The Fenland Farm Incident

Ugh, I hate Mondays. King's Hawaiian Cinnamon Swirl Bite? Uh, Taylor Hansen? Sure, I'll try one. Mmm. Hey, let's get back to work, please. But Taylor Hansen's making my day way better with these new soft and swirly King's Hawaiian Cinnamon Bites. Taylor Hansen? Nice. Try one. Mmm. King's Hawaiian Cinnamon Bites. There's nothing like it. King's Hawaiian Cinnamon Bites There's a great deal of the second kind here because this is fen country and the fen doesn't like to give a man dry ground even to be buried in. I should tell you what the place is so you understand the rest. We sat on a low rise above the black water, the church, and the score of houses around it, and in a wet winter the roads went under and we were an island for weeks at a stretch. The nearest doctor was at the market town, a day's ride when the causeway held and no ride at all. We were used to being cut off. We were used to a good many things that people in drier places aren't. Children died here the way lambs died in their season and we buried them and went on because there was nothing else in the arrangement to do. I believed all that. I believed it right up until the winter it was my own boy in the ground. Len took the fever on a Tuesday in the middle of November. I remember it was a Tuesday because I'd been out for a while. I went out that morning setting a stone for the Pettit family and came in with my hands still cold to find Elsie holding him by the fire. He was seven. He was hot to the touch in a way a child shouldn't be and by the second night he didn't know us and by the third he'd stopped asking for water and on the fourth morning he was gone. The causeway was under a foot of water the whole while. I want that understood. There was no doctor to send for. There's no version of those four days where a man does something and the boy lives. I've gone over it more times than I'd tell anyone and there's nothing in it I could have done. I dug the grave myself. Nobody asked me to and nobody tried to stop me because I was the man who dug the graves and it didn't occur to any of them that this one should be different. The ground by the yew was as good as any we had four feet before the water. I made the box in the shed the same evening. It took me the length of one candle. I'd made a great many boxes and didn't have to think about it and I've wondered since whether that was a mercy or the opposite. We had him in the ground two days after he died. The parish came, all of them that could cross and they stood in the wet and said the things you say. Mrs. Pettit brought a pie in return for the stone I'd set that same week. I counted the mourners without meaning to, the way I count everything. There were 31 of us at the graveside and one of the 31 was in the box. I've never been able to stop the counting. It's a habit of the trade. You'll see, before I'm done, why I wish to God I could have stopped it. Elsie didn't weep at the grave. She'd done her weeping in the house and after that she was quiet in a way that shut the door on the rest of us. She took to her needle of an evening instead, making up the morning blacks by the fire and she never once finished a piece of it. There was always a button left off or a hem left open, some last small thing undone. So the folded black on the settle grew week by week and nothing ever came off that pile finished. What frightened me first wasn't any of what came later. It was the way she spoke of him. She'd say Len likes the crust left on or Len won't wear that. She'd say the grey stockings and she'd say it in the present, the way you speak of a child who's only in the next room. I didn't correct her because there was no kindness in correcting her and because, if I'm honest, it was easier to let it stand. Winnie was ten and she was the living one. Winnie laid at the table that first night for four and set his cup at his place and I watched her do it and said nothing about that either. We were three now and she laid four and I let it be. It was the Reverend Chadwick who told me about the sitting up. He stayed behind when the others had gone and we sat either side of my own hearth and he turned his hat in his hands the way he did. He said there was an old comfort in the parish that he didn't preach on but didn't forbid. He'd tell it me if I wished, he said. Many had found ease in it. I said I would hear it. A man will hear anything in the first week. It was a small thing the way he told it. You light a candle at your hearth in the nights after a burial, one candle and no more. You sit up alone when the house has gone to bed. You keep still and you listen. That was all. They come near, he said, in the first while, before they've gone the whole way off and a body may sit and listen and take what comfort there is in the nearness of them. He said it as if it were a thing everyone knew and no one said, which is exactly what it was. Then he told me the rule, and he told it lightly, the way you