Three people died in Ashrath on the 23rd of October. This is not unusual. This autumn, three in a day is not unusual. I have stopped keeping count of the unusual and begun keeping count of the days.
Which is all a man can hold on to when the ground is moving. Three people on the twenty third, four on the twenty fourth, one on the twenty fifth, which felt God forgive me like a respite.
Then the twenty-sixth arrived, and what I found in the chronicle was not an account of the sickness. What I found was a description of the thing that the chronicle calls in its main hand the patient one, the one that has been writing since before I was born. It calls it the appetite.
Not the sickness, not the wood. The appetite a word that is not a name that resists being a name.
The appetite has been in the wood, the way cold is in winter ground, not placed there, not arrived, present in the way a property of a thing is present, entirely without origin. The chronicle says it was old when the wood was new. The wood grew up around it the way an oak grows around a wound, carrying the scar as load bearing timber.
What the sickness has done moving through this village house by house since September, what the sickness has done is feed it.
Every death is a portion. Every death goes into the ground. And the ground is connected to the wood, and the wood is connected to the appetite.
And it is now, the Chronicle says, the main hand flat and precise. It is now full. Full. The appetite is full. A full appetite does not stay still. The Chronicle calls it walking.
The second hand, a margin note.
It is not the sickness. Say this clearly and say it first. It is older than the sickness. The sickness is a season. This is the thing that waits for the season to end and rises after. It wore the same shape in the famine year of thirteen fifteen, a different shape in the summer of twelve fifty eight, which was the year the sky went wrong and the harvest rotted.
And Ashrath buried twelve in a month. It takes the shape of the worst thing available. This autumn the worst thing is the sickness. The village will see it tonight.
Three names given without preamble at the top of a new page. Hugh Fenner. Wat Cooper? Nan Burrow.
Hugh Fenner is the man the village goes to when it needs something done that requires both a large body and the willingness to do it without asking questions whose answers might change his mind. He is thirty-five. He has a wife, Bess, and two daughters. He carries the younger on his left shoulder at market because it makes her laugh. He is the largest man in Ashrath. He has been until tonight one of the safest feeling things in it.
Wat Cooper is the man you would not notice until you needed to. Small and quick, he repairs barrels and wheel rims and the kind of damage a village accumulates constantly. Incompletely the repairs showing, but holding. He has a dog. The dog is under his bed, and has been since sundown, and will not come out.
Nan Burrow is 53 and has been the midwife of Ashrath since she was 30. 612 children into the world. As many deaths as births. She has been underestimated so consistently for so long that she has stopped noticing it and started using it.
On the night of the twenty sixth, these three were the ones who went.
The Chronicle gives me no comfort here. I looked for comfort in this passage and did not find it, and I am a priest, and I looked for it, and it was not there. The thing came out of the wood at the north margin, at the edge of dark. The light, the colour of old pewter, the rain coming down.
The lane black water. It was tall. Taller than a man in the way a man is taller than a child. Not a matter of inches, a matter of proportion. The wrong proportion. The proportion the eye rejects before the mind has finished looking. It walked upright. It had the number of limbs a person has. These are the only things about it a person could look at.
without the looking costing something. The shape of the sickness in the last days, the blackening, the swelling, the eruption of the skin at the neck and the armpit and the groin. The thing wore this the way a man wears his Sunday clothes, entirely correctly, as if it had put it on with care.
Its face was a face that had been a face. The rain ran off it wrong. Not absorbed, repelled, turned aside. The puddles it walked through did not take its print. The ground knows what it is and will not hold it. It smelled so
Of the inside of the houses where the sickness had been and gone. It was thirty-seven deaths, given a direction and a purpose. The direction was the village, the purpose was not yet clear, which was worse in some ways than a clear purpose.
What they did. Hugh Fenner hit it with a piece of split oak. Four feet of dry English oak swung with both hands by the largest man in Ashwrath. He hit it where its ribs should have been.
The sound was wrong. The sound of a foot going into wet ground. The intake, the displacement, the closing over. The thing did not stop. It turned towards him. The face moved separately from the head. Hugh Fenner did not step back. He had every reason to step back. He did not step back. Wat Cooper went for the eyes. He was quick. He was accurate. He got what he went for.
Behind the first surface the eyes were the colour of skin in the ninth or tenth day of the sickness. Behind the second surface nothing. The absence was absolute. Nothing there that had ever been frightened or glad or in love or tired in the ordinary way. Wat Cooper took that in from four inches away and did not flinch. It did not help.
He turned and shouted the one name he had for the thing that might know how to do what they could not. He shouted, Edith Crow! Before she arrives, the thing touches what Cooper's left arm wants with the full flat of its palm. His arm goes cold.
Not the cold of rain in October, the cold of a house where someone died a week ago, and no one has lit a fire there since. The arm does not warm again for three days.
