The two women at the head of Willow Brook Hollow were named Mercy and Tabitha Ottwell. Mercy was thirty-two in the spring of 1897. Her sister Tabitha was twenty-eight. They were the last of the line that had lived in the hollow since before Letcher County had a name written in ink.

The story the old men told was that their great-grandfather came up from the Yadkin Valley with a rifle, an axe, and a debt he had no intention of paying. He walked past three cleaner, easier settlements to choose a place for himself under a rock that got maybe two hours of sunlight in winter. People said later that he did not choose the place. The place chose him.

There was a difference, if you knew how to listen. The old men would speak the great-grandfather’s name once, then mention Yadkin and the axe, and stop there. They never said what he saw in the hollow when he first entered it. They never said why the porch faced the way it did, which was neither the direction of the sunrise nor the direction of the road.

They did not say what he planted at the head of the gap, or dug, or covered, or did. But they knew, the way small places know things without writing them down, that he did something that first winter. And they knew that whatever he did cost him a hand, because when his son was born the following spring, the great-grandfather held the child with his left arm only, and in the tintype the traveling photographer took in 1831, his right coat sleeve was pinned up. The story of how a family settles someplace, and how someplace settles into a family, is not one anyone in Willow Brook Hollow could tell you plainly.

Four generations later, Mercy and Tabitha tended the same cabin where their mother died. Her name was Sylvina, and she was buried behind the springhouse under a slab of poplar that the sisters polished with grease and soft cloth. Their father’s name was Absalom. He walked past the springhouse on a November morning in 1889 and never came back.

Nobody brought his body home, and nobody pretended they would try. In town they called it a tragedy. In the hollow they said he ended the way some sentences end. The sisters were the ones the county called when you wanted someone who would live through the winter.

Old Prudence Halloran, sixty-eight that spring, would tell anyone who sat still long enough that she had buried her husband and two brothers, and nearly buried herself in 1884. And that Mercy Ottwell came down the mountain in a snowstorm carrying a jar wrapped in cloth, and sat by the bed a night and a day without eating or sleeping. And that the fever broke at dawn. Prudence would tell you the tea tasted strange, and that she never asked what was in it.

She had learned, she said, to want the result, not the recipe. Anyone sensible in that valley felt the same way. So both things were true. The sisters healed.

And the sisters’ names were struck from the church records in ink by the previous preacher, Reverend Kelso, who served the hollow church from 1880 to 1896 and died of a stroke in his sleep in the parsonage at the end of that last winter. For sixteen years he never once rode the Notch Road to visit the family who lived at the top. When asked why in the last months of his life, he answered only that his responsibility was to those below. Pressed once, at a Christmas dinner, by a visiting cousin who did not know better, he set down his fork, left the room, and did not return until the dishes were cleared.

That was the kind of incident the county remembered. It was what drove his successor to come up the Notch Road carrying a Bible under his arm and a question in his mouth in the second week of April 1897. The successor was Reverend Elvenston Corin, forty-one years old. He graduated from a seminary in Ohio, spent two years on a mission along the Cumberland River, and had, according to the deacons who hired him, a genuine desire to know the people he preached to.

He rode a mule borrowed from the deacons and carried a small leather notebook. When he reached the last bend in the road and the trees leaned over him, the mule stopped and refused to go further, no matter how he urged it. He dismounted, tied it to a laurel, and walked the last half mile on foot. Mercy met him at the porch.

She showed no surprise. She told him, before he could say a word, that he was welcome to sit, that she would make tea, and that if he had come to strike them from the book again, he could turn around, because that was already done and there was no need to repeat it. Corin wrote to a friend in Cincinnati six days later that in that moment he felt like the one being questioned. He wrote that Mercy Ottwell looked at you in a way that was not cruel, and that was the problem.

A woman who looks at you cruelly is a woman you can argue with. A woman who looks at you the way Mercy Ottwell looked at him is a woman who has finished the argument in her head and is waiting patiently for you to catch up. He sat. She made tea.

Tabitha came in from behind the cabin with her hands wet and dark, and Corin wrote that he did not ask why. He drank the tea. He asked about their mother. Mercy told him their mother had died at sixty-one.

