The mountain did not take Harlan Petrie all at once. It took his voice first, then his attention, then his will to be anywhere else at all. For a month after he accepted that jar from a man who had gotten it from someone higher up the branch, he had been the best company Six Mile had known in years, loud and warm, his laughter easy and unforced. Then the thing in him turned over like a stone rolling in a streambed, and he went quiet.

That was the word the old ones used when they finally agreed to talk. Quiet. He let the fire die in his shop. He stood at his open door, his large careful hands hanging empty at his sides, looking up the branch toward the hollow.

If you spoke to him, a long moment passed before he came back from wherever he had gone, and his answer was short. On a gray early-spring morning, before the light was complete, his wife woke to a cold place beside her and an open door. Harlan Petrie had gone up the branch barefoot. His good shoes still stood neatly beside the bed where he had left them the night before.

They searched. Men who feared nothing formed a party and went as far as the marked trees and no farther, because the dogs would not go beyond them and in the end neither would the men. The county wrote, when it wrote anything at all, that Harlan Petrie had abandoned his family and gone west, which men sometimes do, and everyone who knew him understood it for a lie the size of the mountain itself. The man who ran the still up there, the name the people of Six Mile gave him, because his real name was taken from the records and no one would claim to know it, was called Absalom Creel.

No one knew where he had come from. No one remembered a time before his arrival, which is a strange thing to say of a man and stranger the longer you hold it. The oldest woman in town, a person I will come back to, told me that her grandmother had spoken of Creel in that hollow as a grown man, which would have put him past a hundred years old in 1924. He did not look it.

They said he looked like a tall tree trunk that lightning had struck and that had gone on living out of stubbornness. Tall, gray as barn wood. His hands were enormous for the rest of his body and never still, always working on something invisible. His eyes held no shine at all, none of the glint of life, only depth and cold air rising.

He owned the finest still anyone in three counties had ever seen, made entirely of gleaming copper, and he ran it day and night, and its smoke rose straight up even in the strongest wind, which smoke rarely does. In October of 1924 the government sent a man named Odell Renfrow into that country. He was forty-three, a revenue agent out of the Louisville office. If you had built a man for that job from nothing but its requirements, you would have produced something close to him.

Tall and lean as rope, hard and unyielding. He walked with a limp in his left leg from a horse that had fallen on him years before, and he had learned to hide it so well that a watcher crossing a room would not notice it until Renfrow had already noticed him. His face was long and dark brown, his features fixed and unrevealing. His hands were stained dark at the knuckles from gun oil and cheap tobacco, and a white scar ran across the back of his right hand that he never explained to anyone.

The vow he had made, I know from an old file, because he told no one. At the grave of the man who raised him he had promised he would never drink as long as he lived. He had kept it for twenty years the way other men keep their religion, joylessly and without exception, and he had built on it a character of pure, hard certainty. He did not drink.

That was what they said of him in Louisville, half admiration, half unease. A revenue man who refused to touch what he was paid to pour out. He once said a man who drinks can be bought for what he wants, but a man who wants nothing can never be bought at all. He had shut down more stills than any two agents in the state.

He had put hard men before judges and watched them leave without it troubling him once. He was, by everything I could learn, precisely the wrong man to send into a mountain that fed on the certainty of men. He was not the first the government had sent to that branch, though they did not tell him so in Louisville, or if they did they were wrong to. I found the names later in a ledger in a city office where the pages had not been cut.

Two men preceded him. The first was a younger agent named Cletus Yardley, sent in the spring of 1922, who came back after three days and wrote a report so short and strange that his own office did not know how to read it. One line about finding no still and no man, a strong request for reassignment, and he left the service within the year. The records note he was of little use afterward, sitting, as the only man who remembered him said, with his hands open in his lap.

The second was a seasoned agent named Ambrose Tolliver, who went up in the autumn of 1923 and never came back. His disappearance was written down as a man who took a bribe and fled south, because that was easier to record than the truth, and because the disappearance of a revenue man in a hollow was something no office wished to admit it could not explain. So Renfrow was the third, though he did not know it. I have wondered more than I would like whether the men in the Louisville office knew exactly what they were feeding into that branch and sent him anyway because he was the best they had, and because the mountain had become a stain on their records that no polished word in a ledger could quite cover.