She came down the die works lane in the rain without a lamp and without a cloak. She was carrying nothing. Her hands were empty. She stood between the thing and Hugh Fenner, which is to say she stood at the front of everything. She was not large. She has never been described as large.
Wide, capable hands, a stillness that costs nothing, because it is not an effort. The smell of forty years of root and bark and berry. Behind her the lane, the village, the houses where the dying were dying and the living were bolted in listening.
then the chronicle uses a word and the word is wrong, wrong for the main hand, which is precise, which never reaches for the extraordinary. The word spoke, she spoke to it. Not in English, not in Latin, not in any language, the chronicle names. The second hand says,
The sound of it was the sound a root makes working through winter ground, not heard with the ears, but felt in the chest, in the back teeth, and in the soles of the feet. An old sound. Nan Barrow heard it, and she knew she'd heard a piece of it before in the delivery room 20 years ago, a baby coming wrong. She had said something, never knew what. The baby came right. She had not thought about it since.
she thought about it now. The thing stopped. Not because it was hurt, not because it had been commanded. She was speaking to it in the language of what it was. Naming the thing it actually was rather than the shape it was wearing.
A thing named in the language of what actually is cannot maintain the pretense of being something else. It could not maintain the shape of the sickness. It went back. The chronicles word, back, back into the ground. The lane closed over it. The puddles were ordinary puddles. The rain was ordinary rain. The thing was gone.
Edith Crow stood in the lane for a long time after, her feet in the black water, her hands at her sides, not shaking. The bolts drew back one by one in the dark, the doors opened. Ashwrath looked out at the woman standing in the lane and knew, in the way a village knows things, without discussion, knew what it had just been given.
Closing.
God Keep, Hugh Fenner, who stood between the thing and the village with a piece of English oak and the large unreasonable willingness of a man who asked the question this time and answered it and stood anyway. God Keep, Watt Cooper, whose left arm is cold tonight and will be warm again and who has his dog back under his hand now because the dog has finally come out from under the bed, which is the dog's form of verdict.
on the state of things and I trust the dog. God keep Nan Barrow who brought 612 children into the world and who heard one word from the old language in a delivery room 20 years ago and kept it without knowing she had kept it. God keep Edith Crow.
who came down the lane in the rain with empty hands and spoke to the thing made of thirty-seven deaths in the language of what it actually was and sent it back. God keep the dead who fed the appetite without knowing it and without their consent. They are owed this. God keep this village.
Which is all a man can hold on to when the ground is moving. Three people on the twenty third, four on the twenty fourth, one on the twenty fifth, which felt God forgive me like a respite.
Then the twenty-sixth arrived, and what I found in the chronicle was not an account of the sickness. What I found was a description of the thing that the chronicle calls in its main hand the patient one, the one that has been writing since before I was born. It calls it the appetite.
Not the sickness, not the wood. The appetite a word that is not a name that resists being a name.
The appetite has been in the wood, the way cold is in winter ground, not placed there, not arrived, present in the way a property of a thing is present, entirely without origin. The chronicle says it was old when the wood was new. The wood grew up around it the way an oak grows around a wound, carrying the scar as load bearing timber.
What the sickness has done moving through this village house by house since September, what the sickness has done is feed it.
Every death is a portion. Every death goes into the ground. And the ground is connected to the wood, and the wood is connected to the appetite.
And it is now, the Chronicle says, the main hand flat and precise. It is now full. Full. The appetite is full. A full appetite does not stay still. The Chronicle calls it walking.
The second hand, a margin note.
It is not the sickness. Say this clearly and say it first. It is older than the sickness. The sickness is a season. This is the thing that waits for the season to end and rises after. It wore the same shape in the famine year of thirteen fifteen, a different shape in the summer of twelve fifty eight, which was the year the sky went wrong and the harvest rotted.
And Ashrath buried twelve in a month. It takes the shape of the worst thing available. This autumn the worst thing is the sickness. The village will see it tonight.
Three names given without preamble at the top of a new page. Hugh Fenner. Wat Cooper? Nan Burrow.
Hugh Fenner is the man the village goes to when it needs something done that requires both a large body and the willingness to do it without asking questions whose answers might change his mind. He is thirty-five. He has a wife, Bess, and two daughters. He carries the younger on his left shoulder at market because it makes her laugh. He is the largest man in Ashrath. He has been until tonight one of the safest feeling things in it.
Wat Cooper is the man you would not notice until you needed to. Small and quick, he repairs barrels and wheel rims and the kind of damage a village accumulates constantly. Incompletely the repairs showing, but holding. He has a dog. The dog is under his bed, and has been since sundown, and will not come out.
Nan Burrow is 53 and has been the midwife of Ashrath since she was 30. 612 children into the world. As many deaths as births. She has been underestimated so consistently for so long that she has stopped noticing it and started using it.
