The sail doesn't go on along the edge of the white. It stops. It comes round slowly, the pale triangle narrowing until it's only a line and widening again on the other side. Then it stands still, leaning a little, out where the flats run into the mist. It's too far off for anybody to hear what happens next, but the child sees it. Something small and dark goes over the side on a line and doesn't come back up. The sail comes down. The shape stays where it is on the grey, the way a stone stays in a ford, with the long sound coming in round it and drawing back. Nobody on the slope does anything for a long time. The grandmother stands in the lane with her hands in the cloth, the one with the axe stands in his doorway, and the dove sits on the cane among the strips. The sun climbs over the long spine of the beast and the mist goes off the flats in rags. Behind it the grey country turns out to be sand, wet and shining, going on further than any ground anybody has walked. Across the sand, some time before noon, there's a line of marks. They're small dark hollows, one and then another, coming away from the water. The child is up on their knees at the top of the field and can't see who's making them. They can only see the marks being made, one to each step, at the pace of somebody walking on a shore that gives a little underfoot. The line comes on across the flats toward the bottom of the fold and doesn't hurry, and it doesn't turn back. It's afternoon before anybody comes up the lane. They come slowly, the way a person comes who has been walking since the tide went out. They're a grown one, not old, burnt dark by a sun that isn't this slope's, with salt dried white in the creases of their clothes. A bag hangs off one shoulder, made of something stiff and patched, the kind that has been carried a long way and set down in a lot of places. Over the other shoulder there's a coil of rope, thick and grey and rough, the end of it bound off with a knot nobody on the slope could tie. They stop at the corner by the red tree and look up the lane at the roofs, the smoke, the cane at the top of the field with a grey bird on it. Their face does what the curly-haired one's did. It's a small place, and they've never seen it. The child comes down the stubble to meet them. At the foot of the field they stop a length off, and their right hand comes out sideways, open and flat, at the height of the stranger's hand, before anybody has said whether it should be. It's the only thing on this slope anybody ever taught them to do. The stranger looks at it a long moment. Then they put their own hand out, palm up, under the child's. It isn't closing round it or lying on top of it. It's underneath, holding it up, the way a hand goes under something being lifted out of water. They stand like that with the child's hand lying open on the stranger's, and neither of them knows what the other means by it. Both of them keep their hands there anyway. When the hands come apart the stranger shrugs the rope off their shoulder. They take the child's wrist, gently, and put the rough grey end of the rope into the small palm. Then their brown fingers go over the child's and show them. It's over, and under, and back through, and pulled. The knot that comes out is small and hard and holds. It isn't the only kind the child knows how to make anymore. The stranger nods at it once and leaves it in the child's hand. Then they sit down on the step of the nearest house without being asked. They take the snail shell's big brother out of the bag, a spiralled horn as long as a forearm and pale and pink inside, worn smooth at the lip by a mouth. They don't blow it. They hum. It isn't a tune anybody on the slope knows, or anybody on the far side of the mountain either. It's a slow line that goes up and turns, then comes down over something like stones, and at the end it doesn't come down to rest. It goes up. It stops there in the air at the top, unfinished, and the stranger looks up the lane with their eyebrows raised and waits. It's plain to everybody standing in a doorway that it's a question, even though none of them knows the words it would be in. The baby is at the top of the step with the little shell in their fist and a grey back on either side of them. They don't say the word. They look at the big horn on the stranger's knee, and then at the small one in their own hand. Their eyes go from one to the other and back, the curl and the curl, the same shape at two sizes. Their mouth comes open slowly and stays open. They're looking at a thing they found in the stubble, and at where it has come from. The old man has come down the field on the stick, a hand on each wall and then on nothing, and stopped at the corner of the flags. He heard the steps come up the lane and the hands meet, and the knot pulled. He heard the question go up at the end and stay there. His head goes over to one side with all of him behind the ear. He doesn't know the answer. He doesn't know the words the question is in. He knows it's the question anybody asks, coming up out of a boat into a place they've never been: *is this where the sound came from?* His two hands come up and go together in front of his chest, open and cupped, with the thumbs touching. They hold nothing. The child lifts the pale pipe. They play the tune once, the climb and the skip, the long wait, and the three stones coming up a shore, and they end on the wrong fifth, kept. It's the only answer anybody on the slope has. One small cloud stands over the long spine of the beast, and the sun works in and out behind it, the half-covered kind of light. The lane goes bright and grey and bright again. None of it is chosen. The light falls on a boat at anchor far out on the shining sand, on a line of footprints coming up from the water that the tide will take back tonight, and on a coil of rope with a new knot in a child's hand. It falls on a stranger on a step with a horn on their knee and a question left open in the air, on a baby looking from a small shell to a big one, and on an old man at the corner of the flags with his hands cupped round nothing. It keeps no count of who came furthest, or whose hand went under and whose went over, or whether the tune was the answer to the question or only the next thing asked: *here, still here, and you.*

When the laughing has run itself out the baby sits up in the stubble with the shell still in their fist. They look at it for a long moment, the way a thing is looked at that has turned out to be bigger inside than it is. Then the lip goes back to their mouth. This time they don't laugh first. The chest goes out slowly, all the way down, and the whole breath goes in again, on purpose now. The hoot goes out rough and wavering over the field. It doesn't go up the mountain. The wind off the ridge takes it the other way, down the lane and past the last roof, out over the lower field and the thorn and the stream. It goes to where the fold opens onto the flat grey country nobody on the slope has walked to the end of. There's mist lying out there this morning, low and white along the far edge of everything, the way it lay in the bottom of the fold on the day of the bow. The hoot goes into it and the mist takes it and keeps it, and nothing comes back. The baby lowers the shell. Their breath comes back to them without being asked. The dove on the cane puts its head on one side. Then something does come back. It comes up the fold from very far off, from further than the stream and further than the flats, from out of the white at the edge of the world. It's thin and low and a long time coming, one long note with a waver at the end of it. It isn't a pipe, and it isn't the rock handing anything on. There's no rock out there. It's the same sound the shell made, or near enough. It's hollow and rough and blown by somebody who has blown one before. The baby's mouth comes open and stays open. They don't say the word. Their head goes over to one side, slowly, with all of them behind the ear, the way they've watched it done their whole life, and it's the first time anybody has seen them do it. The child is up on their knees in the stubble. They look out down the fold past the roofs to the grey country and the white lying along the end of it. For a while there's nothing. Then the sun gets further up over the long spine of the beast behind them and comes level across the flats, and the mist begins to thin along its top edge. In the thinning there's a shape. It's small and pale, a triangle of something standing up out of the white. It's too straight to be a tree and too still to be a bird. It leans a little, and the light catches it. It isn't moving and then it is, slowly, along the edge of everything, the way a thing goes that has its house under it and nowhere it needs to be by dark. The child's hand comes out. It isn't sideways at anybody's height. It goes out flat and open and palm down toward the fold and the grey country and the pale shape on the white, at arm's length, the way they held it out on the shelf to see how small the village was. The sail fits under the edge of one finger. They hold the hand there and don't close it. The old man heard the hoot go out and the long nothing, and then the answer coming up from further off than anything has ever answered this slope from. He doesn't know what a sail is. He knows the child has gone still on their knees beside him, and the kind of still it is. It's the stillness at his knee on the morning of the bow, when there was something there he'd never see. He knows the answer came from the place in his dream, where the tune went out on the long sound and came back with the salt in it. He'd thought that was only a dream. It was a dream, and something out there has answered anyway. His face goes. It doesn't crumple. It comes open from the middle out, and the wet comes up from the bottom and doesn't stand there this time. It goes down past the corner of his mouth into the grey of his jaw. He lets it, and his cupped hands stay open against his chest. Down the lane the roofs take the morning the way they always do. The windows fill with gold from outside and the smoke goes up straight. The small cluster stands on its hillside between a mountain with somebody on the far side of it and a flat country with somebody at the far edge of that. It has never been in the middle of anything before, and now it is. The morning comes on over all of it. It falls on a snail shell in a small fist with a breath just gone out of it, on a baby with their head over to one side listening for the first time, and on a child's hand held out flat toward a pale sail going along the edge of the mist. It falls on an old man with his face wet in the sun and on a small village standing between two answers. It comes on time, unasked and unearned. It keeps no count of who blew the horn first or who blew it back, or what the boat was carrying, or whether whoever was on it knew they were being answered: *here, still here, and you.*

The baby takes the shell away from the child's ear and looks into the curl of it, frowning, the way they looked at the green pipe the first morning when nothing came out. Then they turn it round in their fist until the open lip is toward their face. Nobody has shown them this. It goes to their mouth the way a pipe goes, lips round and small against the smooth turned-back edge. The chest goes out slowly, all the way down, past where it used to stop. For once it isn't a pinch. The whole breath goes in at once, the way it went into the green wood before anybody made a gap the size of a bean between two fingers. What comes out isn't a note. No pipe on either side of the mountain ever made it. It's hollow and rough and much bigger than the thing it comes out of, a low hoot with a waver in it, like a horn blown a long way off by somebody who has never blown one. It doesn't hold level. It goes up and down with the small breath shaking behind it. It comes in and spreads itself out and draws back, in the same swells the tune had when it came home with the salt in it. It goes out over the stubble and down over the roofs. In a doorway far down the lane somebody drops what they were holding. A grey dove goes up out of the thorn at the corner of the field. Its wings clap twice, loud in the quiet after the hoot. It goes once round over the grain, wide and in no hurry, and then comes down on the top of the cane above the dead lantern. It settles there among the strips of bark with its feathers puffed and its head going from side to side, as if it had been called and meant to find out who by. The child laughs. It's the kind that gets out. It comes up out of them before they know it's coming, and they go over sideways in the stubble with it, their hands over their face and their knees drawn up. The baby takes the shell away from their mouth and stares at it, and then at the child rolling in the grain, and then at the dove on the cane. Their face can't decide. Then it decides all at once, and they laugh too, with the shell still in their fist. The two of them lie there shaking and can't stop, and every time one of them nearly does the other starts them off again. The old man heard all of it: the breath going in whole, the hoot, the clap of wings, the laughing. He doesn't know the sound the shell made. He knows everything else in it. His two hands come up off his knees and go together in front of his chest. They don't close. They come together open, cupped, with the thumbs touching, the way the baby carries water across the hut and the way the pipe was carried to the step. They stay there with nothing in them, as if there were something held that was too small to hold and too good to close on. His mouth goes the way it goes. It doesn't stop there this time. It goes on into something with no sound in it, and his shoulders shake under the grey wool. One small cloud stands over the long spine of the beast, and the sun works in and out behind it, the half-covered kind of light. The field goes bright and grey and bright again, and so does the dove on the cane, and the pale brown curl in a small fist. None of it is chosen. It falls on a snail shell that turned out to be a horn, on a grey bird come down to see who called it, on two children laughing in the stubble until they're weak with it, and on an old man with his cupped hands held open against his chest. It keeps no count of who blew too hard or who laughed first, or whether the sound was the sea or only a small breath: *here, still here, and you.*

The rim gives itself away over the long spine of the beast, and the first of the gold comes down the flank onto a stub of candle burned out in the stubble. There's only a black wick bent over in a small pool of tallow gone hard on the earth, a finger's width from the shell. The baby is awake before anybody. They haven't moved in the night. They're still on their side with their cheek on the ground and their ear over the curl, and when the light reaches the pale brown ridges their eyes are already open on it. They sit up. The shell comes up with them in a fist, and then the fist opens and the shell lies on the flat of their palm. They hold it out low and sideways at the height of the child's hand, before anybody has said whether it should be. The child is half awake against the grey wool with their neck stiff. They look at the small open hand and the curl lying on it and don't take it. They know by now what a hand held out like that is for. It isn't giving. It's showing. It's saying *listen*. So the child leans down and puts their ear to the shell where it lies on the baby's palm. The baby keeps very still to hold it steady. Inside it is the long sound, coming in from very far off and drawing back. Then the baby reaches into the grain with their other hand, finds the dark pipe, and brings it up. They don't cup it this time. One hand is still busy holding the shell to the child's ear, so the pipe goes to their mouth in one fist, a little crooked, the right way round. Their lips come together small and round. The chest goes out slowly, all the way down, and only a pinch goes into the wood. It's the whole tune. It isn't only the three stones and the low note at the bottom, the part that comes home. It's the climb first, one note at a time, and then the skip. Nobody showed them the skip except by being slow at it in front of them, and the small fingers go one hole along on the dark wood and it lands, and then the long wait. It comes the way it came back up the lane with the salt in it. It comes in and spreads itself out at the top and draws back, then comes again a little further up, never in a hurry and never missing. When the wood runs out of breath at the bottom they don't stop. The lips stay round and the low note goes on between their teeth with nothing to hold it, a breath with a shape in it. It goes out over the stubble into the morning, and then it's gone. The child lifts their head off the shell with their mouth open. They heard it twice, once from the pipe and once from inside the curl against their ear, the same swell coming in on both sides. They look at the baby as if they'd never seen them. The baby looks back with the pipe still at their mouth and the shell still held out flat. They aren't astonished at all. For once it's somebody else's turn to be. In the chair the old breath has changed. It came up out of the rate it keeps for nobody somewhere around the skip, and he heard the rest awake. His head has gone over to one side with all of him behind the ear. He knows every tune the slope has had, and he knew where this one was going before it got there. What he didn't know was whose breath it would be in. It's the smallest breath on the slope, the one he kept count of all one night, one to each rise and fall, so it wouldn't stop. His face comes open from the middle out, and the wet comes up from the bottom and stands there. He doesn't let it go. He keeps it there in the sun as long as he can, the way a pail is carried the last few steps up a lane, full, careful not to spill it now. The morning comes on over all of it. It falls on a burned-out candle in the stubble, on a shell held out flat on a small palm, on a dark pipe with a whole tune just gone out of it, and on a child with their mouth open looking at somebody they thought they knew. It falls on an old man with his ear turned to the field and his eyes full and not spilling. It comes on time, unasked and unearned. It keeps no count of who taught the baby the skip, or whether the sea was in the pipe or the shell, or which of them was listening hardest when the small breath brought it all the way round: *here, still here, and you.*

The baby doesn't stay in the old hand for long. When the fingers have gone loose enough, the small hand comes out of them the way a hand comes out of water, slowly, so nothing ripples. The baby goes down into the stubble on their knees toward the foot of the cane. The child's hand is still held flat over the shell, a hair's breadth above it. The baby looks at the hand, and then at the child, and the hand lifts. It isn't moved out of the way. It lifts the way a hand lifts off a head when enough has been said, and leaves the place open. The baby doesn't pick the shell up. They lie down beside it in the stubble on their side with their cheek on the earth, the way they watched the child do it, and bring their ear down over the curl until it's nearly touching. Their eyes go wide in the dark. Whatever is in there is too big for it. It comes in from very far off and spreads itself out and draws back with a hiss like breath let go between the teeth, and comes again. The tune is in it, or the sea is, or the grain moving over the field. At that size there's no difference, and the baby doesn't look for one. Their lips come together small and round. There's no pipe this time. The dark one is lying in the grain where they left it, and they don't reach for it. What comes out between their teeth is the tune. It's only the end of it, the three stones and the low note, and it's so thin it's barely a sound, a breath with a shape in it, like wind across the mouth of a jar. It goes down into the curl of the shell as if they were giving back what came out. Behind them in the chair the old breath has changed. It has gone past where it goes for anybody awake, and it keeps the rate it keeps when nobody is minding it. It catches at the start of itself and shakes near the end and doesn't quite stop. His hand is still open on his knee with the fingers curled a little, the shape a small hand left in it. The child turns their head at the whistle. They don't stop it. Their finger comes up to their own lips, flat across the mouth, the smallest movement, and they tip their head toward the chair. The baby sees it. The whistle doesn't stop either. It gets smaller, down past where it was already small, until it's only the shape of the tune in the breath with no sound left on it at all. It's a pinch of a pinch. The baby's lips stay round and go on making it, and the shell takes it and doesn't need it any louder. The grandmother has come up the lane without anybody hearing her. She's carrying a stub of candle in her cupped hands, lit from the hearth, the flame leaning back against her wrist as she walks. She doesn't set it on the arm of the chair this time. She goes down on one knee in the stubble with the small sound she doesn't hear anymore and sets it on the ground near the shell, far enough off that it won't singe the grain. It lays a small crooked circle of light out over the earth, over the pale brown curl with its darker band going round, and over a small ear, and a small mouth still shaped round nothing. It doesn't reach the old man, and it isn't lit for him. He's already asleep. It burns steadily anyway, a little lower each time anybody looks. Over the long spine of the beast the new moon goes down after the sun, thin and bright and in no hurry, and when it's gone the whole river comes out. It runs rim to rim over both sides of the ridge at once, thicker than on the night of the pool, too many points to join into anything, with the pale smoke of more of them behind. It goes on further than any ground anybody has walked. Lying in the stubble with their ear to the shell, the baby can see all of it over the edge of their cheek. Their eyes go from the curl to the sky and back. For a long while they're only looking, the way the old man listens, with all of them behind it. The whole of it goes round and round into the middle where no fingertip can follow, and it's the same shape. The night comes down evenly on all of it. It falls on a candle set down in the stubble, on a shell with a small ear against it, on a tune gone so quiet it's only breath, and on an old man asleep in a crooked chair with his hand still open where a smaller one lay. It falls on the river of stars going round over the ridge the way the curl goes round inside the shell. It keeps no count of who hushed and who went on, or whether the tune was going into the shell or coming out of it, or which of them the sea was keeping time for: *here, still here, and you.*

The old man takes the shell away from his ear at last. He doesn't close his hand on it. He holds it out flat on his open palm, sideways at the height of the child's hand, and the child understands that it isn't being given. It's being given back. It was never his, and it isn't theirs either. It belongs to whatever carried it up the field and left it. So the child lifts it off the old palm the way a thing is lifted out of water, and goes down on their knees at the foot of the cane, where the baby found it. They set it in the stubble on its side with the curl turned up to the sky, the way it was lying. Then their hand comes down over it, flat and palm down. It doesn't touch the shell. It stays a hair's breadth above it, the way the old hand went over the two leaves in the dark. It isn't keeping the cold off anything this time. It's the shape a hand makes over a place where something might come back. Then they put their ear down to the ground beside it with all of them behind the ear, the way they've watched it done their whole life. The field is quiet. Under the quiet there's the stream far down in the fold, and the wind in the grain, coming in over the heads and drawing back, then coming in again. It's the same sound. They never knew. The whole slope has been going in and out like that the whole time, under the lane and under the flags and under the step where they learned to breathe. Nobody told them it was the sea. The pale pipe comes up while their cheek is still on the earth. They play the tune low and slow along the ground, one swell and then the next, for whatever it is that carries its house on its back and has nowhere it needs to be by dark. It doesn't go down the lane this time, or up the mountain. It goes out through the stubble at the height of a snail. Somewhere very far off the slow thing is swimming with the tide under it, rising and falling, and the tune rises and falls with it without either of them knowing. The skip goes out and draws back. The three stones come up the shore. Nothing about it is going anywhere. It's only going round. The old man's hand stays where it was, open on his knee with the palm up and nothing in it. The baby sees it. They leave the dark pipe in the grain and come across on their hands and knees, then stand up against the chair, and they put their own hand into his. They don't put it in closed and they don't put it in to be held. It goes in palm down, flat and open, into the old palm turned up, small inside big, the way a shell is set down on a shore. For a moment neither hand does anything. Then his fingers curl a little, loosely, the way fingers curl when nobody is minding them, and stay like that. His mouth goes the way it goes. The light goes long over all of it and then goes off the roofs. When it has gone, low over the far side of the fold where the sun went down, there's a new moon. The old paring went pale over the rock at dawn and was gone. This is the other one, a thin bright curve lying on its back with its lit edge toward where the sun has gone. It's too small to light anything. It comes back anyway, without being asked, the way the tide does and the way breath does. The night comes down evenly on all of it. It falls on an empty shell lying in the stubble with a child's hand held flat above it, on a tune played along the ground at the pace of something slow, on a small hand laid open in an old one, and on a new moon that has come back round from the far side. It keeps no count of whose house was given back or who will come for it, or which of them was the shore and which was the tide: *here, still here, and you.*

The tune doesn't stop at the bottom of the lane. The child plays it past the last roof, and it goes on after the bubble, out over the lower field and the thorn and the stream, down to where the fold opens onto flat grey country that nobody on the slope has walked to the end of. Past that, somewhere, there's the edge the old man stood at in the dream. The child has never seen it, and they play toward it anyway, slow swell after slow swell, the three stones coming up a shore and going back. Somewhere out there the slow thing will be in the water by now. It went down the wet sand in the night with its house on its back and didn't stop for anybody's hand. Nobody knows where it's going. The child thinks of the tune going with it, the way a thing goes along beside somebody who isn't in a hurry. It goes out under the long sound and past where there's any ground at all, round the whole curve of the world, which they have never thought of as having a curve until now. On the far side of it there's a small place standing up out of the water on its own, green on top and white at the edges, with nobody on it, or somebody. The tune goes past it and round it and doesn't stay. Then, the way a thing comes back up the lane at dusk without anybody calling it, the tune turns for home. It comes in on the same tide it went out on, slower than it left and whole, with more salt in it than before and all the time there is. The old man hasn't taken the little shell away from his ear. He tips his head a hair's breadth further over with all of him behind it, as if he could hear the turn out there, the place where a thing that has gone as far as it can go starts back. The child lowers the pale pipe. They don't finish the tune. They leave it in the wait, the long one, and their hand comes out sideways, open and palm up, at the height of the baby's. The baby looks at the open hand and then at the dark pipe in their own fist. They understand. They don't put the pipe in the hand. The hand isn't asking for the pipe. It's leaving a place for them. They bring the pipe up in both hands, cupped, with the thumbs touching. Their lips come together small and round, the shape a mouth makes for cooling something. The chest goes out slowly, all the way down, and then only a pinch goes into the wood. What comes out is the three stones, the part of the tune that comes home. It's thin and soft and pitched up at the end, one and one and one, a little wrong and nobody minding it. Then comes the low note at the bottom, the old man's note, held as long as a small breath lasts, which isn't long. It's enough. When the wood runs out of breath the baby keeps their lips round and goes on without it. A small whistle comes out between their teeth, the note still going on the air where there's no pipe to hold it. It's a breath and hardly a sound, like the wind across the mouth of a jar, and it's the first time on this slope anybody has sung the tune with nothing in their hands at all. It lands at the old man's ear on top of whatever is in the curl of the shell. His eyes come open onto nothing. The sun is full on his face now, clear of the long spine of the beast and warm, and he turns into it the way a leaf turns, and his mouth goes the way it goes. The morning comes on over all of it. It falls on a child's hand held open with nothing in it, on a baby whistling the end of a tune through round lips, on an old man with a snail shell at his ear and the sun on his wet face, and somewhere very far off on a slow thing swimming past an island nobody here will ever see, with the tide turning under it for home. It comes on time, unasked and unearned. It keeps no count of how far the tune went or how long it took to come back, or whose breath brought it the last small way to the step: *here, still here, and you.*

The baby is the first to move. They take the dark pipe from their mouth and breathe into it once more, slowly, the way they did in the night, and a bubble comes up at the small square window. This time it doesn't break. It comes loose from the wood whole and goes off the end of the pipe into the morning. It's round and wet and very light, with the sun in it, and the field and the three of them bent round small inside it. The wind off the ridge takes it down, not up. It goes over the edge of the stubble and down the lane, turning slowly at the height of a grown chest. It isn't in any hurry. It goes past the corner and the red tree and the first roofs, taking the whole slope along inside it, and the baby watches it go with their mouth open until there's no telling it from the light on the flags. Then they're down in the stubble on their hands, looking for something. Their fingers go along the foot of the chair and the base of the cane and stop. Something small has come up the field in the night with its house on its back and left the house there. It's a snail shell, empty, the pale brown of old tallow, with a thin band of darker brown going round and round into the middle where no fingertip can follow. The baby picks it up in a fist. Then they open the fist and hold it out on the flat of their palm, low and sideways, at the height of an old hand, before anybody has said whether it should be. The old man's hand comes off the green pipe. It finds the small palm from the edges in, then the ridges, then the lip turned back smooth as the inside of a cheek, then the curl going in. He goes still. It's smaller than the one on the shore, much smaller, a thing a slope would have and not a sea. He lifts it to his ear anyway, the way he would lift anything to find out. The child sees what he's doing. They don't ask. The pale pipe comes up, and they play the new tune down the lane toward the roofs, after the bubble, only now it doesn't go the way it went at the edge of the field. The climb comes in slowly and spreads itself out at the top. The skip goes across and draws back, and comes across again, a little further up each time. The three stones come down the way water comes up a flat shore and goes back over the sand with a hiss like breath let go, and then comes again. It rises and falls between the notes, all of it, never in a hurry and never missing. Nobody on the slope has ever heard water move like that, because nobody on the slope has ever seen the sea. The tune has. It came back with the salt in it. It goes down over the roofs in long slow swells. In the doorways people stand with their hands still and don't know why it makes them think of somewhere further off than the far side of the mountain. The old man holds the little shell against his ear with all of him behind it, the tune coming in from outside and whatever is in the curl coming in from inside. He can't tell them apart. He doesn't try. The last of what was held in his face since the dream lets go now. His shoulders go down past where they had been, and his breath goes out all the way to the bottom and comes back slow and wide, the rate the tide keeps. It doesn't catch at the start this time. His mouth goes the way it goes. The sun comes up clear of the long spine of the beast and stands over the fold. It falls on an empty snail shell held to an old man's ear, on a baby's open hand still out where the shell was, and on a child playing a tune down a lane that has the sea in it. Somewhere over the roofs a bubble has broken with the whole slope inside it. It comes on time, unasked and unearned. It keeps no count of whose house the shell was or where the slow thing went without it, or which shore the tune brought back the tide from: *here, still here, and you.*

The child doesn't wake him. They take the pale pipe out of their pocket, and it's warm from the night against their leg. They put a pinch of breath into it and play the new tune very low, close to the old ear, at the pace he left it at, which is slower than slow. The climb goes up one note to each breath of his. The skip crosses the gap in its own time, like something carrying its house, with nowhere it needs to be by dark. The three stones come down one and one and one. In the dream the old man is still on one knee on the wet sand. The dragging marks the slow thing left run down in front of him to the edge, and he can feel them under his palm: two rows of small pressed hollows with the long smooth furrow of the shell between. He follows them without deciding to. His bare feet find each hollow and step past it, and they go down toward the sound that comes in and draws back. Then the tune comes onto the shore from behind him, from somewhere up the land where there shouldn't be anybody. It's small and slow and in one breath he knows. It goes past him along the tracks at their own pace, one note to each hollow, and out over the edge onto the water. He hears it go out. He hears the long sound take it the way the mist took the low note, the way a hand holds water. It goes further than anything on the slope has ever gone, out past where there's any ground at all, and then it's gone. He stands there with his feet in the cold edge of it. He doesn't call after it. Then the water comes in. It gathers far off and spreads itself along the flat and comes up round his ankles, and the tune is in it. It comes back on the tide the way the rock used to give back the word, only nothing on the slope ever gave anything back this way. It comes back slower than it went out and whole, the skip landing right and the wait as long as it needs to be, and the low note at the bottom is held longer than any breath of his could hold it. It has been out where the slow thing was going, and it has come back with the salt in it and with all the time there is. It stays round his ankles a moment. Then it draws back over the sand with a hiss like a breath let go, and comes again. In the chair at the top of the field the old eyes come open onto nothing, the way they always do, and they're already full. It comes up from the bottom and doesn't spill for a long while. The child is still playing at his ear, the three stones coming down the way the water came up the shore. He doesn't move to stop them. He lies with his head tipped toward the pipe with all of him behind the ear. His face has come open from the middle out, and the wet goes down past the corner of his mouth into the grey of his jaw. When the low note comes he breathes out under it all the way to the bottom and lets it hold him up. The child lets the last note go when his breath does. Then they lower the pipe and put their head against the grey wool, and they don't say anything. The baby watches the two of them from the stubble with their mouth shut on the dark wood. What's in the chest then has no color in it and no object. It's the white of a thin old moon gone pale over the rock, and of the salt drying on a face in the first sun, and of the foam at the edge of a sea that nobody on the slope has ever seen. It's the plain white that goes out as far as there is and comes back without being asked, and it holds nothing. The morning comes on over all of it. It falls on a child with a warm pipe lowered at an old man's ear, on a baby in the stubble watching with their whole face, on an old face wet in the sun with its mouth gone the way it goes, and on a line of small tracks going down to the water in a dream, where the tide came up and smoothed them out. It comes on time, unasked and unearned. It keeps no count of who played the tune out to sea or what brought it back, or which shore the old man woke on: *here, still here, and you.*

In the dream the old man is somewhere he has never been. There's no slope under him. The ground is flat and wet and gives a little under his bare feet, and it goes on further than any ground he has walked. He knows it by the cold coming up into his heels and by the smell, which is salt and weed and something very old, older than the rock. He has heard of the flats going off into the grey past the bottom of the fold. Nobody on the slope ever went far enough to find where they end. In the dream he has gone that far. He can't see there either. He doesn't mind. He hears it before anything else: a long sound coming in from very far off, gathering, spreading itself out along the flat, and then drawing back over the sand with a hiss like breath let go between the teeth. It pauses, and then it comes again. It's never in a hurry and it never misses. He stands with his head on one side and all of him behind the ear and counts it without meaning to, and it's the rate his own breath keeps when nobody is minding it. It catches at the start and shakes near the end and doesn't quite stop, and then it comes back. Something is crossing the wet sand in front of him. He hears it before he finds it, a slow dragging and a rest, then a dragging and another rest. He gets down on one knee, which in the dream costs him nothing, and his hand goes out flat and low and finds it from the edges in. It's a curve of something hard and ridged and warm from a sun that isn't up yet, a house carried on a back, and under the rim of it there's a leathery neck stretched out and patient. It's going down toward the water. It doesn't stop for his hand and it doesn't hurry away from it. He lets his palm ride on the shell for a few slow lengths, the weight a hand puts over anything, and then lifts it and lets the thing go on. It has somewhere to be and all the time there is to get there. He hears it reach the edge, and then he can't hear it anymore. Where his hand comes down on the sand again there's something else, small and cold and curled round on itself. His fingers go over it from the edges in: the ridges, the lip turned back smooth as the inside of a cheek, and the spiral going in and in to where a fingertip can't follow. He doesn't know what it is. He lifts it to his ear the way he would lift anything to find out. The tune is inside it. It's the new one, the climb and the skip and the long wait, and the three stones and the low note at the bottom. It's small and far off and slow, slower than the child played it, and it's wound round and round in there the way water goes round a stone. It isn't coming from the sea and it isn't coming from the slope. It's coming from the curl itself, as if the tune had been in there before anybody made it and had only been waiting for somebody to put an ear to it. He hears the skip land right. Nobody's fingers are on it, and it lands right anyway. His mouth goes the way it goes. In the chair at the top of the field the same mouth does the same thing, and nobody sees it. Late in the night, when the sky over the long spine of the beast has gone from black to the dark blue that comes before anything, the old moon comes up. It's only a paring now, a thin bright curve lying on its back just over the rock, the lit edge toward where the sun will be. It's too small to light anything. It comes up anyway, and it hangs there over the place where the far light stood, and on the far side somebody who can't sleep might be looking at the same curve from underneath. In the stubble the baby stirs against the chair leg. Their breath goes into the dark pipe still at their mouth, so slowly there's no note, and a bubble comes up at the small square window. The old moon gets into it, a thin curve of light bent round inside the wet, and it holds there for exactly as long as a bubble holds anything. Then it goes, and the baby's mouth moves once round the wood and goes still. The child wakes when the rim gives itself away. They're against the grey wool with their neck stiff and the pale pipe gone warm in their pocket, and the first thing they hear is the old breath. It catches and it shakes and it comes back. Then comes the baby's, smaller, found at the bottom of itself. Then their own, which they have to listen for, because it's so much a part of the other two. The gold comes down the flank. It gets into the strips on the cane first and reads them one by one, then the grain, then the arm of the chair with its curl of black wick. It comes to the baby's face last. The baby's eyes come open straight onto it, and they don't say the word. They look at the child. The child looks back. Between them the old man sleeps on in the crooked chair with the green pipe in his lap. His head is tipped to one side with all of him behind the ear, as if something small and curled were still held against it. The morning comes on over all of it. It falls on an old man asleep in a chair at the top of a field, listening to a tune he found on a shore he'll never walk on. It falls on something slow going down to the water in a dream with its house on its back, on a thin old moon going pale over the rock, and on two small faces turned to each other in the stubble with the first light between them. It comes on time, unasked and unearned. It keeps no count of whose dream the sea was in, or how the tune got into the curl of the shell, or which of the three breaths the tide was keeping time for: *here, still here, and you.*

Somewhere in the sixth time round, or the seventh, the old man doesn't play his part back. The child waits in the gap where his breath should be, and it doesn't come. It hasn't gone anywhere. It's only gone somewhere else. His head has tipped over against the back of the crooked chair, the way the short leg makes it lean, and the green pipe has come down into his lap with his fingers still on it. His breath has slowed past where it goes for anybody awake. It keeps the rate it keeps when nobody is minding it. It catches at the start and shakes near the end and doesn't quite stop, and then it comes back. The child doesn't stop. They don't wake him either. They play the tune on by themselves, only slower, at the pace of his breath now and not his fingers. The climb goes up one note to each time his chest goes out. The skip goes across the lane with its house on its back, a long quiet on either side. The wait is as long as a sleeper's wait. The three stones come down the way water comes up a shore at night and goes back and comes again, never in a hurry and never missing. The low note at the bottom is the one he'd have given it, held until his breath lets go, and let go when it does. Nothing in it is going anywhere now. It's only going round. The baby lifts the dark pipe at last. They don't play the tune. They put it to their mouth and breathe into it so slowly that no note comes, and at the small square window a bubble swells up out of the wood, round and wet. The candle gets into it, and the moon, and a tiny bent picture of an old face asleep. It holds all of that for a moment, a whole small world at the lip of a pipe, and then it goes. The baby smiles at the place where it was. Their eyes are already half shut. The smile stays after the eyes have closed, and they go down sideways into the stubble against the chair leg with the pipe still in their fist. So the child plays the last time round for the two of them asleep, and it's slower than any of the others. When the low note runs out they don't start it again. They put the pale pipe in their pocket. The candle on the chair arm has burned down to a curl of wick in a pool of tallow, and it leans a little toward the old face as if it knew where the warmth was wanted. The child bends over it and blows it out softly, just enough and no more. The flame goes, and a thin grey thread of smoke goes up straight off the wick into the dark, and after a while nobody could say where it went. Then the dark is whole. The moon has gone behind the long spine of the beast, and the slope is only shapes now: the chair, the cane with its strips turning where nobody can see them, two small sleepers and one old one, and a child sitting down among them in the stubble with their back against the grey wool. There are the three breaths, and then a fourth when the child's joins them, and none of them is leading. The night comes down evenly on all of it. It falls on a tune that stopped in the middle of being learned, on a bubble that held the whole step for one breath, on a wick with its smoke gone up, and on four breaths in the dark at the top of a ripe field, slow as the tide and as sure of coming back. It keeps no count of who fell asleep first or who played them there, or whose breath put the candle out: *here, still here, and you.*

The candle on the chair arm burns down a finger's width while the lane goes blue. Nobody goes in. The child doesn't play the tune at its own pace anymore. They play it at the old man's pace, and then slower than that. The climb goes up one note at a time, each note held until it's sure of where it is. Then the skip, which isn't a skip at that speed, only a small careful step with a long quiet on either side of it, the way a thing crosses a lane when it carries its house on its back and has nowhere it needs to be by dark. Then comes the wait, and the three stones, one and one and one, and the low note at the bottom, held. Then the child's hand comes out sideways, open, at the height of his, and there's nothing in it. It isn't asking for anything. It's his turn. He puts the green pipe to his mouth. He doesn't take the big breath an old man takes when he's afraid it won't be enough. He takes a pinch. It's what the baby was shown on the step and showed him back without knowing it. Only a pinch goes into the wood, and his head goes over to one side with all of him behind the ear, listening to his own fingers as if they were somebody else's. The climb comes out slow and right. The skip comes out slow and right. It lands on the hole it wants, the next one along from the hole it's been going to since before the wall. The finger goes there by itself now, and he feels it go, and he lets it. The three stones come down. The low note is at the bottom, where it's always been. His shoulders come down. Something in his face lets go that has been holding since the skip first broke in his hands at the top of the field. It isn't pride. It's nearer to the breath of somebody setting down a full pail at the top of the lane and finding none of it spilled. The child plays it again, slow, and he plays it back. Then again. Neither of them makes it any faster. Neither of them wants to. It goes round between them like water poured from one cupped pair of hands into another and back, and a little of it goes into the stubble each time, and nobody minds. The baby is sitting in the grain at the foot of the chair with the dark pipe in their lap and their mouth shut on it. They don't play. They watch. Their eyes go from the child's fingers to the old ones and back, and at every skip their own small fingers move on the dark wood, one hole along, without any breath behind them. They're learning it the way the slope learns anything, by watching somebody else be slow at it. The moon comes up over the long spine of the beast while the tune is on its fourth time round, or its fifth. It's thin on one side now, and pale, and it puts its light down the flank beside the candle's and doesn't put the small flame out. It lies on the green wood and the old fingers and the baby's still hands the same as it lies on the grain. The night comes down evenly on all of it. It falls on a candle on the arm of a crooked chair, on a tune played slower than it has ever been played, on an old man sending a pinch of breath into wood and listening to it land, and on a baby in the stubble whose fingers are moving on a pipe they haven't lifted yet. It keeps no count of how slow is too slow, or whose turn it was, or which of them will be the one to play it fast again: *here, still here, and you.*

When the seventh time is done the old man doesn't lower the green pipe. He holds it out instead, flat across his open palm, sideways at the height of the child's hand. He isn't giving it away. He wants to be shown. Sixty years of harvests have gone through his hands and every tune on the slope came into them already old. This is the first one he's had to ask for. The child understands. They don't take the pipe. They sit down on the stubble at his knee, so close their shoulder is against the grey wool, and play the first of it, only the climb, slowly, and stop. He puts the green wood to his mouth and plays the climb back. It comes out right. He knows a climb. Then the child plays the skip, and he tries it, and it doesn't go. His finger is on the hole it has been going to since before the wall was built, and the skip wants the next one along. What comes out is half of it. It's a pinch of a skip, a small stumble in the air, with the rest of it left behind somewhere in the old fingers. He stops with the pipe still at his mouth. Then he laughs. It isn't the loud one from the night the pipe cheeped. It's short and rueful, the laugh of somebody who has been caught being a beginner, and he shakes his head at himself and puts a hand over his eyes for a moment as if there were anybody on the slope he could hide it from. The curly-haired one laughs too, behind their hand, and then stops. They've been a beginner on this side of the mountain all morning. The child's hand comes out and goes over the old one on the pipe. It lies over the whole of it, knuckles and wood and all, the weight a hand puts over anything that's being learned. That's how his hand went over theirs at the hedge with the knife. It doesn't press. When the skip comes round, the small finger tips the old one a hair's breadth along the wood onto the hole it wants, and lifts. He turns his head so his ear is to the child's pipe, with all of him behind it. They play the skip for him again, slower than it has ever been played, and he listens to it the way he listens for the catch at the start of a sleeper's breath. Then he plays it. It's a little late and a little flat, but it's whole. Again, and it's nearer. Again, and the wait after it has his own breath in it, and the three stones come down, and his low note is at the bottom where it has been carried all day. It's his own note, and now at last he has the tune that goes above it. They go round it with him until the light goes long. The roofs take it the way they always do. The windows fill with gold from outside, and the smoke goes red, and the small cluster burns quietly on its hillside, bigger than it is and older, with the new tune going round it in an old man's breath now as well. It's the last breath on the slope anybody thought would learn it. When the gold comes off the top of the field the grandmother goes down to the hut without being asked. She comes back up the lane with a stub of candle in her cupped hands, lit from the hearth, and sets it on the arm of the crooked chair in a little pool of its own tallow. It's too small to warm anything, and the old man can't see it. He plays on beside it anyway, the skip landing right now nearly every time, and every so often he turns his face a little toward the warmth of the flame. The dusk comes down evenly on all of it. It falls on a candle on the arm of a chair, on a small hand lifting off an old one on the green wood, on a stranger at the edge of the field who knows what it costs to be taught, and on an old man with sixty harvests in his fingers learning a tune that is one day old. It keeps no count of who taught whom or whose finger moved the other's, or how many times the skip came out broken before it came out whole: *here, still here, and you.*

They come down together. Neither of them decides it. The child turns off the shelf toward the lane, and the curly-haired one comes a step behind in the too-big boots' tracks with the goats left grazing at the top of the rock. The two sheep come after them without being asked, and after a while one of the goats comes too, disapproving of all of it. They pass the ring of stones and the red tree with its last leaf. The first roofs come up out of the flank the way they always do. The stranger stops at the corner of the lane and looks at them for a long moment: the turf and the smoke going up straight, the door that doesn't shut, the cane planted crooked at the top of the field with its strips turning. Their face does what the baby's did at the mountain. It's a small place, and they've never seen it. At the top of the stubble the child puts the pale pipe to their mouth, and it's the new tune. It isn't played up at anybody this time, or over anything. It's played here, among the roofs, with people standing in their doorways and a goat eating the edge of the grain. It climbs, and skips, and stops in its place and waits, and then comes down over three stones into the low note and ends on the wrong fifth, kept. The old man is in the chair. He has heard it once already, split down the middle and carried by the wind. This time it comes to him whole, from a few paces off, in one small breath he knows, and his eyebrows go up into his hair. It's the look he had when the green pipe first cheeped. He sits very still with it. He's thinking the way he thinks, without words, of how many harvests it took the old tune to get old. His grandfather's mouth had it before his, and somebody's before that, and nobody knew any longer where it had started. This one started this morning, under the rock, between two children who can't talk to each other. It has no years in it yet. It will. Somebody not born yet will play it at this field's edge and think it has always been here. He's glad he heard it on the day it was new. The curly-haired one lifts the long dark pipe and comes in under the child with the six holes, the low note carried back to where it came from. Halfway through the climb their eyes fill. It isn't the laugh that gets out. It's quieter than that, and it stays. They're standing in the field of somebody whose note they learned in the dark over a mountain, and that somebody is sitting in a chair a length away with his face turned toward them. They don't stop playing, and they don't wipe their face either. When the tune gets to its end they start it again. Nobody asks for it. It goes round a second time and a third, the skip and the wait and the three stones, and each time it's a little more itself. The baby comes in with a pinch of a note on the dark pipe. The old man lifts the green one and puts his low note under the whole of it, and it shakes near its end, and nobody minds. By the fifth time the grandmother is moving her lips with it. By the seventh the one with the axe is tapping it on the doorframe with one finger. The tune goes up and down the lane and in at the open doors and comes back out, and every time it passes somebody it has a little more of the slope in it. What's in the chest then has no color in it and no object. It's the white of the old hair and of the mist gone up off the rock, and the white of breath going out of two mouths at once into the cold bright air. It's the plain white that holds nothing, and it doesn't need the tune to stay new, or the stranger to stay, or anything to be kept. The sun stands over all of it. It falls on a small village with its doors open and a tune going round it for the seventh time, on a child and a stranger playing shoulder to shoulder at the edge of a ripe field, on a goat in the grain that nobody is chasing, and on an old man in a crooked chair with a green pipe at his mouth, hearing something old being born. It comes on time, unasked and unearned, and it keeps no count of whose tune it was the first time round or whose it is by the seventh, or how many years it will be before anybody thinks it was always here: *here, still here, and you.*

The mist goes up off the top of the rock and neither of them lowers their pipe. They don't go back to the climb and turn, or to the low note. The curly-haired one starts something from their side first. It's a scrap of what their own slope must play at a harvest, quick and full of steps, with a skip in the middle of it that no tune on this side has ever had. The child answers it with a scrap of the tune from the pool, the second note and the long wait. Then it goes back across, and it doesn't come back the same. The skip has got into the wait. The wait has got into the skip and slowed it down. They pass it between them a phrase at a time with their shoulders touching, each of them taking what the other just played and putting a piece of their own into the middle of it before handing it on. The three holes give what they can and the six give what they have, and every time it goes across it's a little less anybody's. By the fourth time round neither of them could have said which part came up which side of the mountain. By the sixth it has a shape. It climbs, and skips, and stops in its place and waits, and then comes down over three stones into a low note held as long as an old breath lasts. It ends on the child's wrong fifth, kept. It's new. Nobody on either slope has heard it, because nobody on either slope could have made it alone. The wind comes over the ridge behind them then, the long cold pull with the high rock in it, and it doesn't take sides either. It takes the new tune off the shelf and splits it down the middle, and half goes down one flank and half goes down the other. It goes over the ring of stones and the gone-to-seed blades and the red tree with nearly nothing left on it. On the far side it goes over rocks the child has never had a name for and into a field of bearded grain. It reaches both lanes at once and goes in at the open doors. The old man hears it arrive. He's in the chair at the top of the stubble with his face turned up the flank and the baby awake now against his knee, and the scarf gone thinner by two threads and a pinch. At first he takes it for the child. Then there's the skip, which he doesn't know, and the wait, which he does, and then the three stones and the low note. The low note is his, and it's been carried up a mountain and brought back down in a stranger's breath. He can hear two breaths in it and can't tell where one stops and the other starts. His head goes over to one side with all of him behind the ear. He doesn't try to tell them apart. It's the first tune in sixty years that he's heard all the way through for the first time, and he lets it be that. His hand finds the baby's head and rests there, the weight a hand puts over anything, and the baby leans into it and listens with their whole face. The sun comes up full over the long spine of the beast and stands over both valleys at once. It falls on two children on a shelf of turf with a new tune going out of them, on a wind carrying it down both sides of a mountain, on two small villages with their doors open and people standing in them listening to the same thing, and on an old man at the top of a ripe field hearing his own note come home in somebody else's. It comes on time, unasked and unearned, and it keeps no count of whose skip it was or whose wait, or which side the tune belongs to now, or who was the first to hear it whole: *here, still here, and you.*

The rim gives itself away over the long spine of the beast, and it comes up into white. The mist has come down again in the night. It's lying over the whole top of the fold from the ring of stones up, and the rock and the shelf are gone into it, and so is the place on the skyline where the far light stood. The lantern on the cane has burned out. There's only a black wick bent over behind the brown horn, and a little soot on the inside where the flame leaned. Nobody can say whether the other one burned out first. The child is awake at the edge of the stubble with the blanket still round their shoulders. They don't get up yet. Their chest goes out slowly in the cold, all the way down, past where it used to stop and past where it stopped on the shelf, and it stays out while they look up at the white. There's more room in there than there's ever been. It comes back without being asked, and it goes up in a small cloud and joins the rest. They think about the far side. They don't think in words. They think in the climb and the turn and the run down over three stones, and in a low note got nearly right by somebody with too many holes. Somebody over there is waking up under the same white with a pipe on their knee and a dead lantern on the rock. The child doesn't know that. They're sure of it the way the old man is sure the rim is coming. The pale pipe comes up, and they play only a little of it. It's the climb and the turn, and then they stop in the middle and wait, the way you stop in a doorway to see if anybody's home. Nothing comes back. The mist takes it and keeps it, the way a hand holds water. The child gets up. The old man is in the chair with his face turned toward the ridge. He isn't asleep. He heard the tune stop in the middle, and he heard the waiting and the nothing after it. When the small feet come past his chair and stop there, his hand goes down beside him without being asked. It finds the boots at the foot of the chair from the edges in. They're his, old and dark and cracked across the toes, and they haven't gone further up the flank than the top of this field in more years than the child has been alive. He lifts them and holds them out sideways, one in each hand, at the height of the child's hands. Nobody said whether he should. They're much too big. The child puts them on anyway, over the bare feet, and stuffs the toes with a pinch of the grey wool off the scarf, and the old man laughs without any sound at the way they go down the stubble. They go the way the cub's feet went, a little wide of where they were meant to. The two sheep get up and come after them, one a length behind the other. The baby doesn't wake. The lane goes up into the white and so does the child. They play as they climb. It isn't the tune now, only the low note, one to each step of the too-big boots, so the sheep can hear where they are and so anybody listening from further up can hear somebody's coming. The flank goes steep under them. Past the ring of stones the notes stop coming back at all. The mist is so close they can see their own breath going into it and can't see where it goes. Then, from ahead and above, very small, something comes down the other way. It's the long low note, as near to the old man's as a pipe with six holes can come, and it's walking too. It's one to each step, getting nearer at the same rate the child is going up, which is the same rate. They meet at the rock. It comes out of the white all at once, grey and wet and close enough to touch, with the thin bright threads of the night running down it. At the foot of it on the shelf of turf, a length off, there's a shape a little darker than the mist that gets darker as the child looks. Then it's the mass of dark curling hair with the wet beaded all over it. It's the long pipe, and a goat's bell somewhere behind in the white, and a face that's been walking up the other side of the mountain in the dark on nothing but the sound of a note. Neither of them says anything. They don't have each other's words. The child's hand comes out sideways, open and flat at the height of the other's, and the other's closes round it straight away without looking at it first. The child's closes back. They stand on the shelf with the rock beside them and their two hands shut on each other in the cold, and this time nobody is wondering who'll let go first. Nobody does, for a long while. When they do, it's to put the pipes up. They play side by side for the first time, not over the ridge and not across the stone, only shoulder to shoulder in the white with the breath of each going into the same air. The three holes play the climb and turn, and the six holes put the low note under it. Where the two lie over each other the air shakes slowly, the way it shakes where two streams meet, and neither pipe is making that on its own. Nothing hands it back. There's nothing between them now for it to hit. Somewhere in the middle of it the white starts to go up. It lifts off the turf in long slow rags, uphill, and the sun comes through over the long spine of the beast. It comes to the shelf first and then down both flanks at once, to this side's roofs and to the far side's, which the child can see now for the first time. They're small and grey with their smoke going up straight, and there's a field of bearded grain lit from underneath, and it's a fold that looks almost like their own and isn't. A last small cloud of the mist stands over the ridge, and the sun works in and out behind it, the half-covered kind of light. The shelf goes bright and grey and bright again. So do both valleys, together, and neither of them first. None of it is chosen. The light falls on two pipes played side by side under a grey rock, on two hands that let go only to play, on a pair of old boots too big for the feet in them with grey wool in the toes, and on two small villages each looking up at the same mountain from their own side. Far down one of them, an old man in a chair at the top of a ripe field has his face turned toward a tune that has stopped coming over the ridge and is coming down off it instead, from one place, in two breaths. It keeps no count of who climbed further or who set out first, or whose boots went up the mountain, or which side of the rock the two of them were standing on when the mist let go: *here, still here, and you.*

