The snow was falling in thick, wet flakes that clung to everything they touched, and Verly Hardwick was gone from the bed. Silas woke to the cold coming through an open door, the wind banging the wood against the inside wall, the bolt hanging useless on its post. The key was still under his pillow. He had put it there himself, every night since November, the way a man bolts a door against something he cannot name.

She was barefoot in the snow, and the tracks led up the slope toward the ridge. She had been talking in her sleep for weeks by then, saying things she had no right to know, and the dog had stopped coming inside the cabin, and the preacher had laid a hand on her head and seen somebody else watching through her eyes. Now she was walking up the ridge in a storm in her nightclothes. He pulled on his boots without lacing them, took the lantern down from the peg, and lit it with shaking hands.

He did not take a rifle. The things you take a rifle for are not the things he was going after. The year was 1888. The place was a stretch of country in eastern Tennessee called Crowark Hollow, set down between two ridges that ran north and south like the sides of a long shallow bowl.

Maybe forty families lived there: a church, a general store kept by a man named Tobias Renfroe, a road that turned to mud from October through April and to dust the rest of the year. The Hardwick cabin sat on the eastern slope halfway up, a short walk from the cemetery, a long walk from anyone else. Silas Hardwick was thirty-four that autumn, a farmer who took on carpentry work when the season turned. He stood close to six feet, with the wide shoulders and long arms of a man who had grown up swinging an axe before his voice broke.

His beard was already going gray at the chin. His hands were hard as harness leather and ached in cold weather. His wife was twenty-nine. Her name was Verly.

She had come down from a holler up near the Carolina line when she was twenty-two, to marry a Hardwick cousin who died of a fever three months later. Silas had taken her in to keep her from being sent back to her own people, and somewhere between the first hard winter and the second, they had become husband and wife in earnest. Six years they had been together by the time of this story. She was a small woman, slight in the shoulders, with copper brown hair she wore pinned tight at the nape.

Her eyes were the color of a creek bed after rain, brown with flecks of gray in them. She was known in the hollow as a fine seamstress and a quiet churchgoer, and her bread was the kind people remembered after they had eaten it. There was a dog at the cabin, too, a yellow hound named Pard, about six years old. He slept by the fire in the cold months and under the porch in the warm ones, and he went everywhere Silas went.

The dog is the first part of this story, though that comes later. The autumn that year was a wet one. Long rains in September, a hard frost the second week of October that took the late beans. By the time the first snow came in November, the Hardwicks had settled into the winter shape of their days.

Silas worked at a corn crib for a neighbor for wages. Verly sat at the spinning wheel in the evenings. They were both in bed by nine and up before light. The first strange night was the eleventh of November.

Silas remembered the date later, after everything else had happened, because he had been to a barn raising the day before and his back was sore from lifting beams. He woke at three in the morning. He did not know what woke him at first. The fire was down to coals.

The wind was easy outside. Then he saw that Pard’s head was up. And Verly was speaking. She was sitting up in bed beside him, talking to somebody quietly, in a voice that was not quite hers.

He lay still and listened. The words were in English. She was saying, “I told you it would be the husband. I told you he is the one who will grieve when it comes to the grieving.

The rest of them they will get over it. He is the one who will carry it. ”

Then a pause. Then: “I know.

I know. I said. I am not arguing with you. ”

Silas felt the hair on his arms go up under his shirt.

He said her name. Verly. She did not turn. He said it again.

She turned then, and for a moment, in the red bronze light from the dying coals, she looked at him as if she had never seen him before in her life, as if he were a stranger who had walked up out of the road. Her face was perfectly calm. Her eyes were her own, but the way she used them was not. Then she blinked.

She blinked again, slower, and her face came back into her face. “Silas,” she said. “What? What is wrong?

”

He told her she had been talking in her sleep. She rubbed her eye and lay down. She was asleep again inside a minute. Pard never put his head down the rest of the night.

In the morning she made biscuits and gravy the way she always did and remembered nothing. She laughed when he said she had spoken so plainly he had thought somebody else was in the room. “What kind of somebody? ” she asked.

“A man? A bear? Tell me it was not a bear. ” He let it go.

Two weeks passed. You can talk yourself out of almost anything in two weeks if the days are full and the nights are quiet. By the end of November, Silas had decided it was a fever dream and would not come again. Then, one afternoon, Verly stopped.