On the night of the twenty sixth, these three were the ones who went.
The Chronicle gives me no comfort here. I looked for comfort in this passage and did not find it, and I am a priest, and I looked for it, and it was not there. The thing came out of the wood at the north margin, at the edge of dark. The light, the colour of old pewter, the rain coming down.
The lane black water. It was tall. Taller than a man in the way a man is taller than a child. Not a matter of inches, a matter of proportion. The wrong proportion. The proportion the eye rejects before the mind has finished looking. It walked upright. It had the number of limbs a person has. These are the only things about it a person could look at.
without the looking costing something. The shape of the sickness in the last days, the blackening, the swelling, the eruption of the skin at the neck and the armpit and the groin. The thing wore this the way a man wears his Sunday clothes, entirely correctly, as if it had put it on with care.
Its face was a face that had been a face. The rain ran off it wrong. Not absorbed, repelled, turned aside. The puddles it walked through did not take its print. The ground knows what it is and will not hold it. It smelled so
Of the inside of the houses where the sickness had been and gone. It was thirty-seven deaths, given a direction and a purpose. The direction was the village, the purpose was not yet clear, which was worse in some ways than a clear purpose.
What they did. Hugh Fenner hit it with a piece of split oak. Four feet of dry English oak swung with both hands by the largest man in Ashwrath. He hit it where its ribs should have been.
The sound was wrong. The sound of a foot going into wet ground. The intake, the displacement, the closing over. The thing did not stop. It turned towards him. The face moved separately from the head. Hugh Fenner did not step back. He had every reason to step back. He did not step back. Wat Cooper went for the eyes. He was quick. He was accurate. He got what he went for.
Behind the first surface the eyes were the colour of skin in the ninth or tenth day of the sickness. Behind the second surface nothing. The absence was absolute. Nothing there that had ever been frightened or glad or in love or tired in the ordinary way. Wat Cooper took that in from four inches away and did not flinch. It did not help.
He turned and shouted the one name he had for the thing that might know how to do what they could not. He shouted, Edith Crow! Before she arrives, the thing touches what Cooper's left arm wants with the full flat of its palm. His arm goes cold.
Not the cold of rain in October, the cold of a house where someone died a week ago, and no one has lit a fire there since. The arm does not warm again for three days.
She came down the die works lane in the rain without a lamp and without a cloak. She was carrying nothing. Her hands were empty. She stood between the thing and Hugh Fenner, which is to say she stood at the front of everything. She was not large. She has never been described as large.
Wide, capable hands, a stillness that costs nothing, because it is not an effort. The smell of forty years of root and bark and berry. Behind her the lane, the village, the houses where the dying were dying and the living were bolted in listening.
then the chronicle uses a word and the word is wrong, wrong for the main hand, which is precise, which never reaches for the extraordinary. The word spoke, she spoke to it. Not in English, not in Latin, not in any language, the chronicle names. The second hand says,
The sound of it was the sound a root makes working through winter ground, not heard with the ears, but felt in the chest, in the back teeth, and in the soles of the feet. An old sound. Nan Barrow heard it, and she knew she'd heard a piece of it before in the delivery room 20 years ago, a baby coming wrong. She had said something, never knew what. The baby came right. She had not thought about it since.
she thought about it now. The thing stopped. Not because it was hurt, not because it had been commanded. She was speaking to it in the language of what it was. Naming the thing it actually was rather than the shape it was wearing.
A thing named in the language of what actually is cannot maintain the pretense of being something else. It could not maintain the shape of the sickness. It went back. The chronicles word, back, back into the ground. The lane closed over it. The puddles were ordinary puddles. The rain was ordinary rain. The thing was gone.
Edith Crow stood in the lane for a long time after, her feet in the black water, her hands at her sides, not shaking. The bolts drew back one by one in the dark, the doors opened. Ashwrath looked out at the woman standing in the lane and knew, in the way a village knows things, without discussion, knew what it had just been given.
Closing.
God Keep, Hugh Fenner, who stood between the thing and the village with a piece of English oak and the large unreasonable willingness of a man who asked the question this time and answered it and stood anyway. God Keep, Watt Cooper, whose left arm is cold tonight and will be warm again and who has his dog back under his hand now because the dog has finally come out from under the bed, which is the dog's form of verdict.
on the state of things and I trust the dog. God keep Nan Barrow who brought 612 children into the world and who heard one word from the old language in a delivery room 20 years ago and kept it without knowing she had kept it. God keep Edith Crow.
who came down the lane in the rain with empty hands and spoke to the thing made of thirty-seven deaths in the language of what it actually was and sent it back. God keep the dead who fed the appetite without knowing it and without their consent. They are owed this. God keep this village.
