Part 4
In the kitchen, water was running and the grinder was breaking up the last of the coffee beans. Nora heard neither the fence nor Flint’s call. What sent her looking was Caleb’s empty cup, still waiting where she had set it.
His side of the bed was cold. His boots were missing from the mudroom, and through its window she saw the fork lying across the garden. Caleb could be careless about himself, but he never left tools that way.
She reached him in her slippers. Wet frost went through them as she knelt beside the overturned crate and rolled him from his side onto his back. Soil marked his cheek. One arm had been pinned beneath him, and she drew it clear before trying his name again.
Her fingers found something at his neck, or she thought they did. When she shifted them, she could find nothing. Abby answered the phone before Nora remembered choosing her number.
“Mom. Call nine-one-one. I’ll come. Put the phone down and start.”
“I don’t know if he’s—”
“You can do it. Call them now.”
Nora reached the dispatcher and set the phone inside the potato crate. She followed the instructions, counting over Caleb’s open coat. Flint turned again and again between two fence posts. Once he made a piercing sound that pulled her eyes toward him, but the voice from the crate brought her back to her hands.
The ambulance arrived at 7:24. Abby drove in just behind it and took Nora’s place beside Caleb’s head while the two paramedics began working. They cut his shirt open and put their pads around the adhesive patch. Nora told them what it was.
“That one saves the recording,” the older medic said. “We can’t read it here.”
Their own screen showed small, narrow shapes through a wash of interference. During a pause, Nora heard “twenties” and watched the men search for a pulse they could match to them. The older medic moved the cable at its socket. The screen broke into static and stretches of flat line. He pushed the connector back in, tried again, and asked for the spare.
The younger man opened a compartment and stared into it. After the recent service work, the spare had not been put back.
They continued compressions, ventilation, and medication for thirty-two minutes. The ear thermometer gave an error. Nobody obtained a core temperature, and they had no Doppler to look for blood flow. Over the radio, Nora heard the older medic describe the uncertain trace as interference or electrical activity without a pulse. The county physician authorized them to stop and release Caleb for removal.
Nora watched the medic straighten. For the first time since he arrived, his hands were doing nothing.
“No,” she said. “Try again.”
He knelt and checked Caleb’s neck, his wrist, his chest. Nora watched closely enough to see the marks left by the man’s gloves. He gave the same answer, more quietly this time.
Someone said a time. Nora would remember the empty compartment, the dirt beside Caleb’s nose, Abby standing with one hand over her mouth. She could not keep hold of the time.
She closed his coat and wiped his face with her sleeve. Owen arrived while she was doing it. He stopped beside his badly parked truck and looked from the sheet to the people around it, waiting for somebody to explain what he could already see.
Flint had stopped calling.
Elaine Porter came knowing Caleb’s written wishes. Before anything was moved, she explained that the physician’s release allowed her to take custody. It was not a completed death certificate, and it did not authorize burial. The registrar would not review the final-disposition paperwork until Monday.
“We can wait, Nora. There’s no need to arrange the whole day this morning.”
Nora looked toward the ridge. “He wanted us to wash him. Can we do that?”
“Yes. I’ll stay.”
“Then let us take him up for the prayers. We’ll bring him back here afterward.”
Elaine repeated the conditions until Nora answered each one: the casket would remain above ground, Elaine would retain custody, and nobody would open a grave. Nora heard herself agree as though somebody were asking her about a delivery at the gate.
With Elaine’s cot, Owen and Rafael carried Caleb into the cool front bedroom. Elaine logged the release and guided the family through what came next. Abby brought water. Owen found the wedding shirt. Nora washed Caleb’s hands, turning each finger to get soil out of the creases.
He was pale, stiff, and utterly unresponsive. While she cleaned his mouth, a drop of water near one nostril quivered. She stopped with the cloth suspended. Her other hand waited close to his face, searching for air.
Nothing touched her palm. She looked toward the open window, shut it, and went back to work.
They dressed him in the wedding shirt and brown ranch coat. Linen went around him too, something Nora’s grandmother had taught her family to do for their dead. Owen had trouble fitting a sleeve over the rigid arm. Elaine helped without hurrying him and kept speaking Caleb’s name.
Owen and Rafael brought the pine casket from the shed. Six handles ran along its sides; there was no seal. Owen passed his thumb over a rough place in the board he had shaped himself.
“He’d send me back for the planer,” he said.
Abby made a small, startled laugh and bent forward crying. Nora drew both children against her. For a few minutes, the basin and the shirt buttons and all the things still waiting could stay where they were.
Outside, Flint had worn a dark strip into the ground along the fence. Rafael brought him into the main stable before the neighbors began arriving. The horse ignored the grain put in front of him and raised his head each time the house door opened.
Before nine, trucks were lining the ranch road. People Caleb had hired stood with friends whose horses he had helped, families he had known for years, neighbors who had come because there was work and grief and they could carry something. Elaine made clear that they were walking to a farewell service. There would be no burial that morning.
At the casket, Nora kept one hand over Caleb’s. She could still see the little disturbance in the water beside his nose, though she had felt no breath. Two paramedics had checked him. Elaine was waiting, and the people behind Nora had begun to lower their voices.
“Would you like the lid on?” Elaine asked.
Nora withdrew her hand. “Yes.”
In the stable, Flint’s head lifted toward the house as Owen began turning the screws. It was 9:18, two hours and ten minutes after Nora had found Caleb among the potatoes.
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