The last house in Salomere had no salt on the door. Otalie Westerk stood at the top of the rise, her tin bucket heavy on her arm, and looked down into the hollow where the fog had begun to gather under the covered bridge. She had seventy-one years behind her and a hundred yards of empty porches ahead. She knew what came through the valley when the salt ran thin.

She also knew it had already started. They had come to Salomere in October of 1908, a survey crew from Pittsburgh sent by the coal company. Their engineer was a thirty-nine-year-old named Cassander Balinger, a tall, clean-shaven man in a wool suit who looked, when he stepped down from the mule cart at the boarding house, like a man who had wandered into the wrong funeral. He had studied at the Colorado School of Mines, kept a black leather notebook in his breast pocket, and believed with the conviction of a man who had settled the matter young that most of what people believed was nonsense, and that a little clear thinking would fix almost everything.

The valley of Salomere was not on most maps. To reach it you passed the old sawmill, then the covered bridge with one plank missing, then a bend so sharp that wagons had to stop and back up twice. Then the trees closed overhead and the sky narrowed to a strip. The valley ended where the mountain leaned against itself.

The last cabin stood at the top of the rise, hidden among pines, its chimney tilted slightly west from years of wind. That cabin belonged to Otalie Westerk. She had lived there since she was three months old. She was seventy-one that autumn, small and thin as a fence rail, with hair the color of ash water and a face lined like the bed of a creek.

She wore the same brown wool skirt from October to April and the same pale linen dress from May to September. She had left the valley only four times in her life, all to bury someone, and every time she had walked home the same day rather than sleep under another roof. Her routine was known to everyone. She rose before dawn, milked her one stubborn old goat named Beth, fed her chickens, drew water from her well, and ate breakfast standing at the kitchen sink.

She spent her days in her garden or in her chair by the window with her knitting. At dusk, every day of the year without exception, she took down a small tin bucket that hung on a nail beside her door. The bucket was older than she was, filled with coarse salt, the kind that came in twenty-pound sacks for butchers. She walked down into the valley, past the Ashcroft house, past the boarding house, past the Corwith cabin where the widow lived, past Marina Coldwater’s general store, past the closed church, past the row of miners’ houses nearest the shaft, to the covered bridge with the missing plank.

At every doorstep she stopped. She dipped two fingers into the bucket. She drew a thin line of salt along the top of the doorframe and down each side. She did it quickly.

The salt made a faint rasping sound on the wood, a sound the children of Salomere knew so well that the older boys playing by the creek would sometimes stop and say without looking: “That’s Otalie at the Whitmer place. ”

She had been doing it since her mother died and the bucket passed to her, which by most people’s reckoning meant she had been doing it for nearly fifty years. She never explained why. If asked, she would look at you for a long moment, the way you look at a rain cloud that hasn’t decided where it’s going, and say: “My mother did it, and her mother before her.

” Then she would continue on her way. That was the answer. It was always the answer. The town had made its peace with her, as small places do.

There were three opinions about Otalie’s salt, and if you asked at Marina Coldwater’s store on any Sunday you could collect all three within an hour. The old people, those who remembered their grandmothers, believed she was doing necessary work. Zebulon Ashcroft was of this party. He was eighty-three, a former miner with a bad leg, and he told anyone who asked that his grandmother had helped Otalie’s grandmother salt the doors during the war.

That was the end of the argument for him. The second opinion, held by most of the younger men and women, was that Otalie was harmless and possibly a little addled, and that was fine, and please pass the coffee. The third opinion, held by exactly two men, was that she was a nuisance. Those two men never said it aloud.

They simply wiped the salt off their doors before bed, quietly, so no one would see. Then Cassander Balinger came to Salomere, and the opinions became four. He arrived on the fourteenth of September on a mule cart driven by a boy from the county seat. He had been sent to inspect the old Salomere mine and determine whether it could be safely reopened.

The mine had been closed in 1884 after what the company records called a “subsidence event,” and what the miners’ widows called something they did not wish to discuss. On his second evening, Cassander stepped out onto the boarding house porch at dusk to smoke his pipe and saw a small old woman in a brown wool skirt coming up his steps with a tin bucket on her arm. She did not look at him. She stopped at the doorframe, dipped her fingers into the bucket, and drew a line of coarse salt across the top edge and down each side.