tell a child not to lean out over the water. You may listen, he said, but you must never answer it aloud. And you must never sit past the ninth night, for after the ninth night it isn't them any longer. He said that last part quickly and moved on, and if I'd been myself I might have asked him what he meant by that, what it was, after the ninth, if it wasn't them. I wasn't myself. I let it go by. He said one thing more as he stood to leave, almost as an afterthought, that a child should never keep the vigil, and I said, of course, and I didn't think about it again for a long while. He wouldn't look at me when he said the last of it. I marked that even then, that Reverend Chadwick, who had buried half the parish and could look any grief in the eye, found something at the bottom of his hat just then that needed his attention. God. God willing, he said at the door, the way he ended everything, and went out into the dark and the water. I've thought since that he knew. I don't think he knew all of it. I think he knew enough that he shouldn't have told me and told me anyway because he was a kind man and he couldn't stand to send me into that house with nothing in my hands. I don't blame him. I want that on the record too. Everything that happened, I did. That night, I sat until Elsie's breathing settled overhead and Winnie's after it, and the house went as quiet as the fen outside it, which is very quiet indeed. Len's cup was still at his place where Winnie had left it. I took the one tallow candle from the shelf, set it on the hearth, and lit it. I sat down in my chair, and I listened. I told myself it was only a comfort. I told myself I'd know the difference between a comfort and a folly, being a grown man of forty who'd put more people in the ground than he could name. I was wrong about that. I have never in my life been so completely wrong about anything. The candle wanted an hour to settle before anything came of it. That was the first thing I learned. You didn't light it and hear your boy, you lit it and you sat. The flame stood straight up in the still air of the room. You waited while the house cooled and ticked around you, hands folded, mouth shut, and after a long while the waiting changed into something else. I couldn't tell you the moment it did. I'd never sat up in that house so late and so still. A man works a place forty years and thinks he knows every sound in it, and it turns out he knows the daytime sounds and nothing of the other kind. Out past the window, there was the fen, and the fen at that hour gave back nothing at all. No dog, no bird on the water. Not even the wind, which you'd think a flat, wet country would be full of. The air lay over the whole of it without so much as stirring the reeds. The water didn't move, and my own breathing was the loudest thing for a mile. I've sat with a good many dead in my time. I'd never sat inside a quiet like that. The first night I heard nothing I could name. I told myself that was as it should be, and I went up to bed near two o'clock and lay next to Elsie and didn't sleep. It was the second night that Len coughed. I want to be careful how I say this because it matters later how small it was. He had a particular cough, my boy, a little dry catch he made in the back of his throat when he was trying not to be noticed, at church, or when he was back home. meant to be a sleep. I heard it once, low from the corner where his chair stood, no louder than if he'd made it in the next room with the door near closed. I didn't move, the flame didn't stir. I sat and waited to hear it again, and I didn't. After a while, I told myself what any man would tell himself, that a house that old is full of small noises, that a grieving father will hear his own child in the settling of a beam, that I'd heard what I wanted to hear. And that was true. I did want to hear it. I've never been able to decide whether wanting a thing so badly makes you more likely to imagine it or less likely to doubt it when it comes. I settled on the first that night because the first let me go up to bed. In the morning, I said grace over the porridge the way we always had. And when I lifted my head to start the meal, I counted us at the table, which I do without thinking, the way another man cracks his knuckles. Four. I counted four of us. Then I looked properly, and there was Elsie, and there was Winnie, and there was me. The fourth place was Len's empty chair with the cup when he wouldn't let me move, and there were three. I'd counted the chair. I told Elsie the long nights were catching me up, and she said nothing, and Winnie looked at me across the table and didn't look away for a moment longer than a child ordinarily would. She was quieter that morning than she'd been the day before. There was grief enough in the house to put anything to. It was Elsie who first said about the light in his room. She said it flat, the way she said everything now, passing me on the stair with the mending in her arms. "It's