He took the train as far as it went, then a mule for the rest, and reached Six Mile on a gray afternoon when the leaves had fallen and begun rotting in the ditches. The town received him the way such towns receive all revenue men, which is to say it did not receive him at all. Doors that had been open closed slowly. A man cutting wood set down his ax and watched Renfrow pass, and did not pick it up again until he was gone.

There was a store with a porch, and on the porch three old men stopped talking when his mule reached the level of the steps and did not resume. Renfrow was used to it. The silence did not trouble him. He had learned to read a town through the particular flavor of its quiet, and what he read in the main street of Six Mile that first evening was not the sullen silence of people hiding an ordinary crime.

It was closer to the quiet of a house where someone lies sick in the back room and everyone in the front room lowers their voices rather than stop and ask the question. He rented a room above the store from a widow named Dosha Pangle, perhaps sixty, hard as rock, who told him plainly, still holding the money he had paid her, that if he had come from that low place he could turn his mule around in the morning and spare them both the trouble of a burial. He asked her, burial of whom? She said, of him.

Then she did not say another word except about the price of a meal. He got one man to talk that first evening, or close to it. On the store porch, with the light out, sat an old blacksmith named Otis Culpepper, near seventy, who had handed his shop to his sister’s son and now spent his days on a cane chair watching the road for something that never came. Culpepper did not fear Renfrow the way the younger men did.

He had reached an age where he had nothing left to lose. When Renfrow sat down beside him uninvited, silent, only waiting, Culpepper filled the silence the way old men do. He said the government had a bad habit of treating something as unreal merely because it could not be caught. He said he had been shooting horses for sixty years and had learned to trust the judgment of animals over the judgment of men every time the question was safety, and that there was not a horse or mule or hound in the whole county that would go past the marked trees.

A man who thought himself smarter than every animal in three counties was welcome to go up and find out how smart he was. Then he said what Renfrow would remember on the summit, what would complete everything Creel would tell him later. He said the hollow had never once taken a man who did not go up on his own feet. It cannot compel you to come, he said.

It only makes you willing. There is a vast difference between something that pulls you and something that waits for you to come to it, because the first kind you can resist, and the second kind wears your own face. That night Renfrow lay in the widow Pangle’s spare room and listened to the mountain. He was not an imaginative man.

I want to be fair to him, because everything that follows makes him look like a fool who walked in with his eyes shut. He was never that. He lay there and listened. What he heard was the ordinary night noise of a mountain settling, the last chirp of a cricket, an owl, a branch moving somewhere below.

He was a man who could sleep anywhere, in barns, in jail cells, in the beds of people who wished him dead, and he had never lost a night to fear, because fear was something other men carried and he had simply chosen not to. But he stayed awake in the widow Pangle’s spare room a long time that first night. When he finally considered why, it troubled him more than the reason itself would have. It was not the mountain that frightened him.

It was part of him, a part he did not recognize and could not account for, listening to that slow breathing the way one listens to a voice one had been missing. He leaned toward it, and it leaned toward him. Under everything, low enough that he sat up twice certain he had imagined it, a sound like a slow deep breathing. Not wind.

Wind rises and falls and reveals its shape. This kept its rhythm, in and out, in and out, patient as a wave, coming with complete confidence from the head of the hollow. In the morning he went looking for someone to talk to. It was the widow who finally sent him, though I do not think she meant to help him.

She meant to be rid of him. She said that if he was fool enough to go up there, he should at least stop first at the last cabin on the branch and speak to Verlie Sezimore, who had lived at the foot of Sorrel Hollow longer than anyone else and was the only living person the widow knew who had gone up and come back able to tell of it. So Renfrow rode the branch road that narrowed as it rose until it was barely a road at all, two ruts and a crown of dead grass. At its end, where the walls of the hollow began to lean over the water, he found a low gray cabin with smoke going off sideways with the wind, and an old woman sitting on the step with a shotgun across her knees as another woman might hold a cat.