Then she nodded to him without meeting his eyes and moved on to the next porch. He watched her go. Then he laughed, not unkindly, but the way you laugh when something unexpected is smaller and stranger than you thought. He went inside and asked the boarding house keeper, a widow named Prudence Hawrin, who the woman was.

Prudence told him. He asked why she salted the door. Prudence said: “She does it. ” He asked why.

Prudence said: “She always has, Mr. Balinger. It’s harmless. ” Cassander smiled and said, “No, of course it isn’t.

” Then he made a note in his black leather notebook. That was the beginning of the trouble. In the days that followed, Cassander did nothing anyone could point to and call wrong. He asked questions.

He asked Marina Coldwater why Otalie bought coarse salt in twenty-pound sacks every three months when a woman living alone could not possibly use that much salt in her food. Marina, who was fifty-four and had a way of looking at customers over the lower half of her spectacles that made grown men flustered, told him that Otalie bought what she bought and that she did not ask her customers what they did with their goods. He asked Zebulon Ashcroft about the closing of the mine in 1884. Zebulon, sitting on a bench outside the store, took a long time cutting a plug of tobacco before he answered.

Then he said: “Some things stayed down there. We left them there. ” Cassander wrote that down too. Then he began to talk.

Not sermons, just remarks. Standing on the boarding house porch in the evenings while his survey men smoked with him, watching Otalie come up the lane with her bucket, he would say quietly: “Men, we’re living in the twentieth century. ” Or: “Salt is just a mineral. It settles on wood.

It does nothing. ” Or, most often: “If something has never once been proven to work, it probably never worked, and we’re all afraid to say so. ” His men were mostly from Pittsburgh and Wheeling, city men who were glad to agree with him because agreeing with the boss cost them nothing. Within two weeks, on the porches of the two houses the survey crew had taken over, there was no salt at dusk.

Otalie would come up the steps. She would nod without looking. She would raise her hand toward the doorframe, and one of the crewmen, following Cassander’s simple instruction, would say politely: “No thank you, ma’am. ” Otalie would nod again and turn to continue on her way.

She never argued. She never argued about anything. That was what worried Zebulon Ashcroft more than anything else. He said to his son one evening: “That woman has never argued in her life.

That means she doesn’t think she needs to. I don’t know how to read that. ” His son said: “Pa, she’s old. ” Zebulon said: “No.

That’s not it. ”

The first frost came that year on the twenty-second of September, three weeks early. No one remarked on it because everyone had noticed it. That morning, Hop, Marina Coldwater’s thin black cat who had lived in the store for eleven years, refused to cross the back doorstep.

He sat inside on a flour barrel and yowled at the frame until Marina carried him out. Then he ran back in and refused to leave. Marina said nothing about it. That evening she bought a fresh sack of coarse salt from her own stock, took it home, and salted her doorframe with her own hands.

She had never done that before. The widow in the Corwith cabin was named Delphinia Corwith. She was twenty-seven. She had married Ellis Corwith when she was twenty and lost him in the mine in the county in 1904.

She had lived alone in that cabin for four years, mending clothes and keeping six laying hens. She was small and dark-haired, with steady gray eyes. She was the only person in Salomere, besides Zebulon, who talked to Otalie without purpose. She brought her tomatoes in August.

She brought her bread on Sundays. She sat on Otalie’s porch and did not press her to speak. And over the four years of their friendship, Otalie told her pieces of her story, the pieces she was ready to tell. It went like this.

In 1863, when the men had gone off to war and only women and old men were left in the valley, something had come up toward the valley. Otalie was never told what it was. Her mother had been six years old then. Her grandmother, who had seen it, refused to describe it.

She only said it came in the fog on All Hallows’ Eve and knocked on the doors one by one, and took whoever’s doorframes were empty. When it was done, seventeen people were gone. Seventeen. In a valley of barely forty souls.

Those who remained put salt on their doorframes that night, without knowing why, every one of them. In the morning, the salted doors had held. The unsalted ones had not. Otalie’s grandmother salted every night for the next forty-two years until she died in 1905.

