The Silent Supper

THE SILENT SUPPER

a short story

Wesley Doyle

THE SILENT SUPPER

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."

Somebody laughed. Then more of them did, because he was Amos Kettering and they were frightened of him, and a frightened room will laugh at whatever the big man laughs at. I sat there. I felt the heat go up my neck and into my face, and I felt my hands wanting to do something, and I felt the old quiet close over me like creek water over a dropped stone. I could not have spoken if the building were afire. I had not spoken in so long.

He came a step closer, still smiling, and said the last of it soft enough that only the nearest benches heard. "You'll come round by Christmas, I expect. When you've nobody left to sell to and nobody left to bury. You'll see sense."

I stood up. I did not say anything. I walked out of that church and down the steps into the cold, and I want to tell you I walked out proud, but the truth is I walked out so I wouldn't cry in front of him, and the bigger truth is I was halfway down the road before I understood that somebody had gone out the side door behind me, and stood in the churchyard watching me go, and that it was Jonah Beal, with his fists shut at his sides and his face turned toward the lit window where Kettering was.

* * *

I went home and baked the bread.

I don't know how to tell you why, except that I had been silent for two years and seven months about the one thing that mattered, and silent about everything else for longer than that, and on the road home in the dark I had got so angry at the silence it felt like a live coal in my mouth. And here was a thing, the only thing in the world, that silence was for. A rite where keeping still was the power and not the shame. If I was going to hold my tongue until I died, I thought, then by God I would hold it once on purpose, and see what came.

So I did it right. I did it the way my grandmother told it. I baked the salt bread with my hands behind my back, which is a harder trick than you'd think, and I burnt my wrist on the oven door and didn't make a sound. I stopped the clock at a quarter to twelve. I laid the cloth wrong side up and set the plates and forks backwards, walking backwards to the cupboard and backwards to the table. I set my place and I set the place across from mine.

And then -- I have thought about this for sixty years and I still cannot tell you whether I decided it -- my hands set a third place. At the end of the table. I remember watching them do it. I remember my fingers were thinking of a collar, and of buttons, and that the third plate was down and the fork beside it before the rest of me caught up.

I lit two candles. I opened the door to the cold. I sat down with my back to the fire and my face to the dark, and I waited, and I did not speak.

It's a long quiet, a quarter hour with the clock stopped. The fire ticks. The wind comes in the door and lays the candle flames over and lets them stand back up. Out in the dark the creek talks to itself, and you begin to hear everything the night is doing, every leaf that lets go, and you begin to believe you've been a fool, a thirty-one-year-old fool in a cold house, setting out a supper for nobody.

Then I heard him on the path.

Slow steps. Heavy. Bare feet on the frozen ground, I could hear it, the soft slap and crackle. And he came up onto the porch and into the square of candlelight in the door, and it was Jonah Beal.

He was in his trousers and his nightshirt and nothing else, in that cold. His feet were bare and bleeding a little at one heel and black with the mud of three miles of road. There was frost in his hair. His eyes were open, but they weren't looking at anything in this world; they were looking at something a long way off, and his face had the loose, peaceful look of a sleeping child. He came in past me without a sound and pulled out the chair across from mine and sat, and folded his big hands on the cloth, and looked through me as if I were a window.

I nearly spoke. Lord, I nearly did. His name was right there on my tongue. But the rule is the rule: you do not speak until he has eaten. So I held still, which was the thing I was best at in all the world, and I pushed the salt bread across the cloth to him, and he took it in his sleeping hands and ate it. All of it. Salt enough to make a mule weep, and he ate it slow and grave as communion.

And the third chair scraped back from the table.

Nobody was touching it. I watched it move. The candle flames lay down flat, both together, the way grass lies down when something big goes through it, and they did not stand back up. The fire went low and blue. The room filled with a smell I knew, cold and green and rotten-sweet, the smell of standing water under a mill in March. And then she was sitting in it.

Lottie Kettering. Twenty-four years old and two years and seven months dead.

