THERE · The fiftieth to fifty-fifth winters · fifty-eight to sixty-three
The first time my heart fell I was standing in the middle of the Sethry bridge with a mallet in my hand, listening to a pin.
It was a timber span of the old kind over the Sethry burn, and a pin in the lower chord had begun to speak when the carts went over, and I was the one who could hear which pin. I was fifty-eight. I had built forty-one bridges and I still liked best the mending of other men’s, because there is more to learn in what a man got wrong. I struck the first pin and listened, and the next, and the third one answered me wrong, and I was pleased, and then the deck tipped.
It did not tip. The deck stood as it had stood for a hundred winters, and it was my heart that went out from under me, the way a sledge goes when the rope parts on a slope. There was a flutter in my chest like a bird that has come in through a door and cannot find it again. I sat down on the planks with my legs out in front of me like a child, and the mallet went through the gap between two boards into the burn, and I watched it go.
The keeper’s wife was a healer. She went out to her garden in the rain and came back with a leaf, gray-green and furred like the ear of a rabbit, and steeped it, and made me drink it. It tasted of cut hay and of something under the hay that nobody should eat. In a while the bird in my chest stopped trying the walls and sat down.
“Every day now,” she said. “Not more than this much, or it stops the heart instead of steadying it. It is the slow falling. It comes to old men. The leaf does not stop it. It only makes it slower.”
I went home to Hessary in a cart with a pouch of it inside my shirt, and Senna met the cart at the bottom of the orchard, and she looked at my face and did not ask me anything, and that night she moved my side of the box bed nearer the fire.
◆
Maris was the one who asked. She was Pell’s first, and she had come out of her mother asking, and at twenty-one she was apprenticed to a surveyor in Ostrey and bored, because land stays where it is.
She came up at the thaw of the fifty-second winter with her copy of the painted cloth of the Hem, a red mark for every Given thing and its winter beside it, and unrolled it on our floor from the hearth to the door. She took a stick of charcoal and began at the oldest mark, far up the Hem, under the ice where the Oss comes out of the mountain, and drew from it to the next oldest, and the next, across the floor and past my feet. The line went down the mountain as water goes, a little farther every winter, about as far as a man walks while he says the Pledge of Allegiance and the prayer and all five of the monkeys, which I told her, and which she did not think was funny.
“It walks,” she said. “It is one door, and it walks.”
Senna was at the hearth with her back to us. She did not turn around.
She asked me for my three dates in the Slow Country and sat at our table with them for a night and a day, and came to me with a figure I had known since I was nine and had never had in figures. She rolled up her paper.
“Then I only have to find it,” she said.
◆
She listened for two years, at every hole along her line that breathed, on her belly at the mouth with her ear to the dark. I did not go with her. I had sworn on two fires, once at twenty and once at twenty-seven, not to listen at a hole.
In the late autumn of the fifty-fourth winter she came to the timber yard at dusk with one side of her face scraped raw from lying on rock, and took hold of my sleeve, which she had not done since she was small.
“Grandfather. Come and stand on the mountain.”
So I went up with her, and stopped often. The place was below the beech wood, farther down the Hem than I had ever looked, a black split in the stone about the size of a door laid on its side. I stopped twenty paces off and she went on alone. I heard it from where I was. It came up out of the rock thin and high and then low, the same two notes, like a bird inside a bottle.
I sat down on the hillside. Maris came back and sat down beside me, and below us in the dark the Mother breathed in and out, which she had been doing the whole of my life.
After a year of pegs she came to our fire and told us where her line would end and how soon, and Davit got up and went out and did not come back that night.
Senna did not speak until the house had eaten and Maris had fallen asleep on the bench with her book under her head. She sat on the stone lip of the long fire and looked at me across it. She was sixty-two. Her hands were brown to the wrist, and would be until she died.
“You have said her name every night for fifty-five winters,” she said. “I have said it for forty-two. I am tired of saying it to nobody.”
“Senna.”
“Go,” she said. “Tell her. Tell her you were fed and you were warm and you had children, and she can stop.” She held up one brown hand when I opened my mouth. “And come back before the thaw.”
I told her what the thaw was in the Slow Country. How short. How little it left me at my mother’s table. She had heard it from Maris already. She let me tell it anyway.
“Then do not sit long,” she said.
Then she held her right hand out over the fire, low, where it burned, where I had held mine at twenty-seven. I saw the skin of her palm go red in the light and I saw her not move it, and I said her name again, and she did not listen.
“I heard you swear it,” she said to the fire. “I was there. I release it. Once. Hear me.”
She took her hand away. She looked at it, and blew on it, and put it in her lap.
“There,” she said. “Now you have no excuse.”
◆
The place in the rock where the roof comes down had fitted me at eight with a hand’s width of stone above my back. I was not eight. So I built a gauge, because I am a builder. I set two boards on edge on the floor of the timber store and laid a third across them at the height I remembered, and every morning I lay down on the floor and tried to go under.
I did not eat for forty days.