He asked about their father. Mercy said their father had passed the springhouse in November of 1889 and gone up the hill and not come back. He asked if they had searched. Mercy said they went as far as they were meant to go, and no further.

When he asked gently what that meant, she looked at him for a long time with those pale gray eyes and said, and he recorded it word for word in his notebook that night, that some ground has the right to keep what it holds, and some ground you are not allowed to take from. That their father knew the difference, and chose to forget it. Corin did not press, which was to his credit. He asked if they would like a prayer said over their mother’s soul.

Mercy said their mother did not need a prayer. He asked if he could pray in the house. Tabitha spoke from the corner, in a voice so low he almost did not hear it: the house did not need a prayer either. And Corin realized, and it would become important later, that Tabitha had spoken only when prayer was raised, and that when she spoke, the two big dogs sleeping by the stove lifted their heads at the same instant and looked, not at her, but at the door.

He stayed a little while. He took a piece of bread. He asked if he could come back. Mercy said he could come back, or he could not come back, and both were allowed, and if he did come back he should not bring anything with him that he did not know how to use.

Then, standing on the porch as he left, she told him that if he heard singing on the way down, he must not turn around. He must keep walking. He must hum a tune, loud and low, and not stop humming until he passed the sawmill. He wrote to his friend that he laughed politely at this, and that Mercy did not laugh with him.

She said, without changing her tone, that she was not joking. He heard the singing about halfway down. He heard it in the trees on his left, then in the trees on his right, then directly behind his ear, as if a woman were walking a single step behind him, matching his stride. He wrote to his friend, and the letter survives: the voice was Tabitha Ottwell’s.

He had heard her speak only two sentences during the entire visit, and he was as sure of the voice as a man is sure of his own name. He hummed. He hummed a hymn he did not much care for. He kept walking.

He did not turn. He was on the last stretch of road, what he described as nearer to running than walking, and ashamed of it, but he did not turn, and he passed the sawmill, and the singing stopped. It stopped mid-word. He stood there in the last of the afternoon light, trembling so badly he could not untie the mule for a full minute.

That was April 11, 1897. That was the beginning. By the end of the month, three separate accounts reached Sheriff Silas Radcliffe at the county seat. A traveling drummer selling a patent tonic turned back at the bend because his horse could not get past it.

He said he felt watched. That was all he could tell the sheriff. He felt watched, and he turned around, and he did not want to talk about it. A widow named Orah Thridgill, who lived in the last cabin before the road began to climb, said she had woken for three nights running to the sound of someone trying the latch of her front door.

Not knocking. Working the latch. It would move, then stop. After a wait long enough to make her think she had imagined it, it would move again.

On the morning of the fourth day she found a bundle of dried sage on the top step, tied with a strip of gray cloth, and she knew who had left it. She brought it inside and set it on the mantel, and on the fifth night she slept without anything. That was the first account the sheriff took seriously. The third came from Orah’s cousin Uriah Thridgill, forty-six, a stubborn, hard man who had worked timber all his life and did not believe, on principle, in anything he had not seen twice.

He said he was walking his upper line at dusk, checking traps, and came across a place in the woods that made him stop. The leaves were laid out in a circle about the width of a wagon wheel, all turned face down, scattered, turned over the way you turn a playing card. No wind could do that, he said. No animal could do that.

And the circle was not empty. There was something in the middle of it, a small heap, and he had not gone close enough to see what it was. He had walked around it at a distance, come down by a longer route, and would not go back up until the leaves grew over whatever it was. Silas Radcliffe was a practical man.

He asked Uriah what he thought it was. Uriah looked at him for a long time, then said he did not think it was anything he was being watched by. The sheriff was fifty-seven that April. He had served Letcher County for eleven years.

He had grown up in neighboring Perry County and taken office believing firmly that most of what people called mystery in the mountains was nothing but a shortage of daylight and an abundance of local liquor. He had solved four murders and countless thefts in his tenure, and he was not a quick-tempered man. He read the three reports, sat with them for a full day, and saddled his horse on the morning of May 2. He rode the Notch Road with a deputy named Enoch Blidesoe, twenty-nine years old, whose only qualifications were being the nephew of Radcliffe’s wife’s sister and needing the pay.