Her hair was wet and hung in strings down her back, and her dress was dark with water to the shoulders and dripped on my floor, a slow tap, tap, like a clock that wasn't stopped after all. Her collar was buttoned high up under her chin. Every button. The way I had done it.

She looked at me. There was no anger in her face, and I believe that was the worst of it. I had spent two years waiting for her anger and it would have been a mercy. She only looked at me the way you look at a friend who has kept you waiting a long time. Then she lifted her gray hands and began to undo her collar. One button. The next. Slow, the way I had done them up. She laid the collar open and turned her head a little toward the candlelight, so I could see, and there on her throat were the four fingers and the thumb, as blue as the morning I'd washed her. She did not need to say one word. It was the silent supper. Nobody at that table could speak, and that was the whole of her point. I had kept her silence for her. She had come to give it back.

She stood. The water ran off her hem. And she walked out my open door into the dark, not the way she'd come but down the hollow, toward the creek and the road and the mill, and when I got up at last and went to the door, my legs gone to water, I saw her footprints going away in the frost of the yard. Small bare feet. Wet, and black, and every one of them pointing down the hill toward Amos Kettering.

The candles stood up. The fire caught. Behind me Jonah Beal made a terrible sound, like a man pulled up out of deep water, and I turned and he was awake.

* * *

He did not know where he was. He looked at his hands. He looked at his bloody feet, and at the crumbs on the cloth, and at the open door and the frost, and then at me, and I watched him understand that he was in my house at midnight in his nightshirt, and I watched the shame come up into his face red as a stove lid.

"H-Hettie," he said. "Miss -- Miss V-Vail. I d-don't -- I d-don't know how I--"

It was over. He had eaten. I could speak.

"Jonah," I said.

My voice came out rusty as a gate. I had not said a man's name aloud to his face in I don't know how long. It sounded so strange in that room that we both went still to hear it.

"You walked here," I said. "Barefoot. From the church house. In your sleep."

He swallowed. He looked at the table, at the backwards forks and the stopped clock, and I watched him, a man raised in those hills, know exactly what he was looking at. His face went from red to white.

"I d-dreamed," he said. He shut his eyes and fought the word out. "I dreamed somebody c-called me. By my m-mother's name for me. Nobody's c-called me that since I was eight." He opened his eyes. "It was your v-voice. I'd know it. I've h-heard it say lift and easy now two hundred t-times." He looked down at the salt crumbs. "I'd have c-come anyhow, if you'd asked. You d-didn't have to do it with m-magic."

And I laughed. I hadn't meant to. It came up out of me like water out of the spring, and it frightened me, and then I was crying, which frightened me worse, and I sat back down hard in my chair with the dead woman's wet footprints drying on my floor and wept the way I had not wept when my mother died, when Lottie died, when the pew emptied out around me. Two years and seven months of it.

He came around the table. He knelt on my floor on those poor cut feet and took my hands in his, and his hands were as careful as they were with the dead and as warm as they were not.

When I could talk I told him. All of it. The collar and the buttons. The thumbprint. Kettering in the doorway, watching me see. What had just sat in that third chair. I thought he'd let go of my hands. He didn't. When I was done he was quiet a long while, and then he let go of one of them, only one, and reached into the pocket of his trousers and put something in my palm. A silver dollar, worn smooth.

"I c-carry it," he said, "so I don't get to f-forget." He was looking at the coin and not at me. "The night Lottie K-Kettering drowned, I was up late in the b-bell tower fixing the rope. I seen him c-come up from the race. His sleeves was wet to the shoulder, Hettie. To the sh-shoulder. Next morning he found me and give me that and said a sexton don't see nothing at night. I never spent it. I never said nothing, neither." His jaw worked. "We been k-keeping the same quiet, you and me. Two years. Right across from each other."

I closed my hand over the dollar. The fire popped. The clock on the mantel still said a quarter to twelve.

"Tomorrow's All Saints'," I said. "They read the names."

He looked up at me.

