The spring of 1867 came late to the mountains, and the mud on the wagon road off the old slate pike was deep enough to take a horse to the fetlock. Fenomore Hollow did not mean to be found. It sat at the end of that road, three crooked miles of it, crossing the west branch of the Fenomore Creek four times on four log bridges, until the trees thinned and the valley opened in the palm of a ridge that rose behind it to the north. There was a mill run by water off a stone dam, a store, a smithy, a schoolhouse, and a chapel with a white steeple that had never been struck by lightning in eight decades.

At the south end of the settlement, on a slight rise above the burying ground, stood the small house and the larger shop of the doll carver. That shop was the oldest building in the hollow, older than the chapel, older than the mill, older than the settlement itself. It sat empty when the first three families came down that road in the summer of 1798, a structure of squared logs with a good shake roof and a swept hearth, built by nobody. A woman named Hannah Prine wrote to a cousin that September, “We did not know what to make of it.

” Her husband said, “Well, someone means for a shop to be there. ” They let it stand. The first doll carver was a Halley cousin named Elen Halley, who moved into that shop in October of 1798. In December, the first death came: an infant of six weeks.

The older women of the party told Elen to carve a figure of the dead, life-sized, in black walnut, dressed in a white shift with a wide-brimmed hat pulled low over its wooden face, and to set it in a straight-backed chair at the head of the coffin for the three days of the wake. At the burying, the figure went down into the grave first, and the coffin was lowered on top of it, and the earth closed over the two of them. They called it the sitter. From 1798 to the spring of 1867, every person who died in Fenomore Hollow, 146 souls by the count of the doll carver’s ledger, was waked with a sitter and buried beneath one.

Nobody could say why it was done. The women who had brought the practice from the old place were dead before anyone thought to ask. It was simply what you did, the way you washed the body, the way you set the coffin on trestles under the front window. And in 70 years, the hollow had never lost anyone to what came next.

The doctor of the hollow was Josiah Cross. He was not a trained physician; he had read medicine for two years under an old doctor in Bellefonte and ridden out with him for two more, and he had come home in 1850 and put a sign on his door. He was the only man within a day’s ride who knew what to do for a broken bone or a childbed fever. He was 41 in the spring of 1867, tall and thin, a man who chewed the inside of his cheek when he read, who whistled a tuneless scale when he was thinking, and who kept a tin of hard peppermint candy in his desk drawer and took one every afternoon at four.

His wife was Emiline Cross, born Emiline Prine in 1833, the daughter of the storekeeper, a woman everyone called ordinary except for one thing: she could not stand for a thing to be out of its place. She would cross a room to move a candlestick two inches because she had seen it two inches off its wear mark. Her brother used to move things on purpose to watch her find them. She loved her husband more than anything in the hollow.

Josiah caught cold on the 9th of March, riding home in a wet snow after setting a boy’s hand at the Truit place. He was better by the 11th, worse by the 14th, in bed by the 18th, coughing blood by the 25th. He knew what it was, and she knew what it was, and neither said the word out loud, because saying a word does not change a lung. He died on the 12th of April 1867 at about four in the afternoon, in the bed by the west wall of their bedroom, with Emiline holding his left hand in both of hers.

His last complete sentence to her had been that morning: “M, do not sit at me. Sit by me. ” She moved her chair from the foot of the bed to the side. Near the end he whistled a scale under his breath, only three notes of it, then two, and then he was gone.

She did not scream. She was not the sort. She sat with his hand for twenty minutes, then washed her face, went out onto the front porch, and rang the small bell that hung by the door. The first person who came was old Rundle Mint, the doll carver, moving fast from the south end of the settlement.

He came into the house without knocking, went straight to the bedroom, and took Josiah’s measurements with a knotted cord he carried at his belt, from crown to sole, shoulder to shoulder, elbow to fingertip. When he was done, he put a hand on Emiline’s shoulder for exactly two seconds, and left without a word. The sitter was roughed out in black walnut within the hour, finished by the second sundown. The wake was held over the 13th, 14th, and 15th of April.

The sitter sat at the head of the coffin, wooden hands flat on its knees, hat pulled low. Emiline sat beside it and did not weep in front of anyone. On the morning of the 16th, six men carried the coffin down to the burying ground behind the chapel. Rundle Mint carried the sitter first, alone, and set it into the grave flat on its back.

The coffin was lowered onto it. The earth was closed. She went home to a house with a sound missing from it. She began a diary on the 17th of April.

Her first entry ends: “I have been thinking about the sitter under him. It is a foolish thing to think about. But I think about it. I think it is between him and something.

I do not know what. I am tired. ”

Twenty-two days later, on the 9th of May, she wrote in a shorter, colder hand: “The Halley girl was buried yesterday without a sitter. The reverend would not permit it.

Loretta Halley came to my door this morning and asked me to tell her whether stewed apples had a smell she could get out of a cupboard because there was a smell in her pantry that would not leave. Loretta Halley has never eaten a stewed apple in her life. She hates the smell of them. Prudence loved them.

I did not answer her. I went inside and I shut my door and I sat down and I put my hands over my face and I sat there a long time. Something is wrong. Something is very wrong.

I am going to walk down to Rundle Mint’s shop tomorrow at first light. ”

In those 22 days, a young man rode into the hollow on a bay mare. His name was Reverend Otway Bland. He was 29, ordained the summer before, given a circuit of nine settlements along the west branch and the upper reach of the Little Kettle.

Fenomore Hollow was the fourth stop. He arrived on the afternoon of Thursday the 25th of April, a sincere man, not a hypocrite, not a fool, not a bully. He had gone into the ministry because he genuinely believed the small mountain settlements needed plain gospel preaching, and he meant every word of it. On the morning of the 26th, sitting on the Halley front porch with the chapel elder, Silas Halley, he asked what the doll carver was for.