Then Otalie’s mother took up the task. Then her mother died the following spring, and Otalie took the bucket down from its nail and never put it back. There was one more detail. Otalie told Delphinia in the spring of 1906, as they sat on the top step of her porch and a cardinal sang in the pines.

Otalie said: “My mother saw it. ” She was six. She was hiding under the kitchen table when it passed their window. She said it walked like a man walks, but so slowly, like someone in no hurry because he knows the door is open.

My mother said she could see its shadow through the wax paper on the kitchen window. And my mother said she never let a door in her house go unsalted at dusk for the rest of her life, because she said: “Child, some things come once in a lifetime and expect to find the door open. If the door is barred, they turn back. If it is open, they take what they came for.

” That is what my mother told me. Delphinia never told anyone. She understood, in the quiet way you understand what you have been trusted with, that it was not hers to spread. But she also began, that September, to feel worse every day without knowing why.

She began to salt her own door. Not just the outer frame but the inner threshold, the kitchen entry, the stove. She used more salt in September than she had all summer for pickling. She told no one.

She did not need to. Otalie saw the salt at the Corwith door and nodded firmly and walked on. October came cold. On the third of October, the Ashcrofts’ rooster stopped crowing.

It was a four-year-old red bird, a good rooster, and one morning it simply made no sound. Zebulon went out and found it alive, standing by the fence, staring down the valley toward Otalie’s cabin, refusing to look away. It did not crow that day or the next. On the fifth of October, the boarding house spaniel, a dog named Rusty who slept under the porch, disappeared.

Cassander searched the woods for two hours and did not find him. He came back and said: “Wolves. ” Prudence Hawrin, who had lived in that valley for forty-one years and never lost a dog to wolves, said nothing. She salted her doorframe that night quietly while Cassander was upstairs.

On the ninth of October, Marina Coldwater woke at three in the morning to the sound of her husband calling her name from the porch. Her husband had died in 1897. She did not open the door. She lay in bed until dawn, the Bible on her chest, the words of the Lord’s Prayer moving silently on her lips.

When the light came up she rose and salted her doorframe again, over the line that was already there. She told Delphinia the next morning in the store, by the coffee grinder, in a voice so steady it was only a pretense: “I heard something last night I didn’t want to answer. ” Delphinia understood and did not press. She bought a pound of coarse salt wrapped in paper and took it home.

On the eleventh of October at noon, the oil lamp that Marina Coldwater kept burning above the general store ledger, which had burned continuously for forty-one years except for two occasions when she refilled it, went out. She was standing directly beneath it at the time. There was no draft. There was no wind at the door.

She looked up at it. She stood for a long moment. Then she reached into the drawer under the ledger, took out a box of matches, and relit it. It caught on the first match.

She told no one. That same evening the well at Cold Iron’s place turned bitter. Fenwick Cold Iron drew a bucket to wash his hands, and the water tasted, as he said later, like coins and the bottom of a lake. He drew another bucket and it tasted the same.

He rode to the boarding house and told Cassander, who was writing at the parlor table. Cassander wrote: “Well at Cold Iron property showing mineral contamination consistent with seepage from an old mine shaft,” and told Fenwick to boil the water and not to worry. Fenwick nodded and went home. The next morning the well was clear again.

Cassander did not write that part down. On the twelfth of October, Zebulon Ashcroft dreamed of his father. His father had been dead for thirty-six years. In the dream, his father stood at the door wearing the coat he had been buried in, and his father said: “Zeb, open the door, son.

It’s cold out here. ” Zebulon woke sweating. He got out of bed. He walked to the door.

He put his ear to it. He heard nothing. He waited a long time. Then he went down to his dry cellar and brought up the sack of salt his wife had bought two weeks earlier.

He drew a line along the top of the doorframe, down each side, along the inner threshold, and along all four windows. He sat in his kitchen with the lamp burning until dawn. He did not tell his son what he had heard. Cassander Balinger did not sleep well that October either.

He would not have said so. He was a man who bathed in cold water and wrote in his black leather notebook and considered nightmares a matter of digestion. But from the second week of October he began to wake at odd hours and hear, faintly, something moving on the porch below his window. Once he went down.