Blidesoe did not want to go, and said so loudly on the jailhouse porch, and the sheriff told him to get his coat. They rode until the horses would go no further, not much further than the drummer, and tied them at the last flat place before the final climb, and walked. Blidesoe later wrote that the woods on both sides of the road were unnaturally still. No birds.

No squirrels. At one point he stopped because he thought he heard running water, but there was no water, no creek, no spring. The sound continued as long as he stood still, then stopped when he took a step forward, then came back when he stopped again. The sheriff, walking ahead, did not turn around.

Blidesoe caught up. They kept walking. They reached the cabin at half past one in the afternoon. It was locked.

That in itself was unusual. Mountain doors in Letcher County in 1897 were not usually locked, because there was no reason to lock them. And because locking one was, in a small community, a way of saying something no one wanted said. The sheriff knocked.

No answer. He knocked again. He called out Mercy Ottwell’s name, then Tabitha’s. From inside the cabin came a single sound, and Blidesoe swore in his statement that it was a chair being pulled back from a table.

That was all. No footsteps. No voice. The sheriff knocked a third time.

He said through the door that he had come to ask about their neighbors and the reports he had received, and that he meant no trouble. The door opened. Mercy Ottwell stood on the other side. She looked, the sheriff noted in his report, like a woman who had not slept in a week.

Her hair was down. Her eyes were the same pale gray, cold, he had seen her from a distance at a funeral in the hollow the year before. She looked past him, not at him. Past his shoulder, up the road, at something above him.

Then she said, and this is his exact wording in the report, that they had been expecting him, but not this soon. He asked where her sister was. She said Tabitha was resting. He asked if he could speak to her.

She said no, and that she was sorry. He asked what was wrong. She looked at him for a long moment, then came out onto the porch and closed the door behind her. And she said, in a low, very careful voice, that something had gotten in.

The sheriff recorded that. Then he asked her, the question a practical man asks, what she meant by that. Mercy Ottwell said her family had followed a certain way of doing things for a long time. That her mother and her grandmother had known it.

That the ground above the hill was not left untended. That her father, in the last year of his life, had begun to think it was superstition, and stopped. And he had gone up the hill in November of 1889 to prove there was nothing to fear. That was why he had not come back.

She and Tabitha, since that month, had done the tending with twice the care their mother had taught them. Their mother died in 1893. After that they did it alone, and kept it up, and it held. And Reverend Corin’s visit was not the cause of what was happening now.

She wanted the sheriff to know that. But, and this was the part she stressed, his visit had been noticed. Something had used him as a doorway. Something had followed him down.

And after three weeks, it had come back. This time, she said, it had brought a companion. The sheriff did not laugh, which was to his credit. He was not a superstitious man, but he was not a stupid one.

He had been in the county long enough to know that when a woman like Mercy Ottwell speaks to you in a low, careful voice about something on her porch, you do not laugh. He asked what she wanted him to do. She said she wanted him to go back down the mountain. She wanted him to tell the widow Orah Thridgill to burn the sage she had been given, and to sit up with a lamp lit for the next three nights.

She wanted him to tell Uriah Thridgill not to walk his upper line at dusk until mid-June. She wanted him to leave Reverend Corin alone, and to tell him, if he could do it without frightening him, to burn the notebook he had been writing in. She and Tabitha would handle the rest. She said it the way a woman talks about routine work.

The sheriff said he could not simply leave. He said if there was a problem, he was the one who was supposed to be there to solve it. Mercy Ottwell looked at him then and said, very quietly, that the problem was not his kind, and his help would make it worse. She said his revolver was a bell in this case.

She said she did not have time to explain what she meant, and she was sorry for that. And she said, and this was the last thing she said to him on that porch, that if he entered the cabin he would see something he would carry with him for the rest of his life. And she was not asking him as a suspect asks a sheriff. She was asking him as a neighbor asks a neighbor not to come in.

He did not go in. Blidesoe wanted to. Blidesoe wanted to on principle. He was twenty-nine and had something to prove.