Silas told him the truth in about 90 words: when somebody died, the carver took the measurements and carved a life-sized figure in black walnut, and it sat at the head of the coffin for three days, and went into the ground under the coffin at the burying, and the hollow had done this since 1798, and it was a comfort. Reverend Bland set down his cup of coffee and asked, in the courteous voice of a man who did not want to give offense on his second morning in a new settlement: “Brother Halley, is that a Christian practice? ” Silas, who was 62, who had been the chapel elder for 11 years, who had never been asked that question by an ordained man in a black coat on his own front porch, was silent longer than he meant to be. Then he said, “It is our practice.

” Reverend Bland said, “That is not what I asked. ” That was the beginning. Reverend Bland spent the next four days visiting every household, and at every stop he asked whether the family kept the practice of the sitter, and every family said yes, and he asked whether they had considered whether it was scriptural, and one after another they told him it was their practice. On the evening of the 29th he wrote a four-page letter to the moderator of the Presbytery of Huntingdon.

“They carve a figure of the dead and sit it up at the wake and then they bury it under the coffin and they call it the sitter and they will tell you they have done it for 70 years and they will not tell you why,” he wrote. “Because they do not themselves know why. They only know that it is done. I intend gently to bring it to an end on this circuit.

” On Sunday the 1st of May he preached his first sermon, to 84 of the 91 souls in the hollow. He preached a good sermon on the resurrection of the dead, and near the end he came gently to the point. “The practice of the sitter is not a Christian practice,” he said. “The dead in Christ have no need of a wooden figure at their side.

From this day forward on this circuit, I will not preside at a burial where a sitter has been placed. ” He said it kindly, with warmth. Ninety-four people heard him, counting the reverend and his mare tied at the rail. A hush went over the chapel that he took for the hush of conviction.

It was not the hush of conviction. It was the hush of 91 people trying to think all at once of what to say to their reverend on his first Sunday. Nobody said anything about the sitter. At the back of the chapel, by the door, old Rundle Mint stood, and he walked home, and he took down a length of black walnut from the beam above his workbench, and laid his hand on it the way you lay a hand on the shoulder of an old dog you are about to have to put down, and he covered it with a piece of clean muslin, and he went to bed early, and he did not sleep.

Two days later, on Tuesday the 3rd of May, Prudence Halley, 22 years old, daughter of Silas and Loretta, went out at dawn to gather the eggs and collapsed in the yard with a fever that had come on her in the night. By four in the afternoon she was dead. The doll carver did not come. For 69 years, whenever a person died in that hollow, the first thing that happened was that Rundle Mint, or his father, or his grandfather, or Elen before that, heard about it inside of an hour, put on his coat, took the knotted cord off its peg, walked to the house of the dead, took the measurements, walked back, and began to carve, without ever being asked and without ever being paid.

On the afternoon of the 3rd of May, Rundle Mint did not put on his coat. Silas Halley, who had had six days to think about what his new reverend had said, and who had been raised to believe that when the reverend gave a word from the pulpit, it was the word he was to follow, sent his younger boy, Elias, running down to Rundle Mint’s shop with a message. Elias, who was 11, remembered 61 years later the exact expression on Rundle Mint’s face when he delivered it. “Mr.

Mint did not look surprised,” he wrote when he was 72. “That is what troubled me for the rest of my life. Mr. Mint looked at me on his doorstep as if I had brought him a piece of news he had been expecting to hear for a week and had hoped he would not hear.

” The boy said, “My paw says no sitter for Prudence. The reverend has said no. ” Rundle Mint nodded once and said, “Tell your paw I have heard him. ” And he shut the door, and Elias heard the bar go across the inside of it.

The bar on the inside of the door was a detail that meant nothing to an 11-year-old boy. It means something now. It meant something to Rundle Mint, who had something in a locked room at the back of his shop, and a book, and a knowledge that he had prayed his whole life he would never have to use. The wake for Prudence Halley was held over the 4th, 5th, and 6th of May.

There was no straight-backed chair at the head of the coffin. There was a small side table with a Bible and a candle and white violets in a china cup, because Reverend Bland had suggested that would be a fitting and Christian arrangement, and Loretta had done what her reverend suggested, because that is what a woman in a hollow does when her only daughter has died at 22. The whole hollow came, 89 souls in and out over three days. Each of them noticed the missing chair and the missing figure.

And each of them said nothing about it, because Silas was standing at the door and Loretta was sitting in the corner and the reverend was moving quietly through the rooms in his black coat, and nobody was going to be the one to say out loud in that house that something was wrong. Except one person. Emiline Cross came in on the afternoon of the 5th, in her black dress with her mother’s brooch pinned at the throat. She went straight to Loretta in the corner, took her hands, leaned close, and said in the plainest voice she could get out: “Loretta, where is the sitter?

” Loretta, a small woman with gray in her hair at 51 and red eyes from three days of not sleeping, said, “The Reverend said no. ” Emiline said, “Loretta, have him carve one anyway. Have Rundle carve one and put it in the barn. If the reverend will not have it in the parlor, have it under the coffin at the burying.

It does not matter what the reverend sees. Have a sitter for your girl. ” Loretta pulled her hands away gently and said, “The Reverend said no, M. ” Emiline understood in that moment that there was nothing she could say that would move Loretta, because Loretta had made up her mind that the reverend was a good man, and the reverend had said no.

Emiline squeezed her shoulder and walked home in the afternoon sun. She went into her own house and shut the door and sat down at her own kitchen table and put her head in her hands and said out loud to nobody: “Josiah, what am I supposed to do? ”

The burying was on the 7th of May at ten in the morning. Reverend Bland walked ahead of the pallbearers reading from First Corinthians, and there was no small carved figure walking ahead of them, and no chair set beside the grave, and the earth was closed over the coffin alone.

That evening the reverend wrote a second letter to the presbytery: “The practice of the sitter has been set aside in Fenomore Hollow. The good people of that settlement have received the word of the gospel gladly, and have laid down an old custom without resistance. It has been easier than I had feared. ” He was writing away from the hollow when he wrote that.