There was nothing. Another time he did not go down, and in the morning the mat outside his door had been pushed six inches to the left, as if someone had stepped on it hard from the wrong direction. He no longer wiped the salt off his door. He simply stopped adding more, and as the amount dwindled, as coarse salt does on a windblown porch, he convinced himself he had not noticed.

He wrote a letter to his sister in Pittsburgh on the twenty-third of October, a short letter, mentioning only that the survey was progressing, that the mine was in worse shape than the company thought, and that he expected to be home by Christmas. He did not mail it. He put it in the black leather notebook in his breast pocket and left it there. In the last nights of October he stopped writing in the notebook altogether.

He would open it at the table after dinner, dip his pen, hold it for a long moment over the page, then close the book without writing anything. Prudence Hawrin noticed and said nothing. She had lived with two husbands, both dead, and had learned long ago that when a man stops writing at a table he has written at every night for six weeks, it is because something stands behind his chair that he does not want to describe. By the twenty-eighth of October, more than half the doorframes in Salomere were unsalted or lightly salted.

Otalie’s bucket was heavy on her arm when she started her rounds, and by the time she returned to the rise it was nearly empty. She was seventy-one. Her right knee had begun to swell in the evenings. She did not stop.

She walked. She stopped. She raised her fingers. She scattered salt where she was allowed to scatter it, and nodded to the doors where she was not, and went on.

On the thirtieth of October, a Friday, Otalie came to the Corwith cabin at her usual hour, and Delphinia was waiting on the porch with a cup of hot apple cider. Otalie took the cider. She salted the doorframe. She sat down on the top step.

There was a long silence. Then she said: “Tomorrow is the night. ” Delphinia said: “Tomorrow. ” Otalie said: “All Hallows’ Eve.

” And she said: “Do not open your door tomorrow night, girl. No matter what you hear. ” Delphinia said: “I won’t. ” Otalie said: “No matter whose voice it is.

” Delphinia said: “I understand. ” Otalie said: “Salt the inner threshold too. And the stove. And all four windows.

And if you have any left, sit with it in your lap. And do not sleep. ” Delphinia said: “All right. ” Otalie stayed a moment longer.

Then she rose heavily, took up her bucket, and went on her way to the next door. Delphinia watched her until the light failed. That night the moon was a thin pale crescent, tilted, and it set early. Darkness came to Salomere by seven.

There was no wind. The creek, whose sound was usually a companion at every window, ran so quietly you had to strain to hear it. Delphinia did as Otalie told her. She salted the inner threshold.

She salted the stove. She salted the four windows. She sat in her kitchen with the rest of the salt in a cup on her lap, turned her lamp down low, and waited. The fog came into the valley at quarter past nine.

Delphinia would remember later that she felt it before she saw it, the way you feel a train coming through the vibration of the floor. The salt in the cup on her lap shifted faintly, with no hand touching it, and she looked down at it, then raised her eyes to the window. Behind the glass the road was still empty and dark. Then, beyond the covered bridge, something began to change in the darkness.

Nothing appeared clearly. The darkness itself began to take on body, the way still water takes on body when a fish moves beneath it. The fog did not come from the river. It came from under the river.

It rose slowly from the ground and from the stones of the covered bridge, and it moved across the road with a purpose no fog has. It was chest-high at first, then higher, and where it passed the pines the pines went silent, and where it passed the porches the wood made no settling sound. It was not weather. It was a presence, trying to remember how to be a presence.

It moved from the covered bridge past the miners’ houses, past the closed church, past the general store where Marina Coldwater sat on her stoop with her back against the wall and a dim lamp burning, past the boarding house where Cassander Balinger stood at his upper window looking down and thinking in the last clear part of his mind that fog did not behave like this, and up to the Corwith cabin where Delphinia sat in her kitchen with the cup of salt on her knees. And it climbed the rise toward Otalie’s cabin. Otalie was not in her cabin. Otalie was coming down.

She had risen at dark. She put on her coat and her wide black straw hat with the faded ribbon, took her tin bucket down from its nail beside her door, and started down the road with her bucket full and heavy. She met the fog at the Ashcroft gate. It did not touch her.

