Epilogue
Crash
First frost came on a Tuesday in October, and I went out at six to scrape the truck and stood in the drive for eleven minutes holding the scraper, and that's grief, that's the whole thing, that's all anybody needs to know about it.
Four months.
I'm alive. I hate it. I want to say that plainly because there's a way of writing this where I'm noble about it, and I've read those books, and they're written by people who've never had to buy groceries afterward.
You buy groceries afterward. That's the obscenity. The world just keeps handing you Tuesdays.
Deke's approach to grief is food and volume, and it is the correct approach, and I fought it for six weeks like an idiot.
He started showing up. Every day. Not to talk — he never once made me talk — he'd come in with a pan of something and put it on my counter and turn my television on to whatever he wanted and sit there until nine.
If I went to another room he followed me with the cane going like a metronome.
If I said something unkind he agreed with it and stayed.
Week three I told him to get out of my house.
He said, "No."
"Deke—"
"No," he said, and turned the volume up.
Week seven I broke, at eleven at night, over a lasagna, in a way I won't be describing.
He didn't say anything comforting. He put his enormous hand flat between my shoulder blades and left it there and looked at the wall, and after a while he said, "There's garlic bread in the oven," and there was, and I ate it, and that's the truest thing anybody's ever done for me.
Nadia comes Tuesdays.
That was Sol's thing — Tuesdays at the clubhouse — except Sol never once went, so Nadia's decided the appointment transferred to me, which is not how anything works and which I've stopped fighting.
She doesn't do sympathy. She does tasks. She showed up in September with a box of paperwork and said, "You're an executor."
"Of what? She didn't have a life, Nadia, she had a cover."
"She had a rented room in Sterling with eleven months paid up front, a truck registered to a person who doesn't exist, and a savings account with four thousand dollars in it that's been sitting there since 1988 accruing nothing," Nadia said, dropping the box on my table.
"Somebody has to close it. Congratulations. "
We spent five hours on it.
The room had a bed, a chair, and one hundred and forty books, all of them read, all of them cheap, none of them older than 1990.
And a coffee tin.
Behind the flour. Empty, cleaned out, the label worn down to nothing.
I sat on the floor of a dead woman's rented room holding a coffee tin and Nadia sat down next to me and didn't say a word for twenty minutes, which is the exact correct amount, and which is why she gets Tuesdays.
Renny patched in at the end of September.
He took a beating for it that he didn't need and didn't complain about, and Wolf pinned the rocker on him, and the kid looked at his own chest for about ten seconds like it was somebody else's.
Then I stepped down.
I'd been thinking about it since August. I did it at church, no speech, one sentence — I'm done, the club should vote — and there was a silence and then a lot of noise, and Wolf let it run for two minutes and then put his hand flat on the table.
They gave it to Wick.
Not Renny. Wick, who's got three kids and a mortgage and every reason on earth to want the job to stay small. Which is the point. Which has always been the point.
Renny found me in the lot after and said, "You blocked me."
"I nominated Wick."
"Same thing."
"Yeah," I said.
He stood there working up to something, nineteen and furious.
"You think I'd like it," he said.
"I think you'd be good at it. Those aren't different enough to risk it."
"That's not fair."
"No," I said. "It's not."
He was quiet. Then he said, "I'd have done it right," and I said, "I know," and he punched me in the arm, badly, and went inside, and he brought me coffee the next morning without saying anything, so we're fine.
Wolf caught me at the clubhouse in October, late, after everybody else had gone.
"I've been where you are."
"Wolf—"
"I'm not doing a speech. I've got one sentence and then I'll leave you alone." He sat down across from me. "When my father died I said yes to the first thing that offered me a way to feel useful about it, and I've paid for that yes every year since, and I'll pay for it after I'm dead."
"That's a warning."
"That's a forecast," he said. "Something's going to offer you something, Ivar. Inside a year. That's how this works, they don't come when you're strong, they come when you're standing in a driveway at six in the morning holding a scraper."
I didn't ask how he knew about the scraper.
"And when it does?" I said.
"Call me first." He stood up. "That's it. Not don't. I know better than to say don't. Just call me first."