The sheriff, who had watched eleven years of twenty-nine-year-olds trying to prove themselves, put a hand on his chest and turned him around. They walked back to the horses. They rode back down. When they passed the widow Orah Thridgill’s cabin, the sheriff dismounted, knocked, told her about the sage.

She went inside without answering him, came out with the bundle in fireplace tongs, and put it in her stove. When they passed Uriah Thridgill’s yard, the sheriff called out the message. Uriah raised a hand from his porch and did not get up. When they reached the sawmill at last light, Blidesoe reined in his horse and said, in a voice the sheriff had never heard from him, that he had heard singing on the road behind them for the last mile.

The sheriff said he had heard it too. Blidesoe asked what they should do about it. The sheriff said keep riding. What happened inside the cabin comes from two accounts.

The first is Mercy Ottwell’s, given three weeks later, sitting at the kitchen table of the widow Orah Thridgill, with Orah across from her, silent. The second is Reverend Corin’s notebook, which stopped on the ninth day and was never completed, and which the sheriff, in the end, did not order burned. He read it first. For the twenty-two days between the reverend’s visit and the sheriff’s visit, according to Mercy, the cabin was occupied.

Twenty-two mornings of waking in a house that was no longer entirely theirs. Twenty-two nights of hearing something settle into a chair behind a wall. Twenty-two dinners at a table where a third place seemed set, uninvited. Mercy did not use the word haunted in her account.

She used a word that Orah Thridgill recorded, then struck out, then wrote again, because she wanted the account to be accurate. Mercy said the cabin was occupied. That was her word, occupied, like a country under the control of a force it had not summoned and could not, at that moment, remove. In the first week she tried the simple things her mother had left her.

She washed the floor with vinegar and salt. She turned every mirror in the house to the wall. On the third night she buried a piece of iron under the doorstep. None of it worked.

On the fifth night she sat holding her mother’s old handkerchief, and for the only time in her life, she asked her mother aloud what to do. She said she heard no answer. What she heard, she said, was a sound in the kitchen that exactly matched the sound of her mother’s shoes on the floorboards, and she knew, without checking, that if she got up and went in, there would be no one there. She stayed where she was.

She put the handkerchief back in the drawer, and from that night on, she stopped asking. She said it came in with his shoes. She said she knew it was present before it left the porch. She said she did not warn the sheriff because at that moment she was not sure it would stay, and she did not want to burden a stranger with a warning she could not explain.

On that first night Mercy did what her mother had taught her. She lit a candle in each of the four corners of the front room and sat with the candles until they burned down. She did this with Tabitha. She did it every night for the first week, and nothing happened, and she began to hope, cautiously, that she was wrong.

On the eighth night, Tabitha woke her around three in the morning and whispered that someone was sitting in their father’s chair. There was no one in the chair when Mercy looked. But the chair was rocking slowly, in a room with no draft. Mercy told this part at Orah’s table in a calm, steady voice.

She said she went to the chair and put her hand on its back and stopped it. She said she felt the warmth of the chair, the way you would if a man had just stood up. She said Tabitha began to cry, and that she had not cried since their mother died, and that her crying was quiet and regular, not like Tabitha at all. Mercy put her back to bed.

She said she sat in the chair herself for the rest of the night. She said the chair did not rock again. But toward dawn she felt a hand settle very lightly on her head, and remain there. She did not look.

She waited, and after a while the hand was gone. The next night the ladle moved from the kitchen shelf to the middle of the floor. The night after that, every door in the cabin opened at once. The front door, the back door, both bedroom doors, at the same instant, at quarter past four in the morning.

Mercy walked through the house and closed them. Tabitha followed her. The fourth night, Mercy woke to find Tabitha standing in the yard in her nightgown. Tabitha did not know how she got there.

When Mercy asked, she said a woman had asked her to come out and look. Tabitha said she could not remember the woman’s face, but the voice was familiar. Mercy brought her inside and barred the door with the board their father had cut for exactly that purpose, which had not been used since 1889. On the ninth day, Mercy said, very quietly, with Orah writing it down after she had left, the thing in the cabin stopped pretending to be their father.

