Chapter 4
Thaddeus
November comes to Bone Hollow the way November always comes—slowly at first and then all at once.
The maples on the lower slope held their leaves until the first week, and then a single hard frost on a Thursday night dropped them in two days.
By the second week of the month the ridge is bare.
By the third the first snow has fallen and melted and the ground is the soft brown of October's grave.
I have three patients now. Or rather, Rue has three patients, and I have three coffins to build.
The first is for an old she-wolf named Mae, eighty-four, with what Jo calls the Wasting—a slow shifter-specific decline that affects the body's ability to hold the shift in any direction, so that the patient drifts between human and wolf forms in ways they cannot control.
Mae has been in her late stage for a month.
She lives with her son and his family in a small house on the east side of the compound, and Rue visits her every afternoon, and the family has asked me to come up to the workshop in the second week of November because they want to discuss what Mae wants.
What Mae wants, it turns out, is cedar.
"She used to keep her wedding dress in a cedar chest," her son tells me. He is a big man named Hollis, with hands like dinner plates and a face that looks like it has been crying for some time without admitting it. "She always said the smell of cedar was the smell of her best day."
"Then cedar it is."
"I appreciate it."
"Anything carved?"
He thinks about it. "A bird, if you can manage it. She kept a goldfinch feeder at the kitchen window for fifty years."
"I can manage it."
He nods. He pays me. I do not, strictly, charge for the work; the pack supports the workshop and the materials. But families like to pay something, because paying makes the grief manageable, and I have learned not to refuse them.
The second coffin is for a wolf named Beau, forty-six, with a brain tumor.
Beau is the one Rue calls Garrett in her notes, because she has not yet learned his road name—Garrett is what his wife calls him and his children call him, and Beau is what the pack calls him, and the distinction matters in a place like this.
Rue is learning. She learns fast. By the third week of November she has started using both names interchangeably depending on who she is talking to, and Della has begun including her in the women's circle that meets on Thursday nights in the main hall, and twice now I have seen her walking back from the circle with her arms full of bread.
Beau-or-Garrett does not, yet, know about his coffin.
The tumor is aggressive but not yet fatal—Jo has bought him time with surgery, and Rue is managing his symptoms, and there is still a window of months.
But Beau has come to me once already, in the way the older wolves come to me, and we have had the first conversation.
He wants pine. He wants wolves carved on the lid.
Running ones, he said. Three of them. Like they're going somewhere together.
I have not started his coffin yet. There is time.
I am, instead, hand-finishing a small piece of cherry that he will not see for some months.
The cherry is for the lid. The wolves I will carve into the pine, when the time comes, will be small and clean and not heroic, the way Beau would want them—he is not a man who poses—but the lid itself will have a thin border of cherry inlay, because I noticed the cherry tree behind his house on my last walk through the compound and I thought he might like it.
The third coffin is for a prospect.
The prospect's name is Wyatt. He is nineteen.
He was in a motorcycle accident on the south road three weeks ago—black ice, in the first frost of the season—and the injury is to the spine, and the body has not been able to handle a full shift since, and a pressure wound at the base of his back has gone septic in a way Jo cannot yet stop.
This one I have not started either.
This one I do not want to start.
I will not say that to anyone. Coffin-makers do not, as a rule, get to choose who they build for. But Wyatt is nineteen and he is a prospect and his road name has not even been given yet, and a coffin for a boy who has not yet earned his name is a coffin I would prefer not to build.
I have not told Rue this.
Rue is at the clinic almost constantly now.
The three patients require it. Mae is in her last days; she could go tomorrow or in a week.
Beau is stable but in pain. Wyatt is the crisis.
Rue sleeps at the clinic two nights out of three, and on the third night she comes up to the workshop and we sit together in the lamp light and we do not, exactly, talk about the patients.
We talk about the wood. We talk about her mother.
We talk about a town she lived in for six months in Tennessee when she was twenty-three.
We talk about the recipe Della has been trying to get her to learn, a particular kind of cornbread that requires bacon fat and patience and a cast-iron skillet seasoned for forty years.
We do not talk about us.
There is no us yet to talk about.