At the moment he set his pen to the paper, Loretta Halley was standing in her own pantry with a bowl of stewed apples on the shelf above her head, staring at it as though she had never seen apples before. She ate six of them, one after another, with a silver spoon. She walked out into the dooryard in the last of the light. She stood facing east toward the burying ground with her head tilted a little to the left, humming a low, steady, buzzing hum with no shape to it, and she was, in every particular except the body she was standing up in, 22 years old.

On the morning of the 8th of May, Loretta reached across the kitchen table for the sugar bowl with her left hand. Loretta Halley had been right-handed for 51 years. Prudence had been left-handed. Silas noticed.

He did not say anything, because a man in a hollow does not correct his wife about which hand she used to reach for the sugar, especially not on the first morning after they have buried their only girl. But he thought about that sugar bowl for the rest of his life. Forty-one years later, dying in 1908, he described it to a grand-nephew who wrote it down in the back of a Bible. “The sugar was on the wrong side of the table that morning,” Silas said.

“It was the first sign. I did not want to see it, and so I did not see it. She was right-handed her whole life. That morning she was not.

”

That same dawn, a mile and a quarter away, old Rundle Mint sat at his workbench in the pre-dawn dark with a candle burning down and a length of black walnut across his knees. He had been carving since the boy Elias had come and gone on the 3rd of May. He had worked through the wake and the burial and the night after. He had shaped a life-sized figure to measurements he had not been given but had: 40 years of measuring the young women of the Halley family had put them in his hands anyway.

By dawn on the 8th, the sitter for Prudence Halley was finished. He set it in the corner of the back room, dressed in a white shift, hat low over the wooden face, and said out loud in the empty room, “Girl, I am sorry I am late. ” Then he barred the door. At about seven in the morning came the first knock.

It was Loretta Halley. She had gone out to feed the chickens at dawn, and then she had walked the three-quarters of a mile to the south end of the settlement without knowing she was doing it, and she stood on the doorstep of the shop and said through the door in her own voice: “Rundle, I have come to see the girl. Bring her out. Bring her out.

” Rundle sat with his back to the door and did not answer. She knocked once more, three small knocks. Then she went silent, and he heard her breathing on the other side of the door. Then he heard her walk away up the settlement road, with her head tilted a little to the left.

Rundle Mint sat down in front of his workbench and put his face in his hands, because he understood what a village doctor and a village elder and a village reverend had not yet understood. The sitter is not for the dead. The sitter has never been for the dead. The sitter is for what comes to look at the dead.

And what comes to look at the dead does not go home hungry. If the sitter is not in the chair, what comes will take its meal from the closest kin of the dead, and it will take it slow. The knowledge of what the sitter was for had gone the way old knowledge goes: in a village where the thing you know keeps working, it becomes simply how it is done. Nobody had ever stopped.

Nobody except old Rundle Mint, who had the book. The book that Elen Halley had begun in the winter of 1798, that Rundle’s grandfather had carried forward from 1823, his father from 1841, and Rundle himself from 1854. It was bound in dark hide, with a line inside the front cover: “The sitter’s book kept for the settlement at Fenomore Hollow, begun by Elen Halley in the winter of 1798. ” And on the paste-down, in an old hand, were two more lines: “Do not remove this book from the shop.

Do not on any account take it into the burying ground. ” On the evening of the 10th of May, Emiline Cross walked down to Rundle Mint’s shop. She did not knock. She went around the side to the living quarters and wrapped on the window and said, “Rundle, it is Emiline Cross.

I have come to talk to you about the Halley girl. ” He took her arm, brought her into the shop, barred the door behind her, and took her into the back room, where the carved figure stood in the corner on its small platform. And he said, “Miss Emiline, I have been waiting for somebody to come to this door with the question you have brought me. I have something to give you, and it is going to change your life, and you can refuse it if you want to.

It is a book. ” He took a key off a cord around his neck, opened a locked chest under his workbench, and set a small book bound in dark hide on the table in front of her. He said, “The Reverend does not know what he has stopped. He is a good man, and he does not know.

The village has forgotten. The book will tell you. Read it tonight in your own house with the door barred and the shutters closed and one candle. Come back to me tomorrow morning and we will decide together what is to be done.

I cannot decide it alone. ”

She took the book inside her shawl and walked home, and on the way she passed Loretta Halley on the road, walking the other direction, head tilted to the left, humming with her mouth closed. Emiline went into her house, barred the door, closed the shutters, lit a candle, and opened the book. The first page of the book proper was in Elen Halley’s hand, written plainly, a set of instructions a village had by 1867 entirely forgotten.

“The older women of the party brought with them a practice from the place we had been,” Elen had written. “When a person dies in the settlement, a figure is to be carved of black walnut to the exact measurements of the dead and set in a straight-backed chair at the head of the coffin for the three days of the wake and buried under the coffin at the burying and no other way and never omitted. The reason is this, and I am setting it down as it was told to me. The older women say that at every death something comes to the wake to sit with the dead.

It is not the dead. It is older than the dead and older than the living. And it eats the shape of a person the way a moth eats the shape of a coat. It will sit with the dead for three days if there is something to sit with.

If there is not something to sit with, it will sit with the closest living kin, and the kin will not know it is being sat with. And over the course of some weeks, the kin will begin to be less kin and more a garment for the thing that has been sitting. The change begins with small habits and ends with the whole of the person, and the person cannot be got back once the change is complete. The figure is a decoy.

The figure is a garment for the thing to eat. After three days, when the coffin goes down, the thing goes down with the figure into the earth and is stopped up there because it will not come out of the earth once it has been closed in. The earth over the coffin holds it, and the settlement is safe until the next death. They say never to omit the figure.

And they say if you ever forget why, open this book and remember. Peace to whoever reads this after me. ” Signed Elen Halley, doll carver of Fenomore Hollow, the 7th day of January 1800. The rest of the book was a ledger: every death in the hollow from December 1798 forward, one line to a name, in whatever hand kept the book at the time.

The name, the date of the death, the date of the wake, the date of the burying, the measurements as taken by the knotted cord. And at the end of each line, a single mark, identical every time: a small cross with a horizontal bar across the top of it, like a lowercase T with a hat. She ran her finger down the list. There was the mark by every name.