She was at the stove making coffee, and she stopped in the middle of pouring water from the kettle. Her hand stayed in the air. The kettle stayed tilted. Water spilled across the iron and started to smoke.

Silas was at the door pulling off his boots and saw the whole thing. He said her name. She did not move. He crossed the room, took the kettle out of her hand, set it down.

She did not react. She did not react when he turned her by the shoulders to face him. Her eyes were open, focused on something that was not the wall, not the room, not him. He said her name three more times.

The fourth time she came back, the way a person comes back from cold water, with a gasp. Her hand went up to her own throat, and she stared at him like she did not know how she had gotten where she was. “Where was I? ” she said.

He told her gently where she was. She sat on the kitchen chair, holding his hand in both of hers like it was something she might lose, crying a long time, saying, “I do not know, Silas. I do not know. ”

After that, he started watching her.

She would lift her head when nothing had made a sound. She would stand at a window after dark, looking at the dark. She would set the table for three sometimes, then look at the third plate as if she did not remember putting it there. Around the first week of December, Pard stopped coming into the cabin.

He would walk up to the doorway and stop, whine very low, look at Silas, then look past Silas into the room, and turn around and go back to the porch. If Silas carried him in, he would lie shaking by the door until it was opened. If Silas pushed him in and shut the door, he would scratch at the wood until Silas was afraid the dog would do himself harm. So Silas left the door open a crack at night.

Verly did not seem to notice the cold. The third time was the worst before things got really bad. A Sunday evening. Silas was reading the almanac by the lamp.

Verly was knitting by the fire. She lifted her head and said very plainly, “Cousin Tabitha is gone. ”

Silas looked up. “Who?

”

“Tabitha,” she said. “Leavonia’s girl, the one with the limp. She is gone. She just went three breaths in and the last one did not come back out.

”

He waited a moment. Then he said, “Verly, who are you talking about? ”

She blinked. She looked at her knitting.

“I do not know,” she said. “I am not sure where that came from. I am sorry. Did I make sense?

”

He told her she was tired. He did not sleep much that night. Four days later, a letter came down through the hollow from a family in Madison County, North Carolina, posted on the third. It said that a woman named Tabitha Yarrow, a second cousin of Verly’s by way of her mother’s sister, Leavonia, had passed away on the evening of the second of December, very suddenly, of what they thought was a stopped heart.

Silas read the letter twice before he gave it to her. She read it, set it down, said, “Poor thing. ” She did not connect the letter to anything she had ever said. He folded it and put it in the drawer.

That was when he went to see Ephraim Crowley, the pastor at the little Baptist meeting house at the foot of the hollow. A tall, thin man of about fifty-two with a long beak nose and white hair cut close, he had been preaching in the hollow since before Silas was born and was not given to easy alarm. Silas told him everything: the night with the voice, the kettle, Tabitha Yarrow and the letter, the dog. Crowley listened without interrupting, hands folded over his knees, hat on the boards beside him.

When Silas was finished, the pastor was quiet a long time. “Has she done any harm to you or herself or to any animal? ” he asked. “No.

She is just not all there sometimes, and when she is there, she is just Verly. ”

Crowley nodded slowly. “I will come up Friday. Do not tell her I am coming.

Just leave the door open and have the coffee on. If it is nothing, we will have spent an hour together and lost only a little daylight. If it is something, I would rather it not be ready for me. ”

He came up just before noon, riding a small gray mule he had owned for fifteen years.

He hitched it to the post in the dooryard and came inside, pulling off his hat as if he had stopped in on his way home from somewhere else. Verly was at the table mending a shirt. She looked up and smiled. “Pastor,” she said.

“Sit down. I will get the kettle. ” It was the most ordinary moment in the world. Crowley talked about his garden, about a man down by the river selling a horse Silas might want to look at in the spring, about a hymn one of the deacons wanted to add to the Sunday rotation.

Did Verly not think that was a fine one, the one about the river? Verly said it was a fine hymn. She poured the coffee. She mended the shirt.

There was absolutely nothing wrong. After about an hour, Crowley stood up, thanked them for the coffee, and went to the door. Verly stood to walk him out. He turned in the doorway and put his hand very lightly on top of her head, the way he had done at her wedding, and said a small blessing over her: three sentences, old words.

She thanked him kindly and went back inside. When they were out of earshot of the door, Crowley said in a different voice than the one he had been using inside: “Do not leave her alone after dark. ”

Silas asked what he had seen. Crowley looked back at the cabin for a long time.

