No sound came from him that he would ever remember when he cleared the last ridge and came into the boulder field and saw her, an object off the ground, peaceful, not moving, her head tipped down to rest against one shoulder. The mist was not rain then, just wet air streaming against him, wet air that he moved through. The dormant woods, the tree bark, the clotted leaf-duff, the moss on stones, the texture of the stones’ surfaces: all were bright-colored with the wet, each texture distinct, separate. As if to prove the relentlessness of life. Red and mustard-yellow lichens, bright as stains. The warning bark of a squirrel. Her clothing was soaked dark with water and her skin was the dull purple of blackberries dried on the stem with August sun. Going toward her, he could not hold breath. He was wildly angry with his sobbing, a mean, puny indulgence before the sight of her. Nearer, she stank of feces and urine. He took her waist and lifted her with one arm and sawed at the wet rope with his pocketknife and could not cut it. The knife was dulled. He’d not owned a dull knife in his life. He tried again and she turned against him and her face fell against the top of his head and he could not cut the rope. Finally he climbed the stone beside where she swung and took the rope in a hard turn over his elbow and held her weight and gazed off at the higher part of the maple trunk as he reached high and slowly cut it through. Then lowered her to the ground, as close as the short rope would allow. The rope end went through his hands and she dropped and lay crumpled, folded over herself. He slid down the rock face after her and picked her up and cradled her against him, her face now against his, her body held to him. He took her down the hill.

After the graveside service, when the pine box Norman had built and sanded and polished through one entire night was lowered by ropes into the earth and the Congregational minister said his last few spare words, Norman bent and took up the first handful of clumped wet soil and dropped it onto the box where it made a hollow sound loud to the hushed craned necks. Norman stood then at grave edge, wavering a moment, studying the spread clot on the honeyed wood before he turned and took up the spade and drove it deep into the mound that seemed so much greater than the small hole it had made. At the moment that he flung down the first spadeful and swung back toward the pile, his body absorbing the job of work to be done, Jamie broke free from where he’d stood framed by both sisters, a small still figure near alone but for some cousins opposite the grave amongst the adults. Jamie appeared to see no one around him throughout the brief reading of the twenty-third psalm, but at the moment his father took up the spade the boy saw his father’s face black and sagged with anger and grief and tore his hands from his sisters and fled. For a brief moment the family, the minister, Connie and Glen and their children, the small number of neighbors and village tradespeople, the even smaller number of veterans, all lifted their heads from the coffin in the hole and watched the slight figure tear raging across the hillside slope away from the burying plot, his arms flailing for balance in the tight black suit, his voice one long endless wail of rage coming back to them in the still air. The sun was shining on them all, a pale washed thing before the stiffened chill wind out of the northwest.