There had never been a name in the book without it. She turned pages until she found Josiah’s name, Josiah Cross, 12th of April 1867, and the measurements, and the mark. She found her mother’s name, Alma Halley Prine, 3rd of February 1859, and the mark. She found her brother Perry’s name: “Perry Prine, killed at Chancellorsville in May of 1863.

Body not recovered, no sitter possible. ” And beside that entry, in Rundle Mint’s hand, in place of the mark, a small circle with a dot in the middle. She turned back through the ledger. She found 19 such entries.

Nineteen names over 69 years with the circle with a dot and no mark of the sitter. She counted them twice. She read Elen Halley’s instructions again, and when she got to the sentence, “The change begins with small habits and ends with the whole of the person,” she stopped, and she said out loud in the empty kitchen, “Oh. ” And then she said, “Oh no.

” And she thought about Loretta Halley reaching across the table for the sugar with the wrong hand, and Loretta humming with her mouth closed, and Loretta on the doorstep of Rundle Mint’s shop asking to see the girl. And Emiline Cross said in a voice she barely knew: “God have mercy, they have started. ”

She wrote in her diary that night, 11 pages, the longest entry in the whole book, in her own kitchen in the small hours of the 11th of May. She wrote: “Loretta Halley is the sitter now.

Loretta Halley is the chair. The thing has been feeding on us for as long as anybody remembers, and we have never seen it because we have always given it the figures. Rundle knew. Old Rundle Mint knew all along.

” And at the end, at three in the morning: “I will go to Granny Soel at first light. I will take the book. I will not walk down through the burying ground. I will go the long way up the ridge trail and around.

The book says not to bring it into the burying ground. I do not know why. I am not going to be the woman who finds out why. ” She lay down on the kitchen floor next to the stove with her shawl for a pillow and slept for two hours, because she could not bring herself to go into the bedroom where the bed she had shared with Josiah was.

She went up the ridge trail the long way, three miles instead of one, and came to the cabin of Granny Hester Soel. Granny Soel was 92, the last granddaughter of Verly Soel, one of the three older women who had come into the hollow in 1798. She had sat on her grandmother’s porch as a child and been told everything a Soel woman of the coming generation ought to know, including the practice. She opened the door at eight in the morning and said, “Come in, M.

I have been expecting you since Sunday last. ” Granny Soel knew why Emiline was there before Emiline said a word. They sat at the little pine table, and Emiline laid it all out: the reverend’s sermon, Prudence’s death without a sitter, Loretta with the wrong hand, Loretta humming, Loretta on the doorstep asking to see the girl, the 19 names with the circle with a dot. Granny Soel listened without interrupting.

Then she said, “All right, M, you have understood. Not many people would have. You are going to have to be the one who does this because I cannot get down the ridge in a hurry anymore, and Rundle cannot leave the shop because if he leaves the shop, even the ones he has made without orders will not be safe. You are going to be the one who moves.

” She told her three things, and told her once. First: do not go into the burying ground with the book, not for any reason. Second: when you go to a person who has started to change, do not speak the name of the dead one to that person, not once, because the naming fixes the transfer and the person you are trying to save will be gone by the end of the day. Third: if the change has started but not finished, there is one thing that can be done.

You take the sitter Rundle carved in secret and you take it to the house of the changing person, and you sit it in a chair in front of them, and you leave the two of them alone in a room for the full three days of the wake that should have been, and you keep the door shut, and you do not go in for any reason, and you do not speak the dead name, and you do not let the changing person out of the room. At the end of the three days, you take the sitter out and bury it face down on top of the coffin at the head of the grave. If you have done all of it right, the change will stop and the changing person will come back to themselves most of the way over the next year and remember none of it. If you have done any of it wrong, or if you have been more than 49 days late, the sitter will crack from top to bottom in the night, and it will sound like a rifle shot, and the changing person will scream once, and after that scream there will not be a person in that room anymore.

There will only be the thing. Then she gave her one piece of advice, because she was 92 and Emiline was 34 and there was nobody else to say it. “When you go to the changing person and shut them in the room with the sitter, if the changing person is somebody you love, do not stay in the house. Go to a neighbor’s, go to my cabin, go anywhere.

Because during those three days, the changing person will call to you through the door in a voice you love. It will call your name and ask you to come in and ask you to bring it food and ask you to just crack the door and look. If you love the person, you will open the door before you know you are opening it, and the whole thing will fail. Do not stay in the house.

” She said: “Now let us talk about Loretta Halley. Loretta is a week gone. Loretta is the chair now. And there is nothing you and I can do to stop what has begun in Loretta from beginning.

But the thing also nibbles. It nibbles on whoever was closest to the coffin at the wake. We have to move faster than that. ”

The plan was this.

The Halley house had a back parlor off the kitchen that Silas had built as his study and that Loretta disliked because it was on the north side and cold, a room with one door with an iron latch and one small high window of pebbled glass that did not open, a room that did not face the road or the yard or anything except the north woods. On the afternoon of the 13th of May, Emiline would go to the Halley house with a small bottle of laudanum from Josiah’s practice, give Loretta a dose in a cup of tea, help her walk to the back parlor, and sit her in the wing chair. Rundle would bring the sitter for Prudence from his shop in a covered farm wagon. Emiline would set the sitter in the chair opposite Loretta, close the door, drop the bar across it, lock the outside door with the key she would take from Loretta’s apron pocket, and walk up to Granny Soel’s cabin for three days.

Rundle would tell Silas that Loretta had been taken with fever and that Emiline had moved her to her own house, and that Silas was to stay at Rundle’s shop for the next three nights, and trust Rundle in this, because it was the practice of the hollow, and it was old, and it was necessary. Silas, a good man whose grief had already made him vague at the edges, would obey. After three days, Emiline would go in. If Loretta was sitting slumped in the chair, breathing, the sitter had done its work, and Emiline would carry it out to the burying ground at dawn and set it face down on Prudence’s coffin lid and close the earth over it.