"They read the names," I said. "Everybody this hollow has buried since last All Saints'. The first ones on that list I washed and dressed myself, before folks took to sending two ridges over. And every year since she died, Amos Kettering pays the preacher a silver dollar to read Lottie's name at the end, and the whole church bows its head for how he grieves her. I laid her out, Jonah. I buttoned her up and kept my mouth shut." I held his eyes. "I'm going to stand up in that church tomorrow, Jonah, and I'm going to say it. Out loud. In front of him and all of them. And I expect it'll be the end of me in this hollow one way or another."

"N-not by yourself," he said.

* * *

Now I have to tell you the next part plain, because you came all this way and because I am ninety-one years old and past being coy about the one good night that turned into sixty good years.

He tried to go. That's the first thing. He stood up and said he'd better get home before somebody saw, and looked around for a coat he hadn't brought, and I watched him, this big gentle man in his nightshirt with frost melting in his hair, trying to protect a reputation that Amos Kettering had already burned to the ground. And I thought: tomorrow I stand up and speak and it all comes down. Tomorrow I spend everything I've got. And I have washed a hundred bodies in this hollow, and dressed them and combed them and folded their hands, and I have never once in my life been touched by living hands that wanted to.

"Jonah," I said. "Shut the door."

He shut it. He turned around with his hand still on the latch.

I want you to understand I was not out of my head, and I was not grabbing at the nearest warm thing in the dark. I had just watched a dead girl open her collar to show me what silence costs. I knew exactly what I was spending and what I was buying with it. I got up and I crossed my floor with my heart going like a partridge in a sack, and I said, before I could lose my nerve, "You left me a comb with a honeybee on it. Five years ago. I know it was you."

"Y-yes."

"Did you ever think about me," I said. "Not across a coffin. Did you ever think about me."

He let go of the latch. And for the first time in all the years I'd known him, Jonah Beal said a whole sentence without one hitch in it, the way I learned later he always could when it mattered enough.

"Every day for ten years, Hettie, and every night I wasn't too tired to stand it."

I put my hand flat on his chest. His heart was going worse than mine. I said, "Then I would like you to stop thinking about it."

He kissed me like a man afraid of breaking something. I had to show him I wouldn't break. I took his face in my hands and kissed him back harder, clumsy, bumping teeth, thirty-one years old and not knowing the first thing, and he made a low sound down in his chest and his big hands spread across my back and pulled me in against him, and oh, the whole warm length of him, after so long being cold. I could feel him through his nightshirt, hard against my belly, and I was not frightened of it. I was not frightened of one thing in the world just then. I think I had used up all my fright on the dead.

I undressed in front of the fire. I didn't hurry and I didn't turn my back, and my hands shook on the buttons, and I was thinking of Lottie's buttons the whole while, every one I undid was one I was undoing for her too. When I was bare to the waist he just stood there and looked, and his face did a thing I have never had a word for. I was no beauty. I was a thin, work-hard woman with a burn on her wrist and gray coming in over one ear. He looked at me like I was the first morning after a long winter.

"Say something," I said, because I couldn't stand it.

"I c-can't," he said, and laughed at himself, shaky. "You know I c-can't."

"Then don't," I said, and took his hand and put it on my breast.

He learned me slow. I had known the care in those hands for ten years; I had not known what that care would feel like turned on a living woman who wanted it. He learned me the way he did everything, patient and thorough, his thumb dragging over my nipple till it drew up hard and ached, his mouth at my neck, and then his mouth where his thumb had been, and I made a sound I did not know was in me. I got his nightshirt off over his head and there he was in the firelight, big and pale and scarred across the shoulders from the swarm he'd cut for me, a hundred little white stings, and I understood then what those bees had cost him and I put my mouth on the scars one by one until he was shaking.

He laid me down on my mother's quilt in front of the fire. He kissed down the whole length of me, slow, and when he got low and I understood what he meant to do, I put my hand in his hair out of pure astonishment. Nobody had told me people did that. I don't know that anybody in Cane Hollow knew people did that. He looked up at me along my belly, asking, and I said yes, I said it out loud, I was getting good at saying things out loud, and then his mouth was on me and I stopped being able to say anything at all.

