THERE · The twentieth winter · twenty-seven
Orrin died at the thaw of the nineteenth winter, in the timber store, sitting on the bench he had made his apprentices sit on for fifty years while he told them what they had done wrong. He had gone out to look at the ice on the Little Oss and come back and sat down and asked me for his good chisel, the small one, and when I brought it he was not there to take it. His hands were open on his knees. They had not closed all the way for twenty winters, and they did not close then.
He was seventy-eight. He had no children and his wife had been sent up before I came over the Hem, so it was the guild that washed him, and the guild that carried him, six veshwrights from Ostrey and Sethry and the villages between, and I walked in front with the torch because he had drawn me by lot and there was nobody else. We sent him up on the fourth day from the high terrace above the walnut groves. The wood was dry that year and it caught at the first try, and the smoke went straight up in the still air and leaned toward the Mother at the top, the way the old women like to see it. He was a big man, even at the end. He burned a long time.
I did not weep on the terrace. I wept a month later, over a joint.
I was cutting a housing for a brace on a sheep bridge at Tollen, a small thing, and I cut it as he had taught me, the three timbers each holding the other two, and I put my thumb into the joint to test it and heard him say that it was a disgrace. He had said that to me a hundred times. He had meant it every time. I sat down on the beam with my legs over the water and could not get up, and the men with me went away along the bank and let me be.
That is what grief does in a structure. It does not break the member that took the load. It goes looking for the weakest joint, the old one, the one that was never set right, and it opens that. I had known Orrin for eighteen winters. I sat on the sheep bridge at Tollen with the water going under me, and what came up was not his face. It was a woman on a lake path with the sun behind her, and I could not see her face either.
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The whistle came in the autumn.
I was on the Hem with Tam cutting stone for the new wall at the dyers’ yard. The good stone lies along the seam where the rock folded, and we took it from the open ledges below the holes, where anyone may go, and never from inside them. Tam was twenty-three that year and as wide as a door, and he could lift a stone I could only tip. We were resting at the noon bell with our backs to a ledge and the valley under us, and he was talking about Brisa, whom he was going to marry, and I heard it.
It was thin and high, and then low. A bird inside a bottle.
I stood up. Tam asked me what it was, and I said it was nothing, and I sat down again. Then I stood up again. It came from somewhere below us along the seam, down toward the gorge, faint, and when the wind moved it went away, and when the wind moved back it came again.
The Mother breathes in many places. There are holes along the Hem that whistle in a wind and holes that moan, and the children of Hessary are told that it is the dead talking. I had heard the Mother breathe a hundred times in nineteen winters. I had never heard her make that sound.
I had sworn on Wenna’s fire that I would not go into the Mother. Not to look for a hole and not to listen at one. I remembered the words exactly, because I had chosen them, and because I had said them twice.
I went back the next day alone and listened at it.
I went back most days that autumn. I told Senna I was looking at stone. I did look at stone. I walked the seam down toward the gorge with my hand on the rock and stopped wherever the air moved, and put my face to the holes and listened, and some days I heard it and some days I did not, and the days I heard it I came home and ate my supper and put Davit to bed and held my hand over the fire at the Naming and said my mother’s name as I had said it every night since I was eight, and nobody in that house knew that I said it differently.
Senna knew. I think Senna knew. She did not ask. She asked once, about anything, and she was waiting to see if she would have to.
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I went at midwinter, on the longest night, because I had decided that if the door opened for anything it would open for that.
I had thought for a month about what to take. A lamp, the small iron one that hangs by its hook. Two flasks of oil. Hoff for ten days, and dried sella, and a bladder of water. Flint and steel. A coil of rope. A lump of chalk from the dyers’ yard to mark the walls, because I had been a boy in there once and chosen and chosen again and always been wrong, and I was not a boy now and I would not choose blind. I wrapped it all in my coat the night before and put it behind the woodpile in the lean-to where nobody would move it.