It flowed around her as water flows around a stone, and it did not slow. She kept walking. Her breathing was even. Her right knee, which had ached since September, was quiet tonight, and she noticed its quietness, and put it out of her mind, because there was no time to think about knees.

She had been eight years old when her grandmother taught her the salt rule. Right hand, two fingers. Coarse salt only. A thin line across the top first, then each side, from top to threshold.

Don’t waste it. Don’t add water. Don’t speak while you lay it. Don’t answer if something inside the house speaks first.

That was what her grandmother said, and Otalie had not forgotten it in sixty-three years. If you hear a voice calling you from the other side of a doorframe you are salting, that door is one you cannot save. Finish the line if you can. If you cannot, keep walking.

Do not look back. Do not run. Otalie did not run. She stopped at the Ashcroft porch.

The salt there was fresh. Zebulon had renewed it that afternoon. Otalie nodded and went on. She stopped at the next porch.

The salt was thin. She added to it. She stopped at the next. There was no salt at all.

She raised her fingers and began to draw the line. From inside the house, a voice called a name. It was a woman’s voice. Otalie gave no sign she heard it.

She finished the line along the top of the frame. She began the side. The voice came again from inside, sharper, more familiar. Otalie did not react.

She finished the first side. She had begun the other side when the door opened. A man stood in the entry. He was one of the survey crew, a young man from Wheeling named Auden Kelsey.

His face was pale and confused. He said: “Ma’am, my mother is dead. Why are you calling me from the yard? ” Otalie said: “Go inside, son.

” Auden said: “But I heard—. ” Otalie said: “Go inside and close the door, and do not open it again tonight for anything that has a voice. ” Auden went in. She finished the line along the other side of the frame.

From the fog behind her she heard a sound she had never heard before, and she did not turn, and she went on to the next porch. She salted the boarding house porch first. Prudence Hawrin had already salted her downstairs doorframe. Otalie added to it.

She could not salt the upper porches where the survey crew had their rooms, because they had no external doors of their own. She turned to leave, and Cassander Balinger, who had been watching her come up the lane from his upstairs window, who had convinced himself for the past half hour that what he saw was only a woman in the fog and nothing more, who felt, without wanting to name it, a growing certainty that something stood on the porch below him, opened his upper window and leaned out and called to her. He said: “Mrs. Westerk.

Is something wrong? ”

Otalie looked up at him. It was the first time she had looked directly at him since he came to Salomere. He would remember that look later, for the last part of his life.

It was a mercy that he could remember anything, because it was not unkind. She said: “Mr. Balinger. Please go and salt your door.

” He said: “Ma’am—. ” She said: “Please go now. ” Then she turned and walked to the next house. Cassander stood for a long moment at the open window.

He heard something on the porch below. It sounded like the scuff of a shoe. It sounded exactly like the scuff of a shoe. He told himself it was one of the crew.

He told himself the fog was making him tired. He closed the window. He went to his bedroom door. He stopped.

He went back to his wardrobe, where he kept his black leather notebook and a small brass paperweight, and, for reasons he had never analyzed, a handful of coarse salt that he had absent-mindedly wiped from his door on the day he arrived and put there. He picked up the handful of salt. He held it in his palm. He thought about going down the stairs and out onto the porch and putting it on the doorframe.

He thought about how it would look if one of the crew saw him doing it. He put the salt back on the wardrobe. He got into bed. What Auden Kelsey saw from his window forty-five minutes later was this.

The fog had thickened around the boarding house. It had reached the porch rail. From the middle of the fog at the front door, a shape emerged that was not quite the shape of a man. Auden, who described it to the deputy sheriff the next morning before he left the state and never returned, said only that it was the size of a man but had none of a man’s features, and that he could not look at it long enough to say more.

It stood at Cassander Balinger’s front door. It raised a hand, or something like a hand, and made a sound at the door that was not a knock. Auden, in his own room, sat up in bed and pressed his back against the wall and did not breathe. Downstairs, in his room, Cassander heard the sound at the front door.