I will tell you only that he was in no hurry, and that he had been paying attention to me for ten years and it turned out he paid attention to this the same way, to every little catch in my breath, and that when it broke over me I heard my own voice go up into the rafters of that house, loud, loud as Kettering ever sang, and I did not care one bit who heard it.

After, he came up over me and held himself there on his arms, trembling, and I could see what it cost him to wait. "Hettie," he said. Not a hitch in it. "You sure."

"I have never been sure of anything in my life," I said, "the way I am sure of this."

It hurt some, at first. I won't tell you it didn't. He felt me catch and went so still, and held there, and kissed my eyes and my mouth and waited on me with his whole body shaking, until the hurt eased off into a fullness I had no name for and I put my heels against the backs of his legs and pulled him the rest of the way into me myself. Then we moved. Slow, and then not slow. The fire ticking. The quilt rucked up under us. His breath hot in my hair and my name coming out of him over and over, clean, not one stammer in it, Hettie, Hettie, like it was the one word in the language he'd always been able to say. I held on to his back where the bee scars were and I watched his face in the firelight the whole time, because I had spent my life looking at faces that could not look back, and here was one that could, and it was looking at me like that.

When he came he pressed his forehead to mine and said my name one more time, and broke, and I held him through it, the way I had held so many people at the end of things. Only this was not an end.

We lay there on my mother's quilt with the door shut and the clock stopped, sweat drying cold on us, and he pulled the quilt over and said into my hair, "I'm g-going to have to m-marry you now, Miss Vail. For your r-reputation."

"My reputation," I said, "is that I'm a witch."

"Well," he said. "You c-called a man three miles out of his bed with bread. They ain't all wrong."

I laughed until I cried again, and he held me, and we did not sleep. Along toward dawn we did it again, slower, with me on top of him this time because I wanted to see what that was like, and it was like being the one holding the reins, and I recommend it. And when the light came gray in the window I got up and put my Sunday dress on, and buttoned it -- every button -- and he put on a coat of my father's that was too small across the back, and we walked down the hollow together to church, following a line of small wet footprints that had not dried in the frost all night.

* * *

The footprints went past the church. I want you to know that. They went on down the road toward the mill, and turned in at Kettering's gate, and Jonah and I stood and looked at them a long while before we went up the steps.

The whole hollow was there. It was All Saints', when the preacher reads out the names of everybody the hollow has buried since the year before. Kettering was in the deacon's chair up front. He saw me come in, and he saw Jonah Beal come in behind me in a dead man's coat, and he saw where we sat, which was together, and his face didn't change at all except his eyes.

The preacher read the names. Old Mrs. Pruitt. Grandpap Cobb. Those first ones were mine; I had washed them and dressed them and combed their hair and sat up with them through the night. Then came the names I hadn't been let near. The Haskell twin that didn't live. Sudie Marsh's husband. Washed and dressed by a stranger from two ridges over, while I sat home with my hands in my lap and knew it. And then at the end, the way it had come at the end every All Saints' since Amos Kettering took to paying for it, the preacher read Charlotte Kettering, beloved wife, and paused, respectful, and every head in that church bowed for the poor grieving man.

I stood up.

I have never in my life been so frightened. My knees were water. The whole church turned around on the benches to look, the witch at the head of the hollow standing up in the middle of the reading, and I felt the old quiet come up in me, the creek water closing over, and I thought, I can't. I can't.

And then Jonah Beal stood up beside me.

He didn't say anything. He didn't have to. He just stood there with his shoulder touching mine, and I felt the whole warm certain weight of him, and I opened my mouth.

"I laid out Lottie Kettering," I said. My voice cracked across it like ice. I made it go on. "I washed her body in her own kitchen with her husband watching me from the door. And when I unpinned her collar, there was a man's hand on her throat. Four fingers here." I put my own hand to my own throat and showed them. "And the thumb here. Blue as a plum. She didn't drown. She was held. And I buttoned her collar up over it and I kept my mouth shut for two years and seven months because I was afraid of him, and I am telling you now in God's house, because she came and asked me to."

Nobody breathed.