Orah knew Sylvina Ottwell. She knew Absalom. She had held Tabitha on the day after their mother died and had not asked what killed her, because in that valley you did not ask. And because Orah knew the answer would not be the name of a sickness.

For forty years she had spoken kindly of the family at the top of the hill and never once thought to fear them. Because the family at the top of the hill was, in Orah’s understanding, the reason nothing had ever fallen. The Ottwells were the wall. They had always been the wall.

And on the ninth day of what happened in the cabin, by Mercy’s precise and unafraid accounting, the wall was in trouble. On the tenth night, Mercy was in the yard dumping ashes. She looked up and saw the treetops along the ridge above the springhouse bending, one after another, in a slow line coming down toward the cabin. She went inside.

She barred the door. She woke Tabitha. She lit the four candles in the four corners of the front room. And she lit a fifth candle, the one her mother had told her to light only in the worst circumstances, and set it in the middle of the table.

She and Tabitha sat with their hands clasped across the table and waited. Mercy would not say, at Orah’s kitchen table, what happened that night. She said only that it circled the cabin once, outside, and stopped three times at the three windows. That at each window it made a sound on the glass, like a fingernail drawn very slowly across it.

She said Tabitha’s hand went cold in hers. She said she did not look at the windows. She said the fifth candle went out at the third window. And she said that was important.

Then the circling stopped. After a long time, from up the hill, they heard a distant, grieving cry. Not a scream. Not a call.

A cry, she said. The kind of cry a person makes when they understand something they did not want to understand. Tabitha squeezed her hand and whispered, and she told only Orah, and never anyone after, that the cry was in their father’s voice. Mercy squeezed her hand in return.

They did not speak. The candles burned down. Morning came, and the cabin was theirs again. That day Mercy saddled the old mule, put Tabitha on it, and led her down the mountain herself, and left her crying quietly, steadily, in the front room of the widow Orah Thridgill.

Orah asked where she was going. Mercy said she would be back. Orah asked when she would come down. Mercy answered, and this is the phrase the sheriff underlined without comment in his report, that she would come down when the tending was finished.

And if it was not finished, Orah was to keep Tabitha as if she were her own for as long as Tabitha needed keeping. In the drawer of the little table beside Mercy’s mother’s chair was a folded paper telling Tabitha where the small amount of money was. Then Mercy went out. And she turned back up the road.

That was the last time anyone saw Mercy Ottwell in Willow Brook Hollow. It was May 7, 1897. The sheriff came on the ninth. He brought Blidesoe again.

This time Blidesoe brought a rifle, which the sheriff let him carry, and which the sheriff later said was a fool thing to allow. The horses would not even reach the flat place this time. They stopped half a mile short, and the men had to tie them to a tree, and Blidesoe wrote that the horses were lathered and trembling as if they had run. They walked the last mile and a half in the rain.

The road was mud and slick. They did not speak. When they reached the cabin, the door was open. The front room was perfectly in order.

The four candles were set on the four corners of the mantel, burned down to nubs. The fifth candle on the table had burned completely down, and the wax had run over the table’s edge and pooled on the floorboards in a smooth, pale shape. The hearth was cold, but not long cold. It had been used within the past two days.

There was a kettle on it. The kettle had water. The water was clear. The sheriff walked through the cabin.

Both beds were made. Mercy’s Bible, the one the family had kept even after the church struck their names, lay on the little table beside her bed, open to the Ninety-first Psalm. Tabitha’s brass hairbrush was in her drawer. Their mother’s shawl was folded at the foot of the other bed.

Nothing was taken. Nothing was broken. Blidesoe, who had hunted all his life, went out the back door and walked a hundred yards up the hill behind the cabin, and came back after twenty minutes and said, in a voice the sheriff recorded without comment, that he had found the springhouse open and empty, and behind it a place in the woods where the leaves were turned face down in a circle about the width of a wagon wheel, and that there was nothing in the middle of it, and the ground was swept clean. He was ready to go back whenever the sheriff was.

They went back. Blidesoe wrote in a memoir he kept for the rest of his life and left to his wife that the ride down that day changed him in a way he could not describe. He wrote that riding down the narrow road he understood that the world was wider than the county, and the county wider than the courthouse, and that up in the woods above the sawmill there were forces for which the courthouse had no paperwork. He wrote that at the sawmill, when Silas Radcliffe reined in his horse and told him to keep riding, he understood for the first time what a sheriff was for.

