Chapter 1
Rue
Edwin Talbot is dying, and he is unhappy about the wallpaper.
"My wife picked it," he says, glaring at the faded blue florals that ring the bedroom of the cabin he has lived in for forty-one years.
"I told her it looked like a doily threw up.
She didn't speak to me for six days. I lived with the wallpaper for forty years to spite her, and now I'm going to die looking at it, and that is not how I planned to go out. "
I'm setting up the IV stand by the bed. The morning light through the curtains is the soft, almost-rose color you only get in mountain windows in mid-October, and Edwin's face in that light looks both younger and more fragile than it did yesterday.
"Where is your wife now, Edwin?"
"In the ground." He says it without sentiment. "Twelve years next March. Cancer ate her up faster than this one's eating me."
"I'm sorry."
"Don't be. She was a hard woman to love and she knew it, and we loved each other anyway, and that's the best I have to say about marriage." He shifts in the bed and grimaces. "How much of that morphine you got in there?"
"Enough. I'm titrating it down today. I want to see what your pain is doing without the bolus you had last night."
"You always going to be this bossy?"
"I'm not bossy, Edwin. I'm a nurse."
"Same thing."
I smile. I check the line. I take his blood pressure, which is lower than I'd like, and his temperature, which is normal, and his pulse, which is steady.
Edwin Talbot is seventy-nine years old. Lung cancer, metastasized to bone, originating from a five-decade pack-a-day habit that he refuses, on principle, to regret.
He has been fighting for three years. Shifter healing, Jo told me on my first night, slows certain cancers but does not cure them.
The body's accelerated regeneration becomes a kind of stalemate with the disease—new tissue growing as fast as the malignancy spreads, until eventually one outpaces the other.
Edwin's cancer outpaced him about six months ago.
Now he is in palliative care, which is to say, my care.
"Read to me," he says.
"What would you like?"
"That book on the shelf. The blue one. Mountain Ghosts and Hollow Folk. My granddaughter gave it to me last Christmas and I never got around to reading it because I was busy not dying yet."
I find the book. It is a slim volume of Appalachian folklore, the kind that collects old stories about haints and witch lights and the things that howl in the woods on certain nights of the year. I open to the table of contents.
"Anywhere in particular?"
"Start at the beginning. I have time."
He says it with a small smile, and I smile back, and I start reading.
This is the rhythm I've fallen into in the three weeks since I arrived.
Mornings with Edwin. Midday rounds at the clinic, where Jo is training me in the species-specific considerations she promised—the way shifter livers process certain medications, the dosing adjustments needed for body mass that is not always what it appears, the careful, careful titration of any sedative that might suppress the animal as well as the human.
Afternoons with two other patients—an elderly she-wolf named Wren who has dementia and lives with her daughter's family, and a middle-aged man named Garrett who has a brain tumor and a wife and two children and the kind of stubborn, fierce love of life that is going to make his dying harder than Edwin's.
Evenings, usually, alone in my cottage with tea and a book and the slow descent of the mountain into night.
I have not been less lonely in years.
I read to Edwin for an hour. He drifts in and out, his eyes closing for stretches and then opening again to ask a question or correct my pronunciation of a place name.
Hazard, he tells me, is pronounced Hazz-erd, not Hay-zerd, and I should know that if I'm going to live up here.
I tell him I've lived in Appalachia for six years.
He says, "Well, then you ought to know," and closes his eyes again.
At ten o'clock his granddaughter arrives—a young woman named Sage with the same sharp eyes as Edwin and a thermos of soup.
She nods at me. Edwin perks up. I gather my things and make my notes—pain controlled on current dose, appetite minimal, mental status alert, family present, return at three—and slip out the door.
The cabin is on the western edge of the compound, near the tree line.
The path back to the clinic winds along the contour of the hill, past the smokehouse and the toolshed and the long timber building they call the chapter house, where the patched members meet and where I have not, yet, been invited.
I have learned in three weeks that the MC structure of this place is real and rigid, that there is an inner circle of men whose authority is absolute, and that there is also, threaded through and around that structure, a softer community of women and children and elders that operates on its own logic.
