Up until this moment, Feygush had acted with almost defiant practicality, but as they stood in the chill air watching the wasted water run downhill to the river, Bluma heard her mother’s breathing catch and shudder, and she looked up to find her wiping her eye.

In the nearby cemetery, the sound of shovels could clearly be heard digging open her bubbe’s grave.

As much to block out this sound as for any other reason, Bluma spoke.

“Why?” she said. “Why do we pour out the water?”

Feygush sniffed and cleared her throat.

“They say,” said Feygush, “that when the Angel of Death is finished claiming the dead, he washes his knife in the water of the house.”

His knife? That didn’t seem right.

And suddenly all the events of the previous night came flooding through the dam of grief and fatigue that had held them back.

She had seen the Angel of Death.

And her instrument was not a knife.

It was a spoon.

—

The news made its way swiftly through Tupik.

As soon as the members of the Holy Society returned, one by one, to their homes, Bubbe’s name passed from lip to lip, spreading like a virulent cold.

Dvorah Leah, they said.

Who?

Dvorah Leah. You know, the old woman—Zalman the baker’s mother.

Ahhhhh.

Tongues tsked and heads wagged. She had not been a popular woman—she had been very deliberate about that—but just the same she had delivered many of their children, and when death touched even the furthest outpost of their little community, it was a tragedy for them all.

Hands that otherwise might’ve gone idle that morning grasped onto the hafts of shovels. The digging sped by. Between them all, the grave was ready by lunch.

In accordance with tradition, she was to be buried as soon as possible.

Shortly after noon, when news of the grave’s preparation reached the riverbank, people began to tramp uphill. Friends knocked on their neighbors’ windows. Tasks were laid aside. Two feet became four, and then eight, twelve, twenty, slogging through the snow and muck toward the cemetery together, and slowly their number increased until the town ran uphill like an impossible river.

The young were nervous. The old were reflective.

Tupik was going to bury its dead.

—

Yehuda Leib woke woozy and confused, and immediately he was on his guard.

There were voices.

It was a moment before he realized he was in the dusty, dim synagogue attic. Morning prayers were under way in the sanctuary below.

A cacophony of half-chanted melody floated up through the floor, and as Yehuda Leib rose, stretched, began to creep from rafter to rafter, he imagined himself intercepting the rising column of each individual prayer.

Before long, the worshipful murmuration below fell off into light chat, and then into silence. The sanctuary door creaked open and swung shut behind the last straggling worshipper like a final amen.

Yehuda Leib was left alone.