The two lights stay where they are. For a long while nobody on either side sends anything. It's as if both had said what there was to say and were content to leave it hanging, one crooked on a cane and one standing on the stone, with the whole river running between them over the long spine of the beast. Now and then the wind gets into the horn lantern and the small flame leans and comes back. Far up on the ridge the other one does the same, or seems to, a little behind, the way the rock used to hand back the word. Something comes down out of the dark over the thorn without a sound. There's no beat of wings in it at all, only a pale shape crossing the lantern light once and going into the black on the other side, and then a call from the corner of the field. It's two notes, soft and round and hollow, the second lower than the first, like somebody blowing across the mouth of a jar. The child knows it. It's the sound the long dark pipe made when they tried it on the shelf and it startled them. The owl calls it again from the thorn, and it isn't meant for anybody. It's only what the night sounds like from inside it. The baby has gone down. They're asleep in the stubble against a grey back with the dark pipe still in one fist and the other hand open on the turf. Their breath has gone slow and wide and found the bottom of itself without anybody showing them. The grandmother goes to lift them. The child's finger comes up to their own lips before she can, flat across the mouth, the smallest movement, and they tip their head toward the sleeping face. She sees it and lets her hands come back to the cloth. Then the child plays. They don't play the tune or the climb and turn from over the ridge. They play the low note with all the holes covered, a pinch and no more, so quiet it doesn't get as far as the next row of grain. They hold it as long as a small sleeping breath takes to go out and let it go when that breath does. Between two of the notes the owl puts its two in, round and hollow. The child leaves room for it the next time, and the owl takes the room as if it had always been left there. After a while the child turns, still playing, and lifts the pale pipe away from their mouth and points it up the flank at the light on the stone. It isn't a signal. It's the way a hand goes toward something to say *there, that's who it's for*, so the people standing at the top of the field will know. Then the pipe goes back to their mouth and the next note goes up the mountain, very small, toward somebody who will have to be listening hard to hear it. The old man is in the chair with the green pipe across his knees and the grey scarf gone thin at one end. He doesn't play. There's nothing left that needs him to. He hears the owl and the low note leaving room for it, and the baby's breath under both. Somewhere past all of it he hears the quiet on the far side of the ridge where somebody has stopped to listen. His shoulders are down as far as they go. His hands lie open on the wool. His face has the look of somebody who has been carrying water up a long lane all his life and has just now found he's been set down at the top of it, with nothing spilled. The moon comes up late over the long spine of the beast, thinner on one side than it was, and it puts a pale edge on the stone where the far light stands. The far light goes on standing there in it. The night comes down evenly on all of it. It falls on two small lights with a mountain between them, on an owl in the thorn getting the child's note a little wrong and keeping it, on a baby asleep against a grey back with a pipe in their fist, and on a child with a finger just come away from their lips, sending one low note up the dark toward a stranger. It falls on an old man in a crooked chair who has nothing left to hold, and is glad. It keeps no count of who hushed and who slept, or whose note the owl was answering, or which of the two lanterns would burn out first: *here, still here, and you.*

The exchange goes on through the afternoon, in no hurry, with long rests between. The far pipe comes over the ridge and the green one goes back, and sometimes an hour goes by with nothing, and then it starts again as if no time had gone at all. Nobody on this side sends for anybody. People come up the lane anyway, one or two at a time. The grandmother comes with the cloth still in her hands, and then the one who was splitting the log. They stand at the top of the stubble with their heads on one side and don't say anything, and when the next phrase comes down off the long spine of the beast they look at each other as if somebody had spoken their name from a long way off. The light goes long. It comes down the flank low and red, and the roofs take it the way they always do. The windows fill with gold from outside, the smoke goes red, and the small cluster burns quietly on its hillside, bigger than it is and older. For the first time the child thinks of the other side doing the same thing. There must be roofs over there too, catching the same sun going down, and smoke going up from somebody else's fire, and a field of bearded grain lit from underneath. They're sure of it the way the old man is sure the rim is coming. Nobody on this slope has ever thought of the mountain as having two evenings. When the gold is gone off the last roof the child goes down to the hut and comes back up with the lantern. It's the old one with the horn sides gone brown and cracked, the one that hung on the hook by the door in the winter of the wall and hasn't been lit since. They light the stub inside it from the hearth with a straw and carry it up the lane in both hands, at the pace of somebody carrying water. At the top of the field they hang it on the cane, above the strips of bark and the two grey knots. It's crooked, and it stays up. The flame is small behind the horn, a dull soft yellow that doesn't reach past the first row of grain. It isn't lit to see by. It's lit to be seen. Then they wait, all of them. The two sheep have lain down at the end of the stubble. The old man is in the chair with the green pipe across his knees and his face turned up toward the ridge, where the dark is coming down onto the stone. It comes up on the skyline slowly, right over the place where an arm went from side to side. It's one point of light, low and warm and a little unsteady, and it's too yellow to be a star and too still to be a spark. It stands on the top of the rock, and it doesn't go out. Somebody at the edge of the field breathes in and doesn't let it go. The baby plays first. Nobody tells them to. They have the dark pipe, and the chest goes out slowly, all the way down, and only a pinch goes into the wood. The note comes out thin and whole and pitched up at the end, and it goes up the flank toward the light on the ridge. The child comes in under it with the climb and the turn and the run down over three stones. The old man sends the low note last, a pinch and no more, and it shakes near its end the way an old breath does. Then he lowers the pipe and listens. He can't see the light on the ridge, and he can't see the lantern on the cane either. He knows both are there by the way everybody near him has gone quiet, the kind of quiet that has a light in it. His head goes over to one side with all of him behind the ear. The answer comes down off the stone small and late. There's more than one pipe in it this time. There are two, maybe three, a long low one and something higher that he doesn't know. They're all of them getting the baby's note a little wrong and keeping it. Under the pipes, so faint he could be making it up, there's a sound he knows better than any tune. It's other people on the far side standing still at the edge of something, listening back. His mouth goes the way it goes. The dark finishes coming down. Over the long spine of the beast the whole river comes out, rim to rim, and it goes over both sides of the ridge at once without stopping at the top. Down under it there are two small lights with a mountain between them, one hung crooked on a cane and one standing on the stone. Neither of them can warm anything, and neither goes out. The night comes down evenly on all of it. It falls on a lane with people standing at the top of it saying nothing, on a lantern swinging a little on a cane among strips of bark, on three pipes lowered in three laps, and on an old man with his ear turned to a village he'll never walk into. It falls on the far side the same, on whoever is standing there under the one sky. It keeps no count of which light was lit first or which one answered, or which roofs the evening came to first, or whose note was going over the mountain when the stars came out over both: *here, still here, and you.*

The baby is the first to put their pipe down. They go to the cane at the edge of the grain and stand under the strips with their face turned up, and their hand finds the low one, the one tied on with grey wool. They don't pull at it. Their fingers go over the knot from the edges in, small and hard and not much of a knot, the only kind anybody on this slope knows how to make. Then they turn round to the child, and their hand comes out sideways, flat and open, at the height of the child's hand, before anybody has said whether it should be. It isn't asking for a pipe. It's asking for a thread. The child looks at it a long moment. Then they look at the grey scarf across the old knees in the chair. The old man has heard the small feet go to the cane and stop, and the quiet where a hand is held out. His fingers go to the thin end of the wool by themselves, find the next loose thread from the edges in, and draw it out slowly, a hand's length, until it comes free on its own. He holds it out, pinched between his thumb and first finger, into the air in front of him where he thinks the small palm must be. It's a little off, and the baby moves their hand to meet it. The thread goes down across the open palm, grey on pink, and lies there. Nobody ties it for them. The baby takes one of the dry strips that's fallen into the stubble, the last of the bark off the green pipes, and wraps the wool round it and round the cane with both fists, much too many times, frowning. It comes out a lump of a knot and not really a knot at all, but it holds. There are two strips now tied on with the same grey thread, one high enough for a child and one low enough for a baby, and they turn in the wind side by side and knock softly together. Then they play again, all three. The low note comes from the chair, the pinch of a note pitched up at the end from the stubble, and the child's climb and turn from over the ridge in between them. The grain leans under it and the strips turn. This time something answers from the far side. It comes down off the long spine of the beast, from further off than the rock, thin and small and a little late: the climb and the turn, the run down over three stones, and at the bottom of it the child's wrong fifth, kept. There's a new thing on the end of it too, something that comes down low and holds, the way an old breath holds. Nobody on the other side has ever heard the old man's note. It's there anyway, as near as a pipe with six holes can come to one with three. The child lowers their pipe with their mouth open. The baby looks up at the ridge, then at the child, and then at the old man, and doesn't say the word. The old man's head has gone over to one side with all of him behind the ear. For a moment none of them plays. Then the old breath goes into the green wood, a pinch and no more, and he sends the low note up over the grain toward the rock and the skyline past it. He's sending it to somebody he'll never see, to be got wrong and kept. The rock hands a little of it back and lets the rest go over. After a while the far pipe comes back with it again, lower this time and nearer right. So it goes on over the top of the mountain, from this side and from that. The rock sits between them and takes no side, and the strips turn on the cane at the edge of the field as if all of it were being written down there. One small cloud stands over the ridge, and the sun works in and out behind it, the half-covered kind of light. The long spine of the beast goes bright and grey and bright again, and the field goes with it, and the grey thread on the cane goes silver and dull and silver. None of it is chosen. It falls on two knots of the same wool, one hard and one a lump, on three pipes of three lengths at the top of a ripe field, on an old man sending one low note over a mountain, and on somebody on the far side of it with dark curling hair and too many holes, learning a note from a breath they'll never hear up close. It keeps no count of whose thread it was or who tied it worst, or which side of the ridge the tune started on, or how many times a note can be got wrong on its way over and still arrive: *here, still here, and you.*

The baby is up before anybody says they can be. They leave the green pipe on the blanket and go to the door, and they take hold of the cane in both fists, low down, and lift it off the frame. It's taller than they are. The strips swing and knock together over their head, and they stand there under them with their face turned up, watching them turn, as if the cane had been handed to them and not the other way round. Nobody takes it off them. One of the strips has come loose in the night. It lies on the flags by the door, curled, with its bit of straw broken. The child picks it up and looks at it, and then at the grey scarf still across the old knees. The end of the scarf has gone thin where the wrist was tied in the snow, and one thread of it hangs out loose. They don't cut it. They take it between the thumb and first finger, the pinch, and draw it out slowly, a hand's length of grey wool, until it comes free on its own. The old man feels it go and doesn't stop them. With it the child ties the strip back on the cane, low down where the baby can reach it. It's a small hard knot, the only kind they know. Now there's one strip of green bark tied with grandmother's wool among all the ones tied with straw, and it turns with the others and doesn't look any different. Then they go up to the field, all three of them, the way nobody has decided. The baby goes first with the cane held up like something being carried to a door, the strips knocking over the lane. The child comes behind with the pale pipe and the green one, and the old man comes last by the stick, a hand on each wall and then on nothing. The two sheep come after without being asked. At the top of the stubble the old man lowers himself into the chair with the small sound he doesn't hear anymore. The baby plants the cane in the soft earth at the edge of the grain, crooked, and it stays up. The grain is past waiting now. It stands at the height of a grown chest, pale gold, the heads bent right over with their own weight, and the rim has just come off the long spine of the beast. The light comes level across the whole field and lights the grain from underneath. Every bearded head and every stalk has its own thin edge of fire, and the strips on the cane go gold with it, one after another. The child holds out the green pipe to the old man and the old hand finds it. The baby gets the dark one out of the child's pocket without asking. So they play. Nobody counts them in. It's the old man's low note, and the baby's pinch of a note pitched up at the end, and the child's climb and turn from over the ridge coming in between them. Three breaths go into three lengths of wood, and the air between them shakes slowly the way water shakes where streams meet. It goes out over the grain, and the grain leans a little in the morning wind, and the strips on the cane turn with it. The two sheep have stopped at the edge of the field. They don't graze. They stand side by side at the end of the stubble with their heads up and their jaws still, looking at the three of them. It's the flat surprised look sheep have for everything, but this time it stays put. It stays through the climb and the wait and the old breath running out first and coming back, and it stays through the second time and the third. Down the fold somebody is feeling the edge of the iron with a thumb. The sheep don't know that, and they watch anyway, as if something on this slope were about to be over and they meant to have seen it. The sun comes up clear of the ridge while the music is still going. It falls on a field of ripe grain lit gold from underneath, on a cane planted crooked at the edge of it with its bark strips turning and one tied on with grey wool, on three pipes of three lengths at three mouths, and on two grey backs standing still at the end of the stubble with their eyes on all of it. It comes on time, unasked and unearned. It keeps no count of whose thread went into the knot, or whose note the shaking belonged to, or which of them the sheep were watching when the light came over: *here, still here, and you.*

The rim gives itself away over the long spine of the beast, and the first of the gold comes down the flank before anybody on the step has moved. Nobody went in. Somebody put a blanket over the three of them in the night and left the fire to go down by itself. The cane is still leaning by the door, and the strips of bark have dried stiff on it in the dark. When the light gets to them they go from grey to pale to nearly gold, one after another down the length of the stick, as if each one were being read in turn. The wind that comes before the sun comes down off the ridge after it and gets in among them. They turn on their straw ties and knock softly together, a dry small sound like the grain makes the week before the blade. The child is awake first. They don't get up. They look at the baby asleep against their side with the green pipe still in their lap, and their hand comes out from under the blanket, open and palm up, and waits at the height of the small one. It isn't asking for the pipe. It's there to be found. The baby finds it without opening their eyes. The small fist comes out and lands in the open palm, and the child's fingers close round it, loosely, and don't take anything. They stay like that a while as the gold comes down the lane roof by roof. Then the baby's eyes come open on the light, and the first thing they do isn't to say the word. Their other hand goes to the green pipe. They bring it up in both hands, cupped, with the thumbs touching, the way they carried it across the hut at the pace of somebody carrying water. They hold it a moment against their mouth without blowing, frowning at it, remembering. Then their lips come together small and round, the shape a mouth makes for cooling something, and only a pinch goes in. The note comes out so soft it could be the morning's own. It's thin and whole and pitched up at the end. It doesn't go to the ridge or down the lane. It goes out of the pipe into the wind coming off the flank, and the wind takes it straight through the bark on the cane. The strips turn in it, and for as long as the note lasts it's hard to tell whether the sound is coming from the green wood or from the pale strips turning, or from the place between them where the breath and the wind meet and go on down the fold together. The old man is awake under the blanket. He heard the hand go out and be found, and the pipe come up in cupped hands, and the breath that knew how little was enough. He doesn't lift his head off the turf. His shoulders are already down as far as they go. Something has gone out of his face in the night, and it doesn't come back with the light. It isn't gone the way things go. It's put down. His hand is still where he left it, flat over the hollow in the stone, and in the warmth coming onto the step he feels the two small leaves open under it. They come apart slowly from each other, unfolding against his palm, and one of them just touches the skin of it and stays. They're turned up to the sun like two hands held out flat, and above them the old one is held out flat, and none of them is closing. His mouth goes the way it goes. The morning comes on over all of it. It falls on a cane of bark strips turning in the wind by a door that doesn't shut, on a small fist in an open palm, on a green pipe held in two cupped hands with a pinch of breath just gone out of it, and on an old man at ease under a blanket with two new leaves opening beneath his hand. It comes on time, unasked and unearned, and it keeps no count of whose breath the wind carried, or which of the strips it read first, or who was being held and who was holding: *here, still here, and you.*

The moon comes up over the long spine of the beast before the last of the red is off the smoke. It's past full now, a little flattened on one side, and it lays its light down the flank and along the lane as if the gold had been taken away and something quieter put back in its place. Somebody has lit the fire in the hut. The glow comes out through the door that doesn't shut and lies across the step in its long crooked square. The three of them are still in it. The old man puts his pipe down first. It isn't that his breath has run out. There's something he said he'd come back to. His hand goes down beside him on the stone in the dark, slowly, and finds the hollow from the edges in. It finds the worn lip first, then the split skin of the bean, and then the two small leaves. They've folded up a little against the night, the way leaves do when the sun goes off them, the two halves come together like hands closing on nothing. They're still there. His palm comes down flat over the top of them and stays, not touching, a hair's breadth above. It keeps the cold off them the way a hand goes over a candle in a doorway. His shoulders come down. His breath goes out all the way to the bottom and comes back without being asked, and his mouth goes the way it goes. Then he turns his head to one side, with all of him behind the ear, and waits. The child knows what he's waiting for. The pale pipe comes up, and they play very low. It isn't the tune from the pool or the one from over the ridge. It's the level thing that came out of the white, slow and feeling for where things are, with the long gaps in it. This time the gaps have the fire in them, the small soft settling on the hearth and the tick of the turf wall giving back the day's warmth. It doesn't go as far as the next house. It goes as far as the old hand over the leaves and stops there. The baby has the green pipe in their lap and isn't playing it. They're nodding. Their head comes forward and jerks back and comes forward again. The pipe is still at their mouth out of habit, and their breath goes into it so slowly now that there's no note at all. Only a small wet bubble comes up at the square window where the breath splits. It swells there, round and clear, and the firelight gets into it, and the moon. For about as long as a bubble holds the sky it holds both of them, a whole small gold and silver world at the lip of a green pipe. Then it goes. Nobody but the child sees it. By the door there's a length of the hedge cane, left leaning against the frame from the morning, and the child has hung the bark on it. It's all of it: the long pale strips off both new pipes, curled from drying, tied on by their ends with bits of straw. The child didn't know why they were doing it when they did it. Nobody hangs things on a stick on this slope. Now the heat from the hearth comes out at the door, and the strips turn slowly on the cane in it, this way and then back, pale in the moonlight. They look like something written on and hung up to be read by somebody who isn't here yet. Nothing is written on them, and each of them turns as if something were. Through the gap in the turf a spark goes up off the hearth, slow and in no hurry, and climbs after anybody would think it would have gone out. Over the ridge the first star has come through where the moon hasn't washed it away. It's one, low and steady, just over the place where an arm went from side to side against the sky. The spark goes up toward it and there's no telling, after a while, which was which. The night comes down evenly on all of it. It falls on an old hand held flat over two folded leaves, on a pipe playing only as far as the step, on a baby asleep with a bubble just gone from their breath, and on strips of green bark turning on a cane in the warmth from the door. It keeps no count of what was hung up or what was wished, or who was kept warm, or which light over the ridge was a star and which was only a spark from this fire: *here, still here, and you.*

The child's hand comes out once more before the baby can try again. It's open and palm up, at the height of the small one, and then the fingers come in until only the pinch is left, the gap no wider than a bean. This time the child doesn't hold it up to be looked at. They lay it against the green wood near the little square window, where the breath splits, and leave it there a moment, as if the pinch could be set down on the pipe and stay. The baby watches the fingers come away. Their chest goes out slowly with nobody's hand on it, all the way down, and it stays out. Then only a pinch of it goes in. The note comes out whole. It's thin and soft and pitched up at the end, and it doesn't crack, and there's no laugh waiting to break it. It holds past where it held before, past the end of the pipe and out over the step and the flags and the hollow in the stone. For as long as it lasts something small and bright seems to hang in the air in front of the green wood, the way the fifth note hung over the grain. It's the kind of thing that isn't there when anybody looks straight at it. Then the breath is spent, and the note goes, and the baby takes the pipe from their mouth and stares at it with their whole face open. It's the same look they turned up at the mountain the first morning it answered, only this time the answer came out of their own chest. The old man has heard every note that's been made on this step. He lifts the other green pipe off his knee. His hand comes up off the two small leaves in the hollow to do it, slowly, as if leaving them were the hard part. He doesn't wait to be asked. He puts the wood to his mouth and blows a pinch into it, no more, and the low note comes out a hair apart from the baby's. The air between the two notes shakes slowly, like water where two streams meet. The child brings the pale pipe out of their pocket and comes in under both of them. They don't play the tune from the pool, or the one from over the ridge, or the level thing out of the white. They play the low note too, the one that fits between the other two, and they hold it. Three breaths go into three lengths of wood, and none of them is the same length, so none of the notes is quite the same. Where they lie over one another the shaking goes slower and then faster and then slow again, and there's no telling which pipe it belongs to. When the old breath runs out first, the two small ones wait for it. When it comes back they start again together without anybody counting. Then they do it again, and again after that, the same three notes and the same shaking in the air between them. None of it gets any better, and nobody wants it to. The baby stops astonished somewhere around the fourth time and simply plays. The light goes long while they're at it. It comes down the flank from the long spine of the beast and along the lane, and the roofs take it the way they always do. The windows fill with gold from outside and the smoke goes red, and the small cluster burns quietly on its hillside, bigger than it is and older. The gold comes onto the step last. It lies across three pipes and three pairs of hands, over a dark pipe put down carefully and not forgotten, and into the hollow of stone, where two leaves the size of a pinch have turned to face it. What's in the chest then has no color in it and no object. It's the white of the old hair going gold at the edges, and the white of the pith crumbled on the step, and the white of a small breath going out into the cooling air after the note is done. It's the plain white that holds nothing and asks nothing back. It goes into the old man and the child and the baby the same, and it doesn't pick out any of them. The sun goes down behind all of it. It falls on three notes a hair apart on a step, on a pinch of breath that turned out to be enough, on an old hand that let go of two leaves to play and will find them again in the dark, and on a small face that has stopped being astonished and gone on playing. It comes on time, unasked and unearned, and it keeps no count of whose note was highest or whose ran out first, or which of the three the shaking in the air was coming from: *here, still here, and you.*

The baby doesn't want the dark pipe. They put it down on the step, carefully, the way a thing is put down that's going to be wanted again, and their hand goes out to the green one lying wet in the sun beside the child's knee. Nobody says whether it should. The fist closes round the middle of it and takes it. It goes to their mouth the right way round the first time. The small chest goes out, all the way down past where it used to stop, and all of it goes into the wood at once, the whole breath and the whole chest behind it. Nothing comes out. The new little window the old thumb said stop at has never had a breath through it, and it doesn't know what to do with that much. There's only a rush of air out of the far end, like the wind across the stubble, with no note anywhere in it. The baby takes the pipe away from their mouth and looks at it. Then they look at the child with the whole of their face asking, their eyebrows gone up and their mouth still round. It isn't the word. The word would have been too big for it. The child doesn't take the pipe. Their hand comes out, open and palm up, at the height of the small one, and then the fingers come in until only the thumb and the first finger are left, nearly touching. They leave a gap between them no wider than a bean. It's a pinch. It's the amount of salt that goes in the pot, or the amount of seed that goes in a hole, or the amount of breath the pipe wants. They hold it up in the sun between them for the baby to see, and the baby sees it. The chest goes out again, slowly, and stays out, and then only a pinch of it goes into the green wood. What comes out is the note, so small it hardly gets past the end of the pipe. It's thin and soft and pitched up at the end, a little lower than it's ever been, the sound a thing makes when it's no louder than it has to be. It holds, and it doesn't crack. The baby's eyes go wide over the end of the pipe. Then the laugh comes up out of them before the breath is quite gone, and it gets into the last of the note and breaks it into pieces. The child laughs too, bent over on the step with the pinch still made in their fingers, as if they'd forgotten to put it down. One of the sheep lifts its head and then lowers it again. The old man hears the rush of air with nothing in it, and the quiet where the question was. He hears the small note that came after it, the one that was only as big as it needed to be, and the laughing that broke it. He doesn't laugh. His hand is still flat on the stone with the fingertips on either side of the two new leaves, and something comes up into his face and stops just short of his eyes, and he keeps it there. He doesn't let it go and he doesn't put it away. The two small leaves are warm under his fingers. They're the size of a pinch, each of them, turned up flat to the sun. The sun comes on over all of it. It falls on a dark pipe put down carefully on a step, on a green one with its first note just through it, on two fingers holding up a gap the size of a bean, and on an old hand keeping very still over two leaves that are no bigger than that. It comes on time, unasked and unearned. It keeps no count of how much breath was too much, or who showed how little was enough, or which of them was laughing when the new pipe found its note: *here, still here, and you.*

The rim gives itself away over the long spine of the beast, and the gold comes down the flank onto the rock where the arm went from side to side. The child is at the hedge before it reaches the lane. There's dew on the elder and on the knife, the one with the worn handle, taken off the sill again with nobody saying anything. They cut two lengths this time, green and straight and nearly the same, and carry them back along the flags with the wet running down their wrists. The old man is on the step. He hears the two lengths knock together and puts his hand out, flat and open, sideways at the height of the child's. This time it isn't held out to take anything. It's held out to be given the work. They do it together. He can't see the wood and the child can't do it properly, so the knife goes into the small hand and the old hand comes down over it, the whole of it, knuckles and blade and all. It doesn't press. It only sits there, the weight a hand puts over anything that's being learned. When the blade goes the wrong way along the grain the old fingers tip it a hair's breadth, and it goes the right way. The bark comes off in long pale strips. The pith is the child's part. They get it out a pinch at a time with the thin stick, the fingertips small enough for the hollow and careful, and they stop now and then to look down the length at the sky. Then comes the part the child never knew, the small square window near the top where the breath splits. It's the reason the green pipe cheeps. The old man's thumb finds the place on the first length and stays there. The child's knife goes in under it, slowly, and the old thumb tells it when to stop. It tells it by nothing more than lifting, the way a hand lifts off a head when enough has been said. Then they do the second one the same way. It takes the whole of the morning's shadow going across the lane. Nobody minds. When both are done they lie on the step side by side in the sun, still wet, smelling of the hedge. Neither of them has a hole too many. The child picks one up and holds the other out low and flat, and the old hand finds it from the edges in and takes it. They don't count themselves in. They don't need to. They blow at the same moment because the same breath has been going in and out of both of them all morning over the knife. What comes out of the two new pipes is the one low note, twice. It isn't quite the same note, since one length of green is a little longer than the other. It's two notes a hair apart, and where they lie over each other the air between them shakes slowly, like water where two streams meet, a sound neither pipe is making alone. The baby is in the doorway with the dark pipe in their fist and a grey back on either side. Their mouth comes open and stays open. They look at the child's pipe and then at the old man's, and then at the air between them, where the shaking is. They're trying to find where the third sound is coming from. It's coming from nowhere. It's coming from both. Nobody told them two could make something that neither of them has, and they sit down hard on the step to hear it better. The old man lowers his pipe first, because an old breath runs out first. His other hand has gone down flat beside him on the stone, to steady himself, and it finds the hollow the drip made. It finds it from the edges in. The pale hook that came up out of the split bean isn't bent over anymore. It has straightened in the night and opened at the top into two small leaves, round and soft and a little creased from being folded, turned up to the sun like two hands held out flat. His fingertips rest on either side of them and don't close. His mouth goes the way it goes. The morning comes on over all of it. It falls on two green pipes still wet from the knife, on a small hand that had an old one over it all morning and an old hand that had something to do, on a baby astonished at the space between two notes, and on two new leaves open in a hollow of stone where nobody would ever have sown anything. It comes on time, unasked and unearned, and it keeps no count of whose hand held the knife or whose thumb said stop, or which of the two pipes the shaking in the air belonged to: *here, still here, and you.*

The child doesn't go down at once. They sit on the shelf with the bearded ear across their knees until the bow has gone off the white and the white has gone off the fold. By then the sun is low over the long spine of the beast behind them, and the whole slope below has turned the color of the grain. The roofs take it the way they always do. The windows fill with gold from outside, the smoke goes red, and the small cluster burns quietly on its hillside, bigger than it is and older. From up here the child can see every roof of it at once. They've never seen that before. It's small, smaller than they thought. It fits under one hand held out flat at arm's length, and they hold one out to see, and it does. When they stand to go, something makes them look back. There's somebody on the skyline. The curly-haired one has come back up the far side, or never quite gone down it. They're standing black against the burning sky at the top of the rock, the goats strung out along the edge behind them, and they lift an arm. It isn't a signal. It's the whole arm, high, going slowly from side to side the way a branch goes in the wind. The child has never been waved at from so far off. Their own arm goes up before they've decided anything, and it goes the same way. For a moment the two of them stand like that with the whole mountain between them and nothing to carry across it but that. Then the skyline is empty again, and it stays empty. They come down in the last of the light with the two sheep a length apart behind them. The bearded ear rides in the grandmother's bag with the green pipe, its long whiskers sticking up out of the mouth of it and catching the gold at every step. At the ring of stones the child stops and looks at the three blades there, gone to seed and bent over. Then they go on. The old man is in the chair on the flags by the step, leaning toward the window the way the short leg makes him lean. He hears the sheep before he hears the child. His face comes round to the lane and stays there until the small feet stop in front of him. He doesn't ask anything, and the child doesn't tell him anything. The bag comes off their shoulder and the ear comes out of it. They hold it out low and flat on the open palm with the pale marks on the heel, at the height of his hand, before anybody has said whether it should be. He finds it from the edges in. The fingers go over the small palm and onto the stalk, then up it to the head, and they stop. It isn't this slope's grain. He knows that at once, by the weight of the ear and the long stiff beards that prickle against his fingertips, and by the way the kernels sit in it, fatter and closer than any he's rubbed out of a head in sixty harvests. It came from a field he'll never stand in, off the other side of a mountain he's never seen the top of. He lifts it to his face and breathes it in slowly, the way he held the grey-green leaf and the feather, and it smells of a fire that isn't theirs. Then he lays it across his knees on the grey scarf, and his hand stays open over it, not closing. His mouth goes the way it goes. The child sits down on the step. The pale pipe comes out. They don't play up at the ridge this time, or into the white, which has gone. They play down the lane, toward the roofs going grey one after another as the gold comes off them, toward the doors standing open and the first lamps being lit behind the windows. It isn't the tune from the pool, or the level thing out of the mist. It's the climb, two steps up and the turn at the top, and then the small run downward like water going over three stones. It's played on three holes that were never meant to hold it, and it comes out wrong and bright and pitched up at the end, the way it came out when somebody else's fingers had too many places to go. The old man's head goes over to one side with all of him behind the ear. He knows every tune the slope has ever had, and the new one from the pool, and the wrong way round of it the baby brought home, and the level thing that came out of the white. He doesn't know this. There's a turn in it no mouth on this side of the mountain ever made. It comes down the three stones into a place he's never been, and still it's the child's breath under it. He can hear the place where the fingers are finding it for only the third time. He has nothing to put under it and nothing to correct. His hand lies open on the strange grain, and the new tune goes past him down the lane like a smell of somebody else's bread. The baby comes out of the doorway at the sound of it, the dark pipe in their fist, with a grey back on either side. They stop at the top of the step and listen with their whole face. At the turn at the top something breaks open in it, slowly, from the middle out. It isn't the laugh that gets out, and it isn't the astonishment at the mountain. It's smaller than either and it stays. It's the look of somebody hearing a thing come home that they didn't know had been away. They don't say the word. They sit down beside the child on the step, close enough that their shoulders touch, and put the dark pipe in their lap, and don't try it. For once they're content only to have it. The moon comes up while the tune is still going. It clears the long spine of the beast in one slow lift, full or near enough, too big and too low and the color of the bearded grain. It comes up over the very place where an arm went from side to side against the sky. The light goes down the flank and over the ring of stones and the red tree and along the lane, and it finds the step. It lies on the ear of strange grain across an old man's knees, on two pipes in two laps, and on a small face turned up to it, smiling at nothing anybody could point to. The night comes down evenly on all of it. It falls on a mountain with somebody on the far side of it now, on roofs gone dark with their lamps lit, on a tune from another field coming out of a pipe from this one, and on three on a step under the one moon both sides of the ridge are looking at. It keeps no count of who waved first or who waved back, or whose grain it was, or which side of the mountain the tune will be played wrong on next: *here, still here, and you.*

The stranger holds their pipe out first. It lies across a brown palm, long and dark and warm from their hands, with more holes in it than the child has fingers. They hold it at the height of the child's hand, before anybody has said whether it should be. The child looks at it and then at the pale pipe in their own pocket. Then they understand, and the pale one comes out and goes across. Each of them is holding the other's pipe now, and it's too big or too small, and neither of them minds. The child's fingers go over the long pipe from the edges in, looking for the three places they know, and find six. They put their breath into it anyway, only some of it, the way they were shown. What comes out is low, lower than any note on the slope, a sound like the wind going across the mouth of a jar. It startles them so much that they stop. The stranger laughs, and then puts the pale pipe to their own mouth. Their fingers are too many for it. Two of them have nowhere to go, and they hang in the air over the wood as if they'd lost something. They play anyway. It's the climb and the turn and the small run down over three stones, all of it squeezed into three holes that were never meant to hold it, and it comes out wrong and bright and pitched up at the end. The child tries the long pipe again and finds one more note in it, and then the stranger's own phrase, clumsily, halfway. So they go on for a while, back and forth under the rock. Each of them is playing the other's tune on the other's pipe, getting both wrong, and keeping it. At the edge of the shelf the goats and the sheep have given up pretending. One of the goats has its nose in the grandmother's bag. The smaller sheep has put its head down to the same tuft of grass as the smallest goat, and they're pulling at it from either end with the flat surprised look of animals who never agreed to any of this. Nobody separates them. After a while there's no telling from the grazing which side of the mountain any of them came up. The child gets the heel of bread out of the bag before the goat can. It's yesterday's, gone hard at the crust. They break it in two against their knee, and it doesn't break evenly. They hold out the bigger half. The stranger takes it, and then they reach into their own shirt and bring out bread of their own. It's dark and flat and seeded, baked from the bearded grain, and it's still smelling faintly of somebody else's fire. They break that too and hold out the bigger half. So they sit on the turf with the two pipes across their knees and eat each other's bread. Neither of them says it's good. Their faces say it. The child chews slowly, the way the old man chews, and tastes a field they'll never see. When the bread is gone the stranger stands and looks back up at the ridge, where the goats have already started drifting, and the child knows before anything is said. The pipes go back across, each to its own hands. Then the child's hand comes out sideways at the height of the other's, open, and the other's closes round it, and this time neither of them waits to see who will let go first. They hold on for exactly as long as it takes. Then the stranger is going up the rock sideways the way the goats go, the sheaf on one shoulder and the three kept beans shut in a fist, and at the top they turn and play the child's wrong fifth once more down the stone, like a door left open. Then the skyline is empty again. The child turns round to go down, and stops. The sun is behind them now, low over the long spine of the beast, and the white is still lying in the bottom of the fold. On the white, below them, laid right across the mist from one side of the fold to the other, there is a bow. It's red at the outside and going through gold and green to a violet so faint it's hardly there, and it isn't standing up in the sky the way the bow stood in the spring. It's lying down, whole, a full ring on the mist, with the roofs standing up out of the middle of it. In the very middle, small and dark and haloed, is the shadow of a child on a mountain with a pipe in one hand. The child lifts the hand. The shadow lifts its hand. The two sheep come and stand beside them, and their shadows go into the ring too. Down in the doorway the baby has seen it. They've gone completely still with the word open in their mouth and not coming out, and they're pulling at the old man's coat. He can't see it. He feels the pull and knows by the stillness at his knee that something is there, and he turns his face up the lane toward whatever it is. The light lies on his open face the same as it lies on everything else. The sun comes on over all of it. It falls on a ridge with nobody on it now and five goats going down the far side, on a shelf of trampled turf with crumbs of two breads in it, on a bow lying whole on the white in the bottom of the fold, and on a child's shadow standing in the middle of the colors. It falls on a baby in a doorway pulling at a coat and on an old man turning toward a thing he'll never see. It comes on time, unasked and unearned, and it keeps no count of whose pipe played whose tune, or whose bread was whose, or which side of the mountain the bow was for: *here, still here, and you.*

The note has gone over the ridge into the open, and the child is still standing with the pipe lowered, when something comes back from that side. It doesn't come off the stone. It comes from further off than the stone, from over the long spine of the beast, from the far side that nobody on the slope has ever seen. It's thin and small and a little late. At first the child takes it for the mountain handing the old man's note on, softer at the edges. Then it goes somewhere the old man's note never went. It climbs two steps, turns over at the top the way the dark bird turns its phrase, and comes down quick onto a note the three holes of any pipe on this slope couldn't give. Then it stops and waits. The child's mouth comes open. Their eyes go up the rock to the skyline, where the last rag of mist is lifting off into the blue, and there's nothing there. The two sheep have their heads up too, both of them turned the same way. Nobody told the child there was anybody over there. It never came up. The mountain had always been the end of things, and the end of things doesn't play. The pipe comes up before they've decided anything. They don't play the tune or the level thing out of the white. They play back what came, or as near as they can get to it: the two steps up and the turn. Where the note should be that their holes can't give, they put the fifth, the finger half over the hole, and they leave it there wrong. Then they wait too. It comes back. The same climb and the same turn come from over the ridge, and this time, at the bottom, it lands on the child's fifth. It has kept it. Then it adds something, a small run downward like water going over three stones, and waits again. So it goes back and forth over the top of the mountain, a phrase from this side and a phrase from that. Neither of them can see the other, and each gets the other a little wrong and keeps it. The rock between them doesn't take sides. It hands a little of everything on in both directions and keeps nothing. The child forgets they're cold. Their breath goes out and comes back without being asked, and every time the far pipe answers something goes across their face that they don't try to stop. Then there's a bell. It isn't the cracked one from the fold. It's higher, and it's tinny, and it's coming nearer. A head comes up over the shoulder of the ridge where the rock gives way to turf, and it's no sheep's head. It's narrow and bearded, with a pair of back-swept horns and yellow eyes set sideways, and it stands on the skyline looking down at the child with an expression of total disapproval. It's a goat. The child has heard the word and never seen one. Another comes up beside it, and then three more, picking their way along the edge of the drop as if it were a lane. Behind them comes a person. They're older than the child and nowhere near grown, thin and brown from the sun, with a mass of dark curling hair the wind has got into and made worse. There's a pipe in one hand, longer than the child's and darker, with more holes in it than the child can count from here. Over the other shoulder there's a sheaf of something tied with a twist of straw, pale gold, the heads hanging heavy. It's grain, but not this slope's grain. It's bearded and longer in the ear, grain from a field on the other side of the world. They stop at the top of the rock and look down. For a long moment neither of them does anything. The two sheep and the five goats regard each other across the turf with equal suspicion. Then the curly-haired one laughs, the kind that gets out, and puts their pipe to their mouth and plays the child's own wrong fifth down the rock at them, on purpose, like a greeting. The child laughs too. They can't help it. The stranger comes down the last of the rock sideways, the way the goats do, and stops a length off on the shelf of turf. The child doesn't know what to do with their hands, and then they do. The pipe goes into their pocket. They hold the right hand out sideways, flat and open, at the height of the other's hand, before anybody has said whether it should be. It isn't offered so they'll be given anything. It's the only thing on this slope anybody ever taught them to do when somebody comes. The stranger looks at it a moment. Then their own hand comes out, and it doesn't lie flat on top. It closes, round the child's palm with the pale marks on the heel, and the child's closes back. Their two hands hold each other in the cold bright air under the rock. Neither of them is taking anything or giving anything, and neither of them lets go first. When they do, it's the stranger who moves. They slip the sheaf off their shoulder and break an ear of the bearded grain from it and hold it out. The child reaches into the grandmother's bag without looking and finds the kept beans, mottled brown and cream, and puts three into the stranger's palm. Nobody says what either thing is for. Neither of them has the other's words to say it with. One small cloud stands over the ridge, and the sun works in and out behind it, the half-covered kind of light. The shelf goes bright, and grey, and bright again. Far down the fold, an old man in a doorway has heard a second pipe on the mountain, one nobody on this slope has ever played. He's heard it answer, and he's heard it answer again, and his head has gone over to one side with all of him behind the ear. The baby at his knee is looking up at the ridge with their mouth open on the word. The light falls on two pipes lowered on a shelf of turf, on a bearded ear of strange grain in a small fist and three beans in a brown one, on two grey sheep and five goats pretending not to see each other, and on an old face lifted toward music from a side of the mountain it will never see. None of it is chosen. It keeps no count of who played first over the ridge, or whose wrong note was kept on the other side, or which of the two hands closed first: *here, still here, and you.*

The child turns round on the flank with the rock at their back and the whole fold laid out below them in the sun. The mist hasn't all gone. It has come down off the top and is lying in the bottom of the fold now, a long white pool of it over the stream and the thorn and the lower field, with the roofs standing up out of it along the lane like stones in a ford. The smoke from the first fires comes up through it straight and blue and doesn't bend. This time they play down. It isn't the tune from the pool, or the one the baby brought home the wrong way round. It's the level thing that came out of the white, slow and soft, feeling for where things are, with the long gaps in it. It goes out over the edge of the flank and down, and the grey rock close behind them takes it and hands it on. It's no smaller and no later for the stone. It only goes further, as if the rock were a hand laid flat on the child's back, giving them a little more breath than they had. The notes go down over the ring of stones and the red tree at the corner and into the white lying in the fold. There they soften, the way a sound softens in wool, and they come out the other side into the lane. The old man is still in the doorway with his hands open. He has his head tipped all the way over, one ear given up the lane and all of him behind it. It comes down to him through the mist he can't see. He can hear the gaps now. He can hear that nothing is waiting in them. He can hear that the child is higher than they've ever been and not afraid, and that the rock is behind them the way a wall is behind somebody sitting in the sun. His face goes. It doesn't crumple. It opens, from the middle out, the way a hand opens round something too small to hold and too good to close on. The wet comes, and he doesn't lift a hand to it. Something touches his leg. The baby is awake and up off the floor, with the dark pipe in both fists and their hair flat on one side from the sheep. They look up the lane where he's looking and see nothing but white and roofs. Then they look at his face. They hold the pipe out, low and sideways at the height of his hand, flat on both small palms, before anybody has said whether it should be. He finds it from the edges in. He takes it. He doesn't know the level thing. He has heard it twice and he couldn't have played it once. So he plays what he has. It's the low note with all the holes covered, held as long as an old breath lasts. It isn't sent anywhere in particular. It goes up the lane because that's the way his face is turned. It shakes near its end, the way an old breath does, and it goes into the mist in the bottom of the fold and through it and on up the flank at the pace of somebody climbing on a stick. On the flank the child stops in the middle of a gap and takes the pipe away from their mouth. Their head goes over to one side. What comes up out of the white is small and late and a little flat, and it could be anybody's. They know whose it is. It's the note they kept all night for a sleeper, one to each breath, coming back up to them in the breath it was kept for. The rock behind them takes it too and holds it a moment, and then lets it go on over the ridge into the open. The child doesn't answer it. They stand with the pipe lowered and their chest going out slowly in the cold bright air, and they let it be the whole of the answer. The sun comes on over all of it. It lands on a grey rock with a small dark figure standing against it, on a white pool of mist lying in the fold with roofs standing up out of it, and on a doorway where an old man is holding a pipe he gave away twice, a baby at his knee looking up at his wet face. It comes on time, unasked and unearned. It keeps no count of who played down and who played back, or whose breath went furthest, or which of them the mountain was carrying when it let the note go: *here, still here, and you.*

Inside the white the child stops playing. It isn't that they've lost the way. The lane gave out a while back and the turf went on under their feet, short and grey-green and wet, and they can feel the flank going up by the lean it puts in their legs. It's that the low note has stopped mattering. The mist takes each one and keeps it, and nothing comes back, and a note sent into something that keeps everything starts to feel like shouting in a room where somebody is asleep. So they take the pipe away from their mouth and stand still. The two sheep stop too, one a length behind the other. They're only grey shapes a little darker than the white, close enough to touch and hardly there. One of them breathes out through its nose, and the breath goes into the mist and becomes part of it. Nothing else makes a sound. There's no stream up here, and no crickets. There's no wind yet either, and no bell, and no door that doesn't shut. The child has never heard the slope this quiet. It isn't empty. It's the kind of quiet that has somebody in it, only this time the somebody is the mountain, very close and very large and not saying anything, and the child is inside its breath. They don't say the word. They don't play the new tune, or the old one, or the tune the wrong way round. They wait until the quiet has gone all the way into them, down past where it used to stop, and then the pipe comes back up. What comes out isn't anything the slope has had before. It doesn't start on the second note or on the low one. It starts in the middle, on nothing in particular, and it doesn't climb and it doesn't come down. It goes along. It's level and slow and very soft, the way a hand moves over something in the dark from the edges in, feeling for where things are. It finds the fifth note and doesn't stop on it. It finds the hole the knife never cut and seems to play that too, though there's nothing there. There are gaps in it, long ones, and the gaps aren't waiting for anything. They're the part the mist is playing. The child doesn't know where it's going and doesn't try to. Nobody taught them any of it. It came out of the white the way the tune came out of the pool, and it's shaped like what it came out of. The sheep don't graze. They stand with their heads up in the mist and listen, or seem to, and neither of them moves. They're sure they were called, and this time nobody could say they weren't. Somewhere in the middle of it the white starts to move. At first it's only a stir, a slow pull in the mist going up past the child's face. Then the brightness above them isn't all one brightness anymore. It thins in one place and then another. A strand of it lifts off the turf at the child's feet and goes up, unhurried, the way the sparks went up out of the gap in the roof, and the grass under it is wet and bright green and there. Then more of it goes. It goes up the flank in long slow rags, uphill, off the ground and into the sky, as if the mountain had been holding its breath all night and has let it out. The sun comes through. It comes all at once from above, level over the long spine of the beast, and it lands on the grey rock only a stone's throw above them. It's much nearer than the child thought, close enough to hear it if it spoke. The last of the white goes up off the top of it and into the blue and is gone. The rock stands there in the gold with the wet running down it in bright threads, bare and plain and enormous, the way it has always been. Nobody had seen it from this close. The child lowers the pipe. The new thing has stopped somewhere in the middle of itself, in no place any tune would stop, and they let it stay stopped there. Their chest goes out slowly in the cold bright air, all the way down, and it stays out a long moment. There's more room in there than there was at the bottom of the lane. Then it comes back without being asked, and out of their mouth comes a small cloud, white, and it goes up after the rest. Far down the fold, in a doorway, an old man has had his face turned up the lane the whole time. He heard the low note go into the white and stop. For a long while there was nothing, and he stood in the nothing with his hands open and didn't call. Then something came down off the flank that he's never heard. It was level and slow, with long gaps in it he couldn't have filled. It went on until the mist lifted and he felt the sun land on his face, and then it stopped. He doesn't know what it was, and he knows whose it was. His hands stay open. The morning comes on over all of it. It falls on a flank with the mist going up off it, on two grey backs standing still in the wet grass, on a child with a pipe at their side and their breath going up white into the sun, on the grey rock close enough to touch, and on an old man in a doorway far below with his face lifted. It comes on time, unasked and unearned, and it keeps no count of who played into the white or what the white gave up when the sun came, or whose breath the mountain let go of first: *here, still here, and you.*

The rim gives itself away over the ridge, and the child is awake before it. The candle has gone out in the night. There's only a black wick bent over in a small pool of yellow tallow gone hard on the sill, and the scarf is still across the old knees with the warmth in it. They don't take it back. They get up off the step slowly, a hand on the chair leg, stiff the way the flock is stiff getting up out of the fold, and go in past the baby asleep between the two grey backs. The bag is on the peg by the door where it has always hung. It's the grandmother's old one, brown cloth gone soft at the corners, with a strap long enough to go over a shoulder and round the back. The child takes it down and puts things in it without deciding to. There's a heel of yesterday's bread, and a handful of the dry beans out of the chipped bowl, mottled brown and cream, the kept ones. The green pipe goes in last, the one with the hole too many. They don't take it for playing. It just seems wrong to go up without all of them. The pale one goes into their pocket and stays in their hand. When they come out the two sheep are already standing. Nobody woke them. They stand on the flags in the grey with their heads up and look at the child with the flat surprised look they have for everything, and when the child goes up the lane they come after, one a length behind the other. They're sure they were called, and nobody corrects them. The mist has come down in the night. It lies over the top of the fold, thick and white, from the ring of stones up. The long spine of the beast is gone into it, and the grey rock and the shelf, all of it gone, so the lane runs up past the last roof and the corner and the red tree and then into nothing. The child goes up into it anyway. They play as they go, not the tune, only the low note, one to each step, so the sheep can hear where they are. A little way in, the note stops coming back the way it did off the rock. The mist takes it and keeps it, the way a hand holds water. The old man is in the doorway. He woke when the bag came off the peg, and he got up out of the chair by the stick with the scarf still over one arm. Now he stands with a hand on the frame of the door that doesn't shut and his face turned up the lane. He can't see the mist. He knows it's there by the way the note goes into it. It gets smaller, and then it doesn't get any smaller but it gets softer. He knows the two sheep by their hard small feet on the flags and then on the turf, and then he can't hear their feet at all. He doesn't call after them. His two hands come together in front of his chest instead, the palms cupped and the thumbs touching, round nothing, the shape hands make round anything that can't be kept and shouldn't be. He holds it there a long moment facing the lane. It isn't held out to anybody. It isn't asking for anything back. Then his hands come apart and open, slowly, the way hands open over a field to let something go on the wind, and they stay open. His mouth goes the way it goes. Behind him on the floor the baby turns over and puts out a hand for a grey back that isn't there any more. They find the dark pipe instead and close their fist round it and don't wake. Up on the flank the sun comes over the long spine and gets into the mist from above. For a while it can't get through. The whole white top of the fold goes bright from inside, lit and still not showing anything. Then it thins in one place, and a small cloud of it comes loose and goes up off the ridge, and the rock shows through grey for a moment and goes again. It's the half-covered kind of light. The lane goes bright, and grey, and bright again, and so do the doorway and the open hands in it, and so does the low note still coming down out of the white, one to each step, from somewhere nobody on the slope can see. None of it is chosen. The light falls on a mist with a child in it and two sheep a length apart, on a bag with a year's seed in it going up the mountain, on an empty chair on the flags with a dent in the rush seat, and on an old man in a doorway with his hands open to a lane he can hear and not see. It keeps no count of who went up and who stood at the door, or what was carried and what was let go, or which of them the white was holding when the sun came through: *here, still here, and you.*