Then Kettering laughed. The big voice. He rose up out of the deacon's chair. "The witch speaks," he said, and spread his hands to them, all of them. "You hear her? This is what I've been warning you of. A spiteful, lonesome creature who took against me for an honest offer and has been cursing your cattle all year, and now she'd hang a grieving man on the strength of -- what? Her say-so? A dead woman's ghost?"

Jonah stepped out into the aisle. He walked up it slow, the way he walked behind a coffin, and every eye in the church went with him. At the front he stopped before Kettering and set a silver dollar down on the rail, click, in the dead quiet.

"N-night Lottie died," he said. He looked out at them all, and he was stammering, and he did not care. "I s-seen him come up from the race. Wet to the sh-shoulder. He p-paid me that to forget it. I'm g-giving it back."

Kettering opened his mouth.

And that is when the water came.

I have heard it told a dozen ways since, but I was there, so here is how it was. It started under his feet. A dark wet stain came up through the floorboards around his boots, spreading, the way water comes up through sand when you stand at the edge of a creek, and the smell of it came with it, cold and green and rotten, the millrace in March. Then there was a sound from the back of the church, soft and steady. Tap. Tap. Tap. We all turned. The doors were standing open to the gray morning, and coming up the aisle from them, one at a time, in plain daylight, in front of every soul in Cane Hollow, were small bare wet footprints. Nobody making them. Just the prints, appearing on the swept boards one after the other, coming up the aisle past me, past the Pruitts, past the Cobbs, past the preacher with his book shaking in his hand, straight up to the deacon's chair.

They stopped in front of Amos Kettering, toe to toe with his boots.

The water had risen to his ankles by then. It was coming up out of nowhere, out of the dry wood, and it was so cold the breath smoked out of him, and he looked down at those two small footprints in front of his own, and whatever he saw standing in them, the rest of us never did. I only know his face came apart like wet paper.

"I held her till she stopped," he said. Not loud. Not the singing voice. Just a man's voice, small and thin, the first true thing I ever heard come out of him. "I only held her till she stopped. She wouldn't stop talking--"

Then he heard what he'd said, in that room, in front of all of them, and he tried to run, and old Asa Haskell and two of the Cobb boys stood up out of their pews and put him down on the wet floor, and held him there until the high sheriff could be sent for from Batesville.

The water was gone by noon. The boards were bone dry. But there's a stain on that floor in front of where the deacon's chair used to sit, the shape of two small feet, and they've sanded it and painted it and put a rug down over it for sixty years, and it's there yet. You go look, when you go back down. Tell them Hettie sent you.

* * *

He hanged in the spring. I didn't go. They dug Sarah up, the first wife, while he was waiting on the circuit court, and the doctor from Batesville found what he found, and that was the end of the talking about it. The Kettering mill went to his brother in Little Rock, who sold it, and the new people were Baptists and never did anything worse than overcharge for meal.

My honey sold again that winter. Folks started sending for me again to lay out their dead, sheepish, bringing hams. I took the hams. I was not so proud as all that.

And I married Jonah Beal on Christmas Eve, which was the day Kettering had allowed I'd come round by, and I have always thought that was a fine joke on him. We were married fifty-nine years, until he went in his sleep a winter ago, and I laid him out myself and nobody said a word against it. He never did lose that stammer. He never needed to. Every time it mattered, every time in sixty years, he could say my name straight through.

Every All Hallows' Eve since, we set the silent supper. The two of us, and then the children, and then the grandchildren, backwards and without a word, the bread with too much salt. We set a place for each of us, and one for Lottie, and one for Sarah, whom I never knew but owed the same as I owed Lottie. They never came again. We set their plates anyhow. That's not what it's for anymore. It's to remember that there is a kind of quiet that keeps a woman safe and a kind that keeps her buried, and you had better learn the difference while you still have breath to speak.

So there. You asked who came to sit at my table, and I have told you. My husband came, and a dead girl came, and I came too, I suppose, for the first time in my life, all the way in and sitting down.

Now go on home before midnight. I've got a supper to set, and I'm slower at it than I was. It has to be done quiet.