dark." "His room goes dark before the others," she said, and went on down. I stood in the doorway of it that same afternoon to see. It's a small room, west-facing, one window, and outside the window stands the yew. The same yew his grave lies under at the other end of the churchyard, and the branches of it had grown close over the glass across the years, the way I'd never bothered to notice. The light did go out of that room sooner than the rest of the house. The light did go out of that room sooner than the rest of the house, ten minutes, perhaps a quarter hour, sooner than the room beside it. But there was the yew, and there was the old thick glass with the green in it, and a man doesn't need a stranger reason for a west room going dim when there's a tree across its window. I told Elsie it was the yew wanted cutting back. She said she knew. Neither of us cut it back. I sat up the third night and the fourth, and each night the cough came. And one or two things besides, all of them small, all of them the sort of thing that lived at the very edge of a man's hearing where he couldn't swear to it. Len's chair took a small creak once, as if a weight had come onto it. A word I couldn't make out, close and low. I didn't answer any of it. I had that much of the reverend's rule still in me. You may listen, but you must never answer it aloud. I broke that part on the fifth night, and I broke it without deciding to, which is the only honest way to say it. The cough had come, and then, clearer than anything yet, I heard him say, "Pa, just that." The way he said it when he wanted me to come look at something. And before I knew my own mouth had opened, I said his name back into the dark room. Len. Only the one word. It was out of me before the rule so much as crossed my mind. The way you answer any child who calls you in the night without thought because ten years of a child calling you in the dark is in your body and doesn't ask your leave. The flame went down. I want to be exact. Nothing was near it. No door was open. The room was as sealed and still as it had been every night. The flame of that candle dropped to a low blue bead, as if the wick had drowned. It stayed down a moment, the room going dim around it. Then it climbed back up to its full height and burned as before. Nothing had passed it. Nothing had touched it. I sat looking at it a long while. Then I told myself the tallow had a fault in it, a pocket of wet in the fat, a bit of grit in the wick, that I'd seen candles do such things. Nobody was there to hear me say it, so I said it out loud, which I've thought about since. And I decided, sitting there, that I'd sit up only to the ninth night, as the reverend had said, and not an hour past it, and take what comfort was in it and let it go. I didn't put the candle out. I remember thinking that it seemed a waste to snuff it with good tallow left, and I sat with it until it was gone of its own accord, near three o'clock, and only then went up. That was the fifth night. There were four more in the rule. Ugh, I hate Mondays. King's Hawaiian Cinnamon's swirl bite? Uh, Taylor Hansen? Sure, I'll try one. Mmm. Taylor Hansen? Nice. Try one. Mmm. I've gone back over those four more times than all the rest, because those were the nights the choice was still mine, and I made it the way I made it, and there's no one to blame for that but the man in the chair. By the sixth night, I'd stopped telling myself I would stop. I didn't say so, even alone. I dressed it up as other things. I told myself I'd sit only a little while, and then not sleep, and then I sat the whole night. I told myself, Elsie, I'm going to sleep. I told myself, Elsie, I told myself, Elsie, I'm going to sleep. I told myself, Elsie slept better knowing the candle burned, though I'd never told her it burned and didn't know what she knew. A man can keep a thing from himself a long time if he's willing to lie to the one person who would catch him at it, and the one person was me, and I was willing. The counting was the first thing that turned. I count us at grace, I've said that. By the sixth morning, it was no longer that I counted the chair for a fourth. It was that I'd count four true heads, four warm faces around my table. And then I'd look to be sure, and it was always Winnie who wasn't there when I looked, not gone from the room, gone from the count. I'd have her plain in the corner of my eye, laying the spoons or standing at Elsie's skirt, and my counting would pass over her as if the place she stood were empty, and I'd come up one short of my own family and have to find her by turning my head. Then there she was. I'd been there for her, but I'd never seen her again. She was always there when I turned my head. It was only the count that lost her, and it lost her every time, and never her mother, and never me. I took to watching for it, which was worse because a thing you watch for at every meal becomes the whole of the meal. Elsie asked me once why I stared