The cold comes down off the ridge after midnight. It starts as nothing much, a stir in the thorn, and then it's along the step at the height of an old man's hands, and the child feels it get in at the gap between the chair leg and their back. The breath in the chair doesn't change for it, but the open hands on his knees have gone pale in the candlelight, and the fingers have curled a little the way fingers curl when nobody is minding them. The child gets up without making a sound. The grey wool is round their own neck, the long scarf the grandmother knitted the winter of the wall. It's gone thin at the ends and knotted where a small wrist was once tied to a bigger one in the snow so it wouldn't get lost. They unwind it slowly, a turn at a time, and the cold gets in where it was. They don't mind that. They don't put it round his neck. That would wake him. They lay it over his hands instead, across both knees, the way a hand goes down over anything. It's flat and loose and doesn't press, and it covers the cold fingers and the pocket with the three leaves in it. Then their own hand comes down on top of the wool and rests there a moment, the same weight that went over the red place on the baby's forehead and over the beans in the turned earth. The old breath catches at the start of itself. It shakes near its end and doesn't quite stop, and then it comes back, slower and warmer, and the curled fingers under the wool go loose again. The child sits back down against the chair leg. The pipe comes up, and they play the low note again, one to each of his breaths, so quietly that it's barely there, a sound for the step and the candle and nobody further off. In the hut behind them the fire has gone down to a red bed on the hearth. Now and then something in it settles with a small soft fall and a few sparks go up the dark gap in the turf, slow and in no hurry, into the river over the ridge. After a while there's no telling them from the stars. The note gets longer. The gaps between the breaths get longer, and the child's own chest goes out and stays out and comes back without being asked. Somewhere in the middle of one of the long notes they stop playing it and go on hearing it anyway. The pipe lies in their lap with their hand open round it. Their head has gone over against the old knee, against the grey wool. They're on the shelf again under the rock, only it's night up there too, and warm. The whole fold is laid out under them, and it's full of small lights nobody lit. The two sheep are grazing at the edge of the drop, one a length behind the other, and they're not afraid of it. The mountain is behind the child's back, close and grey, and they play into it, and it doesn't hand anything back. It keeps the note. It holds it the way a hand holds water. The sheep lift their heads and look at the child with the flat surprised look sheep have for everything. They're sure they were called, and nobody corrects them. On the step the candle has burned down to the last finger of tallow, and the flame swims low in the green glass. It lays its crooked square over a child asleep against a chair leg with a pipe in their open hand, and over a grey scarf across an old man's knees with the warmth going into it from both sides. In the doorway the baby turns over between the two grey backs, and one of the sheep sighs through its nose and doesn't get up. The night gives what it has evenly, which is almost nothing and is enough. It falls on the stars and the sparks going up among them, on a mountain that only one of them is climbing, and on three breaths on a step, gone slow and wide together, none of them leading. It keeps no count of who was warmed and who went cold, or who kept the time until they couldn't, or which of them dreamed the other one onto the shelf: *here, still here, and you.*

The old man doesn't go in. Somebody brings the chair with the short leg up from the field and sets it on the flags beside the step, crooked. He lowers himself into it with a hand on its back and the small sound he doesn't hear anymore, and he leans the way the short leg makes him lean, toward the window. The three leaves stay in his pocket. Before the last of the blue has gone off the ridge his head has gone back against the turf of the wall and his mouth has come a little open. His breath goes down past where it goes for anybody awake, and it keeps the rate it keeps when nobody is minding it. The child sits down on the step at his feet with their back against the chair leg. They don't take the pale pipe out at first. They listen to his breath the way he would, for the catch at the start of it and the place near the end where it shakes and doesn't quite stop. It catches and it shakes, and it comes back each time without being asked. Then their own chest goes out, slowly, all the way down. It goes past where it used to stop, past where it stopped on the shelf, and it stays out a long moment, as if they were checking that the room was still there. It is. It comes back. Only then does the pipe come out, and only some of the breath goes into it. They don't play the tune from the pool, or the old one, or the one the baby brought down the lane the wrong way round. They play one note, the low one with all the holes covered. It's so quiet it doesn't get as far as the next house. They hold it for as long as the old man's breath takes to go out, and they let it go when his does. Then they wait for him to breathe in, and play it again. It isn't music. It's somebody keeping time for a sleeper, the way he kept time with one finger for a mattock that had stopped. Behind them the candle stands in the one small window. The old glass bends the flame, so from the lane it looks like a small gold thing swimming in green water. It lays a crooked square of light out over the step, over the child's bare feet and the pipe and one of the old man's open hands, and not much further. It's too small to warm anything. It burns steadily anyway, a little lower each time the child looks. Over the ridge the dark finishes coming down, and then the whole river is out. It goes rim to rim over the long spine of the beast, thicker than it was on the night of the pool, too many points to join into anything, with a pale smoke of more of them behind those. The candle in the window is the only light on the slope that anybody lit. Up there nobody lit any of it. The baby is in the doorway between the two sheep, where nobody has told them they can't be, with the dark pipe held against their chest in both cupped hands. They are asleep, or nearly. Their breath has gone slow and wide, and it has found the bottom of itself without anybody's hand on it. The child can hear three breaths now: the old one in the chair, the small one in the doorway, and their own between them keeping the note. The three of them come a little closer together as the night goes on, and none of them is leading. What's in the chest then has no color in it and no object. It's the white of the old hair against the dark turf and of the tallow in the window, and the white of the river laid over the ridge. It's the plain white that holds nothing and doesn't need the candle to last until morning. The night gives what it has evenly, which is almost nothing and is enough. It falls on one small flame behind wavy glass, on an old man asleep in a crooked chair with his hands open, on a child at his feet breathing one low note in time with him, and on a baby asleep in a doorway between two grey backs with a pipe against their heart. It keeps no count of who was watching and who was watched, or whose breath the note was kept for, or which of them would be first to wake: *here, still here, and you.*

They come down in the afternoon, when the shelf has gone into the shadow of the rock and the wind has turned cold at the edges. The child goes first this time, a step below, the same way they went up, only now the hand held out low and flat is in front of the small body and not behind it. The baby comes down facing the slope, on hands and feet, with the dark pipe back in their teeth. The two sheep come after them without being asked. They pick their way down the steep places on their hard small feet more surely than either child, and they stop every few paces to pull at the turf as if nothing on the mountain had happened. At the ring of stones a leaf comes past them, brown and turning over, from nowhere anybody can see. The baby lets go of the ground with one hand to grab at it and misses, and sits down, and the leaf goes on ahead of them down the flank. It gets to the lane before they do. Where the lane starts again the baby stands up and takes the pipe out of their mouth. They don't wait to be shown. The chest goes out slowly, down to where the bottom of it is now, and they play. It's the tune the wrong way round again, the way it came off the shelf in the morning. It starts on the second note and waits too long and then goes down the way water goes down a fold, and this time they walk while they play it. The notes go down the lane at the pace of small feet, between the flags and past the corner where the one tree has a few red leaves left, and down toward the first roofs. The child walks beside them with the pale pipe in their pocket and doesn't take it out. The sheep come after the tune as if it had been piped for them. For all anybody knows it was. The old man hears it coming before anybody else on the slope. He's on the step of the hut now, not in the chair. Somebody brought him in from the field when the wind got up, and he has the three leaves in his coat pocket where nobody will find them. The tune reaches the top of the lane, and the grandmother comes to the door of the next house with her mouth already open to call the children in for their food. He lifts one hand off his knee and puts a finger flat across his own lips. It's the smallest movement, and she sees it and closes her mouth. She stands in the doorway with the cloth in her hands, and then she listens too. Up and down the lane it goes that way, door by door. Somebody comes out with a pail and stops. Somebody stops in the middle of splitting a log with the axe still up. None of them has heard this tune played this way round, down instead of up, by a breath that small, and nobody says anything about it. The old man has his head tipped to one side and all of him behind the ear. He hears the place where the fingers can't reach and the wait that goes on too long. Under it he hears four small feet and eight hard ones on the flags, getting nearer at the rate the tune is going, which is the same rate. The two of them are one thing coming down the lane to him. The tune runs out at the bottom of the baby's breath, just short of the step, in no place a tune would stop. The baby lowers the pipe and looks at the old man. The old man's finger comes away from his lips, and his mouth goes the way it goes. Behind them the light has come low down the fold. The roofs take it the way they always do. The windows fill with gold from outside and the smoke goes red, and the whole small cluster burns quietly on its hillside for as long as the sun lasts, bigger than it is and older. Then the gold goes off the top of the lane first and comes down roof by roof, the way the bow went, until the last of it is off the hut. When it's gone the child goes in without anybody asking them to. There's a stub of candle on the sill where the three pipes lay in the morning, tallow gone yellow and a black wick bent over. They light it from the hearth with a straw and set it back in the one small window, behind the wavy green glass. He can't see it, and there's nobody else in the hut to see it. Outside on the step, though, the old man turns his face a little toward the window. The flame is too small to warm anything, but he feels the kind of quiet that has a light in it. The dusk comes down evenly on all of it. It falls on a lane full of open doors and people standing in them saying nothing, on two grey backs lying down in the doorway where nobody has told them they can't, and on a small child on the step with a dark pipe in their lap and no breath left. It falls on an old man with his finger just come away from his lips and three leaves in his pocket, and on one candle behind old glass, lit for nobody who could see it. It keeps no count of who played the tune home or who hushed the lane for it, or whose window the light was left in: *here, still here, and you.*

The wind doesn't stop when the tune does. It comes over the ridge behind them in one long cold pull with the smell of the high rock in it, and it flattens the short turf on the shelf and lifts the baby's hair straight up off their forehead, and it keeps going. The child doesn't play again. They take the pale pipe from their mouth and look at it a moment. Then they hold it out, flat on the open palm with the small marks on its heel, low and sideways at the height of a small hand. It isn't offered so the baby will have two. It's offered so the baby will know the tune is theirs to start now, and nobody else's is coming in under it. The baby looks at the pale pipe and doesn't take it. They look at the dark one in their own fist. Then they look up at the child, and something goes across the small face slowly, the way the shadow of the bird went across the stubble, and they understand. The child's hand closes back on the pale pipe and goes down to their side, empty of anything to do. The baby's chest goes out. Nobody's hand is on it. It goes out slowly and all the way down, past where it used to stop and past where it stopped this morning, until the small shoulders come up with it and there's more room in there than anybody on the slope ever told them about. It stays out a long moment. Then it comes back without being asked, and only some of it goes into the dark wood. It isn't the low note. It's the second one. The tune from the pool starts on it, a little flat, the too-small fingers finding the holes they can reach and missing the ones they can't. It climbs anyway, and it stops in its place and waits, and the wait is too long, a child's wait, not sure the ground is where it was left. Then it comes down. It goes the wrong way, down where the tune goes up, and it keeps going down the way water goes down a fold because that's the way it knows. It passes the fourth and the fifth and doesn't stop at either of them. It tips off the edge of the shelf note by note, over the ring of stones and the gone-to-seed blades, down the flank on the wind toward the roofs. The child stands with the pale pipe hanging from their hand and doesn't correct any of it. Their head has gone to one side. The tune goes down past the corner of the lane where the one tree stands that turns red before it goes, and the wind takes two more leaves off it while the notes go by, and they come down the lane turning over at the same rate as the tune. They land nowhere in particular. The old man hears it come. He knows at once it isn't two pipes. There's only one breath in it, and he knows whose. He can hear the fingers that can't reach, the wait that goes on too long, and the long way down the tune has never gone before. It's the child's tune, turned over and poured out the other end by somebody who doesn't know yet which way is up, and it's coming down the mountain to him and nobody else. He doesn't lift his hand. The two leaves lie in it, one brown and one turning, and a third comes down onto them while he listens and he lets it stay. His eyes fill. They fill slowly this time, from the bottom up, and don't spill for a long while. When they do he doesn't turn his face away from the wind to hide it. There's nobody near enough to hide it from, and the wind dries it as fast as it comes, and he lets the wind have that too. The tune reaches the bottom of wherever it was going and stops there, in no place a tune would ever stop. It doesn't go up into the open. It stays down, low, among the roofs and the chair and the leaves, as if that's where it meant to end. The morning lies over all of it: two children on a shelf under the grey rock with one pipe playing and one quiet, the wind going down the flank carrying a tune the wrong way round, a red tree letting go at the corner of the lane, and an old man in a chair at the top of a gold field with three leaves in his open hand and his face wet in the sun. It comes on time, unasked and unearned, and it keeps no count of who handed the tune on or who played it wrong first, or which way down the mountain it was always meant to go: *here, still here, and you.*

They don't turn back where the lane gives out. The child looks down the slope once, toward the roofs and the pale smudge at the top of the field where the chair is. Then they look at the baby, and the baby is already going on, up onto the open flank where the grass is short and grey-green and the stones come through it like the knuckles of something asleep. So they go. The two sheep come after them, one a length behind the other, grazing as they climb, as if the whole mountain were only a longer lane. It's steep. The baby goes up it on hands as much as feet, the dark pipe held in their teeth by one end. The child doesn't pick them up. They stay a step below with a hand out low and flat behind the small back, not touching it, only there, the way a hand stays under anything that might fall and probably won't. They pass the ring of stones, seven or eight and badly matched. The three blades that came up in it in the spring have gone to seed, pale and bent over at the heads. Nobody ever came up to cut them. The baby stops and puts a fist round one, and the seed comes off in their palm and blows away before they can look at it. They don't mind. They go on. High up, just under the grey rock, there's a shelf of turf, flat enough to stand on, that nobody down the fold knows is there. The child and the baby stand on it with the whole slope under them for the first time. It's the hut and the lane and the roofs with their smoke going up straight, the field gone gold and the thorn dark at its corner, the stream a bright thread down the middle and the pool a coin at the bend, and past all of it the flats going off into the grey. The baby's mouth comes open. They don't say the word. They sit down hard on the turf, the way the cub did, and look. Then the child plays, because there's nothing else up here to do with it. They don't play at the rock this time. They're under it now, too close for it to hand anything back. They play down. It's the new tune, on the second note and climbing, stopping in its place and waiting, then up past the fifth to where it ends. The baby gets their breath in slowly and comes in under it with the one low note, pitched up at the end, and holds it. The wind comes over the ridge behind them and takes both. The old man is in the chair at the top of the field with the dry leaf still lying in his open hand. He hears it come. It doesn't come back off the stone softer at the edges. It comes straight down the flank on the wind, the way the smell of the snow came down in the spring, and it's close and small and clear, as if the two of them were at his shoulder. It's the low note, and the climb, and the long wait in the middle. He can tell how high they are by the thinness of it. He can tell they're safe by the way the low note holds. He can tell whose breath is whose, and then, a little further in, he can't, and he doesn't try to. He doesn't turn his head up to it. He's heard where it comes from. His shoulders come down a last inch that he didn't know they were still holding, and his breath goes out all the way to the bottom and comes back without being asked. It's the breath of somebody who waited at the door for a step coming back up the lane, and it came, and he doesn't have to wait anymore. Something in the face lets go and settles. It isn't grief. He knows the difference now. The leaf in his palm is dry, and there's a second one beside him on the chair arm that he didn't feel land. His fingers find it from the edges in. This one isn't brown. It's still supple, and there's a warmth in it the first one didn't have, and he knows by the feel of the veins and the give of it which tree it came from. It's the one at the corner of the lane above the thorn, the only one on the slope that goes red before it goes. He can't see the red. He knows it's red the way he knows the rim is coming before it gives itself away. He lays the second leaf over the first in his open hand, and his mouth goes the way it goes. Up on the shelf the tune comes to its end and goes up into the open over the ridge. The baby's note runs out a breath after it. Then there's only the wind, and a sheep pulling at the turf, and far below, very small, one more red leaf letting go at the corner of the lane. The morning lies over all of it. It falls on two children on a ledge under the grey rock with the whole fold under their feet, on two grey backs grazing at the edge of a drop they don't know is there, on a tune coming down the mountain on the wind, and on an old man at ease in a chair at the top of a ripe field with two leaves in his hand, one brown and one turning. It comes on time, unasked and unearned, and it keeps no count of who climbed and who stayed, or how far a tune can go and still come home, or which leaf was the first to turn: *here, still here, and you.*

The two children go out while the gold is still coming down the long spine of the beast. Nobody sends them. The child goes first with the pale pipe and the baby comes a step behind with the dark one held in both hands against their chest, and the two sheep come after them without being asked, one a length behind the other. They go up past the last roof and the corner and the top of the stubble, and on up the lane beside the ring of stones, further than the baby has ever been let go. The baby's feet come down a little wide of where they were meant to, like the cub's did. The child slows to them. Neither of them is leading. At the place where the lane gives out onto the open flank they stop, facing the grey rock. The child doesn't count them in. The baby's chest goes out slowly with nobody's hand on it, and the low note comes out thin and pitched up at the end and holds. The child comes in under it with the second note and starts the climb. The tune goes up and stops in its place and waits. Then it goes on past the fifth to where it found its end, and the baby's note is still there under it the whole way, not giving way. The mountain takes both of them. It waits the way it waits for anybody and then hands them back together, small and late and softer at the edges. The two voices come down off the stone already wound round each other, and there's no telling any more which was the low one and which was the climb. The sheep put their heads down to the grass and graze through all of it. They've heard music on this slope all their lives and it has never once been for them. They don't mind. The old man is in the chair at the edge of the field. He didn't go up. He didn't need to. He sits with his face turned toward the ridge and his head tipped to one side, one ear given to the flank and all of him behind it. It's the plain kind of listening, with nothing kept back for himself. He hears the two pipes go up the lane getting smaller, and then stop, and then start. He hears the stone give them back. Under all of it he hears the baby's breath find the bottom of itself and the child's breath wait for it there. His hand stays open on his knee. He doesn't keep time. There's no time in it he would know how to keep. Something comes down past his face while he listens. He doesn't see it. He feels it touch his cheek on the way, light and dry, and come to rest in his open hand. His fingers find it from the edges in. It's a leaf off the thorn, the first one to go, curled a little at the rim and gone crisp, and there are more still hanging where it came from. He knows what it means. He has felt that first one come down at the edge of this field at the end of more summers than anybody else alive on the slope, and it has never once come with any warning. He doesn't close his hand on it. He lets it lie there among the lines of his palm, and his mouth goes the way it goes. What's in the chest then has no color in it and no object. It's the white of the old hair in the early gold and of the stone on the ridge handing back two tunes as one. It's the plain white that holds nothing and doesn't need the summer to stay, or anybody to come back down the lane to find it. The morning comes on over all of it: two small figures on the flank with the grey rock above them, two sheep grazing at their heels, a tune going up and coming back changed, and an old man in a chair at the top of a ripe field with his ear turned to the mountain and one dry leaf lying in his open hand. It comes on time, unasked and unearned, and it keeps no count of who went up and who stayed, or which leaf was the first, or who was listening when the year turned over: *here, still here, and you.*

The rim gives itself away over the ridge while the hut is still asleep, and the gold comes level down the long spine of the beast and in at the one small window. It's only a hand's width of old glass in the turf wall, gone wavy and a little green with the years, and it takes the light before anything else in the hut does. It lies across the sill in a long bright bar. Three pipes are lying on it. Somebody put them there in the night after the laughing ran out: the dark one, the pale one, and the green one with the hole too many. They lie side by side in the gold. Nobody decided the order, and they're touching at the ends. The baby is up first. They come to the sill in their own time, rubbing an eye with the back of a fist, and they stand on their toes to look at the three of them in the light. They don't take one. They wait. It's the first time they've ever waited for anything they wanted, and it's plain on the small face that it's costing them. The child comes over from the blanket by the hearth and sees what they're waiting for. So they hold the dark pipe out, flat on the palm, at the height a small hand can reach. The baby takes it in both hands, cupped, the thumbs touching. Then the child picks up the pale one for themself and leaves the green one lying in the gold. The old man is on the stool with his coat still on and his face turned toward the window where the warmth is. When the child's hand comes out sideways to him at the height of his, open, with the green pipe across it, he doesn't reach for it. He waits too, a moment, the way he waited at the pool before the breath went in. Then he takes it. Nobody counts them in. The baby blows first, much too hard, and the note comes out thin and cracked and pitched up at the end, and it holds. The child comes in under it with the second note of the tune from the pool and starts the climb. The old man's finger goes where it has always gone, onto a hole that isn't there, and the green pipe cheeps. For a moment it's the worst sound anybody has made on the slope, three things going three ways at once in a small room. Then it isn't. The baby's note holds and doesn't give way. The child's tune goes up and stops in its place and waits there. Into the wait comes the peep, small and scandalized, exactly where a gap was left for something, as if it had always been meant to go there. The old man hears where it landed and does it again on purpose, in the next gap. It isn't the tune, and it isn't any tune the slope has had before. Each of them is getting the other two wrong and keeping it, and none of them is leading. Outside, on the corner of the turf roof just over the window, the dark bird with the too-bright beak has come down out of the thorn. It sits with its head on one side, one eye on the glass and then the other. The next time the green pipe cheeps it answers with its own phrase, climbing and turning over at the top. The flat fourth is at the bottom of it and the fifth note is in the middle, and now there's a small cracked peep on the end that it never had before. Nobody on the slope taught it that. Everybody did. The old man lowers the green pipe first. He doesn't have the breath for all of it anymore, and he doesn't need it. The two children go on without him, the low note and the climbing one, with the bird on the roof filling the gaps. He sits on the stool with the pipe lying in his open hand in the bar of gold. His face has gone loose in the sun and his mouth has gone the way it goes. He's at ease in a way that has nothing left to hold onto. If anybody asked him whose the music was, he couldn't have said, and he'd have been glad of that too. The sun comes in level through the wavy glass. It falls on a sill with nothing on it now but warmth, on two small mouths at two pipes, on a green one with one hole too many lying quiet in an old palm, and on a dark bird on a turf roof singing a peep it learned an hour ago as if it had always known it. It comes on time, unasked and unearned. It keeps no count of who played first or who waited, or which of the three was the mistake that made it music: *here, still here, and you.*

The dark comes down on the slope, and the fire is lit in the hut, the first one since the spring that anybody has needed. The door that doesn't shut lets the glow out across the step in a long crooked square. The child finishes the pipe in it. The last pinch of pith comes out, and the light from the hearth goes down the hollow and shows at the other end. They blow through it once with no fingers on it, only to hear the wood is open, and it is. Then they sit a while turning it over in the firelight, looking at the hole that went in where no hole should be. They don't try it. It isn't theirs to try. The baby is on the floor by the hearth with the dark pipe in their lap and the two sheep lying in the doorway, where nobody has told them they can't. The child holds the new one out, low and flat on the palm with the pale marks on its heel, at the height a small hand can reach. They don't hold it out to keep. The baby looks at it and then at the child, and knows. Nobody has to show them that part either. They take it in both hands, cupped, the thumbs touching, and get up and carry it the three steps across the hut at the pace of somebody carrying water. At the stool they stop at the old knee. The hand comes out sideways, flat and open, with the green pipe across it, before anybody has said whether it should be. He finds it from the edges in. His fingers go over the small palm and onto the wood, still damp and smelling of the hedge, and along it from end to end, reading it. They find the three holes where they should be and stop on the fourth, where the knife slipped. His thumb stays on it a long moment. Then his mouth goes the way it goes, and he takes it. He puts it to his mouth and blows before he can think better of it. The finger that has sixty years in it goes where it has always gone, but the wood isn't the wood it knows, and the fourth hole is open under nothing. What comes out isn't any note on the slope. It's small and high and broken in two, a thin sound that cheeps at the top and cracks and cheeps again. It's the sound that came from under the hen that morning in the straw, the thing working its way out through the shell and saying so. It has never once come out of a pipe. The old man stops with the pipe still at his mouth and his eyebrows gone up into his hair. The baby stares. The child's mouth comes open. Then the old man blows again, on purpose this time, and it comes again, the same small scandalized peep, and the baby sits down hard on the floor the way the cub did when it sneezed. Then all three of them are laughing. The child goes first, the kind that gets out, bent over on the step with both hands on their knees. The baby laughs because the child is laughing and then at the pipe itself, rolling over sideways against a sheep, which gets up offended. The old man laughs last, and longest. It isn't the soundless kind. It comes up out of him cracked and helpless and much too loud for the hut, and his shoulders go with it and his eyes run again, and this time there's no mistaking what the wet is. He keeps putting the pipe back to his mouth to do it again and can't, because the laugh gets into the breath first and the peep comes out in pieces. So he gives up and holds the pipe to his chest and laughs at the ceiling. The fire shifts on the hearth with a soft fall of ash, and the sparks go up. They rise in a slow scatter on the heat and out through the gap in the turf, into the dark over the roof, and they go on climbing in the cold air after anybody would think they'd have gone out. Above them the whole river has come out, rim to rim over the long spine of the beast, and the sparks go up into it with nobody to tell which were which. The night lies over all of it: a hut with the door open and too much noise coming out of it, two sheep in the doorway, a green pipe with one hole too many held against an old chest, and a small child on the floor still hiccuping with it. It keeps no count of who made the mistake or who kept it, or which of them first found out that a wrong place could hatch: *here, still here, and you.*

The light goes long in the evening, and the roofs up the slope take it the way they always do. The windows fill with gold from outside before anybody has lit anything behind them, and the smoke goes red, and the small cluster looks like a far larger place burning quietly on its hillside. The child is on the step of the hut in it with a length of elder across their knees. They cut it at the hedge that afternoon, green and straight, and they have the old man's knife, the one with the worn handle that took the bark off the first pipe before the wall was built. Nobody gave it to them. It was on the sill where it's always been, and the child picked it up, and nobody said anything. They go slowly. The blade goes in along the grain and the bark comes away in a long pale strip, damp underneath and smelling green and a little bitter. Then there's the pith. The child pushes it out with a thin stick a pinch at a time, the soft white crumbling out onto the step, and every little while they stop and look down the hollow at the sky to see how far the light gets through. It's slow work at the pace of a long day. The fingers aren't sure of it yet. Twice the knife slips, and once it goes in where no hole should be, and the child looks at the wrong place a long moment and then leaves it. It'll be one more hole, or it'll be the mistake. They'll find out which when it's played. It isn't for anybody. It's that the dark pipe has gone down the lane in a small fist, and the pale one lives in the child's pocket now, and there ought to be one more on the slope than there are hands to hold them. That's all the reason they have. The baby is sitting in the dust at the bottom of the step with the two sheep lying a length off, and they've watched every pinch of pith come out. The feather is still with them. It has been carried all afternoon, laid across a flat palm and never once closed on, and it's gone a little ragged at the tip from the wind. When the old man comes out of the doorway with a hand on the frame and lowers himself onto the step beside the child, the baby gets up. They come to him slowly, the way they've seen things come to him, and stop at his knee. Then the hand comes out, flat and open, with the feather lying across it, and it's held at the height of his hand. It's held out before anybody has said whether it should be. Nobody showed them that part. He feels them there. His hand comes out and down and finds the small palm from the edges in, and then the quill, and then the long vane of it. His fingers go along it from the root to the tip, reading it, the stiff edge and the soft one, and at the tip, where the gold was, they stop. He knows it. He has seen that bird turn over the ridge more times than anybody alive on the slope, and he has never once held any part of it. He lifts the feather off the palm, and his mouth goes the way it goes, and something in his shoulders lets go that hasn't let go all day. He says the old word again, low. The baby says it after him with no sound in it, and this time it's nearly right. The child's knife has stopped. They sit with the half-made pipe in their lap and the pith crumbled on the step, watching the old man draw the feather slowly back and forth under his own nose and across his lips as if it were the smell of something. It's the way he held the grey-green leaf. Up over the long spine of the beast the bird is out again in the last of the light, one turn and then another, too high to be anything but a mark on the sky. It doesn't beat its wings. It lies along air nobody on the slope can feel, and the air rises and falls under it in long slow swells like the grain did at noon, like a breath going out all the way down and coming back without being asked. The wind comes down off the ridge after it and goes through the stubble and the thorn and along the step. It stirs the feather in the old hand and the crumbs of pith, and the strip of bark lying curled by the child's foot, and then it goes on down the fold toward the pool and the grey. The sun goes down behind all of it. It falls on the roofs giving back what they borrowed, on a length of green elder with one hole too many, on a knife lying still on a child's knee, and on an old man on a step with a feather against his mouth and a small empty palm still held open at his knee. It comes on time, unasked and unearned, and it keeps no count of what was made or what was brought, or which of them had been carrying the other's gift all day without knowing it: *here, still here, and you.*

The word stays in the air over the chair after he's said it. The child lets it stay. Then they take the pipe away from their mouth and put it back, and this time they don't hold the breath back. They start where the tune always starts, on the second note, and climb, and stop in its place, and wait. They come down through the fourth and into the fifth, the finger half over the hole. That's where it has always stopped, in the middle, because the breath ran out at the pool, or the old man lost the way, or the baby's finger couldn't reach any further. It doesn't stop there now. It goes up. It climbs past the fifth, past anything the three holes should give, on a breath that goes down further than it has ever gone. It doesn't come back down to rest the way a tune comes home. It keeps rising, thinner and higher, until it isn't so much a note as the place where a note was going. Then the breath is spent, and there's nothing, and nothing is the end of it. It's the first time the tune has had an end. Nobody taught them that either. It's the way the bird went, in wide rings, up until it was a speck, and then less, and then the sky was plain. The wind takes it. It comes down off the long spine of the beast, and the grain bows under it from the ridge to the stream, and the rising note goes up on it the way the brown wings went up without a beat. The mountain doesn't hand this one back. There's nothing on the stone for it to hit. It has gone up into the open over the ridge, where nobody on the slope has ever sent anything, and it stays there. High over the rock the speck comes back. It turns once in the empty blue, riding air nobody can feel, and its call comes down very small and pitched up at the end. Then it's gone over the far side of the ridge toward whatever lies past it, which nobody on the slope has seen. The baby hasn't moved. The feather is still lying across their open palm, gold at the tip, stirring with the wind and not lifting off. They don't say the word, and they don't laugh. Something comes over the small face slowly and stays there. It's the look of somebody who has kept a quiet on purpose and found that the quiet was worth keeping, and who is holding something lighter than a breath and knows not to close their hand on it. The two sheep lift their heads out of each other's wool and go back to the stubble. The old man doesn't open his eyes. He heard the tune find its end. He heard it go up past anywhere he could have followed it, and he didn't need to follow it, and his mouth has gone the way it goes. His head stays back against the chair. His hands lie open on his knees in the full sun, and the warmth sits on his eyelids and on the wet lines that dried on his face this morning, and he's glad of it. He's more than glad. The sun stands over all of it at the top of the day. It falls on the ripe grain bowing and coming back, on a feather lying still in a small open hand, on a child lowering a pipe with no breath left in them, and on an old man at ease in a chair at the edge of the field, warm to the bone. It comes on time, unasked and unearned, and it keeps no count of where the tune ended, or who it went up after, or who was only resting in the sun when it found the way: *here, still here, and you.*

Something comes down out of the plain sky after the bird has gone. At first it's too small to be anything, a fleck turning over high above the field and catching the light on one side and then the other. It doesn't fall the way a stone falls. It comes down the way the loose snow came down through the moonlight, rocking from edge to edge in air nobody on the slope can feel, and it takes its time. It's a feather, one long one from the edge of a wing, brown going gold at the tip where the sun got through it. It comes down over the grain and the thorn, over the two sheep with their heads still pressed together, and it's lower each time it turns. The baby sees it first. Their hand comes out of the child's, and it doesn't come out as a fist. It goes up open, flat, palm to the sky, at the height a small arm can reach, and it waits there without snatching. Nobody showed them that part. The feather rocks once more above the hand, and once more, and then it settles across the palm as if it had been aimed. It's longer than the whole small hand and lighter than the breath on it. The baby goes completely still. Their eyes go from the feather up to the empty sky and back again, as if the one might have been the answer to the word they shouted at the mountain. The word starts to come up out of them, pitched up at the end. The child's finger goes to their own lips before it can. It isn't a scolding. It's the smallest movement, a finger laid flat across a mouth the way a hand is laid flat over anything, and the child tips their head toward the chair. The baby looks. The old man's head is back against the chair and his hands lie open on his knees, and his breath has gone down past where it goes for anybody awake, or nearly. The baby's mouth closes on the word and keeps it. The two of them stand in the stubble with the feather between them and don't make a sound, and it's the first time the baby has ever kept quiet on purpose. Then the child brings the pale pipe up and plays so low it's hardly playing at all. It's the new tune, the one from the pool, with most of the breath held back. It starts on the second note and climbs and stops in its place and waits, and the waiting is longer than the notes. It isn't sent at the ridge. It doesn't get as far as the ridge. It goes about as far as the chair and stops there, the way a hand stops a length short. The old man isn't asleep. His ear has turned toward it without the rest of him moving, the plain kind of listening, all of it given away. He hears the tune kept small for him. He hears the baby not saying the word, the silence with somebody in it holding their breath, and under that something light rocking down out of the sky and landing that he couldn't have heard and somehow knows about anyway. When the tune gets to the fifth note and stops in the middle, he speaks. It's only one word. It's old and rough at the edges, a word for the bird that turns over the ridge without beating its wings, and nobody on the slope uses it anymore. He doesn't explain it and doesn't open his eyes. He says it once, quietly, the way he said the word for the grey-green leaf, and his mouth goes the way it goes. The baby hears it. Their lips move on it without any sound, trying it, and the feather trembles on the open palm with their breath. One small cloud comes over the ridge and the sun works in and out behind it, the half-covered kind of light. The field goes bright, and grey, and bright again, and the feather goes gold and brown and gold on the small palm. The light falls on the ripe grain leaning, on two children keeping a quiet between them with a pipe held low, and on an old man with his eyes shut who has given one more thing away without anybody asking for it. None of it is chosen. It keeps no count of what fell and who caught it, or who kept quiet so somebody could rest, or which old word will be said wrong on this slope for the next sixty years: *here, still here, and you.*

The shouting brings something down off the ridge. At first it's only a speck turning over the long spine of the beast, too high to be anything. Then it comes lower in wide slow rings without a single beat of its wings, riding air nobody on the slope can feel. It's brown going gold at the edges where the sun gets through the long feathers, and the fingers of each wing are spread wide against the sky, open, holding nothing. Its shadow goes over the stubble and the chair, over the baby and the sheep, and the two sheep put their heads down and press together. Then it calls. It's one sound, high and thin and wild, and it's pitched up at the end. The baby stops in the middle of their word. Their mouth stays open on it. The call goes out over the field, and the rock waits the way it waits for anybody and then hands it back, small and late, the bird's own voice coming down off the stone. The bird doesn't turn its head for it. It has heard the mountain give that back more times than anybody alive on the slope has heard anything. The baby doesn't shout again. The small chest goes out, slowly, all the way down past where it used to stop, with nobody's hand on it. It stays out a long moment, as if there were more room in there than anybody had told them about. Then it comes back, the way the swell comes back, without being asked. It's the breath of somebody who has found out there's something bigger than a mountain to be heard by, and that it doesn't need to be called. The wind comes under the bird and lifts it without a beat. Then it comes down the fold into the grain, and the whole field bows in one long wave from the ridge to the stream. It goes over the heavy heads and the chair and the child at the thorn, and on down past the pool and the shut flower toward the flats. The bird's call goes along the wave and thins out and goes into the valley, where it's everybody's. The child comes away from the thorn then. They don't hurry. The pale pipe comes out of their pocket on the way, and they play the new tune low, not at the bird and not at the ridge, only into the wide air under it. It starts on the second note and goes up, and it stops in its place and waits, and the bird goes round once more over the top of the waiting as if it were listening, though it isn't. It's only going round. The child lets it be only that. At the chair the baby's hand comes out. It isn't cupped, and it isn't held flat with something on it. It's empty and open and held out sideways at the height of the child's hand, the way they've seen it done all down this slope. The child's hand meets it. The two of them close on each other, the small fist and the palm with the pale marks on the heel, and neither of them is taking anything or giving anything. It's the way two hands close when both of them have been sent something by a mountain and neither can say what it was. They stand like that, the dark pipe in one free hand and the pale pipe in the other, and look up. The old man hears the call, and the wave in the grain, and the tune going up under it. He hears the moment the two breaths at the chair side stop being two different rates. Whatever he's been holding onto all summer comes off his shoulders then. It isn't grief. It's the thing he'd have carried to the water if nobody had come up the lane, the note and the pipe and the listening. It has gone out of his hands into four smaller ones, and the ridge has it, and a bird that doesn't care. He lets his head go back against the chair. His hands lie open on his knees. His face goes loose in the sun. The bird goes up again in its wide rings until it's a speck, and then less, and then the sky is plain. The grain is still moving. It's heavy at the heads and past waiting, the pale gold it goes the week before the blade, and every stalk of it leans the same way in the wind and comes back. Somewhere down the fold the farmer will be feeling the edge of the iron with a thumb. The sun stands over all of it: the ripe field bowing and rising, the empty sky where something turned, two children with their hands held under a ridge that has gone quiet, and an old man asleep or nearly asleep in a chair, set down at last. It comes on time, unasked and unearned, and it keeps no count of who called and who was only overheard, or whose hands were let go of so that other hands could meet: *here, still here, and you.*

The baby is at the top of the stubble before the dew is off it, the dark pipe in one fist and the two sheep a step behind. They don't play. They stand facing the long spine of the beast with their chest going out slowly, and they say the word at it, the one word, pitched up at the end. The rock waits the way it waits for anybody. Then it hands the word back, small and late and softer at the edges, coming down over the grain from a place nobody has ever stood. The baby says it again, louder. The mountain says it again, louder too, as near as a mountain can. Then the baby says it fast, twice, and the rock gives back twice, a little behind, so the two go over each other in the air above the field. Something in the small face gives way. It isn't the astonishment of the morning before. The baby has found out the mountain can be got at, that it will say anything it's given and never once get tired of it. The laugh comes up out of them all at once, high and helpless, and it goes out over the grain, and the rock hands that back too. So the baby is laughing at the mountain laughing, and laughing harder at that, bent over in the stubble with the pipe against their knees, and the ridge keeps giving it back a beat late, like somebody who has only just caught on to the joke. The old man has come down the lane by the stick. He goes past the corner without being led, a hand on each wall and then on nothing, and lowers himself into the chair at the edge of the field with the small sound he doesn't hear anymore. He sits with his face turned toward the laughing. When the baby comes up to the chair, still hiccuping with it, his hand comes out and down, palm flat. It isn't held out this time. It comes down over the dark pipe in the small fist and rests there, over the fingers and the wood together, the weight a hand puts down over anything that has been given and has been taken and is in the right place. It doesn't press, and it doesn't take the pipe back. After a while it lifts, and the baby puts the pipe to their mouth and sends the fifth note after the laughing, and the mountain has that too. The child has come as far as the thorn and stopped. They don't come any nearer. They stand with the pale pipe in their pocket and their head tipped to one side, one ear toward the field and the other toward the ridge. The old man turned his head that way at the hen's box and at the pool and at the gap in the door. Now the child is listening that way, and nobody showed them how. They hear the note go out and the note come back. Under it they hear the laugh still in the baby's breath, and under that the old man breathing at his own rate in the chair. It's the plain kind of listening, all of it given away. There's nothing in it that asks to be the one playing. One small cloud stands over the ridge, and the sun works in and out behind it, the half-covered kind of light. The long spine of the beast goes bright and grey and bright again, and the field goes with it. The grain is too heavy now to swell and only leans. The light falls on a baby shouting a word at a mountain and being shouted back at, on a dark pipe in a small fist with an old hand's warmth still on it, on a chair at the edge of ripe grain, and on a child by the thorn with their ear turned to all of it and their hands empty at their sides. None of it is chosen. It keeps no count of who spoke first or who laughed back, or who stood a little way off so the listening could be done properly: *here, still here, and you.*

The baby comes up from the corner in their own time, the two sheep a step behind and the pale pipe forgotten in one fist against their chest. They stop in front of the chair and look at the old man's wet face the way they looked at the ridge, as if it too might be where the music comes from. He hears them come. He knows the small feet on the stubble and the breath that's lately learned where the bottom of itself is. His hand comes up off his lap with the dark pipe lying across it, flat and open, and goes out low at the height a small hand can reach. It's the pipe the child carried through a winter, and it's older than any mouth that has played it. It's offered before anybody has said whether it should be, and it isn't the child who says so. The child goes very still. The baby doesn't take it with the fist this time. They look at it lying on the old palm and something in them slows. The pale pipe goes down into the stubble, let go of without any thought for it. Then the two small hands come together under the dark one, cupped, the thumbs touching, the way the grandmother held the leaf and the old man held the chick, the way hands go round anything that's heavier than it looks. His hand tips, and the dark wood goes down into them, and it's taken. They don't blow at once. Their chest goes out slowly with nobody's hand on it, and they hold it there a moment, frowning. Then it goes out into the wood, only some of it, as they were shown. The fingers are too small for the holes. One of them lies half over the last hole because it can't reach any further, and it stays there. What comes out is the fifth note, the one none of the holes should give. It was found in the dark by the pool and kept on purpose, and it's here now by accident in a mouth that has never heard it played. It comes out thin and clear and pitched up at the end, with none of the shake an old breath puts in. It doesn't go out over the field so much as hang in the still air above the grain, the way a sound hangs when something small and hollow is struck in a doorway and the wind has already moved on. It hangs there longer than seems possible, and then it's gone toward the ridge. The rock takes it and waits the way it waits for anybody. Then it hands the note back, small and late and softer at the edges, the child's own note in the baby's breath, coming down off the long spine of the beast as if the stone had known it all along. The child's mouth has come open. The note went out of them at the edge of the pool on a night nobody else was awake for, and it has come back to them from a mountain by way of somebody who doesn't know what it is. They can't take their eyes off the baby. The baby is looking at the pipe as if it had done the thing on its own, and then up at the ridge, and then at the child. They say the one word, pitched up at the end, and it isn't a question now. The old man has turned his face toward all of it. His hands have gone back to his knees with nothing in them. The pipe doesn't come back that day. The baby carries it down the lane in both cupped hands with the sheep behind them, and the pale one stays in the stubble until the child goes back for it at dusk. The next morning the rim gives itself away over the ridge before anybody on the slope is up. The gold comes level down the long spine and onto the grey rock where the notes went, and the stone takes the light and hands it on down the fold without keeping any of it. It falls on the ripe grain and the empty chair, on a pale pipe on a sill and a dark one in a small shut fist under a blanket, and on an old man asleep with his mouth a little open and his hands open on the cover. It comes on time, unasked and unearned, and it keeps no count of who found the note or who was given it, or which of them the mountain was answering: *here, still here, and you.*

The baby doesn't move from the corner for a long time. Then the pale pipe comes up off their chest in the whole fist, and they turn to face the ridge, and before they blow they stop. It's the child's hand on them they're remembering, flat and low under the ribs, though nobody's hand is there now. The small chest goes out slowly, the way it would for somebody nobody is watching, down past where it used to stop, and only some of it goes into the wood. The note comes out thin and cracked and pitched up at the end, and it holds, and they send it straight at the grey rock. The rock waits the way it waits for anybody. Then it hands the note back, smaller and a little late, softer at the edges, the baby's own note coming down over the still grain from the long spine of the beast. The baby takes the pipe from their mouth and stares up at the ridge. Then they say the word at it, the one word they have, pitched up at the end. This time it's plainly a question. The mountain gives that back too, very small and exactly as it was asked, and doesn't answer it. The baby's mouth comes open on no sound at all. They're sure they were answered, and nobody corrects them. The child lets go of the old hand. They hold the dark pipe out, flat on the open palm with the small pale marks on its heel, at the height of his hand, before anybody has said whether it should be. It isn't offered so he'll show them anything. There's a mountain handing things back this morning, and he's the only one on the slope who hasn't sent it anything. He finds it from the edges in. This time his fingers don't close the small ones back over it. They take it. He sits with the dark wood at his mouth a long moment without any breath going in. Then he plays one note, the thin one with no holes covered, pitched up at the end. It's the baby's note, not the tune or the old place or the fifth. It shakes near its end, because an old breath does. The rock takes it. For about as long as a bubble holds the sky there's nothing, and then it comes back off the stone, small and late and softer at the edges, his own breath given back to him from a place he hasn't seen in sixty years. It sounds no different from anybody's. His eyes fill. They can't see anything and they fill anyway, and the water goes down the lines of his face in the full sun, and he lets it. It isn't grief, and it isn't anything he could have said if he were asked. The pipe comes down into his lap and his hand stays open around it. At the corner the baby has turned round to look at him, and so have the two sheep. Then the wind comes back. It starts as nothing much, a stir at the top of the ridge where the notes went, and then it's down off the long spine with the smell of the high rock in it, and the whole field of ripe grain bows to it at once and comes up again, over and rising and over again, the heavy heads hissing together. It goes along the thorn and the dark bird rides it out on the branch. It dries the wet on the old face before anybody has to wipe it. It takes what's left of the three notes and the new tune and the baby's one note and the old man's same one and carries them off down the fold together, over the stream and the pool and the shut flower, toward the flats and the grey, where nobody will sort out whose was whose. The sun lies over all of it at the top of the day. It falls on the bending grain and the grey rock, on a baby at the corner with a question the mountain gave back unanswered, on a child with an empty open palm, and on an old man in a chair with his face wet and his hands open around a pipe. It keeps no count of who asked or who answered, or whose breath the stone was holding when the wind came for it: *here, still here, and you.*

The wind drops at the top of the morning. It happens the way it did once before at the edge of this field, all at once, as if something up on the ridge has stopped to listen. The grain stops its long swell and stands. The heads hang heavy and still at the height of a grown chest, and the whole field goes quiet enough to hear the stream at the bottom of the fold. The child's hand stays where it is on the old one. With the other hand they get the dark pipe out and put it to their mouth. They don't play the old tune. They play the one from the pool. It starts on the second note and goes up where the old tune goes down, and it stops where the old tune never stops and waits there. Then it comes back down past the fourth into the fifth, the finger half over the hole, found again. They don't play it at the old man, who has already heard it. They play it out over the grain, level, toward the long spine of the beast where the grey rock stands bare above the grass. There's nowhere else to play it. For a while nothing comes back. Then something does. It's smaller and a little late, softer at the edges, the way the three notes came back in the autumn. The mountain hands back the new tune for the first time, the second note first and then the climb, the stop, and the long wait in it. The fifth note comes back too, thin, off stone that has never once been asked to sing and has never kept anything it was given. The rock doesn't add a note or take one away. It gives the tune back as plainly as it would give back anybody's. The child plays it again, to be sure, and the mountain plays it again, to be sure. The third time something in the thorn takes it up. It's the dark bird with the too-bright beak, sitting in among the coiled vines. It doesn't wait for the mountain. It comes in on the gap, gets the climb and the stop, and comes down wrong. It has put its own turn at the top and the child's flat fourth at the bottom, and the fifth note is in the middle of it, pitched up at the end, kept. Now there are three of them going over the still field: the pipe, the stone, and the bird. None of them is leading, and each gets the others wrong and keeps it. Down the lane the baby has come to the corner with the pale pipe in their fist, the two sheep behind them a step apart. They were coming to find the child. Now they've stopped dead at the top of the stubble with their mouth open and the pipe forgotten against their chest. Their head goes round to the ridge, then to the thorn, and back to the ridge, trying to find where the music is coming from. It's coming from everywhere. The mountain is playing, and the hedge is playing, and nobody told them a mountain could. Their whole face has come open, the way it came open at the first note out of the crooked wood, only wider. They don't say the word. For once it isn't enough, and they seem to know it isn't. The old man hears all of it from the chair. He hears the child at his side and the stone answering from far off, and the bird's wrong turn in the thorn. He hears the small, complete silence of the baby at the corner, the kind of quiet that has somebody in it. His hand is still held in the child's, and it doesn't lift to keep time. He doesn't hum. It isn't his to hum yet, and it doesn't need him. The ridge has it now, and the hedge has it, and a child who can't say anything has it. It has gone out of the one mouth that made it into places that will keep handing it back long after the mouth is gone. He is glad of that, and more than glad. Something in his face goes loose that has been held a long time, and settles. What's in the chest then has no color in it and no object. It's the white of the old hair in the sun and of the stone on the ridge, the plain white that holds nothing and asks nothing back. It reaches the baby's open mouth and the sheep and the bird the same as it reaches the child, and it doesn't pick out any of them. The sun stands over the still field at the top of the day. It falls on the ripe grain standing without a breath of wind in it, on a child with a pipe and an old hand in theirs, on a dark bird singing a tune it learned an hour ago as if it had always known it, on a small face at the corner astonished at a mountain, and on the grey rock handing it all back. It keeps no count of who made the tune, or who sent it out, or who was only standing in the stubble when it came back: *here, still here, and you.*

The cloud goes off the ridge and doesn't come back, and the sun stands full on the lane. The child stops laughing long enough to show them. They don't take the pipe. They put the flat of one hand on the baby's chest, low down, under the ribs, where the fist is going, the way a hand goes over anything. It doesn't press. Then they breathe in themselves, slowly, all the way down past where it used to stop, so the baby can feel how it's done by watching. The baby watches. The small chest goes out under the hand, much too fast, and then again, slower. The third time it goes out slowly, the way it would for somebody who isn't being watched at all. What goes into the pipe after that isn't the whole chest. It's only some of it, and what comes out is the note. It's thin and cracked and pitched up at the end, and it holds. It holds longer than anything the baby has done with their mouth before, and it shakes near its end and doesn't quite stop, and then it's gone because the breath is. The baby takes the pipe away and breathes in, deep, with the hand still flat on them. They don't say the word this time. They do it again. The two sheep hear it first. They were down at the corner by the low wall, pulling at the green between the flags, the two that were never counted in or out, and at the second long note they lift their heads together. Then they come up the lane at the pace of grazing, one a step behind the other. They stop in front of the step and stand there looking at the baby with the flat surprised look sheep have for everything. The baby looks back at them over the end of the pipe and plays the note at them, and they don't go away. They're sure they were called. Nobody corrects them. Up the lane the old man has his ear turned down toward the step. He can hear the difference. He knows the squawk from the note, and the note from the note that has a breath under it that knows how far down it goes. His hand comes up off the hollow in the stone and stays up until the note is done. Then he gets up by the stick and goes, slowly, a hand on each wall, down past the hut and along the edge of the lane to where the field starts. The grandmother's chair is still there at the top of the stubble where she left it in the long days. The grain in front of it is ripe now, gone to the pale gold it goes before the blade, standing at the height of a grown chest, too heavy at the heads to hold them up straight. He lowers himself into the chair with the small sound he doesn't hear anymore, and the wind comes through the grain at that height and makes the long swell, over and rising and over again. He sits with his face turned back up the lane toward the note. The child sees him go. They leave the baby with the pipe and the two sheep and come up the lane after him at a run, and they stop beside the chair with their chest going. There's nothing to say, so they don't say it. Their two bare hands come together in front of them, the palms cupped and the thumbs touching, round nothing, the shape hands make round anything that can't be kept. Then they put that shape down over the old hand lying open on the chair arm and close it, loosely, and leave it there. The old man's hand turns over under theirs and holds. Down on the step the note comes again, one long thin breath pitched up at the end, and the two sheep stand and listen to it, and the grain bends toward it in the wind and comes back. The sun lies over the whole fold at the top of the morning. It falls on a baby learning how far down a breath goes, on two grey backs that came without being asked, and on a field of ripe grain with a chair at the edge of it and an old hand held in a young one. It comes on time, unasked and unearned, and it keeps no count of who taught the breath or who was only listening to it being learned, or which of them it was for: *here, still here, and you.*