And he heard, beneath it, a voice. It was his father’s voice. His father, who had died in 1891, calling him by the name only he had ever called him. Cassander sat up in bed.

He said to himself, quietly: “No. ” But his hand was already reaching for his lamp, and his feet were already on the floor. He was already opening his door. He came down the boarding house stairs in his bare feet, carrying the lamp.

He crossed the front room. He put his hand on the latch of the door. He said aloud: “Father. ” And he opened the door.

No one heard a sound from him after that. There was no scream. There was no struggle. Prudence Hawrin, sitting in her kitchen downstairs behind her salted door, heard the front door open and heard nothing else.

When she came out at dawn, she found the front door standing open, the lamp on the floor still burning, and Cassander Balinger’s shoes on the mat. She found nothing else. On the doorframe, from top to bottom, on the right-hand side, there was a deep scratch, as if something with a nail had drawn its finger down the wood, slowly, patiently, all the way to the porch. The fog hung over Salomere until first light.

It began to thin around four in the morning. Prudence Hawrin, who had not slept, watched from her kitchen window as it retreated toward the covered bridge, moving now the way a well-fed animal moves back to its den, slowly, unconcerned with what it left behind. It went back down the valley the way it had come, and by the time the sun rose over the hills at seven o’clock it was gone, and the outside world was clear and cold and still in a way none of the survivors would ever be able to describe. Delphinia Corwith opened her front door at seven-fifteen.

The cup of salt was in her lap, untouched. She too had not slept. She stepped out onto her porch and looked down the valley, and she saw Otalie coming up the road toward her, walking slower than usual. Otalie looked at her and gave a small nod, the only greeting she ever gave anyone, and kept walking.

Delphinia went inside and made two cups of hot black coffee. She carried them to the porch and waited. When Otalie came up the hill half an hour later, Delphinia handed her a cup. Neither of them spoke.

Otalie sat on the top step of the Corwith porch and drank her coffee and let her hands stop shaking. Then she stood, thanked Delphinia, and went home. Seven people were missing by dawn. Cassander Balinger.

Two of the survey crew, both from Wheeling, named Ellery Witmarsch and Fenwick Cold Iron, whose doorframe was also unsalted because Cassander had told them not to bother. Marina Coldwater’s cousin, visiting from the county seat, who was sleeping in the storeroom and who opened the back door at some point in the night because he thought he heard his sister calling him. Two miners named Otterbein Sledge and Lem Corbin, both single, boarding in the little house nearest the mine shaft, the two men who had for years quietly wiped Otalie’s salt off their doors before bed. Their door was open in the morning.

Their beds had not been slept in. The seventh name was entered in the sheriff’s ledger in careful pencil, and four hours later it was crossed out, rendered illegible by three heavy strokes of ink. The deputy who did it never explained why, and died the following winter of a fever, and took his decision with him. Sheriff Demian Bread rode up the valley that evening.

He was a small, neat man in his sixties, mostly gray, with a habit of turning his hat in his hands when he thought. He had been sheriff of that county for twenty-nine years. He had ridden up to Salomere perhaps four times in his life. He knew, the way a lawman in old country knows things without having them written down, that this valley had a history the county records did not quite tell, and that the closing of the mine in 1884 had been signed by his predecessor with the same tidy word he was about to use himself, and that once a place has been signed with the wrong word, it is easier to sign it with the wrong word again than to open the ledger and begin again.

He walked the valley. He looked at the six doorframes that had no salt on them. He looked at the doorframes that had fresh salt, and the people who were still inside them. He looked at the deep scratch on the Balinger door.

He looked at Cassander’s shoes on the mat. He looked at Otalie Westerk, sitting on her porch at the top of the hill, her empty tin bucket at her feet, her hands folded in her lap. He climbed up to her. He said: “Mrs.

Westerk. ” She said: “Hello, Sheriff. ” He said: “Ma’am, is there anything you’d like to tell me? ” She said: “No, Sheriff.

” He said: “Ma’am, is there anything I ought to know? ” She said: “Sheriff, the seven are not coming back, and I am sorry for it. I told them all. ” He stood for a long moment on her porch.