“I have not seen anything,” he said finally. “I never see anything. But she did not blink when I prayed over her. Not once.

Her eyes were closed. But there is somebody behind those eyes, Silas, who was watching me through them. And she answered my blessing in her chest before I had spoken it. ” He pulled on his hat.

“I will come back. I want to think about this. ” He rode out of the dooryard and down the hollow. Silas stood there a long minute after the sound of the mule had gone.

When he came back inside, Verly was at the table. She looked up and said, “He came twice. ”

“What? ”

“He came twice, Silas,” she said.

Then her brow furrowed. “Did he? I do not know why I said that. Did he come twice?

I do not think I remember him leaving. ” She put her hand to her temple. “I am tired, Silas. I think I need to lie down.

” She slept for four hours in the middle of the day, which she had never done before. That night Silas did what Crowley had told him. He did not leave her alone after dark. He sat by the fire while she knitted.

He went to the privy with the lantern only when he could see her through the open door. He bolted the door from the inside before bed and put the key under his pillow. He did not know what he was bolting against. He did not think the bolt was for anything that could be kept out by a piece of iron, but he did it anyway, because it was something to do.

The next two weeks were quiet. Not normal. Quiet. There is a difference.

No episodes, no words she could not account for, no nights waking. The dog still would not come inside, but he came to her in the dooryard and let her scratch his ears. For a little while Silas let himself hope. You can imagine what he was hoping, because if you have ever loved somebody who is going wrong in ways nobody can fix, you have hoped the same way.

I will tell you about that hope and then not tell you about it again, because it did not last. What broke it was the doctor’s visit. Crowley had sent a letter three counties over to a man named Morai Greer, a country doctor of long standing, forty-four years old, the kind of physician who traveled with two bags. One bag had medicine in it.

The other had the things he had picked up over the years that he was not entirely sure were medicine but which had seemed to help on certain occasions with certain things. Greer came up the second week of January. A square-set man with thick eyebrows and a clean-shaven jaw, spectacles he kept polishing on the corner of his vest. He arrived mid-afternoon and asked very politely if he could examine Mrs.

Hardwick on the matter of headaches. Verly did not have headaches, but she agreed, because a guest is a guest in the hollow. He listened to her heart. He looked into her eyes with a small mirror.

He felt the glands under her jaw. He had her walk across the room and back, hold her hands out with her eyes closed. He asked in a normal conversational voice how she had been sleeping. Well, she said.

Did she have dreams she remembered? No. “I do not dream much anymore. I used to dream when I was a girl.

I dreamed of a stairway once that went up into the dark and never finished. But that was years ago. ” The doctor wrote nothing down. He thanked her, said she was in very fine health, which was true, and asked if he might have a cup of coffee with her husband before he went.

She made the coffee and brought it to the table. She set the doctor’s cup down in front of him and said, in the same conversational voice in which she had told him about her dreams: “How is Cordy these days, Morty? Tell her I send my respects. ”

The doctor went very still.

He looked at the cup. He did not pick it up. “I beg your pardon. ”

Verly smiled.

It was her own smile, nothing on her face but warmth. “Cordy. Your wife. She is better, I hope.

I know it was a bad winter for her lungs. ”

The doctor sat a moment. He took off his spectacles, cleaned them, put them back on. He picked up the cup and held it without drinking.

“My wife,” he said, “is called Cordelia by me and by everybody we know. She was called Cordy by her own mother when she was a girl. Her mother passed in 1871. As far as I know, nobody has called her Cordy in seventeen years.

” He paused. “And nobody outside of my own mother ever called me Morty. My mother is buried in Greene County. She has been there since 1863.

”

Verly’s smile did not change at first. Then slowly, like water turning under a thin sheet of ice, it did change. It folded inward. Her hand went to her mouth.

“I do not… I do not know why I said that. I am sorry. I do not know any Cordy.

I never met your wife, doctor. I never met your mother. Why would I say a thing like that? ” She stood up, said, “Excuse me,” politely, and went into the bedroom and shut the door.

The doctor and Silas sat at the table. The coffee got cold. After a while, the doctor said very quietly: “Mr. Hardwick, I do not know what is wrong with your wife.

I will tell you plainly that whatever it is, it is not a thing I treat. I have nothing in either of my bags for this. I am very sorry. ” At the door he turned.

“I will say something to you, and you can do with it what you will. I am a man of medicine. I do not put much faith in things I cannot weigh and measure. But there are things in this country, in these hollows, that I have seen in twenty years of practice, that I cannot weigh and measure.

