Chapter 4 #2
The walk back up the hill is the slowest walk I have taken in fourteen years.
Not because I am tired. Because I want the walk to last. I want the time between this moment and the moment I sit down across from her in her cottage with a piece of cherry in my hand to be long enough to hold the size of what is happening.
That night I bring a bottle of wine, which I do not drink, and the piece of cherry, which I cannot yet do anything useful with. Rue has made a stew. She has made it herself, from a recipe Della taught her, and the cottage smells of onion and braised beef and the woodsmoke from her stove.
She has set two places at the small table.
She has lit two candles.
This is, I realize as I stand in her doorway with the wine and the cherry, not a meeting. This is a dinner.
I have not had a dinner with a woman in fourteen years.
"You came," she says.
"I came."
"Sit."
I sit. She pours the wine. She does not insist that I drink it. She lets the glass sit by my hand and lifts her own and says, very simply, "To the wood samples."
"To the wood samples."
We eat. The stew is good. She has the easy unselfconscious eating habits of a woman who has spent six years eating cereal over a sink, and who has decided, in this moment, that she is not eating cereal anymore.
I tell her about Mae's cedar.
She tells me about Mae's request to be wrapped in a particular old blanket—a quilt her grandmother made, that Mae has slept under since she was a child—and I tell her I will fit the coffin to accommodate the quilt.
She tells me about Wyatt.
I do not tell her about the coffin I have not yet started.
I do not need to. She knows. She is looking at me across the candle and she says, "Have you started his?"
"No."
"Thaddeus."
"I know."
"You do not want to."
"I do not want to."
"Are you going to be ready?"
I think about it. "Jo says we have a week. Maybe two. The infection is responding to the new antibiotic. There is still a chance."
"And if there is not?"
"Then I will have a long night in the workshop. And I will be ready in the morning."
She nods.
We finish the stew. She brings out a small plate of biscuits—Della's recipe, the cornbread kind with bacon fat, which Rue has finally, after three attempts, gotten right—and we eat them with butter and honey. The candles burn down. The fire in her stove crackles.
I tell her about Elena.
I have not, in the conversation we had in the workshop three weeks ago, told her everything.
I told her the death. I did not tell her the life.
Tonight, with the wine still untouched and the biscuit crumbs on the plate, I tell her the life.
I tell her how Elena and I met—she was selling preserves at a market in Knoxville, before she came up the mountain, and I had stopped to buy a jar of blackberry jam and ended up talking with her for two hours and missing my own funeral home appointment because I could not, for the life of me, let her stop talking.
I tell her about the wedding, which was small and held in the cemetery here on the hill because Elena said she wanted to be married where she would eventually be buried, which I had thought at the time was morbid and which I now understand was a kind of foresight.
I tell her about the seventeen years of marriage that came between the wedding and the death.
I tell her about the morning Elena told me she was pregnant—she came into the kitchen with the test in her hand, very calm, and said, Thaddeus, we are going to have a daughter, and I said, We do not know it is a daughter yet, and she said, I know.
She did know.
I am quiet, after, for a long time.
Rue is quiet too. She does not, the way some women would, fill the silence with consolation. She lets it sit. She lets it be what it is.
Then she says, "Thank you for telling me."
"Thank you for listening."
"What was she like?"
I think. "Stubborn. Funny. She had a temper. She had a soft hand for animals. She read all the time. She did not believe in God but she believed in the dead—she said the dead were the only thing she could prove, and so she trusted them. She would have liked you."
"Would she."
"She would have. She liked sharp women. She had no patience for soft ones. She used to say, Soft is fine in a sweater, Thaddeus, not in a person."
Rue laughs.
The candle flickers.
She reaches across the table.
Her hand is warm. Mine, I realize, has gone warm too—the heat I run, the wolf-heat, the temperature she has commented on more than once. Our fingers fit together with the unsurprising ease of two things that have been moving toward this configuration for some time.
We do not kiss tonight.
We do not kiss. We sit at her small table with our hands joined and the candles burning down and the fire ticking in the stove, and we talk—about her mother, about my wife, about Mae and her quilt, about Wyatt and his fever, about the cherry tree I want to use for the inlay on Beau's coffin, about a town in Tennessee where Rue once watched a woman die on a porch swing—and the talking is, I realize at some point near eleven o'clock, the longest single conversation I have had with anyone in fourteen years.
At eleven-thirty she walks me to the door.
"Take the cherry," she says. "Build me something."
"I will."
"And come back tomorrow."
"I will."
"And Thaddeus."
"Yes."
She lifts up on her toes. She presses her mouth—not to my mouth. To the corner of it. The corner where my own mouth does the small thing it does when I am almost smiling. She does it carefully, deliberately, the way I would carve a fine line into a coffin lid.
She lowers herself.
"Goodnight, Thaddeus."
"Goodnight, Rue."
I walk up the hill. The night is very cold.
The stars are out. The cemetery on the hill is quiet—Edwin's grave is settling, the soil dark with the first rain that has come since the burial, the white oak headstone catching the moonlight—and the workshop is dark behind it, and my cabin is dark below.
I do not go to the cabin.
I go to the workshop. I light the lamp. I set the piece of cherry on the bench. I sit down across from it and I look at it for a long time.
Then I take the smallest chisel.
I start to carve.
I do not know yet what I am carving. I have decided, after some thought, to stop deciding before I start.
I have always made coffins by deciding first. The shape, the wood, the dimensions, the carving, all decided before the first cut.
But the things I am making for Rue are different.
The piece of HAZZ-ERD oak. The small wolf.
They came out of the wood. They were not designed; they were discovered.
I let the cherry be what it wants to be.
I work for hours. The shape that emerges is small and round. A medallion, perhaps. The size of my palm. The wood is dense and dark, and the grain has a deep figure to it—the kind of figure that only comes from old cherry, from a tree that took a long time to grow.
By three in the morning I have the outer shape.
By four I have the rough of what I will be carving on the face—the silhouette of a porch swing, half-suggested, a small figure on it, the back of her hair just visible.
By five I have stopped working.
I sit on the workbench with the cherry medallion in my hand and the lamp guttering and the dawn just starting to gray the skylight, and I am thinking about Rue Whitaker telling me about a woman she watched die on a porch swing in Tennessee, and I am thinking that I have been listening to her for three weeks the way I once listened to Elena, and I am thinking that the wolf at the back of my mind is awake and the man at the front of my mind is awake and neither of us is afraid.
I am thinking that I want her.
Not the way a younger man wants a woman.
Not the surge of it. The slow, patient, settled wanting of a man who has lived long enough to know that the wanting itself is a kind of life, and that the life of a wanting cannot be rushed, and that the only thing you can do with a wanting like this is honor it.
I am thinking, also, that I have not, in fourteen years, allowed myself to want.
I set the cherry medallion down. I go to my cabin. I sleep for two hours. I dream, again, of the coffin made of light, but tonight the dream is different. Tonight, the hand reaching for the coffin is mine.
And the coffin, when my hand touches it, dissolves.
What is left, in the place where the coffin was, is a small carved wolf, lying down, head on his paws, eyes open. And a piece of HAZZ-ERD oak. And a medallion of cherry with the silhouette of a porch swing.
And a woman.
I wake at seven.
The morning is bright. The frost is heavy. The first thing I see, on the small table by my bed, is the photograph of Elena from the summer before we married, laughing at something I said off-camera with the wind in her hair.
She is laughing.
She has always been laughing.
For fourteen years, the laughing has been a kind of accusation. Look how happy I was. Look what you have lost. Look what you can never have again.
This morning, the laughing is different.
This morning, it is permission.