Chapter 2
Thaddeus
I have not dreamed in fourteen years.
This is not strictly true. The body dreams—the brain runs its electrical errands at night whether the man at the center of it consents or not.
What I mean is that I have not remembered a dream in fourteen years.
I have gone to bed and gone to sleep and woken up to whatever the day required, and the soft territory between sleeping and waking has been, for me, a black corridor I cross without looking at the walls.
Last night I dreamed of a coffin made of light.
I cannot reconstruct it now. I remember only the impression—a long shape, woven of something pale and warm, set out on the workbench in my workshop. And I remember a hand reaching for it. Not my hand. A woman's hand, with short clean fingernails and a faint scar along the back of the wrist.
I woke up at four in the morning with my heart doing something I do not remember asking it to do.
I lie in the dark for a long time before I get up.
My cabin is small and clean and contains very little.
A bed. A table. Two chairs, because Elena bought two chairs forty years ago when we first set this cabin up, and I have never been able to bring myself to remove the second one even though no one sits in it.
A bookshelf. A small stove. A photograph of Elena on the mantel, taken the summer before we married, in which she is laughing at something I said off-camera and the wind is in her hair.
The photograph is the only thing in the cabin that is not strictly functional.
It has been on that mantel for almost forty-six years.
I get up. I make coffee. I pull on yesterday's flannel because the one I'd planned for today is still on the line and needs another hour of mountain air, and I go out into the dawn.
The compound is quiet at this hour. Smoke is starting from one or two chimneys—the early risers, the parents of young children.
The dogs are out. A pair of crows is arguing in the big maple by the chapter house.
The light is the particular slow gray of an October dawn that promises a clear day later but is not interested in hurrying.
I walk up to the workshop.
This is what I do. Every morning. Coffee in one hand, the day in the other, the same path under my boots for fourteen years.
I open the workshop. I check the tools. I check the wood.
I check the half-finished pieces on the bench and the ones drying along the back wall, and I plan the day's work the way another man might plan a battle.
Today the day's work is Edwin Talbot's coffin.
I have been building it for three weeks.
The lid is shaped. The sides are joined.
The interior has been sanded and waxed and lined with the soft linen that Elena's mother used to weave and that I bought, all those years ago, in such quantity that I will not run out of it in my lifetime.
What remains is the carving. Edwin wants his wife's initials on the lid—M.T.
, in a simple script, no flourishes—and I have been putting off the carving because the carving means the coffin is done, and the coffin being done means Edwin is closer to needing it than I would like him to be.
I do not, as a rule, become attached to my patients.
Patients is the wrong word. My patients are dead by the time I receive them.
What I mean is that I do not, as a rule, become attached to the people who are dying.
I learned, after Elena, that the work asks too much of you if you let it.
So I keep a clean line. I am present. I am respectful.
I attend the deathbed when the family asks me to, and I leave when I am no longer needed, and I do not, in the dark hours, allow myself to remember the dying as people.
Edwin Talbot is going to be an exception.
I knew him before I started building his coffin.
He was sergeant-at-arms for ten years under the previous president.
He taught me how to shoot a pistol I never learned to use well.
He came to Elena's funeral and stood at the back and did not speak to me afterward because, he said later, he did not have the right words and would not insult me by attempting the wrong ones.
He has been, for the entirety of my time in this club, the kind of older man who is in the room without occupying it, the kind whose presence steadies you without demanding anything from you.
I am going to carve his wife's initials into his coffin lid today, and after I do that I am going to wax the carving, and after that the box will be finished, and after that I will wait. I am very good at waiting. The dead make you patient. The dying make you something else.
The wolf stirs.
This is new.
For fourteen years my wolf has been a quiet presence at the back of my mind—not dormant, exactly, but settled, the way an old dog settles by the fire and does not move unless food or fire or the front door require him to.
He surfaces when death is near. He surfaces, very rarely, when violence is.