so at Winnie over the porridge. I said I was seeing her mother in her. Elsie said, "She's got none of me in her, that one." "She's her brother through and through," and went back to her bread. I didn't know then how near she'd come to the truth of it, and I'm glad I didn't. The nights changed at the same time, and they changed in a way I couldn't lay at the door of grief. What came through the candle stopped being old things. In the first, while it had been Len as I had him by heart, the cough, the way he said "paw," the small, worn shape of a boy I'd carried in my head for seven years. Now it turned to telling me the house. On the seventh night, the voice said, low and close as ever, that ma'am broke the blue plate. Elsie had broken the blue plate that afternoon at the dresser and swept it up, and I'd been out at the churchyard the whole of it and heard of it from no one because there was no one to hear it from, because we didn't speak of small things anymore in that house. Grief doesn't tell a man a fact, he doesn't already know. It gives him back what he's carried in. It doesn't go into the scullery while he's out and come back with the news. The next night, it was Winnie's boots. "Her boots are wet by the fire," the voice said. I hadn't been in the kitchen since noon. I went and looked when the candle was out, and her boots stood by the fire with the fen still dark on the leather where she'd been down at the dyke after seven days. I'd been in the kitchen since noon. I hadn't put them there. I hadn't seen them. The voice had. I stopped trying to explain it to myself after the boots. Not because I had an answer, because I'd run out of the easier kind and the harder kind I wasn't yet willing to pick up and hold. Then it said, "Pobbies." I should tell you what that is, or you won't feel the floor go out of it the way I did. When Winnie was small, she couldn't say the bread and milk her mother made her of a cold morning, the sopped bread in the warm milk, and what came out of her instead was "Pobbies." It stuck, the way a baby's word will stick in a family until the grown girl is still saying it and turning it around. I'd been in the kitchen no one recalls it was ever wrong. It was Winnie's word. She made it. Len used it because she used it, the little brother taking the big sister's word. But it was hers. It came out of her mouth before he was ever born. And on the ninth night, in my son's voice, close by his chair, the candle standing straight and yellow between us, I heard it ask for Poppy's. It wasn't Len's to ask for. I knew that. I knew whose word it was, and I sat in my chair and couldn't have stood if the house had been afire. The ninth night. I have to be honest about the ninth night because the ninth night was the one the reverend had drawn the line at, the one he said quick and wouldn't look at me over. After the ninth night, it isn't them. I'd told myself that fifth night with the candle guttering. That I'd sit to the ninth and no further. The ninth came. It asked for Poppy's in my daughter's stolen word. And I didn't put the candle out. I sat with it until it burned itself down near three, the way I had every night, and I went up to bed. And the night after the ninth, I lit it again just the same. And the night after that, as if the line the reverend had drawn had been drawn in water. I had to sit to the ninth and no further. The ninth came. I have no defense to make of that. I want none. A wiser man, a colder man, would have heard that word in that voice and thrown the candle in the fire and cut the ewe down over the boy's grave with his own hands before morning. I lit it again. That's the whole of what there is to say about the kind of man I was that winter. Winnie, by then, had gone very quiet. She'd been a talking child, a child who filled a room, and across those days she thinned down to almost nothing, her voice gone small and far. And I put it to the grief the way I put everything to the grief, but I marked that she'd taken to singing her brother's tune under her breath. He had a tune, Len, a nothing little thing he made up and went about the yard with. No one else had ever sung it, because it was his, and it was daft, and it had no words. Winnie sang it now over her mending, soft and low, without seeming to know she did. I asked her where she had it. She looked up at me from a great distance and said, "'Len taught it me,' and looked back down. He hadn't. It was his. He'd never taught it to a living soul. She said it the way you say a thing you've always known." And once, that same day, Elsie called across the kitchen for Len to bring the kindling, and Winnie stood up from her place by the fire and went and brought it. Neither of them thought a thing of it. I stood in the doorway with my heart doing something, and I said, I won't dress up in words, and said nothing, because what was there to say, and to whom? It was at supper on the twelfth day that I put my spoon down and didn't pick it up