than they had been, every last one of them, drawn in tight toward the center. The month after that his name went soft in the middle and picked back up at the end, as if the pen had gotten heavy partway across. Then he started holding the pen a different way, up high near the top, pressing so the nib bit the page, taking longer over it, so that a thing that had been eight seconds of his month became a minute of it, then two. I watched a man's name get harder for him to write for the better part of a year, dear, and I never told a living soul, because a trouble I only saw from behind that glass was mine to keep and no one else's.
There came a day the pen would not do it at all. He had his letter waiting, I had it there under the counter, and he took up the pen and set it to the book, and nothing came off it that a person could read as a name. He tried it once and looked at what it made and crossed it out with one small line. He tried it twice. There was a line behind him by then, a Saturday line, four or five people with their errands, and he did not turn to look at them, and he did not hurry, and he set the pen down and squared the book up and took it up again. The rule at that window was a plain one, registered mail gets signed for or it stays behind the counter. And that same rule was the only thing in the lobby still holding that man up in front of the line, because his own name was about the last of himself he had left to write.
Now, there is a thing in the rules for exactly this, and hardly anybody knows it is there, because hardly anybody ever needs it. A person who cannot write his name can make his mark instead, an X or a line or whatever his hand will make, and if a clerk stands witness to it and puts her own name under his, the mark counts the same as a signature and the mail goes. I did not make a speech of it. I turned the book so it faced me, and I told him it would take a mark just as well if I put my name under it to witness, same as we do for anybody, and I said it plain, the same as I would say the scale was running a half-ounce heavy, so it came out as nothing more than the next thing to do at the counter. He made his mark, and I put my name under his, and he took up his letter and went on home.
And that was how it went from then on. Once a month or near it he came to the window, and I would turn the book to face me before he ever reached for the pen, and he made his mark, and I put my name under it, and his letter went home with him the same as always. We never once talked about it, not the first day and not in all the years after. There was never anything that needed talking about.
When you sign for registered mail the record of it does not stay with you, it goes into the files, a slip for every piece, and a town this size makes thousands of them in a year. Somewhere in those files there is a run of slips, one a month for years, and every one of them has his mark on the line and my name written in under it. Nobody will ever go looking for them. They are only there in case somebody ever asks whether the mail was let go as the rules say, and the rules say it was, every time, with two names on the one line.