Not to catch thieves, mostly, but to stand between the people of the county and the things they could not handle, and to make the small decisions, in the moment, that kept the county from ever knowing what those things were. He wrote that Silas Radcliffe made the right decision that day, and that he, Blidesoe, at twenty-nine, had not been brave enough to make it, and was glad the sheriff was ahead of him. The sheriff filed a report stating that the two women were missing. He did not use the word disappeared.

He did not use the word abduction. In fact he used no word at all for what had happened. He wrote in his own hand that Mercy and Tabitha Ottwell, sisters of Willow Brook Hollow, had not been seen since the seventh and ninth of May respectively, that a search of the cabin produced no evidence of resistance, that the cabin and outbuildings were left in good condition, that the springhouse was empty, and that the road above the sawmill had been closed by his order to traffic until its condition improved. That last line, which seems odd on its face, is what the county kept.

The road was never reopened. In 1922, when the state was surveying a new road to connect farms to markets, a young engineer came to Letcher County to review the route. He met with the sheriff, a different man by then, a nephew of Silas Radcliffe who had taken office in 1916. The engineer went home.

The road was rerouted. On modern maps it is drawn with a dotted line and labeled private. No private owner is recorded. Orah Thridgill kept Tabitha in her home for the rest of her life.

Tabitha did not speak from the day Mercy left her at Orah’s door, except once. She helped in the garden. She sat by the fire in the evenings. Sometimes she sang softly, a tune Orah did not know and never asked about.

She lived quietly and cleanly in Orah’s spare room until Orah died in 1911, then in the same room in the home of Orah’s niece, who took her in the way you take in family and never asked questions. Tabitha died in 1934 of an old woman’s cough, at sixty-five, in a bed turned to face east because she had asked, in the only piece of writing she left in the thirty-seven years between her sister leaving her at Orah’s door and her death, that her bed be turned. The note said, in fine old handwriting: Please turn the bed to the east so I can see her when she comes down. The one time she spoke in those thirty-seven years was in 1902.

She was thirty-three. Orah came into her room in the morning and found her sitting up in bed, awake, eyes on the window. Orah asked if she was all right. Tabitha answered, without turning her gaze from the window, in a steady voice, as if she had spoken every day of her life, that Mercy did it.

Orah asked, did what. Tabitha said, and Orah wrote it down that evening on the back of an old letter she had kept, that Mercy had finished her tending, that she was still up there, that she did not want to come down, and that Orah must not send anyone up. Orah asked how she knew. Tabitha said she woke up knowing.

That was all. Then she lay back down. She did not speak for the next thirty-two years. Reverend Elvenston Corin left Letcher County in June 1897.

He wrote to his friend in Cincinnati that he could not continue with a clear conscience. He did not say why. He took a small parish in central Illinois. He died in 1914 of pneumonia, at fifty-eight.

His notebook, the one that stopped on the ninth day, went to a nephew, who gave it to a historical society in the 1940s. It is now preserved in a file in an archive in Chicago. The last full entry, for the eighth day, says that he did not know what he had seen at the head of the gap. He knew it was a woman.

He knew it was not the older sister, and not the younger. He knew she was looking at him, and he knew she was smiling, and he knew she was standing where no woman should stand, because the ground behind her was not there. Behind her, the mountain simply ended. Then the record stops.

The ninth day is a single line, written plainly: God help me. Then a blot. Then nothing. Silas Radcliffe served as sheriff of Letcher County until 1915.

He never spoke publicly about what happened in Willow Brook Hollow. In a private letter to his wife four years before his death, he wrote that he thought about the porch of the Ottwell cabin at least once a week, that in his life he had done many things he was proud of and a few he was not, and that the thing he was most sure of was that not entering that cabin when Mercy Ottwell asked him not to was the best decision of his career. He wrote that he did not know what Mercy was about to do that day, but that he understood, standing on that porch looking at her face, that she was about to do something on behalf of all of them. Not on his behalf, not on her sister’s behalf, but on behalf of the whole valley.