again. I'd asked Winnie only to hear her ordinary voice, whether she wanted the crust off her bread. It was a nothing question. And there was a pause before she answered, a small wrong pause, half a beat too long, the length of time it takes a thing to remember how a girl would say it. And then she said, "No thank you, Pa," in Winnie's own voice, every sound of it hers, and it was the pause that wasn't hers. The pause had been someone else deciding to use her mouth. I sat with my spoon in my hand and my supper going cold, and I understood, in the way you understand a thing in your body before your head will say the words, that I'd let something in through my grief and it wasn't in the candle anymore. It was at my table, it had my daughter's voice now, and it used it as easy as I'd use my own. I didn't sleep at all that night. I didn't light the candle either. I thought if I didn't light it, it would stop. I know better now. In the morning, I took the candle out to be rid of it. I hadn't lit it the night before, and I hadn't slept for the not lighting of it, lying stiff beside Elsie listening to the house and hearing nothing, which was worse than hearing something because it meant the thing didn't need the candle anymore and was only being polite about it. At first light, I got up and took the stub down off the hearth, the little tallow end of it, and I carried it out past the shed to the far corner of the churchyard where I put the parish rubbish. I dug a hole with my hands in the cold ground and buried it. I don't know what I thought that would do. A man reaches for the shape of a thing when he can't reach the thing. I'd buried a great deal in that ground, and it had always stayed buried. I suppose I wanted this to be one more of those. I felt better for an hour. I have to be truthful and say I felt better, out in the grey morning, with my hands dirty and the candle in the ground, as if I'd cut something off clean. It was at supper that it spoke to me plain. Winnie sat in her place. She'd eaten almost nothing in days. Elsie set the bread and milk in front of her, the poppies, and Winnie looked at it and didn't take it up. And then she raised her head and looked at me down the length of the table, and she said, "You can't stop now, Edmund. You'll lose us both." She called me Edmund. My daughter had never called me anything but Pa in her life, and it wasn't her voice. I need you to understand that I'm not a fanciful man. I've spent my years among plain hard facts, and I'm telling you that the voice that came out of my ten-year-old girl was old. It was dry, and low, and grown. The voice of something that had been speaking a very long time before Winnie was born, and it came out of her small mouth shaping her words with no more trouble than a man puts on a coat. Elsie went on cutting her bread. Elsie didn't hear it. That's the part I've never told anyone until now. Her own mother sat three feet away, buttered her bread. I got up so fast the chair went over behind me. I don't remember crossing to her. I had her by the shoulders. "Winnie." I said her name into her face. "Winnie, look at me." And she did look at me, and the thing behind her eyes looked at me with her, unhurried, taking me in. The way you might look up at a man who has come into a room where you've been sitting a long while already. That was when the whole of it came apart in my hands. I couldn't breathe. I couldn't breathe. I couldn't breathe. I couldn't breathe. Because I understood, holding her, that it had never been Len. Not the first night. Not any night. The cough, the way he said "paw," the small worn shape of the boy I had by heart, all of it had come out of the same old mouth I was hearing now. A dead child doesn't know that his mother broke a plate that afternoon. A dead child doesn't know his sister's boots are wet by the fire. Those weren't Lens to know. They were the house, seen from inside it, seen from wherever the thing had been standing all along, which was closer every night. Which was at the table now, which was in the count I kept losing, because the count had been trying to tell me the truth from the start. It was always Winnie the count couldn't find. I'd thought that a fault in my tired old head. It was the plainest sight I had. The thing was standing where she stood. It had been coming up through her a little more each night while I sat at the hearth and fed it my son's name. I said none of that. I said "We're going out. Get your coat." I'd have carried her out into the flooded dark and the cold sooner than leave her in that house another night. I got her to the door with her coat half on, Elsie asking from the table where in God's name I thought I was taking the child at this hour. I got the door open onto the black water standing over the road. And I stopped. Because Winnie had gone soft and easy under my hands. She looked up at me in the doorway and she smiled and she said, in her own voice now, in Winnie's own small voice, "It's