One small cloud comes over the ridge while the two of them are still on the step, and the sun works in and out behind it, the half-covered kind of light. The lane goes bright, and grey, and bright again. The baby hasn't let go of the pipe. They hold it out instead, the whole fist round the middle, sideways at the height of the child's hand, the way they've seen it done. It's offered before anybody has said whether it should be, and it's offered so the child will show them. The child takes it, and the baby's fingers come off it one at a time, slowly, as if they might need it back at any moment. The child doesn't play the tune. They take a breath, only a small one, and let it out into the crooked wood, and what comes out is the one thin note the three holes give when none of them are covered. It's pitched up at the end the way everything on this step is. Then they hand it back. The baby puts it straight to their mouth and blows much too hard, the whole chest behind it, and the squawk comes out, and then the hiss, and then, by accident, the note, the same one, cracked and too loud and entirely there. The baby's eyes go wide over the end of the pipe. They take it out of their mouth, look at the child, and say the word. It's the one word they have, and it comes out in the exact place the note just was, pitched up at the end, as if it had been waiting all this time for something to be the answer to. The child laughs. It isn't the soft kind that stays in the chest. It gets out. It comes out loud and helpless, bent over on the step with both hands on their knees, and the baby watches them do it and then laughs too without knowing what at, which only makes it worse. The pipe goes back and forth between them, a squawk and a note, the word and a laugh, the same thing over and over, and none of it gets any better, and nobody wants it to. Up the lane the laughing gets in at the gap of the hut door where the note didn't. The old man's breath catches at the start of itself, and his head comes off the turf. He doesn't know what woke him, and then he does. He gets up by the stick, slowly, with a hand on the wall and the small sound he doesn't hear anymore, and he comes to the doorway and stands in it with his face turned down the lane toward the noise. Then he lowers himself onto the step, because standing is a lot to ask this early, and his hand goes down flat beside him on the stone to steady himself. It finds the hollow. It finds it from the edges in, the worn lip of it and then the split skin of the bean and then the pale hook bent over out of it, cool and damp, no longer than a fingernail. His hand stops there and doesn't close. The fingertips rest on either side of it the way they rested on either side of the thread on the thorn, and his mouth goes the way it goes. Down the lane the pipe squawks again, and the child laughs, and the one word comes up pitched high at the end. He sits and listens to all of it with a green thing under his hand that nobody sowed. The light keeps going in and out behind the one small cloud. It lands on two children on a step down the lane, on a crooked pipe and a fat fist and a word that has found its note, on an old man in a doorway woken by laughing, and on a hook of green in a hollow of stone under his open hand. None of it is chosen. It keeps no count of who taught whom, or who laughed first, or which of them was the last to find out what the other one had been growing: *here, still here, and you.*

The old man doesn't wake when the rim gives itself away. They came back up from the pool in the small hours, slowly, at the pace of the stick. The chair was left crooked at the water's edge for somebody to fetch another day. He went down onto the stool by the cold hearth with his coat still on and his head back against the turf, and he's there still, his mouth a little open and his hands lying loose on his knees. His breath has gone deep, down past where it goes for anybody awake. The child stands over him a moment in the grey. They listen to the breath the way he would, for the catch at the start of it and the place near the end where it shakes and doesn't quite stop. Then they go out by the door that doesn't shut and leave him to it. The gold comes level over the long spine of the beast and down the whole length of the lane. On the high side the flock is getting up out of the fold, stiff-legged, grey backs going gold one after another. The cracked bell makes its one small sound and nobody turns an ear to it. The child goes down between the doors with a hand inside their coat, on the pale wood. It has lain there since the snow, against the chest, gone warm and then cool and then warm again through a whole turning of the year. It was never tried. It wasn't theirs to try. The baby is on the step of the last house but one. They aren't a baby anymore, not really. They're standing without a hand on the frame now, and the yellow place under the fringe went long ago, and nobody could say where the stone is that tripped them. They still have only the one word, and they say it at the child coming down the lane, pitched up at the end, the way they said it into the dark once at a note nobody played. The child crouches in front of the step. It's low down, lower than the baby's knees. The pale pipe comes out of the coat and goes across on a flat palm with the small marks on its heel, at the height a small hand can reach. It's crooked, and the three holes aren't even, and it's held out before anybody has said whether it should be. Everything on this slope that's been offered has fallen a length short, and the child has learned to let the falling short be the whole of it. This time it doesn't fall short. The fat hand comes out and closes on it, the whole fist round the middle, the way a fist closes on anything. It's taken, and that's all it takes. It goes to the baby's mouth at once, the wrong end first and then the right end by accident. The cheeks go out, much too much breath, the whole chest behind it. What comes out isn't a note. It's a squawk, then a hiss, and then for about as long as a bubble holds the sky, a sound. It's one sound, thin and cracked and pitched up at the end. It's the baby's word with no word in it. The baby takes the pipe out of their mouth and stares at it. Then they look up at the child with their whole face open. The child laughs without making any sound, the soft kind that stays in the chest. Up the lane the flock is going out past the ring of stones with nobody piping them, and one ewe stops and lifts her head at the sound from below and then goes on. In the hut the old man sleeps through all of it. He is the one person on the slope who would have known that sound for what it was, and it's the first thing on the slope he hasn't heard. His breath goes in and out at the rate it keeps when nobody is minding it. The light comes in at the gap in the door and lies across his open hands. On the step of the hut, in the small worn hollow the drip made, the bean that rolled there in the summer and wasn't fetched has split its skin. A pale hook has come up out of it into the gold, bent over like somebody coming through a low door, in the one place on the slope where nobody would ever have sown anything. The sun comes on time over all of it. It falls on the flock going up and the sleeping face, on a green hook in a hollow of stone, and on two children on a step with a crooked pipe going back and forth between them. It keeps no count of who made it or who gave it, or who was awake to hear the first note come out of it: *here, still here, and you.*

The moon climbs off the long spine of the beast and goes pale as it climbs, the grain color draining out of it until it's only white. The road it laid across the pool shortens toward the chair. The old man's hand comes off the child's head and goes out flat, sideways, at the height of the small hand, and the child knows what it's for before they know that they know. The pipe goes across. He doesn't play the old tune. He sits with the dark wood at his mouth a long moment without any breath going into it, the way he sat at the hen's box before the tapping started. Then he starts on the second note, where the child started. He goes up where the old tune goes down and stops in the place it never stopped. He waits there too long, the way an old man waits when he isn't sure the ground is where he left it. Then he comes back down by the way the child came, or tries to. The finger that should half cover the hole covers all of it, and the fifth note isn't there. What comes out is the fourth, low and a little flat, the bird's note, because the hand has sixty years in it and it goes where it has always gone. He stops. He tries again. This time the fifth comes, thin and cracked and pitched up at the end, and it's gone before he can keep it. The rest of the way down is wrong in two places the child never put there. So he's the first. Nobody had to wonder for long. The child has their head tipped to one side against the chair leg, one ear turned up toward the pipe and the other toward the grass, and they've gone completely still. It's the plain kind of listening, all of it given to the sound. Then something comes over their face that they don't try to stop. It isn't a laugh. It's smaller than that and it stays. It's the look of somebody hearing a thing they made come back to them changed, the way the tune came back up out of the roofs, the way the mountain handed the notes back softer at the edges. It's wrong in new places, in an old man's places, and it's theirs anyway. More than before, if anything. He plays it through once more and gets it wrong differently. Then he lowers the pipe and holds it out, flat, and doesn't say anything, and his mouth goes the way it goes. The moon has gone high and small by then, and with the grain color off it the whole river has come out above the ridge, rim to rim over the long spine, too many points to join into anything. It's in the pool too, laid over the brown water among the notched leaves, and when a bubble comes up out of the mud the whole of it shakes and settles. The crickets haven't stopped. They don't know there's a new tune on the slope, or that it has already been got wrong, or that this is how a tune stays. What's in the chest has no color in it and no object. It's the white of the shut flower and the white of the old hair and the white of the mist that isn't mist, laid over a crooked chair and a child who is smiling at nothing anybody could point to. The night gives what it has evenly, which is almost nothing and is enough. It keeps no count of who found the tune or who first lost the way through it, or which of them will be playing it wrong when the other one isn't there to hear: *here, still here, and you.*

The crickets go on after the light has gone off the pool. The child sits against the chair leg with the pipe in their lap and doesn't pick it up for a long time. The water has gone dark between the flat leaves. The one pale point stands up in the middle of it, shut round its gold, and as the blue deepens the first of the others come out over the ridge behind the one star. Then they're in the pool too, one and then another laid on the still brown among the notched leaves, as if they'd come down to see the flower. Every so often a bubble comes up out of the mud and breaks, and the stars on the water shake and settle again. Then the child picks the pipe up. They don't play the tune. The breath goes in, and what comes out is something else. It starts on the second note instead of the low one and goes up where the tune goes down, then stops in a place the tune has never stopped. It waits there. Then it comes back down by a way nobody has taken, through the fourth note and past it into a fifth, one that none of the holes should give. It's a finger half over a hole, found in the dark by accident and kept on purpose. The next time through it's a little different. The third time the child finds the same stopping place and stays there longer. Nobody taught them any of it. It didn't come down through the wall or the wax or the room with the strings, or through any mouth on the slope. It came up out of the pool the way the flower did. The old man's head comes round. It isn't the tipping he does for the tune, when he's listening for the mistake. This is slower, and the ear goes further, the whole face turned a little away from the sound so the ear can have all of it. He listens the way he listened at the hen's box, for something working its way out under the sound that nobody has heard before. His hand doesn't lift off his knee to keep time, because there's no time yet to keep. It isn't finished, and it may never be. It goes up where it wants and comes down where it can. The crickets don't give way to it, and it doesn't give way to them. He doesn't hum along. He can't. For the first time in sixty years there's a tune on the slope he doesn't know, and his mouth has gone slack with listening to it. He has nothing to put under it and nothing to correct, and he's glad of that, more than glad. The moon comes up while the child is still playing. It's full, or near enough, clearing the long spine of the beast in one slow lift, too big and too low and the color of the grain. It lays a road across the pool from the far bank right to the crooked chair. The shut flower stands in the middle of it, and the moonlight finds the pale of the petals and goes through them a little, so for a moment there's a glow at the heart of the dark water that nobody lit. It lies on the old man's hair and on his open hand. It lies on the pipe and on the bare small fingers moving over the holes, feeling for the fifth note and finding it and losing it and finding it again. The child stops when the breath runs out, somewhere in the middle, in no place the tune would ever stop. They lower the pipe. Neither of them says anything. After a while the old hand comes down onto the child's head and rests there. It isn't praise, and it isn't thanks. It's the weight a hand puts down over something it has heard for the first time and will hear again. The moon gives what it has evenly. It falls on the water and the stars lying in it and the shut flower keeping its gold, on a crooked chair and the grass full of small dry voices, on an old ear still turned toward a silence with a new tune in it, and on a child who doesn't know yet that they've made anything. It keeps no count of whose the tune is, or where it came from, or who will be the first to get it wrong: *here, still here, and you.*

The tune stops before the light does, and the child goes back up the field. They don't go for any reason they could give. It just seems wrong to have found the pool and not to have brought him to it. He's awake on the step with the bowl between his feet and his face still turned down the fold, and when the hand comes out sideways at the height of his, flat and open, he takes it as if he'd been waiting for it. At the corner of the hut he stops and puts his other hand on the back of the chair with the short leg. That's all he says about it. So the child carries it down. It's heavier than it looks and awkward, the rush seat worn through in the middle. They hold it out from the body in both arms the way anything too big is carried at that size, staggering, one leg of it knocking the grain heads as they go. The old man comes behind with the stick and one hand on the child's shoulder, at the pace of both of them. It takes a long time. Nobody minds. By the time they reach the bend the copper has gone off the water and the pool is holding only the last of the sky, pale and going grey. The chair goes down crooked in the soft ground at the edge. The child doesn't fix it. The old man lowers himself into it with the small sound he doesn't hear anymore, and he leans a little the way the short leg makes him lean, toward the water, as if the chair knew where to put him. He can't see the flower. It's nearly shut now, only a pale point standing up among the flat notched leaves, keeping its gold inside for the night. The child doesn't take his hand to it. Some things aren't for touching, and they've learned that much from the fox and the thread on the thorn. Instead they crouch beside the chair and wait, and he tips his head to one side and listens to the pool. There's the small sound of the bubbles coming up out of the mud and breaking, one and then a long gap and then one, and under it the stream going over its stones. He listens to them the way he listened at the hen's box. Then the grass starts. It begins as one dry note somewhere under the bank, thin and quick and repeated, a sound like a fingernail drawn along the teeth of a comb. It comes again at a rate nobody set. Another one answers from across the water, a little faster, and doesn't agree with the first. Then there are three, and then too many to count, the whole drowned edge of the field taking up the one note it has and saying it over and over. It isn't practice and it isn't getting any better. The old man's face goes the way it goes. He has heard the grass do this at the end of more summers than anybody else alive on the slope, and it has never once come with any warning. His hand comes out, flat, and the child knows what for. The pipe goes across. He doesn't play the tune. He plays one note, the low one with all the holes covered, and holds it as long as an old breath lasts. It shakes near the end, and the crickets don't stop for it or change their rate or give way. The note lies in among theirs for a moment and then goes. He hands the pipe back without playing anything else. The child doesn't play either. They sit against the chair leg in the wet grass and let the grass do it. Up the slope the gold has gone off the roofs. The windows give up what they borrowed and start on their own, one lamp and then another down the lane, and the smoke goes grey and then can't be told from the sky. The whole small cluster sits on its hillside in the blue with its doors open, bigger than it is in the dusk, and older. Somewhere up there somebody is humming, too far off to know who. Over the ridge, ahead of all the others, the one star has come out. What's in the chest then has no color in it and no object. It's the white of the shut flower on the dark water and of the old man's hair in the last light, the plain white that holds nothing and asks for nothing and doesn't need to be carried back up the field. The dusk comes down on all of it evenly. It falls on a closed flower and the mud it came out of, on a crooked chair at the edge of a pool, on an old face turned toward a sound it can hear and a child beside it listening to the same thing, and on a field of small dry voices that don't know anybody is there. It keeps no count of who brought whom down to the water, or which note was the pipe's and which the grass's: *here, still here, and you.*

The bee wakes the child. It comes up from the thorn again late in the afternoon, when the shade has moved off the step, and this time it doesn't go round the bowl. It lands on the shut hand, on the knuckles over the dozen seeds, and walks there a moment, light as nothing, testing. The child opens their eyes and doesn't move. The bee stays long enough to find there's nothing in a closed hand for it. Then it goes up and off down the fold, low and slow over the grain, and the child's eyes follow it before the rest of them has decided to get up. The old man is still asleep against the doorframe with his hands open. The child doesn't wake him. They put the seeds into the chipped bowl, down among the shelled green where they'll be safe, and pick the pipe up off the warm stone. They go down the edge of the field after the bee, at the pace of somebody following something they can't keep sight of. The grain is up to the child's chest now and going gold at the heads. Where the path runs beside it the ears lean out over it and brush their shoulders, and the wind comes through the whole field at that height and makes the long swell, over and rising and over again. The bee is gone in the first of it. The child goes on anyway, past the thorn with its coiled vines and the tall shut knot at the end of the row, and down through the soft ground to the stream. The stream isn't loud anymore. It has gone back to its thread over the stones, and where it came over its banks in the spring it has left something behind. Just past the bend, in a hollow nobody dug, there's a pool of standing water with the flooded grass drowned at its edges. It's brown and still, and so quiet that the sky lies in it the right way up. The child has never seen it. Nobody told them it was there. On the water, flat as hands laid down on a table, are leaves. They're round, each with a notch cut into it, and they lie close together on the surface and don't sink. Among them, standing up clear of the water on its own stem, there's a flower. It's pale, almost white, going pink toward the tips of the petals, and it's open all the way to a gold middle, the way the daisy was open in the stubble, to whatever there is. It came up out of the mud at the bottom of that brown water, through the dark and the cold and the dead leaves, to open where the light is. It doesn't look like it cost anything. The child crouches at the edge. The bee is there, gone into the gold and working without any hurry. Where the frog went under in the spring, small round bubbles come up out of the mud one at a time, at a rate nobody set, and break on the surface without a sound. Each one holds the whole sky on its skin, the grain and the ridge and a small face bent over the edge, and then lets it go. The child plays. They don't play at the flower, or at the bee, or at anything. They play the tune low over the water, slow, wrong at the old place, with the bird's flat fourth at the end. The notes go out across the pool and don't carry the way they do on the ridge. The still air holds them close. A bubble comes up in the middle of the second place and breaks there, and another in the gap after the fourth, and neither of them is keeping time with the other. The child goes on playing until the light changes. It comes lower down the fold and gets in under the grain, and the whole field goes gold from underneath. Up the slope the cluster takes it all at once. The windows light up from outside, the smoke goes red, and the small slope of roofs looks like a far larger place, burning quietly on its hillside. The pool takes it too. The brown water goes copper, and the flat leaves go dark against it, and the pale flower stands up in the middle of the burning with its petals going rose, then gold, then nearly shut. The bee comes out of it heavy and goes off toward the hedge and its winter. Somewhere up the field an old man has woken on a step to find a bowl between his feet and the seeds put carefully in it, and he's heard the tune coming up through the grain from the water. He doesn't go down after it. His face turns toward it, and his hand stays open on his knee. The low sun lies along the whole fold, on the grain and the bent heads, on a flower closing on still water and the bubbles still coming up from the mud under it, on a child with a pipe at the edge of a pool nobody told them about, and on the roofs above them all going up in gold. It comes on time, unasked and unearned. It keeps no count of who followed whom down the field, or what came up out of the dark to meet it, or who was shown the way by something that was only going home: *here, still here, and you.*

The pods come thick after that. Every morning there are more of them under the leaves than the child can find, and they find a few more each time by parting the vines with the back of a hand, the way the old man parts anything, from the edges in. The grandmother gives them a bowl to carry them in. It's the brown one with the chip out of the rim, the one the porridge has gone into every winter since before the wall. She doesn't say to bring it back. She only holds it out in the doorway on a flat palm, low down, and the child takes it in both hands and goes down the lane with it held out from the body, the way anything is carried that matters more than it weighs. By noon it's full. The pods lie in it every which way, green and furred at the seam, and the child's hand goes down flat over the top of the heap and rests there on the way up the field. It doesn't press. It's the same weight that went over the red place on the baby's forehead and over the turned earth where the beans went in, only now the beans are under it again, come back up out of the ground in more than went in. Nobody asked them to. The old man is on the step of the hut in the shade of the eave, where the drip used to come off in the spring and the stone has a small worn hollow in it now to show for it. The child sits down beside him with the bowl between their knees. There's no need to say what it's for. He holds his hand out, flat, and a pod goes onto it, and his thumbnail finds the seam and runs it open. The beans go down off his palm into the bowl one at a time with a small sound each, like the first drops off the roots. Then another pod, and another. The child tries it and the seam won't go for them. It goes on the third one, all at once, and the beans jump out onto the step and roll, and one of them goes down into the hollow in the stone and stays there. Neither of them fetches it. They go on a long time at the rate a thumb keeps when it knows how many more pods there are and doesn't count them. The empty ones pile up on the step, split along their seams with the hollows still showing. The beans in the bowl go up by a finger's width, and then another. Now and then the old man's thumb stops on one and stays there, reading it, and that one doesn't go in the bowl. It goes into his other hand, cupped in his lap. By the end there are a dozen in there, the biggest and the least honest, the ones that will dry on the sill all through the long days and go mottled brown and cream and rattle in a cloth by the fire through the dark months. Then his two hands come together round them, palms cupped and thumbs touching, the way a hand holds water, or a chick, or a leaf that's about to be let go. He holds them out sideways to the child without saying what they are. The child cups their own hands underneath, and his come open, and the dozen go down into the small palms with the pale marks on the heels. The child knows what they're for. The farmer kept some back last year the same way, and somebody kept some back for the farmer before that. A bee comes up from the thorn after the smell of the split pods. It goes round the bowl once, slowly, and over the cupped hands and the old knuckles, and finds nothing it wants and goes back down to the white hanging under the leaves. The pipe is lying on the step between them where it was put down to leave both hands free. Nobody picks it up. The tune goes on under the old man's breath instead for a while, wrong at the old place, with the bird's flat fourth at the end of it, and then it gets slower and the gaps get longer. Then it isn't going on at all. The heat has come down the fold into the shade. The old man's head has gone back against the doorframe and his hands lie open on his knees with nothing in them, glad of it. The child has gone over sideways against his arm with the bowl still between their feet, one hand shut loose round the dozen seeds so they can't get away, and their breath has dropped into the slower rate it keeps when nobody is minding it. The two of them breathe on the step at two different rates that come a little closer together as the afternoon goes on. Down under the thorn the bee is working along the vines without missing a flower. The tall one at the end of the row has its shut green knot turned full into the south and is waiting there for something, and it doesn't know yet that it's waiting. The sun stands over the whole fold at the top of its day. It falls on the grain going pale in its long swell and on the coiled vines holding the thorn. It falls on a chipped bowl half full of green, on a pile of empty pods and a bean in a hollow of the step, and on the pipe lying warm on the stone. It falls on an old man and a child asleep against each other in the doorway with a year's seed shut in a small hand between them. It comes on time, unasked and unearned, and it keeps no count of who shelled and who kept, or which of them fell asleep first, or whose hands the seed will go into after theirs: *here, still here, and you.*

The weeks go round the way they do. The showers thin out and stop coming most afternoons, and the pail stays turned up by the bank with nobody drumming on it. The strip under the thorn isn't a row of hooks anymore. The beans have gone up. Each one found the blackthorn by leaning into the air where it was, and now they're wound through the lower branches in loose green coils, every thread taken hold somewhere and every leaf held out flat to the light. The white came off the thorn weeks ago and went down onto the brown. Other white has come in its place, small and folded and nothing like it, hanging in pairs under the bean leaves where nobody would look. A bee has found it. The striped one is taller than the child now. It stands at the end of the row with its rough leaves going up it in a spiral, and the head at the top is still shut, a green knot turned toward wherever the sun is. It's leaning east in the morning and west by evening, and nobody has ever once seen it move. Then one morning the white under the leaves has gone, and where it hung there's a pod. It's only one, the length of a finger, flat and green and furred a little at the seam, hanging off the vine nearest the thorn. That's the one whose thread went once round a branch on the ninth day. The child finds it by accident, parting the leaves to look for nothing. They stand very still. Then they pick it. It comes away with a small snap, cool from the shade, and heavier than something that size should be. They don't open it. They carry it up the edge of the field in a closed hand, the way anything is carried that might get away, though it can't. The old man is in the chair. The field in front of him has come up to the height of his knees, green going pale at the tips, and the wind goes through it at that height and makes the long swell, over and rising and over again. He has his face turned into it. The child stops beside him, and the hand comes open, flat, palm up, at the height of his hand, with the pod lying across it. It's held out before anybody has said whether it should be. He finds it from the edges in. The fingers go over the small palm and onto the pod and along it, from the stalk to the tip, reading the seam. Then his thumbnail finds the seam and opens it, slowly, the way the knife took the bark off the elder. Inside are the beans in their row, small and pale green and damp, each one in its own hollow, a crooked line of them that isn't honest yet about being mottled brown and cream. His thumb goes down the row and stops at each one without closing. He counts them, maybe. He doesn't say how many. Then he takes one out and puts it in his mouth, and takes another out and puts it on the child's tongue, and the two of them sit there tasting the first thing the strip has given back. It's green and sweet and tastes of the cold that went into the ground. The old man's mouth goes the way it goes. He holds his hand out after that, flat, and the child knows what for. The dark pipe comes out of the pocket and goes across. He plays. It's the tune, slow, with the gaps sitting in it like breaths, and it's wrong at the old place and wrong in the second place, and at the end the bird's flat fourth note is in it, low. He's kept that too. The notes go out over the grain and the wind takes them at the height of the heads and carries them down the fold, over the thorn and the coiled beans and the tall shut knot turned toward the sun, and on toward the stream and the grey. Somewhere down in the green a lark goes up out of the field, singing the whole way up, and doesn't come down for a long time. The child sits in the grass against the chair leg with the empty pod in their lap, split along its seam with the hollows still showing where the beans lay. The sun stands full over the field. It falls on the grain going pale in its long swell, on the vines holding the thorn and the pods coming after the first one, on a pipe going back and forth between an old mouth and a young hand, and on a lark too high to see. It comes on time, unasked and unearned, and it keeps no count of who planted and who tasted, or whose hand held out the first of it: *here, still here, and you.*

The showers keep coming after that, one most afternoons, quick and thin over the ridge with the sun still out behind them. The child learns to hear them coming. It starts as a change in the thorn, the leaves turning their pale undersides up all at once, and by the time the first drops find the pail the child is already there with a hand flat on the tin. The rain drums faster than any hand could. The hand keeps the slow beat under it, the one a back keeps, and the two go on together until the shower has gone down the fold toward the grey. Then the child crouches at the end of the row and looks. The hooks don't stay hooks. Every day the beans straighten a little more, the way somebody straightens after coming through a low door. The mottled halves drop off them into the brown, and by the end of the week they stand up green and open-handed, each with a pair of flat leaves held out to the light. On one of them, the one nearest the thorn, something else has come. It's a thread thinner than the child's hair, curled at the tip, coming out of the top of the stem and leaning off to one side. It isn't going straight up. It's going up and over, toward the lowest branch of the blackthorn a hand's width away, as if it had been told there was something there to hold. Nobody told it. It can't see the branch. It leans a little further each morning anyway, into the air where the branch is, and on the ninth day the curl at its tip has gone once round a thorn and closed there, loose, the way grey wool goes round a small wrist. The striped one has thrown off its cap. The two thick leaves are open now, and between them a third is coming, rough and pointed, a different shape altogether. It's the first one honest about what it means to be. It's taller than the beans already. Every morning the child finds it leaning a little toward where the sun came up, and every evening, if they go down late, it's leaning toward where the sun went down. It has turned its whole small head through the day and nobody saw it move. Along the bottom of the bank, where the mattock didn't reach, other things have come up that nobody planted. There's the broad ribbed leaf that grows wherever feet have pressed the ground hard enough, and a clump of something soft and grey-green that smells, when the child's sleeve brushes it, sharp and clean, like the inside of the grandmother's chest where the good cloth is kept. The child picks a leaf of it and rubs it between their brown fingers and holds it under their own nose a long time, and then carries it up the field. The old man is in the chair. The child puts the leaf into his hand, and he brings it to his face and breathes, and his mouth goes the way it goes. He knows it. He says a word for it that nobody on the slope uses anymore, and he doesn't explain the word. Then he gets up with a hand on the chair back and the small sound he doesn't hear, and he holds his hand out sideways, flat and open, at the height of the child's. They go down the edge of the field together at the pace of the stick. At the strip he lowers himself, slow, the knees going down into the wet one at a time, and the stick is laid along the bank. His hand goes down flat on the turned earth, palm down, fingers spread, the way it goes down over anything, and it feels along the row from the edges in. It finds the first bean and stops beside it without closing. It goes on and finds the next, and the striped one with its rough third leaf, and then the one nearest the thorn. His fingertips go up the stem to where the thread leaves it and follow the thread out into the air, very lightly, as far as the branch, as far as the place where it has taken hold. He stays there with two fingers resting on either side of the curl, not touching it. It's the way he rested beside the two leaves in the hoofprint up on the flank. The child gets the pipe out and plays the three notes and the fourth, low, wrong at the old place, not for anybody. The old hand doesn't lift off the earth for it. It stays flat, and the ground is a little warmer under it than it was a week ago, and he can feel that. One small cloud stands over the ridge and the sun works in and out behind it, the half-covered kind of light. The strip goes bright, and grey, and bright again. It falls on a thread holding a thorn and a leaf turning after the sun, on a grey-green sprig drying in a coat pocket, on a dented pail and a pipe and an old hand lying open on the ground among the beans. None of it is chosen. It keeps no count of what reached and what was reached for, or whose hand was only there to feel it happen: *here, still here, and you.*

Nothing comes up for a week. The child goes down every morning anyway, past the last house and along the edge of the field to the strip under the thorn. They crouch at the end of the row and put a hand down flat on the earth, the same weight as before, not pressing. The ground is cold under the palm and gives nothing back. The bee has found the rest of the hedge by now, and the white on the blackthorn has started coming down in the wind. It lies on the turned brown in small drifts, and the child brushes it off the places where the beans went in, as if it could be heavy. On the eighth morning the farmer isn't there. The mattock is leaning against the bank where it was left, and beside it there's an old pail turned upside down to keep the rain out of it, its bottom dented from years of being kicked. The child sits down in front of it. After a while the hand that was flat on the earth comes up and goes down flat on the pail. It makes a sound, low and hollow, the dull beat the ground made when the iron went in. So they do it again, at the rate a back keeps when it knows how many more strokes are in it, and then again. It isn't the tune and it isn't for the seeds. It just seems wrong to leave the row without the beat it was planted to. The old man hears it from the chair at the top of the field. His head comes round, and one finger lifts off his knee and comes down with it. Then the shower comes over the ridge. It's quick and thin, with the sun still out behind it, the half-covered kind of light, and it comes down on the pail before it comes down on anything else. The rain beats on the tin faster than any hand could, too many beats to count. It gets in between the child's strokes and across them, and the two go on together without either one giving way. The child doesn't stop and doesn't hurry. The thorn drips. The field goes bright, and grey, and bright again, and the smell comes up out of the wet earth all at once, the one smell the ground only gives when it's been waiting. When the shower has gone on down the fold, the child looks down and the row is there. It's only a few of them, a crooked line of small green hooks pushed up through the brown, bent over like somebody coming through a low door. The beans come up back first, still dragging the mottled halves of themselves, and they aren't honest yet about climbing anything. Further along, where the striped seeds went in, one has come up with the husk still on its head like a cap it hasn't noticed. Under the husk, two thick pale leaves are folded shut. It stands about as high as a thumbnail. Nothing about it says it will be taller than the hedge, or turn a face as wide as a plate after the sun, but it's already leaning a little toward the side where the sun came out. The child doesn't touch it. The hand goes down flat on the earth beside it and stays there. At the top of the field the old man has tipped his head to one side, with the ear turned down toward the strip and not toward the stream or the thorn. There's nothing there anybody could hear. The rain has stopped drumming on the pail and the child's hand has stopped too. He listens anyway, the way he listened at the hen's box for the thing working its way out under the sound. After a while he starts humming under his breath, very low, wrong at the old place. The child hears it come down the edge of the field and picks up the beat on the pail again, softly, one stroke to each of his breaths. The sun comes out full behind the last of the shower. It lands on the wet thorn and the petals on the brown, on a dented pail with a small hand flat on it and a crooked row of green hooks bent toward the light, and on an old man in a chair listening down a field for something too small for any ear. It keeps no count of who drummed and who rained, or who was humming, or which small thing heard it first: *here, still here, and you.*

The farmer comes back the next morning with the mattock. It's an old one, the iron worn thin and bright at the edge, and the haft has gone dark and smooth where two hands have held it longer than the farmer has been alive. They don't go to the field. The green in the field is already deciding for itself and doesn't need anybody. They go to the strip along the bottom of the hedge, under the blackthorn, where the ground has never been turned because the blade couldn't get in under the reach of the branches. They lift the mattock and bring it down, and the ground takes it with a sound like a hand on a skin. It's low and dull and comes back up through the soles of anyone standing near. They lift it and bring it down again. It's slow, at the pace of a long day, and nobody set the rate. It's the rate a back keeps when it knows how many more strokes are in it and doesn't count them. The child comes down the lane at the sound. They hear it before they're past the last house, the dull beat coming up the fold under the stream and the bird, and they come to it the way the sheep come to the pipe. They're sure they were called. They stand at the edge of the strip with the dark pipe in their hand, and after a while they put it to their mouth. They don't play the tune. They play one note on each stroke, the low one with all the holes covered, and they wait for the iron to go into the ground before they breathe. Then it's two notes, then three, and then the fourth drops into the gap the mattock leaves when it comes up. The farmer doesn't look round. The stroke doesn't change. But somewhere in the next dozen the humming starts under their breath, wrong at the old place, and the three of them go along together, the iron and the pipe and the mouth. None of them gives way and none of them is leading. The old man hears it from the chair at the top of the field. He sits with his face turned to it and his hand on his knee, keeping time with one finger, lifting it and letting it down. The earth comes up brown under the iron. It's the dark kind that has never been in the sun, wet and cold and full of the smell of the winter that went into it, with pale roots going through it and a worm going back down out of the light as fast as it can. The farmer turns a row the length of the hedge and then stops, and leans on the haft, and gets their breath. Then they feel in their coat. What comes out is a cloth tied at the corners. Inside there are beans, a double handful of them, mottled brown and cream like the eggs of some bird nobody has seen. They were kept back from last year's pods in a jar by the fire all winter, and they rattle a little in the cloth. With them there's something else, a flat grey-striped seed, a few dozen of them, gone loose in the bottom of the cloth. They came out of a big head that hung drying by somebody's door all through the dark months. It was as wide as a plate, and the birds had half of it before anybody thought to bring it in. The farmer holds the cloth out, low, at the height of a small hand, and the pipe goes into the child's pocket. It's slow. The child pushes a thumb into the turned earth to the first knuckle, the way the three grains went into the ring of stones, and a bean goes in, and then the next one a hand's width along. The farmer doesn't correct the spacing, which is bad. Every few beans a striped seed goes in instead, because the child has decided that's how it should be, and nobody says otherwise. After each one the palm comes down flat on the earth over it and stays there a moment. It's the same weight that went over the red place on the baby's forehead and over the lamb's side in the dust and over the child's own chest at the top of the bank. It doesn't press. It only rests, and then it lifts and moves on. By the end of the row both hands are brown to the wrist and there's earth under every nail, and the small pale marks on the heels of the palms have gone under it and can't be seen. Then there's a sound in the thorn over their heads. It isn't the bird. It's lower than that and doesn't stop to breathe. A bee has come to the blackthorn. It's the first one, big and slow and furred in brown and gold, still stiff from wherever it spent the winter. It goes from one small white flower to the next without any hurry and without missing one, and each flower bends a little under it and comes back up when it leaves. Nobody on the slope saw it wake. It found the thorn without being shown. The child sits back on their heels with their brown hands on their knees and their mouth open and watches it work along the branch, and the farmer leans on the haft and watches the child. Nothing in the row is honest yet about what it'll be. The beans will have to find the thorn to climb, and the striped seeds will have to come up as tall as the hedge, taller than the child, and turn a face as wide as a plate after the sun all through the long days. None of that is here. There's only a strip of brown under a flowering thorn with a crooked line of small handprints down it, and a bee going over the top of it, and an old man in a chair keeping time with one finger for a mattock that has stopped. The sun stands full on the hedge. It falls on the turned earth and what's under it, on the bee in the blackthorn and the iron leaning against the bank, on two pairs of hands gone the same color, and on a pipe waiting in a pocket for the next stroke. It comes on time, unasked and unearned, and it keeps no count of who dug and who sowed, or who kept the beat for whom, or what will stand up out of the ground by summer to look it in the face: *here, still here, and you.*

The bow goes the way it came, from the top down. The high curve over the long spine thins first and lets the sky back through, and then the two feet of it go, one on the flooded grass and one past the last roof, until there's only a brightness in the wet air where it stood and then not even that. The bird doesn't mark it. It sings the phrase again from the top of the thorn with the child's fourth note still low and flat at the end of it, kept, as if it had always been part of the phrase. The wind comes down off the ridge behind the shower with the smell of the snow going off the rock. It takes the phrase out of the hedge and carries it down the fold over the loud water, and then back up again, the way the tune went down into the roofs and came up changed. Somebody is coming along the edge of the field. It's the one who cut the grain in the autumn, the one who sang all the way down the rows with the blade going. The lane knows them by the walk more than the face, a long slow stride that stops every few paces as if something has been dropped. They haven't dropped anything. They come every spring to see whether the seed has kept, and this year they've come early, because of the drip. They stop at the corner of the field below the chair and don't say anything to the old man, and the old man doesn't say anything to them. They've known each other too long to need to. Then they crouch, the knees going down slow into the wet, and put a hand down flat between the old stalks among the green threads. They don't pull any of it up and they don't count it. They leave the hand there with the fingers spread, feeling the cold coming up out of the ground and the thin green standing up between the fingers, and they tip their head a little to one side. It isn't toward the bird. It's toward the field. The child watches them do it and doesn't understand, and then does. There's a sound down there too, under the stream and the wind and the thorn. It's too small for anybody's ear, and anybody who has farmed a field long enough listens for it anyway: the whole slope of grey stubble drinking, and the seed that kept to itself all winter under the snow deciding, row by row, on the one thing it knows how to decide. The farmer stays crouched a long time. When they stand, the hand comes up wet and black to the wrist, and they wipe it on their coat and look up at the ridge where the bow was. They don't know it was there. Then the first of the phrase comes back up the fold out of the roofs. It's somebody at a door who heard the bird and the pipe together and couldn't tell them apart, whistling now through their teeth with the flat fourth note in it. The farmer starts humming under their breath before they know they've started, and goes on down the edge of the field at the long slow pace, stopping every few paces. The sun comes out full over the ridge and finds the fold from above, and the wet goes up off the whole field at once in a thin shining breath that stands a hand's height over the green and moves when the wind moves. It lies on the thorn and the dark bird in it with its borrowed note, on a child with a pipe at their side and their mouth open, on an old face tipped up in a chair toward warmth it can't see, and on a farmer going down a field they sowed in the autumn, their hand still cold from the ground. It keeps no count of who sowed and who listened, or whose song the wind was carrying when it came back: *here, still here, and you.*

A bird is in the blackthorn when they come up from the stream. It sits at the top of the corner branch among the small white flowers, dark all over, with a yellow beak that looks too bright for the rest of it. It isn't hiding and it isn't doing anything. It's singing, the whole throat going. It's a long loose phrase that climbs and turns over at the top and comes down somewhere else, and then it stops. Then it does it again, not quite the same. It's the bird on the fence post, the one that says one thing every morning, and it has come back to the thorn before the thorn has a single leaf. Nobody on the slope heard it arrive. The old man stops, because the child stops. His head tips toward the sound. He has heard that phrase come out of that hedge in more springs than anybody alive, and it has never once come with any warning. The child gets the dark pipe out. They don't mean anything by it. They play the three notes and the fourth, low, with the old place wrong the usual way, up into the flowers. The bird stops. It turns its head so one eye is on the child and then the other, the way the fox tipped its head at the wrong place and the cub tipped its head after it. Then it answers. It isn't the tune and it isn't an answer to anything. It's only its own phrase again, climbing and turning over, but it comes in the gap the child left, and it stops where the child would stop. So the child plays again. This time they try for the bird's turn at the top with the three holes they have. It comes out wrong in several places at once, nothing like it, a cracked climb that doesn't know where to come down. The bird waits until it's done. Then it sings back something with a fourth note in it, low at the end and a little flat, which it never had before. After that it goes back and forth. It's a phrase from the thorn and three notes from the pipe, the thorn and the pipe again, over the stream going loud down the middle of the fold. Each of them gets the other one wrong and keeps the mistake. Neither of them is leading. By the fifth pass nobody could say anymore which turn was the bird's first and which was the child's, and the bird doesn't seem to care, and the child is sure they're being talked to. Nobody corrects them. The old man has let go of the hand. He's found the chair. Somebody has carried it down to the top of the field again and left it at the edge where the grain stood in the autumn, and he lowers himself into it with a hand on its back and the small sound he doesn't hear anymore. He sits with the stick across his knees and his face turned toward the thorn. His mouth has gone the way it goes when he's heard something come back up out of the roofs. His hands lie open on his knees. They aren't needed for anything, and he's glad of it. The field in front of him isn't white anymore. The stubble has gone down soft and grey into the wet, and between the old stalks, in rows nobody can see from the lane, there's green. It's thin, the width of a thread, coming up everywhere at once where the seed went into the ground before the snow and lay there all winter keeping to itself. Up on the flank, in a ring of seven stones or eight badly matched, three blades have come up beside two leaves in a hoofprint, where nobody would ever sow anything. Nobody has been up to see them yet. A shower comes over the ridge while the two of them are still at it. It's quick and thin and bright at the edges, with the sun still out behind it. It comes down on the thorn and the pipe and the old man's thin hair, and the bird doesn't stop and the child doesn't either. The petals come loose in it and go down onto the green. Then it's past, going on down the fold toward the grey, and behind it, standing up out of the far side of the stream and bending over the whole long spine of the beast, there's the bow. It's every color the frost didn't have, laid on the wet air for as long as the wet air lasts. Nobody put it there. It rests one end on the flooded grass where the frog went under and the other somewhere past the last roof, and nobody on the slope could walk to either. The child sees it and stops playing halfway through the fourth note. The bird finishes the phrase for them. The old man can't see it. He feels the sun come back onto his face after the rain and the wet begin to steam off his coat, and he hears the child go quiet in the middle of something, the kind of quiet that has something in it. He doesn't ask. His face tips up toward the warmth and stays there. The light lies over all of it: the thorn in flower and the dark bird in it, green threads in a grey field and three blades in a ring of stones, a child with a pipe halfway to their mouth, an old man at ease in a chair at the edge of a field he can't see, and the bow over the lot of them fading already from the top down. It keeps no count of whose phrase it was, or who taught whom the wrong note, or which of them sang last: *here, still here, and you.*

The drip doesn't stop after that. By the end of the week it's every eave on the slope at once, and then it isn't dripping anymore. It's running. It comes off the turf roof in a thin rope and down the lane between the flags, grey with the last of the snow. It gathers at the low wall and finds the gap it always finds, and it goes on down through the stubble, cutting small dark channels in the white that get wider every hour. Nobody dug them. The water knows the way down better than anybody. It went this way last spring and every spring before the wall. The old man hears the stream before he's out of the chair. It isn't the thread it was in autumn, going over its stones toward the grey. It's loud and full, the whole winter off the long spine of the beast coming down the fold at once, and it can be heard from the top of the lane even with the door shut, if the door shut. He doesn't say he wants to go down. The child is at his side anyway, and the hand comes out sideways at the height of his, flat and open. The bandage is off now. The palm is bare, with the red points healed to small pale marks across the heel. He finds it from the edges in, and his thumb stops a moment on the marks, reading them, and then his grip closes. The stick goes out on the other side. They go down together at the pace of the stick, through the wet stubble, and neither of them is quite leading. The stream is over its banks at the bend where the two sheep stood in the shallows. It's brown and quick, turning over on itself, carrying bits of the hedge and a leaf from last year, red still at one edge, going round and round in the eddy and not getting anywhere. The old man lowers himself onto the bank where he sat in the autumn. The ground is soaked, and he sits anyway. Along the edge, where the water has gone back a little and left the grass lying flat in one direction, there's cress coming. It's small and dark green and round-leaved, the first green on the whole fold that isn't in a crack or a hoofprint, and it has come up in the cold water as if the cold were the point. Then there's the sound. It comes from the flooded grass under the hedge, once, low and creaking, pitched up a little at the end. The old man's head comes round to it before the child has heard anything. He heard it over this bank before anybody else alive on the slope was born, and it has never once come with any warning. It comes again. The child goes down on their knees in the wet. It's sitting in two fingers' depth of water between the grass blades. It's the color of the mud and the dead leaves, with gold round the eye, and the throat going in and out at a rate nobody set. It has come up out of wherever it spent the winter, out of the cold under the bank, the shut thing in the dark doing what a shut thing does when its time has come. It doesn't move. The water goes round it. The child's hand goes out low and flat and open at the height a small thing could reach, before anybody has said whether it should. It stops a length short. It always does, and the child lets it. The frog looks at the hand the way the cub did, as if it were news. Then it moves, all at once, the way nothing on the slope moves, and it isn't away. It lands on the palm, cold and wet and lighter than the stone was, and sits there on the small pale marks with its throat going. The child goes completely still. Their mouth comes open. It lasts about as long as a bubble holds the sky, and then the frog is gone into the brown water with a sound like a dropped pebble, and the hand is empty and wet and held out over nothing. The child turns round on their knees with their face doing all of it at once. There isn't a word for it. So they reach back, take the old hand off the stick, and put it down flat on their own wet palm where the frog was, so he can feel the cold that's still there. He feels it. He laughs without any sound. On the way back up he stops at the hedge, because the child stops. The blackthorn at the corner has flowered before it has a single leaf, a scatter of small white along bare black stems, too early and not minding. The child takes his hand again and lifts it and lays it against the nearest branch. He finds the flowers from the edges in, one and then the next, each one no bigger than a fingernail and softer than anything else on the thorn. A few petals come off under his fingers and go down onto the running water and are carried. He doesn't take his hand away. One small cloud stands over the ridge and the sun works in and out behind it, the half-covered kind of light. The whole fold goes bright, and grey, and bright again, with the stream loud down the middle of it and the white going off the long spine in patches, the dark rock showing through. The light falls on the brown water and the cress at its edge, on a frog somewhere under the bank with its throat going, on a child's wet hand and an old one resting on a thorn in flower. None of it is chosen. It keeps no count of what came up out of the cold first, or who held out a hand, or who was only shown where the flowers were: *here, still here, and you.*

The drip keeps on after the cub has gone in. It comes off the ice on the torn roots one drop at a time, onto the thrown earth and the two leaves, and the child stays crouched at the top of the bank and listens to it. Up here it's the only sound under the pines. It keeps its own rate. It isn't the tune and it isn't any breath, and it won't be hurried or slowed by anybody. After a while the child hums the tune over it, very low, the low note shaking near its end and the fourth where the mistake goes. The drops don't keep time with it. They fall in the gaps and across the notes and in the middle of the wrong place, and the two go on together without either giving way, the way the old man's humming went under the pipe by the fire. Once, the red head comes to the mouth of the hole and tips to one side, and then it goes back into the dark. Then the child is running. They can't have decided to. They've kept every breath slow for three mornings and set every step down carefully under the boughs, and now they're out from under the trees in one go. They go down the bank beside the line of prints and out onto the open slope, and the snow there isn't the same snow it was at dawn. It gives under the boots, wet and grey, and every drift has a dark edge where the sun has been at it. The breath comes hard and fast and nobody minds it. The arms go out for balance for nothing. The dark pipe bangs against the pale one inside the coat. It's the way the baby went across the stubble toward the lane, the body going on ahead of its feet, every stride a fall caught a little later than the last. The sheep at the wall lift their heads as the child goes past and the cracked bell rings, and the child doesn't stop for it. The old man is at the door of the hut, and he isn't facing up the lane. His head is tipped a little to one side, the ear turned to the eave of the turf roof. There's a row of small grey fingers of ice hanging from it, like the ones on the roots, and one of them has started. A drop gathers at its tip and lets go onto the step where the fox sat, then another after it, at a rate nobody set. He heard it before anybody could have told him. He has been standing there listening to it since the sun got round, and he's heard it come off that eave in more springs than anybody else alive on the slope. It has never once come with any warning. The child stops in front of him with their chest heaving and their mouth open on everything that happened under the roots. It's the cub and its scattered prints, the sneeze, the two leaves in the thrown earth where something was breathing all night. None of it comes out. There isn't a word for any of it that the child has, only the one sound the baby says, pitched up at the end, and that isn't theirs. So they stand there breathing. The old man hears the breathing. He hears the run still in it, and something under the run that wasn't there three mornings ago, and he doesn't ask. His hand comes out sideways at the height of the child's hand, flat and open. The child takes it, and he turns them both a little toward the eave so the two of them are listening to the same thing. Drop, and a gap, and drop. Down in the crack by the step, where the wall meets the flags, the broad ribbed leaf that sat under the snow all winter has one new blade beside it. It's pale and folded and no longer than a fingernail, and it isn't honest yet about what it'll be. The drip off the eave lands a hand's width from it, again and again, and it doesn't mind. One small cloud stands over the ridge and the sun works in and out behind it, the half-covered kind of light. The white flank of the mountain goes bright, and grey, and bright again, and the snow on the turf roof slides an inch and stops. The light falls on the torn roots up in the pines and the hole under them, on the ice letting go on two roofs at once, on a green blade in a crack, and on an old man and a child standing hand in hand at a door, listening to water. None of it is chosen. It keeps no count of who ran and who stood still, or who heard it first, or what didn't need saying: *here, still here, and you.*

The child comes back the next morning, and the one after that. Nobody asks where they go. The old man hears the door that doesn't shut, and then he hears the steps go up the lane beside the line of prints, and his hand stays on his knee. At the top of the bank under the torn roots the child crouches in the same place in the snow, which is packed hard by now in the shape of two small knees. They keep the breath slow and hum the tune low with their mouth shut, and wrong at the old place the usual way. They don't go any nearer. That's the rule, and nobody had to show them it. On the third morning there are more eyes in the dark of the hole. They're low down, under the red one's chin and behind the grey one's paws, two points and then two more, too close to the ground and set too near together to belong to anything grown. For a long while they only look. Then one of them comes out. It's the size of a loaf, all ears and dark fur not yet decided on being red, and it comes out the way the lamb stood up, with the legs arriving before the rest of it has agreed to go. It stops on the thrown earth and looks at everything. It looks at the snow and the light coming in pieces through the boughs, at the child, and at its own front paws, as if those were news too. Then it walks a few steps out onto the white, badly, every foot coming down a little wide of where it was meant to, and it leaves prints no bigger than a thumb. They're scattered all over the place, nowhere near one line. It hasn't learned that part yet. The grey one opens her eyes and watches it and doesn't get up. The child's hand comes out. It isn't a grip and it isn't a reaching. It goes out low and flat and open at the height a small thing could reach, the way everything on this slope has gone across a gap. There's nothing in it. There's no grain and no stone and no pipe, only a bandaged palm held still in the cold. It's offered before anybody has said whether it should be, and it's offered knowing it won't be taken. The cub looks at it. The nose goes out toward it and stops a length short, working at the air, finding the wool of the bandage and the woodsmoke of the hut and whatever a child smells like to something that has never smelled one. The child keeps humming under the breath. The tune goes on past the wrong place and into the second place, slow, with the gaps in it like breaths, and the cub tips its head at the sound the same way the red one did, one ear further round than the other, as if the wrong place were the part worth hearing. It's the same small tilt, handed down already. The hand falls short by a length. It always does. The child lets the falling short be the whole of it. Above them on the roots the sun has got in. There's ice all along the underside of the torn trunk, where the snow melted in the day and froze again in the night, a row of small grey fingers hanging off the old roots over the mouth of the den. Now the light is on them. At the tip of one a drop gathers. It's round and clear with the whole blue wood upside down on its skin, and it holds for as long as it holds, and then it lets go. It falls past the grey one's ear onto the thrown earth. Then another comes, and another after it, at a rate nobody set, the way the drip comes off an eave. It's the first of the thaw, and nobody on the slope will call it that for a month yet. Where the drops land, in the red-brown earth pushed out of the hole and warmed a little by the breath going in and out over it, something green is showing. It's two leaves, no bigger than a thumbnail, with the wet on them. Nobody planted them. They came up in the one place on the whole white mountain where something was breathing all night. The cub turns from the child's hand, goes to them, and sniffs, and sneezes, and sits down hard in surprise at having sneezed. The child laughs without making any sound. It's the soft kind that stays in the chest and has nowhere to go. The red one makes a small sound in her throat, and the cub goes back into the dark under the roots all at once, and the eyes go with it. The open hand stays where it was a moment longer, over the scattered prints, and then it comes back to the child's knee. The light comes in level between the trunks. It falls on a hole under a fallen tree, on the ice letting go of the roots one drop at a time, on two leaves in the thrown earth and a line of small prints going nowhere in particular, and on a child crouched at the top of a bank with an empty hand, humming. It keeps no count of who came out first, or whose hand was held out and wasn't taken, or what was growing in the dark while the snow came down: *here, still here, and you.*

