“Good morning, Miss Thomas.” Mr. Coates smiled as he helped me into the wagon.

“Good morning,” I began, but my throat had closed over his name. It was too much. Where was Papa? I stepped up into the seat and sat down next to Mama, turning my face toward the trees.

The road to Middle Haven passed by the old quarry, and I looked through the trees at the great amphitheater of white rock, blasted open, the giant chunks of quarried granite shining through the trees, now left cast about like a god’s toy blocks. Last summer we had picnicked there, Miss Grange and I, and somewhere past it, in those woods, lay that hidden grave.

We left Mr. Coates and the wagon at the green, as Mama wished to walk the rest of the way to the cemetery. We walked through the bustle of a market day, past the mackerel and cod on beds of wet seaweed laid out in barrows, past new lettuces brought from inland to this town where nothing grew in the rockbed soil but pavement blocking, church corners, and the markers for Middle Haven’s dead. Then we bent our steps onto the road that led up a small hill to the cemetery. We were alone as we followed it, and Mama walked, I realized, with a gladness about her, her shoulders cast wide as she stepped quickly upward. The white and green tops of the new summer grasses bent about us, whispering into the fresh breeze that blew from off the water. Here in town, farther removed from the bay, the sun beat back the fog that hovered still at the edge of the breakwater and hung over Grange House point.

She leaned down and opened the little iron gate suspended between two great granite pillars that marked the entrance to Middle Haven’s simple graveyard, and we climbed up the hill through the rows of Ameses and Browns, Calderwoods and Carvers, to come to Papa, who lay singly amongst those native families.

A peace came over me then such as I had not looked for. There he was after all, chiseled into the gray stone.

LUDLOW THOMAS, b. 1838 d. 1896
Beloved Husband of Libby. Devoted Father of Maisie.

As I grew accustomed to the granite letters, I felt oddly comforted. There we three were, twined in his death and marked that way for both the curious and the devoted. How necessary it was to be able to have him here in one place. How restful after the past months, in which he slipped in and out, speaking through the dumb language of his things—this pipe, a red slipper, the black stylo—and through the pages of Miss Grange’s diary. But here, beneath this stone, I could address him; here he could not move, could not shift. Here was my father where we had placed him, and I knew because I had watched him lowered down.