Verlie Sezimore was sixty-eight that autumn, looked older, and moved like a young woman, which is the way of mountain women who have outlived everything that was supposed to kill them. Her face was folded like a paper kept in a pocket for forty years. She watched him dismount, watched how his left leg touched the ground, and said, before he spoke a word of introduction, that the mountain would love him because he walked as though something had once been torn out of him and he had learned to keep going. That kind, she said, stays longest.

Renfrow told her his name and his work. He was polite. He was always polite, which troubled people more than rudeness ever had. He said he had come to find the still in Sorrel Hollow and shut it down, and to bring the man who ran it to account, and he asked her plainly whether she would tell him what she knew.

She was silent a moment, then set the shotgun aside, which he took for a good omen, though it was not. She told him to sit. Then she told him what she knew, and I will give it to you almost as she gave it to him, because it is the closest thing to a warning anyone in this story received, and because Renfrow took none of it. She said the hollow was older than the town and older than the people in it, and that the man called Creel was not its master but its mouth.

She said her grandmother had carried water to that cabin in a time long past and had seen Creel then, grown and gray-haired, and that Creel had not aged a single day between her grandmother’s time and Verlie’s own. That was because Creel was not subject to time the way men are. She told him something her grandmother had been told by the people who had lived in that country before all of them, before the town, before the church, before the first tree was cut with an ax. They had a name for the hollow that Creel never spoke, and they did not go up it, not to hunt, not for water, not for anything.

They were the ones who had put the marks on the trees first, those first white marks, carved to keep their own people from wandering in. The marks Creel kept fresh now were only the old ones preserved fresh, turned from a fence into bait by what Creel had become. She said the spring at the head of the hollow ran cold and clear and had never gone dry in any drought any living person could remember. That was not a blessing.

Water that does not fail in a place where everything else fails is water better left undrunk, because something pays for its continuing, and it does not pay with rain. She said the still was real, and the liquor was real, and that was the trick of it, because a man will believe in the still when he will not believe in anything else. So the still opened the mountain a door that men walked through of their own accord. The liquor was the bait, she said, and the emptiness was the trap, and Creel was only the hand that set it.

She leaned toward him and put her dry finger on the scarred back of his right hand. The mountain does not take a man all at once, she said, because a man taken all at once would be missed and searched for, and might be found. It takes him piece by piece. First it takes his thirst and gives it back to him changed, so that nothing quenches it but what comes out of that copper.

Then it takes his talk. Then it takes his wish to be anywhere else but there. And when it has taken the last of him, he walks up the branch to meet it, gladly, hat in hand. The hardest part, the part that had kept her awake at the foot of that hollow most of her life, was that the men did not suffer, or did not seem to.

Not at the end. Something that dragged people upward screaming she thought she could bear living beside. But those who went up past her cabin in the last light did so freely. Some went smiling.

She had learned over the years not to call out to them, because calling did no good at all, and because she could not bear the way they turned and looked at her when she did. With a kind of gentle pity. As though she were the one who had lost her way, and they the ones who had finally found the road home. She told Renfrow three things and made him repeat them back to her.

Never drink anything that had been in that hollow. Not water, not liquor, not even a sip from a stranger’s dipper. Never go past the marked trees, and he would know them when he saw them, because they were marked in white in a way that was wrong. And never let Absalom Creel hand him the cup himself, no matter what he did, because the mountain takes only what is given, and Creel’s whole art, the art of a hundred years or more, was in persuading men to drink the cup themselves.

The mountain keeps what it is given, she said, and it had never once been given anything it wanted. Renfrow thanked her. I believe he was sincere, as sincere as he was about anything. Then he did what men like Renfrow do, the thing that had made him the best in the state and that was about to make him something else entirely.

He filed it away. He took everything that old woman had told him, every true and terrible word of it, and put it in that part of his mind where he kept the stories that frightened people into cooperation. He thanked her for her cooperation, then went back to his mule and rode past the marked trees into Sorrel Hollow, because he did not believe her, and because his job was not to believe her. The trail past the marked trees was worse than a trail and better than nothing.