all right, Pa. We don't mind waiting." And I understood that there was nowhere to carry her. That the door I'd opened wasn't in the room and wasn't in the candle. It was in her. I could no more take her away from it than I could take her away from her own breath. If I took her out into that water to be rid of it, I'd only be losing my daughter to the water, and the thing would sit down again by my fire and wait for me to come back in and be its company. Ugh, I hate Mondays. Uh, Taylor Hansen? Sure, I'll try one. Mmm. But Taylor Hansen's making my day way, way worse. Taylor Hansen? Nice. Try one. Mmm. Bites, jibba-da, bite you. Don't you love 'em? Sweet, swirly, he's all good. I brought her back inside. I put her to bed. I sat on the floor by her bed the rest of that night with my back against the door, and she slept, or lay, with me. Her eyes shut and didn't stir. And once toward morning, she said, without waking, "We could hear him again if you wanted. You only have to light it." It offered me my boy the way you offer a grieving man a chair and it's been offering ever since and it's in no hurry at all because it has the one thing I don't which is all the time there will ever be. I've had a long time to understand it and this is what I understand. It answered from the very first night. There was never any len on the far side of that candle to bring home. My boy was gone the way the dead are gone, all the way gone, past any flame a grieving fool could light and he was gone before I ever struck the match. What answered wasn't late in coming and wasn't near going off. It was only the thing that answers. It had been in the parish longer than the parish had a name I think in the ground or the water or the old dark of the place and it knew the one shape a hollowed out man will open his door to and it wore my son to come through. Because a father will let his son in where he'd let nothing else. Every night I sat there thinking I was keeping my len near. I was holding a door open with my own two hands and it wasn't my dead boy coming through it. It was coming through and it was going into the only child I had left a little at a time while I fed it her brother's name and called it comfort. I did that. No one made me. The reverend told me the rule and I broke every part of it in turn and a wiser man would have stopped the first night the flame went down. I lit it again for eleven more. It was mine to answer for. I've never once let myself forget that and I'm not going to start now at the end by pretending the ground was ever anyone's but mine. He told me that first night with his hat turning in his hands that a child should never keep the vigil. I've turned that one over more than a thousand times. I've turned that one over more than almost anything else he said to me. I think he had it backwards or else I did. The danger was never that the child sits up with the dead. It's that the thing you sit up for takes the child instead. Elsie went four winters after. She'd never truly been in the house with us after that November. One cold week she took a chest complaint and didn't fight it and I don't think she wanted to and I buried her by the boy. She went to her grave believing our Len was still with us and that it was Winnie who'd been taken and I never once corrected her. By then I'd learned what correcting a person cost and the truth would only have frightened her and changed nothing. Let her have it. She's passed being told now. The parish thinned out over the years the way these places do. They drained more of the fen and the water went down and the people went down with it off to the towns. The church that had been full enough on a Sunday when I was young stood empty every year. Still I dug the graves because I was the man who dug the graves and there's a kind of comfort even in that. I know where every one of them lies. I could walk it blind. Winnie grew up. That's the plain hard middle of it that I can hardly stand to write. She didn't sicken and she didn't fade away to nothing as I half feared and half hoped she might in those first years. She grew. She kept my house better than her mother had. The folk of the parish thought her a little simple, a little touched. The quiet daughter who stayed to mind her old father and they were sorry for me. I let them be sorry. It was easier than the truth and by then easier was the only road I knew how to walk. But I've sat across a table from my daughter for the better part of my life. I've watched her lay the plates and mend the fire and ask after my knees in the damp. All of it just as it should be. And every so often, not often, she'd go still between one thing and the next and something a great deal older than her would look out at me through her eyes, taking the measure of the room the way it had that first night at supper. Then she'd come back and finish pouring the tea. She was in there. I want to believe she was still in there, my Winnie, somewhere under it. I couldn't