Page 42 of She, Wolf, Him.

NO BRAKE

AGNÈS

When the shepherd goes, the flock scatters. When the priest goes, the flock devours itself.

— HIGHLAND PROVERB, MARGERIDE ORAL TRADITION

The church is colder than the morning outside it. The cold stands up out of the stone floor and gets into the knees and the teeth. The light through the high windows comes down in long grey lengths that warm nothing they touch. We work by two candles Anselme grudged us out of the vestry, Berthe and I, with the other woman whose name I can never hold in my head, shrouding the priest of Saint-Élie in his own nave. The air smells of old incense and cold stone. Under both, faintly, the iron the washing didn't carry off.

We washed him yesterday. Today is the linen.

Every band of it is stiff from the night in the vestry chest, and I warm each one between my palms before it goes across him, because my mother taught me warm cloth for cold flesh, as her mother taught her. There's no sense in it. The dead can't tell the difference. You do it anyway. Most of what this work gives the living is in the doing.

His right hand lies bound shut on his breast. I unwound the rosary out of it yesterday, bead by bead. He'd gripped it so hard at the end that the beads left their print in his fingers, a row of small round graves pressed into the flesh, and the print is still there this morning. Water and wax don't take out what a body does at the last.

The left arm ends above the wrist. Berthe keeps to his feet and her prayers. She won't come near that end of him, as she kept above the old shepherd's collar in the summer, so it's mine to fold the linen down over the absence and make it neat. It's always mine. The village mutters over my luck and then sends me its priest.

"Hold the band," Berthe says, at the shoulder. "Tighter. He was a thin man, it'll slip." She watches me make it good. "You've a better hand than I ever had," she says, and doesn't look at the end of him I've just made neat.

"Who'll bury me," the other woman says, at his feet, to no one. "Who's left to say the words over me."

"Hush," Berthe tells her, sharp, crossing herself over the body. "You'll see us all out yet, and me first."

The wounds are the Beast's work, past mistaking. I've had its dead under my hands since the summer. Its marks are as familiar now as Berthe's stitching. It came up the middle of the village in the dark and took him on his own steps. Every woman in Saint-Élie drew her bolt last night on a smaller world than she'd had the night before. All the while my palms go on with the cloth, I listen for the horror that ought to be there. I stood on the church steps at first light with the linen over my arm, waiting to be let in to him, and I was as level as the frost.

The horror doesn't come.

What comes instead is a stillness I'm ashamed to put a name to. It sits where grief should sit and weighs nothing at all. Relief. He read my banns from those steps. He blessed me to Thibault, flat and final. He has stopped me in the lane after every grave I've stood at, to ask how I found myself, and let the silence after the asking do the work of it. He watched me all this black autumn with an eye like a man counting his change. Now he's dead. I'm not sorry, and the not-being-sorry is one more sin he'll never get to hear.

Berthe starts the prayers for the dead, and I give back the responses where they fall. "Requiem aeternam," she begins, low, over him, and after her I answer, "Dona eis, Domine." My voice comes out level. It always has.

The face we leave for last. The washing didn't take the look off it. I draw the linen up over him, over whatever he was correcting when the dark came up the lane to meet him. I cross myself and step back. Done. He'll lie in the cold under his own church until word comes up from Mende, because the priest who buried this whole parish has nobody left to bury him.

Out on the steps the morning is loud. No bell over it, only voices, more voices than a burying gathers, pitched like nothing I've heard in this square before. I stand a moment with the church's cold on me, then I go down into it.

By midday half the parish is standing in the square and the other half is at its doorways minding it. Nobody works. There's no bell left to order the hours and no voice left to order the people, and the fear that's been made to kneel every Sunday since summer is up on its feet, going round the square, trying out its own words.

Anselme does what he can. He stands on the second stair, not the top one. No one has set a foot on the top one. He reads out the night-watch roster in the dry voice he keeps for the register. "Berthou, Vidal, Crouzet. The lower pens again, five men, and the lane between—" "To hell with the roster," somebody says, out of the middle of them. "The roster didn't keep the Father." "The roster is what we have," Anselme says, dry, and goes on reading, but for the first time in all his years of lists, the village talks over him. A list was never going to hold this.

The men have brought their tools. Staves, a billhook, the long iron bar they lever stones with. Nobody says what the tools are for. They hold them close and they talk, louder than square-talk has ever been let to run here, and the talk keeps coming back round to the one name.

"The Father stood on those steps and named him." Pascal's voice, and it isn't low today. Grief has been working in him since the dying in the valleys took his cousin, and it's found the shape it was looking for. "Named him before God and the parish. Now the Father's dead at the foot of them. Does anybody want the count said plainer?"

"He mocked him." A woman's voice from the well-side. "Mocked God's judgment on the steps of God's own house."

"The nights the Beast walks, the hunter walks. The Father said it himself." That from a man I've known since I was a girl, quoting the dead like Scripture.

"He should be held," a man says. "Held till Mende sends up its men, and made to answer."

"Held where," another answers him. "There's no gaol in Saint-Élie. There's the Beast, and there's him, and I know which of the two I can find after dark."

Gaspard stands at the mouth of the lane he lodges up, apart, where the village has kept him since the day he rode in. He's the one man in the square with nothing in his hands. He watches them lay it out against him, his jaw set, his face shut, and he doesn't answer. I understand that much. There's no answer a hunted man can give a square like this that doesn't sound like running.

I've been standing with the women at the church side all this while, the laying-out barely dry on my wrists, listening. Quiet has been the only safe country I've ever had. I stand in it now and feel it change under me. If I hold my tongue while they hang a lie on him, the quiet stops being shelter and starts being a hand on the rope.

So I don't hold it.

"The killing was here before he was." My voice goes out over the square, level, the same voice I give back the responses with, and it carries. I never knew it could. "I washed the old shepherd myself before one of us knew this man's name. And no man born made those marks on the church door. You've seen them. You've all seen them. Father Reynaud accused him, and Father Reynaud is dead, killed as the others were killed. Hang your hunter, and the thing that did it is still in the woods come dark."