Renfrow went up slowly, reading the ground the way he read a room. The white marks were the first thing he saw. Verlie had said he would know them when he saw them, and he did. They were cut into the bark at the height of a man’s face, not the slanted blaze a timberman makes, but like an open hand, five white lines, and the sap that had run from them was dark, almost black, and smelled like no sap he knew.

His mule would not pass the first of them. It planted its feet and blew and rolled its eyes until they showed white, and no persuasion would move it, and in the end Renfrow did the practical thing. He tied it to a laurel below the line of trees and went on foot. Hold onto that mule, because it was the last living creature in this story to show good judgment, and it was the only one to make it home.

On foot, the hollow closed around him. Its walls rose sheer on both sides, all gray rock and hanging roots, and the light came in faint and green, the color of light coming through pond water, and the branch ran beside the trail whispering to itself in a low voice. Renfrow noticed himself leaning toward it the way one leans toward a conversation in the next room. Then came the cold.

He had climbed many cold hollows in his life and knew the ordinary cold of stone and shade. This was not that. The cold came in a straight line, a hard edge he stepped across the way one steps over the threshold of an icehouse, warm behind and cold ahead and nothing between. When he looked at his breath it hung in the air longer than it should and drifted upward against the slope of the water.

Under everything, closer now, was that slow breathing he had heard in the widow’s room, in and out. He felt it now as much as heard it, a pressure coming and going on his eardrums, and he understood in some part of him that had nothing to do with belief that he was walking inside the chest of whatever made that sound. He counted things as he walked, because counting was what he did when the rest of his body wanted to turn back. The birds had stopped.

That was one. He had not noticed the moment they stopped, only that at some point in the climb the forest had gone silent except for the branch and the breathing. No crow, no jay, not even the faint rustle of a living thing in the leaves, as though the hollow no longer held any creature that could rise and leave when it chose. The trees had changed.

That was another. Below the marked line they were ordinary hardwoods, oak and poplar and walnut, gone gold and brown with the season. Above it they were bare, every one of them bare and gray and wet-looking though no rain had fallen, and they leaned, all of them, slightly uphill toward the head of the hollow the way grass leans toward light. And the light itself, that green shimmering light, came from no sky he could find when he looked up.

When he looked up he saw only the tilt of the gray trees and a paleness behind them that was not the sun and did not move as the sun moves. He found the first pair of shoes at about a mile. They were set beside the trail, side by side, neatly, the way a tired man sets his boots at the foot of his bed. A good pair, hardly worn, laces still tied, and no man anywhere near them.

A little later a hat hung on a tree trunk at the height a head ought to be. Then more shoes. One good coat folded over a rock with its arms folded beneath it, as though the man who folded it meant to come back at once. There was no violence in any of it.

That was the horror of it. Renfrow, who had seen much violence and made his peace with it, felt the first true crack in his composure there, standing among the neat patient belongings of men who had removed their gear like guests at a door and gone ahead barefoot, gladly, hats in hand. He counted the shoes. He was a careful man, and care was a habit.

He counted nineteen pairs before he forced himself to stop, and there were more along the trail ahead out of sight. I will leave that number to sit with you the way it sat with him. Nineteen men at least, and the law had written them down as lost. He made himself look closely at the arrangement, because looking closely at something terrible was one of the ways he kept his feet under him.

The shoes were not thrown down, not scattered. Every pair was set in order, toes touching the trail, the way a careful man sets his boots where he can find them in the dark, and every hat was hung at head height, and every coat was folded, and there was a tenderness in it heavier than any violence could have been, because violence is at least something done to a man, and this was something each of them had clearly done to himself, quietly and gladly, shedding the last of the world he wished to leave the way a man throws off a heavy coat at the end of a long cold walk when he finally reaches a lit window and a warm room. That was the word that came to Renfrow standing there, and he did not like that it came to him. Welcome.

Every neat pair of boots on that trail had belonged to a man who felt, at the end, welcomed. He continued upward past the shoes. He had made his decision by then, and it was the decision of a practical man in an impractical place, the most dangerous decision there is. He decided that a clever and patient criminal had built himself a legend out of superstition and mountain cold and the ordinary disappearances of men in debt or fleeing their wives, and that he would find him at the head of this hollow at a copper still, and that he would arrest him or bury him, and that the legend would come apart in his hands the way everything else had.