There is only the slow, patient growing of two roots underground, and the small things that have, in three weeks, started to appear—the way she lets her hand brush mine when she takes a mug of tea, the way I have started carrying a clean kerchief in my pocket because she always seems to need one, the way her face appears in my mind the moment my hands go idle in the work.
The wolf has not gone back to sleep.
He sleeps when I sleep. He is awake when I am awake.
He is curious. He is patient. He watches the world through my eyes with an interest he has not had in fourteen years, and the things he is most interested in are, in this order: the sound of Rue's footsteps on the path, the angle of her shoulder when she is bent over the chart she carries everywhere, and the small precise line her mouth makes when she is concentrating.
He does not howl. He does not surge. He is, like his man, a wolf who has learned that the longest patience is the patience that does not announce itself.
I bring wood samples to the clinic on a Tuesday.
This is a pretense. I do not need wood samples evaluated by a hospice nurse. I have evaluated wood for forty years. But I have, three days running, been unable to come up with a good reason to walk into the clinic, and today I have committed to the lie of the samples and I am sticking to it.
Rue is at the small desk in the second exam room when I come in. She is making notes. The light from the window is on the side of her face, and her hair—she has been wearing it down lately, which I think is for me, although she has not said so—is loose at her shoulder.
She looks up.
"Wood samples," I say, holding up the box.
"Wood samples."
"I am considering a new species for the next round of coffins. I wanted your opinion."
She sets down her pen. She tilts her head. "My opinion."
"Your professional opinion."
"On wood."
"On wood."
She is fighting a smile. She is not winning.
"All right, Thaddeus. Show me the wood."
I open the box. There are five samples, all of which I selected this morning at random from the offcuts shelf. Black walnut. Tulip poplar. Cherry. Sycamore. A piece of butternut I have had for a decade and have never used. I lay them out on her desk in a careful row.
"What is the question?"
"The question is which of these you would want."
She looks at me.
"For what?"
"For—" I hesitate. I have not thought this far. "For furniture."
"Furniture."
"Yes. Hypothetically. If you were—if I were going to make you something."
She is very quiet for a moment.
Then she says, "You are going to make me something."
"I am considering it."
"Thaddeus."
"Yes."
"You have a piece of the Hazz-erd white oak on my bedside table. You have a small carved wolf on the shelf above it. You have a sprig of pressed wildflowers on the windowsill that I suspect you snuck through Della."
"I did not sneak it through Della. Della had her own idea and I declined to interfere."
"Mm-hm. And now you are offering me five wood samples."
"Yes."
She picks up the cherry. She turns it over in her hand. She runs her thumb across the grain.
"Why are you bringing me wood samples, Thaddeus?"
I look at her.
I am not, by nature, a man who explains himself.
I have spent the last fourteen years answering questions only when asked them and not always then.
But Rue is asking. Rue is sitting across a desk from me with a piece of cherry in her hand and her eyes patient and her mouth doing the small precise thing it does when she is concentrating, and the wolf in the back of my mind is awake and watching.
"Because I do not know how to court a woman in this century," I say.
She blinks.
Then she laughs.
She laughs the way I have heard her laugh, perhaps four times in three weeks, which is the laugh of a woman who saves her laughter for moments that deserve it. It is not loud. It is full. It is the laugh of someone who has been surprised into joy and has decided not to suppress it.
"Thaddeus Mercer."
"Yes."
"You are courting me."
"I am attempting to."
"With wood samples."
"It is what I have."
She sets down the cherry. She looks at me for a long moment. The light has moved across her face. Her eyes are full of something that I do not, yet, have a name for.
"Cherry," she says.
"Cherry?"
"For the furniture. I like cherry. It darkens with age. It tells you it has been around."
"All right."
"What are you making me?"
I think about it. "I do not know yet. I will know when I start."
She nods. She picks up her pen. She goes back to her chart. But there is a small color in her cheeks now that was not there before, and she does not, when I gather my samples and leave, say goodbye in the absent professional way she has said it three days running. She says, "Thaddeus."
"Yes."
"Come up to the cottage tonight. Bring the cherry."
"I will."
I leave the clinic.