Chapter 1 #2
I have, in six years of this work, never met another professional who treats the end of life as a craft.
I have met doctors who treat it as a failure, hospice nurses who treat it as a calling, chaplains who treat it as a passage.
I have not met a man who treats it as carpentry—as a thing you make, deliberately, with care, with the grain of the person who is going.
"What does Edwin want carved?" I ask.
"His wife's initials."
I look up.
"He told me that two years ago," Thaddeus says, "when he first came up here. He said if he was going into the ground next to her, he wanted her initials on the lid, because he never put a stone on her grave. He'd been meaning to. He kept putting it off."
"He never told her that he loved her, either," I say. "He told me. This morning."
Thaddeus glances at me. "He'd be glad to know he told someone."
"I think he wanted me to tell her."
"You can. After."
"I will."
The silence in the workshop after that is a different kind of silence than the one we started with.
It is the silence I recognize from hospice rooms after a particularly true thing has been said.
The silence of recognition. The silence of two people who do not need to fill the air to be in the same place.
He sets down the plane. He picks up a chisel and runs his thumb along the edge to test it. He looks at the oak.
"You're good at this work, Rue."
I do not know what to do with the compliment, so I do what I always do, which is to deflect.
"I'm trained."
"That's not what I meant."
I wait.
He looks at me. The amber-dark eyes. The patient face.
"Training tells you what to do," he says. "It doesn't tell you who to be while you're doing it. You're good at the who. I've seen it. With Wren the other day. With Edwin's granddaughter. You hold them without holding them. It's rare."
"I—" My throat is suddenly tight. "Thank you."
He nods. He goes back to the oak.
I drink my coffee and watch him work for another minute, and then I push off the doorframe and set the mug on the bench and say I'll see him later.
He says, Yes, you will, in a tone that is not flirtation but is not, exactly, not flirtation either, and I walk down the hill with my face warm and my hand around the spot where the warmth of his hand has not, in three weeks of handshakes and tea and morning coffee, entirely faded.
At lunch I sit with Della in the kitchen of the main hall. The main hall is a long timbered building with three big trestle tables and a hearth at one end where a pot of something is always simmering. Today it is stew. Della pushes a bowl in front of me and sits across the table with her own.
"You've been seeing Coffin," she says.
I almost choke on the stew.
"I have not been seeing him. I've been—we have coffee. In the mornings."
"That's seeing him, honey."
"Della."
"I'm not warning you. I'm observing." She blows on a spoonful of stew. "Everyone observes around here. There's no use pretending."
I set my spoon down.
"I'm not anything," I say. "We're—he's just—"
"Mm-hm."
"He's the undertaker, Della."
"I am aware of his job, yes."
"And I'm—"
"The hospice nurse." She looks at me over the rim of her bowl. "Funny how that works."
I do not know what to say to that, so I eat my stew. Della watches me with the patient, almost grandmotherly expression she wears when she is letting a person come to a conclusion on their own.
"Can I ask you something?" I say, finally.
"Always."
"Why do the others—the wolves, the patched members—why do they keep their distance from him? It's not unkind. But it's noticeable. Even at meals. He sits at the edge of the table, when he sits at all, and people leave him a space."
Della sets down her spoon.
"He smells like death, honey," she says.
"It's not personal. It's not a judgment.
The wolf sense is what it is. He's been doing this work for fourteen years, and he's prepared more bodies than any of us want to count, and our wolves smell it on him.
The death-sense. It isn't something he can wash off. "
"That sounds lonely."
"It is lonely. He chose it, after Elena.
He needed somewhere to put himself, and the work needed doing, and he was the only one in the pack who'd been a mortician before the change.
So he stepped into it. And the work suited him.
And the loneliness—" She shrugs. "The loneliness suited him too, for a long time. "
"And now?"
She looks at me. Not unkindly.
"Now, you walk past his workshop every morning."
I do not answer.
I finish my stew. I take my bowl to the basin and rinse it.
I go to my afternoon rounds. I see Wren, who calls me by her dead sister's name and then catches herself and apologizes, and I tell her not to apologize, and I help her with her exercises and rub lotion into her thin hands.
I see Garrett, who is having a worse pain day than yesterday and whose wife, Neena, hovers in the doorway looking ten years older than she did when I met her.
I adjust the medications. I sit with Garrett's older daughter, who is twelve and asking the questions twelve-year-olds ask when they are trying not to ask the one they really want answered.
I am tired by the time the light starts going.
I walk back along the lower path, the short one, because I have been on my feet for ten hours and the upper path is too steep at the end of a day like this. I expect to go back to my cottage and make tea and eat toast and read myself to sleep.
What I find on the step of my cottage, instead, is a small piece of white oak, sanded smooth, no bigger than my palm. Carved into it, in clean simple letters, is the word HAZZ-ERD, with an underline beneath the pronunciation, and a small carved leaf in the corner.
I sit on the step. I hold the wood in my hand. It is warm—the late sun has been on it. It smells of oil and finish and the same wax I smelled in the workshop this morning.
I do not cry. I am not a person who cries easily.
But I sit on the step of my cottage in the failing light of an October evening in a mountain hollow that was not on any map two months ago, holding a carved piece of wood in my hand, and I understand, in a way I cannot yet articulate, that something in me has just shifted under its own weight, the way a sleeping body shifts in a bed, and that nothing is going to be quite the same shape again.
I put the piece of oak on my bedside table.
I sleep with the lamp on.
In the morning, I take the upper path.