He was partly right. There was a man at the top. The hollow ended in a kind of bowl, a flat place where the branch came out of the ground clear and hard and cold from a spring. Around that spring was the still, and it was everything they had said it was.

Copper, gleaming, tall as a man and taller. A worm coiling down through a barrel of that spring water, and a low fire beneath it that gave off no smoke Renfrow could see, though the smell of the liquor was thick as a wall, sweet and grainy at first, and beneath that something else, something like the smell of a still pool with a scum over it, and beneath that a faint ancient smell he knew and could not name until much later, and I will not name it for you here because you do not need it in your dreams tonight. Beside the low fire stood Absalom Creel. He was exactly as they had described him, and worse for being real.

Tall to excess, his hair and skin and clothes all gray, as though the color had been drawn out of them into the ground. His hands were huge and never still. When he looked at Renfrow, his eyes were what the old woman had tried to warn him of and could not, because no warning can carry it, the mere fact of looking into a face and finding no person behind it, only depth, only cold air rising from a place with no bottom. They stood a moment, both of them, on either side of that low fire.

Renfrow did what he had done in a hundred rooms with a hundred hard men. He stayed silent and let the silence do its work, because silence, in his long experience, had always belonged to him. It did not belong to him here. Creel let it stretch with a patience that made Renfrow’s seasoned patience look like a child fidgeting in a church pew.

When Creel finally spoke, it was not to answer any question, because Renfrow had asked none. It was to observe, gently, as one comments on the weather, that Renfrow had come up the hollow faster than most and had not stopped at any pair of shoes to wonder whose they were. That told him something worth knowing. It told him Renfrow was a man who had gone his whole life without stopping, without asking, without wanting.

A man who had made himself into a hard smooth stone that nothing in the world could get a grip on. Creel said he loved that kind of man. The weak ones, the thirsty ones, the ones who came up the branch already half gone, they were easy and boring. He had taken so many of them that they had long since lost any meaning for him.

But a hard man, a man who had refused his own desire for twenty years, who had banked his wanting down to an ember and buried it deep and walked for two decades pretending the fire was out. Creel said that was worth waiting for, because a fire never goes out. A man who has taught himself to forget his thirst is the thirstiest man alive. There was no surprise in Creel.

That was the first thing to reach Renfrow through the practical armor he had worn down the mountain. Creel looked at him the way a man looks at a letter he has been expecting. He said in a voice like two stones settling against each other that he had wondered what letter they would send this time, and he was glad, on the whole, that it was a man with a limp, because the mountain, he said, favored those who had given up a piece of themselves and gone on. Renfrow gave his name and his office and told Creel he was under arrest.

Creel smiled, if it could be called that, and went on with his work. His work was this: he took down from a shelf a vessel of the prepared liquor, clear as spring water and brighter, holding the green light of the pool and keeping it, and poured a measure of it into a metal cup. He held the cup out across the fire toward Renfrow, arm extended, in that huge gray unquiet hand. And he said what I believe to be the truest thing said in this whole account, the reason I have carried it with me this long.

I do not take, he said. Understand me. I have never taken one. The mountain keeps what it is given, and what is given cannot be stolen.

So I do not steal. I pour. That is my trade, revenue man. I pour and I hold out the cup and I wait.

Everyone whose steps I counted coming up to my floor reached out and took the cup from my hand of his own free will, thirsty and glad and grateful to me for what I offered. I have all the time there is. I can hold a cup out to a man across a fire for a night or a week or the rest of his life, and it costs me nothing, because I am only the hand. The wanting is yours.

It was always yours. I only hold the cup. And he held it there. Here is the thing I want you to consider closely, because it is the center of this night.

Odell Renfrow did not want that liquor. Renfrow had not wanted a drink of anything in twenty years. He had built his entire self, his reputation, his safety, his pure hard pride, on a single foundation: that he was a man who wanted nothing that was offered to him. And he stood in that cold bowl at the head of Sorrel Hollow, surrounded by the breathing of the mountain, in and out, in and out, patient as the tide, and he felt a thirst rise up in him from a place he had spent two decades burying.

