All characters depicted in sexual situations are eighteen years of age or older.

I’ll tell you straight off who came to sit at my table that night, since you’ve come all the way up the hollow to ask and I’m too old to make a body wait. My husband came, though he wasn’t my husband yet. And a dead woman came, though she hadn’t gone dead of her own accord. Between the two of them they gave me back my voice, which I had not known I’d lost until I heard it coming out of me in a church full of people on All Saints’ morning. The rest is only particulars. But I have always found the particulars are where the good Lord keeps the best of anything, so pour yourself some of that cider and pull the quilt over your knees, and I’ll give you them.

My name was Hester Vail then. Hettie, to anybody who used my name at all, and not many did. I lived alone on forty acres at the head of Cane Hollow, in the Arkansas hills, with my bees and my mother’s loom and the only spring in the county that had not run dry in the drought of ‘81. I was thirty-one years old in the fall of 1887, which in Cane Hollow was the same as saying I was a piece of furniture. And I laid out the dead.

That was my trade, the way it had been my mother’s. When somebody passed, they sent for Hettie Vail, and I came with my basin and my good lye soap and my two old pennies, and I washed them and dressed them and tied up their jaws and combed their hair the way they’d have wanted it for company. It is holy work and it is lonesome work, and I will tell you a thing I never told anybody while I was young enough to be ashamed of it: for ten years the dead were the only folks in Cane Hollow who ever let me put my hands on them. The living would take my honey and send for me when Grandpap stopped breathing, and nod to me at meeting, and not one soul of them had touched me in kindness since my mother went. You get so you don’t notice. That’s the danger of it. You get so quiet inside yourself you think the quiet is just the shape of you.

The other half of the trade was Jonah Beal.

Jonah was sexton at the Cane Hollow church. He rang the bell and mended the benches and dug the graves, and when I had finished with the dead, it was Jonah who came with the cart and lifted them into the box I’d lined, and Jonah who carried them, and Jonah who filled the hole after the preacher went home to his dinner. He was a big, slow-moving man with shoulders like a yoke and a stammer so bad that he mostly didn’t bother talking, and folks took the one for the other and decided he was simple. He was not simple. I had worked across a dead body from Jonah Beal perhaps two hundred times in ten years, and I knew the care in his hands. I knew how he’d cup the back of an old woman’s head so it wouldn’t knock against the coffin board, though she’d never feel it. I knew he left things on my gatepost, a mended hinge, a swarm of bees he’d cut out of a hollow sycamore and brought me in a tow sack at great cost to his arms, once a comb carved out of cedar with a honeybee on the spine so small and fine you needed the lamp to see its wings. He never said they were from him. He never said much of anything. We had spoken, I suppose, a hundred words to each other in ten years, and most of them were lift and easy now.

I tell you all this so you’ll understand what it meant, later, that he was the one who came.

The trouble in Cane Hollow was a man named Amos Kettering.

Kettering owned the gristmill and the sawmill both, down where Cane Creek falls into the race, and he owned the store that took the flour, and he sat in the deacon’s chair at meeting and led the singing in a voice you could hear from the road. A large voice and a small mercy, my mother used to say of him, and she said it before any of the rest of it happened. He was a handsome man in the way a new-painted barn is handsome. He’d buried two wives.

The first was Sarah, who fell down his stairs in ‘79. I was a girl yet, helping my mother, and I remember only that Mother came home from laying her out and sat a long time at the table without lighting the lamp. The second was Lottie. Lottie Kettering was twenty-two years old when he married her and twenty-four when they pulled her out of the millrace one March morning in ‘85, and it was me they sent for, my mother being gone by then.

I washed her in her own kitchen. Kettering stood in the doorway the whole while, which husbands do not do, and I remember thinking it was grief. Then I unpinned her collar to wash her neck, and on her throat, blue as a bruised plum, were four fingermarks on the one side and the print of a thumb on the other.

I looked at it. I looked up. Amos Kettering was looking at me look at it.

And Lord forgive me, I buttoned her collar back up to her chin. I buttoned it up with my own two hands, every button, and I dressed her for her burying and I combed her pretty and I set my two pennies on her eyes and I went home and never said one word. There was no law in Cane Hollow but Kettering’s friends, and I was a woman alone at the head of a hollow, and I told myself a great many things on a great many nights about what good it would do anybody, Lottie least of all. I was quiet. I was so good at being quiet by then. I carried that collar with me for two years and seven months, and I felt the buttons of it under my fingers every time I washed a body afterward.

It was the next spring Kettering started calling on me.

He brought a ham. He sat on my porch in his black coat and admired my spring and talked about how lonesome it must be up here for a woman, and how the mill could use a steady water in the dry years, and how a man of his standing needed a wife to keep his house. I understood him. I don’t believe he troubled to hide that I understood him. A woman can’t be made to testify against her husband, not in the courts of Arkansas, not in those days. He wanted my spring and he wanted my silence, and he meant to have them both in one ring.

I told him no. It was the only thing I said to him, and I said it three times that year, and each time he smiled a little wider. And then the talk started.

You know how talk goes. Somebody’s milk cow went dry after she drank at my spring. The Pruitt baby took the croup the week after I sold Mrs. Pruitt a jar of honey. I kept bees, didn’t I, and everybody knew what bees were, they were witches’ cattle, they carried word to the dead. It was only talk. But by the fall of ‘87 my honey sat on the store shelf going to sugar, and the families down the hollow had begun sending for a woman two ridges over to lay out their dead, and at meeting the pew around me had got so roomy I could have laid down across it.

And that is how things stood on All Hallows’ Eve.

The church held a pie supper every Halloween, to raise money for the roof. I went because I had always gone and because staying home would have been a kind of confession. I brought a vinegar pie that nobody bid on, and I sat on the end of a bench with my hands in my lap and listened to the young women, the unmarried girls of eighteen and nineteen, giggling over by the stove about the dumb supper.

You won’t know what that is. Nobody sets one anymore. On All Hallows’ Eve, the old folks said, an unmarried woman could learn the face of the man she’d marry. She had to do everything backwards and she had to do it in silence, not one word from sundown till it was over. Bake the bread backwards, hands behind her. Set the table backwards. Salt in the bread, a great deal of salt. Stop the clock. Open the door at midnight to whatever was out in the dark, and sit, and wait, and not speak. And if you had done it right, your husband-to-be would come walking in and sit down across from you and eat — his living body if he was near, his fetch if he was far, a wraith of him wearing his face. And if you had done it wrong, my grandmother used to say, if you’d let a word slip or turned your face the wrong way, then something else might come in and take the chair. A coffin. A shadow. Some hungry thing that had been waiting all year for an open door.

The girls by the stove were daring one another to try it, the way girls will, and not a one of them meant it.

And then Amos Kettering’s voice rolled across the room, pleasant and loud, the singing voice.

“Why, Miss Hettie ought to set one.”

The room went still the way a room does when it smells blood.

He was standing by the pie table with a plate in his hand and a smile on his face. “She ought,” he said. “Poor soul, it’s the only way she’ll get a man through her door. Though I’d not wait up, Miss Hettie. There’s nothing living in this county would come sit at your table.” He let that land. He took a bite of somebody’s pie. “Unless it’s whatever keeps you company up on that ridge. Something’s got to. All those bees, and all those dead folks, and never a word out of you.”