I will not give them a name, because I have not earned the right to name them. But do not be alone with her at night, and do not leave her alone at night. And send for Pastor Crowley, and ask him to send for whoever Pastor Crowley wants to send for. ” He left.

The dog did not bark at him as he rode out. The dog was watching the bedroom window. That night Silas sat by the fire. Verly sat with him.

She was not knitting. Her hands were folded in her lap. She looked into the fire a long time, and then she said, “Silas, I want to tell you something. ”

He waited.

“I do not always know,” she said, “when I am myself. ”

He did not say anything. “There are days I know. I wake up and I know my hands and I know your face and the room is the room I went to sleep in.

And then there are days when I wake up and I feel like I am a long way off, and somebody is doing my work in my body, and I am watching from down the road. I am watching them put on my apron and braid my hair and salt the pork. I can see what they are doing, but I cannot reach them. I cannot reach in here.

” She tapped the center of her chest. “There is somebody else in here, and I am very, very far away. ” She looked up at him. “Today, with the doctor, that was one of the bad days.

I was watching from somewhere out by the smokehouse. I saw her say those things. I saw her with my eyes. I do not know who she is.

I do not know how to make her go away. ”

She cried then, not loudly, the way people cry when they are already tired of crying. He held her a long time and said nothing, because there was nothing he could say that would be a true thing. He thought about telling her she was going to be all right.

He did not, because he did not believe it himself. That night he sent word to Crowley. Crowley came up the next morning, and he brought somebody with him. The man was older than Crowley by ten years at least.

His name was Obadiah Renshaw, the preacher at the meeting house in Shallows Branch, two valleys over. A small, wiry man with very black eyes and a hand-carved walking stick worn smooth at the grip. He came up the slope on foot because the road had iced over and his horse was not young. Renshaw shook Silas’s hand.

He shook Verly’s hand. He sat at the table without taking off his coat and looked at her a long time without saying anything. Verly looked back at him. Then Renshaw said, “Mrs.

Hardwick, I am going to pray over you in a little while. Before I do, I want to ask you something. Is that all right? ”

“Yes, sir,” she said.

“When did you first start hearing the other one? ”

Verly was quiet. She did not say, “What other one? ” She did not pretend not to know what he meant.

Her hands moved a little in her lap. “October,” she said finally. “Maybe the end of September. I thought it was me at first.

I thought it was just thinking, the kind of thinking you do when you are alone in the house. Then I noticed I was not doing the thinking. The thinking was being done at me. ”

Renshaw nodded.

“Does she have a name? ”

“She told me one once. I do not want to say it. ”

“That is wise,” Renshaw said.

He took a small black book out of his coat. A Bible, very worn, the pages stained brown around the edges. He set it on the table. He did not open it.

“I am not going to drive her out,” he said. “I want you to know that before we begin. I do not know how to drive her out. I do not know that she can be driven out.

What I know how to do is to ask and to listen and to tell her that this is not her house and this is not her body, and the road home is a road she has to take herself. Some take it. Some do not. I have seen both.

”

Verly nodded. “Are you afraid? ” Renshaw asked. She thought about it.

“No,” she said slowly. “I am tired. ”

He prayed over her then, for about twenty minutes, some words old, some he seemed to be making up as he went. Crowley stood by the wall the whole time with his head bowed.

Silas sat across from Verly and held her hand. Her hand was cold the whole time and did not warm. When it was done, Renshaw closed the book. “Did you hear me, ma’am?

” She said yes. “Did she? ” Verly was quiet a long moment. Then she said, “She heard you.

She does not want to go. She says it is warm here in this body. She says she has been cold a long time. ”

Renshaw drew a breath and stood up.

“Then she has a choice in front of her, and you have a choice in front of you. And there is not much more that I can do today. I will come back. I will pray again.

In the meantime, Mrs. Hardwick, I want you to do something for me. When she speaks to you, speak back. Not loud, not angry.

Tell her she is welcome to listen, but the door is yours, and the body is yours, and the road home is hers. Do not argue with her. Do not let her argue with you. Just keep telling her.

Do you understand? ”

“Yes, sir,” Verly said. At the door, Renshaw turned to Silas. “She is a strong woman.

She has been holding the door a long time. ” Silas asked what he had seen. “I saw two women in that chair, Mr. Hardwick.

