Her body. She was dead, as they had known she would be. Jeff, crying now, held her in his arms, her face covered with dirt so that her features were barely recognizable, her hair matted, her mouth plugged with dirt, and her body spattered with blood, which they would later understand was theirs, from their bleeding hands. Later, when they laid her out on the table in their cabin, undressed her, and washed her following Granny Jane's directions, they saw she had suffered no external wounds. She had been crushed and suffocated by the dirt suddenly coming down on her as if it were just one huge solid thing.

Jeff carried her outside the cabin and laid her on the ground, just beyond the door. Charlie knelt beside her, not crying yet, just touching her and brushing the dirt from her face, still not understanding what had happened. Granny Jane went to the pile of pine straw and picked up Ola May. She passed by Reed, who even yet was standing stock-still, eyes wide open, not blinking, staring beyond them at something they could not see, something immense, perhaps his own stupidity for trying to put a sod roof on green lumber or from using a just-felled tag alder as a ridgepole.

Jeff went back to the cabin, retrieved the shovel, and walked over to Reed. “You could have helped. You could have done something more than twitch. You killed my wife and child, and you didn't do a damned thing. Stop that twitching.” He swung the shovel like a baseball bat, hard all the way around his body. It caught Reed on the shoulder, a tremendous whack, skittered upward, took off a couple inches of scalp and most of his left ear, and sent Reed sprawling onto the ground. Reed began to scream then, lying on the ground, knees pulled up to his chest, blood covering his face. Great wracking screams, not of pain but of some deeper agony. He had stopped twitching.

When her body had been washed, Mattie lay there on the table, naked, clean, and still, her hair wet from Granny Jane's washing with pine tar soap, her belly barely swollen with the baby she was carrying, their fifth child. Jeff ran his hand from her face across her chest, pausing at the swell of her belly. Granny Jane slapped his hand. “Get her dress. She's done with you now. Go on. Tend to your children.”