I got up in the dark before the first bell. Senna was asleep with her back to me. Pell was in the box bed at the end of the hearth with her arm over her face, seven winters old and sleeping as if she had been struck down. I went across the floor on the boards that did not speak.
Davit was standing in the door.
He was nearly four. He was in his shift, and his feet were bare on the stone of the step, and he had pulled the door open a hand’s width and was looking out at the snow in the yard. He did that. He woke in the night and went to look at things. Senna said he would be a watchman or a thief.
He turned around. He was not surprised to see me. Children that age are not surprised by anything that happens in the dark.
“Where are you going?” he said.
“To my mother’s,” I said.
It was the truth. It was the first time I had said it out loud, in any language, and I heard how it sounded, and I did not take it back.
He thought about it. He knew his grandmother Wenna’s house at the top of the village, and I think he thought I meant there, at that hour, and that it was strange but not very strange. He looked at the coat bundle under my arm.
“Get back in with your mother,” I said. “Your feet are cold. You are letting the snow in.”
I put my hand on the top of his head. His hair was warm from the bed. I turned him around by it, gently, and pushed him in, and pulled the door shut behind me, and went across the yard in the snow to the lean-to for the rest of it.
I did not look back at the house. I knew if I looked back I would see the door, and I knew what I would do.
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The hole I had chosen was an hour down the seam, past the last of the holes I had ever gone into as a boy, where the whistle had been loudest in the last days of the autumn. It was low, and I had to go in on my knees, and it smelled of cold stone and something older under that, and when I was inside I lit the lamp and marked the wall with the chalk at the height of my shoulder. A triangle. Then I went on.
I will not tell all of it. There is not much in the dark to tell.
The Mother’s Rooms are not rooms. They are the places where the rock ran hot and hollowed itself, tube into tube, some as high as a hall and some so low a man goes through on his belly with his cheek on the stone, and they branch like a river in its delta, without reason, and join again, and branch. I marked every choice. On the third day I came to a wall with my own triangle on it, and I sat down under it with the lamp and did not get up until the lamp had burned down the width of a finger. Then I got up and chose the other way.
The whistle was there. I want to be exact about that, because I have been asked since whether I imagined it. I did not imagine it. It was there every day. It was always one wall over. I would hear it on the left, thin and high, and find the way left, and crawl, and come out into a chamber, and it would be on the left again, one wall further. I would hear it ahead and go ahead and it would be behind. I know now where it was. It was not where I was. It had walked farther along the Hem than anyone in the valley knew, and it had walked slowly, as it does, and in all the winters I had lived under it I had never once thought that a door could move.
The first flask ran dry on the fifth day. The second on the ninth.
I sat with the lamp in my hands and watched it go down, the flame getting small and blue at the root and then yellow and then the orange of a coal you have stopped blowing on, and I thought about a thing I had not thought about in nineteen winters, which was a boy at the bottom of a garden counting to sixty. Then it went out, and I did not shake it.
After that it was the dark.
In the dark you do not have days. You have sleeping and not sleeping. I went on with one hand on the wall and the other out in front of me, and I felt for my chalk marks with my fingers, and found them, and found them again, and after a while I could not tell which ones were new. The hoff was gone. There is a gray crust that grows on the walls where the water runs, and I scraped it off with my thumbnail and ate it. It tasted of old coins. It kept me alive, I think, or it did not kill me, which in there was the same.
I said my night-language in the dark to keep my mouth working. The address, and the gap. My mother’s telephone number, all ten, over and over, until the numbers stopped being numbers and were only a shape my mouth made. The monkeys. The prayer. I said them louder when the whistle came and quieter when it went, as if it could hear me. Once I heard myself say Mom into the rock, not in the garden voice but in the voice of the boy on the path, and it came back off the walls at me three times, smaller each time, and after that I did not say anything for what I think was a day.
Near the end I lay down. I remember that. I lay down on my side on the stone because I was cold and it was easier than getting up, and after a time I was not cold any longer, and I knew what that meant. I lay there and knew it. I thought about Senna, asleep with her back to me. I thought about Pell with her arm over her face. I thought about Davit in the door, and my hand on his warm hair, turning him around.