Not a thirst for whiskey. A thirst for the cup. For the taking of it. For the simple animal relief of reaching out that stained scarred hand and closing it around the one thing in the world being offered to him freely.

In a life where he had made a religion of refusing everything offered. The mountain had not needed to know he was a drinking man. All it needed to know was that he was a man, and that somewhere under the brick there was a thirst, because there always is. In every one of us.

That was the part the old woman knew and could not say, and the part Creel said plainly across the fire. The wanting is yours. It was always yours. Renfrow raised his hand.

I want to be honest with you, because he was honest in the end, in the one account he ever gave, and honesty is the least I owe him. His hand rose of its own accord, his scarred right hand, and crossed half the distance to that metal cup before he knew it had moved. The fingers opened. The pale face of Absalom Creel did not change at all, because Creel had watched this same scene play out at least nineteen times, and perhaps many more.

There was no triumph in him, only the patience of the hand that holds the cup. What saved Odell Renfrow, if saved is the word, and I am not sure it is, was the mule. Down at the bottom of the hollow, below the line of marked trees, the mule he had tied to the laurel, the last sensible living creature in this story, threw its head back and screamed. You have never heard a mule scream.

I pray you never do. It is a sound with a person in it. It came up through that emptiness, through the cold and the green light and the breathing, and went into Odell Renfrow like a nail. It was ugly and ordinary and alive in a way that broke the spell for half a second, the moment a man needs to remember who he is.

Renfrow looked at his hand, halfway to the cup. And he understood in one stroke, in all its detail, everything the old woman had told him and everything Creel had just said. It was not the practical armor that saved him, because it was the practical armor that had walked him straight here. It was the animal horror of seeing his own hand betray him at twenty years that saved him.

Or at least that turned him around. He did not take the cup. He closed his fist and stepped back across the fire, back across that hard cold line. Absalom Creel watched him go and did not follow, because Creel never followed.

The mountain does not chase. The mountain waits. And Creel said to his back, in that voice of settled stone, come back when you are thirstier. You know the way now.

Renfrow ran. A grown man, a hard man, an agent of the United States government. He came down that hollow on foot in the faint green daylight, his breath rising up before his face. He did not stop at the shoes.

He ran between the shoes and the hats and the folded coats of all those nineteen glad grateful men, and he untied the mule with hands that could not hold the knife steady, and he did not ride it down the branch so much as let it carry him. When Verlie Sezimore came to her door at the sound of them, she asked him nothing. She looked at his face, and looked at his right hand still clenched against his chest, and nodded slowly the way one nods at a funeral, and went back inside and shut the door. Because she had seen men come running down that branch before, and she knew the running was not the end.

It never was. What the record says is this. The record with the three pages cut from the binding and the name struck through with the two words in the sheriff’s own hand. It says a federal agent named Odell Renfrow concluded his investigation of Sorrel Hollow in November 1924, found no illegal still in operation, no person residing in the hollow, and recommended the file be closed.

It says, in that same neat hand that had earlier written that the man reported to have lived there, and this is the word, and I want you to hear how small it is next to everything I have just told you, the man had left the county. Left the county. The record also says Agent Renfrow requested reassignment to the Louisville office, and his request was granted. That is where the official account of Odell Renfrow ends, and where the other account begins.

The account I got from the widow Dosha Pangle before she died, and from two old men on the porch of that store, who told me only after the sun was fully up and they had turned their backs to the mountain. Because Renfrow returned to Louisville, took a desk, and by all accounts closed the page on Sorrel Hollow the way he closed everything in his life, neatly and firmly. But the men who worked beside him in those last years said the revenue agent who came back from Kentucky was not the man who had left. They said he went quiet.

That is the word. That is the only word, and it struck me cold as the line of cold on that hollow the first time I heard one of them use it, all those miles and all those years away, without knowing it was the word. He went quiet. He stopped field work.

He sat at his desk and wrote his papers and spoke less every year. More than one of them saw him in the afternoon not working, sitting with his right hand open on the desk before him, palm up, the scarred hand, open and empty and waiting, his eyes at a middle distance as a man watches something being offered to him from the edge of the room. He never drank. I want that on the record too, because he would have wanted it.