The rest of the time he sleeps, and I let him sleep, because the alternative—a wolf hungry to feel something again, a wolf hungry for the warm bodies of the living—is a wolf I do not know how to manage anymore.
He has been stirring for three weeks.
He stirred the first time I saw Rue Whitaker standing in the cemetery beside Jo, looking at the hill the way most people look at a building they intend to occupy.
He has stirred again every morning when she comes up the path with her hair tied back and her hands in her pockets, when she stops at my doorway and accepts a cup of coffee she does not really need and stays longer than the coffee can account for.
He has stirred when I am not even with her—when I am up here in the workshop alone, planing a board or carving a peg, and her face appears in my mind with the unbidden ease of a face that has been waiting at the edge of my consciousness for some time.
I have not told the wolf to settle. I have not, as a younger man would have, fought him.
I have simply noticed him.
This is what fourteen years of mourning have done to me, I think.
They have made me curious about my own grief in a way I was not, before.
They have made me a careful witness to my own internal weather.
When something stirs that has been still for a long time, I do not panic. I notice. I record. I let it stir.
I take a sip of coffee. I pick up the chisel.
I have been working for perhaps an hour when I hear her footsteps on the path.
I know the footsteps now. Light, even, the small click of a boot heel against stone.
I do not look up. I do not need to. The wolf does the work of looking; he tilts his head, in the back of my mind, in the direction of the door, and the gesture is so small and so familiar that I have started to find it almost domestic.
"Morning, Thaddeus."
"Morning, Rue."
She is in the doorway with two mugs of coffee.
The kettle in the kitchen of the main hall, I have been informed by Della, has become Rue's pretext for the upper path.
She makes coffee for me there now, in addition to or instead of mine, because the main hall coffee is, in her words, not war-grade, and she has decided that I, like Edwin Talbot, need to be reminded that things can be made well.
"You're working on the lid," she says.
"I am."
"His wife's initials."
"Yes."
"Can I watch?"
I gesture to the chair by the stove. She sits. She sets one of the mugs on the workbench within my reach and cradles the other in both hands, blowing across the surface. The steam rises into the morning light from the skylight. The shavings on the floor are pale and curled.
I work.
I do not narrate the work. I have been doing this for too long to need to.
I score the wood lightly with a pencil—the shape of the M, the curve of the T—and then I take the smallest of my carving gouges and I begin.
The gouge bites. The wood gives. A thin curl of oak peels away.
I shape the inner line of the M, and then the outer, and then the two diagonals, and then I move to the T.
It is slow work. The grain of white oak is harder than pine; you cannot rush it without tearing.
She watches.
The watching is different from any I have known.
The pack watches me out of wariness; the families of the dead watch me out of need; the prospects who are sometimes assigned to help me dig watch me out of obligation.
Rue watches me the way I watch the wood.
With patient interest. With attention. With the small, calm pleasure of someone observing a thing she enjoys.
I am, by the time I finish the second initial, painfully aware of her in the room.
The wolf is not stirring now. He is sitting up.
"Beautiful," she says, when I straighten.
"Thank you."
"How long have you been doing this?"
"The carving?"
"All of it. This work. Coffin-making. The funerals."
I set down the gouge. I sit on the edge of the workbench. I run my thumb along the grain of the lid.
"Fourteen years," I say.
"Why?"
"Why did I start, or why have I kept going?"
"Both. Either."
I look at her. She is in profile to the light, the autumn sun across the bridge of her nose and the line of her cheekbone, and her eyes—gray-green, I have determined, the color of a river under a cloudy sky—are watching me without any of the careful guardedness I am used to from people who ask me about my work.
I have not told this story to anyone in fourteen years. I have not been asked to.
"My wife died," I say. "Fourteen years ago. In childbirth. Our daughter—" I stop. I have not said the word daughter out loud in fourteen years, either. I find that it does not, as I expected, lodge in my throat. It comes out. "Our daughter went with her."
Rue does not speak.