Part 4
Judith poured hot water into the coffeepot, set out Daniel’s cup, and waited for the mudroom door.
The grinder had been running when he fell. The kitchen tap had been running, too. By the time the house grew quiet, Onyx was pacing beyond the window, but she hadn’t looked out to see him.
She touched Daniel’s cup. Still empty.
In the bedroom, his side of the bed had cooled. His boots were gone. She crossed to the mudroom window and saw the fork lying on its side.
Daniel might forget a dozen things in a morning. He didn’t leave a tool flat in the garden.
She ran out without changing her slippers.
Frost soaked through them as she knelt. He lay on his side near the spilled potatoes, one arm trapped beneath his body. She pulled it free and rolled him onto his back, saying his name more sharply each time.
His face was dirty. His eyes didn’t open.
She put her fingers against his neck. For an instant she thought something moved beneath them. She adjusted her hand and lost it.
Lydia answered her phone.
“Mom?”
“He’s in the garden.”
“Call the ambulance. Right now. I’m coming.”
Judith looked at Daniel’s mouth.
“I can’t tell if—”
“Call, Mom. They’ll tell you what to do.”
The emergency dispatcher’s voice came from the phone Judith set inside the crate. She opened Daniel’s coat and followed the instructions, counting while her palms pressed down.
Onyx made a high, harsh sound. Judith looked toward the fence.
“Stay with me,” the dispatcher said.
Judith looked back at her hands.
The ambulance reached the garden at 7:21. Lydia pulled in close behind it and came running over the frosted ground. One medic took Judith’s place. The other opened equipment beside Daniel’s head.
They cut his shirt and placed their pads around the small adhesive monitor.
“That’s from his heart doctor,” Judith told them.
The older man nodded. “It keeps a record. We need ours for right now.”
On their screen, tiny repeated shapes appeared under bands of noise. One medic said something about a rate in the twenties. Both searched for a pulse during a brief pause.
The older man touched the cable where it entered the machine. The trace dissolved into interference, then a flat stretch. He reseated the plug. The shapes came and disappeared again.
“Spare lead,” he said.
His partner opened a compartment and reached inside. Then he looked in another.
It hadn’t been replaced after the equipment’s recent service.
They kept working. Judith saw the bag helping Daniel breathe and the medication going into him. She heard them count. When one man tried the ear thermometer, it gave an error.
They never obtained a core temperature. They had no Doppler with which to search for the faint movement of blood.
Thirty-one minutes passed under their hands. Over the radio, the older medic described the questionable trace, the absent pulse, the treatment already given. He said the display might be showing interference or organized electrical activity that wasn’t producing circulation.
The county physician authorized them to end the effort and release Daniel for removal.
Judith watched the medic take his hands away.
“Check him.”
He looked at her.
“Again.”
The man knelt. He checked the neck, the wrist, and the chest while she watched every movement. When he sat back, his voice was lower, but the answer hadn’t changed.
Lydia covered her mouth with her hand.
Someone stated a time. Judith heard it without retaining it. What stayed was the empty equipment compartment and a little ridge of soil beside Daniel’s nose.
She closed his coat. Using her sleeve, she cleaned the dirt off his cheek.
Seth arrived before she finished. He left his truck crooked near the gate and stopped several paces away. His eyes went from the medics to the sheet, then to his mother.
At the fence, Onyx stood without making a sound.
Vivian came with Daniel’s instructions in a folder. She sat beside Judith before discussing arrangements.
“The release lets me take him into my care,” she said. “It doesn’t give us permission to bury him. That paperwork still has to be reviewed, and the registrar won’t do that before Monday.”
Judith stared at the wet toes of her slippers.
“We don’t have to decide anything else yet,” Vivian added.
“He wanted us to wash him.”
“We can.”
“And prayers up on the ridge.”
Vivian paused. “A farewell service, yes. Above ground. I would stay responsible for him, and we would bring him back afterward. No grave opened.”
Judith made herself repeat it. No burial that day. Vivian would stay. They would bring him back.
With the funeral cot, Seth and Tomas helped carry Daniel into the cool front bedroom. Vivian recorded the transfer, then stayed beside the family while Lydia fetched basins and towels.
Seth found the shirt Daniel had worn at their wedding.
Judith began with his hands. There was dirt in the creases of every finger. She worked it loose carefully, rinsing the cloth, turning each hand as she had done after splinters or cuts when he’d come in pretending he didn’t need help.
He was pale and cold, his body resistant when they moved him. As she cleaned beside his mouth, a bead of water near one nostril trembled.
Her cloth stopped.
She held the back of her other hand near his face. Waited. Moved it closer.
She felt nothing.
The bedroom window stood partly open. Judith shut it and returned to the basin.
They dressed him in the wedding shirt and his brown work coat. Judith brought out linen, following the custom her grandmother had taught her for tending the dead. Seth struggled with the coat sleeve over an arm that wouldn’t bend easily.
Vivian came beside him.
“Let’s turn Daniel a little this way,” she said.
She used his name each time they moved him.
When the pine casket came in from the shed, Seth ran his thumb across a place he had sanded poorly. There were six carrying handles, a simple fitted lid, and no seal.
“He’d have me out there fixing that before he’d let me quit,” Seth said.
A laugh escaped Lydia so unexpectedly that she clapped a hand over her mouth. Then she bent at the waist and began to cry. Judith drew her close, and Seth came into her other arm.
For a while Vivian left the basin where it was.
Tomas took Onyx into the stable before the yard filled with people. The horse left his grain untouched. Whenever the house door opened, his head came up.
The first neighbors arrived before nine. More trucks followed: men Daniel had employed, people whose animals he’d helped, families who knew where to put a casserole without asking. Some stood in the yard with nothing in their hands, waiting to be useful.
Vivian told them there would be prayers on the ridge but no burial. She said it more than once.
Judith stood beside the casket with her hand over Daniel’s. She kept seeing the water move near his nose. She had checked. The medics had checked. She had made them check again.
Behind her, voices quieted.
Vivian approached without touching her.
“Shall we close it now?”
Judith took her hand away.
“All right.”
Across the yard, Onyx lifted his head as Seth began tightening the lid’s screws. The clock in the front room read 9:13. Judith had found Daniel two hours and ten minutes earlier…
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