Bone Ledger

Intro

Grandfather kept a ledger bound in cracked deer hide

Wrote debts in teeth and scar tissue, never one line lied

Said the coal camp paid in coughs before it paid in coin

Every name that owed him breath, he'd mark it and rejoin

Verse

He set bones for miners when the shaft roof caved in twice

Splint from a rail tie, whiskey standing in for ice

Paid in chickens, paid in silence, paid in a debt he'd keep

Wrote the sum in soot across the ledger while men'd sleep

Nineteen-forty, black lung took the man who owed him most

Grandfather crossed the debt out, said the dead don't need a ghost

Kept his tools in oilcloth, kept his patience in his palm

Set my father's collarbone the night the dam broke calm

Taught him early, every wound's a currency that's real

Pain's the only interest rate a poor man learns to feel

Mining company burned the records when the seam went dry

Grandfather kept his own, said paper outlives a lie

Thirty years of splints and stitches, thirty years of debt

Died with forty names uncrossed, the balance not been met

Left the ledger to my father, wrapped in tar and twine

Said the book don't close on us, it just moves down the line

Chorus

Everything gets paid in the bone ledger

Every scar's a receipt, every ache remembers

Write it in the marrow, sign it in the ash

Nobody leaves this life without they settling the tab

Everything gets paid in the bone ledger

Verse

Now the corner's my clinic, block's the only shaft I know

Same debts different currency, same interest when it's owed

Fronted product to a cousin, wrote it down inside my head

Ledger's in my memory now, no ink, no page instead

Watched a young boy learn the weight a favor comes to cost

Paid it back in loyalty the winter that his mama's lost

I collect on old accounts my grandfather never closed

Some debts skip a generation, land wherever blood still flows

Kept a scar above my eyebrow like a comma in the sum

Every stitch a punctuation mark for what's still owed and won

Never lent what I couldn't lose, never asked for what ain't fair

Learned that mercy's just a discount that the strong alone can spare

Watched the block turn ledger too, names crossed out too soon

W