“If she is in there and she is soft, do not say her name until you are outside in the yard with her in the light with the door shut behind you,” Granny said. “In the room she is between. In the yard she is back. Speak her name in the room and you will pull the wrong one out.

” And there was the question of the reverend. “When is his circuit due back? ” Emiline asked. “The 21st of May.

That gives us four days of margin. Four days is not enough margin for a man like that. But we cannot wait. He had better not come back early.

”

They moved on Monday the 13th. Emiline and Rundle drove the wagon down the settlement road slow, the way a farm wagon goes on a Monday morning, and nobody paid it any mind. They backed up to the Halley back porch. Loretta opened the door with a bowl of shelled peas in her left hand.

Emiline said she had brought something for the shakes she had seen at chapel, made the tea, measured three drops more of laudanum than a healthy woman would need for a night’s sleep but no more than that, because she wanted Loretta soft and did not want Loretta harmed, and added the sugar. Loretta drank it in slow sips. In twenty minutes she said, “M, I feel very tired all of a sudden. ” Emiline helped her to the back parlor and sat her in the wing chair.

Then she went out to the wagon, and the two of them lifted the carved figure down, heavier than she had expected, and carried it through the kitchen and down the short hall, and set it in the straight-backed chair opposite Loretta, wooden knees almost touching her black skirted knees, hands flat on its own knees, hat pulled low. Loretta was asleep with her chin on her chest. The room was very quiet. Emiline felt something in that room she had not felt in any room since Josiah had died, a feeling she could not name.

Then she stepped out, and Rundle set the iron bar into the brackets across the outside of the door. Emiline said she wanted to see it once more, just for a minute, to be sure she had done it right. Rundle said, “No, M. That is the whole point of the bar.

You do not go back in and you do not look. It has to be alone with her for three days without any watching eye. ” She locked the outside door with the key from Loretta’s apron pocket. They drove to Alsie Prine’s house, where Alsie opened the back door, and they carried a paper sitter into Cassie Prine’s bedroom: a small flat brown paper figure about 18 inches tall, cut roughly to the shape of a person, dressed in a scrap of the shroud left over from Prudence’s burial, pinned with three plain pins, set on the sill of the north window.

Emiline told Alsie to keep the door of the room shut, to burn the paper sitter to ash on the 30th of June, to bury the ash at the foot of Prudence’s grave, and to tell Cassie none of it, ever. Alsie said, “My mother told me a story about a book like that when I was 7 years old. If I ever saw it on my kitchen table, I was to hear whoever brought it and do what they said. Tell me what needs doing.

I will do it. ” Then Emiline walked up the ridge trail the long way to Granny Soel’s cabin. She ate cornbread and drank milk and lay down in the little back room and did not sleep at first, thinking about Loretta in the back parlor with a wooden figure three feet from her in the dim light, and a reverend on a bay mare somewhere between the Little Kettle valley and the head of the west branch. Then she slept, and she did not wake until dawn on the 14th.

Something began that would not stop for three days. The accounts of what happened in that parlor come from two sources: a marginal entry Rundle Mint made in the sitter’s book a week later, and Loretta Halley herself. Thirty-five years later, in 1902, dying of a heart complaint at 86, Loretta opened her eyes in a moment of extraordinary clarity and said to Emiline, sitting by her bed, “M, I remember it. I remember all of it.

I did not remember any of it for 35 years, and I remember it now. ” Emiline wrote it down. Loretta remembered waking in the wing chair and seeing the dark wooden figure across from her, and her first thought was, “They have brought Prudence to sit with me,” and her second, “That is not Prudence. That is only the sitter,” and her third, “Thank God they have brought the sitter.

I have been waiting for the sitter. ” She wept, and while she wept, the buzzing hum that had been in her mouth for six days went quiet, and she felt something in her chest that had been sitting warm and heavy shift and turn and get up and cross the space between her and the figure and settle into it. And the figure began to hum, a low buzzing hum with no tune, coming out of a wooden mouth that had no lips, and she did not scream because she understood without being told that the humming meant it was working. On the second day the figure’s wooden hands were no longer quite flat on its knees but were curling slightly, as though a person had begun to make a fist and had stopped in the middle, and its head was tilted a little to the left.

On the second night the humming stopped, and a small dry clicking came from the figure, the sound of a wooden jaw opening and closing a fraction of an inch at a time. She was frightened, and she said out loud, “Hush now. You are all right. You have three days.

Do your work and then you can rest. ” The clicking stopped. On the third day, so hungry and thirsty she began to think about calling out, she opened her mouth to call, and the figure across from her spoke. It said, “Mama, do not call.

I am almost done. ”

On the dawn of Thursday the 16th of May, Emiline came down the ridge with a lantern she did not need. She had not slept for three nights. She stood in the hall of the Halley house and heard nothing on the other side of the door, not humming, not a step, not a breath, a quiet that gave her nothing to read.

She lifted the bar and opened the door. The air was close and warm and had in it a smell like old sawdust and something under sawdust. Loretta was upright in the chair by the north wall, head against the tall back, eyes closed, hands in her lap palm up, chest moving. In the chair across from her sat the sitter.

It had shifted. Its left hand had curled in on itself. Its right hand was farther forward on the knee than it had been, as though it had begun to reach and thought better of it. The head was tilted a little to the left.

There was a hairline crack running from the corner of the wooden mouth up along the jaw and disappearing under the brim. The wood had given, but it had held. Emiline understood, without being told, that a thing had come into that room over three days and tried to open the seam of the wood and get out the other side, and the wood had bent to the very edge of what wood will bear, and it had not broken. She knelt beside Loretta, put her hand on her cheek.

It was warm. She got her up, one step and one step and one step, and did not turn her back on the sitter until the doorway was between them. In the hall, with the door shut and the bar back in the brackets and the sun in a stripe on the wall, she said, “Loretta. ” Loretta opened her eyes and looked at her and said in a voice that was hoarse and small and entirely her own: “Emiline, honey, I am so tired.