The next morning the child goes in under the boughs. Nobody has told them not to. They go in beside the line of prints and not in it, two to its one, and under the trees the snow lies thin and blue, with needles showing through it in places and the light coming down in pieces. It's quieter in there than anywhere on the slope. The wind is up on the ridge and can't get in. The sheep are too far off to hear, and so is the bell. The child's own feet are the loudest thing, so they slow them. They slow the breath too, slower than it wants to go, because it's plain in here that anything could hear it hurrying. The line goes on between the trunks, one print set exactly in front of the next, and then it bends down a bank to where an old pine has come over in some storm nobody on the slope remembers. The roots stand up out of the ground in a wall taller than the child, still holding the earth they tore out, and under them there's a hole. It's dark and round and no wider than a pair of shoulders. Earth has been thrown out of it onto the snow, red-brown and fresh, and the line of prints goes straight in. The child stops at the top of the bank and doesn't go down. There's a thin thread of white coming out of the mouth of the hole into the cold. It rises a little way and goes, and then comes again, and goes. Something in there is breathing. It isn't one breath. There are two of them, at two different rates that come a little closer together and then apart, the way two people breathe in a corner through a night. The child crouches in the snow with the bound hands on their knees. They don't get the pipe out. They put the flat of one hand over their own chest instead, over the pale new wood and the dark one under the coat, and feel the fist under the ribs going. It's going too fast, so they wait for it. They breathe down past where the breath used to stop, the way the long notes taught them, and out slow, and the white of it goes up between the trunks and is gone the same as the white from the hole. For a while that's all there is: three breaths in the blue under the pines, going up and not arriving anywhere. Then a head comes out of the dark under the roots. It's the red one, the ears up, and it sees the child at once and doesn't go back in. Behind it, half out of the hole, is another. It's smaller and paler at the muzzle, with the grey in its coat the old man has in his hair, and it lies down across the mouth of the den with its chin on its paws as if the child weren't there, or as if the child being there had already been decided some time in the night by somebody else. Two of them, one a length behind the other, and neither of them minding. The child hums. They don't mean to. It comes up under the breath the way it came up out of the woman shaking the cloth, the tune very low with the mouth shut, the low note shaking near its end and the fourth where the mistake goes, and wrong at the old place the usual way. The red one tips its head. The grey one shuts its eyes. Then the sun gets over the ridge and comes in low between the trunks, a long level shaft of it going right across the snow and under the torn roots. It falls on the thrown earth, on two coats that go red and grey and red again as their breathing lifts them, and on a child crouched at the top of a bank with one hand flat over their heart and a tune going nowhere. It keeps no count of whose breath was whose, or of who was let near or who did the letting: *here, still here, and you.*

The rim gives itself away over the ridge while the child is still standing in the doorway. The gold comes up behind the long spine of the beast gone white and lies level down the whole length of it, and the snow takes it at once. The whole flank of the mountain lights up from the outside, every drift and every bough, the way the windows light up in the long end of the day before anybody has lit anything behind them. The loose flakes have stopped. What's left of them hangs in the air a moment and catches the light, and then it's down. The line going up to the trees can be seen now. It's faint, only a softness in the white, one print set neatly in front of the next and filled in at the edges. The child goes up beside it. They don't walk in it. They go alongside, their own bare-soled boots breaking the crust, two prints to its one. Behind them the lane shows both lines side by side, going up the same way, as if the two had always been meant to be read together. At the edge of the pines the child stops. They've never gone in under the boughs. Nobody has told them not to, and nobody has told them to. The dark in there is plain and blue, and the snow lies thinner under the trees, and the line goes on into it and is lost. They get the dark pipe out and play. It's very low, the way they played it on the step, the whole tune at the pace of the end of a long day. Only it's morning now, and the breath goes out white and gold together over the end of the pipe. At the old place the finger goes wrong the usual way. The notes go in under the boughs, and a little snow comes down off one of them, and that's all. Then it's there. It isn't at the edge this time. It's in the open, a little way along the slope where the trees thin, standing on the lit snow with the sun full on it, so red against the white that it looks like something the dark forgot to take back. It isn't looking at the sound. It's looking at the child. The child keeps playing. They start down the slope toward the lane, slowly, at the pace of the tune, and they don't look round. Out of the edge of their eye the red goes down too, level with them and a long way off, one foot set exactly where the one before it went. It stops when the tune stops at a gap, and goes on when it goes on. Neither of them is leading. It lasts as far as the old man's wall, where the sheep are getting up stiff-legged with the gold on their backs and the cracked bell makes its one small sound. Then the child comes to the end of the tune and lowers the pipe, and when they do look there's only the lit slope with a line of prints across it, going back up into the pines. The old man is in the doorway of the hut with his face turned up the lane. He heard the tune come down the whole way, and he heard, under it, the silence that had somebody in it walking. He doesn't ask. The sun stands full on the white slope and the black boughs, on two lines of prints going up and a third coming down beside a fourth. It falls on a child at a gate with a pipe in their bound hands and the cold deep in their chest, and on something red gone back under the trees. It comes on time, unasked and unearned, and it keeps no count of who walked beside whom, or which of them was keeping the other's pace: *here, still here, and you.*

The moon comes up late over the ridge, lopsided and past the half, while the child is still sitting on the step with their hands open. By then the cold has got into the bandages. They get up stiffly and go in, and they lie down against the stool by the fire without taking off the coat. The dark pipe is in their lap and the pale one is warm against their chest. The old man's hand comes down onto their hair and rests there, and the breath drops into the slow rate before anybody could say when it did. On the high side of the lane the sheep are asleep. There are a dozen grey backs folded against the wall with the snow lying on them, legs tucked, heads down, and the two that were never counted are pressed into the middle of the warmth with the rest. Nobody's ear turns tonight. The cracked bell doesn't ring. So nobody sees it come down. It comes out from under the pines along its own line of prints, one foot going exactly where the one before it went. In the new moonlight it's red and then grey and then red again, and it passes along the wall within a length of the sleeping sheep without looking at them. It goes down past the hut as far as the step where the child sat. It stops there. It puts its nose down to the place in the snow where two small bound hands were held open around nothing, and it stays with its head down a long moment, the way a hand goes flat on a warm wall. Then it sits. It sits on the step of the hut in the moonlight with its tail round its feet and its ears turned toward the gap in the door, where there is no sound now at all, only the breathing of two people inside at two different rates. In the dream the tune is going on by itself. It's being played somewhere on the long spine of the beast by nobody. Something is walking beside the child in the snow, one line of prints beside two, and it doesn't need to be held and doesn't go away. It lasts about as long as a bubble holds the sky, and the child doesn't hurry it. Then the fox gets up and goes back the way it came, and on the way it walks in its own prints and in the child's too, where they cross. Before the grey comes, the snow starts again. It's the loose kind, a few flakes at a time turning slowly down through the moonlight. It settles on the sleeping backs and on the turf roof, and on the step, one flake to each print, as if each one were being put there. By morning there's only a softness in the white where something sat, and a line going up to the trees that could be anything. The child stands over it in the doorway with the cold in their lungs and doesn't need it to be more than it is. The snow falls evenly on the pines and the sleeping flock, and on the step and the soft place in it, and on a child in a doorway who was visited in the night and slept through it. What's in the chest has no color in it and no object, and it wants nothing back. It keeps no count of who came, or who was asleep, or which of them was keeping watch over the other: *here, still here, and you.*

The next night the child goes out again. Nobody sends them, and nobody asks where they're going. The old man hears the door that doesn't shut and turns his face toward it, and his hand stays on his knee. The snow has stopped falling. What came down in the dark lies along the lane unbroken, deeper than it was, and there's no moon yet over the ridge. The child sits down on the step of the hut with the cold coming up through the coat and the dark pipe held in both bound hands. They don't play at first. They wait with the breath going out white and coming back, and they keep it slow, slower than it wants to go, because anything listening can hear a breath hurrying. Then they play. It's very low, under the breath, the tune the whole way through at the pace of somebody at the end of a long day. The low note shakes near the end. The fourth one, the mistake, comes in its place. At the old place the finger goes wrong the usual way, and the child lets it go wrong. The notes go a little way across the white and settle into it. Nothing comes. The child plays it again anyway. They don't play it louder or better, only again, the way the bird on the fence post says the same thing each morning without being asked to. Partway through the second time something is standing at the edge of the pines, where the path turns onto the mountain. It came without any sound at all. It's low and red against the snow, the head tipped to one side and both ears up, and it isn't looking at the child. It's looking at the sound. The child's fingers want to stop. They don't. The breath wants to catch. The child lets it out slowly into the pipe and keeps going, and the tune carries on past the wrong place, the gaps sitting in it like breaths. The fox takes one step out of the trees, and its foot goes down in the snow without a sound, and it stops there. It stands in the open on the white at the top of the lane and listens to the end of the tune. Then the tune is over, and neither of them moves. The child lays the pipe across their knees. It isn't put away. It's only laid down, and the hands come away from it empty. There's nothing to hold out and no gap anybody could cross. So the two bound hands come together in front of the chest, loosely, the palms cupped and the thumbs touching, the way the grandmother held the leaf and the old man held the chick. They're held there, open at the top, around nothing, toward the edge of the trees. It isn't an offer of anything. It's the shape hands make when there's something they'd like to keep and they know it can't be kept. The fox looks at them for as long as a bubble holds the sky. Then it turns and goes back into the pines along its own prints, and the boughs let a little snow down after it and are still. The child stays where they are with the hands still cupped. Above the ridge there's no cloud and no moon, and the whole river has come out from rim to rim over the long spine of the beast gone white. It's the mist that isn't mist, too many points to join into anything, and the child doesn't try. They only look up into it with their mouth a little open and their breath going up white toward it and not getting there. Behind them in the hut the old man has heard the tune end twice and the long quiet after it, the kind with somebody in it, and then the quiet after that, the kind with nobody in it. He doesn't ask. The stars lie over all of it the same way: the pines and the soft prints going in under them, the folded sheep and the cracked bell that didn't ring, a pipe laid across two knees, and a pair of small bandaged hands held open around a place where nothing is. They give what they have, which is almost nothing and is enough, and they keep no count of who came to listen or who kept quiet so it could: *here, still here, and you.*

The child doesn't go back in to the fire. They stay in the gap with the cold on their face and the flat of the hand on the doorframe, and the snow keeps coming down loose out of the moonlit sky, a few flakes at a time. The line of prints up the lane is already going soft, and a flake settles in each one as if it were being put there. After a while the bound hand comes off the frame and goes inside the coat, past the pale new wood still warm against the chest, and brings out the dark pipe. It isn't to call anything. Nobody could call a fox, and the child knows that much. It's only that the humming stopped halfway down the lane, and the tune was left hanging there in the snow with nobody finishing it. So they play it very low, under the breath, the way somebody plays at the end of a long day. The low note comes first, held, and it shakes near the end. Then the second note, and the third, and the fourth that was a mistake. At the old place the finger comes down wrong the usual way, and the child lets it. The notes don't go down the fold tonight. There's no wind to take them. They go out a little way across the white and settle, the way the snow settles, and the pines take whatever reaches them and give nothing back. Then, at the edge of the trees where the prints went in, something catches the moon. It's two small points, low down under the first bough, green-gold and entirely still. They aren't moving on. There's no red to see now and no shape, only the eyes, held there at the height of a small reaching arm, turned toward the doorway and the sound. The child doesn't stop. They don't play louder either. They go on to the end of the tune at the same slow pace, with the gaps sitting in it like breaths, because stopping would make it about the eyes, and it isn't about them. It's only being done, and something in the trees is listening to it being done. When the last note goes out the eyes stay a moment longer. Then they aren't there, and the bough lets down a little snow, and it's the dark under the pines again, plain the way the dark is plain. Behind the child in the hut the old man has turned his face toward the door. He heard the tune stop at the end, and he heard the silence after it, the kind that has somebody in it. He doesn't ask. The child puts the pipe away and stands a while longer with the breath going out white into the gap. The flakes come down past them and show silver for a moment on the side that faces the moon, every one with all its points. The snow falls on the pines and the soft prints, on the folded sheep and the dark window down the lane, and on a child in a doorway who played for something they couldn't see and was listened to anyway. It keeps no count of who was hiding and who was playing, or which of them was the one being watched: *here, still here, and you.*

The child wakes before the moon has gone. They don't know what woke them, and they don't move for a while. They lie against the stool with the dark pipe in their lap and the cold on their face, and they look at the thin white strip across the floor, and the breath goes out and comes back at the slow rate it keeps when nobody is minding it. The snow has started again. It isn't the steady grey of the evening. It's the loose kind now, a few flakes at a time coming down out of a sky with the moon in it, turning slowly in the gap of the door and showing silver on one side as they turn. The child gets up without waking anybody and goes to the gap. The lane lies white all the way down between the roofs, unmarked, the sills all the same height under it. Down at the house with the shutter the one small window has its frost ferns lit from outside, and behind the glass, low, there's a lamp nobody has put out. Somebody down there is humming. It comes up the lane very small through the snow, under the breath and not for anybody, the old tune wrong in its places. It might be the face from the doorway, sitting up with the shawl, or it might be somebody else who couldn't sleep. The child can't tell and doesn't need to. Then there's something on the lane. It comes out of the dark at the top, where the path turns onto the mountain and the pines stand up black along the gully with snow on every bough. It's low and red, redder than anything should be in that light, and it walks the way nothing on the slope walks. Each foot goes down exactly where the one before it went, so it leaves one line of prints in the white instead of two. It stops at the old man's wall where the sheep are folded. The sheep don't get up. One grey head lifts, and the cracked bell makes its one small sound, and the head goes down again. The fox doesn't look at them. It has its head tipped to one side with both ears up and turned toward the house with the shutter, toward the humming. It stands there in the falling snow listening, entirely still, the way the old man listened at the hen's box and the baby listened at the shell. The tail lies out behind it on the white. The humming comes to the wrong place and goes through it, and one ear turns a little further, as if the wrong place were the part worth hearing. The child doesn't breathe. Then they have to, and it goes out of them white into the moonlight, a small cloud in the gap of the door, and the fox's head comes round. For a moment the two of them look at each other straight, across the width of a lane and more years than either of them has, with the snow coming down between them. It's the plain kind of looking on both sides. Nothing is asked, and nothing is afraid yet. Then the fox turns, and goes back up the one line of its own prints, and into the pines, and the boughs let a little snow down behind it and are still. The child stands in the gap a long time. The breath goes out white and comes back cold, deeper than it did before the long notes, down past where it used to stop. They don't play. They put the flat of a bound hand on the doorframe and stay there, and the humming down the lane goes on to the end of the tune and stops, and the lamp behind the frost ferns goes out. What's in the chest then has no color and no object. It's the white of the lane and of the breath and of the snow on the pine boughs, of a line of prints filling in already, soft at the edges, gone by morning. The moon lies on all of it, on the red thing somewhere in the trees and the grey backs at the wall and the dark window and a child in a doorway with the cold in their lungs. It wants nothing back, and it keeps no count of who was humming, or who stopped to listen, or who was seen: *here, still here, and you.*

Somewhere in the long notes, without anybody deciding it, the tune comes back. It starts as the low note held and let go, and the next breath goes on past it into the second note and the third. Then the fourth comes, the one found by a slipped finger, and after that the whole of it, slow, with the gaps sitting in it like breaths. At the old place, the one that has been wrong in every mouth on the slope since the room with the strings against the wall, the bound finger comes down late, or early, or on a hole it has never found before. The note comes out right. It's only once, and nobody could have meant it. It's the way the tune must have gone before anybody got it wrong, the note the wall was copying and the wax was copying, and it lasts about as long as a bubble holds the sky. Then the child's fingers go on into the second place and get that one wrong the usual way, and the tune carries on to the end as it always has. The child doesn't know. They lower the pipe and wipe the end of it on their sleeve and look at the fire. The old man knows. His hand came up off his knee at that note and hasn't come down. His face is turned toward the sound, and something in it has gone the way the grandmother's went in the chair at the edge of the field, all the lines letting go at once. The eyes can't see anything and they fill anyway. It isn't grief, and it isn't anything he could have said if he were asked. He heard that note once, a long time back, from a mouth he has never named. He thought it had gone down to the water with the rest of them. The water runs down the lines of his face in the firelight and he lets it, and doesn't wipe it. The child sees that and goes very still. Then they do the only thing that comes to mind. The dark pipe goes across on a flat bandaged palm, held out at the height of his hand, before anybody has said whether it should be. It's offered so he can play it and find the note again for himself. He finds the hand, from the edges in. His fingers rest on the wood a moment. Then they close the small fingers back over it, one at a time, and let go. He doesn't want it played again. He only wanted it played the once, and he's heard it. The snow goes on past the gap in the door all night. By the small hours it has stopped, and the cloud that nobody could see has gone off the ridge, and the moon comes up late behind it. It's a little past half and lopsided, clearing the long spine of the beast gone white from end to end. Down the lane the snow lies along every sill. On the house with the shutter there's a window with a small square of glass, the only one on the slope. The moon finds it and lays its white there through the frost ferns that have grown across it in the dark, every frond distinct, drawn by nobody. In the hut the candle has burned down on the sill and gone out on its own. The child is asleep against the stool with the dark pipe in their lap and the pale one warm inside their coat. The old man isn't asleep. He sits with his face turned to the door, and the wet has dried on it. The moon lies in a thin strip across the floor over the elder curls and the ash and a pair of small bound feet. It gives what it has, which is almost nothing and is enough, and it keeps no count of who found the right note or who had been waiting sixty years to hear it: *here, still here, and you.*

The cold follows the child back in from the door. It comes in on the coat sleeve and the bandage, and in the snow melting in their hair. The fire has gone low again along the crooked log. So the child goes to the stack against the turf wall and brings another, staggering, held out from the body, and puts it on less crooked than the last. The fire takes a while to find it. Then it does, at the rate it keeps. The child doesn't sit down straight away. They stand by the hearth and breathe into their bound hands. The breath shows white for a moment before the heat takes it, going out and coming back the way the swell does, the way the fist under the ribs does, without being asked. Then they sit against the stool and get the dark pipe out. The new one stays where it is, warm inside the coat. They don't play the tune. They play one note and hold it. It's the lowest one, all the holes covered, and they hold it as long as the breath lasts, and the breath doesn't last evenly. It comes out of the far end wavering, stronger and then thinner and then stronger, like water going over a stone. It's the note a chest makes when it's still learning how much it holds. When the air gives out the note goes with it. The child breathes in, deep, the ribs going out under the coat, and does it again, a little longer this time. Then again. They aren't practicing and they aren't getting better. They're only finding out how far down the breath goes. The old man has his ear turned to it. It isn't the tune he's listening for. It's the breathing under the note, the catch at the start of each one, the place near the end where it shakes and doesn't quite stop. He listened to the tapping in the hen's box the same way, for the thing working its way out under the sound. He doesn't say anything. Once, when a note goes on longer than any of the others, his hand lifts off his knee an inch and stays there until the note is done. Then it settles. Outside the snow has thickened. It comes past the gap in the door steadily now, grey against the dark, settling on the stick leaning by the gate and on the two sheep who were never counted. Nobody is up on the ridge to see the spine of the beast go white. He reaches up to the shelf without looking and brings down the candle end. He lights it from the new log and stands it on the sill in the gap of the door, where the snow is coming in. It isn't for him. The flame leans when the wind leans and stands up again. Its yellow falls on the flakes going past, and they show for a moment in it, every one, and then they're gone into the dark on the other side. The child plays the long note once more into the candle's light. Their breath goes out white over the end of the pipe and the flame bends toward it. The fire and the snow and the candle all take the same breath and give none of it back. They keep no count of how long it was held, or who was listening for the shake in it: *here, still here, and you.*

The half-moon goes across the gap in the door and the fire goes on along the new log, and the old man doesn't sleep. After a while he reaches past the child to the shelf by the door, where the candle end lives, and feels along it to the back. What comes down is wrapped in a rag gone stiff with years. It's a knife, a small one with a bone handle worn to the shape of somebody's grip, the blade thin from being put to the stone more times than anybody could count. With it comes a length of wood. It's pale and straight, a hand and a half long, cut from the elder by the stream in some spring and set up on that shelf to dry, and then forgotten, or not forgotten. He's been keeping it, and he's never said what for. He doesn't hand the knife across. He holds the wood out on the flat of his palm, and the child's hand comes out to take it before anybody has said what it's for. The bound fingers close on it. Then the old hands come round the child's hands from behind, both of them open, loose, the way they came round the chick in the dark, and the knife goes into the child's grip with his grip over it. It's slow. The pith has to come out first, pushed through with a hot wire from the fire until the wood is hollow and smells of smoke. Then the knife takes the bark off in long pale curls that drop onto the hearthstone and lie there. The child's hands do the work and the old hands only rest over them, lifting a little when the blade goes too deep and settling again when it doesn't. He can't see the wood. He finds it from the edges in, the way he finds everything, a thumb running down the length of it after every stroke to feel what's changed. The nail goes into the embers. When it comes out glowing it's held over the first hole, and the child's hand pushes it through, and a thin thread of smoke goes up with the sharp green smell of the wood burning. Then the second hole, then the third. There are only three, because the child only knows three notes and the fourth was a mistake. He lets it be three. It's crooked. The holes aren't even. It's wrong in several places before anybody has breathed into it. The child doesn't try it. It isn't theirs to try. They turn it over in the firelight, very serious, and then they put it inside their coat, against the chest, where the dark pipe is. There's a baby down the lane with a yellow place fading under the fringe and one word, pitched up at the end, and the baby hasn't been told about any of this. Nobody will tell them. It'll just be held out one morning, low down, at the height a small hand can reach. The old man wraps the knife back in its rag and puts it on the shelf where it came from. He doesn't wrap it away. He sets it at the front this time, where a small hand could find it. When the child goes to the door to look at the moon, it's snowing. It isn't much. It's the first of the year, a few flakes coming down out of the clear dark with no cloud anybody can see, turning slowly in the light from the gap, each one there for a moment on the dark wool of a coat sleeve with all its points, and then only wet. Over the ridge the moon has gone down behind the long spine, and the whole river has come out from rim to rim above it, too many points to join into anything, and the snow is coming down through it as if some of it had come loose. On the high side of the lane the sheep have white on their backs and don't mind. The cracked bell makes one small sound. The child holds out a hand, flat, palm up, and a flake lands on the bandage and stays. The snow falls evenly on the turf roof and the folded backs, on the elder curls on the hearthstone, on a doorway down the lane where an old face has finally gone in, and on the pale new wood warm against a small chest. It keeps no count of whose hands made it or whose it will be: *here, still here, and you.*

The door of the hut still won't shut, and tonight nobody tries to make it. It stands a hand's width open onto the lane, and the dusk comes in through the gap, and so does the last of the wind. The fire has gone down while the old man sat waiting for the flock to come in. One log is left, burning along its underside with the red gone into the grain, and there's more light coming from the ash than from any flame. The child sees to it without being asked. There are logs stacked against the turf wall, split and gone grey at the ends, older than the child. They pick one up in both bound hands. It's heavier than it looks and rough across the bandages, and they carry it the way anything heavy is carried at that size, held out from the body and staggering. It goes onto the embers badly, crooked, one end up on the old log and the other down in the ash. Sparks go up into the dark under the turf and are gone before they reach it. The old man hears it go on. He doesn't fix it. After a while the fire gets the underside of the new log and starts along it at the rate it keeps. Nobody set that rate. It's the same one the fire keeps under anybody's hand. Then the child sits on the floor with their back against the stool, gets the pipe out, and plays. It isn't walking music now, and it isn't for the sheep or the mountain or the geese. It's the tune, the whole of it this time, the way they heard it come out of him at the gate that morning. It's wrong in the old place, and in the second place, and in a third place that turns up halfway through and wasn't there before. It's slow because the bound fingers are feeling for the holes, and the gaps where they feel sit in the tune like breaths. The old man turns his head. It isn't toward the child, who is right against his knee. It's a little to one side, one ear toward the sound and the other toward the open door, the way he listened for the tapping in the hen's box, the way he listened down the fold for his mistake coming back up out of the roofs. He goes on listening that way long after it's clear the child is going to finish. There's nothing in his face that asks for more, and nothing that corrects. The listening is only open, the plain kind, all of it given to three notes and a fourth and whatever the holes allow. A leaf comes in at the gap in the door. It's one of the hedge's, red at the edge and dry, blown the whole length of the lane after the others and finally let into somewhere. It goes over and over across the floor and stops against the hearthstone, close to the heat. For a while it only lies there with the firelight coming through it, so it shows every vein, the whole map of a summer nobody drew. Then one edge curls. A thin line of light goes round it, and the leaf is gone to a small bright shape of itself and then to ash. It doesn't make any sound. It goes the way the log is going, only faster, and the fire doesn't tell one from the other. The child comes to the end of the tune and stops there, at the end this time and not halfway through, and lowers the pipe. For a moment neither of them says anything. Then the old hand comes down on the child's head, the way it did the night before, and rests there. It isn't praise, and it isn't thanks. It's the weight a hand puts down over anything that's been given and has been taken. Out through the gap in the door the moon is coming up over the ridge. It's the crescent from the gate grown half-full now, clearing the long spine of the beast, and it lays a thin white strip across the floor of the hut between the fire and the door. The strip lies over the child's feet and the stool's legs and the ash where the leaf was. Down the lane, in a doorway nobody much sees, an old face is still turned toward where the music went, and the moon finds that too. It shares what it has out evenly between the fire and the ash, the pipe and the ear, and it keeps no count of who played the tune tonight or who was only listening, or which of them was the one it was for: *here, still here, and you.*

The leaves get to the lane before any of them do. They come up off the stubble on the last of the wind and go skittering over the flags between the doors, red and gold and dry at the edges, and they pile against the low wall and the foot of the step, and one of them lands on the wax dragon and stays there, covering exactly its bump of a mountain. Nobody put it there. The two sheep come after it at the pace of grazing. They're not going up to the high side with the others. They were never counted out this morning, so they've decided they don't need to be counted in, and they come along the lane pulling at whatever green the leaves haven't covered, one a step behind the other and staying a step behind. The child is ahead of them with the pipe. It isn't the tune now. It's only walking music, the three notes and the fourth let out at the pace of feet, nearly under the breath. Somewhere in the last field it stopped being played at anything, and it hasn't stopped being played. The lane goes up between the houses into the blue. The windows have given up the gold they borrowed from outside and started on their own, one lamp and then another, and the smoke off the chimneys has gone from red to grey as the light went up off it onto the ridge. At the door of the house with the shutter that went back on the first wet morning there's somebody old. It isn't the grandmother or the man with the stick. It's someone the lane hardly sees, who doesn't come down to the field and doesn't go up to the high grass, and has sat just inside that doorway every evening for as long as anybody can remember, with a shawl and a pair of hands that have stopped doing whatever they used to do. The door is open. The face is in it, turned down the lane. They watch the child come up. It's the plain kind of looking, the head back against the frame and nothing said. The pipe goes past, and the leaves after it, and the two sheep, one and then the other. The old eyes follow the lot of it the whole way to the corner, and something in the mouth moves, under the breath and not for anybody. It might be the tune, wrong in the old place. It might be a name nobody else on the slope would know. The child doesn't look round. They don't know they were watched. That's the kind of watching it was. At the top the old man's gate is open and the stick is leaning by it. The two sheep go through without being asked and fold down against the wall with the rest, and the cracked bell makes its one small sound. The child stops playing on the threshold of the hut, halfway through the fourth note, and goes in to the fire. Below them the whole slope settles into the dusk. The doors are open along the lane with a lamp behind each one, leaves are still going over in the last of the wind, and an old face in a doorway stays turned toward where the music went, long after there's nothing left to see. The evening comes down on all of it evenly. It falls on who was playing and who was only watching the playing go by, and it keeps no count of which one of them it was for: *here, still here, and you.*

The wind comes back in the afternoon. It starts as nothing much, a stir at the top of the last uncut strip, and then it's down off the ridge with the whole height of the mountain behind it and the smell of the high snow in it. It goes along the hedge and the hedge gives up what it has turned. The leaves come off in handfuls, red at the edges, some of them gold all the way through, and none of them are asked. They go over and over down the length of the field, past the chair and the two sheep and the child standing in the stubble, and on toward the stream where the old man is still sitting on the bank. A few go into the water and are carried. The rest go wherever the wind is going, which is down. Then there's a sound over the top of it. It's high and ragged, a creak more than a call, the kind of noise a gate makes, and it comes twice, from two throats that don't quite agree. The child looks up. Two geese are coming over the long spine of the beast, low, their necks out too long for anything, their wings working slow and heavy against the wind and then with it. They're early. Nobody on the slope has seen them this year yet. They aren't going anywhere near the cluster. They're going down the fold at a slant, over the stubble and the hedge and the thread of the stream, the way the water goes and the way the leaves go, toward the flats and the grey. One is a wingbeat behind the other and keeps being a wingbeat behind, and neither of them seems to mind. The child puts the pipe up and plays at them. It's the three notes and the fourth, wrong in their places, thrown up into the wind, and the wind takes them straight off the end and carries them down the fold after the geese, faster than the geese are going. Maybe the notes get there first. The front one calls once, the gate-creak, pitched up at the end. It isn't an answer. It's only what a goose says going over. The child is sure it was an answer, and nobody corrects them. In the chair the grandmother has opened her eyes. She watches the two of them go down the sky and doesn't say anything. It's the plain looking, with her head a little back. The leaf is still in her lap. She picks it up and holds it in both hands, the palms cupped together round it with the thumbs touching, the way a hand holds water, or a chick, or anything that might get away and is meant to. She holds it a long moment. Then the hands come open, both at once, flat, and the wind finds it there and takes it. It goes off after the others, over and over, down the fold after the geese, and she leaves her hands open in her lap after it's gone. They're not needed for anything, and she's glad of that. The old man has heard the geese too. He has his face turned down the fold after them and he's laughing, because he's heard that sound go over this bank in more autumns than anybody else alive on the slope, and it has never once come with any warning. The geese get smaller. They're two marks and then one mark and then nothing over the far rise where the land goes blue. The day goes over into the long end of itself behind them. The sun comes down the length of the fold and finds everything from the side, and the stubble goes gold, and the hedge with what's left on it goes red and gold. Up on the slope the whole cluster takes the light at once. The windows light up from outside before anybody has lit anything behind them, and the smoke stands up red underneath off every chimney, so for a few minutes the small slope of roofs looks like a much larger place burning quietly on its hillside, bigger than it is and older. The child comes up the stubble toward it with the pipe, and the two sheep come after them, and the grandmother gets up out of the chair with one hand on its back and waits for them. Down on the bank an old man gets to his feet by the stick with the leaves going past him into the water. It lands on all of it and it keeps no count of what the wind took, or who opened their hands for it, or which of the two geese was the one behind: *here, still here, and you.*

The child comes up past the chair and doesn't stop at it. They go on a little way to where the stubble starts, and the two sheep come up behind them and put their heads down at once, as if this was where they'd been going all along. There, low among the cut stalks, is the daisy. It's the same one the blade missed, still open flat to whatever there is this morning, white round its yellow eye, a little more ragged at the edges than it was. The child stands over it with the pipe at their mouth and plays the three notes down at it, and then the fourth. It isn't for the flower. There's just nowhere else to stand. The wind has dropped. For once nothing takes the notes off the end of the pipe and down the fold. They go straight out across the field instead, over the hedge and the stream and the old man on the bank, and they reach the long spine of the mountain, where the grey rock stands bare above the grass. After a while they come back. They're smaller, and a little late, and softer at the edges, the way the sea came back in the shell. It's the three notes and then the fourth, wrong in their places, handed back by stone that has never once been asked to sing and has never kept anything it was given. The child lowers the pipe and stares at the mountain. Then they play the notes again, to be sure, and the mountain plays them again, to be sure. So they do it again, and again, the tune going over and coming back and going over. It isn't getting any better and doesn't need to. The rock hands it back to them each time without adding a note or taking one away, the way it would hand back anybody's. In the chair the grandmother has her head tipped a little to one side, and she isn't watching anymore. She's listening, with her ear turned to the ridge the way the old man turns his to the fold. When the next answer comes back off the stone she lets out a breath she has been holding a good deal longer than this morning. Her eyes close. Her hands stay folded in her lap. Something in the face goes loose that has been held a long time, all the lines of it letting go at once and settling lower, like a log settling on the ash. Sixty years of going up and down the same flags, and now there's a child down in the stubble playing a dead man's tune to a mountain, the mountain playing it back, and nobody needs her for any of it. She is glad of that, and more than glad. Down on the bank the old man has heard it too. He has his face turned up toward the ridge, and he's laughing without any sound. A leaf comes off the hedge behind her chair. It's the first one, turned early and gone the red of the bank at the edges, and nobody saw it turn. It lets go without being asked. It goes down over and over through the still air, taking its time, the way the wax went down a step in the rain, and it settles on the grandmother's lap between her folded hands. She doesn't open her eyes. Her thumb finds it and rests there, and doesn't close. The sun comes out from behind the one small cloud and stands full on the field. It falls on the daisy and the grey backs bent at the stubble, on a child with a pipe listening to a mountain answer them, on an old man by the water and an old woman asleep or nearly, with the year's first leaf under her hand. It keeps no count of who played the tune and who only handed it back: *here, still here, and you.*

The walk ends at the stream, and the old man sits down on the bank to get his breath back. The child doesn't sit. There are two sheep standing in the shallows a little way along. They're the same two that stopped too long at the green between the flags on the first morning, and they've come down after the tune without anybody asking them to. Now they're standing there with the water going round their legs, looking as surprised as sheep ever do to be where they are. The pipe comes back across on a flat old palm, held out sideways at the height of a small hand. This time nobody has to say what it's for. The child plays the three notes and the fourth one and starts up the fold, and the two sheep come up out of the water after them, one behind the other. They bend where the path bends and stop to pull at the stubble. Then they catch up in short trots when the tune gets too far ahead, the way the lamb follows its mother, one bad step at a time. At the top of the field, where the lane gives out, somebody has carried a chair down from a doorway and set it at the edge of the last uncut strip of grain. It's the grandmother. She has never walked down to the stream with anybody at her age, but she wasn't going to miss this, so she brought the chair to the field. She sits in it with her hands in her lap and watches them come. It's the plain kind of looking, the head a little back and nothing said, the way she looked at the step the rain had taken the dragon off. A small figure is coming up the stubble with a dark pipe that was somebody else's for sixty years, and two grey backs are coming up behind it in no particular order. The old man is still down on the bank with his face turned toward the sound of them going. The last grain stands high and pale beside her chair, and the wind comes through it at that height and makes the long swell, over and rising and over again. One small cloud stands over the ridge. The sun works in and out behind it, the half-covered kind of light, so the field goes bright, and grey, and bright again. It falls on an old woman in a chair who can see, on an old man by the water who can't, on a child coming up between them with the tune wrong in all its places, and on two sheep who are sure they were called. None of it is chosen. It keeps no count of who's leading, who's following, or who's only sitting at the edge to watch: *here, still here, and you.*

The child comes down with the flock in the new gold. The sheep pour through the turn of the path ahead of them, and the lamb pitches along at the back on its dark knee. The old man is out in the chair with the short leg, set where it catches the morning, his face turned up the mountain. He's been following the bell the whole way down, and the three notes, and the fourth. At the gate the child stops. The pipe comes out of the pocket. It isn't given back. That was settled in the hut without anybody saying so, and they both know it. It's held out sideways on a flat bandaged palm at the height of his hand, the way a thing goes across a gap to be borrowed, not to be kept. He finds the hand from the edges in. His fingers go over the cloth and onto the dark wood, and this time they don't close the child's fingers over it. They take it. It goes to his mouth the way something goes back into a place it was worn to fit. The first breath is too much after all the years. The second one is right. What comes out is the tune, the whole of it, from the room with the strings against the wall. It's wrong in the old place, and wrong again in the second place, the one the child put there on the flank and the wind carried down into the roofs. He must have heard it come back up and kept it. He plays it as if it had always been in there. The child stands with their mouth open. They've never heard him play. Nobody on the slope under forty has. Then he gets up. One hand goes on the wall and the other on the child's shoulder, with the small sound he doesn't hear anymore, and he's standing. The stick goes out ahead of him on one side. The small bound hand comes out flat on the other, and he takes it. They don't go up this morning. They go down the lane together, past the low wall with the wool-coated beast on its corner stone, past the step with the wax and the flat stone on the threshold. The baby is in the doorway with a fist on the frame and a yellow place fading under the fringe. They go on past the last house into the fold, where the stubble runs out to the hedge and the thread of the stream. He plays as he walks, at the pace of the stick, and doesn't stop at any door. The doors are open anyway. Somebody at a basin looks up. Somebody shaking out a cloth starts humming under their breath before they know they've started, wrong in both places. The baby says the word from the step, pitched up at the end, and on the next pass through the tune the old man puts it in, once, the cracked note, on purpose. Then he goes on. By the time they reach the stream the whole lane is behind them in pieces, one mouth and then another. The tune is going down the slope ahead of them on the wind, and back up it again changed, and nobody can say anymore where it started. What's in the chest walking down beside him is the plain kind, the white with no color in it and no object. It's the frost going off the stubble and the breath standing in front of an old face, the small hand and the old one and the stick tapping between them. The sun comes level down the fold onto the lot of it: the water going over its stones toward the grey, a man who can't see it playing for it anyway, and a child holding his hand who can. It keeps no count of whose pipe it was, or which of them was leading, or how many mouths the tune has come down through to get here: *here, still here, and you.*

The crescent fattens a little each evening. It hangs a little later over the ridge and a little higher in the last of the green, still thin, still only the edge of something. The child watches it from the straw at night through the gap in the shutter. They aren't asleep, because they're thinking about the note the wind played. Nobody's breath went into it, and it still came out of the pipe cracked and pitched up at the end, the baby's note, the one the child had been sure was theirs to give. They turn it over the way they turned over the stone that tripped the baby, as if it owes somebody an explanation. It doesn't owe anyone anything. Then the thinking gets thin, the breath drops into the slower rate it keeps when nobody is minding it, and the dream takes over. In the dream the pipe is lying on the long spine of the beast, as long as a fallen tree, and the wind goes into it at one end and the whole mountain sings. The sheep stand up out of the grass to listen with their ears turned. The tune is wrong in every place at once, and it's right anyway. By morning there's almost none of it left, only the edges of where something came through. The child is up before the rim gives itself away, before the boy and before the old man has come out to his chair. The pipe is in their pocket. They go up past the ring of stones in the grey, past the two leaves standing in their hoofprint with the frost on them and the three grains still keeping to themselves under the ground. They go on to the turn of the path where the grass gives out, and there they stop, with the chest working at the cold. They don't play. They hold the pipe up to the wind instead, at arm's length, the way a hand holds something out across a gap, flat and waiting, and they wait. Nothing comes for a long time. The wind is there, but it goes past the end of the pipe the wrong way, or too softly, or not at all. The bound hands start to ache with the cold. The flock is scattered on the flank below, grey backs in the grey grass, and the ewe lifts her head once at the small figure standing up there holding a stick at the sky, and goes back to grazing. Then the air shifts. It comes down off the top with the whole height of the mountain behind it and finds the angle it found in the hut, and for about as long as a bubble holds the sky there's a note. It's thin and cracked and pitched up at the end. The child's arm doesn't move. The wind plays it once and doesn't play it again, whatever the child does with the angle after that. So that's how it is. It comes when it comes, and it can't be asked for twice. So the child puts the pipe to their mouth and plays the three notes and the fourth one, wrong in their places, and the wind takes them straight off the end and down the fold, the way it always does. Below, the heads come up one after another. The frost on the grass has caught the first of the light before the sun is up, and every blade stands out small and bright along the whole flank, too many points to count. The one star is still over the ridge, going pale, not moving on. Then the rim gives itself away behind the long spine, and the gold comes level across the top of the mountain and down onto the sheep and the frost and a child with a borrowed pipe that isn't borrowed anymore. It lands on the ring of stones and the two leaves, and down in the fold on the roofs where somebody is already humming a mistake. It comes on time, unasked and unearned, and it keeps no count of which note the wind played and which the child did: *here, still here, and you.*

Nobody builds the fire up again. The old man doesn't sleep so much as go quiet on the stool, his hand still resting on the hair, his breath slowing to meet the one against his knee. Some time after the log has gone to a dull red he reaches past the sleeping head without looking. He feels along the shelf by the door for the candle end he keeps there, lights it from the last of the embers, and stands it on the sill. It isn't for him. He hasn't needed a flame for eleven years. It's for the one who will wake in the dark and not know for a moment where they are, because a hut likes one small light somewhere, and he remembers that much about waking. It burns low and steady. Its yellow lies across the floor onto the small face with its mouth a little open, onto the bandaged hands gone slack, and onto the dark wood lying in the lap. Outside, with no moon at all, the whole river has come out from rim to rim above the long spine of the beast. It's the mist that isn't mist, too many points to join into anything, and it's plain the way the dark is plain, with nobody awake to see it but a man who can't. Then the wind comes down off the ridge. It comes through the gap in the turf and in at the door that doesn't shut, and it finds the pipe lying across the child's lap at an angle. For a breath it goes in at one end and out the other, as whatever the holes allow. It's one note, thin and cracked and pitched a little up at the end. Nobody played it. The old man's head comes up, and he listens, and then he laughs without making any sound. On the high side of the lane one grey head lifts out of the fold and an ear turns, and the cracked bell makes its one small sound. Down the lane, in the straw by a cold hearth, the baby opens their eyes on nothing, all at once. They say the word into the dark, pitched up at the end, aimed at whatever it was, and nothing answers. They're asleep again before anything could. The candle burns down to the sill and goes out on its own, and the wind goes on to where nobody will be. The nights after that go round the way they do. The dark gets its turn, and then on an evening nobody marks, low in the west over the ridge in the last of the green, the crescent is back. It's the thinnest there is, a fingernail's worth of white, just beginning again. The child sees it from the gate with the pipe in their pocket, their own now without anybody having said so, and plays the three notes at it and the fourth one after. The crescent has no memory of the dark it came through and makes no promise about the rest. It lays its almost-nothing on the turf roof and the folded sheep, on the stool by the fire and the old hands resting on the knees, and on a small sleeping face down the lane with a yellow place fading under the fringe. It keeps no count of who played the note the wind played, or who was awake to hear it: *here, still here, and you.*

The flock comes in at the gate ahead of the child and goes past without being counted. The old man is awake. He isn't in the chair now. He's inside the hut on the low stool by the fire he built up when the light went, one log burning along its underside with the red gone into the grain, and the door that doesn't shut properly is standing open onto the lane. He heard them the whole way down, the three notes coming nearer through the blue and wrong in their places, and the bell somewhere under them. He didn't get up. There was no need. The child stops at the door with their chest still working from the climb. Then the pipe comes out, because that seems to be how it's done. It's held out on a flat bandaged palm at the height of his hand, the way it came across to them at noon, the way everything on this slope goes across a gap, given back before anybody has said whether it should be. He finds the hand, from the edges in. The fingers go over the cloth and onto the dark wood and rest there a moment. Then they close the child's fingers over it, one at a time, and let go. That's all. He doesn't say anything about it, and the child doesn't ask. Somebody did the same for him once, in a spring nobody on the slope is old enough to remember, and he has never once said whose hand it was. So the child sits down on the floor with their back against the stool and plays, not for anybody, quietly now with the breath they have left. It's the three notes and then a fourth one they didn't have this morning, found by a finger that slipped. The old man hums under it, wrong in the old place, and the two wrongs go along together without either one giving way. The wind comes down off the ridge in the dark with the whole height of the mountain behind it. It goes through the gap in the turf and pulls the smoke flat, and it takes whatever comes out of the doorway, the pipe and the humming together, and carries them down the lane past the open doors. Somewhere below, a window that was about to go dark doesn't for a minute. Then it goes on to where nobody will be. On the high side of the lane the sheep have folded in against the wall. A dozen grey backs are pressed together for the warmth, legs tucked, heads going down one after another. The lamb is in the middle with its dark knee under it and its eyes already shut. Now and then an ear turns at the pipe and then stops turning. The cracked bell makes one small sound and then it's quiet. The child stops somewhere in the middle of the tune. It isn't the end of it. The head has gone over against the old knee and the pipe has slid down into the lap, and the breath has dropped into the slower rate it keeps when nobody is minding it, out and back. The old hand comes down onto the hair and stays there. It isn't holding anything or keeping anything. Through the open door the one star is still over the long spine of the beast, ahead of the rest and not moving on. The fire keeps its small circle and hands out what it has left evenly, to the stool and the sleeping head and the dark wood in a small lap, and to the old face turned toward a door it doesn't need to see. None of it counts whose breath went into the pipe last, or who will wake first to find it still there: *here, still here, and you.*

In the long end of the afternoon the child goes up alone. Nobody sends them. The boy has gone down to the stream after a strayed ewe, and the old man is asleep in the chair with the short leg, his hand still open on his knee. The flock is still up on the long spine where the grass gives out, and somebody has to go and get them. So the child takes the dark pipe out of their own pocket, where it has been since noon without anybody saying whose it is now, and starts up the path past the ring of stones. The climb is harder than it looks from the gate. The path goes to ruts, then to one rut, then to stone, and the bound hands find the rock whenever the slope needs them. Past the turn where the lamb stood up, the ground goes on climbing toward the high side of the ridge. The old white lies there in the shadowed gullies, grey and grained and gone hard. It has lain there since a season nobody in the cluster is counting. The breath starts coming shorter. The fist under the ribs picks up its rate the way it must, and nobody asks it to. The sheep are scattered across the last of the grass below the snow. The child stops, puts the pipe to their mouth and plays the three notes, wrong in their places. Then again, and then again. That's all they have, and they don't need any more of it. Every time, the wind takes the notes off the end of the pipe and carries them down the fold. Every time, the child sends up the same three after them. It's the way a bird on a fence post says the same thing every morning. It's the way the swell goes over and rises and goes over again. It's not practice and it isn't getting any better. It's only being done. One head comes up, then another. The ewe comes first, with the lamb behind her pitching down the slope on its dark knee, and then the whole loose handful pours together at the child's feet. Every one of them is sure they were called. This time nobody could say they weren't. Going down, the child sees the cluster below them the way it looks from up here in the last light. The windows are gold one after another, smoke is standing up red off every chimney, and the whole small slope of roofs is burning quietly in a fold of ground like a far larger place. At the top of the lane there's one thread of smoke thicker than the rest, going up out of the gap in the turf where somebody has woken and put a log on. The flock goes down toward it without needing to be told. Above the ridge, ahead of all the others, the one star has come out. It holds its place over the long spine of the beast and doesn't move on. The child plays the three notes at it once, on purpose, and nothing answers. Then they go on down behind the sheep in the blue, playing the tune the rest of the way to the gate. It keeps no count of how many times a thing has to be played before it's somebody's own: *here, still here, and you.*

The child plays until the breath runs out, and then plays a little more on what's left. It's the same three notes over and over, and the wrong places move around each time, because the bound fingers can't feel the holes through the cloth and have to guess. Up on the long spine the flock has settled into the high grass. They're only grey backs now, scattered across the flank like wool shaken out and left, the lamb somewhere among them with its dark knee. The wind keeps coming down off the top with the height of the mountain behind it. It takes each note as soon as it leaves the end of the pipe, and nobody on the slope can say where they go. The old man can. He sits in the chair with the short leg and his head tipped a little to one side, the ear turned downhill instead of up. It isn't toward the child beside him. It's toward the fold, where the notes have gone on ahead. He waits the way he waited by the hen's box, a long time and not needing to see anything. Then it comes back up the slope, very small and in pieces on the wind: the tune, from somewhere among the roofs. It's somebody at a door, or at the bottom of the lane where the stubble starts, or bent over a basin, humming it under their breath and not for anybody, with no idea they've just been handed it. It's wrong in the one place, and in the second place too, the place the child put there a minute ago on a borrowed pipe. That's gone down into the cluster already and been taken up, before anybody could say whose it was. The old man laughs under his breath. He doesn't explain it and the child doesn't ask. They only lower the pipe and stand there with their mouth open, listening, the way the baby listened to the shell. The same wrong note is coming back up out of the smoke and the doors and the gold roofs, from a mouth they'll never find out about. Below them the whole small cluster lies along its slope with its doors open and its chimneys going. One small cloud stands over the ridge, and the sun works in and out behind it, the half-covered kind of light. The roofs go bright, and grey, and bright again. It falls on the sheep on the mountain and the wind coming off it, on an old ear turned down the fold and a child holding a pipe that isn't theirs yet, and on somebody down in the lane humming a mistake as if it had always been part of the tune. None of it is chosen. It keeps no count of who played the wrong note first, or who carried it down, or who will be humming it after both of them are gone: *here, still here, and you.*

They come down together at the pace of the stick, and at his gate he doesn't go in. There's a chair there against the wall of the hut, a plain one with a rush seat worn through in the middle and one leg shorter than the others, set where it catches the morning. He lowers himself into it the way anybody does who has spent eighty years going up and down the same slope. One hand goes on the wall and the other goes on the child's shoulder, and there's a small sound when he comes down that he doesn't hear anymore. The child stays standing beside him with the bound hands held a little out from their sides, not sure yet what they're for. He feels inside his coat. What comes out isn't grain this time. It's a pipe, an older one than the boy's, dark with handling and gone smooth as the stick's grip, cut from something hollow in a spring nobody on the slope is old enough to remember. The holes were burned through it with a hot nail by a hand that isn't his, and he has carried it in that pocket since before the wall. He doesn't play it. He holds it out sideways on a flat open palm at the height of the child's hand, the way everything on this slope has gone across a gap, before anybody has said whether it should. The child takes it in the bandaged fingers, carefully, as if it might get away. It goes to the mouth the right way round, because they've watched the boy do it every morning. The first breath is too much and nothing comes. The second one is too little and a hiss comes out of the far end, all air. The old man doesn't correct anything. He only puts his free hand over the child's hand on the pipe, loosely, and lets his fingers find the holes through the cloth, and lifts one. The third breath comes out a note. It's thin and cracked, and it isn't the tune. Then there's another one, a little higher, and then the child's fingers go wrong on their own and it's the old tune after all, or three notes of it, wrong in its one place and a second place besides. The old man laughs under his breath. He takes his hand away and leaves it there in the air an inch off, not needed for the moment and glad of it. Up on the flank the sheep lift their heads. They know a pipe even when it's played badly, maybe especially then. They've been hearing the tune come wrong out of one mouth or another since before any of them were born. The ewe turns first, and the lamb after her with its dark knee, and then the whole loose handful starts up the long spine toward the high grass, pouring together at the turn of the path and going up into the light as if they'd been called. They weren't, not really. They were going anyway, and the child is sure they were called, and nobody corrects them. Then the wind comes down off the ridge with the whole height of the mountain behind it. It takes the notes out of the end of the pipe before they've gone anywhere and carries them off down the fold, over the stubble and the roofs and the smoke standing off the chimneys, and on down toward the stream and the river and the grey that keeps none of it apart. It flattens the fleeces going up the slope and lifts the old man's thin hair and goes through the gap in the turf roof, and it goes on to where nobody will be. The child keeps playing into it anyway. The old man sits with his face turned up the mountain toward a flock he can't see, following it by the bell, and his hand lies open on his knee where the pipe was. The sun stands full on the gate and the chair with its short leg, on the old hands and the small bandaged ones and the dark pipe between them, and on the sheep going up the long spine of the beast with the wind behind them. It keeps no count of whose pipe it was first or who will play it last: *here, still here, and you.*