Wren came out to my place in November with a folder.
She's been at that sheet since August. Nine hours a day. Wolf says she's stopped sleeping and I've stopped believing anything Wolf says about sleep, since he's married to her and equally guilty.
"Okay," she said, spreading it on my kitchen table. "I'm going to tell you a thing and you're going to be careful with it, because I'm about eighty percent and eighty is not a hundred."
"Wren."
"The twelfth line. She didn't sign a death warrant."
I sat down.
"It's a muster roll," Wren said. "I've said that since August but I don't think anybody heard the implication.
A muster roll isn't a list of the dead, Ivar.
It's a list of the serving." She turned a page around.
"And there's a body of material — Norwegian, mostly, some Danish, one very weird Orkney fragment — about riders being recalled.
It's not resurrection, it's not a loophole, it's — the term translates roughly as discharge, and slightly less roughly as relief. "
"Meaning what."
"Meaning the muster runs both ways," Wren said. "You can be called up. There is at least a described mechanism for being called back."
I looked at the paper for a long time.
"Eighty percent," I said.
"Eighty."
"And the twenty?"
"The twenty is that I'm reading a document written by something that has lied to this family for three generations," she said, "and I would rather cut off a finger than give you false hope. So: eighty. Don't build a house on it."
"I'm going to build a house on it."
"I know you are," Wren said. "I'd have led with the eighty either way. I just wanted the record to show I said the thing about the finger."
Halla came to see me in December.
I want to put that in, because I've only told Wren, and Wren wrote four pages about it and then asked me to confirm details I'd already told her twice, which is how I learned that folklorists interview you the way cops do.
She was in my kitchen when I came in from the cold. Sitting at my table. Coat on.
I knew her immediately. Same stillness. Same structural quality.
"You're the sister."
"I'm the sister."
"Is she—"
"I'm not permitted," Halla said, "and before you say something bitter about that, I'd like you to understand that I have spent four months trying to find the edge of it, and I have found it nine times, and I begin to see what she saw in the exercise."
I sat down across from her.
"Then why come."
"Because somebody should tell you what she was," Halla said.
"Nobody will. There's no funeral for one of us.
There's no notice. There isn't a file. She'll be gone for four hundred years and no one alive will have said her name out loud, and I found that arrangement completely acceptable up until August."
"Say it, then."
So she did. Eleven minutes, flat voice, no ornament — a thousand years of a woman who stood in fields.
Ferries, plagues, a burning church in 1602, a road outside Novgorod.
She listed it like an inventory and I let her, because I understood that this was the only shape grief was ever going to be permitted to take in her.
At the end she stood up and buttoned her coat.
"One thing," she said. "Not a promise, and if you tell anyone I said it I'll deny it in a way you'd find upsetting."
"Go on."
"A muster has terms," Halla said. "I have read the terms. There is a word in them that I would translate, badly, as relief."
Then she left, in the way they leave.
Here's the comedy landing, because there always is one, because this club is incapable of a solemn month.
Tactical the raccoon has now been patched three years.
Ozzy Prine raised, at church, in front of everyone, the question of whether a three-year patched member outranks a first-year full member, specifically Renny, specifically in the matter of who cleans the fryer.
Nadia — who does our books, who is the only person here who reads anything — went and got the bylaws.
The bylaws are silent on species and extremely specific about seniority.
Tactical outranks Renny.
We put it to a vote to overturn it and it failed nine to six, and Wolf abstained, and Renny cleaned the fryer, and Deke laughed so hard he had to sit down on the step outside, and I laughed too, out loud, for the first time since August, and then had to go stand behind the building for a minute.
Sol would have found that funny. That's the thing that gets you. Not the big stuff. It's having a joke and nowhere to put it.
I found the Sandviks in Sterling.
There's three families. It took nine phone calls and one very confused eighty-year-old man named Verner who kept asking if I was from the gas company.
Ingrid was his aunt. Died in 1954, grain auger, everybody knew the story.
I said there was money for the church roof in a coffee tin behind the flour, and Verner Sandvik went quiet on the phone for so long I thought he'd set it down.
