Epilogue
Rue
One year later, I climb the path to the workshop in the snow.
I know now that the cemetery is older than the compound.
I know now that the compound was built around the cemetery, the way a house is built around its hearth.
I am carrying two mugs.
The cherry medallion is at my breastbone where it always is, on the leather cord he tied for me last winter, and the small carved wolf at rest—the cherry-wood wolf with his head on his paws and his eyes open—is in my coat pocket where I have carried him every day for thirteen months now, the way some women carry a rosary or a photograph or a stone from a place they cannot return to.
The wolf is not for grief.
The wolf is for company.
I have learned, in the year since Thaddeus first carved him for me, that the dead are not the only ones we carry.
The workshop comes into view through the bare birches and I stop, the way I sometimes do, to look at it before he sees me.
The skylight is gray with snow. Smoke is curling out of the stovepipe in a thin steady line.
The door is open a crack—he always leaves it open a crack when he is expecting me, so the wolf in him will catch my scent on the wind before I have to knock—and through the crack I can see the lamplight, warm and yellow against the wood.
I can hear him working.
But the sound is not the sound I am used to.
The sound I am used to, after a year of climbing this path most mornings, is the long slow rasp of a hand plane on coffin pine, or the small precise tap of a chisel against cedar, or the soft whisper of sandpaper across a lid that has already been smoothed three times and is being smoothed a fourth time because Thaddeus, when he builds a box for someone, smooths it until the wood is the color of an inner thing.
This morning the sound is different.
It is heavier.
It is the sound of mortise and tenon. The thunk of a mallet on a chisel butt. The dry click of joinery being tested and pulled apart and tested again. It is the sound a man makes when he is building something that has to bear a hinge.
I push the door open the rest of the way.
He is at the workbench with his back to me, his sleeves rolled, the silver at his temples catching the lamplight, and laid out across the bench in front of him is not a coffin lid.
It is a door.
A door.
Tall, narrow, paneled, with a frame already pegged at the corners and two long mortises gaping open along the stile, waiting for the rails.
The wood is white oak. There is a small heap of shavings at his feet the color of pale honey.
The chisel is in his right hand, the mallet in his left, and even from the doorway I can see that he has been working since before dawn.
He turns.
The almost-smile happens at the corner of his mouth.
Last December the almost-smile was the only smile he had, and I learned to read it the way a sailor learns to read a low cloud.
This December the smile that follows the almost-smile is a whole smile, and the whole smile is one of the things I have built with him, the way he has built me a cherry medallion and a small wolf and a beam over our bed and now, apparently, a door.
"You're early," he says.
"You're late."
"I have been at it since four."
"That's not late. That's barely sleep."
"The wolf woke me."
"The wolf is meddling."
"The wolf," he says, and the corner of his mouth lifts further, "has opinions now."
I set the mugs down on the small bench near the stove—the bench he built me last February, just my height, just for the mugs—and I cross to him, and he turns from the workbench and catches me at the waist and lifts me onto the cleared edge of the bench beside the door he is building, the same way he lifted me last November onto a different bench and changed everything.
He is wolf-warm even through his shirt.
He puts his forehead to mine.
"Morning," he says.
"Morning."
"You walked up."
"I walked up."
"In the snow."
"It is barely snow."
"It is enough snow that I would have come and got you if I had known you were coming."
"I know. That is why I did not tell you I was coming."
He laughs.
It is a small laugh. He still does not laugh often. But the laugh is there now, where last year there was nothing, and it travels through his chest into mine in the place where our bodies touch and I feel it the way you feel a wood stove kick on in a cold room.
I look past his shoulder at the door.
"What is it for," I say.
He pulls back. He looks at me for a long moment. The amber-dark of his eyes has a thing in it I have learned, in a year, to recognize: it is the thing that means I have been waiting to tell you and I do not yet have the words.
"Come here," he says.
He takes my hand. He pulls me down off the bench.
He leads me past the workbench, past the door-in-progress, past the chair by the stove and the small heap of cherry scraps and the row of his good chisels racked along the wall, to the back corner of the workshop, where there is a window I have looked through a hundred times without ever quite seeing what is beyond it.
He stops at the window.
He puts his hand at the small of my back.
"Look," he says.
I look.
Beyond the window is the small clearing behind the workshop where he stacks his wood to season.
The stacks are there, neat, tarped, the way they always are.
But the clearing is different. Someone—someone who has been working since four in the morning, and probably also since four in the morning yesterday, and probably also since four in the morning for several mornings before that, while I was sleeping on his shoulder in our cottage and noticing only that he was warm in the bed and gone in the gray light and back in the gold light with coffee already on the stove—someone has begun to clear the ground at the far edge.
There are stakes in the snow.
There are stakes in the snow in the shape of a small room.
A small room with a window.
A small room with a window facing the cemetery on the hill.
I do not, immediately, understand what I am looking at.
Then I do.
The door under his chisel is the door for this room.
The room is for our cottage. He is going to add it to our cottage—because the cottage is our cottage now, the cottage I once stood in alone with a kettle and a jar of wildflowers and a fear I could not name, the cottage he has slept in every night since the night of Garrett's wake, the cottage where the small wood beam over the bed is the beam he built two years before I came because Della told him someday someone is going to need a place to sleep, Coffin, and they will want a beam to look at.
He is building a second beam.
He is building a second beam in a second room.
I put my hand against the window.
The cherry medallion taps against my breastbone with the small movement.
"Thaddeus."
"I know."
"You're building—"
"I know."
"A room."
"Yes."
"With a window."
"Yes."
"Facing the cemetery."
"Yes."
I turn from the window. I look up at him.