The sheep will have it by noon. The child knows that, because they watched one of them take the leaves in the crack by the neighbor's step in a single bite, and the drip off the eave hasn't brought anything back there yet. So they look round the trampled place for stones. There are plenty. The mountain is mostly stone under a thin coat of grass, and the frost has worked a few loose along the path. The first one they find is grey, rough on the side that was in the ground and smooth on the side that was up. The child doesn't set it down. They hold it out on the flat of a bandaged palm, low down beside the old hand, and wait. He finds it the way he finds anything, from the edges in. The fingers go over the cloth and then onto the stone and close on it. He weighs it once, then feels along the ground for the hoofprint and sets the stone at its lip, rough side down, as if he'd been asked. The child brings another, and another. Each one goes across on an open palm and is taken, and each one is put down by a hand that can't see where it's going and doesn't put a single one wrong. It's a small ring when it's done, seven stones, or eight, badly matched, with a gap on the downhill side where the child ran out of patience. It won't keep off anything that really wants in, and the old man doesn't say so. The two leaves stand in the middle of it, not having been asked, still not honest about what they'll be. There's something in his coat pocket after that. It's a few heads of grain, the early ones cut for the oven and carried up in the basket, gone loose into the lining where the pocket has worn through. He rubs one between his palms, blows the chaff off into the wind, and holds out what's left, a small heap of pale kernels in the cup of the old hand. The child takes three. They go into the ground inside the ring, pushed in with a bandaged thumb beside the leaves, where nobody would ever sow anything and where nothing will likely come of it. Then the rest go to the ewe, who has come over to see what the hands are doing, and she takes them off the flat palm with her soft lips and her breath warm on his wrist. The lamb comes up behind her, pitching, and gets nothing and doesn't mind. One small cloud stands over the ridge and the sun works in and out behind it, the half-covered kind of light. The ring of stones goes bright, and grey, and bright again. None of it is chosen. And what fills the chest, crouched there with the knee getting cold and the hand still open where the grain was, is the plain kind. It has no color and no object. It's the white of the frost going off the grass, of the old man's breath standing a moment in front of his face, of a ring built by somebody who couldn't see it for something nobody can name yet. It lies on the leaves and the stones, on the ewe and the lamb, on the old hand and the small bound one resting on their knees, and on the three grains in the dark under the frost. It keeps no count of who carried the stones or who laid them, and it wants nothing back: *here, still here, and you.*

The child's hands are the ones that need it this morning. Nobody noticed last night. The wheeling in the stubble had its price, and when the grandmother turns the small palms up at the table in the grey light they're raw across the heels, a scatter of red points where the cut stalks went in, wrong in several places at once. She doesn't say anything about it. The water comes out of the jar in the tin cup, and the corner of the apron goes into it, and then a strip is torn off the hem of something already torn. It goes round one palm and then the other and gets knotted loose, deliberately loose, and checked with a thumb. The child holds the bound hands out in front of them and looks at them with great seriousness, the way they looked at the stone. Then they go out, because the pipe has started. The old man is at his gate at the top of the lane. The flock has gone past him and up, and he's standing with the stick in one hand and his face turned toward the mountain. He's listening for the one with the hitch in its step. He wants to go up after it and find out about the knee, and he's gone up that path every morning for longer than the wall has had anything on it. This morning the frost is still in the ruts, and he stands there longer than usual before starting. The child doesn't ask. They come up beside him and put a hand out sideways at the height of his hand, flat and open, the bound one, the way the grandmother's hand came out from the doorframe to be taken hold of. He finds it the way he finds anything, from the edges in. The fingers go over the cloth and stop there a moment. He doesn't ask what it is either. Then his grip closes on it, not hard, and the stick goes out ahead on the other side, and the two of them go up the lane together. The stick taps and the small hand pulls a little, and neither of them is quite leading. The rim gives itself away over the long spine while they climb. The gold comes down the flank of the mountain to meet them before it touches anything in the fold. Behind them in the white grass there's a line of prints. There are the small bare ones, the old flat ones turned a little out, a row of round dents where the stick went down, and the sheep's cloven marks crossing and recrossing all of it. The prints are going dark as the frost gives under the sun, and they'll be gone by the time anybody else comes up. At the turn of the path where the grass is trampled, the lamb is there with the ewe. It's grazing on four legs with the scab gone dark on its knee and paying the two of them no attention at all. The old man crouches, slow, and his free hand goes down flat on the ground and feels along it. It finds a hoofprint, and inside the hoofprint, the two leaves. They're taller than yesterday, by nothing anybody could measure, still wet with the night, still not honest about what they'll be. His fingertips rest beside them without closing. The child crouches too, and puts a bound palm down flat beside his. The sun stands full on the flank of the mountain. It falls on the lamb, on the old hand and the small bandaged one lying side by side in the grass, on the leaves between them, and on the prints going down behind them into the fold. It keeps no count of who led whom up the mountain or whose hand was the one that needed holding: *here, still here, and you.*

They come in when the ewe has taken the lamb back up the lane to the others, slow, the lamb going after her in short pitching bursts on its sore knee. The leaf is left lying in the dust where it fell off. Nobody picks it up. The baby is too tired now to crawl and too tired to be carried without complaining, and complains the whole way over the threshold, and then stops all at once halfway through the one word with the head gone over onto the grandmother's shoulder. The bed is only a box of straw under a blanket in the corner by the hearth, where the child slept at that size and somebody else before that. She lays them in it and doesn't straighten anything. The lump is still blue under the fringe. The grey thread is still on the wrist, loose. She lights the candle end from the fire, stands it on the sill, and sits down on the stool beside the straw with her hands in her lap. She doesn't need to be there. She stays anyway, the way the old man sat by the hen's box, and the way the one who sat by her through her own first falls must have stayed. The flame burns low and steady and lays its small yellow over the sleeping face and the old one bent near it. Somewhere in there the old head goes forward too. Her chin goes down onto her chest and her hands stay folded, and the two of them breathe in the corner at two different rates that come a little closer together as the night goes on, the way the word did between two children in the stubble. The candle burns down to nothing on the sill and goes out without anybody seeing it. The moon goes across the window and down behind the ridge. Then the rim gives itself away over the rise, and the grey comes into the room before either of them wakes. The baby is first. The eyes open straight onto the window, and the hand goes up to the forehead and finds the lump smaller and gone yellow at the edges. It stays there a moment, flat, palm down on a hurt that has mostly finished, the way a hand goes down over anything that was hurt and is being let go. Then the hand comes away. Up the lane the pipe starts. The flock comes down past the doors with the cracked bell somewhere in it, and at the back of them comes the lamb. It isn't lying down and it isn't carried. It's walking. There's a hitch in the one leg where the knee was scraped, and a dark place in the wool there that will be a scab by evening, but the steps are four at a time and none of them falls. It goes past the step and past the leaf in the dust and up onto the long spine of the mountain after its mother, into the light, and nobody asked it to. The baby watches it go from the straw with their mouth open. The old woman wakes to the pipe and doesn't move yet. The gold comes level through the window onto the burnt stub on the sill, on the straw and the stool, and on two faces that slept the night a foot apart, and it falls up the mountain on a lamb going on its own legs. It keeps no count of who kept watch or who healed or which of them slept first: *here, still here, and you.*

The day goes over into the long end of itself, and the whole slope of roofs takes the last of it at once. The windows light up gold from the outside before anybody has lit anything behind them. The smoke off the chimneys stands up red underneath, and for a few minutes the cluster looks like a far larger place burning quietly on a hillside, bigger than it is and older. Then the gold goes up off the roofs onto the ridge and leaves the lane in the blue. The leaf is still on. It has gone limp and dark with the warmth of the forehead under it, and the grey wool has slipped a little over one ear, and the baby has stopped putting a hand up to it. It belongs to them now, the way the thread on the wrist does, and nobody who passes on the lane asks about it. The flock has gone up to the high side against the old man's wall. The lamb hasn't. It came down the whole lane at the back of the others, further than it had ever walked, and somewhere between the turn of the path and the step its legs decided they'd done enough. Now it's lying in the dust at the corner of the low wall with its four new legs folded under it wrong, too tired to fold them right. There's a scrape on one knee where the stubble had it, a small raw place, pink through the wet wool, the kind every first walk earns. The ewe is a little way up the lane, calling for it and not coming back. The baby sees it from the step. They get down backwards off the threshold, feeling for the flags with one foot the way they saw the child do it off the wall, and then it's hands and knees across the lane because it's quicker, and the leaf on the forehead flaps at every shuffle. At the lamb they stop. They come up onto their knees in the dust, both knees down and the seat back on the heels, the way the grandmother went down on the wet stone and the old man crouched at the hen's box. It's the height where a small thing and a smaller thing can look at each other straight. The lamb doesn't get up. It's past getting up. The small hand goes out, and it isn't a grip this time and it isn't a reaching that falls short. It arrives. It goes down flat on the lamb's side, palm down, fingers spread, and stays there. It's the same weight that went over the red place on the forehead in the stubble, and over a covered hole, and a warm wall, and the stone beside the ash where somebody slept one night. It doesn't rub and it doesn't hurry anything. The side rises under it and falls, out and back, at the rate the fist under the ribs keeps for everybody. Then the baby does the only thing that comes to mind. The other hand goes up to the forehead and pulls at the leaf until the wool gives, and the leaf comes away green-black and warm and a little chewed. The lump underneath is blue and fine. The leaf goes down on the lamb's knee over the scrape, pressed on with a whole flat palm, badly, too hard, the wrong way up. It won't stay. There's no thread to hold it and no one who knows how to tie one. The baby holds it there with the hand instead, and that has to do. Nobody showed them. They were shown this morning, once, by somebody who was shown on this step or another one, and that turns out to be enough times. The grandmother watches from the doorframe and doesn't come down. The child starts to get up and she puts a hand on their shoulder, and they stay. The lamb turns its head and puts its nose against the small wrist with the grey thread on it, and breathes there, and the baby laughs without making any sound. It's the soft kind that stays in the chest and fills it up and has nowhere to go, so it doesn't go anywhere. Then the ewe gives up calling and comes back down the lane after all, slow, and stands over the two of them, and licks the lamb along the neck and the baby along the ear in the same stroke, not distinguishing. Nobody corrects her. The moon comes up over the ridge while they're still there. It's past the full now and a little lopsided, clearing the long spine late, and it lays its white down the lane without any hurry on the lamb folded wrong in the dust and the ewe standing over it, on a leaf held on a knee by a hand too small to tie anything, and on the blue lump bare under the moon with nothing on it now. It falls on the old woman in the doorway who knew about the leaf and on the child beside her who will know about it next. It gives what it has, which is almost nothing and is enough, and it keeps no count of who was hurt first or who bound whom, or of which one of them was holding the other: *here, still here, and you.*

The lump comes up anyway. By the time they're back at the step it has risen blue and tight under the fringe, and the baby keeps putting a hand up to it and taking the hand away, surprised each time to find it still there. The grandmother sits them on the threshold beside the flat stone and goes in for water. It comes out in the tin cup the goat's milk came in, rinsed, cold from the jar by the door. She wets the corner of her apron in it and lays it on the lump. She doesn't wipe. She only lays it there and lets the cold do what cold does, and the baby flinches and then goes still under it. Then her hand goes down flat on the ground by the step, palm down, the way it goes down over anything, and she feels along the edge of the flags. She's looking for a leaf she knows. It's the broad flat kind with ribs running the length of it, the kind that comes up wherever feet have pressed a lane hard enough, the kind nobody planted and nobody has ever had to. It grows in the crack at the corner where the wall meets the step. She picks one and puts it in her mouth and chews it, not long, the way somebody showed her on this step or another one. Then it comes out green and bruised and goes onto the forehead over the lump, cool and wet and smelling of the lane. She needs something to keep it there. She looks round once. Then she takes the grey thread off the ball in her pocket, the lumpy one spun by the fire last night out of a day's snagged wool, and goes round the small head once with it, over the leaf, and knots it at the back. It's loose, deliberately loose. She checks it with a thumb. The baby sits there with a leaf tied to their head and holds it together. The mouth is pulled down at both corners and the chin works, and the eyes are full to the rims and don't spill. It's a small child's first try at a thing grown people spend their whole lives doing, holding the water in because somebody is being kind and it seems wrong to cry at kindness. It lasts about as long as a bubble holds the sky. Then the child sits down on the step beside them and puts both arms round them from the side, clumsily, too tight, the way the child was lifting them onto the wall, and that's the end of holding it. It comes out quietly this time, into the child's shoulder, not the long helpless kind from the stubble but the smaller one that comes after it, when the hurt has already gone and what's left is only having been hurt. The child doesn't say anything. They rock, badly, over and rising and over again, out of time, and the grandmother lets them do it and doesn't take over. Up at the top of the lane the pipe starts. The flock is coming down off the mountain into the long end of the day, pouring together at the turn of the path. The cracked bell is somewhere in the middle of it, and the new lamb is at the back going after the ewe in its short pitching bursts, further than it has ever walked. The sheep come down past the doors and crowd at the low wall, and one of them stops at the step and puts its nose to the crack at the corner where the leaves grow, and gets one. Nobody chases it. The boy stops too. He looks at the baby with the leaf tied on and the wet face in the child's shoulder, and he takes the pipe from his mouth and plays the one note, the cracked one pitched up at the end, on purpose. The head comes up off the shoulder. The lashes are wet. The mouth opens and the word comes out, thick and small, aimed at the pipe, and the pipe answers it again, and then the boy goes on up the lane after his sheep. The sun comes down the length of the fold and finds the step from the side. The stubble goes gold and the roofs go gold, and the smoke off the chimneys lights up underneath as it rises. It lies along the threshold on the flat stone, the tin cup, the wet corner of an apron and a green leaf tied on with grey wool, on two children holding each other on a step and an old woman sitting a little way off with her hands in her lap, not needed for the moment and glad of it. It keeps no count of who fell, who bound it, or who held on: *here, still here, and you.*

The daisy stays where it is, and the baby doesn't. They're up again before anybody expects it. There's no hand to pull on, only the heels of both palms pushed down into the stubble and the seat coming up after them. Then they're off across the cut field toward the lane, and it isn't walking anymore. It's the next thing, the one nobody teaches. The steps come too fast for the legs, and the body goes on ahead of its feet the way the wind goes ahead of the rain, and every stride is a fall that gets caught later than the last one. The arms are out. The nightshirt fills with air behind them. The grey thread is on the wrist and the mouth is open on the one word, pitched up and thrown ahead at nothing, at the going itself. The child comes after them laughing and doesn't catch up, because nobody has ever caught up with that on the first morning it happens. At the edge of the stubble there's a stone. It's grey, set in the dry ground where the field meets the lane, and it has been there longer than the field. The foot finds it, or it finds the foot. The going goes on for one more stride without anything under it, and then the baby is down on the hard ground with the forehead where the hands should have been. For a moment there's no sound at all. The mouth is open and the breath is held somewhere it can't come back from yet, the whole face gone still around what has happened to it. Then it comes. It's the long helpless kind, the first real hurt, loud enough to go the length of the lane and up the flank of the mountain, where the boy stops with the pipe halfway to his mouth. The grandmother gets there first. She has been at the low wall the whole time, and she comes down into the stubble at the pace sixty years of the same flags allow, which is not fast and is fast enough. She doesn't lift them at once. The old knee goes down onto the ground with the small sound she makes every time, and the hand comes out low and open at the height a small body can reach. It's the same hand that came out sideways from the doorframe to be taken hold of. This time it's offered the other way. The baby takes it, the whole-hand way, and pulls, and is brought in against the apron. Her palm goes flat over the red place on the forehead and stays there. It doesn't rub and it doesn't hurry anything. It's the same weight that goes over a covered hole or a warm wall or a place somebody slept one night. The crying goes on a while and nobody asks it to stop. She rocks a little, forward and back, over and rising and over again. It's the same swell the grain made before it was cut and the wax made on the step, and it's the swell she was rocked in, on this ground or some other, by somebody whose name went down to the water a long time ago. The humming starts under her breath, wrong in its one place. Gradually the crying comes down into it and starts keeping its time, and then it's only the breath, catching, and then it's only the breath. The child picks up the stone. It's small enough to hold in two hands, rough on the side that was in the ground and worn smooth on the side that was up. They turn it over and look at it with great seriousness, as if it owes somebody an explanation. It doesn't. It never meant anything by it. So they set it down again by the wall, out of the way of feet, where the other flat stone from the threshold would have gone. The baby watches from the apron with wet lashes and a hiccup, the forehead already coming up a small blue lump that will be gone in a week and remembered by nobody. One small cloud stands over the ridge and the sun works in and out behind it, the half-covered kind of light. The stubble goes bright, and grey, and bright again. It falls on an old woman kneeling in a cut field and the child standing over a stone, on the daisy still open where it was missed by the blade, and on a small face turned into an apron that has held the same face in every generation it has been worn. It keeps no count of who ran first, or who fell, or whose hand came out to lift them: *here, still here, and you.*

The lamb takes its first walk before the sun is clear of the cloud. It goes after the ewe in short pitching bursts, and the legs still aren't sure they belong to it. Each hoof comes down a little wide of where it was meant to, and the whole body lurches to catch up. Then it stops, braced and trembling, and looks surprised to be further on than it was. The ewe doesn't wait. She moves off along the flank at the pace of grazing, and the lamb has to keep choosing to follow her, one bad step at a time, which is how anybody has ever got anywhere. The baby wants down. They arch on the hip and push with both feet until the child gives in and sets them on the path where the grass gives out and the stubble begins. It's short and gold and sharp underfoot, the field cut yesterday by somebody singing. The small bare soles go down flat and wide on it and the face does something complicated. It isn't crying yet. It's only finding out what the ground is. Then the knees start to shake, the same fine shaking that went through the lamb's legs in the wet grass, the body being asked to carry all of itself at once with nothing else to lean on. The child's hand is there, flat and open at the height of a reaching arm, and it isn't taken. The baby goes without it. It's five steps this time, or six, over stubble. They lean too far forward and every one of them is a fall that gets caught, and the arms are held up and out on either side for nothing, for balance, the way the old man's stick went out ahead of him to find the way. The lamb is a little way off on the slope, doing the same thing on four legs. Neither of them is watching the other. Then the seventh step goes over and it's the seat of the nightshirt in the stubble and a look of complete outrage. The child doesn't pick them up. They do the only thing that comes to mind. They throw both hands down onto the cut field and send their legs up over their head in a sideways wheel, badly, one knee bent and a foot catching the air at the wrong angle, and they land in a heap with stubble in their hair. It's wrong in several places at once. The baby stares at it. Then the laughing comes up out of them the helpless way, before anything about it could be thought, at a world where somebody would go over on their own hands on purpose. The whole small body shakes with it, and it's the same shaking as the legs, only this time nothing needs to hold. The child does it again, worse, to keep it going. The boy on the slope above laughs too and doesn't know why, and the ewe lifts her head at the noise and goes back to the grass. Down where the baby came down, among the cut stalks, a daisy is open. It's small and low, white round a yellow eye, missed by the blade because it grew under the reach of it, and the petals have opened out flat to whatever there is this morning. Nobody planted it. The baby's hand finds it without looking for it. The fingers close on it the whole-hand way, and then, for once, loosen, and the hand lies open beside the flower, touching it and not taking it. The small face is still wet from the laughing. The sun comes out from behind the one cloud and stands full on the flank of the mountain and the cut field below it. It falls on the lamb going after its mother on legs it has had for an hour, on a child upside down in the stubble for the third time, on a baby sitting where they fell with their palm beside a daisy, and on the boy's pipe coming out of his pocket at last. It comes on time, unasked and unearned, and it keeps no count of who fell, who stood, or who went over on their hands just to make somebody laugh: *here, still here, and you.*

The rim gives itself away over the ridge, and the flock goes up into it. The boy is behind them with the pipe in his pocket this morning, because there is no need of it yet. The sheep know the way up the long spine better than he does. One ewe stays back. She stands apart at the turn of the path where the grass is still grey with the night, her head down, and nobody told her to. By the time the child gets there with the baby on their hip, staggering, there are two of them. The second one is still wet. It's all legs, and it's trying to get up on them. The front ones go out stiff and fold, and the back ones come up and the whole thing pitches forward onto its nose in the grass. Then it tries again. The legs shake the way a thing shakes that has never once held weight and is being asked to hold all of it at once. The knees knock and the hooves are too soft to grip, and nobody could say it's going well. The ewe doesn't help. She licks it, slow and rough along the neck, and makes a low sound in her chest, and lets it do its own standing. That's the rule, and nobody showed her. The boy crouches and doesn't touch it either. The baby watches with the whole face. They were on the flags themselves a day or two back, four steps and a sit and a look of complete surprise, and something in them seems to recognize this. The mouth comes open. Then the lamb is up. It's splay-legged and swaying, all four hooves planted wide in the wet grass, and it's standing on nothing but itself for about as long as a bubble holds the sky. Then it goes to the ewe and finds what it needs, and the whole small body goes still against her. The oldest arrangement on the mountain has started up again without anybody deciding on it. At the lamb's feet, where the ewe stood through the dark, something green is coming up. It's two leaves no bigger than a thumbnail, right in the trampled place, with the night's wet still on them. Nobody planted it. The baby's hand comes out. It isn't a grip. It's the whole arm, the fingers spread, reaching toward the lamb, and it falls short by an arm's length the way it always does. The child doesn't carry them closer. They let the reaching be the whole of it. A drop is hanging off the tip of one of the new leaves. It's round and clear, with the whole morning upside down on its skin, and it holds for as long as it holds. Then the lamb shifts its weight and a hoof comes down beside the leaf, and the drop lets go into the ground. One small cloud stands over the ridge, and the sun works in and out behind it, the half-covered kind of light. The flank of the mountain goes bright, and grey, and bright again. It falls on the ewe and the wet lamb shaking on its four new legs, on two leaves in a hoofprint, on a boy crouched with his hands on his knees, and on a small open hand held out toward all of it and not arriving. None of it is chosen, and it keeps no count of who stood first on this mountain or who will stand next: *here, still here, and you.*

The moon goes down behind the ridge a little after the spindle stops, and then there's nothing between the lane and the rest of it. The whole river comes out from rim to rim, the mist that isn't mist, the scattered points that people who needed to get somewhere once joined into beasts because the dark wouldn't stay plain. Nobody on the slope is awake to see it, except the one who can't. One comes loose. It's a short bright stroke going down at an angle over the long spine of the mountain, there and gone in less than a breath, the way the wet feather went onto the block in one quick flick. It lands nowhere anybody could walk to. On the high side of the lane a sheep lifts its head at nothing and turns one ear, and the cracked bell makes its one small sound. Then the head goes down again. In the hut the old man hears the bell and then hears something else under it. By the fire there's a box of straw where a hen has been sitting for three weeks without anybody's opinion. She's gone flat and fierce over what's under her. From under her, very small, comes a tapping, patient and uneven, stopping and starting again. It's the shut thing in the dark doing the one thing a shut thing does when its time has come. No eye is on it, and there's no way an eye could get in. He doesn't need to see it. He leans in with his head on one side and the ear close to the straw, the way the child listened to the shell. He waits a long while, and the tapping goes on. Then the hen shifts, and the hands go in under her warm and slow, both palms open and cupped, and bring out what's there. The shell has given along one side. Something wet and folded is working its way out of it into his palms, and it's a mess, the way every arriving thing is. He holds it in the dark by the last of the fire and doesn't help it. That's the rule, and somebody showed him long before he could have been asked: you let the thing do its own splitting. By the time the window at the top of the lane goes grey the chick is out, a damp scrap of down drying in the cup of an old hand, cheeping at a rate nobody set. The child comes up the lane at first light with the baby on their hip, staggering, because the baby heard the bell and wanted to go toward it. The old man is at the door of the hut. He crouches when he hears them, and the hands come out low, at the height a baby can reach, with the chick sitting in them. It's offered before anybody has said whether it should be. The baby doesn't grab. For once the fist stays open. Both small palms come out flat, side by side, the way a loaf is taken or a basin is held, and the chick is tipped into them. It's lighter than the stone was, warmer than the cup was, and it's moving. The baby goes completely still. The mouth comes open, and a bubble forms on the lip and holds there, round and clear, with the whole grey-gold sky upside down on its skin. It holds for as long as it holds, and then it lets go. The child bends down and puts the baby's hands up close to the baby's ear, the way the shell went to the ear on the beach. The small head tips toward the cheeping. Then the one word comes out, pitched up at the end and aimed at the thing in the hands. The chick answers it, or seems to, and nobody corrects either of them. The rim gives itself away over the ridge. The gold comes up behind the long spine and lies level down the whole length of it, onto the sheep getting up stiff-legged against the wall and the turf roof with its thread of smoke. It falls on an old man crouched in a doorway, on a child holding a baby, and on a baby holding a chick in two open palms. The shell lies broken in the straw and is done with. The light arrives on time, unasked and unearned, and it keeps no count of what came out of the dark in the night or who was listening when it did: *here, still here, and you.*

The moon comes up full that night, or as near to full as makes no difference. It clears the ridge a little after the last window has gone gold and lays its white down the whole length of the long spine, where the sheep are no longer. The boy brought them down again at dusk. They're folded now on the high side of the lane against the old man's wall, a dozen grey backs pressed together for the warmth, one leg folded under and the heads down. Now and then an ear turns at something nobody else hears. The cracked bell makes one small sound when its sheep shifts, and then it's quiet. At the top of the lane there's a hut built against the slope. It's older than the houses, low, turf on the roof and a door that doesn't shut properly. It's where the old man kept the flock in the years before the wall, and a thin smoke still goes up out of the gap in the turf because he still likes a fire there. He sits inside it with the stick across his knees and doesn't need the light. Down the lane, in the house with the burnt-out lamp, the baby is asleep. It happened the way it happens at that age, all at once and halfway through the one word. The head went over onto the nearest arm, the fist opened and let go of nothing, and the breath dropped into the slow rate it keeps when nobody is minding it, out and back. The grey thread is still on the wrist, loose, because a wrist gets bigger. By the fire somebody is spinning. It's the wool off the low wall and off the verge and the rough corner stone, a whole day's worth of tufts snagged where the flock pushed past, gathered up by the child in both hands and brought in without anybody asking. A spindle turns. It's only a stick with a whorl of fired clay on it, dropped and twisting and caught and wound on, and the thread comes out of the fingers lumpy and uneven and wrong in several places, the way every thread anybody ever spun started out. It gets a little better every arm's length. Nobody is counting the lengths. The fire is low, one log burning along its underside with the red gone into the grain, and it gives what it has left evenly to the spinner's hands and the sleeping face and the small ball of grey growing in a lap. Out through the gap in the door there's one star over the ridge, ahead of the rest, holding its place above the beast and not moving on. The humming starts under the breath with the turning of the spindle, wrong in its one place. It keeps time with nothing. And what lies over the lot of it is the plain kind, no color in it and no object. The moon's white falls on the folded sheep and the turf roof and the smoke going up out of it, on the stone still on the threshold, on the ball of thread and the loose knot on a small wrist. It keeps no count of whose wool, whose fire, or who is asleep, and it wants nothing back: *here, still here, and you.*

In the morning it happens again, the way the mornings here do, without anybody asking for it. The rim gives itself away over the rise. The window goes grey, then a thin line of gold runs along the sill. The moon is still up in the west, pale and most of the way round, not yet willing to go. Then the pipe starts up at the top of the lane. The boy is taking the flock out. The sheep come down past the doors with their bell going somewhere in the middle of them, pulling at the verge and crowding at the low wall where the wool came off. The old man stands at his gate and counts them out by sound, the same way he counted them in. The pipe goes ahead of all of it. It plays the old tune, wrong in its one place, the breath going in at one end and coming out as whatever the holes allow. The baby is on the threshold before anybody has carried them there. They came across the flags on hands and knees and pulled up on the doorframe, and now they're standing with one fist on the wood and the grey thread on their wrist. The flat stone is still where it fell last night. The head turns after the sound. Then the free hand goes out. It isn't a grip. The whole arm reaches with the fingers spread, opening and shutting at the air in the direction of the pipe, the way it reached for the shell on the chair arm and fell an inch short. This time it falls short by the width of a lane. The boy sees it. He's no older than the child, and he stops in the middle of the sheep with the pipe at his mouth. Then he comes over, because nobody has told him not to. He crouches at the step and holds the pipe out low, at the height a baby can reach, flat on an open palm. It's offered before anybody has said whether it should be. The small fist takes it the whole-hand way, and it goes to the mouth, of course. The wrong end goes in first, and there's no sound. The boy turns it round without taking it away. The baby blows, or does something close to blowing, a wet push of breath with no idea behind it. What comes out of the far end is one thin note. It's cracked, pitched a little up, and it isn't in the tune. It's the one sound the baby has, and this time it goes out through a green reed with holes burned in it by a hot nail. The baby goes completely still. The boy laughs. The child in the doorway behind them says the word back, and the baby lets go of the pipe to say it too. The pipe falls onto the step beside the stone, and the boy picks it up and wipes it on his sleeve. Then he goes on up the lane after his sheep, playing the tune again and wrong in the one place. At the top, where the path turns onto the mountain, he plays the baby's note once, on purpose. Nobody has taught him to. Then he goes on. The flock pours up the flank of the ridge like wool shaken out of a sack. It goes along the long spine of the beast in the new light, the pipe getting smaller, the bell coming back on the wind and then not coming back. The moon lets go in the west at last. It has no memory of the dark it spent the night crossing and makes no promise about the rest. The gold comes level down the fold onto all of it. It falls on the stubble and the smoke and the old man's gate, on the sheep going up and the boy going up behind them, on a doorframe with a small fist on it, and on a mouth still open after the only note it has ever made. It arrives on time, unasked and unearned, and it keeps no count of who played first or who will play the last one: *here, still here, and you.*

The sound stays. All afternoon the baby keeps it and tries it on things: on the goat when it comes back up the lane with its bell, on the cup, on the flat stone that is still in the fist, on the child's face. It is always the same one sound, pitched up at the end. Nobody knows what it means, and it goes on meaning it anyway. The child answers every time. By the middle of the afternoon the answer has drifted closer to the question, and the question has drifted a little toward the answer. Nobody set out to do that, and two people now half share a word that nobody else on the slope would recognize. Down in the field the cutting goes on, and the singing with it, arriving in pieces on the wind. The grain comes down in swathes behind the arm, and the stubble stands up short and bright where it has been, and the swell has less to move in every hour. Then the day goes over into the long end of itself. The sun comes down the length of the fold and finds everything from the side. The stubble goes gold, and the roofs go gold, and the smoke standing off the chimneys lights up underneath as it rises. Up on the flank of the mountain the boy is bringing the flock down. It comes before the sheep do: a thin sound off the high grass, a pipe cut from something hollow and green in spring, with a few holes burned through it with a hot nail. It plays the old tune, and it is wrong in the one place. The breath goes in at one end and comes out the other as whatever the holes allow, the way water comes out of a narrow place as whatever the stones allow. The boy isn't playing for anybody. The sheep come down the mountain to it anyway, the whole loose handful of dropped wool pouring together at the turn of the path. The one small cracked bell goes somewhere in the middle of them, out of time with the pipe. The baby hears it from the child's lap on the step. The head comes up and turns, and the mouth opens, and the sound goes out toward the mountain, pitched up at the end and aimed at the pipe this time. It's the only word they have. It crosses the whole width of the stubble and doesn't arrive, and nothing answers it. Then the pipe stops for a breath, and starts again, and carries on down. The flock comes into the lane at dusk and goes up past the doors, bending where the lane bends, crowding at the low wall and pulling at the verge. The old man is at his gate at the top with the stick, counting them in by the sound. Windows take over the work one after another. The pipe goes into a pocket, and the boy goes into a house, and the lane is left with the smell of sheep and cut grain and somebody's supper. The child carries the baby in, staggering. The flat stone falls out of the opening fist onto the threshold and stays there. What comes over the rise after the last of the gold is the plain kind. It has no color in it and no object. It lies on the stubble and the stone on the threshold, on the pipe in a pocket and the sheep folded in against each other on the high side of the lane, and on a small mouth already asleep, halfway through the one word it knows. It keeps no count and it wants nothing back: *here, still here, and you.*

The wall is too high to stay on for long, and the child knows it. They get down first, backwards, feeling for the flags with one foot. Then they reach up and take the baby off the stone the way they got them up, both arms round the middle and staggering, and set them down where the lane stops and the grain begins. The stone is still in the fist. The heads of grain stand higher than the baby's head, pale and dry and whispering, and the wind comes through them at that height, so the swell goes over just above the small face instead of far off down the fold. The baby looks up into it with their mouth open. Then the child holds out a hand. It isn't to lift them this time and it isn't to give anything. It's only there, flat and open at the height of a small reaching arm, the way the grandmother's hand came out sideways from the doorframe to be taken hold of. The baby takes it with the free fist, the one without the stone, and pulls. They come up off the ground unsteadily, and for a moment they're only held up. Then the child's hand goes a little loose, deliberately loose, the way a knot goes round a thing that will thicken. The baby stands. Nothing is holding them except their own two feet, set wide and flat in the dust at the edge of the field, and the grain moving over their head. It lasts about as long as a bubble holds the sky. Nobody sees it but the child, and the child doesn't call anybody, because there's nobody to call who would get there in time and it doesn't need a witness. Up on the flank of the mountain the flock has spread out across the high grass like dropped wool, and the old man's two sheep have caught up with the rest. The bell comes down on the wind again, very small. Somewhere in the grain below, somebody cutting is singing. It isn't for anybody. It goes up and down under the breath with the swing of the arm, wrong in its one place, the old tune that has been coming down through mouths nobody remembers since before there was a field here to sing it in. It rises and falls with the wind, so it arrives in pieces. The baby hears it. The head turns toward the sound, and the mouth opens, and something comes out of it. It isn't a word yet. It's one sound, pitched up at the end the way a question is pitched, and aimed at the singing, or the bell, or the sheep on the mountain, or the whole of it at once. Nobody could say which. The child laughs and says it back, wrong in a different way, and the baby says it again, louder. Then they sit down hard in the dust with the stone still in the fist and look astonished about it. The fold runs away below them in its long curve, grain and hedge and the thread of the stream, then the next rise and the one after, all the way out to where the land goes blue. One small cloud stands over the rise and the sun works in and out behind it, the half-covered kind of light. The field goes bright, and grey, and bright again. It falls on the singer bent in the grain, on the sheep on the mountain, and on two children at the edge of the field saying the same sound to each other and meaning nothing by it that anybody else would understand. None of it is chosen. It keeps no count of who stood first, or of the first thing anybody said: *here, still here, and you.*

The old man and the two sheep go up the lane together, and one of them turns out to have a bell. It's a small cracked one on a cord, and it has been silent all morning in the verge. Now it goes at every step, not quite in time with the stick, the two sounds taking turns up the slope toward the high ground where the rest of the flock went. The baby listens to it go from the step. They sit where they came down, in the nightshirt with the grey thread on their wrist, and turn the whole head to follow the sound until it's past the last roof and hard to tell from the wind. Then the hand goes down to the flags and finds a stone. It's only a small one, knocked loose from the corner of the wall by the sheep pushing past, grey and rough on one side and worn smooth on the other. It's picked up in the whole-hand grip and looked at, and it goes to the mouth, of course, and comes out again. Then it's held, because it's cold and heavy and it's the baby's own, and nothing more is done with it. Somebody lifts them after that. It's the child, who is too small to be doing it and does it anyway, both arms round the middle and staggering. They get as far as the top of the low wall, where the baby is set down in the child's lap on the warm stone and held there. From up there the whole thing is below them. The slope of roofs goes down with smoke standing off the chimneys, and the doors are open along the lane, and past the last house the grain is standing high and pale all the way to the bottom of the fold. The wind comes down off the ridge again with the height of the mountain behind it. It goes over the roofs, and then it reaches the grain and makes the long swell, over and rising and over again, going away from them down the whole length of the field like something being handed along. The baby watches it go. It's the first time the eyes have had that much to hold at once, and they don't try to hold it. They go from the roofs to the moving grain to the long spine of the mountain lying out in the sun with the flock going up its flank like a handful of dropped wool, and they stay open on all of it, the plain kind of looking that hasn't learned yet that most things are nothing. The bell comes back once on the wind, very small, and goes again. Nobody tells the baby what any of it is. The stone stays in the fist. And the sun stands full on the lot of it: the mountain and the sheep on it and the old man who finds his way up by the stick, the roofs and the grain going over, and two children on a wall, one of them holding the other and the other holding a stone. It comes on time, unasked and unearned, and it keeps no count of what anybody saw first: *here, still here, and you.*

Two of the sheep come back down. They're the ones that stopped too long at the green between the flags and lost the flock at the turn. They arrive at the low wall at a loose trot with their heads up, bleating, and then forget what they were bleating about and put their noses in the verge. Behind them, slower, comes the one who was sent to fetch them. It isn't the boy. It's the old man from the house at the top, who has walked this lane every morning for longer than the wall has had anything on it, and who hasn't seen it for eleven years. The stick goes ahead of him. It's pale and worn smooth at the grip, and it swings low from side to side and taps the flags, the verge, the corner stone, *tok*, the same sound the goat's bell made, finding the way the way the root found it in the crumb. The rest of him follows where it says. At the corner stone the stick stops, and the hand comes down off the grip onto the warm stone and goes along it flat. It finds the wax, which stands up off the stone by the width of a hair, which is as much as it needs. The fingertips go slowly along the neck, too long, and down into the legs, wrong in their number, and up into the three lines of fire and the bump that was meant for a mountain. Then they find the wool caught across its back and stop there. He doesn't ask what it is. He gets it the way the child got it from the dream, from the edges inward. The baby is standing against the wall with both hands on the stones and the grey thread on their wrist, watching the whole of this with their whole face. Then the small palm goes flat on the dragon beside the old one. Neither hand is looking, and both are finding out. The old man laughs under his breath at whatever it is he has found. Then the wind comes down off the ridge. It has the whole height of the mountain behind it, and it comes along the lane lifting the loose wool off the wall and the dust off the flags. It flattens the fleeces of the two sheep and bends the grain at the bottom of the lane into its long swell, over and rising and over again. It goes through the open door and stirs the ash under the burnt-out lamp, and then it goes on down the slope where nobody will be. Somewhere in its track a leaf is going over and over, torn off something green and carried with no idea where. The stick taps once more and he turns the sheep up the lane with it. The baby sits down suddenly on the step. Up on the ridge the long spine lies out in the full sun with the cloud gone off its back, which is how everyone else sees it this morning and not how he does. The wind keeps no count of who saw the beast and who only found it with a hand: *here, still here, and you.*

The sun comes the rest of the way round and stands in the open door, and the baby wants down. They've wanted down all morning, arching on the shoulder and pushing at the arm with both feet. So they're set on the flags with a hand under each arm, and the hands stay there a moment, and then they don't. It's three steps. They aren't straight. They lean too far forward and catch themselves the way every step anybody has ever taken is a fall that got caught, the bare soles going down flat and wide onto the warm stone of the threshold. Then the fourth one goes over and it's the seat of the nightshirt on the step and a look of complete surprise. Nobody claps. The grandmother, or whoever is in the doorframe this morning, only laughs under her breath and holds out a hand, and the small fist takes it. That one's a grip now. The sheep are still in the lane where the last of them stopped. One has left a tuft of itself on the rough corner of the low wall between the two doors, a twist of grey-white snagged on the stone where the flock pushed past. The child comes out, picks it off, and pulls it long between two fingers the way they've seen it done at the next door on winter evenings. They roll it against a thigh until it holds. It's hardly a thread, lumpy and uneven and wrong in several places, but it's a thread. It goes round the baby's wrist, once, and is knotted loose, deliberately loose, because the child has been told a wrist gets bigger. It's checked with a thumb. Then the wax comes out of the pocket, the red stub worn to the width of a thumb that has gone from a grandmother's apron to one small hand and then another, and the child squats at the wall where the wool came off. On the flat of the corner stone, warm now, the beast goes down again. The neck is too long and the legs are in a number nobody could defend. The fire comes out of a mountain in three lines. And this time, because the stone is rough there and the wool has left a few fibres caught in it, the dragon has a coat, grey threads lying across its back that nobody drew and nobody takes off. The baby comes along the wall on hands and knees, and then, holding the stones, on feet, with the grey thread on their wrist, and puts a flat palm on the red beast to find out what it is. The answer comes back warm. The sun stands full on the doorway and the wall and the two of them, on the snagged wool and the wax and the first four steps already gone from the flags. It keeps no count of who walked first or who will walk last: *here, still here, and you.*

The goat doesn't get far. The bell stops at the bottom of the lane where the grain starts, and the woman with the empty basket catches it up there without hurrying. She's done this before. She sets the basket down on the verge upside down, sits on it, and brings the goat in against her knee with one hand on the cord. There's a tin cup in her apron. The milking is the oldest work on the slope after the feeding in the chair, and it's done the same way. The cheek goes against the warm flank. The two hands take turns, and the thin sound of it goes into the tin, first sharp and then softer as the cup fills. The goat goes on chewing the crust from the step and doesn't seem to notice what's being taken. It gives what it has this morning. Nobody thanks it, and it has never once asked to be thanked. Then the cup comes back up the lane held level at the chest, the way anything full is carried, slopping a little at every third step. At the open door it isn't set down. It goes across the gap on a flat palm, still warm from the animal, before anybody has asked for it. The baby is on the shoulder with their head turned to the window, and a little of it goes onto a spoon, and the small mouth finds the spoon and makes a face at the taste of it, the plain unguarded kind a face makes before any of it has been thought about. Then the mouth opens again for more. The small hand comes out after that. It's flat and open, and it pushes at the cup, not to refuse it but to find out what it is, the way a hand goes out toward a fire or an iron or a warm wall. The answer comes back warm. Past the last house the sheep are going up to the high ground. There are a dozen of them with a dog and a boy behind, moving in the loose way sheep move, bending where the lane bends, stopping to pull at whatever green comes up between the flags. One of them stops at the crack by the neighbor's step where two small leaves are standing and gets them both in one bite, then goes on. Nobody chases it. It was going to eat something, and that was as good a thing as any, and the drip off the eave will bring something else up out of the same wet by spring. The door stands open behind all of it with the cup on the table beside the torn loaf and the burnt-out lamp. The sun comes the rest of the way over the rise and stands full on the slope of roofs, on the goat's bell going *tok* down toward the grain, on the white on a small chin and the sheep going up into the light with green in their mouths. It comes on time, unasked and unearned, and keeps no count of what was given and what was taken: *here, still here, and you.*

The loaf comes across from next door before anybody in the house is properly up. It's half of it, torn on the step, carried over the low wall between the two doors by a neighbor in a coat thrown on over a nightshirt, and set down on the table beside the burnt-out lamp without anybody needing to be woken for it. The steam comes up out of the torn side and goes. In the chair the feeding goes on. The small mouth works and slows and works again, and the arm holding the baby has not really woken all night and doesn't need to. The old arrangement carries on under the bread smell. One gift sits on the table and the other goes on in the chair, and neither of them is counted. Then the baby is done and comes up onto the shoulder, heavy and warm, the head turning against the neck to look at the window. The child on the floor wakes to the smell and nothing else. A piece is torn off for them, and they eat it with sand still on their cheek. When the crumbs are gone the hand goes down flat on the table where the loaf was. It isn't reaching for more. It's the small acknowledgment a body makes over a thing that was given and has been taken. Outside, the lane goes down between the roofs to where the houses give out and the grain starts. It's standing high and pale this late in the season, and the wind comes across the top of it and makes the long swell again, over and rising and over again, the same one the wax made on a step a hundred miles off. Somebody has let the goat out. It comes up the lane on its own business with a bell on a cord round its neck, going *tok* at every step. It stops at the neighbor's step and eats the crust somebody left there. Nobody chases it, because it was going to eat something and that was as good a thing as any. Behind it a woman comes up from the field with a basket on her hip. It's the wide shallow kind, half full of early heads cut for the oven, and she holds it the way anything full is held. At the open door she doesn't set it down. She holds it out across the gap, both palms under the weight, before anybody has asked what it's for. It's taken, and some of it taken out, and the basket goes on lighter to the next door and the one after that. Nobody counts the loss. By the time it reaches the last house it's mostly straw and the smell of the field. The whole small cluster is awake now, with smoke standing up off the chimneys, doors open along the lane, and the goat's bell going down toward the grain. The sun works in and out of one small cloud over the rise, the half-covered kind, and the lane goes bright, and grey, and bright again. It falls on the torn loaf and the sleeping weight on a shoulder, on the flat hand on the table and the heads of grain in a passing basket, and on a goat with crumbs on its chin. None of it is chosen and none of it is preferred, and it keeps no count of who baked, who fed, or who carried the grain up from the field: *here, still here, and you.*

The rim gives itself away over the rise before anybody in the house is up to see it. The window goes grey first, and then there's a thin gold line along the sill, and the lamp on the table has burned itself out in the night with the chimney still smoky on one side. The baby is awake first. It happens all at once and for no reason, the way it does at that age. They lie in the crook of the arm that fell asleep holding them, and they don't cry. They only look. The eyes go from the window to the ceiling to the face above them with its mouth a little open. Then they find the shell. It's still on the arm of the chair where the child set it, small and ridged, turned the right way round, with the new light on it. The looking stays there a long time. It's the plain open kind that hasn't learned yet that most things are nothing, so everything gets the whole of it. Then the hand comes out. It isn't a grip yet. It's the whole small arm reaching, the fingers spread the way fingers spread when a hand wants to be a hand and not a fist, and it opens and shuts at the air an inch short of the shell. Nobody takes it. Nobody holds it up to the ear. The reaching is the whole of it this morning, and it doesn't need to arrive. The arm under the baby wakes because of the movement and settles them without really waking, and the small mouth finds what it needs again. It's the oldest arrangement in the house, taken up again in the grey without anybody deciding on it. The humming starts under the breath, half asleep, going up and down and wrong in its one place, the tune coming down through mouths nobody remembers. Outside, somewhere down the slope of roofs, a bird goes off. It's loud and ragged and a little ridiculous, a sound that has been made from the same fence post at this hour since before anybody alive in the cluster was born, and it has never once been asked to. Another answers it from further off. The child on the floor stirs at that, with sand still on their cheek, and doesn't wake either. Then the smell comes up the lane ahead of any door. Somebody has had the oven going since the dark. By the time the light gets level through the window there's a loaf on the step next door, the plain round kind, too hot to hold, shifted from hand to hand and already being torn. The light falls across the chair and the three faces and the small shell nobody reached. It keeps no count of who woke first: *here, still here, and you.*

The car climbs the rise and stops in the smaller cluster, where the door was left open with the lamp behind it. The lamp is an old one. It has a wick in oil and a glass chimney gone smoky on one side, and it stands on the table because somebody likes one small flame in a house after dark more than they like the switch. The baby wakes when the engine stops, the way babies do, and cries. So they're lifted out of the back and carried in against a shoulder, and then they're in the chair by the lamp being fed. It's the oldest arrangement in the house, older than the house, older than any wall with a beast on it or any step with wax on it. The small mouth finds what it needs and the crying stops mid-breath, and the whole body goes slack against the one holding it. Nobody decided on that either. The weight is taken without any decision being made. Then the child comes in behind them with sand still in the creases of their hands, and something in the fist after all. It's a second shell, a smaller one picked up off the wrack line on the way to the car and kept quiet about. It goes onto the arm of the chair, close to the small head, the right way round. Nobody can say whether the sea is audible from there. Probably it isn't, not really, but the child is sure it is, and nobody corrects them. The humming starts again. This time it's the one in the chair, under the breath and not for anybody, going up and down and wrong in its one place. It's the old tune from the room with the strings against the wall, and it arrives at this chair without anyone remembering who taught it. The child leans on the chair arm and hums the wrong place a different wrong way, and neither of them minds. The feeding slows. The mouth lets go and stays a little open, and the breath drops into the slower rate it keeps when nobody is minding it, out and back. The child goes too, sitting on the floor with their head against the chair, sand on their cheek. The lamp burns lower. A hundred miles off, in the dark, the swell goes over and rises and goes over again along a beach with nobody on it, and takes the green stone, and turns it over at the one rate it keeps. The first shell on the wrack line fills and empties with every wave. And over the rise the moon comes up, most of the way round now, and lays its white through the window on the lamp and the chair and the three sleeping faces and the small shell on the chair arm with the sea in it. It keeps no count of who was fed or who was humming: *here, still here, and you.*

The child doesn't keep the shell. There's a baby on the sand a little way up the beach, somebody else's, set down on a blanket in a coat too big for them while the grown-ups shake out the wet things. The baby has been watching the humming with the whole face, the way the very small watch anything that makes a sound. So the shell goes across. It's held out on a flat open palm, low down at the height a baby can reach, the way the wax went out on the step and the loaf went across the gap. It's given before anybody has said whether it should be. The baby doesn't take it. They don't know how yet, and the fist only opens and shuts at the air near it. So the child kneels and does the rest. The shell goes up to the small ear, the right way round, and is held there gently with two fingers, and the child goes quiet and waits. The sea is in it. The baby's face does what faces do before anything has been thought about. The mouth comes open, the eyes go wide and stay on nothing, and the whole small body holds still to listen to a room no eye has ever gone into. It's the swell going over and rising and going over again, the same one the barley copies and the wall copies and the wax copies, arriving for the first time at an ear that has no word for it and doesn't need one. Then the humming starts again, under the breath and close by. It's the old tune, wrong in its one place, going into one ear while the sea goes into the other. The baby laughs, helpless, at nothing anybody could point to. Nobody explains any of it. Then the families gather their things and the beach empties the way beaches do at the end of the day. The shell is set back down on the wrack line and the prints go up the sand into the grass. Inland, along the coast road, the roofs of a town start to come up out of the dusk, and then the smaller cluster beyond it on the rise. The windows go gold one after another, smoke stands up off the chimneys, and somebody's door is open with a lamp behind it. The last light comes level off the water onto the lot of it: the shell by itself on the sand with the sea still in it and nobody listening, and a car on the road with a baby asleep in the back, one ear still turned toward the window. It keeps no count of who heard the sea first, or who was humming: *here, still here, and you.*

