Page 61 of She, Wolf, Him.

The looks go with me all the way up the lane. I've spent a working life walking out of villages with looks on my back. These are the first ones I've ever agreed with.

The treeline again, alone, with the morning fully up.

The blood has gone dark on the frost, and the frost is giving it up by inches as the sun finds the ground. The tracks are still here, waiting at the stone they vanish onto. I walk it all again, the gap, the rail, the trodden ground where she lay, up to the granite and back, and I read it the third time no better than the first two, which is to say perfectly. There was nothing hard in this reading. The hard part I supplied myself, all autumn, by refusing to do it.

I sold the king anyway, because selling is the half of my trade that has never failed to pay.

And I stayed to see the sale hold, when I should have been two valleys gone inside the week. I told the parish the snow was coming on the road. I told myself it was a watch I'd set. It was her.

I sewed the show on for good that night, and I swore only the country itself would ever unpick it. The country heard me. It has done its unpicking in a single night, behind a hay-store, on the one soul in this parish who never asked me for anything.

I say the last of it out loud, to the empty treeline.

No more lies.

32

THE WOUND THAT WON'T CLOSE

AGNÈS

I have washed the dead since I was a girl. It is women's work, and no one thanks us for it. But I had never washed one I loved.

— A MIDWIFE OF RIMEIZE, 1761

When Thibault died, the women kept me from the washing. A betrothed is near enough a widow, they said, and a widow doesn't lay out her own dead. So I stood in the open with empty hands while other women did the last work mine were owed. Nobody keeps me from Margot. There's no word in Saint-Élie for what she was to me, so there's no custom to bar my way, and when I come up the aisle with my sleeves already rolled, the women simply step back from the trestle. They know we were close. They're being kind. They don't know the love they're making room for.

Berthe has water warming before I've asked for anything. She sets the basin at my elbow with her red hands. "Her mother couldn't be got past the church door," she says, low. "The boys have her at home, and that's where she's wanted. Her father's sat his own doorstep since the bell went, and won't be got in." It's said so I'll know the work is mine by right. "You've only to call," she adds, and takes the others back toward the door, where they'll keep near enough to be decent and far enough not to crowd me. "We'll keep the door," one of them says, as they go, and they do. One or two murmur their sorrow at me in passing. "She was a good soul." "The best of us." I don't try to answer. Whatever answering costs, I haven't got it today.

"There was nobody better with a sick lamb," Berthe says, at the door, to the others, not to me. "Nor a sick child. She had the touch."

I'm good at this. Nobody thanks a woman for it, but it's the one work this village has always trusted me with. I'd give it up entire to be useless here this morning.

Her face was spared. Whatever else was done to her in the dark, I have her face, open as it was always open, and I wash it first, the brow, the small lines at each eye that only laughing put there. Below the collarbones is linen's work now, mine to do and nobody's to see. I keep my eyes where my cloth is and give my hands to the habit of it, wringing, smoothing, wringing again.

Then her hands. The right one wears its lambing scar at the base of the thumb, a thick cord of it under my cloth. We were seventeen. The blade slipped in the pen and she finished with the ewe before she'd let a soul see to her own hand, dripping and laughing at the fuss, prouder of the mark after than of anything the village ever said of her. That evening she still fed the young ones before she let me change the binding. She carried it the way other women carry a ring. I leave it till last, and I'm slow over it.

Her hair never would stay where she put it. It stays for me now. I plait it smooth for the ground. It lies quiet under my fingers, and I'd give a great deal to have it fighting me.

The dress is her Sunday one, the blue gone soft with washing, the one good dress she owned. Berthe comes up without being called and lifts where lifting's needed. "Lift," she says, at the shoulders. "There. Gently." Between the two of us we work her into it as gently as if she could still feel seams. Then it's done. Margot lies in her church best on a plain trestle, candles at her head and feet, and there's no work left in front of me anywhere.

There's a name I've had for her since before I understood what the having would cost. I've held it behind my teeth at the well, in the hay-store, across her father's table with the young ones shouting round us. Three nights past it came as far as my lips, her hand warm against my jaw in the dark, and I shut my mouth on it and called that carefulness.

"Ma mie," I say to her now. Once, low, under the murmuring at the door, where nobody living can take it from us.

It comes out with no trouble at all. That's the worst of it. All the years I kept it, I thought the saying of it would be like a wall coming down. There's no wall. There's nothing left it can open and nothing left it can spoil, so it only falls, soft, onto a face that can't turn toward it, and lies there with the candlelight, doing the same amount of good.

I'd meant to mend it today. That's what breaks over me standing there, slow, like cold coming through wet wool. I'd chosen the words on the walk home, in the last of the light. I was going to find her at the chicken-run behind her father's house and say I was sorry, properly, with no excuse hung on it anywhere. She'd have stayed angry the length of the morning. She'd never in her life held anger past her own good sense. By supper I'd have been forgiven more than I deserved, because that's how she forgave, the whole hand at once, nothing kept back for interest. There was time. I'd have sworn on this floor there was time. Her last words to me said different. I took them for anger and slept on them.

She'd gone back up to the hay-store. Of course she had. It's where she went to nurse a hurt, where she'd have nursed this one all those weeks, waiting on me to come, and I handed her a fresh one at the treeline and walked home to bed.

The work held me up while there was work. There's none now, and what comes up out of me comes from somewhere older than manners, a sound with no dignity in it at all. I get my wrist to my mouth in time to keep most of it from the room. The women study the floor. I stand over her in her Sunday blue with my sleeves wet through and cry as I haven't cried since my mother went, ugly and jolting, a girl's crying, until it has cried itself dry enough to see through.

When I can see again, the church has emptied itself of everyone but us. Berthe's doing, and a kindness past thanking. I kiss the plait where it crosses her crown, because nobody's by to see it. Then I go out into the grey noon, and the grief comes out with me.

My own house does nothing against it. It comes over the threshold at my heel and sits down where it likes, and it likes everywhere. The fire's laid from yesterday morning, kindling and two split logs, set by a woman who still believed she had a friend to make things right with and a day to do it in. I don't put a light to it. I cut bread because it's noon and noon is when bread is cut, set it on the table, and can't look at it.

The quiet has her voice in it. Old women say grief does that, and I've nodded along at wakes and believed none of it. It keeps only the last words. Twenty years of her voice, the teasing, the scolding, the humming under her breath when her hands were busy, and what the quiet gives back is myself at the treeline, cornered by a truth I had no answer to, reaching for whatever would cut deepest. You built a whole life on a door I never opened, and now you want to charge me rent on it.