He is looking down at me, and the wolf in him is at the surface of his face, awake and unguarded, the way the wolf only ever is when he is alone with me, and the almost-smile and the whole smile and the smile after the whole smile are all of them happening at once on the right side of his mouth, in the way that I have, in a year, become a small private scholar of.
"You are building a room with a window facing the cemetery."
"I am."
"Thaddeus."
"Yes."
"Why."
He does not answer right away. He takes my left hand in both of his hands.
He turns it palm up. He puts his thumb in the center of my palm, the way he sometimes does when he is feeling for the slow steady beat at the inside of my wrist. He has told me, twice, that he likes to feel my pulse there because the wolf in him hears it across a room but the man in him likes to touch it. The man, he says, has the better deal.
He looks at my palm.
He looks at me.
"Because," he says, "Della came up here last week."
I wait.
"Della came up here last week and she stood in the doorway and she looked at me for a long time and she said, Coffin, are you ever going to ask that girl what she wants the rest of the cottage to look like."
I breathe.
"And I said, Della, the cottage is fine."
"And what did Della say."
"Della said, The cottage is fine for a woman and a man."
I close my eyes.
"And then," he says, "Della said, The cottage is not yet fine for what is coming."
I open my eyes.
He is watching me.
The amber-dark of his eyes is the amber-dark of a man who has, for fourteen years, built only one kind of box, and who has, this week, started to build another kind of thing entirely, because Della Wainwright—who knows what she knows the way the white oak above Asa Pell's grave knows what it knows—has told him, before I have told him, before I have told myself, what is coming.
I put my hand over my belly.
It is, under my coat, still flat. I have not yet, in the eight weeks since the test on the bathroom floor of the cottage at six in the morning while he was up here at the workshop, told him.
I have been waiting for the right moment, the way he waited for the right moment last December to say the word love, and the right moment with a man like Thaddeus does not announce itself, because the man like Thaddeus is the kind of man whose wolf already knows.
His wolf already knows.
His wolf has known for weeks.
I look up at him.
"How long," I say.
"The wolf told me at four weeks. The wolf could smell it."
"At four weeks."
"At four weeks."
"And you did not say anything."
"I was waiting for you to say."
"Thaddeus."
"I am still waiting for you to say."
I laugh. It is half a laugh and half a sob and the cherry medallion bounces against my breastbone with the laugh and his hand is at my waist and his other hand is at my jaw and his thumb is moving across my cheek the way it has moved across my cheek every morning for a year.
"There is a baby," I say.
"There is."
"There is a baby coming."
"There is."
"In June."
"In June."
"And you have been building—"
"Since five weeks. The room since five weeks. The door I started this Sunday."
I look at the door on the workbench.
The white oak.
The white oak that came, I know now without asking, from the same tree Edwin Talbot climbed and fell from.
The same tree above Asa Pell. The same tree he has, in this workshop, in this winter, been pulling from for the small carvings and the cabinet hinges and the spoons he has made me for our kitchen and now, for the first time in fifteen years, for a door that is not the lid of a box.
I look back at him.
"Thaddeus."
"Yes."
"You are building a door."
"I am."
"For our child's room."
"I am."
"The first thing you have built that is not a coffin in fifteen years is a door."
He looks at me for a long time.
The wolf is at the surface of his face. The almost-smile is gone.
What is on his face is the unhidden thing, the unguarded thing, the thing he has worn only with me and the thing I have, in a year, learned to recognize as the face of a man who has been waiting his whole life to be allowed to make a thing that opens.
"Yes," he says. "It is a door."
"And what is on the other side of the door."
"A room."
"And what is in the room."
"You. And me. And a child."
"And after the child."
"After the child, another child if we want one. After the children, a room with two beams and two windows. After the windows, whatever else we build."
"Together."
"Together."
I put my forehead to his chest.
I close my eyes.
The wolf inside him is breathing slow and even and unsurprised, the way Rue is breathing slow and even and unsurprised, the way the cemetery on the hill is silent and the snow is steady and the workshop is warm and the door is on the bench behind us with its mortises still gaping open, waiting for the rails, waiting for the panels, waiting for the hinge.
I think about the math.
The math is the math.
The math is that I am twenty-nine and he is forty-seven and the species are not the same and the years are not the same and one of us is going to leave the other and we will not, in this life, get to choose which.
But the math is also this:
This year. This room. This door. This child.
A long-living wolf and a short-living woman, in a workshop high in the Appalachians, in the December of a year that no actuarial table predicted, are making a small thing together that has a hinge.
That is also math.
That is, in fact, the math.
He kisses the top of my head.
"Drink your coffee," he says. "It is going cold."
"Yours is, too."
"Mine has been cold since five o'clock. I have been waiting for you."
I lift my head.
I look at him.
I take the cherry medallion off my breastbone and I close it inside his palm and I close his palm inside mine.
"Build the door," I say.
He looks at the door.
He looks at me.
The almost-smile, finally, becomes the smile, and the smile becomes the laugh, and the laugh is the laugh of a man who has, in a year, learned every other thing he forgot he could do.
"I will build the door," he says.
He builds the door.
I sit by the stove with my coffee, my hand on the small private place where our daughter is, for now, the size of a poppy seed, and I watch him at the workbench with the lamplight in his hair and the wolf at his shoulder, planing white oak smooth, planing white oak smoother, planing it until the wood is the color of an inner thing.
Outside, the snow keeps falling.
Inside, the wolf is awake.
The cemetery on the hill is full and quiet and, for the first time since I learned to count my dead, I am not, this morning, counting them.
I am counting, instead, the small steady beats of a heartbeat under my own.
And the slow steady fall of a plane along a piece of white oak.
And the slow steady breath of a man who has, after a long long winter, begun to build a thing that opens.