When I Forget, He Keeps

The Ninth Stone

Her mother's stone was the last in the row and the newest, and the ground under it had not frozen as deep.

Maren started at two in the morning and worked with her back to the wind. Corvin stood at the fence with his hands in his pockets and did not offer to help, and she did not ask, and that arrangement held for an hour and a half.

The spade hit pine at twenty past three.

This lid came up easier than the other one because whoever had nailed it had used four nails instead of twelve, and afterwards she sat back on her heels in the hole with the light in her fist and understood that the person who closed this box had been in a hurry.

One coat. Gray wool, her mother's, the one that hung by the door for as long as Maren could remember, the one with the burn hole in the left cuff from the year of the stove.

No body.

Above her, Corvin said nothing at all, which was the loudest he had been all night.

Maren got out of the hole with the coat over her arm and stood on the grass and shook the dirt out of it, and something in the lining clicked against her knuckle.

Pills. A blister pack, half gone, with the pharmacy label scraped off. And a tag, the kind sewn into uniforms, in the inside pocket, printed in blue.

RANDALL BASIN WATER. EMPLOYEE CLINIC. 4461.

She held the tag up in the light.

"Nine stones," she said. "Nine coats. No bodies. What happened to them."

Corvin looked at the row.

"You want the version with the poetry in it," he said.

"I want the version from the man who was standing there."

He came away from the fence and sat down on the edge of the hole with his long coat spread under him, and it was the first time in eleven days that he had put himself lower than her.

"Nine coats," he said. "You keep saying it like it's a number."

"It is nine."

"It is nine women." He looked at the hole and not at her. "The first one was called Elise. She lasted six years. When she went, she went in the kitchen, middle of the afternoon, and it was clean."

"Clean."

"She put the kettle on and forgot what a kettle was for. Then she forgot the word for water. Then she forgot she had ever been a person with a name." He said it flat, without any weight on it. "That's the third year most of them get to. The last year, they stop being able to read the words."

"So they die of it."

"They die of it eventually," Corvin said. "That's the part the family tells the town, and it's true, and it takes about four more years than anybody has."

Above them the rooster at the Ferris place started up, way early, because the rooster at the Ferris place had never once been right about anything.

Maren crouched and put the coat down flat on the grass and smoothed it.

"Four years," she said. "So there's a point where they can't read the page anymore and there's four years left. Nobody in my family has ever spent four years sitting in a room with that."

"No."

"So what do they do."

He did not answer.

"What do they do," Maren said.

"They take her up the hill."

The wind came down off the ridge and moved the coat on the grass.

"And you finish it," she said.

"I finish it."

"How."

"Quick." He looked at her for the first time since he had sat down. "It's the one thing I'm good at. They never asked my opinion about any other part of it."

Maren stood up.

"Who takes them up."

"Elias."

"Elias as in my uncle. Elias as in the man who read the service over this stone."

"Elias as in the man who has read the service over nine stones, and who did it every time with a full church, and who is very good at it," Corvin said. "He learned it from his mother. She learned it from hers. It's not a family secret. It's a family chore."

She was aware that her hands were shaking and that this was not useful and that she could not stop it.

"Eight of them," she said. "He took eight women up that hill and asked you to do it."

"Eight."

"Then who took the ninth."

Corvin got up. He got up slowly, and he did it with one hand flat on the ground, and when he was standing he was closer to her than he had been at any point since the grove, close enough that she could see the red in the eye and the gray coming in along the jaw and the very small amount of the man that was left in there.

"He came to me in March," he said.

Maren did not move.

"Elias came up the hill in March with the coat in his hands. The one you are standing over. He had it folded over his arm the way you'd carry something you were going to give back." Corvin put his hands back in his pockets. "He asked me for the ninth. He asked me to do it, and he asked me for a day, and he told me he would handle the stone and the service and the story, and he told me she had already said yes."

"And?"

"And I told him no."

The rooster went off again.

"He stood there for about a minute. Then he folded the coat back up and walked down the hill, and he said, on the way out, that it didn't matter, because the family would find another way."

Maren looked down at the coat on the grass. Then at the nine stones. Then at the light coming up gray in the east, turning the row into a page.

"Find another way," she said.

"Ask him which way," Corvin said.