” That was the whole of the coming back. Rundle came up the lane at nine, without being sent for. Silas came up from his brother’s at ten. They took the sitter out wrapped head to foot in unbleached linen, because a sitter that has done its work must not be looked at by the living until it has been laid, because the face of it has learned a face, a face someone in the yard will love.

They carried it up to the burying ground, and Emiline dug at the head of Prudence Halley’s fresh grave, straight down, a hole about three feet deep. Rundle laid the sitter face down in the hole with the brim of the hat pressed into the raw dirt of the wall, and said quietly, “Over the hole, Prudence, this is your sitter. It sat for you. Take it under with you, and let it lie.

” Emiline filled the hole in and packed the dirt down with the flat of the spade, and said nothing at all, because Granny had told her that the burying is the carver speaking, and the kin who fills it in is the silence that seals it. They did not know, walking down from the burying ground, that Absalom Truit had died at dawn. They found out at the branch where his daughter-in-law Margery Truit stood with her apron up to her face, and a boy of nine sent to fetch the reverend. The boy told them: Absalom had gone in his sleep easy in his own bed, and his son Foster was trying to hold himself together, and Mr.

Bland had come back from Little Kettle the night before, one day early, because his horse had thrown a shoe, and Mr. Bland had already been up to the Truit house and had said the burying would be on Sunday, and the wake would be sat by the living, and no other thing would be brought into the room. Not the third time, not the twentieth time, not while he had breath. Emiline stood at the branch with the spade over her shoulder and the fresh dirt still on the back of her hand, and Rundle said the first word he had said out loud since the burying ground.

The word was, “No. ” She said, “I will go to him. ” Rundle said, “I will go with you. ” She said, “No, I will go alone.

If we both go, he will read it as a quarrel. If I go alone, he will read it as a widow. He will be careful with a widow. Careless is what I want.

” Rundle looked at her a long moment and nodded once and said, “If he lifts a hand—” She said, “He will not lift a hand. He will lift a book. That is worse. ” He said, “If he sees the sitter’s book, he cannot unsee it.

Once he knows, he knows. ” She said, “Rundle, he already knows. He has known since the 1st of May, when he stood in the pulpit and used the word idolatry, which is a word a man uses when he has looked at a thing and seen what it is and decided to call it something else so that he does not have to answer for what it is. ” She went up the road to the Truit house with the spade still over her shoulder and the dirt on the back of her hand.

The front room was full. Absalom was laid out on the long table with a cloth over the lower half of his face and his hands folded on his chest. Where the sitter should have sat, there was an empty straight-backed chair set at the head of the table. Emiline understood that the reverend had ordered the chair set on purpose, without anything in it, as a kind of answer.

He was not in the room when she came in. Margery said he had gone up to the parsonage to fetch his book. Emiline went and sat beside Foster Truit, who was 51, mild, tall, careful, the one in the Truit family who bent, who had built his quiet life inside the sheltering shape of his father’s refusal to bend. He said quietly, in a voice that was not shaking at all, which was worse: “Emiline, he did not want the sitter.

He said so in April. If I go before you and this preacher is still here, do not bring it into the room. My father was 91 years in this hollow, and he was a chapel elder for 40 of them, and he took the preacher’s part on the day the sitter was banned because he was tired. He was tired of the fight.

He wanted the last thing he did to be an agreement. ” And Emiline, looking at Foster’s profile in the light from the west window, saw a small thing that made her stomach turn over. His hair, which he had always combed the way his father combed his, straight back with a part on the left, was parted on the right. She had known him for 34 years.

It had not been parted on the right before. The reverend came back into the room carrying a book. He was 29, in a black frock coat too heavy for the weather and a white collar too tight for his neck. He nodded to Emiline.

She nodded back. She did not stand. He read from the Psalms, from Ecclesiastes, from First Corinthians about the sting and the victory. When he had finished, he said, “Brothers and sisters, we sit up with our dead in this hollow because we love them.

We do not sit up with our dead because we fear what walks in the dark. And a chair set for love does not need a body in it. ” There were a few soft amens around the room. Not many.

Emiline counted three. Two were from women who had come with the reverend from the Little Kettle circuit for the day. The Fenomore Hollow women did not amend him. Marjery Truit did not amend him.

Alsie Prime, who had come in during the reading and sat down on the other side of her without a word, did not amend him. He looked around the room, and Emiline could see that he had counted the amens too. Then he went out. He did not sit.

He said he had two other calls to make in the hollow. When the door closed behind him, Alsie leaned across Emiline’s lap toward Foster and said quietly, “Foster, honey, would you fetch Margery in here? ” When he was out of the room, Alsie looked at Emiline and said, “Lo, his part is on the wrong side. ” Emiline said, “I know.

” Alsie said, “And Cassie was humming this morning at the pump. Not with her mouth open. With her mouth closed. She has never hummed in her life.

My mother hummed. My mother has been dead 9 years. ” Emiline said, “Keep her at home tonight. Keep her at home tomorrow.

Rundle will bring a paper thing to you before dark. Set it on the sill of the north window. Do not touch it after you have set it. Do not tell her it is there.

Do the humming test at your own door every night for 49 nights. On the 50th day you burn it in the yard in a clean fire alone, and you take the ash to the head of Absalom’s grave and put it under the sod. You do not tell Foster. You do not tell Margery.

You do not tell your husband. Alsie, do you hear me? ” Alsie said, “I hear you. ” Emiline said, “And the second one is for Foster, and it is harder, and I will not do it tonight, because tonight we sit, and tonight we keep the shape the reverend has set.

Tonight is his night. Tomorrow is ours. ”

They sat through that afternoon and into the evening. At about eight, Margery Truit went home to her cabin on the far side of the pump, and Emiline walked her to the road.

At the road, Margery said in a thin, puzzled voice that was not quite her own: “Emiline, my hand feels warm. Both my hands feel warm. Is that not queer? ” Emiline said, “Margery, honey, go home and go to bed.

Do not stop at the pump. Do not stop at the chapel. Go the short way. Bar your door.