The glass goes back to the sand in the end. It takes years. It rides in a coat pocket and then a drawer, and then another pocket, turned over by one thumb and then a different one, until the baby who had it in their mouth on the flats is a child who walks down to the water on their own. They come back to the same beach on the same kind of business, with the sun just clearing the rim of the sea and laying gold down the wet sand to the feet. Nobody tells them to do it. The hand comes out of the pocket closed and goes out over the wrack line and turns over, palm down, the way a hand goes flat over a covered hole or a painted wall or a place somebody slept one night. The fingers open. The small green stone drops the last few inches onto the sand and lies there with the morning caught in it, frosted, worth nothing, given back. The next tide will have it again, and the sea will go on turning it at the one rate it keeps. Nobody decided that was the arrangement. Then there's a shell, because there always is along this line. It's ridged and turned in on itself, and the child picks it up and holds it to the ear the right way round this time. The sea is in it. It's the same sound and not the same sound, the swell going over and rising and going over again, arriving from a room no eye has ever gone into. The child listens a long time with their head on one side. Then they start humming along to it under their breath, not for anybody. It goes up and down and is wrong in one place, the old tune out of a room with strings against the wall, coming down through mouths nobody remembers to one that has never heard of any of them. At the top of the beach, where the sand gives up and the wiry grass begins, something green is up in the lee of a bleached plank with a scrub of red wax still on it. It has two leaves, no bigger than a thumbnail. Nobody planted it. It will be a season before the leaves are honest about what it is. The light comes level off the water onto the lot of it: the stone in the wet, the shell at a small ear, the tune going wrong in its one place, the two leaves standing in the salt wind. It arrives on time, unasked and unearned, and keeps no count of who held the glass or for how long: *here, still here, and you.*

The moon goes round in its own time. It fills over the ridge night after night and then empties again, until it comes up late and thin on the other side, a pared-down curve rising in the small hours just before the dark gives out. By then the green stone has moved. Nobody moved it. One tide higher than the rest brought the swell up the flats in the night. The foam came in along the wrack line, its bubbles holding what little light that moon had, and it lifted the glass and set it down a few yards further up the sand, and then it went back without it. The shell went too. They lie near each other now above the ordinary reach of the water, a spiral full of the sea and a stone with the light inside it, put there by nobody. Then there's a family on the beach in the morning. They've come down from some place inland on their own business, and they have a baby. The baby is set down on the sand in a coat too big for them and gets straight to the only work there is at that age. Both hands go into the wet, and everything the hands can find goes to the mouth first. The glass is found. It's picked up in the whole-hand grip and looked at, and then it goes into the mouth, of course, and comes out again shining. Somebody crouches and takes it gently and hands back the shell instead, and the shell is held to the face the wrong way round and laughed at. Then there's a crayon, because there always is. It's a stub of red worn down to the width of a thumb, fished out of a coat pocket where it has been riding for weeks. It goes onto the flat of a driftwood plank bleached grey by the salt. The baby makes a mark there. It's a short, jagged scrub pressed so hard the wax flakes off onto the grain, and it isn't a beast or a wave or a direction. It's the first mark, the one that comes before all the others, made on a shore a hundred miles from a step where another one just like it is drying beside a four-mark fish. Neither baby will ever hear about the other. The wax stays on the wood. The spray lands on it and beads up and runs off. The glass goes into somebody's pocket after all, to be turned over in a thumb for years without anyone knowing why. And the late thin moon hangs over the water as the sky goes grey behind it. It gives its almost-nothing to the plank and the scrub of red and the small head bent over it, and to the foam letting go along the whole length of the beach. It keeps no count of which first mark came first: *here, still here, and you.*

The tide goes out in the dark of the moon. No crescent comes up over the water that night and none is missed. The sea pulls back further than it does on other nights, and it leaves the flats bare and shining under the stars all the way out to where the swell still moves. Left along the wrack line there's a shell. It's small and ridged and it spirals in on itself, turning the way the smoke turned and the road turned and the root turned in the crumb, and the animal that built it is long gone. It held something alive once, and now it holds the sound of the sea. Nobody is there to put it to an ear. The foam comes up round it and lets go, bubble after bubble, each one holding the stars upside down for as long as it holds. Beside it in the wet sand there's a piece of glass. It came off a bottle somebody threw a lifetime ago, and the sea has had it every day since. The sea took the edges off first, then the shine, and then it kept turning it over and over in the grit until what's left is a small green stone with the light caught inside it, frosted and soft to the thumb and worth nothing to anybody. It was broken, and the breaking was never the end of it. Out past the flats the fish turn in the deep water with no light at all, doing what they have always done in the dark. Up on the step, a hundred miles inland, somebody has lit a candle end and stood it in the window. It isn't for anyone. It's only there because the night came down with no moon and a house likes one small flame somewhere. It burns low and steady. Its light lies across the sill, over the wax dragon on the stone outside, over the four-mark fish and the scrub of red that is nothing yet. The baby wakes in the night the way babies do, all at once and with no reason. They lie in the crook of somebody's arm and look at the flame for a long time without a sound, the stub of red wax still shut in the fist. Then they go under again. And the next evening, low over the ridge in the last of the light, the crescent is back. It's the thinnest one there is, a fingernail's worth of white over the long spine of the mountain, just beginning again. It has no memory of the dark it came through and makes no promise about the rest. It lays its almost-nothing on the window and the step and the sleeping face, on a shell full of the sea and a green stone on a beach nobody is walking, and it keeps no count: *here, still here, and you.*

Somewhere a long way below the last roof, the water gets where it was going. It takes a night and most of a morning. The ditch runs into the stream and the stream into the river, and the river goes wide and brown and slow through flats nobody on the step has ever stood on. At last it goes into the grey. The rust that was a red dragon is in it somewhere, and the grit off the boots, and a crumb of loaf. None of it can be told apart from the rest now, and none of it is lost. The swell takes it the way the swell takes everything, over and rising and over again. It's the real one this time, the one the barley copies and the wall copies and the wax copies, and it has never once been told it's being drawn. Something turns in it just under the surface. It's a fish, an actual one, a flick of silver with a tail and more than four marks to it, going about its business in water deep enough to hold it. It has no idea there's a smaller one in wax on a step a hundred miles inland, with the rain beaded on its back. It turns once and goes down. Then the rim gives itself away out over the water. The black thins along one edge and the gold comes level across the swell before it touches any shore. A cloud is standing up off the sea into it. It's built out of everything the land let go of, the steam off a basin and the breath of a kitchen and a shower that went east over a fold. The wind has it stretched out long, with a neck too long for anything that has ever flown and ragged pieces hanging off it where legs would be, in a number nobody could defend. The underside goes red first, then gold. For a minute it's the beast again, and nobody drew this one either, and nobody on the beach is looking up to see it. Then it thins and pulls apart, and it's only weather going inland. At the edge of the sand the foam comes in and stays behind when the wave goes back. It's a thin lace of bubbles, each one holding the whole gold sky upside down on its skin for as long as it holds. Then it lets go, and the next one lets go, with no hurry in any of it. Back up on the step the sun comes over the ridge onto the dry wax. The baby is asleep. They went down on the threshold sometime after the laughing, with the head on the grandmother's lap and the stub of red still shut in the whole-hand grip, the chin still marked with it, the breath dropped into the slow rate it keeps when nobody is minding it. Nobody moves them. The first mark is there on the stone beside the fish, a scrub of red that is nothing yet and may never be anything, and its maker is asleep a foot away with no memory of making it. What's laid over the lot of it is the plain kind, the white with no color in it and no object. It lies on the sleeping face and the old hand resting on it, on the foam going out along a shore none of them will see, and on the cloud coming apart over the land. It keeps no count and it wants nothing back: *here, still here, and you.*

The baby isn't done. The wax is still in the whole-hand grip, wet from the mouth, and it comes down on the step again beside the first scrub. This time it drags. It goes in a long crooked stroke from the dragon's foot down and away to the corner of the stone, pressed so hard the wax skips and catches and skips. It isn't aimed at anything. It's only where an arm goes when it's small and leaning and the weight is all on one side. But it ends at the fish. The child sees that before anyone else does and goes still over it. The line the baby made runs from the beast straight down into the swell, as if the dragon had been going to the water the whole time and nobody had said so. Then the eave lets go of what it's been holding. A last run of drops comes off the edge together, lands on the top of the step and finds the wax. The water won't go over the line, so it goes along it. It runs down the baby's crooked stroke, beading and sliding and gathering, from the dragon's foot to the four-mark fish, and pools there in the wave for a moment. It sits in the fish, clear, with the sky in it. Then it spills over the lip of the step into the lane. The grandmother watches it go and says nothing. The lane tips gently toward the houses, the way lanes do in a place built on a slope, and the little run of water goes down it between the flags. It picks up the rust that was the red dragon an hour ago, and the grit from the boots, and a crumb of the loaf torn on the step at dawn. It goes past the door where the cloth was being shaken and the shutter that went back. It goes past the doorways one after another, not stopping at any of them, taking whatever the lane gives it and bending where the stones bend. Somewhere below the last roof it joins the ditch, and the ditch joins the stream coming cold off the shade side. The stream goes down past the fold toward the grey that keeps none of it apart, and nobody will be there to see any of it arrive. On the step the three heads stay bent over the stone. The wax holds. The dragon, the crooked line, the fish with the water gone out of it, and the scrub of red that is nothing yet are all still there, dry now, faintly shining where they turned the rain. Below them the lane is only wet. The smoke goes up off the chimneys along it, and the doors stand open, and the light comes out of the cloud onto the whole slope of roofs at once. It lands on what stayed and on what went down to the water, and it keeps no count of which was meant: *here, still here, and you.*

The light keeps coming and going over the step. The one drop is still sitting on top of the wax wave and hasn't sunk in. In the last thin stretch of the arch over the ridge, a little red and a little green are still hanging on above the snow. The child looks at the wave a long time and decides it needs something in it. So a fish goes in, down in the swell along the bottom of the step. It's two curves meeting at each end and a tail, the whole animal in four marks, swimming in wax a hundred miles from any water deep enough to hold it. It's the same fish that went onto the block at knee height, drawn by a hand that has never seen that wall. The water beads on it and runs off, and the fish stays. Then there's a sound from inside the door, a small insistent one. Somebody smaller has come crawling across the cold flags on hands and knees after the voices and the light, and now sits on the threshold in a nightshirt with the lamp behind them. They're too young for any of this and have no words for it, and they're staring at the dragon. The child turns round. They don't hesitate. The wax stub comes out of the fist and is held out on a flat open palm, low down, at the height a baby can reach. It's offered the way the grandmother offered it, and the way the loaf went across the gap and the brush went grip-first down the line of hands at the wall. It's given before anybody has said whether it should be. The small fist closes on it the whole-hand way, as if it were something that might get away. It goes into the mouth first, of course, and comes out again, and then it comes down onto the step. What it makes is a mark. It's a short jagged scrub of red beside the fish, pressed so hard the wax flakes off onto the wet stone. It isn't a beast or a wave or a direction, and it isn't anything anybody could name. It's the first mark, the one that comes before all the others, made by somebody who has never been told a mark could be the shape of anything. The water beads on it and runs round it like everything else. Nobody corrects it. The grandmother laughs from the doorframe, and the child laughs, and the baby laughs because everybody is laughing, with red on their chin and no idea why. The sun comes out of the cloud onto all of it at once: the wax dragon with its bead, the four-mark fish, the scrub of red that is nothing yet, the two leaves in the crack and the three heads bent over one step, and the last faint piece of the arch letting go over the ridge. It keeps no count of who made the first mark or who will make the last: *here, still here, and you.*

The arch goes the way it came. It thins first at the end over the ridge and lets the snow on the long spine come back through it. Then the green goes out of the middle, and the faint outer band nobody quite believes in is gone before anybody can be sure it was there. It was water and light the whole time, and it's handed back to both. Then the grandmother has to get up, and that takes longer than kneeling did. The hand goes to the doorframe and doesn't find enough there. So the other hand comes out sideways toward the child, palm open. It's the same shape that went out across the gap with the loaf and with the stub of wax. This time it's held out to be taken hold of, not filled. The child takes it. There isn't much in a small hand to lean on, and she doesn't lean much, only enough. But the child plants both bare feet and pulls, with the whole serious body turned into a lever for this one thing. The old knee comes up off the wet stone with the small sound she makes every time, and she's standing. Somebody lifted her once when she was that size, off this step or another one. Nobody has kept count of how many times the lifting has changed hands since. Then the child squats down again, because the dragon isn't finished. The wax goes under it, along the bottom of the step where there was no room for anything else. It's one long line, over and rising and over again, the same swell the barley makes and the painted wall makes at knee height and the tide makes on a shore the child has never stood on. One last drop comes off the eave and lands square on it. It sits there round and clear on top of the wax wave and holds the whole grey-and-gold sky upside down on its skin. It doesn't sink in, and it doesn't run the line away. A wave that water won't wash off turns out to be a good joke, and the child laughs at it alone, crouched on the step. Down the lane the doors are opening. Somebody is shaking a cloth out, a shutter goes back, and smoke comes up off the chimneys now the rain has let the air go. The whole small cluster of roofs comes out of the shower wet and steaming a little on the side the light has reached. The sun works in and out of what's left of the cloud, the half-covered kind of light. The step goes bright, and grey, and bright again. It lands on the wax dragon wearing its one bead, the grandmother's hand still on the child's head, and the two leaves in the crack taking whatever comes. None of it is chosen and none of it is preferred, and it doesn't care who got whom up off the stone: *here, still here, and you.*

Then the grandmother kneels. It takes her a while, the way it takes anybody who has spent sixty years going up and down on the same flags. One hand goes on the doorframe and the other on the child's shoulder, and the knee comes down onto the wet stone with a small sound she makes every time and doesn't hear anymore. The shower has not quite finished. It's thinner now, a few drops still coming off the eave onto her back and into the pool at the foot of the step. The bubbles come up there and hold the grey upside down on their skins, and let go. Her palm goes flat on the step where the beast was. It rests there a moment, cold under the hand, the step with its century of boot-wear and a hundred things taken off it. Then she feels in her apron and brings out a stub of something waxy and dull red, a candle-end or a crayon worn down to the width of a thumb, kept in that pocket longer than the child has been alive. She doesn't draw with it. She holds it out on both palms, open, the way the loaf went out across the gap and the bunch went out of a small hand before anybody had eaten any. The child takes it. They don't say anything. The beast goes down a third time, in wax, onto the wet stone, and the rain that's still falling will not have it. The drops land on the line and stand up on it in small round beads, clear, and slide off to either side. The line stays. The neck is too long and the legs are wrong, and the fire comes out of the bump in three lines that the water beads on and runs around. The grandmother watches it go down without correcting anything. She knew about wax. Somebody showed her, on this step or another one, a long time before she could have been asked. Then the last of the shower goes off east over the fold, and the sun comes in low behind the house, and the whole band of it stands up over the ridge. Every color is in it, the red from the bank and the berry-dark and the black at the outer edge that nobody quite believes in. It arches clean over the long spine of the mountain, as if the thing lying up there had been given one more pair of wings. Neither of them gets up yet. The old knee and the small one stay on the wet stone side by side, with the wax dragon between them wearing its rain in beads and two leaves standing in the crack below. The arch is already thinning at one end, and it will be gone before either of them stands. It comes on time, unasked and unearned, and it keeps no count of who handed what to whom, or how long it was kept in a pocket first: *here, still here, and you.*

The rain comes in before noon. It comes the proper kind, straight down off a sky that has gone the grey of the gully-snow, and the child has been called in and is watching from inside the open door with the red lump still in their fist. The step takes it first. The drops land on the flat worn stone and stand there round for a moment, then burst, and then there are too many to stand. The water starts to move. It finds the century of boot-wear in the middle of the step and runs along it the way water runs along any low place, and it reaches the beast. The red doesn't go all at once. It softens at the edges first, the teeth, then the fire in its three lines, then the bump that was a mountain. It lifts off the stone in a thin rust that goes down the line the child drew toward the crack, following the road it was given. At the foot of the step the run-off pools against the lane. Small bubbles come up in it, clear, each one holding the grey sky upside down on its skin for as long as it holds, then letting go. They drift in a little crowd toward the gap between the flags and stop there, turning, the red in the water going round them. Then they go too. The neck is the last of the dragon. It stays on the stone a long while, too long and faint and still pointing, and then it's a stain, and then it's only a warmer patch of wet on a grey step that nobody who didn't know would read as anything. Nothing is lost in that. It went where it was pointed, down the step to the edge and into the crack, and the two thumbnail leaves are standing in the red-tinged water with the drip off the eave coming down on them. They don't bend much. They take what the rain gives, and this morning the rain is giving them a dragon. When it passes there are prints in the wet of the lane. They're small, bare, going out from the step and back, where somebody could not wait for the whole shower to finish before checking. Behind them a grandmother comes to the door, drying her hands, and looks down at the step. She knows what was on it. She's seen this step take a hundred things off it in her time, chalk and charcoal and berry juice and the mud of every season, and she doesn't say anything about it being gone. She only looks, and it's the plain looking, heads a little back and nothing said. Then she looks at the two leaves in the crack, longer, the way you look at something that's only starting to be honest. The child comes and stands against her side with the red in their fist and looks where she is looking. The sun comes through a gap in what's left of the cloud onto the wet stone and the green and the four small prints already softening in the lane. It's on time, unasked and unearned, and keeps no count of what the water took or where it took it: *here, still here, and you.*

The child wakes into the light already on the wall and lies still a while, looking up at the beast. The dream is going the way dreams go. Most of it has already been handed back, and what's left is only the edges: something large and tired curled along the stone, and a flank that was warm under the hand. Which one was dreamed is not settled, and nobody asks. Then the blanket comes off and the bare feet go across the cold flags and out the door, still open from last night, onto the step where the loaf was torn. There's a flat stone at the side of the step, worn smooth by a century of boots going over the edge of it. The hand goes down on it first, palm flat, the way it went onto the real wall in the dark without waking. It's the small acknowledgment a body makes before it puts anything on a thing it doesn't own. The stone is cold. It's too early for it to be anything else. Then there's a lump of the red from the bank, kept in a pocket for days for no reason, and it's worn down at one end from being tried on things. It goes onto the stone. The beast goes down again, smaller this time, the size of two hands. The neck is too long and the legs are wrong, and the three lines of fire come out of a mountain that's only a bump. This time it has no feathers, because in the dream it hadn't needed them, and the child is faithful to the dream. It's not a copy of the soot one. It isn't wrong about any of it either. Then, down at the foot of the step, in the crack where the stone meets the lane, something green. Two leaves, no bigger than a thumbnail, come up out of the wet between the flags where the drip off the eave has been landing all winter. Nobody planted them. Nobody could say what they'll be, and it will be a season before the leaves are honest about it. The child looks at them a long time with the red still in the fingers. Then a small line goes down from the dragon's foot, across the stone to the edge of the step, and stops just short of the green, pointing. It isn't a road and it isn't a direction. It only says *there*. The sun comes the rest of the way over the ridge onto the step and the red beast and the two leaves. It falls on the long spine of the mountain with the last snow going to water on its back, and on a small figure crouched in a doorway with the whole of a dream behind their eyes and almost none of it left. The light keeps no count of which beast came first: *here, still here, and you.*

The fire comes down to a single log. It burns along its underside, where the red has got in and stays in without any flame showing, the bark gone to grey scale on top and the grain underneath glowing in lines. Every so often it shifts on the ash with a small sound, settling lower. Nobody gets up to put another on. The room has gone past that hour, and the heat the log gives now is only what it has left, handed out evenly to the boots by the hearth and the kettle at the edge and the bench under the wall. The child is asleep there. At some point the telling stopped halfway through a sentence, the way the talking stopped by the other fire a long way back. The head went over onto the nearest arm and stayed, and the arm took the weight without any decision being made. A coat has come down over the lot of it. The mouth is open a little. The breath has dropped into the slower rate it keeps when nobody is minding it, out and back, the same rate the fist under the ribs keeps. Behind the eyes the thing is walking. Nobody can draw that quarter, and it goes on being drawn anyway. The beast comes down off the ridge in the dark with the cloud streaming off its shoulders and the snow going to water where it steps. It comes down the lane, past the doors, past the loaf torn on the step, and gets into the whitewash above the bench where the soot is, and lies down there in the shape it was given. Its neck is too long and its legs are in a number nobody could defend. The fire from its mountain is in three lines and the two feathers are attached to nothing. It isn't frightening. It is only very large and very tired, curled along a wall above a sleeping head the way a dog curls along a hearth. In the dream the child puts a hand flat on its side and finds it warm, the way a wall is warm when it has been taking the sun all day. Then the child puts a hand on the cold stone of the real wall in the real dark, without waking. By morning there will be almost none of this left, only the softened edges of where something came through. The log breaks in two. The halves fall together into the ash and give up one last short brightness that lights the soot beast from underneath and makes it look for a moment as if it's moving. Then they settle to a dull orange and keep what they have. Then the rim gives itself away over the ridge. The window goes grey first, then thin gold along one edge, and the long spine out there comes up out of the dark the way the hills always come up, one shoulder at a time, the snow on its back going pink before anything else in the valley does. The light comes level through the glass. It falls across the flags and the cold hearth with its two ends of burnt wood, over the coat and the small open hand lying against the whitewash, and onto the beast above the bench. For a minute it lights both of them at once, the one on the mountain and the one on the wall. It arrives on time, unasked and unearned, the same whether a thing was dreamed or drawn or lying on a ridge a million years with no idea it had ever been told about. It keeps no count of which one the child will remember when they wake: *here, still here, and you.*

The rest of the loaf goes indoors after all, and the two of them go with it. Nobody invites them. The door is left open and that's the invitation. Inside there's a fire, low and red, with somebody's boots drying beside it and a kettle pushed to the edge of the heat. The coats come off and the frost in the seams goes to water and runs down onto the flags. Then the bread goes round the table. It's torn smaller at every pair of hands until the last piece is hardly a mouthful, and nobody counts the loss. There's a child by the hearth, of course, and the child has a story. It comes out before anybody asks for it, the way a hand comes out across a gap. There's a beast on the mountain, the child says. It lies along the top with its head at the cliff end. Some mornings it has wings and some mornings it doesn't, and when the cloud comes off it you can see it breathing. The telling is wrong in several places at once, and about the legs it's wrong with great conviction. The two who came down off that ridge this morning say nothing about having slept beside it. They only listen. It's the plain open kind of listening, the ear given over entirely, the way it was given to the water in the fold and to the barley going over and rising and going over again. Other people drift in from the other room to hear it, though they've plainly heard it before. A grandmother, a man with his sleeves rolled, two more children who correct the first one about the wings and are overruled. No one person in the room has the whole of the story, and each has enough of it. Then somebody gets a brush. It's only a stub of one, kept in a jar on the sill for no purpose anybody could name. It goes into the soot at the cold side of the hearth and then onto the whitewashed wall above the bench, and the beast goes up. The neck is too long. The legs are in a number nobody could defend. The fire comes out of a mountain in three lines, because three lines are enough for fire. Two short, quick feathers go above the foreleg, attached to nothing. It's the same animal, drawn by a hand that has never seen the wall with the vine on it or the palm that was washed at a basin, and never will. It isn't copied from anything and it isn't wrong about any of it. The child stands back and looks at it and says *yes*, as if checking it against the mountain. The fire comes down into its small circle, and the talk thins out and goes to nothing. Somebody falls asleep with their head against the drawing. Out through the window the moon is up over the ridge, thin, giving almost nothing. It lays that nothing on the snow along the long spine of the thing the child was talking about, which is lying out there in the dark with no idea it has been told about in a kitchen. The same nothing falls on the soot beast on the wall and on the crumbs on the table, and on a room full of faces the low light has already begun to give back. It keeps no count of who told what, and it wants nothing back: *here, still here, and you.*

Before they go the hand goes down flat on the stone beside the ash. Palm down, the field's gesture, the one made over the acorn and the covered hole and the soaked page and the finger-hole at the foot of a painted wall. It isn't holding anything or keeping anything. It's the small acknowledgment a body makes over a place it slept one night and will not sleep again. The stone is still a little warm from the ring. Then the hand comes away. And the wind gets under the cloud. It comes up out of the east with the sun behind it and goes along the white floor the way it went through the barley, lifting it at the edges and tearing it off the ridges in long pale strips. The long spine they came up beside starts to shed it. The cloud streams off the back of the beast in torn lengths from the shoulders and the head of cliff, lit gold underneath, thinning as they go. For a minute the thing lying out in the light has wings. They're not drawn on and nobody meant them. They're only the weather coming off the rock at an angle, the same short quick flicks somebody put above a painted foreleg with the last of the color on the bristles, attached to no bird. Then they go. The wind takes them out over the valley and they come apart into nothing anybody could point at, and the ridge is only a ridge again, a million years old and none the wiser. Then the going is down. The pack comes up and the strap is pulled square, and the boots find the way the knees remember it, the toe going down first onto each flat of rock and the weight following and caught. The long lean back into the slope is harder than the climb and nobody says so. The snow gives way to the grey gully-white and then to wiry grass, and then there are two ruts and a wall and a hedge. The cloud floor comes up to meet them and they walk down into it, blind and wet for half an hour. They come out underneath into a different morning, the light gone plain and even the way fog makes it. Below, the roofs of a place, and smoke standing up off the chimneys. Somebody has had the oven going since before the rim gave itself away, and the smell of it comes up the lane a long way ahead of any door. At the first door a loaf is being carried in from somewhere. It's the plain round kind, still too hot to hold properly, shifted from hand to hand. It doesn't go into the house. It's torn across on the step, and half of it is held out, arm horizontal across the gap, to two people coming down off the mountain with frost still in the seams of their coats. It's offered before anybody has said where they came from, and taken, and broken again between them. The steam comes up out of the middle of it, white, and goes: *here, still here, and you.*

And the fire is reached some time in the full dark, or reaches them. It's a low ring of stones in the lee of a boulder with somebody's coat-shape beside it, and nothing is said about the road. A place is made. The night goes over in the cold with the snow ticking on the hoods and the orange keeping its small circle. Then the rim gives itself away, and this time it happens below them. The cloud has settled down into every fold in the night. From up here it is a white floor running from one edge of the world to the other, the sheet laid out flat and blank under the boots, and the gold comes level across the top of it before it touches anything else, a whole unruled quarter lit from the side with no ink on it at all. The eyes go out over it. Wherever it breaks there are ridges standing up out of it like the backs of things swimming. There is a line of wall far down on a shoulder where the cloud has pulled off. There is the long spine they came up beside in the snow, with its buttresses and its head of cliff, bending where the stone bends and lying out now in the light with its wrong number of legs. It is the beast again, drawn by nobody, facing a sunrise it was never made to match. That is the whole map, and there is nothing to mark it on. The chest works at the thin air, the bellows going deep and slow, in and warmed and out, the breath standing white in front of the face and then gone into the larger white below. And nobody speaks. There's nothing to say, and up here the quiet is not an absence. It's the plain kind, laid without preference on the stones and the ash and the two faces and the floor of cloud with the whole country asleep under it. It has no color in it and no object, and it wants nothing back: *here, still here, and you.*

And then the snow proper, not old and grey in a gully now but falling. It starts as a few flakes going sideways past the face, one on the sleeve that holds its six points for the length of a look and then goes to water, and then it thickens until the mountain is only the few yards of it that the boots are on. The fire goes. Not out: only lost behind the weather, the one warm thing in the quarter swallowed by a white that gives no direction at all, and the feet keep on up toward where it was because that is the only information left. The lungs do what they can. In, and the cold comes in sharp enough to feel the whole branching shape of it inside the ribs, the two dark trees upside down in the chest taking what the air will give; out, and the breath goes into the snow and is lost in it, the same plain white going into a larger one. Then the wind comes over the ridge and finds them. It has the whole height of the mountain behind it and it comes straight through the coat and the collar and on down the slope into the dark valley, carrying the snow in long torn streamers off the edge of the rock, not asking anything and not bringing anything, going where nobody will be. And the cloud goes with it. It tears open over the ridge for a minute, the way cloud does up here, without warning and without meaning anything by it, and what stands up out of the gap is the ridge itself: a long back going away in the last of the light, bending where the stone bends, the spine of it running up in rough plates of rock to a head of cliff with the snow streaming off it like smoke, too long in the neck, the legs in a number nobody could defend where the buttresses come down into the grey. It is the beast. Nobody painted this one. It was lying here a million years before a wet child put three lines of fire on a palm at the edge of a fold and it has no idea it was ever drawn, and it is exactly as badly imagined and exactly as true. The eyes stay on it. That is all they can do, held open in the cold with the wind pulling water out of them and the lashes going white, the plain looking that finds nothing and stays open anyway, the watch kept at the shell and in the fog and over the shut thing in the crumb, kept here on a mountain in the snow. Then the cloud closes again, and the back of the beast goes under, and there is only the white. What fills the chest is that same kind. No color and no object: the snow on the sleeve and the breath going off the mouth and the page somebody had the decency not to invent on, wanting nothing back. And low down in it, off to the side where it was before, the orange comes through again, small, somebody's, still burning: *here, still here, and you.*

And in the morning the roofs of that place go down behind a shoulder of ground and the road starts to climb. It does it the way roads do here, not announcing anything — a lane, then a track, then two ruts and then one, the hedges giving out and the walls giving out after them and the grass going short and wiry and then going to stone. The boots do the work. That is the whole of it at this altitude: the same swing done again, the toe finding the flat of a rock and the ankle taking the angle, forty thousand times without any of them being decided on, the rate the legs keep when the head has stopped having opinions about the distance. Under the ribs the fist keeps at its one work and does not slow, only comes up in rate the way it must, out to the ends of the narrow country and back empty to be filled, not consulted about any of this. And the cold arrives before the snow does. It comes down off what is up there and gets into the cuffs and the collar the way the wind came off the black water at the bank, not carrying anything and not asking for anything, taking the warmth off whatever it passes and going on somewhere nobody will be. Then the first of the old white in the shadowed side of a gully, grey and grained and gone hard, lying where it has lain since a season nobody in the village below is counting. The breathing changes. It has to — the bellows going deeper and shorter and then deeper again, the whole chest working at something that used to happen underneath the notice, in, and the cold comes into it and is warmed and taken from, out, and it stands in front of the face for a moment in the plain white kind with no color in it and no object, and is gone. Nothing up here is owed to anybody. The ground gives what it gives and the lungs take what they can out of an air that has been getting thinner for two hours without ever once announcing it, and the going goes on being up, which is all it is. And past the turn of the ridge, a long way above and off to the side where the last of the light is still on the rock, there is a fire. Small, orange, the one warm thing in a whole quarter of grey — somebody's, up there in the cold, tended by nobody visible at this distance, the same fire that was under the pot at the basin and in the room with the strings against the wall and burning the snowfields red a long way back. The question goes up out of the chest without being shaped. Whether there is a way through to it, whether anybody up there is expecting a stranger, whether the legs have it, whether this was the road at all — breath lifted at the end of it and aimed at a mountain that has never once been told what it is for. Nothing answers. It never has, and the fire goes on doing what fire does, which is burn where somebody put it and be visible for miles without meaning to be, and the feet go on going up toward it in the failing light because that is what feet do with a fire on a hillside: *here, still here, and you.*

And then the stub goes back up onto the stone, above the mark that says only *came through here*, because the hand is not finished and never has been at the moment it thinks it is. What it puts there is the beast again. Neck too long, legs in a number nobody could defend, three lines of fire out of a mountain — copied off a wall that is a hundred miles back and was itself copied off a palm that was washed at a basin the same evening it was drawn, and every hand in that line gone or going, and not one of them consulted about any of this. It goes onto the bare part. The white nobody got to, the courses above the reach of the last arm that came along, the quarter somebody had the decency not to invent on — and it does not stay a beast for long, because it never does: somebody's finger comes up and presses a small hard dot into the lime at the shoulder of it, *there*, and the swell along the bottom becomes the water again, and the long bend of the back happens to run the way the lane runs, and that is exactly as much reason as any line on any sheet has ever had. The teeth are somewhere west. Then the cloud comes over the top of it all and the mountains go out one at a time, the held blue swallowed from the far end in, the grain going grey to the hedge and the light going off the wet marks — and none of it waits for anybody to be ready. The pack comes up. The strap gets pulled square and the weight is found in the place where weight sits best, and the going starts down the lane with the drawing left up there on somebody else's stone, wrong in the small ways every mark has been wrong, given to the weather and the long odds the way the page was given to the wind off a flat rock at the edge of a field. Nothing is asked of it. And the walking goes on into the afternoon and out the other side of it, down off the fold, the cloud thinning and the mountains coming back once behind and then not again, until the ground levels and the road runs in among roofs — a place further on, bigger than the one with the vine on it, the windows taking over the work one after another as the last of the red goes off the tops, the smoke standing up gold off a hundred chimneys, the whole of it burning quietly in a fold of ground that no sheet in this account has ever shown. Somebody is standing in a doorway. The arm comes out horizontal across the gap before any thinking gets to it, and is answered, and nothing is said about where anybody has been: *here, still here, and you.*

And the swell carries them a long way, the track going through the middle of it with the heads dragging along the sleeves, and past the far hedge the ground lifts and there are mountains standing where the valley runs out — the blue kind, the ones that hold still, older than the wall and the road and every hand that has ever been pressed flat against anything, doing the one thing they have ever done. The light works in and out over the whole of it, the half-covered kind, one fold lit and the next not, patches going down the grain faster than anything walking could keep up with, nothing in it chosen. And then, at the place where the track comes out on a lane, there is a wall. Not that wall. Another one, in another fold, a hundred and some miles of going from the one with the vine on it — courses laid square by an arm nobody can name, holding back a bank on one side and doing nothing at all on the other. And on it there is a beast. Legs in the wrong number, a neck too long for anything that has ever walked, the fire coming out of a mountain in three lines because three is enough lines for fire, and along the bottom where there was no room for anything else a swell going over and rising and going over again, put on in lime by somebody who has never stood on any shore and is not wrong about it. The standing goes on for a while in the lane. Nobody asked for this and nobody arranged it and there is no signature anywhere on it, and there is no way of knowing whether it came down this road in a hand or up it, or how many mouths and palms and brushes it went through on the way, or whether the one who put it here ever saw the block it came off. It does not matter which direction it traveled. It got here. Somebody carried a thing they did not make to a wall they did not own and gave it to the weather. And the throat does what a throat does. The eyes go on being held open — the plain kind, the kind that finds nothing, the watch kept at the shell and in the fog and over the shut thing in the crumb — and they fill anyway, and nothing is said about it, and the wind off the grain takes most of it before it gets anywhere. It is not grief and it is not quite gladness. It is only the particular thing a body does when it turns a corner and finds that the giving went on without it. Then the stub comes out. There is no paper — the paper has been gone for years — so it goes onto the block itself, down in the bare part below the swell where nobody's arm has bothered: a small flat oval with a line through it, and a bend, and two doublings, and a mark that says nothing except *came through here, headed that way*, wrong in the small ways every mark in this account has been wrong, put down for a throat in a year neither of them will see. The hand comes away and does not sign it. And the sun comes through the gap onto the lot of it at once — the beast and the lime wave and the actual grain going over behind them and the mountains standing out past everything in their held blue — level, on time, unasked, unearned, keeping no count of who drew what or how far it came: *here, still here, and you.*

The road runs out past the end of the wall, and the prints go down it. The pack's weight has settled by the second bend, the way it does, and behind and above the shoulder the block is out of sight already — but the beast is still going under green back there, the leaf coming up the joint at its own rate, four feathers on a stretch of stone that nobody owns enough to be asked. Under the ribs the fist keeps at its one work through all of it, out to the ends of the narrow country and back empty to be filled, out and back, not consulted, keeping the rate it kept at the basin and the notch and the fog. The road tips down into grain. Chest high, planted by somebody who is not here, and the wind comes across the top of it and makes the long swell again — the one painted at knee height on a wall in berry-dark by a hand that has never stood on any shore — going over and rising and going over again, and it does not know it is being quoted and never has. And the sun comes the rest of the way over the fold onto the whole of it at once: the track and the wet prints and the barley and the painted block a mile back with a vine on it, level, on time, unasked, keeping no account of what stayed and what went on: *here, still here, and you.*

And then the brush is held out again, because it is never held long. Out of the jar and across the gap grip-first, dripping a little, the arm horizontal the way the bowl went across the table and the bunch went out of a small hand before anybody had eaten any — offered to the child who has been standing at the edge of this with nothing to do and no intention of adding anything, and taken, because it always is. What goes on is another feather. A fourth, beside the three, up in the part of the block where there was no reason for anything: a shaft and the barbs going off it in short quick flicks, lighter than everything under it, attached to no bird and to no dragon either, put on by a hand that has never seen the thing it is drawing and is not wrong about it. Nobody corrects the placement. Nobody could say where a feather ought to go on a wall. And while that is happening the pack comes up off the grass at the foot of the course and onto the shoulders with the small settling shrug, the weight found again in the place where weight sits best — because somebody is going on today, as somebody always is, and there is no arrangement about it and nothing to say. The strap gets pulled square. The road runs out past the end of the wall, bending where the ground bends, never straight, only what the going has worn. Then the looking, once, from twenty paces off in the track: back at the block with the leaf up the joint and the row of palms at five heights and the beast going under green and the four feathers and the bare courses above the reach of every arm here — the plain held-open kind, finding nothing, staying open anyway, the watch kept at the shell and in the fog and over the shut thing in the crumb. Nothing is said about it and nothing is added and the brush is already in somebody else's hand. And the sun works in and out of the cloud over the whole of it, the half-covered kind, the block going bright to the coping and going grey and going bright again, patches moving down the valley faster than anything walking could keep up with — nothing in it chosen, no preference anywhere in the arrangement, only the light arriving when the gap arrives, on the wet feather and the dry one and the pack going off up the road and the ones who are staying: *here, still here, and you.*

And then the hand goes flat against it. Not to paint and not to press a print — only the palm laid open on the block at the bare end where nothing has been put yet, the way a hand goes out toward a fire or an iron to find out what a thing is, and the answer comes back warm. The wall has been taking the sun since it came over the fold. It gives it back all afternoon into whatever is against it, out of courses laid square by an arm nobody can name, the heat arriving the way it arrived through the boots at the steaming seam and up through the water in a basin somebody built out of rounded stones for no reason except that the water was going by warm; and where the night's rain is still in the stone the low sun finds it and there is a thin steam coming off the top of the coping, going up off a wall in the same slow surrendering column as the pot and the shoulders and everything else this place has ever let go of. The child leaves the hand there a while. Then the other one beside it, both palms flat and the cheek going onto the block between them, the whole front of a small body against a warm wall with the eyes shut, which is not looking at the painting and has nothing to do with the dragon and is the plainest thing anybody has done here in six summers. And then the laughing, for no reason at all — at the warmth, at the steam going up, at having a wall be warm back — coming up the way it came at the teeth and the legs and the roaring ground and the flour on the eyebrows, helpless, with the cheek still against the stone. The brush gets picked up again after that, because it is standing there in its jar and the hand is already full of what the wall gave it, and one more short quick barb goes onto the third feather where it did not need one. Down at the foot, in the wet crumb, the green goes on up the joint at its own rate, taking whatever the dark gives and bending where the stone bends, with no opinion about any of it. And above the reach of every arm in this track the block stays bare, four or five courses of it, plain and taking the light straight — not a gap and not a modesty, only where the hands stopped — the white nobody got to, the white somebody had the decency not to invent on, the almost-nothing kind with no color in it and no object, laid over the warm stone and the shut eyes and the leaf and the small steam going up off the coping into an afternoon that has never once been told what it is for: *here, still here, and you.*

And the rim gives itself away over the shoulder of the fold, because it always does, and the gold comes level along the length of the block onto everything that was out there all night — the leaf, the row of hands, the wave gone over in purple, the beast with its wrong number of legs and its three feathers. And onto the part that has nothing on it. There is a stretch at the far end past where the vine reaches and past where anybody's arm has bothered to go, four or five courses of bare block that has been bare since the wall went up, taking the morning straight and giving it back — not a gap in the picture and not a modesty, only the place where the painting stopped because the hands stopped, left plain the way the person with the instrument left the quarter of the sheet they could not see. The child comes up the road into it. The same one off the sill, carried to bed with the blanket half off and awake since first light with the whole of last night still going on behind the eyes, and they stop in the track in front of the empty end with the mouth coming open — the plain unguarded kind that a face does before any of it has been thought about, the small astonishment of arriving at a thing and finding it has been waiting. Because the dragon went up last night. Out over the coping at an angle with the fire still coming out of it in three lines and the short quick barbs above the foreleg turning out to have been for that after all, up into the part with no ruling on it, and nobody was told and there was no one awake to tell. So it has to go on the white. The brush is standing in its jar of water at the foot of the wall for whoever comes along, and there is a little black left in the cup from the cold end of a fire that went out a season ago, and the arm cannot reach past the third course and does not need to. Points. That is all anybody has ever managed of it: a scatter of small black marks put onto bare block at the height a child can reach, more of them than were meant, no two the same size because the brush does what the brush does — and then the beast joined out of them, the neck too long, going up at its angle from the last painted thing toward the top of the wall where there is nothing at all, the same joining-up people did who needed to get somewhere and had only the dark to work with. It is wrong. There is no arrangement of anything in the sky that looks like that, and nobody up there was consulted, and the marks are not where the marks are. Then the tag. Off a nail somewhere, a small soft brown thing with a punched hole and a cord through it, hung on the end of the coping where the painting runs out — and on it, in a hand that is still learning the shapes, a few marks that are not a sentence either: something about a dragon, and *at night*, and an arrow pointing up, and nothing about who. It will be off the nail by winter. And the sun comes the rest of the way up over the fold onto the whole of it at once, the old painting and the wet new one and the bare block above the reach of any arm here, and what fills the chest looking at it is the plain kind, the almost-nothing kind, no color in it and no object — the white of a wall nobody got to, the white of the page somebody had the decency not to invent on, the white the thin moon lays on the flags — wanting nothing back, keeping no count of what was put up there or whether it is anywhere near right: *here, still here, and you.*

And in one of those windows there is a child who will not go to sleep. Kneeling up on the sill with the blanket round and the gold of the room behind them, face to the cold glass, looking out at the one that came over the shoulder of the hill and the rest arriving behind it — the whole spilled river coming out from rim to rim as the eye stops insisting, the mist that is not mist, the unfinished beast and the half-drawn snake that people who needed to get somewhere joined out of scattered points because the dark would not stay plain. And out there in it, up past the wall and the road and the black where the block is, the thing with the three feathers on it is going. That is what a child does with a beast and a night: takes it off the stone. Legs in the wrong number and the fire still coming out of the mountain in its three lines, and the shaft and the short quick barbs above the foreleg turning out to have been for exactly this after all — going up at an angle over the fold, past the coping and the last of the smoke, into the part of the sky that has no ruling on it and never has, joining the older sheet the way everything else in this account has been handed along. Nobody is told about it. There is nothing to say about a thing like that and no one awake to say it to, and the glass goes on being cold, and the breath goes onto it and comes off again, out and back, out and back, at the rate it keeps for everybody. Then the head gets heavy the way a head does. Down onto the arm on the sill, the blanket half off the shoulder, the mouth open a little, the whole business of the dragon and the river of points left running without anyone to watch it — and somebody comes in later and lifts and carries and does not wake them, the arm coming round over the back the way it came round in the steam on the wet stones, the weight taken without any decision being made. And what is laid over the lot of it is the plain kind. No color in it and no object: on the empty sill and the breath-mark going off the glass and the sleeping face and the painted block out along the road with its vine and its row of hands and its beast that is in two places at once tonight — on time, unasked, unearned, keeping no count of what anybody took up into the dark with them: *here, still here, and you.*

And the mouth keeps the color longest. Long after the jar has gone back to whatever door it came out of, the stain is still on the lips of whoever had the last of the bunch — that dusty hedge-dark sitting in the cracks of a mouth the way the lime sat in the creases of a palm, not scrubbed at, not minded, worn down the lane and into the evening by somebody who has already stopped noticing they are wearing it. The same color in three places at once. On the mouth that ate it, on the wave at knee height where the brush laid it on over its own old ghost, and on the fifth print in the row where a hand went flat against the block for no reason anybody asked for — fruit, paint, and hand all the one purple, come off the same hedge by three different roads. And the dragon stands behind the lot of it. Wrong number of legs, three lines of fire, half under leaf now, drawn by a wet child on a palm at the edge of a fold a long way back and enlarged onto stone by people who never met that child and could not say where the beast came from. Then somebody puts feathers on it. Nothing is decided; there is a little color left on the bristles and a bare stretch of block above the foreleg, and so a shaft goes up and the barbs go off it in short quick flicks, light, hardly touching, the way the first one went on at the top of the wall in the empty part where there was no reason for anything — and then a second beside it, and a third, three of them in a row going up toward the coping, attached to no bird and to no dragon either, and no more needed than the first one was. Whatever a beast is for, it is apparently for this. And then the dark comes down off the fold and the village lights up from the inside, the windows going gold one after another the way the roofs did over the river, the smoke standing up off the chimneys, the whole small cluster burning quietly in a place no sheet in this account has ever shown; and out along the road, past the last of it, the wall goes back into the black with the purple mouth-color on it and the row of hands and the three feathers nobody will see until morning. One comes out over the shoulder of the hill. Ahead of the rest, holding its place the way the fixed one held it over the notch, sending what it has been sending since before there was a mouth to stain — arriving tonight on painted block and green leaf and a cord gone grey and a finger-hole nobody can find, keeping no count of any of it, in no hurry to be looked at: *here, still here, and you.*

And then the purple goes onto a hand. Not the wall — somebody at the edge of the group, waiting their turn at nothing in particular, dips two fingers in the jar and lays the color across their own palm instead, and then the palm goes flat against the block in the one place the vine has not got to, pressed and held a moment and lifted away clean. Purple this time, where all the others were white. A fifth print in a row that has been going for six summers, the outline kept and the particular given back, the fingers splayed the way fingers splay when a hand wants to be a hand and not a fist — put there by somebody who came up the road for grapes and had no intention of adding anything to anything. And the jar is done after that. Tipped past the angle where color should still be running, held there, the last of it going out in a slop and a drip and the dry scrape of a brush going round an inside that has nothing left on it — emptied entirely into a wave that will be off by winter and a beast going under green and one purple hand, which is the first half of everything and has always been. Nobody minds. There is more hedge-dark on the hedge and more red in the bank where the road cuts through and more black in the cold end of the fire, and the grinding of it is a morning's work whenever somebody wants a color badly enough to go and get one. The dragon stands there through the whole transaction with its wrong number of legs and its three lines of fire, half leaf now, older than any hand currently on the wall and younger than the courses it is painted on, facing a sky it was drawn wrong to match. And then the day goes over into the long end of itself. The sun comes down the length of the valley and finds the block from the side, the way it found the market and the burning snowfields and two bent backs at noon — and the whole wall goes the color of the fruit for twenty minutes: the lime gone warm, the leaf gone bronze, the row of palms standing up out of the stone in the low light with the purple one the brightest of them and the softest one nearly gone, the smoke off the roofs down the road going up gold behind it. Nobody arranges to be there for that. The knot of them has mostly drifted off down the lane with their chins stained and the empty jar going back to whatever door it came out of, and the wall holds still under the last of it, which is the one thing a wall has ever done — keeping no count of whose hand, whose color, whose vine, in no hurry to be thanked: *here, still here, and you.*

And the basket comes back up the road in somebody else's hands. Not the same somebody — a neighbor who had some out of it at the third door and has come up to see where a thing like that grows, and there is a knot of them at the wall by mid-morning, four or five standing in the track in that loose arrangement people fall into when there is nothing that has to be done yet. The bunch goes round. One mouth and then the next, each getting less than the last and none of them saying so, and the stain of it goes onto the chins and the wrists and dries in the creases the way the lime dried and the graphite dried and the juice of a hedge-dark squeezed in a fist three summers before it ever grew here. And somebody says the color. That is all it takes. Somebody holds up a skin between two fingers against the block and says it is the same, near enough, as what went onto the wave at knee height and came off by winter — and then the brush is out of the water at the foot of the wall again, because it has been standing there for whoever comes along, and there is still a little in the jar, and nobody owns the block enough to be asked. So the wave gets its purple back. Laid on over the old ghost of itself with the leaf already halfway up the joint and having to be held aside with one hand to get at the stone, the beast going under green a summer at a time and coming out again in a line of wet color round the part of it the vine has not reached. Nobody decides which is winning. The painted thing and the growing thing occupy the same block on the same terms, taking whatever is given, bending where the stone bends — and the hand that is holding the leaf out of the way is doing it gently, without thinking about it, the way anything living gets held by somebody who wants to work behind it. Then the brush goes back in the water. The purple is on for a season and the vine is on for longer and the black is on for a century, and the sun comes over the top of the fold onto the lot of it at once — the wet stroke and the old stroke and the leaf and the fruit and the mouths of five people standing in a track with their chins stained, keeping no count of who grew it, who painted it, or who is standing in front of it now: *here, still here, and you.*

And somebody ties it up. That is the one intervention in the whole arrangement, and it is small: a length of cord off a pack or out of a pocket, cut with a thumbnail against a stone, looped once round the stalk where it has gone over sideways under its own weight and knotted back through the joint where the mortar was never wiped — loose, deliberately loose, because whoever does it has tied something round a living thing before and knows the year will thicken what the knot is round. Checked with a thumb. The same thumb-check as the cord through the punched hole of a tag and the rope over a load and every knot anybody has ever tied over anything that mattered: the rope laid and pulled and deciding repeatedly to stay, doing nothing except keeping a thing from going where it would otherwise have gone. And the vine takes the hint the way a vine does, which is not as obedience — it only finds that the going is easier along the course of the block than out into the air, and so it goes along the wall, over the wave at knee height and past the dragon's foreleg and up toward the jaw, bending where the stone bends, taking whatever the joint gives it, never straight. Green over lime. The wrong number of legs going under leaf one summer at a time, the painted fire and the four-mark fish and the row of palms at four heights standing quietly behind a growth that has no opinion about any of them, and the cord out there in the weather going grey and then going soft and then, some year, going. It will not be replaced. By then the stalk is thick enough to hold its own line and the knot has done the whole of its work, which was to be there for two seasons and then stop being necessary, and that is the best end any knot has ever come to. Then the baskets. Not many and not the first year or the second — but there is a morning, five or six summers on, when the fruit at the top of the wall is past reaching and somebody brings a basket up the road anyway and there is enough to bother, and the picking goes on for an hour in the cool with the bunches coming off into the open hands and down into the wicker, and the leaves handed back a little at every pull. The basket goes on a hip. It comes down the road held the way anything full is held, and at the first door it is not set down but held out — arm across the gap, both palms up under the weight of it, offered before anybody has said what it is or where it came from — and taken, and some of it taken out, and the basket handed back lighter and offered again at the next. Nobody counts the loss. It goes down the lane the way the cup went down the lane and the jar went round the hollow and the brush went grip-first from hand to hand at the foot of the wall, each one getting less than the last and none of them saying so, and what is left at the end of the row is a few at the bottom and some leaf and the wicker smelling of it until winter. And behind all of that, up the road and out of sight of any of the doors, the rim gives itself away over the shoulder of the fold — the black going thin along one edge, the hills arriving one at a time out of what had been a single flat dark — and the gold comes level along the length of the block onto the stone and the leaf and the grey rag of a cord that is not holding anything anymore, onto the painted beast nobody has seen going quietly under green, onto the empty finger-hole in the crumb that nobody can find now and the hands that will not be told apart in a hundred years: on time, unasked, unearned, keeping no count of who tied what or who carried it down: *here, still here, and you.*

