Page 3 of She, Wolf, Him.

The wood will not say what took her.

1

THE LAYING-OUT

AGNÈS

The women of Saint-Élie prepare the dead. It is women's work, like everything else that must be done and must not be spoken of.

— FOLK SAYING, THE MARGERIDE

They bring the shepherd down at first light, what the dawn left of him, and lay him in the church because there's nowhere else cold enough for the work in late summer. I'm there before the bell stops ringing. I'm always there before the bell stops. It's the one task this village asks of me that I'm good at, and I've learned to take what little I'm good at where I find it.

The church sits above the square, as if stone and God both need the rest of us beneath them. Below its door the cottages fall away toward the one road out, low roofs, goat pens gone quiet, smoke, and the valley pressing beyond them. Shutters stand half-drawn though the morning is warm. Anyone brought here has already been carried past every door that will talk of it by noon.

Margot comes with me. She doesn't have to. The laying-out belongs to me and the two old ones, Berthe and the other whose name I can never hold in my head, and Margot has her father's house to mind. She comes anyway. She always comes anyway. She stands close, and that's the first brightness I let myself notice. She's a head shorter than me, sturdy where I'm all elbows and narrow wrists, her brown hair already working loose of its knot while mine stays pinned hard under the kerchief. Her face gives everything away. Mine learned the opposite trick young, to give back nothing. She's the one who looks anyway.

The cold comes up through the soles of my clogs from the granite, the deep stone-cold this church keeps even in August, and works into my knees and the small of my back to stay there till dark. After enough years, I barely notice.

Under the linen there isn't enough of him left to pass for a man. I won't say what the Beast leaves. You've heard, or you haven't, and either way the words don't help. We wash what there is to wash, straighten what will go straight, fold the cloth back over the rest so his wife can stand at the table later and tell herself a kinder story. Berthe makes the sign of the cross, her black shawl pulled tight at her throat, and won't put her reddened hands past his collar. I put mine where they're needed. I've done this since I was fourteen, long enough that I don't flinch any more.

Berthe watches my hands do what hers won't. "You've always had the right hands for the dead," she says, low, not unkind. "Even back." She catches herself, crosses herself, goes back to her praying.

He used to carry me up to see the new lambs, this man, when I was small enough to ride a shoulder. I hold that and I do the work. Both at once.

You learn how.

I grieve him. I keep my hands steady because the whole room watches to see whether I'll flinch. It doesn't help the dead. It frightens the living, and a frightened village is a cruel one, so I wash my shepherd, keep my face shut, and give them nothing they can use. They call that strength, though it's only practice.

Margot works the far side, quick and gentle, humming low under her breath until she catches herself doing it over a dead man and stops. "Forgive me," she breathes, to him. Her hands are better than mine at the careful parts, the closing of the eyes, the folding of fingers that want to fall open.

"Give me the eyes," she says, soft, under the sound of the bell. "You take the jaw."

"His poor face," she says, quiet, over him, when the eyes are shut. "Étienne. He gave me a ribbon once, at the fête, when I was small. A red one."

Reaching across him for the cloth, her fingers find the back of my wrist and stay a breath longer than the reaching needs. I don't lift my head. Ma mie. The old foolish name rises on its own, the same as it always does when she's near. It's no word for a friend, that one, and I've known as much longer than I've let myself. I've never said it aloud and never will. I tuck it away with the rest and reach her the cloth.

Father Reynaud prays at the altar the whole while, thin and upright in his black, the Latin running on like water over rocks, and he studies us at work. His eye is on me. He's measured me in Mass since I was a girl, the same flat patience a cat gives a doorway. His face is all hollows, the skin drawn dry and sallow over the bone. Nothing in it moves but the eyes. I resent how quickly he makes me careful. When I glance up, he's waiting, his mouth still making the holy words without a pause.

Outside, the shepherd's wife is keening, that high thin sound a woman makes when the grief won't fit through her mouth. Words come loose out of it now and then. "Forty winters he had that flock," she says, to no one, to all of us. "Forty winters."

Under it the men talk low and angry, which is what men do when they're frightened and would rather sound brave. "It was always other valleys," one says. "Carried up with the salt, they said, and gone out again with it." "It's ours now," another answers. No one says the rest of it. The rest of it is in here under the linen.

When I carry the soiled water out to pour off, Pétronille is at the corner of the churchyard wall, leaning on her stick, her white hair loose of its scarf and her knuckles stained green from the herbs she grows where the village won't have them. No one stands near her. No one ever does. She lives at the edge of everything and the village likes her there, near enough to fetch when the fever comes, far enough to blame when it doesn't lift. I've seen a bad winter turn that blame ugly, the fouled well, the talk that stops just short of naming what they think she is. The others fear her. I don't. She knows it. We give each other the bare nod allowed to women no one quite trusts, then Berthe calls me back in.

We finish. I wash my hands in the cold water until they're raw and the smell is mostly gone. It's never all gone. It lives under my nails a day after, tallow and iron, the lye trying to cover both.

Reynaud lifts his hand over the table and says the words that send the shepherd on. "Go home and pray for him," he says when it's done, to the room and not to us. Like servants, which is what we are.

At the door the marguillier counts the parish's coin into Berthe's palm, a few deniers, his eyes on the coins and never on what we just washed. "Three ways, as ever," he says. What the church reckons fair for work none of its men will touch. Berthe tucks the coins away. "Fair would be a man's wages," she says, so low only I hear it, and then looks to see whether the Father heard it too. "Hush," she tells herself, or me, and crosses herself at her own boldness. I take my share. It buys salt. I walk out into a morning so bright it hurts.

The square is too full and too loud after the dark of the church. The whole hamlet's turned out, as it does for a death, everyone needing to stand near everyone else and call it grieving when it's mostly fear wanting company.

Reynaud comes out behind us and the talk dies. He doesn't raise his voice. He never has to. He tells us that the Beast is a scourge and a scourge is God's wrath, that it doesn't come to villages that haven't earned it, that we're each to search our hearts for the sin that called it down and repent before it comes again. He says it like all his judgments, settled above us before we're told. Heads bow all around me. Some of them are already weeping.

"God keep the rest of us," a woman near me says, to no one. Behind me, a man's voice. "It took Étienne off his own pasture, an hour from his own door. What chance has a man in his bed." "They say it came over the col at Rimeize," another answers. "That's what I heard."

Near the church door two women hold the widow up between them. "She hasn't eaten since they brought him down," one says. "Nor slept, I'll warrant. Who'd sleep, with it still up there on the high ground." "She's to sleep at her sister's," the other says. "She can't be left in that house alone tonight. I'd not sleep a night alone there ever again."