In the morning, I will come see you. ” Margery went. She walked with her left hand swinging at her side the way a hand swings that has never been crushed. And Emiline stood at the road and watched her go, and she noticed that Margery was reaching with her left hand, the hand that had been crushed under a wagon wheel in 1848 and had never straightened out again, the hand that had never held any weight since.

Emiline went back into the Truit house and sat at the head of the table on the near side of the empty chair, and she stayed there through the night, and she did the small thing Granny had told her to do at a sitterless wake if there was no other choice: she kept her own eyes on the empty chair, unblinking at every hour, and she said in her head, over and over, without moving her lips, “I see you. I see you. I see you. ” Because Granny had said, “If it must have an eye upon it, give it your eye.

Do not give it a chair. ” At some time in the deepest part of the dark, in the hour when the tallow was low in every candle and the two other watchers had gone into a heavy stillness, Emiline saw the empty chair tilt, not far, a quarter of an inch, as a chair settles when a weight comes onto it. And there was no sound, and no one there to have sat down. Emiline did not move her eyes.

She did not stop saying I see you in her head. After a long minute, the chair tilted back the other quarter inch and settled and was empty again. She sat that way until dawn. When the gray came in the east window, she stood up on legs that had gone numb, went out into the yard, was sick against the fence quietly into the grass, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, and walked down the road to Rundle Mint’s shop.

When he opened the door, she said, “Three of them. Foster. Margery. And I think Nell.

Start carving. ”

Rundle carved Foster’s sitter in 20 hours. He did not sleep. He drank water and did not eat.

Emiline sat on the bench in the back of the shop and watched the shavings come off the black walnut. At midnight on the 18th, they took Foster out of his father’s chair when he was drowsing, gave him laudanum in a cup of cider, carried him to the small bedroom on the north side of the Truit house, set the sitter across from the bed, and barred the door from the outside. They would come back at dawn on the 21st. At two in the morning on the 19th of May, Reverend Otway Bland came up the Truit lane on foot with a lantern in his hand.

He had heard from a Little Kettle man that a sitter had been buried on the head of Prudence Halley’s grave on the 16th. He had ridden up to the burying ground alone at dusk and found the disturbed dirt. He had understood that if a sitter had been buried, a sitter would be sitting, and he had come to put a stop to it. He went around the side of the house to the small bedroom on the north side, put his ear to the shutter, and stood that way for a long minute.

What he heard through the shutter was a low buzzing hum with no tune, then a small dry clicking, then a voice he knew, from inside the room, quietly: “Otway, honey, come in and pray with me. I am so cold. ” Otway Bland’s mother was Ruth Bland of Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, who had died in 1864 of consumption. She had called him honey all his life, and no other soul on earth had called him honey, and she had said in her last hour, in her bed in Huntingdon, “I am so cold.

” He stood at the shutter with his hand flat against it. And Emiline Cross, who had come down off the ridge the moment Granny had said, “He is going. He is going now. Run,” came up the Truit lane at a dead run in her nightdress and shawl, with the sitter’s book under her arm, and called sharp from the yard: “Otway Bland, step back from that shutter.

” He turned. His face was the color of tallow. She said, “Do not go in that room. Do not speak into that room.

Do not answer what is in that room. It is not your mother. Your mother is in Huntington in the ground. It is not your mother, Otway.

” He took his hand off the shutter and stepped back, and then sat down in the yard in the wet grass, with his lantern by his knee and his book in his lap. After a long moment he said, in a voice that was not the voice he had used in the pulpit on the 1st of May: “Emiline, it said my name. It said ‘honey. ’” She said, “Yes.

It learns. ” He said, “How long has it been in this hollow? ” She said, “Longer than the hollow. It was here when the first Soel came up the ridge in 1798.

The sitter has been sitting for it since 1798. That is what the sitter is. That is what your predecessor knew, and your predecessor before him, and every man who stood in that pulpit until you. ” He said quietly, “Why did no one tell me?

” She said, “Because you would not have heard it. You did not hear it in April. You will hear it now. That is the difference.

” At three in the morning, Otway Bland stood up. He said, “I will go to the parsonage. In the morning, I will write to the presbytery. I will not preach against the sitter again.

I will not preach for it. I will not stand in that pulpit again. ” She said, “Otway. ” He said, “I cannot stay here, Emiline.

I cannot stand in a pulpit and look out at a hollow that has a thing in it that says my mother’s name. I am not built for it. You are built for it. I am not.

” He rode out of Fenomore Hollow at dawn, and he never came back. The Presbytery of Huntingdon received his letter of resignation on the 9th of August 1867. He lived seven more years and preached no sermon in any pulpit in any state, and died of a fever in Ohio in the winter of 1874 in a boarding house. The woman who sat with him at the end said he asked in his last hour for someone to sit in the next room in a chair in the dark, so that he would not be alone but would not be spoken to.

He died at four in the morning. He did not speak her name. At dawn on the 21st of May, they unbarred the bedroom door of the Truit house. Foster Truit was asleep on the bed.

The sitter across from him had cracked along its jaw and along its right shoulder, and its left hand had come off at the wrist and was lying on the floor beside the chair. Foster’s hair was parted on the left, straight back, the way his father had combed his father’s. When they woke him, he said, “Emiline, honey, I had a bad dream, and I do not remember it, and I do not want to. ” They buried the sitter that afternoon, face down at the head of Absalom’s grave.

Rundle carried the broken hand in his coat pocket and put it in the hole with the rest. Margery Truit’s paper thing sat on the sill of her north window for 49 days. Cassie Prine’s did too. On the 30th of June, Alsie Prine burned Cassie’s paper sitter in a clean fire in her yard at dawn and carried the ash to Prudence Halley’s grave and put it under the sod at the head.

Cassie woke that morning right-handed again and asked her mother, from the kitchen doorway, “What was for breakfast? ” And Alsie sat down on the floor and cried for the first time since the 4th of May, and Cassie came and knelt beside her and did not know why. Alsie did not tell her, ever. Cassie lived to be 81 and never knew.