He never drank a drop, not ever, right to the end. But the thirst, as the old ones said, never left him. It got worse, the way the old woman said, a little at a time, until the thirst was no longer something that could be quenched. One of them, the older of the two men on the store porch, told me something I have not been able to forget since.

About the last winter Renfrow spent at that desk. He said Renfrow would fill a metal cup with water and set it on the edge of the desk, out of reach, and leave it there all day. A man passing the open door would see him looking at that cup, and never reaching for it. His scarred hand lay flat on the wood, still as a man holds still when a wasp has landed on the back of his neck.

And that was worse than if he had drunk it all at once, because you understood, watching him, that not reaching for it was costing him everything he had, every hour of every day, and that he was almost out of whatever a man pays with for that. Renfrow told him once, the only time he ever heard him speak of it, that the trouble with the mountain was that it had shown him the wanting was his own. A man could pour out other men’s liquor his whole life and feel right about it. But you cannot quench your own thirst.

You can only carry it, and it does not lighten with the years. And there is no post in this world you can be transferred to far enough away from yourself. In the spring of 1931, seven years after he walked out of Sorrel Hollow, Odell Renfrow did not come to his office on a Monday morning. They went to his room.

He was not there. His bed had not been slept in. There was no letter, no sign of trouble, nothing stolen, nothing at all, except that his good shoes were gone from beside the door. A neighbor woman on the second floor said she had heard him go out a little before dawn, and that his steps on the stairs had been audible.

She said she could not explain why she said it, but they had sounded happy. I will tell you the last thing, and then I will let you go. I want you to carry it carefully, because I have carried it a long way to give it to you. A few years ago, when I began to think about this and could not let it go, I drove to that county, to the real county I call Delwood, and found the branch road, and took it as far as any truck can go, which is not nearly as far as it went in 1924, because the road has been let go.

I want to tell you what the place looks like now, because you will want to know, the way you always want to know what a haunted house looks like in daylight, hoping it will not look like anything at all. It does not oblige. It looks like a place waiting for the road to finish going out entirely so it can have its quiet back. The town of Six Mile is almost gone.

A few foundations lost in the grass, one standing chimney, a church whose roof fell in long ago. The county I call Delwood was absorbed into a neighboring county after the Second World War and gave up its old name. Having thought about it at length, I have come to believe the giving up of the name was not carelessness. Someone wanted that place to disappear entirely.

Someone cut three pages from a ledger. Someone wrote a neat name, and then two small words in a beautiful hand. And years later, someone quietly agreed that a county with a hollow like that in it was better not recorded on paper at all. I cannot tell you they were wrong.

At the place where the walls of the hollow begin to lean over the water, there is still a depression in the grass where the gray cabin stood, though the cabin itself has long since become a green mound. Beyond that, where the light begins to take on the color of pond water, there are trees. And on the trees, at the height of a man’s face, cut deep and old, their edges pale but as clear as the day they were made, there are white marks. Five white marks like an open hand.

I stood at the first of them a long while in the cold, while the branch murmured to itself low beside me, and something in the hollow kept a slow patient rhythm that I convinced myself, as Renfrow convinced himself, was only the water moving over stone, back and forth, back and forth. I did not go past the marked trees. I want you to know that. I turned and came back down.

I have never in my life been so glad to be walking downhill. But I will tell you the truth, because you have stayed with me this whole way, and you have earned it. In the years since, there have been nights, more and more of late, when I find myself sitting in a quiet room, my hand open on the arm of the chair, palm up, empty, waiting. Then I notice it and close it.

So far I have always closed it. And you, there in the dark, wherever you are listening to me tonight, I will ask you the final question, and I will ask you to answer honestly, if only to yourself. What is the cup that has been held out to you with patience across a fire for as long as you can remember? What is the thing you have spent your whole life refusing, convincing yourself the wanting was not there, while the truth is the wanting was always yours, because the mountain does not have to be a mountain.

It takes many shapes, and it has all the time there is. It does not chase. It only waits, and the cup is held out to you, on the night you are thirsty enough to forget who you are. Stay away from the marked trees.

Keep your hand closed. I will see you next time.