Then he said, "Who is this?"
"Nobody. Somebody who heard it."
"That church burned in 1961," he said. "There's a metal building there now."
"Okay."
"They never did do the roof," Verner said. "My mother said for years that Ingrid had put money by and it never turned up and my uncle spent it, and there was a feud about it, mister, there was a twenty-year feud about it in this family—"
"She didn't want him to have it," I said. "That's the whole message. She wasn't ashamed. She just wanted it to get there."
Verner Sandvik cried on the phone for a while, and apologized for it, which runs in this state, and then said, "I'm going to call my cousin," and hung up on me.
One down.
I've got a notebook now. She never told me any of the others. That's the joke, that's the thing that'll follow me — she carried nine hundred thousand of them and she gave me exactly one, on a roof, to make me laugh.
I'm going to spend the rest of my life on a list of one.
I go out to 200 most weeks. Mile marker where the third sign is.
Nothing happens. The road's just a road. It's been four months and there hasn't been a single accident on that stretch since August, which the state has noticed, and there's a man from the DOT who thinks it was the rumble strips.
The other thing I did in October was finish the gate.
That's not a metaphor and I'd like it not to be treated as one. There's a churchyard outside Havregard with a gate that's been off its hinges since 2019, and the congregation is nine people and the youngest is sixty-one, and it's been on a list at the back of the bulletin for seven years.
I've got a welder. I've got winter. I did the math.
It took me eleven days and it's terrible work, technically, which I'd like on the record because the whole point of the story she told me was that the smith's hands were going and he made the worst thing he ever made anyway.
Mine were fine. I just don't have the hands for it in a different way.
Deke came out on day four and looked at it and said, "That's crooked."
"I know."
"That's visibly crooked, Ivar, from a car—"
"I know, Deke."
He stood there in the cold for a while.
"You want help?"
"No."
"Okay," he said, and went and sat in his truck at the end of the drive for three hours with the heater running and did not offer again, and that's the second truest thing anybody's ever done for me.
Every hinge on it is a bird.
I'm not going to explain that to anybody and I'd appreciate it if nobody asked.
The call came in on a Thursday, on the clubhouse landline, which nobody uses.
Sunny picked it up and stood there a while and then came and got Wolf, and Wolf listened for four minutes without saying a word, and then said, "When," and then, "We'll come."
Appalachian charter. The Celtic one. Nobody's spoken to them in eleven years, since a thing happened that everybody in this room describes differently.
Their president is dead.
He was killed by lightning, in his own yard, in October, on a clear night.
The lightning did not come from a cloud. There was no cloud. There were eleven witnesses and a county coroner and a burn pattern that goes the wrong way — up, from the ground, in a spiral.
They want somebody from the Norse charter. They were very specific: they want somebody who's been held.
There's one of those.
So on the first Saturday in November I packed a bag and got on my bike in the lot with Deke standing in the doorway not saying goodbye, which is our arrangement, and Renny came out and put his hand on the bar for a second and took it off again, and Wolf said, "Call every night," and Wren said, "Every night," and Nadia handed me an envelope of cash I hadn't asked for and told me not to be proud about it.
And I rode out east on 200, past the third sign, past the mile marker, into a morning about eighteen degrees with the frost still on the beans.
Here's the thing.
Nothing happened.
No deer. No blowout. No truck with its lights off. Ninety miles of highway and not one single thing in this world tried to kill me, and I had every gauge on the bike watched and both hands ready and one eye on the ditch the whole way.
Nothing.
Twelve wrecks in six years, and now the road just lets me through. Clean. Polite. Like a doorman.
And I want to tell you that felt like freedom.
It didn't. It felt like being carried.
It felt like somebody's got a hand under me — the same hand that held me off a page for six years — and it's not holding me back anymore, it's holding me up, and it's moving me east at seventy-two miles an hour toward a man who got hit by lightning that came out of the ground.
I've spent four months hoping something's watching.
It is. It absolutely is.
I just don't like the direction it's pointing me.
Eighty percent, Wren said. Don't build a house on it.
I've got a bag, a blank page, and a hinge to make.
I'll build what I want.