Della and Jo are the hinges. The men respect them.
The women rely on them. Everything I have needed has come through one of those two doors, and both doors have stayed open.
The path bends. The hill rises. And above me, against the bright autumn sky, the cemetery comes into view, and beside the cemetery the small open-sided workshop, and inside the workshop a man whose name I have learned and whose silence I have, against my better judgment, started to seek out.
He is planing a board this morning. Long, smooth strokes, the curls of pale wood spilling onto the floor.
He works with the unconscious grace of someone whose body knows the work better than his mind does.
His sleeves are rolled to the elbow. His forearms are corded with the kind of muscle you get from labor rather than vanity.
The silver in his dark hair catches the light.
I do not need to walk past the workshop on my way back to the clinic.
There is a shorter path along the lower trail.
I take the upper path anyway, the way I have taken it almost every morning for three weeks, and I tell myself it is because the view is better, and I do not let myself examine the lie too closely.
"Morning, Rue."
He does not look up. He knows it is me by sound, or smell, or some sixth thing I do not understand yet.
"Morning, Thaddeus."
"How's Edwin?"
"Stable. Tired. He wants me to know that Hazard is pronounced Hazz-erd."
"It is."
"I'm aware."
He sets down the plane and straightens, and now he looks at me, and the corner of his mouth does that small thing again—the not-quite-smile that, I am learning, is the largest expression Thaddeus Mercer permits himself.
"You walk past my workshop every morning," he says.
"I do."
"The lower path is shorter."
"I know."
He considers me. He does not ask why I take the longer path. I do not offer.
"Coffee?" he says.
"Please."
He pours from a tin pot kept warm on a small wood stove in the corner of the workshop.
The coffee is strong and black and tastes like something a person who has lived alone for a long time makes for themselves: unapologetic.
I take the chipped enamel mug he hands me and lean against the doorframe and watch him for a moment in his own space.
The workshop is not what I expected, the first time I came up here.
I expected austerity, gloom, the visual vocabulary of a man whose profession is the dead.
Instead it is full of light. The roof has a long skylight cut into the south face, and the sun pours in across the workbench and lights up the wood shavings like fallen leaves.
There are tools hung on the walls in careful order.
There are jars of nails and pegs sorted by size.
There is a wide low shelf where finished work waits—right now, two pine boxes for an order that has not come, a small carved stool for a child whose name I do not know, and a long beam of white oak that is going to be, I have learned, Edwin's coffin.
"You're working on Edwin's already," I say.
"I am."
"He has weeks. Maybe a month."
"I know."
"That isn't a question, that's me confirming our assessments line up."
He smiles. The smile is a fraction larger than the last one. "They line up."
I sip my coffee. He picks up his plane and goes back to work.
There is a peace in his workshop that I have not been able to name and have stopped trying to.
The closest word I have for it is the same word I would use for a well-tended deathbed: prepared.
Everything is ready. Nothing is hurried.
The work happens at the speed the work requires.
"Can I ask you something, Thaddeus?"
"Yes."
"Why white oak?"
He doesn't look up from the plane. "Edwin mentioned, once, years ago, that the prettiest tree he ever climbed was a white oak. He climbed it when he was eight. Fell out of it when he was nine, broke his arm. He's hated and loved white oak his whole life."
"He told you that?"
"He told me a lot of things. He used to come up here. Most of the older ones do, eventually. They like to know who's going to build their box."
"Does it bother you? That they come here while they're alive to see it?"
He pauses. The plane goes still in his hand.
"No," he says. "It steadies them. They sit in that chair"—he tips his chin toward a worn wooden chair by the stove—"and they tell me what they want.
The wood. The shape. Whether they want anything carved on the lid.
Some of them want their initials. Some want their pack mark.
Some want nothing. One woman, ten years ago, wanted a hummingbird, because she said her mother believed hummingbirds were the souls of people who hadn't finished what they came to do, and she'd always felt like she hadn't finished, and she wanted to be carried out under one. "
"Did you carve a hummingbird?"
"I carved a hummingbird."
I am quiet. He is quiet. The plane resumes its long, slow strokes.