like an old tomato. Wrecker nodded soberly and turned from them. At the edge of the porch he lifted a shovel and they watched him walk away, his shoulders broad and his tread heavy.
“I’ll send Jack to help when he gets here,” Melody called after him. “For all the use he’ll be,” she added, her voice low and ironic.
“Maybe he can make the time pass quicker,” Ruth murmured.
Wrecker turned once and flashed them a smile, and then passed out of sight.
Ruth patted Melody’s hand. “I’d better get inside. Do you know what you’re doing?”
“Figured I’d start with a washcloth and a bowl of warm water, and pray for inspiration.”
Ruthie smiled. “That should do it.” She turned toward the door. “Melody? Light some incense. Meg’s going to get ripe.”
“You did everything you could, Len,” Ruth said. She did not move far from his side for the long day and night and half a day again it took to prepare for Meg’s burial. It was the living who needed the vigil. The dead was lying on cleated planks in the lumber shed, washed by now, and oiled, and wrapped. A neighbor woman had arrived with skill and experience to share with Melody, and together they made sure that Meg would go out in style.
“I know,” Len answered, as he did each time. There wasn’t much more for either of them to say, but Ruth thought it was good to keep Len’s larynx from closing up from lack of use. She prodded him with this every hour or so when they were both awake. He didn’t cry. She suspected he didn’t know how to. Sometimes men lost the knack for it when they moved past boyhood and into the narrowed expectations of their later years. Or maybe Len was just cried out. The Meg he’d lived with for the past eighteen years was a sweet girl, and Ruth would miss her. But the Meg he’d married? She’d been long gone. That was the shame of it, Ruth thought. He’d spent all these years unable to mourn the loss of the woman he loved, and now that he was finally laying her to rest he had nothing but regret to grieve her with.
The goose? She knew how to cry. They let her grief speak for them all. She was an elderly bird and her voice wasn’t nearly as strong as it had been in her youth, but she’d been heartbroken by the loss and was determined to let the world know. She waddled around their frequent haunts, her plaintive honk echoing in the yard and threading through the saplings that had sprung up in Meg’s vegetable garden. Len didn’t think he could live with that, he said. It was the longest sentence he’d strung together since he’d woken to find Meg still beside him.
Len was vertical, now. He’d tired of lying in the bedroom, and now, the second day, they had moved together into the kitchen. Ruth was cutting banana slices into an enormous bowl of Jell-O while she boiled macaroni for a salad. She gazed at him with pity and irritation. “Wait and see if you change your mind,” she said. “We’ll take her if you still want.” She glanced out the window, and sighed. “All right, then. People coming,” she reported. She crossed to him and ran her fingertips along his temples to smooth his errant hair. “You’ll have to speak to them. Are you ready?”
All of Mattole, it seemed, assembled in Len’s yard to honor Meg. The neighbors came with their arms burdened with the food they’d cooked and the flowers they’d picked from their gardens, and they milled through the small cabin and mumbled whatever words they had to offer their sympathy. The women hugged Len and the men clapped him on the shoulder in shared sorrow. Len wasn’t an easy man to comfort, but he showed them his gratitude. He straightened his back and he received them with a somber grace. Late in the afternoon, after Meg had been laid to rest and the food had been eaten and the small talk had been made, they went home and said That poor man, and weren’t sure why.
Ruth kept looking around, but she never came.
Melody had thought that she would. She’d called Willow as soon as she heard the news and the two of them had spoken briefly, just long enough to relay the information and discuss arrangements before she got off the line to make the rest of the