ever be sure. That's the cruelty of it, if it has a cruelty. Not that it took her. That I could never once be certain how much of her was left to take. I'm very old now. I've outlived nearly everyone who could tell you I ever had a son and the account I'm giving you is the only stone I'll ever set for him because there's nothing under the ewe but a boy who was already gone before his father made a fool of himself over a candle. Last night she came and sat with me by the fire, my daughter, a grown woman with grey coming into her hair, and she took up the mending. After a while she said, without looking up, that it was a cold night and a still one, and that we could hear him again if I liked. That the candle was still in the ground where I'd put it but that a candle was an easy thing to come by. The way you offer a thing to a man you know will say yes in the end because you have all the time there is and he has almost none. I looked at her a long moment. I looked at the old, still thing behind her eyes that was waiting for me to say, and I told her that there was no one left to hear. That the candle was only a candle now and the boy was gone and I wouldn't be lighting anything again. She smiled at me. She wasn't troubled. She'd known I would say that, the way she has always known, and it didn't cost her a thing because it's nothing to her whether it's tonight or after I'm in the ground beside them. She only smiled and picked up her mending and said that was all right. That she didn't mind waiting. "She has waited this long," she said. "She can wait a while more." Outro My name is Arthur and I have been the sexton of this parish for exactly three days. I took the work after old Hargreaves died in the winter, past eighty by the register. I dug his grave myself and put him where his own ledger demanded: the corner under the yew, beside his wife, and beside a statue of the Lord Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It was my first grave and beside a small worn stone with a boy's name on it and a single date. Three in a row. It was my first burial in this waterlogged fen. I wish to God I had kept walking. There was one mourner, the daughter. The village folk speak of her as a poor, touched old woman who spent her whole life quietly minding her father. But at the edge of the pit there was nothing frail about her. She did not shiver in the biting frost. She stood in it as though the cold were nothing to her at all. When the grave was filled she knelt at the fresh earth and I turned away to give her a moment's grace. Then the wind dropped and I heard her plainly. She was not weeping. She pressed her mouth to the mud and whispered in a dry, cracked, ancient voice: "Down you go, keeper. In you go with the others." When she stood she looked straight at me and smiled. She looked at me with a smile, but she smiled and it was a wrong, awful thing. Too wide, the old skin stretched impossibly tight across the teeth. She thanked me for my work. She said she had a comfort from the old parish ways that a lonely young man ought to know. She said she had been waiting a very, very long time for someone new to come. She was in my cottage tonight. She did not knock. She was simply sitting at my hearth when I came in from the cold. She had brought a candle, not new wax, a filthy, misshapen stub of yellow tallow crusted black with the dirt of decades as though it had been clawed up out of the churchyard ground. She set it on my table like a gift and she told me the rules of the sitting up, gentle as a nurse. "You sit up alone. You keep still. You listen. And whatever answers you out of the dark, you must never, ever answer it back." I have the parish book open in front of me now. Two hundred years of names, in one hand or another, and the last of them written in mine. I am setting this down because she has not left. She stands in the dark corner of my room, perfectly still, watching me. And her eyes are old and hollow, and each time I glance away I would swear they catch the light a dull, wet red. I told her I would not light it. I told her to get out of my house. Her smile only grew, there in the gloom. Because I had spoken to her. Because I had answered. And then, in the small, piping voice of a seven-year-old boy, she whispered, "Blow it out if you like. I'm not in the candle, Arthur. I'm already in the room with you." "Rex here. Thank you for staying till the end. If you liked it, a like and subscribe on YouTube or a follow and a rating on Spotify honestly means the world to a channel this size. Take care of yourself, don't answer anything in the dark tonight, and keep a light on. Good night." "Ugh, I hate Mondays." "King's Hawaiian Cinnamon Swirl Bite?" "Taylor Hansen? Sure, I'll try one." "Mmmm." "Hey, let's get back to work, please." "But Taylor Hansen's making my day way better with these new soft and swirly King's Hawaiian cinnamon bites taylor hansen nice try one king's hawaiian cinnamon bites there's nothing like it