Page 53 of She, Wolf, Him.

The measure I wouldn't lay this morning is still there to be laid, the king on the wall set against the shape I saw among the firs the day the pack had me. I leave it lying.

The village sleeps behind me, the first honest sleep in a season, bought with a grey king and a showman's word. Whatever walks that black country yet, it isn't hanging on a church wall. Of every soul in Saint-Élie tonight, I'm the one it has looked at and left. It knows me.

What I've bought will run out. I stand a while longer in the cold, at the edge of the firelight, and keep the watch nobody asked me to keep.

28

THE EXHALE

AGNÈS

On this day the Beast was declared slain and the parish rejoiced. We rang the bells until our hands bled. God had delivered us.

— PARISH REGISTER FRAGMENT, SAINT-ÉLIE, 1766

There's meat turning on a spit somewhere down the lane, at an hour when frost should own the air entire. "It's a feast-day," a child shouts, running past my door. "Mother says it's a feast-day." I stand in my doorway with the pail on my arm and let the smell come up to me, fat and woodsmoke laid over the cold. It's the smell of a village that has decided it means to live.

I slept the night whole. Dusk to broad light, the bar down, the fire damped, and the dark asked nothing of me clear through. No knock at the shutter, no water to heat before day for work nobody names at table. I can't put a name to the last morning that was true.

Overhead, the sky has swept itself clean to the last rag of cloud, the first unbroken blue since the chestnuts came down, and the light lies along the lane the colour of broom-flower. Doors stand open on both sides, airing houses that have been shut like fists since summer. The Vidal woman beats a blanket over her sill and sings at the work, a song she only half owns, louder than she'd ever let it out in church. Children are abroad ahead of their chores and nobody calls them back to it. Up in the tower the bell goes in fits and starts, whenever another boy wins the rope, ringing for nothing at all, which I have never heard it do.

The talk at the well doesn't drop when I come up to it.

All my grown life the well has had two sounds, the one before I come and the quieter one after. This morning the women are pulling the night's stories back and forth like washing. "—and then he fell over the church step," one is saying, when I come up. "Flat on his face before God and everyone." "Serves him," says another, cheerful. "He danced me off my feet and told my man it was the wine." "The wedding's set at last," a third says. "This autumn's been death from one end to the other. It's time for a marrying." "Yours first," somebody's aunt says to the third, passing me the rope out of turn. "One swallow's no spring." I thank her. She's already laughing at what comes next. "Did you ever think," a woman says, to the well in general, "we'd see the end of it." "Don't," says another, quick, crossing herself. "Don't say it out loud." "It's said now," the first one answers, laughing, and draws her water fast, as if it could climb a bucket rope after her. "She's up at all hours," I hear, at my back, and turn, and it's the apple-woman from the market, and she means nothing by it at all. "Up at all hours, and still first at the oven before any of us. I don't know how she does it." I stand among them drawing my water, one woman of a dozen. A small enough wonder, and I take it home like a coin found in the road.

Gaspard comes down while I'm still at the rope. The village hails him house by house, men lifting their cups to him from their own thresholds, a woman calling a blessing down on him with her arms full of bedding. "God keep you, King's man," she calls, "and God keep your rifle." He answers what wants answering and comes on, slower than his stride was a month ago, yesterday still heavy on him.

He takes his place beside me at the well-head in the plain gold light, before the open morning, and stands there. That's all it is. That's everything it is. What we've had since summer has been had in the dark, or under a crowd's noise, or inside a sickroom's leave. Now there's nothing over us but daylight, and the morning's business goes on around us as though we were any two people in it. The half-step apart we've kept in every daylight hour is gone. Neither of us puts it back.

"It's over," he says, low, for me.

It hasn't the full shape of a question. I hear the question anyway. I know what the wolf on the church wall is worth, none better. I helped set its price. But the dying could be done for all that. Creatures range. The thing that has emptied this parish since summer could be two valleys gone already, with winter coming down behind it to close the country. Wiser women than I am believe as much this morning, and just this once I'd as soon be no wiser than my neighbours.

"It's over," I say back, half borrowed, half wished. He lets it stand, and neither of us puts anything truer in its place. The coin is his and the road south is open before the snow, and still he hasn't spoken of leaving. Neither have I.

The one face I want in this morning is nowhere in it. From the well I can see down the lane's length to the square and across to the church. Margot isn't anywhere the joy is.

By midday the square is fuller than it's been for any Mass this year.

Trestles have come out of barns and been set end to end with no plan to them, and what the village has, the village has carried down. Bread and cheese, a ham that was meant to see some household through to Lent, wine in cups that don't match. The wolf hangs where Bertrand chained him high on the church wall, and the parish has been up to him by turns all day. Men lay a palm on the pelt for luck as they pass. Women hold their children up to see, so they'll have it to tell when they're old. He was a wonder yesterday and he's a wonder today. I look at him and see a poor old king who came down hungry out of the high country and bought this parish its winter. When the wind sets from the church wall it carries the first sweetish warning that a wonder is also a carcass. Nobody minds it today.

No one sings a Te Deum over the deliverance. The man who'd have claimed it for God lies under his own church waiting on the thaw and a bishop's word, and if anyone misses his voice today, they keep it to themselves. Anselme has carried his table out into the sun instead, the register open on it, and for once the line at his elbow wants him for something other than graves. A girl and her man stand getting a wedding set down at last, the one this autumn twice pushed off. "Names," Anselme's saying, grave as ever, licking the pencil. "I need the fathers' names for the book." It was their family's wine the square drank first last night. "Well spent," the whole line tells them. "Well spent, and well married."

Pascal is at the well when I cross for more water. All autumn he's held the count of our dead at that well-head, laying it out for anyone who'd stand still long enough to hear it. Today he draws and carries, draws and carries. His fingers are only fingers. Bertrand stands through the afternoon with one cup he doesn't refill, saying, as near as I can tell, four words the length of it, and the four words, when they come, are "It's a good wolf," said once, at the wall, to no one. He looks more at home in the crowd's joy than any ten of the talkers.

And Gaspard is thanked. There's no end of it. Man after man at his elbow, the cup pressed on him, the same words over and over. "You've saved us, monsieur. You've saved this parish." "Tell it again," a boy begs. "The fight. How you took him." "Another time," he says, and the boy goes off telling it to himself instead. He takes every round of it the same, few words, no flourish, letting them read the shortness for modesty. I'm the one soul in this square who knows what each thank-you costs him, every gripped hand another sou set down against the lie, and he doesn't once let the count show.

"To the wolf," a man says, raising his cup at the trestle, to general laughter, "the first parishioner to die respectable all year."

"And to the priest," an old woman says, dry as dust, "who didn't live to see it," and is answered by a silence she doesn't mind at all.

"I can't remember the last of these," an old man says, over the ham. "My wedding, maybe. My second one." "How many autumns have you seen," somebody asks him, fond. "Enough to know this one's price," he says, and drinks to the wolf all the same.

"Dance with me, then," a girl says to her man, bold as brass, in the middle of the day, and he does, and nobody says a word against it.

Margot's Denis goes by with a wedge of somebody's ham in each fist and his elbows through both sleeves, the smallest at his heels with the crust, sent for the family's share and eating it on the way.

Somebody gives me a cup of wine I didn't ask for, from a neighbour who didn't first reckon up who I was. Of everything this bought bright day has handed round, that small kindness is the one that nearly undoes me.