One of them is your wife. The other one is the one who is tired of being cold. ” He went down the slope. Crowley followed.

That was a Wednesday. The Wednesday and Thursday were calm. Verly did what Renshaw had told her. Silas heard her sometimes in the kitchen, talking to no one he could see.

Her voice was steady, not pleading, not shouting, just talking the way you would talk to a person who had come into your house without an invitation and was sitting in your chair, telling them evenly that the chair was yours. For a day, two days, three days, things seemed to be holding. Then the storm came. It came in Saturday night, down the ridge from the north: a hard, cold wind, then snow, then ice on top of the snow.

By midnight the trees were creaking under the weight. By two in the morning the eaves dripped icicles thicker than a man’s wrist. The wind came through the chinking, and the fire would not stay even. Silas banked the fire, checked the door, bolted it from inside the way he had done every night since November, put the key under his pillow, and went to sleep with Verly beside him.

He woke at some hour he could not name. The lamp was out, the fire low, and the wind made it hard to tell time by anything outside. Verly was not beside him. The door was open.

The wind was coming through it, snow on the threshold, the door banging against the wall, the bolt hanging on its post. The key was in his hand, still under the pillow. He sat up and went to the door. There were tracks in the snow, one set only, going out across the dooryard and up the slope toward the ridge.

She was barefoot. He pulled on his boots without lacing them, pulled on his coat, took down the lantern, lit it with shaking hands. He did not take a rifle, because the things you take a rifle for are not the things he was going after. He stepped out into the wind.

The tracks went up the slope, across the broken pasture above the cabin, through the gap in the snake-rail fence, into the woods. He followed. For what felt like an hour and was probably twenty minutes, the lantern guttered and held. The snow was up to his shins in places, his knees in others.

The trees were heavy with ice, and the woods made a noise he had never heard them make before: a long, low groaning, as if the ridge itself were settling under a weight. He came out of the trees at the top of the ridge and stopped. The wind had dropped. That happens sometimes in those storms: the wind comes through, then there is a pocket of quiet, then it comes back.

In the quiet, he heard a voice. It was Verly’s voice, coming from the old place. A cabin at the top of the ridge that had been there before the war and had been burned partway down in the war. Three walls still stood.

The roof was gone. The chimney was still up at the north end. People in the hollow knew about it and did not go up there. Nobody had ever told Silas why.

Some places get that way on their own. He had never told Verly about it. He had never spoken its name to her. But the tracks went straight to it.

He came up to the broken doorway and lifted the lantern. She was sitting on the floor of the cabin in the snow, in her nightclothes, hair down, hands folded in her lap. She was talking, not to him. She was looking at a place between the two standing walls where the snow lay flat and undisturbed, talking to a person who was not there.

The wind came back as he stood in the doorway and took most of her words. He heard only fragments. “I told you. I told you the husband.

No, you cannot. No, it is not yours. It was never yours. You have to go.

”

He took a step into the cabin, and the lantern light fell on the corner where she was looking. He did not see a body. He did not see a face. He saw what looked, for a moment, like the shape of a person standing where there was no person.

Not a clear shape, more like the air had grown thicker in one particular place, like heat coming off a stove, but cold. He had the impression of a tall figure. He had the impression the figure was leaning forward. Then the lantern flickered.

When it came back, there was nothing in the corner. Only snow. He went to her, knelt down in the snow beside her, put his arm around her shoulders, said her name. She turned her face to him slowly.

It was her face. It was Verly. “Silas,” she said. “She does not want to go.

”

“I know,” he said. “She is very tired. I told her she cannot have my body, Silas. I told her again and again.

”

“You did right. ”

“She says she will go,” Verly said. Her voice was so soft he had to lean down to hear her. “She says she will go if I will sit here with her a little while longer.

Just a little while. ”

“Verly. We have to go home. You will freeze.

”

“Just a little while,” she said. He saw the snow on her shoulders. The snow in her hair. The white skin of her bare feet against the white of the snow.

He saw, for one second, his own hand on her shoulder shaking, and he understood somewhere very far inside himself that he was looking at a woman who might not be able to walk home. He picked her up. She did not fight him. She put her face against his neck and said very quietly, “Thank you.

” He did not know which of them was thanking him. He carried her down the ridge. Halfway down he met Crowley coming up. The pastor had seen the lantern light moving from his own porch, half a mile away.