The first time I went forty days without food I was alone in the dark and nobody knew where I was. This time everyone knew. That was worse and it was better. Senna fed the house every night and did not feed me, and I sat at the fire with them while they ate, because I would not be put out of my own house, and the smell of the eel and the hoff came up to me and I held my hands together in my lap. Pell came up from Ostrey every seven days to put her ear on my chest and count, and to tell her mother things I was not meant to hear.
On the twentieth morning I got both shoulders under the board and lay there with the wood across my back like a yoke and laughed until the bird in my chest came up. Aurel came in that day to watch. He was twenty and the thinnest of all of them, all elbows and knees like a young heron, and he lay down beside me and slid under the board and out the other side without touching it, and got up, and bowed. I threw a wedge at him. I missed.
On the thirty-eighth morning I went under the whole way, and lay on the floor of the timber store with shavings in my beard and looked at the underside of the roof.
◆
Senna stitched my boots in the last nights, by lamplight at the fire, with the elk hide across her knees.
She had made them in the summer, before any of it, and she said she had not known. Now she had turned the left one inside out over her fist and was working a needle through the lining with dark thread. She did not look up when I sat down beside her. I watched her finish a whole line before I asked.
“What are you sewing?”
“Everyone,” Senna said.
I read it over her arm, line by line. Pell, and Pell’s husband, and Maris, and Aurel. Davit, and Davit’s wife, and their three boys. Ilse, and Corran, and their girls. Oss, by himself, with the space after him that is left at the Naming. Ines. Wenna. Orrin. Tam. It took ten lines, close and even, one under another, each the width of the boot. She had put every name she said at the fire into the leather where I would feel it against my leg with every step I took away from them.
Then she tied off, and turned the boot on her fist, and began again below the tenth line, low down, where the bone of my ankle would sit. She made two small words with a space between them. She knotted the thread on the inside, where I would never see the knot, and bit it off.
Ama Jo.
I looked at it, and at her. She turned the boot right side out and handed it to me and picked up the other one, and she did not say anything about it, and I did not ask, and she never told me.
The next day she took me up the Hem, slowly, with her hand under my elbow, which I let her do. At the black split below the beech wood she walked out a square on the hillside, ten paces by eight, on a flat place where the ground was good, and stood in the middle of it with her hands on her hips.
“What is this,” I said.
“A house,” Senna said. “In case you are late.”
◆
The first snow came in the night. I woke to the silence of it on the thatch, and lay and listened, and then I got up.
I put on the boots. I put the satchel over my shoulder with the pouch of leaf and a twist of dried cherries and my bronze triangle, and Maris’s map, though I knew the way. Senna reached up to the high shelf by the salt crock in the house that had been her mother’s and was ours now, and moved aside what fifty-five winters had put in front of it, and took down the flashlight. It had lain there since the eleventh night. It was black with smoke. She rubbed it on her skirt until my father’s letters came up, and she put it in my coat.
“She will want to see that you kept it,” she said.
They walked me up, all of them, as far as the square Senna had paced out and no farther, because nobody goes into the Mother. The snow came down on us slow and thick and without wind, as it had come down the night I came out of the mountain. At the black split I turned around. Senna was in front of the others with snow in her hair.
“Before the thaw,” I said.
She laughed, as if she were asking me something.
I went in.
◆
I will not tell the Rooms again. I had Maris’s line and I had the whistle, and they were the same, and I followed them on my belly with my coat torn at both elbows until the roof came down to a hand above my back, and I thought of the gauge, and I went under.
The line was where Maris had said. It was black water, all at once, the weight and the roar and the cold in my teeth, as if it had waited fifty-five winters for the same boy. My heart went out from under me in it and came back. My nose bled. Then it was only rock again, and a round room that rang, and a long black tube, and gray light at the end of it, and air that smelled of pine pitch and dust and something else I no longer had a word for and knew at once, as a man knows a voice in the next room before he knows whose.
The Slow Country was in the middle of an afternoon. The sun came down through the pines at the same slant as the last time I saw it. I walked down through the rocks and had to stop and sit many times. At the bottom there was a road, and along the road a board under a little roof with papers on it, and one of them had my face on it, and beside it was the gold dog. I stood in front of them for as long as I could stand. An old man was sitting at a table under the pines across the road, looking at the water, and he did not turn around.
I went along the road to the place where the camper was.
I knocked three times, not hard, with a space between, so as not to frighten whoever was inside, and then I stepped back off the step onto the gravel, so that you would not have to open the screen all the way to a stranger. The inner door opened. There was a shape behind the screen and then a face, and it was your face, and it was not old. I had had you old for so long. A blue bird was screaming in the pines. I heard my own voice ask for a glass of water, in English, in a boy’s words, as if they had been waiting behind my teeth all that time for somebody to open a door. You handed it out through the gap in a small plastic cup with the marks of a child’s teeth in the rim, and I drank all of it, and when I gave the cup back I could not make my hand let go, and you did not pull. Then I sat down on your step and unlaced my boots, and set them side by side on the gravel below it, heels together, toes to your door, with everyone inside them.