Then he tipped his hat. Then he turned and went back down the hill. He wrote the report that evening at the boarding house kitchen table. He wrote it as follows.

The loss of seven people from the community of Salomere, presumed to have wandered into abandoned mine workings during hours of poor visibility on the night of October 31, 1908. No signs of criminal activity. Cause of disappearance undetermined. It is recommended that the mine opening be sealed.

He signed it. He blotted the ink. He rode down the valley at dusk without looking back. Everyone in Salomere who read that report knew it was a lie.

No one corrected it. Auden Kelsey packed his bag that evening and left Salomere on foot, while Prudence Hawrin stood on the boarding house porch and watched him go and did not try to stop him. He passed the general store without looking at it. He passed the covered bridge without looking at the missing plank.

A woman on the county road saw him board a freight train heading north, and two weeks later the coal company received a letter from him resigning without notice, stating that he would not return to West Virginia for any wage, and requesting his final check be sent to an address in Ohio. It was. He lived to be seventy-eight. He never went south of the Ohio River again.

The Pittsburgh company sent a replacement engineer in November, a man named Houston Fry, who took a long look at the mine, and at the door of the boarding house, and at Otalie Westerk coming up the hill in the fading light with her tin bucket. He wrote a two-line report to his superiors: “On balance, the Salomere mine will be flooded permanently at company expense. There is nothing here worth reopening. ” The mine was flooded before Christmas.

A small compensation was paid to each of the families of the seven missing men. None of them disputed the amounts. Over the next ten years Salomere emptied out. It emptied slowly, the way a barn empties of swallows in autumn, one at a time, then in small groups, then in one last rush.

The Widow Witmarsch was the first to leave. She packed a wagon in early December before the ground froze, took her two grown sisters and a caged canary, and went to Pittsburgh to live with a relative. She never wrote to anyone in Salomere. The house she left behind stood empty for three years before its roof collapsed in a snowstorm in March of 1911.

The Cold Irons left in February, to Ohio, to a town outside Akron where the wife had kin. The Mooreheads, who had lived across the creek since before the war, left in April, taking their oxen and their loom without telling anyone the day of their departure. Their empty cabin stood open for a week before Zebulon Ashcroft came and closed the door and salted the frame himself, without being asked. The miners moved to the county seat for work.

The Corwith cabin stayed inhabited because Delphinia stayed. The Ashcroft house stayed because Zebulon refused to leave. The general store stayed because Marina Coldwater knew no other way to live and refused to be moved. But by 1915 only nine houses were inhabited.

By 1920, four. By the spring of 1922, two. One of them was Otalie’s. Delphinia Corwith married a man from Charleston in the summer of 1916.

His name was Marius Everson. He was an accountant for a coal shipping firm. He was thirty-one, gentle, and he did not laugh when she told him on their second walk together that she would be salting every door in every house they ever lived in for the rest of her life. He said: “All right, Delphinia.

” They moved to Charleston. She wrote to Otalie every month until Otalie died. She kept all the letters for the rest of her life, tied with string in a tin box. After she died, in 1959, her granddaughter opened the box and read them and did not know what to do with most of them.

Marina Coldwater died in the winter of 1919 in her bed, of a lung complaint, with a sack of coarse salt on her nightstand within reach. Zebulon Ashcroft died in the winter of 1921 at the age of ninety-six in his kitchen chair, the door salted and the window salted, a small box of salt in his shirt pocket. His son found him in the morning and buried him on the hill. Otalie remained.

She was the last one. At dusk every day, through the few years that were left to her, she carried her bucket and walked the empty valley, past the vacant porches, past the sagging cabins, past the shuttered store with its dust-gray windows, and she salted every doorframe that still had a door. She nodded to the empty windows, and she went home up the hill. She was eighty-four in the spring she died.

A coal dealer named Emmet Brass came up the valley in April of 1922 because Otalie had not come down for flour in three weeks. He knocked on her door. There was no answer. He opened it.

She was sitting in her chair by the window, small and gray and neatly folded into herself, her tin bucket in her lap, empty and clean, her hands folded over the bucket as if she knew she was about to go to sleep and did not want to drop it. She was cold. She looked like she had been gone for days. Emmet rode his horse to the county seat and reported it.