And his job that day was to get out of her way. The road above the sawmill was never reopened. The cabin, as far as anyone knows, still stands. Hunters in Letcher County say they have gone up in deer season and seen it.

Hunters say they have not. Both may be telling the truth. Those who say they have seen it say it looks maintained. They say the paint on the front door is new.

They say the porch is swept. They say the remains of the four candles are still on the four corners of the mantel, and the fifth is still on the table. And the wax is still on the floor, a smooth, pale pool shaped like a hand. They also say, and these are the hunters who do not go back a second time, that the back door of the cabin, the one that leads to the springhouse, is always open.

And if you are quiet at the right hour, and the wind is coming down the hill, you can hear from somewhere above the springhouse a low, steady humming. A tune no one quite knows, but everyone thinks they have heard before. An old hunter named Raven Coulter, in the 1940s, over dinner at the sawmill store, when asked about it, said after he had drunk enough to talk that he had heard the humming, and he knew, without knowing how, that Mercy Ottwell had been humming it since May 7, 1897, and would keep humming it at the head of that gap until whatever she had gone up to deal with tired of being held. He said he did not think it would tire.

He said he believed Mercy had agreed to it in her own quiet, careful way. When asked why she would do such a thing, he said, and the phrase stuck: the woman who tends something her whole life knows it better than anyone. And when the tending gets hard, the one who tends best is the one who knows the price of letting go. And Mercy Ottwell, on May 7, had decided that letting go would cost the whole valley.

And she, simply a woman who had spent her life making tea for the dying, had set the price. The county buried Tabitha Ottwell in 1934 in the church cemetery below the hollow. The reverend, DeWitt Marshbanks, entered her name in the register. He wrote it in ink, and he did not tear the page.

At the graveside he said, as recorded in the church minutes for that Sunday, that a woman who had waited thirty-two years for her sister to come down from the mountain had earned her name in a register, and that whatever had been struck from the records of the previous preacher in the 1890s, he had no intention of knowing or correcting, but Tabitha Ottwell’s name would be written in his record and would stay. There is a small, plain stone in the church cemetery in the hollow. It reads: Tabitha Ottwell, 1869 to 1934, sister. That is all.

No birth date on the mountain. No mother. No father. Just sister.

Whether the tending still goes on, whether Mercy Ottwell is still up there, somewhere above the springhouse, humming her tune, keeping something quiet that would otherwise not be quiet, the honest answer is that no one knows. The county records suggest it. They go silent after 1955, the last recorded incident, when a state trooper stopped a car full of hunters trying to drive the closed road, found them in an extreme state of agitation, and requested that they be transported to the county seat and questioned there rather than on the road, which he said he personally did not care to remain on any longer than necessary. That questioning never happened, as far as anyone knows.

The trooper drove them down the road, filed a brief report, and requested a transfer to another county the following week. It was granted. The hunters, named in the trooper’s brief report, gave three separate accounts in the following days of what they saw on the closed road. The accounts did not match.

One said he saw a woman walking. One said he saw a light in the window of a cabin where there was no cabin. The third said nothing at all, and when pressed would neither confirm nor deny seeing anything, and said only, repeatedly, that the road above the sawmill had a strange quality that he could not describe in more detail, and that he wished to go home. That last man, Elwood Kassenberry, forty-eight, left Letcher County that month and never returned.

He was, by the records, the last person to attempt the Notch Road by vehicle. The road has been practically forgotten since. It appears on no county map printed after 1962. The land it crosses is listed in the state tax assessor’s office as unbuildable.

And there is a note in the margin of the assessor’s ledger, in an old hand no one has bothered to identify, which reads plainly: no surveying. That note has been copied word for word into every edition of the book since 1922, and no one in the county offices can say who wrote it first. Orah Thridgill wrote, in a hesitant, careful sentence dated 1910, a year before her death, in the last page of her small diary, that she had come to believe there were two kinds of people in the world. There were those who tended things, and those who benefited from the tending.

And she wrote that most of us live our whole lives as the second kind without knowing it, and die grateful for a quiet valley, never once asking who stands above us in the dark, keeping it that way.