Then the air moved on my face.
It was not the whistle. It was a draft, low along the floor, and it smelled of sheep.
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I came out of the Mother on my hands and knees on the fortieth day into a white glare that I thought was the line, and it was only snow, and daylight, and I had come out two valleys down the mountain on the flank above a herders’ fold. I did not know that. I did not know anything. The herders’ dogs found me first, two of them, gold, of the Hound’s line, and stood over me barking until the men came up the slope.
They were sheep people from the high fold and they did not know who I was. They thought I was a dead man who had been sent up badly and had come back down. One of them would not touch me. The other put me across a mule and fed me whey in a horn spoon, which I brought up, and then fed me more. They kept me four days, until I could stand, and then the one who would not touch me took me on the mule as far as the Oss, and pointed upriver, and went home fast.
I walked the rest. It took me two days. I was so light I could not keep warm.
I came up the road into Hessary after dark on the second day, past the eel sheds and the dyers’ yard with the vats frozen over, and up through the bare orchard toward Orrin’s house, which was my house, and I saw the light before I saw anything else. A small light, low down, at the door.
Davit was standing in it.
He had the clay lamp from the window, the one we burned in the long nights, and he was holding it up in front of him in both hands so that it lit his face and his chin and his bare feet on the step. His head came to the triangle I had cut in the doorframe when I was fourteen, the small one, low, at a boy’s height. The lamp was held just under it.
He had been there every night. Senna told me that afterward. Every night of it she had put him in the box bed and every night when the house was asleep he had got up and taken the lamp from the window and lit it at the fire and gone to the door, and she had found him there in the morning asleep on the step with the lamp gone out in his lap, and carried him in, and he had done it again. She stopped carrying him in after the tenth night. She put a fleece on the step.
He saw me coming up through the orchard. He did not run to me. He stood where he was with the lamp, and watched me all the way up the path, and when I was close enough he asked me something.
He asked me two things. I answered both of them. Both of my answers were no.
Then Senna was behind him in the doorway. She took the lamp out of his hands and held it up and looked at my face in its light for as long as it took, and then she lowered it, and stepped back from the door to let me in, and went to the fire and put food in a bowl.
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I swore the next night.
The house was full. Wenna had come down from the top of the village, and Tam, and Brisa with him, and two men of the guild who had come up from Ostrey when word went down the valley that the Given veshwright of Hessary had gone into the Mother and come out. The door was shut. Davit was on Senna’s knee. Pell sat on the ladder where she could see.
I held my right hand out over the long fire, low, where it burned, and I swore that I would never go into the Mother again, for any reason, for anyone, and I said the rest of it the way the oath is said, and then I did not take my hand away.
The first time, at Wenna’s fire at twenty, the hair had curled on the back of my hand and the palm had gone red and I had thought that was the fire hearing me. It was not. It is after that. It is after you have stopped being able to think about anything but your hand, and after you have stopped being able to think about your hand, when there is only the heat and the voices of the people watching counting under their breath. I heard Tam counting. I heard Wenna say longer. The skin of my palm went tight and shining and I smelled it, and still Wenna said it, and I held it.
When she took my wrist and moved it out of the heat, the blister had come up across the whole heel of my hand, white, the size of a hen’s egg. Davit had his face turned into Senna’s neck.
The guild took my seal for a season. I was not asked to a hearth-feast in Hessary until the thaw. Senna fed me and did not speak to me for a month, not one word, and then one morning at the fire she asked me to pass her the salt as if she had been asking me for things every day, and I passed it, and that was all.
I never told her what Davit asked me at the door. She never asked.
He went on getting up in the night for the rest of that winter. I would hear him, from the box bed, with my wrapped hand on the blanket. The small feet on the boards that did not speak. The scrape of the lamp coming down off the sill. The door. I lay and listened to him stand there with the light held up, watching the orchard for somebody who was already home, and I did not go to him, and I did not sleep until I heard the door close.