Loretta Halley lived another 35 years. She never quite came back the whole way. The small habits went. She did not hum with her mouth closed.

She did not tilt her head to the left. She reached with her right hand for the sugar, and for the door latch. And no one who did not know would ever have said she had been changed. But there was a way she had for the rest of her life of pausing for a beat and a half before she answered when anyone spoke her name, as though she were listening for a second voice to answer first, letting the second voice pass by, and then answering in her own.

She died in the winter of 1902 of pneumonia at the age of 86. On her last night she asked for Emiline. Emiline came from Bellefonte on the train and sat with her, and Loretta told her, in a hoarse voice, the story of what the sitter had said on the third day. Emiline wrote it down that night on the back of a letter.

Rundle Mint carved four more sitters between May of 1867 and his death on the 14th of March 1889. His apprentice was a boy named Paleleg Mint the Younger, who carried the practice through the 1890s. Paleleg’s son Verlin carried it through the 1910s. The last sitter carved in Fenomore Hollow was carved in the summer of 1938 by Rundle’s grand-nephew Merrule, for an old Halley cousin who died at 94.

There were nine people at the wake, and no preacher, because the chapel had closed in 1929 when the last of the six families with children moved out to Bellefonte for work. After 1938 the village had 11 souls, by 1951 it had four, by 1960 it had none, and the roofs began to go in, and the hollow closed itself up the way a hand closes over a coin. Emiline Cross lived in the Halley house until 1873, then went to Bellefonte to teach school, and taught there for 21 years, and never remarried. She kept, in every kitchen and every parlor of every room she rented, an empty straight-backed chair set at the head of every table she ate at.

Her landladies noticed, and no one ever asked her why, because there was something in the way she set the chair that told them the asking would not be welcome. She said once to her grand-niece Ruthie, who was nine and had asked: “Honey, that is for the sitter. ” Ruthie said, “What sitter? ” And Emiline said, “The one who watches the door for me.

” Ruthie thought no more of it until she was 48, reading her great-aunt’s diary in the attic of the Curtain Street house in the fall of 1961. Then she thought of it every day for the rest of her life. There was one more thing. In the summer of 1901, Emiline was 68, sitting on the porch of the Curtain Street house with her cousin Bailey Cross, her husband Josiah’s youngest brother’s boy, 30 years old, a printer who had come down from the hollow at 17.

Bailey was a talker. After supper, on the porch with the light going, he pushed his chair back and stood up to stretch, and began absent-mindedly to whistle. It was a tuneless scale, up four notes and down five. Emiline’s hand went very still on the arm of her chair.

Josiah Cross had whistled that scale, up four and down five, every evening after supper for the 16 years she had known him. She had not heard it in the mouth of any other living soul since he had died. She said quietly, “Bailey, honey, when did you start whistling that? ” Bailey said, “Whistling what?

” and stopped, and could not remember what he had been whistling, and laughed at himself, and sat down, and went on talking. She did not say a word about it. When Bailey went home, she wrote a letter to Merrule Mint and asked for a paper thing, cut small and dressed in a scrap, sent by post. It came in a plain brown wrapper on a Thursday.

She waited until Bailey came for Sunday supper, asked him casually whether he might like to sleep in the back bedroom because it was late for the walk home. He said yes. While he was helping her nephew move a table in the front room, she went into the back bedroom and set the paper thing on the sill of the north window behind the curtain, where he would not see it. He slept there.

In the morning he was cheerful. He did not whistle. Not that morning, not the next Sunday, not any Sunday after. She kept the paper thing on the sill for 49 days.

On the 50th day, at dawn in the yard behind the Curtain Street house, in a clean fire in a tin bucket, she burned it. She took the ash on the noon train to Fenomore Hollow, walked from the crossing up the road, four miles in the summer heat, went to the burying ground, to Josiah’s grave, which she had not visited in 11 years. She knelt at the head of it, scraped a small hole in the sod with a table knife she had brought in her handbag, poured the ash in, covered it, and pressed the sod down with the flat of her hand. She said out loud, “In the summer sun, Josiah, thank you for lending me the whistle.

Take it back now. I have brought it home. ” She walked down to the crossing and took the evening train back to Bellefonte, and she never went to Fenomore Hollow again. Bailey Cross lived to be 62 and died of a stroke in 1933 in Pittsburgh, and he never once, from that Sunday on, whistled his uncle’s scale.

Emiline Cross died on the 11th of November 1903, at the age of 70, in the front bedroom of the Curtain Street house in Bellefonte, of a bad heart, in her sleep, in a bed that had been turned to face the door, in a room in which a straight-backed chair had been set three feet from the foot of the bed, its seat empty, its wooden back to the window. The woman who sat up with her that night said Emiline had asked for the chair to be set that way, and for the door to be left open, and for a lamp to be left burning low in the hall, and had said quietly before she closed her eyes for the last time: “If it comes for me tonight, do not answer it in my name. Let the sitter answer. ” She died at three in the morning.

The chair, the woman said, did not move. Her diary was found in a trunk in the attic of the Curtain Street house in the fall of 1961 by her grand-niece Ruthie, clearing the house for sale. Ruthie read it in one sitting on the attic floor in the light of a single bulb. When she was done, she sat for a long time, and then she went downstairs, found the sitter’s book wrapped in oilcloth in the same trunk, and read that too.

In the morning she took both books to a historical society in Bellefonte. The woman at the desk said, “We have three others. Three others from three other hollows in three other counties in three other decades. All of them written by widows.

All of them written in a hand that steadied itself over a winter. ” There is a room in a basement in Bellefonte where those four books are kept in a wooden box on a shelf. The box has a lid. The lid has a small brass hasp.

The hasp is not locked. Any person who walks into that room may lift the lid and take the books out and read them, and no one will stop them, and no one will ask them why. And if in the dark tonight, when the house is settled and the lamps are out and the clock has struck the small hour, a voice you loved called your name from the hall, you would have to decide whether you would answer, or whether you would let the sitter answer.