He had a coat over his nightshirt, snow up to his thighs, breathing hard. He took Verly’s other side. Between them they got her home, put her in the bed, wrapped her in every blanket in the house and one of Crowley’s coats besides. They built the fire up until it was roaring.

Silas took her feet between his hands and rubbed them for an hour. She slept through the rest of the night and most of the next day. When she woke, it was the middle of Sunday afternoon. The storm had passed.

The sky was clear and very pale blue. The icicles were dripping off the eaves. She sat up in bed and said, “Did I dream? ”

Silas sat on the edge of the bed and took her hand.

“You walked up to the old place last night,” he said. She thought about this. “I do not remember,” she said. “I remember being cold.

I remember somebody telling me to sit. I remember thinking she was going to go. ”

“Did she? ” Silas asked.

Verly was quiet a long moment. Then she said, “I do not hear her right now. In this minute, I do not hear her. ” She put her hand to her chest.

“It is very quiet,” she said. “It has not been this quiet in a long while. ” She did not smile. She was not quite ready to smile.

But she rested back against the pillow and closed her eyes, and Silas sat with her, holding her hand, until she slept again, and her sleep was easy. So that was the end of one part of the story, but not all of it. For weeks after that night, Verly was herself, though tired in ways she had never been tired before. She slept more than she used to.

She lost weight she could not afford to lose. But the voice did not come back, and the staring fits did not come back, and the names she had no business knowing did not come out of her mouth anymore for weeks. Then small things returned. She would stop in the middle of a sentence and have to ask Silas what she had been saying.

She would set down a sewing needle and go looking for it where she had never put it. She would wake at three in the morning and lie awake looking at the ceiling for an hour, and when Silas asked what was wrong, she would say only, “Nothing. It is quiet. I am just listening to the quiet.

”

The dog never came back into the cabin. Pard lived another four years and slept on the porch every night of it. When he died in 1892, Silas buried him by the cemetery fence. He did not get another dog.

Pastor Crowley moved to Knoxville in the spring of 1890. He never said why, and he never preached in Crowark Hollow again. Renshaw stayed at Shallows Branch until his own death in 1895. Silas Hardwick lived until 1914.

He was sixty-seven when he died, a long life for a man of his time and place, though he looked older than that for the last ten years of it. Verly outlived him by three years. She lived alone in the cabin on the slope, kept the garden, kept the chickens, walked down to the meeting house every Sunday until the year she died. She did not remarry.

She did not, as far as anybody in the hollow knew, ever speak again of the woman who had once been in her body. She is buried next to her husband at the cemetery at the foot of the slope. The stone says her name and her dates and nothing else. There is one more part.

In the autumn of 1914, a hunter from over in Camp County came through Crowark Hollow on his way home from a deer he had not found. He stopped at the old store, the one Tobias Renfroe had kept, though Renfroe was long dead by then, and asked the man behind the counter about a woman he had seen up on the ridge. He said he had been crossing the ridge near the burned-out cabin just before dusk, and he had seen a woman standing in the doorway. Slight build.

Copper brown hair pinned tight at the nape. Brown dress. She had been looking down into the hollow as if she were waiting for someone to come up the slope and fetch her. He had called out to her.

She had turned to look at him. Then she had not been there anymore. He walked up to the doorway. The snow was just starting to come down.

There were no tracks in the snow. Not his, not hers, not anybody’s. He said he had not been frightened exactly. The woman had not seemed angry, only tired.

He wanted to know if anybody in the hollow could tell him who she was. The man behind the counter looked at him a long time before he answered. Then he said: “Friend, you go on home. You go on home, and you forget you came up this way.

The road back is the way you came. Do not go up that ridge again. Do not ever go up that ridge again. ” And then he added: “That woman has been let alone these last six years, and that is the way she will stay.

”

The hunter went home. He never came back through the hollow. But years later, when he was an old man, he told the story to his grandson, who told it to his nephew, who told it to a man who much later told it to me. I have given it to you the way it was given to me.

I cannot tell you who the woman on the ridge was: whether she was Verly Hardwick, come back to the place where she had once held the door, or whether she was the other one, the one who had finally gotten the body she had been waiting for, even if it was only for a few minutes at dusk in front of a stranger from the next county. I cannot tell you if there was ever really a woman on that ridge at all. I can only tell you that the people of the hollow, while they lived, did not go up there. And the burned-out cabin, the last time anyone went looking for it, was still there.

Three walls. The chimney at the north end. The snow lying flat where nobody had walked.