Two men came with a wagon and a wooden coffin, and they dug her grave in the small family plot behind her cabin, beside her mother and her grandmother. It was a Tuesday, cold for April, with a light wet snow coming off the hills and settling on the fresh earth as they worked. Neither of them had ever known her in life. One was named Wildritch Artis and the other Sam Hollicombe, both from the county seat, both in their late forties, both used to digging graves in country places where no one was left to care.

When they lowered her down and filled the grave and stood a moment at the edge of the hole, one of them, Wildritch, took off his hat, and after a moment the other took off his hat too. They looked at each other, and Wildritch said: “Well. ” And Sam said: “We ought to. ” So they went into the cabin and took down the sack of coarse salt from beside her door, and they sprinkled salt on her grave.

Then they salted the doorframe of her cabin. Then, without saying anything to each other, they walked the empty valley in the failing daylight and salted the doorframe of every cabin in Salomere that still had a door standing. When they were done the sack was nearly empty, and they left what was left of it in the covered bridge under a stone, and rode home. Salomere is empty now.

It has been empty a long time. The county dropped its name for tax purposes in 1948. The road up from the bend has not been graded in seventy years, and in places the pines have grown so close together that a wagon could not pass, even if there were any reason to try. If you drive on the county road today you will find the site of the sawmill, though the sawmill itself is gone.

The covered bridge fell into the creek in the spring flood of 1952, and no one rebuilt it. If you want to cross the creek now you have to wade. The bend is still there. If you come up it and follow the road through the thick pines, you reach Salomere in about forty minutes.

You can walk the whole valley in an hour. The foundations are there, and some of the chimneys. A few cabins still have their walls mostly standing. A doorframe here and there, its wood gray and warped but still plumb.

The Corwith cabin is one that still stands. The Ashcroft house is another. Otalie’s cabin by the top of the rise has nearly vanished, but the doorframe still stands, holding up nothing. It stands alone among the pines like a picture frame around a piece of forest.

And here is the part of this story that has been weighed for a long time. Over the past fifty years or so, a handful of people have come up into Salomere in October. Mostly hunters. A survey crew once, in the sixties.

A young man from West Virginia University in the seventies writing a paper on abandoned communities. A retired schoolteacher and her nephew in the nineties on a fall drive, who lost the road and ended up at the bend and decided to walk it. Two brothers from Beckley on a fall hunting trip in 2007, camping near the old sawmill site, who out of curiosity walked up the road at dusk with a flashlight because one of them wanted to see the abandoned houses. The older brother, who was fifty-two then, who told the story once in a bar in Charleston and never told it again, said his brother was walking ahead of him a few steps and stopped at the first standing doorframe, and touched the wood with his fingers, and turned with a strange look on his face, and said only: “This is fresh.

”

They walked up the road together, past cabin after cabin. And on every doorframe that still stood, and there were seven or eight of them along the way, there was a thin, careful line of coarse salt across the top and down both sides. It could not have been more than a day old. They came back down the road faster than they went up.

They broke camp in the dark and drove home to Beckley in the middle of the night without saying a word. The younger brother died of a heart attack in a grocery store parking lot six weeks later. The older brother never returned to that county for any reason. Every one of them, without knowing about the others, came back and told whoever was with them the same thing, quietly.

They said there was fresh salt on the doorframes, not scattered or thrown, but laid in a thin, careful line along the top of every standing doorframe and down both sides. Coarse salt, the kind that comes in twenty-pound sacks for butchers. No one lives in Salomere. No one sells salt within twenty miles of that road.

There is no reason for anyone to walk up a dead valley in October and draw a thin, careful line on the doorframes of houses no one has lived in for years. And yet someone still salts the doors. If you are the kind of person who thinks about things, and I suspect you are, since you have stayed this long, you may find yourself asking the question I have tried not to ask since I first heard this story. The question is not who.

The question is: what would happen if they stopped? Perhaps some of these old rituals were not built on nothing. That the mountains keep things. That the salt on the doorframe is not magic.

It is a covenant. And that covenant is kept, all these years, by someone who understands better than the rest of us what happens when the covenant is broken.