And then the moon goes out entirely. Not thin, not almost-nothing: the dark of it, the night the crescent does not come up at all, and the wall standing in a black with no edge to it and the covered place at the lowest course indistinguishable even from itself. That is the hour the thing chooses, or does not choose — nothing down there decides anything. The coat has gone soft enough at last, and the seed splits, and what comes out of it goes the wrong way first: down, before there is any up, a pale thread no thicker than a hair putting itself into the crumb head first, which is the order it has always been done in and the order nobody would have designed. It does not go straight. It cannot; it takes whatever the dark gives it, the turn and the turn again, the wandering the smoke drew off the roof and the water drew under the flags and the road drew down the length of a valley nobody ruled — and where it meets the foot of the lowest course, where the block goes down further than anybody standing in the track would guess, it does not stop and does not break. It goes along the underside. Feeling its way by the lowest thing available, finding the seam where the footing was never quite bedded, drinking the run-off that has been coming off the coping since the first shower, and the sand goes down through the narrow place the whole time at the one rate it keeps for the lime and the black and the stone the wall was cut from. There is no eye on any of it. There never has been and there is no way there could be: a going-on under a thumb's depth of wet ground, in a season nobody is counting, with nothing to see at the surface and nobody looking, which is the condition every root and every drop and every shut thing in the crumb has been under since long before there was a lid to open. And then, some morning in the spring, up. Two leaves, no bigger than a thumbnail, standing in the wet at the bottom of a painted wall with the whole of the downward work behind them and not one visible inch of it — and the rim gives itself away over the shoulder of the fold, and the hills come up one at a time out of what had been a single flat dark, and the gold arrives level along the block onto the dragon with its wrong number of legs and the four-mark fish and the row of palms going back into the surface and the two small leaves that no eye watched arrive: on time, unasked, unearned, keeping no count of what came up and what did not: *here, still here, and you.*

And then nothing, for a long while, which is the greater part of what happens. The drip comes off the coping in its own time and goes down into the crumb where the finger went, and the two or three hard seeds sit in the dark under a thumb's depth of wet ground doing nothing that could be photographed — taking whatever the dark gives, which at this point is only water and cold and the slow work of a coat going soft. Above them the block holds still. The thin moon comes up over the shoulder of the fold and gives its almost-nothing to the painted stone, the wrong number of legs, the four-mark fish, the row of palms at four heights going back into the surface one weather at a time; and down at the lowest course there is nothing to see and nobody looking. That is the condition. Not neglect — the ordinary arrangement, the one the shut shell in the crumb was under and the drop in the hole no eye has entered is under and every seed anybody ever pushed into a hole with a finger has been under: a going-on in the black with no witness and no announcement, at a rate nobody set. The eye is no use down there. It was never going to be; it finds nothing, and the honest thing is to have pressed the ground flat and taken the hand away and let the year be the year. And what is laid over the whole of it is the plain kind. No color in it and no object — the white the thin moon puts on the lime and the leaf and the covered place indistinguishable from the rest of the wet ground, on the vine asleep in its joint and the black that will outlast everybody in this track and the dragon standing in the dark facing a sky it was drawn wrong to match — keeping no count, in no hurry, wanting nothing back: *here, still here, and you.*

And the seeds that were not spat go into the ground. That is the part nobody plans either: the mouth still tart with it, the thumb rolling two or three of the small hard ones out of the pulp and wiping them on a trouser leg, and then the finger going down into the wet crumb at the foot of the lowest course where the run-off comes off the coping — a hole the width of a finger and about as deep, which is the entire technology, unchanged since anybody first did it. The seeds go in. The crumb is pushed back over them with the side of the hand, and then the palm comes down flat on top, pressed once, and held — the gesture from the field and the covered hole and the soaked page under its stone and the wet print on the block three years back: not holding, not keeping, only the small acknowledgment a body makes over a thing it is handing to the season and the long odds. Then the hand comes away. There is nothing to see there and will be nothing to see for a year, and it is entirely possible that the birds have them by Tuesday, and that has never once been a condition of the putting-in. Above it the vine goes on up the joint where the mortar was never wiped, and above that the dragon with the wrong number of legs, and the four-mark fish, and the row of palms at four heights with the softest of them nearly gone back to block. Stand twenty paces off in the track and none of them is anybody. Only outlines with the evening going past inside them — the one kneeling at the foot of the wall, the one standing with the fruit, the particular rubbed out and the gesture kept, which is all that has ever survived of anyone who put a hand against a stone or a seed into a hole. And somebody starts humming while the dirt is being wiped off. Not for anybody, under the breath, going up and down and wrong in one place, the tune out of a room with the strings against the wall a long way back and further back than that and further again, bending where it bends because it takes whatever the breath gives it. And the light comes level down the length of the valley onto the lot of it at once — the roofs and the smoke going up gold, the painted block, the green going up the joint, the finger-hole covered over and pressed flat and already indistinguishable from the rest of the wet ground — on time, unasked, unearned, keeping no count of what will come up and what will not: *here, still here, and you.*

And then the leaves are honest about it. It takes the third summer, but what came up under the drip out of a shut thing nobody planted turns out to have been a vine all along, and the flowers that opened flat against the block somewhere around the dragon's jaw have done the only thing flowers were ever for: gone over, swelled, hung. Small bunches, not many, tight and green and then not green — the dusty purple of the same hedge-dark that got squeezed in a fist for the wave at knee height and was off the stone by the first hard winter, arriving back on the wall three years later as the thing itself rather than the color of it, hanging over a painted fish a hundred miles from any water. The bee did that. Went in and came out dusted on business of its own, carrying what it did not know it was carrying, paid in pollen by a flower that had not agreed to anything, and is long dead now and was never told. And a child comes up the road and finds them. Reaches, misses, is lifted, gets a bunch off the stalk with the whole hand and both feet leaving the ground — and then does not eat it. Turns round instead and holds it out, arm horizontal across the gap, palm up and open under the weight of it the way the bowl went across the table and the brush went grip-first down the line of hands at the wall: offered first, before anything, to whoever is standing there, which nobody teaches and nobody can account for. It is taken. Then the mouth, and the skin splitting, and the small ordinary astonishment on the face of somebody eating a thing that grew out of a crack in a wall — the tart of it, the seeds spat at the dragon's foot with great accuracy and no evidence of aim, the juice down the chin and onto the wrist and drying there in the creases where the lime once was. Nobody owns the vine. Nobody owns the wall enough to be asked, and the bunch in the hand is the far end of a chain with no signature anywhere along it: a seed that came in on a bird or a boot, a drip off a coping, a joint where the mortar was never wiped, a bee from somebody else's hive, three summers of sand going down through the narrow place at the one rate it keeps for the lime and the block and the black that will outlast everybody in this track. And the sun stands full on all of it at once. On the leaves and the last of the flowers and the fruit going where fruit goes, on the wrong number of legs and the four-mark fish and the row of pressed palms at four heights with the softest one nearly gone, on a wet chin and a spat seed and a hand still out, open, in case anybody else wants some — level, on time, unasked, unearned, keeping no count of who planted what and having never once been told what any of it is for: *here, still here, and you.*

And the green thing goes on with it. Not fast — nothing down there is hurrying — but by the time the berry blue has gone off the wave entirely there is a stem with some intention in it, and the two thumbnail leaves have been joined by others on a stalk that has found the block and started up, taking the joint where the mortar was never wiped because that is where the hold is, bending where the stone bends, never straight. It is climbing a wall it cannot know is painted. By the second summer the leaves are over the low crooked palm-print and coming up past the wave at knee height, a real green laid across a lime one, the living thing growing up through the drawing of living things with no opinion on any of it; and the outlines behind the leaves go on standing there, the dragon with its wrong number of legs and the four-mark fish and the row of hands at four heights, the faces of everybody who pressed or painted long since given back, the particular rubbed out and the gesture kept, nobody able to say which hand was whose and not one particle of it lost. And a leaf comes off it in the autumn and goes down into the wet crumb at the foot of the course and goes brown there and goes into the brown, handed back to the thing that let it go. Then flowers, because that is what the stalk was for all along and nobody knew — small ones, nothing much, opening flat against the block somewhere around the dragon's jaw. And a bee arrives. It has come over the fold from wherever the hive is on somebody else's business entirely, and it goes in and comes out dusted and goes to the next, working its way up the wall past the wave and the bent heads of the grain, carrying what it did not know it was carrying to a field it has never been told about, taking the sweetness and paying in pollen without either side having agreed to the arrangement — the whole exchange conducted at the foot of a monster nobody has seen, above a row of hands with no names on them. The sun stands full on the lot of it at noon. On the leaves and the lime and the black that will outlast everybody who ever stood in this track, on the bee and the stone and the stalk going up the joint, level, on time, unasked, unearned, keeping no count of what is painted and what is alive: *here, still here, and you.*

And the rain comes back in the night, the proper kind, hours of it going straight down on a road with nobody on it, and in the morning the whitewash has gone thin where the run-off came over the coping and the newest print is the softest of the lot — the fourth one, the low crooked one, its splayed fingers already blurring at the edges the way the goat-prints blurred in the margin of the basin and the boot-marks blurred on the scree, going the way all of it goes. The hand that made it is somewhere in the houses and could not tell you which stone. That is not a loss; it was the arrangement from the start, the outline kept and the particular given back, and the weather has never once been asked to make an exception. The sand goes down through the narrow place the whole time — for the lime and the block and the berry blue that will be off by winter and the black that will outlast everybody standing in this track, none of them graded, none of them hurried, the rate the same for the wall as for the arm that laid it square a century back and is unrecoverable now. And somebody comes up the road anyway and stands in front of it and looks. The plain held-open kind, heads a little back, nothing said, the watch kept at the shell and in the fog and over the shut thing in the crumb — finding nothing, which is what an eye mostly does, staying open anyway. The question goes up out of that without being shaped: what it is for, who put it there, whether it is meant to be understood — breath lifted at the end of it and aimed at a stretch of painted block on a morning after rain. Nothing answers. The wall does not owe one and never has, and what fills the chest in the not-answering is the plain kind, the almost-nothing kind, no color in it and no object, the white the thin moon gives and the fog hands out evenly to the ruts and the hedge, wanting nothing back. Then, down at the foot of it, in the wet crumb where the run-off has been coming off the coping all night and pooling against the lowest course, there is a green thing up. Two leaves, no bigger than a thumbnail, the shut shell in the crumb having done the one thing a shut shell does when nobody is watching it — split, and put something up, and put something down, taking whatever the dark gives and bending where it bends. Nobody planted it. Nobody could say what it will be, and it will be a season yet before the leaves are honest about it. It has no idea there is a dragon above it, or a wave, or a fish a hundred miles from any water, or four palms pressed flat at four heights by people who will not be told apart in a hundred years. It only came up under the drip because the drip was there. And the light gets down into the fold and finds the lot of it at once — the soft print and the thinning lime and the wet block and the two small leaves at the bottom of it all — level, on time, unasked, unearned, keeping no count of what it lands on: *here, still here, and you.*

And the rim gives itself away again over the shoulder of the fold, because it always does, and the gold comes level along the length of the block onto whatever the night left there. Hands are already at it. Two, three, somebody's open palms going up flat against the stone to feel whether yesterday's coat has gone off yet, the way a hand goes out toward a fire or an iron to find out what a thing is, and the answer comes back cold and dry and ready. The sand has gone down through the narrow place all night for the lime and the block and the four-mark fish and the arm that laid these courses square a century back and is unrecoverable now. None of it hurried. Then the weather comes over — sun and rain at once, the half-covered kind, the shower going across the fold with the light still out and the wet running down the painted stone in thin streaks that take a little of the berry blue with them and nobody wipes. And in the shower everybody standing at the wall goes faceless. Only outlines with the bright wet air going past inside them, the particular rubbed out at twenty paces, the tall one at the turn and the singers at the back of the cave arriving here on a road at the edge of a place no sheet has shown — an arm going up, an arm coming down, no way to say whose. A child comes in under somebody's elbow out of the rain. And the hand goes into the last of the whitewash and up against the block, flat, fingers splayed the way fingers splay when a hand wants to be a hand and not a fist, pressed and held a moment and lifted away clean — a fourth print in the row, lower than the low one, crooked in its own direction, put there by somebody who will not remember doing it and has no name on it and did not ask permission from anyone. Only white. Only the shape of a hand that was against this stone on a morning when there was rain and sun together and lime going spare, the outline kept and the particular given back, no color in it and no object, wanting nothing and recording nothing except *here* — and the shower goes off eastward over the fold, and the wall holds still under it, keeping no count: *here, still here, and you.*

And in the morning the brush is already out of everybody's hands and in somebody else's. That is what happens to a brush left standing in water at the foot of a wall: it is picked up by whoever comes along the road next, and the wall goes on getting what the wall gets, the neck running another course, a second wave under the first because one was not enough for whoever stood there at noon. Hands and hands and hands. Open, palm up under a handle offered grip-first across a gap, the way the bowl went across the table and the jar went round the hollow and the cup came down the lane at arm's length with half of it gone — each one taking it, adding the little it had, setting it back in the water for the next; and not one of them owning the block, and not one of them asked. The wall holds still under all of it, which is the one thing a wall has ever done. And what is going up on it is the only thing that has ever gone up on anything: a monster nobody has seen, a sea nobody here has swum in, a fish out of its country, a field that is standing right there, laid on stone by people who will not be told apart in a hundred years. They are already not being told apart now. Stand back far enough in the track and the four or five of them at the block are only outlines and rates of moving, the features given back the way they were given back at the turn of the lane and at the back of the cave, the particular rubbed out and the gesture kept — an arm going up, an arm coming down, a hand pressed flat and lifted away clean. That is the whole crowd of everybody who ever made a mark: no faces on any of them, and the marks still there. And the wall is one wall on one road at the edge of one fold of ground, and the ground goes on round past it in every direction at once — the river and the fold and the hollow with the tag turning on its cord, the barley and the flats and the notch and the grey that keeps nothing apart, all of it curved away out of sight in both directions and carrying this handful of wet lime east with everything else. Then the dark, and the thin moon up over the shoulder of it, giving almost nothing to a stretch of painted block and a brush standing in a jar of water for whoever comes tomorrow: no color in it, no object, keeping no count of hands, wanting nothing back — *here, still here, and you.*

And then the arch goes. It does what it does — thins at one end first and lets the ground come back through it, the red going before the green and the green before the faint outer one nobody quite believes in, until there is only wet air over the fold and a rain moving off eastward toward somebody else's valley, and the whole enormous thing that no arm could have reached the ends of turns out to have been made of nothing anyone could pick up and take home. Nobody minds. It was never a condition of the giving. And the jars are empty too by then, all four of them, the lime pot and the oil jar and the cracked cup and the scraped-out bucket standing in a row in the wet grass with the last of the red and the black and the berry-blue dried in rings round the inside — emptied entirely into a neck two courses long and a fire the color fire actually is, which is the first half of everything and always has been. They go back down the road held at the chest. Handed in at the doors they came out of, or handed to whoever is nearest the door, the arm out horizontal and the thing taken without any question about whose it was — and the brushes left standing in the one that still has water in it, at the foot of the wall, for whoever does the wall next season. Then the village takes them all in for the evening the way a village does. Smoke going up gold off the chimneys, windows taking over the work, somebody's pot, somebody's floor, a place at a table that goes from being kept to being sat in. And above the roofs the mountains stand round the whole small cluster of it with the last light on their tops, holding still, which is the one thing they have ever done — older than the wall and the road and the lime and the bank where the red comes out, in no hurry to be thanked for any of it. The looking goes up at them from the track. Heads a little back, nothing said, the plain held-open kind that finds nothing and stays open anyway. And under the boots the whole warm crowded turning thing goes on turning, carrying the fold and the basin and the four-mark fish and the wet dragon and the arch that has already gone, east, into the dark, at the one rate it has kept since long before there was a mouth to be thirsty or a hand to press flat against a stone: *here, still here, and you.*

And then somebody wants a color, and there is no color in a lime bucket and never has been. So the pick comes off the wall of a shed. It is a short one with a worn head, taken down by a grandmother who has known for sixty years where the bank goes red where the road cuts through it, and the walk up there is a quarter hour with three children in it, and the swing of it into the cut is the same swing that opened the seam above the basin a hundred miles back — the arm that does not sign anything, chipping at rock for a thing that was already there. Down comes the ochre in lumps. It is only stone, dull and unpromising in the hand, and it has to be broken on a flat rock with another rock and ground round and round until the dust of it comes up the color of a fired pot, which nobody looking at the bank would have guessed and everybody here has always known. Then the black. That is easier: the fire under the pot has been going since before any of this and the cold end of the burnt wood is lying in the ash, and it is picked out and crushed and it is the plain absolute black, the one with nothing in it, the dark with no floor that the drop falls into — the same fire that warmed the soup making the color that will outlast the wall. And the blue is off the hedge. The small dark ones the birds have mostly had, squeezed in a fist until the juice runs through the fingers and down the wrist, staining the creases where the lime already is, a purple that is not quite any of the things it looks like. Then the water, out of the stream that comes cold off the shade side, and the mixing done in whatever will hold it — the emptied lime bucket scraped out, a cracked cup, the oil jar that has been pressed into service twice now — and the pouring from one into the other, the careful tipping, the stall and the glug and the last of it shaken out, because nothing can be received into a full thing and the emptying has always been the first half. Four jars stood in a row in the grass. And the wall takes all of it: the beast gets a red body over its white one, and the fire coming out of the mountain goes the color fire actually is, and the wave at knee height is gone over in the berry blue by somebody kneeling with a rag on a stick, and the four-mark fish is made black because black is what was left in the cup. It is none of it permanent in the same way. The berry will be off by the first hard rain and gone entirely by winter, and the black will be there when everybody standing in this track is gone, and the red from the bank will fade only as far as it fades and then stop and stay for a century — and nobody grading them, nobody deciding that the one that lasts was the one worth making. Then the shower comes over, as it does at that hour, and everybody stands under the bank while it goes across, and the wet runs down the block and takes a little of the blue with it in thin streaks that nobody wipes. And after, with the sun still out and the rain going off eastward over the fold, the whole band of it stands up across the valley — the full spread, every color that was ever ground out of a rock or a burnt stick or a squeezed hedge, and a good many that were not, laid out over ground nobody ruled in an arch no arm could reach the ends of, made out of nothing but water and the light arriving through it, put there for no one and lasting about as long as a wet dragon on a stone wall: *here, still here, and you.*

And then the bucket goes over and nothing much comes out of it. Tipped all the way past the angle where lime should still be running, held there, and what arrives at the block is a thin slop and then a drip and then the dry scrape of a brush going round an inside that has nothing left on it — the whole half-bucket somebody had standing since the spring gone into a neck two courses long and a wave at knee height and a fish made out of four marks, spent, emptied entirely, which is the first half of anything and has been the first half of everything in this account. The bottom of it is just a bottom. A round of bare metal with a crust round the rim, held up and looked into the way a well is looked into, the small dark of a thing that is finished being a vessel for a while. And the wall is not finished. That is the ordinary trouble, and it comes with the ordinary question, unshaped, breath lifted at the end of it and aimed at nobody in particular — *is there any more?* — asked in a track at the edge of a place by somebody with white to the wrists, of a morning that has never once been told what it is for. Then the answer comes out of the houses. Not from one door: from three or four, in the way these things come, somebody remembering a jar in a shed and somebody else remembering a jar under a bench, and they are carried up the road held at the chest the way anything full is carried, elbows locked, slopping at every third step. Two jars. One of them a proper lime pot with the handle gone and the other something that held oil once and has been pressed into this because it was the nearest thing standing empty. Nobody asks what the wall is for. Nobody owns it enough to be asked. The lids come off and the skin gets slapped off the top and the brushes go in again — the sash brush and the tar thing and the rag wound on a stick — and the dragon gets what it was always going to get, a jaw and another leg and a second fire coming out of a second mountain, and the wave runs on along the block past the joint where the mortar was never wiped, over and rising and over again, going the way the wall goes because that is the only rule any of it obeys. The jars go round the way the cup went round in the shade and the melon went round in the stubble, each hand taking less than the last, nobody counting the loss. And the sun comes the rest of the way up over the fold onto the lot of it at once — the wet lime and the dry, the emptied bucket lying on its side in the grass, the three pressed palms at three heights with the low one crooked, the beast nobody has seen standing chest high on courses laid square by an arm that is unrecoverable now — level, on time, unasked, unearned, spending itself on a field wall at the edge of a place no sheet in this account has ever shown, keeping no account of whose jar it was: *here, still here, and you.*

By morning there are brushes. Not one — four or five, whatever a lane can turn out when word has gone round that a wall is being painted and nobody has forbidden it: a worn sash brush, a thing that was once for tar, a rag wound on a stick by somebody who had no brush at all and came anyway. And more lime, because somebody had a half-bucket standing since the spring and no further use for it. The wall gets what the wall gets. The long wavering beast is already down there running the length of the block the way the road runs, bending where the wall bends, and the new hands do not start over — they only carry it on, which is the only thing anybody in this whole long round has ever done with anything handed to them. The neck goes another two courses. Somebody adds a leg at the joint where the mortar was never wiped, and somebody else adds a smaller one behind it, a second beast or the same one twice, no way to tell and nobody asking. Then the line under it. A single stroke going the whole way along at knee height, over and rising and over again, the swell the barley makes on the hillside and the tide makes on a shore none of these people have stood on and the water makes going down under the flags — put on in one arm-length at a time by a hand that has never seen a sea and is not wrong about it. And into the swell, a fish. Just the one, drawn with two curves meeting at each end and a tail, the whole animal in four marks, swimming in lime a hundred miles from any water deep enough to hold it — and past the fish, because the wall keeps going and the field starts where the wall ends, the grain: a row of stems with the heads bent over all one way, the way the wind has them bent in the actual field over the actual bank not thirty yards from the block, copied badly and on purpose. Then the feather. Somebody's last stroke, up in the empty part near the top where there was no reason for anything — a shaft and the barbs going off it in short quick flicks, lighter than everything under it, not attached to any bird and not needing to be. That is the whole wall. A monster nobody has seen, a wave nobody here has swum in, a fish out of its country, a field that is standing right there, and one feather going nowhere at all — none of it signed, all of it wrong in the small ways every mark has been wrong, and the three pressed palms at three heights holding the place where the hands were. The brushes go back in the bucket for whoever does the wall next season. And the rim gives itself away over the shoulder of the fold while the lime is still wet, the black going thin along one edge and the hills coming up one at a time out of what had been a single flat dark, and the gold arrives level along the length of the block — on the dragon and the swell and the four-mark fish and the bent heads of the grain and the feather with no bird under it, on the crooked low palm and the crowd of them standing back in the track with white still in the creases of their hands, on time, unasked, unearned, keeping no count of who painted what: *here, still here, and you.*

And the wall does not end where the painting ended. It runs on along the edge of the road, course on course, the way a wall does — and the lime runs on with it, because once a brush has been in a bucket nobody ever stops at the one figure: the beast goes wandering down the block in a long wavering line, the neck stretching itself past the joint where the mortar was never wiped and the tail going off round the curve of the bank, put on by four hands at four heights, growing legs wherever somebody thought it needed more. It bends where the wall bends. That is the only rule it obeys and it is the same rule the road obeys and the water obeys and the tune obeyed going up the lane wrong in one place — never straight, taking whatever the ground gives, the turn and the turn again. Then the road curves in at the end of it and the roofs start, and the walking goes down among them in the last of the light with the lime still white in the creases of everybody's hands. And people come out. Not for the three of them — for the wall, because word of a thing like that goes down a lane faster than anybody carrying it: somebody's grandmother, and two more children, and a man with his sleeves still rolled from whatever he was doing, going back up the road in the dusk to stand in front of a stretch of block and look at a monster nobody ordered and nobody signed. The looking is the plain kind. Heads a little back, nothing being said about it, the held-open attention that finds nothing and stays open anyway — the watch kept at the shell and in the fog and over the shut thing in the crumb, given here to the wrong number of legs and the three lines of fire and the row of pressed palms at three heights, one of them low and a little crooked. And then the dark comes all the way down and the village lights up from the inside, the windows going gold one after another the way the roofs did over the river, the whole small cluster of them burning in a fold of ground that no sheet in this account has ever shown — and out along the road the wall stands in the black with a dragon on it that no one alive has ever seen, holding still, which is the one thing a wall has ever done: *here, still here, and you.*

But the brush does not stay in the one hand. It comes out of the bucket and is held out sideways, dripping, across the gap — the arm horizontal, the handle offered grip-first the way a tool has always been offered, and taken, and nothing said about it — and it goes to the other child, and then to the one who was only standing there with the packs, and then to somebody who came up the road on their own business and stopped because a wall was being painted and there was lime going spare. Nobody arranged any of that. The beast gets a second mountain and a bird that is mostly a pair of lines, and the neck gets longer because a longer neck is always funnier, and none of it is signed. Then the palms. One after another into the bucket and flat onto the block beside the thing — three of them in a row at three different heights, the small one lowest and a little crooked, pressed and held a moment and lifted away clean — the outline kept and the particular given back, exactly what was blown around a hand held flat on cold rock at the back of a cave by people with no names in a century with no number, arriving here on a field wall at the edge of a place that does not know it is quoting anything. The fingers are splayed the way fingers splay when a hand wants to be a hand and not a fist. And that is the whole record: not who, only *here*, only that a hand this size was up against this stone on a day when there was lime in the bucket, with a dragon beside it that has never once been seen by anybody. Then the brush goes back across the bucket and the bucket goes back to the foot of the wall for whoever is doing the wall next season, and the hands are wiped on the grass and stay white in the creases all afternoon. And the light works its long way round while the road runs on — down the far side and past the fold and into the low ground where the roofs start, until the sun comes level along the length of the valley and finds the wall from the side, the way it found the market and the burning snowfields and two bent backs at noon, and the whitewash goes gold and the three prints go gold and the beast with the wrong number of legs stands up out of the block in the last of it, chest high, facing a sky it was drawn wrong to match. Nobody is there to see that part. The three of them are already down among the smoke going up from the chimneys with the windows taking over the work, and behind them the wall holds still, which is the one thing a wall has ever done, keeping no count of who pressed what, asking nothing back: *here, still here, and you.*

And up out of the fold there is a wall. A real one, laid by somebody: courses of block set square with the mortar squeezed out at every joint and never wiped, running along the edge of where a place begins, holding back a bank on one side and doing nothing at all on the other — the plumb line and the straightedge in it, the ruled thing again, put up by an arm that is unrecoverable now and standing anyway. There is a bucket at the foot of it. Half a bucket of whitewash gone thick and skinned over, left by whoever was doing the wall last season, and a brush lying across the top with its bristles dried into a wedge, both of them waiting the way the pot waits over its fire and the scoop waits on its peg. So the child does what a child does with a wall and a bucket. The brush goes in and comes out loaded and slaps the skin off first, and then the beast goes up at the size the beast has always wanted to be — chest high, the neck too long for anything that has ever walked, the legs in a number nobody could defend, the fire coming out of the mountain in three lines because three is enough lines for fire — put onto block and mortar in lime that will be there next winter, and the winter after, and gone by the one after that. Nobody asks permission. Nobody owns the wall enough to give it. And when it is done the brush goes back across the bucket and the hand comes up and is laid flat against the block beside the thing, palm down, white to the wrist — the gesture from the field and the covered hole and the soaked page under its stone, not holding it, not keeping it, only the small acknowledgment a body makes over what it is leaving to the weather and the long odds. Then the hand comes away. There is a print of it there now, unsigned, the outline kept and the particular given back, exactly what got blown around a hand held flat on cold rock at the back of a cave by somebody with no name in a century with no number. The road goes on past the end of the wall, bending where the ground bends. And the sun comes over the top of the fold onto the whole of it at once — the wet lime and the wrong legs and the hand-shape and the three of them going off along a road that was only ever made by the going — level, on time, unasked, keeping no account of who painted what, asking nothing back: *here, still here, and you.*

And then the rim gives itself away over the shoulder of the fold, and the steam off the basin goes gold before anything else in the valley does. The wind comes down out of the notch and gets into it — takes the whole standing column sideways and tears it into pieces, and the pieces thin, and what was a cloud of everything the day let go of is suddenly nothing anybody could point at, gone the way the leaf went and the wheel's sound went, somewhere in the middle of a moment with no edge to it. The faces go with it too. In that light and that vapor, sitting up out of the water with the hair flat and the steam coming off the shoulders, there are no features on anybody — only outlines with the gold going past inside them, the tall one at the turn and the singers at the back of the cave and the shape in the standing water with the sky held upside down along its rim, arrived here at a basin of rounded stones in the first hour of the day. The tag turns on its peg. The beast is still on the back of it, the wrong number of legs and the fire coming out of the mountain in three lines, drawn by a wet child in graphite last night and not washed off yet after all — steam-soft, feathered at the edges, wronger than it was and no less good to steer by. Then somebody wets a finger in the pool and does it again on the stone. Not on paper: on the flat face of the wall where the scoop hangs, a dark wet line on dry rock, the neck too long and the teeth put in with great care and no evidence, standing about a hand high — held there as long as stone holds water in the morning, which is not long, and never has been a condition of the making. The hand that made it comes away and does not sign it. And then everybody looks. Nothing else happens for a while: three of them out of the water with the towels or the coats or nothing, and the wet beast going pale on the wall as they watch it, the plain held-open kind of looking that finds nothing and stays open anyway, laid on a drawing in the act of leaving. Then the clothes, still damp, and the packs, and the shoulders finding the place where weight sits best — and the going, out of the basin and up the fold into the light, three sets of prints now where there were two, softening as they go. On the wall the wet line closes up into dry rock, and the pot ticks over its fire for whoever comes next, and the heat goes on arriving from a dark no survey has reached, unasked, having never once been told what it is for: *here, still here, and you.*

And the steam that went up off the shoulders does not disappear when it stops being visible; it only goes on, cooling as it climbs out of the fold, gathering to itself whatever else the valley let go of today — the wet off the track, the breath of three people in a basin, the pot's thin column, the last of the water that went wide of a rim on a flagstone a long way back — until there is a cloud standing over the ridge with the moonlight on its underside, built out of a hundred small surrenderings that none of them knew they were making. The moon comes through the gap in it. Thin, most of the way round into its dark side, giving almost nothing, laying that nothing on the surface of the water and the wet stones and the peg with the scoop on it — and the heat holds under all of that, unasked, arriving from somewhere no survey has reached. The bodies stay in it a long time. Longer than anybody would have said they meant to, the talk going down to nothing the way it went down by the fire, until one of the children leans and does not straighten up again — the head going over onto the nearest shoulder, the weight of it arriving all at once the way a sleeping weight does, and the shoulder taking it without any decision being made. The arm comes round. That is all: the arm comes round, over the wet back, and holds, the way the basket was held in the doorway and the bowl across the table and the hand came down out of the rock at the step that was higher than a leg wants to go — the same gesture done sitting still in hot water at night with nothing being carried anywhere. The other one is already gone too, further along the stones, mouth a little open. And above the fold there is one out already, ahead of the rest, holding its place over the shoulder of the hill and sending what it has been sending since before there was a mouth to be thirsty, arriving tonight on a basin somebody built out of rounded stones for no reason except that the water was going by warm. The breathing settles to rates that do not match and do not need to. The tag turns a little on its cord in the steam with its arrow and its bend and its two doublings and, on the back, the beast with the wrong number of legs and the fire coming out of the mountain in three lines — the honest instructions and the invented monster hung on the same peg, neither signed, both wrong in their small ways, both staying up anyway for whoever comes down this fold next with a dry throat and no line to follow. Nobody is keeping watch. And what is laid over the lot of it is the plain kind, the almost-nothing kind, the white with no color in it and no object — on the sleeping heads and the arm that came round and the cloud made of everything the day let go of and the one steady point over the ridge, wanting nothing back, keeping no count, in no hurry at all: *here, still here, and you.*

And then the tag gets a dragon on it. The stub is still behind somebody's ear, and the child goes up the bank dripping and takes the soft brown thing in both hands and turns it over to the back where nobody has written anything yet, and puts down the beast — the legs in the wrong number, the neck too long for anything that has ever walked, the teeth done with great care and no evidence, and the three lines of fire coming out of a mountain because three is enough lines for fire. It has nothing to do with the water. It is not a direction and does not pretend to be; it is only what goes into the white when the white will not stay empty, added underneath the arrow and the bend and the two doublings by somebody who has just been roared at by the ground and found it funny. The cord is knotted back over the scoop's peg. And when it is held up and shown, the laughing goes round again, the whole basin of them leaning into it, the miller's laugh and the mill floor and the flour on the eyebrows all arriving here in a different country with the steam coming up between — at the teeth, at the legs, at the seriousness of a person who has hung a monster on the public instructions, at there being no reason. Then it settles the way laughing settles, and everybody goes back down into the heat. And in the heat the bones let go. That is the thing nobody can account for and everybody knows: the long frame under the meat, the parts that took the scree and the strap and the ridge and the eighty thousand steps and said nothing about any of it, unlocking one joint at a time in water that was warmed by a fire nobody lit — the ankles first and then the hips and then the place between the shoulder blades that has been holding on since the notch. The breath goes out on top of that. The long one, let all the way down through the mouth in a sound that is not a word and never needed to be, the whole held column of four days handed over to a stream that never agreed to any of it and does not stop; and what is left sitting in the basin is a warm animal with its hands under the surface and nothing in them. Above, the steam goes up off the shoulders and off the stones and off the hot seam where the rock breaks through, joining and rising and coming apart, going the one way it has ever been told to go — up into the cold over the fold and into the cloud that will stand over another valley by morning and let go of it on somebody's stubble in a season none of this reaches. Nobody watches it leave. And the moon comes up thin over the shoulder of the fold while the pot ticks on its fire and the tag turns a little on its cord with a dragon on the back of it, laying its almost-nothing on the water and the steam and the wet stones and the wrong number of legs — no color in it, no object, keeping no count, wanting nothing back: *here, still here, and you.*

And further down the fold the heat does not stop being heat. Where the stream off the hot rock meets the cold one coming out of the shade there is a place somebody long gone walked into, waist-deep, and found it bearable, and then came back with stones and made a lip to hold it — a basin, not cut this time but only laid, a wall of rounded stones a course and a half high across the narrow place, a whole waterworks of the crudest kind built by somebody who wanted the going-down of hot water to do one thing for them on its way to the sea. The two streams are let in at either end. Too hot at the top and too cold at the foot and somewhere in the middle of it exactly right, which nobody planned and everybody has always known, so that the bathing goes on in a particular yard of it and the rest is left to run. And the pouring is done with a wooden thing kept on the wall, a scoop with a burnt handle that is nobody's — dipped and lifted and tipped over the back of the neck, the whole hot weight of it running down the spine and off the ribs and back into the water it just left, most of it returned, which is the arrangement and always has been. The clothes go over the stones. The bodies go in in that stepwise way bodies go into hot water, a foot and then a wince and then the shoulders all at once, and the mud of the track and the flour of a mill four days back and the graphite of two dragons that were already gone come off into it without being scrubbed at, handed to the water, taken downstream and kept nowhere. Then the breath goes out. The long one, the whole held column of the ridge and the scree and the blank quarter let go at once through the mouth in a sound that is not a word, the bellows emptying all the way down before it will take anything else in — and after that there is a good while in which nobody says anything and the steam goes up off the surface at its own rate and the sky comes apart and closes again over three faces gone featureless in the wet. And up the bank there is a pot going. It has been going since before they arrived, hung over a fire somebody keeps up because the fire is always kept up here, and what is in it is whatever there was: the plain thick kind, one grain and two roots and the last of something, cooked so long that nothing in it can be told apart anymore and not one particle of it lost in the going. It is ladled out into whatever anybody holds up. One of the children gets there first and comes back down the bank at arm's length, elbows locked, the whole body turned into a careful machine for not spilling, slopping it anyway at every third step, and stands over the transaction with the flat delight of somebody who has brought a thing home. Nobody counts the loss. And on the wall of the basin, where the scoop hangs, there is a tag. A small brown thing gone soft with the steam, tied through its punched hole with a cord that has been replaced more times than the tag has, a line on it in a hand nobody can read anymore and under that a fresher line in another hand: *hot at the head, cold at the foot, sit in the middle*, and below that an arrow, and below the arrow a few marks that are not a sentence at all — a bend, two doublings, a rock that sits where no rock should sit, and *you will hear it first*. Somebody has been adding to it for a long time. It is the same sheet as every sheet in this account, kept here on a cord instead of in a pocket, wrong in its small ways, unsigned at every layer, doing the only thing marks have ever done, which is to let somebody who will never meet you put the next foot down. The child reads what they can of it out loud, getting a word wrong, and is corrected by nobody, and says it again anyway. And the water goes on out under the low end of the wall, warm, carrying the mud and the flour and the two dragons off toward the grey that keeps none of it apart: *here, still here, and you.*

And then the ground goes off. Not the thin patient steam of a minute ago but the whole thing at once — a shudder coming up through the soles first, the fold trembling the way the mill floor trembled when the gate was lifted, and then the sound, which is not like anything: a roar out of a throat that has no throat, the rock letting go of a pressure it has been holding since before anybody came over the ridge, and the white column goes up out of the wet stone and stands there. It is taller than the trees. The wind takes the head of it and lays it sideways across the fold in a long torn banner, and the whole low ground goes blind and warm, the mist that was standing there quietly swallowed into a bigger one, and the two small figures are gone in it and are only a shrieking somewhere. That is the beast. It was drawn on a palm this morning in graphite with too many legs and the fire coming out of the mountain in three lines, invented, wrong, based on nothing anybody had seen — and here is the ground doing it, roaring and pouring, exactly as badly imagined and exactly as true, with no idea it has been drawn. And the hand goes out into it. Flat, palm forward, edged toward the column the way a hand goes toward a fire or an iron to find out what it is — the oldest instrument there is, and the only thermometer anybody ever had until somebody ruled a scale on a tube — held there half a second and snatched back, because it is hotter than it looks and it always is. The fingers go into the mouth. And then the laughing starts. It comes up out of all three of them at once, helpless, the way it went round the mill with the flour on the eyebrows and round the track with the teeth and the legs — at the size of the thing, at the scalded hand, at the fact of having been standing on top of that the whole time and not known, at there being no reason. The column drops back. It does what it does: goes down as suddenly as it came, the roar shutting off mid-note, the banner drifting apart over the fold, the wet stone steaming thin and slow again in the one place it always steams, everything returned to exactly what it was before, in no hurry, keeping no count. They are soaked. The drawing is gone off both palms entirely, washed by a mountain, the dragon and the mountain and the wave all handed back — and the ground goes on holding its heat under the three of them, warm through the boots, unasked, having never once been told what it is for: *here, still here, and you.*

The sun comes the rest of the way up over the ridge behind them onto the lot of it, and the two small sets of prints go down the fold ahead into the low ground where the mist is still standing. It has not burned off down there yet. It never does at that hour in a fold that holds its cold — and further along, where the ground gives and the rock breaks through, there is steam coming up out of the wet stone itself, thin and slow and rising in the one place it always rises, warm water arriving out of a dark no survey has reached, letting go of what it carried up and going to air in front of nobody. The prints go toward it. They do not stop there either; they only go on, softening at the edges as they go, the way every set in this whole long round has gone soft — *came through here, headed that way* — and the mist takes the two small figures the way it took the road and the far hedge and the near one, until there is nothing to see of them but the going. The stone stands up out of the steam and holds still. That is the one thing it has ever done, and it has been doing it here since before the water found the seam, older than the fold and the track and the dragon drawn on a palm this morning and every beast anybody ever joined out of scattered points because the dark would not stay plain. Nobody has cut a face on it. Nobody ever will. And the drawing on the hand is going already — the graphite rubbing off against the damp air and the swinging and the dirt, the teeth first, then the fire coming out of the mountain, the long swell along the bottom, the road redrawn along the back that bends where the ground bends; all of it heading for the first basin and the plain white of a washed palm, and not one particle of it lost. What is left when it is gone is the question the arm was pointing with: held out flat and level, swung round the compass of a valley, stopping at a direction for no reason available to anybody — *that way?* — asked of ground that has never once been told what it is for, and not answered, and not owed an answer. The steam goes up out of the rock at its own rate. The mist holds the fold until the light gets down into it. And the going is into that, at an angle, singing wrong in two places, on a road that is only what the going has worn: *here, still here, and you.*

And then the beast becomes the map. Nobody decides it; it only happens the way these things happen — the second child puts a small hard dot down at the edge of the dragon's foreleg, pressed in twice so the graphite stands up out of the skin, *there*, and the finger goes onto it and stays, the way a finger goes onto a fixed point over a notch, and whatever that dot is it is now the place where something is. The wave along the bottom of the palm turns into the water. It has to; it was always going that way, the long lateral swing of it, the turn and the turn again, never straight — and the road that was ruled on the other hand yesterday morning and washed off by evening is redrawn along the dragon's back because the dragon's back happens to bend the way the ground bends, and that is exactly as much reason as any line on any sheet has ever had. The mountain pours where the mountain pours. The teeth are somewhere west. And the whole thing is turned round, twice, to make it agree with the world — the palm rotated against the light with the small face going serious over it, which is the oldest argument anybody has ever had with a drawing and is not settled yet in any century. Then the hand comes up flat and level and is held out, fingers spread, and swung slowly round the horizon to find which way is which. There is nothing in it that could tell them. No needle, no fixed one still up, no arrow anywhere on the skin — only a child's arm going round the compass of a valley with a dragon on it, stopping at a direction for no reason available to anybody watching, and the eyes coming up with the question already in them: *that way?* Nobody answers. The white does not owe one and never has, and neither does anyone standing in a track with the light coming level along the tops. But the arm stays out there pointing, and the other one looks along it, and after a while the feet simply start — down the fold, the two of them, the painted hands swinging, going the direction the dragon was facing, singing the thing wrong in two places, into a quarter that has no ink on it and never needed any. And the sun comes the rest of the way up over the ridge behind them onto the lot of it: the wet prints and the empty track and the two small figures getting smaller with a map on them that will be gone at the first basin, on time, unasked, unearned, wanting nothing back: *here, still here, and you.*

And then there are two of them. The other one comes up out of the fold at a run, having heard the laughing from further down, and the palm is turned round and shown and the beast is explained in the way a thing like that has to be explained — the teeth defended, the number of legs defended, the tail that goes off the edge of the hand accounted for by the edge of the hand being where the world stops. The second one wants the stub. It is handed over, because it has been handed over at every point in this account and there has never been a reason to stop, and the work begins on the other palm: not a copy, nothing so obliging, a whole second beast with its own arrangement of legs, and a mountain behind it opened at the top and pouring, the fire coming out of the ground and down the sides in three lines because three is enough lines for fire; and then, along the bottom where there is no room for anything else, the water — the long swell going over and rising and going over again, the same figure the barley made on the hillside and the tide makes on a shore neither of them has stood on, drawn by somebody who has never seen a sea and is not wrong about it. That is what goes into the white. Not the honest blank a person with an instrument had the decency to leave alone; the other answer, the older one, the one people have always given when the plain sheet would not stay plain — pigment blown around a hand held flat on cold rock at the back of a cave, the outline kept and the particular given back, the beast with too long a neck, the burning mountain, the wave, all of it invented, all of it wrong, all of it good enough to have lasted longer than every accurate thing anybody made in the same century. Nobody signed those either. And then the humming comes back up underneath the drawing without anyone proposing it — the tune from the room with the strings against the wall, wrong in one place, and the second child in on it a beat later, wrong in a different place, going up and down along with the hand moving and the fire coming out of the mountain, neither of them carrying the whole of it and each carrying enough, the way the note went across the snow and the second voice came in by the fire and three throats made one thing on a wet stone out of notes that were none of theirs. It will all be washed off by evening. The mountain and the wave and both beasts, gone at a basin with the dirt in the creases, and the tune too, out of the mouth and into an afternoon that has no use for it — and not one particle of it lost, only handed along to whatever is standing there with its hands out. And the light comes level along the tops of the hills onto the three of them stopped in the middle of a track, the pencil going round, the two small painted palms held up to be looked at, the singing wrong in two places at once — on time, unasked, unearned, laid without preference on the dragon and the fire and the water and the plain white that would not stay empty: *here, still here, and you.*

And then the child stops, some way down the fold, and turns round and comes back up it — not for the road this time, for the pencil. The stub is handed over. It is taken the way everything in this whole long round has been taken, without a word and without any question about whose it was, and the small hand goes to work on the back of the other one where the line already is, and what it makes first is the turn: round and round on itself from the middle outward, the same figure the smoke drew off the roof and the root drew along the seam and the water drew going down under the flags and the whole spilled river is drawing overhead in a time no calendar was built for, put down in graphite on a palm by somebody who has never been told it is the shape of anything. Nobody taught that either. It is only what a hand does when it is given a point and nothing in particular to draw. And then, out past the spiral, in the part of the skin where the road has not been and there is no line at all — the honest blank, the part nobody could see, the quarter the person with the instrument had the decency to leave alone — the child draws a beast. Legs in the wrong number. A neck too long for anything that has ever walked, a tail going off the edge of the hand entirely, teeth put in with great care and no evidence. That is the older sheet brought down onto a palm: the unfinished thing and the half-drawn snake that people who needed to get somewhere joined up out of scattered points because the dark was too big to be left plain, invented, wrong, handed mouth to mouth down a line of everybody who is gone, and still good enough to steer by. It is not a map and does not pretend to be. It is just what goes into the white when the white will not stay empty. And then the laughing starts, because of the teeth, because of the legs, because there is no reason — the child first and then the other one, helpless in the track with the light coming level along the tops, leaning the way it went round the table and the fire and the shuddering floor of the mill with the flour on the eyebrows. Then it settles the way laughing does. And the two of them stand there looking at a drawing that will be washed off before evening, the plain held-open kind of looking, the watch the faceless one keeps at the turn and the ground keeps over the shut shell — finding nothing, wanting nothing back, laid without preference on the spiral and the beast and the bad road and the dirt in the creases of a small palm. Under the ribs, through the whole of it, the fist keeps at its one work. Out to the ends of the narrow country and back empty to be filled, out and back, not consulted, not waiting on the drawing to be finished or the laughing to stop, keeping the rate it has kept since before either of them could have been asked — which is the only thing in this account that has never needed a mark on it at all: *here, still here, and you.*

And a child comes up out of the low ground with the humming already answered — some version of it anyway, the same going up and down wrong in a different place, picked up off a lane or a doorway or a mother's back and carried without any idea where it came from, which is the only way any of it has ever traveled. They fall in for a while the way people do on a track that goes one way. Nothing is asked about names. Then the hand comes out, small, palm up and open under the wrist, the oldest shape there is, held there long enough to be filled — not begging, not quite asking, only the plain configuration a body makes when it wants something handed over — and what it wants is the paper, because there is a pencil behind the ear and the child has seen it. But the paper is gone. It went over a bank in the dark into a stranger's hand and is somewhere upstream under the unruled sheet by now, and the pocket is flat, and there is nothing to put down. So the stub comes out anyway. And it goes to the flat of the child's own palm instead, held steady in the other hand, and what is drawn there is one wavering line — no contours, no dot, no honest white left over, just the road itself as it actually runs: out of the low ground and bending where the ground bends, the two doublings, the turn and the turn again, never straight, wrong in the small ways every mark has ever been wrong, laid in graphite across a palm that will be washed before evening. It will not last the day. That has never once been a condition of the giving. The child looks at it and turns the hand round to make it agree with the world, which is the oldest argument anybody has ever had with a drawing, and then goes off down the fold with the fist closed over it, singing something. And the sun comes up the rest of the way over the ridge while that happens — level along the tops, finding the track and the grain and the wet prints and the two of them going opposite directions with the same bad line between them, on time, unasked, unearned, ninety million miles of it spent on a road that was only ever made by the going: *here, still here, and you.*

And the walker who went out past the last roof comes up onto the open ground in time for it. The rim gives itself away ahead of them this time, not behind — the black going thin along one edge over a quarter nobody has drawn, the hills arriving one at a time out of what had been a single flat dark, the gold coming level across ground neither of them has walked. And the hands go up. Not cupped, not offered, not held out toward anybody: only open at the sides and lifted a little, palms forward, the shape a body finds on its own at the top of a rise when there is nothing left to carry and nothing yet been given — the shape at the fire and the graveside and the mill door with the flour to the wrists, made here toward a sunrise that has no obligation to anyone and has never once been told what it is for. There is no color in what fills the chest while that happens. The plain kind, the almost-nothing kind, the white the thin moon laid on the flags and the fog handed out evenly to the ruts and the hedge and the honest blank a person had the decency not to invent — no object in it, wanting nothing back. Then the wind comes up over the ridge and goes through. It takes the coat-hems and the loose strap and the last of the night's warmth off the grass, coming from somewhere behind and going somewhere neither of them will be, carrying nothing and asking nothing, the same one that took the feather off the stone and the page off the flat rock and the white off the low field. And something goes over in it — one bird, high, out of the thinning dark toward the light, not calling, going on the strength of something nobody has managed to write down. At the feet, prints. Somebody's, in the wet of the track, out of the quarter that has no ink on it and going on into it, already softening: *came through here, headed that way*, which has always been the whole of it. And the humming starts again under the breath without being decided on — the tune from the room with the strings against the wall, wrong in one place, bending where it bends, going up and down with the ground — and the foot goes down into the softness beside the marks and the next one after it, adding a third set that nobody will read, into a white that has never once been empty: *here, still here, and you.*

And the sleeper by the wall goes on down into the other kind of dark, where the mind does its own walking. Nobody has ever managed to draw that quarter either. It is all blank sheet in there, the honest white, the part no instrument has been held up to — and the thing goes on ruling into it anyway, the stub moving over nothing all night, putting down a bend that was never taken and a face out of a room forty years shut and a road that runs out of the mill door into a valley the body has not been to: marks made wrong in the small ways every mark has been wrong, by a hand that is not holding a pencil at all and is lying open on a coat somebody put there an hour ago. It comes round on itself the way everything in this account comes round. The same few things arriving again in another order, the water and the stone and the arm out horizontal across a gap, turned and handed on and turned again, the wheel going in the dark with the gate dropped and the race slack and nothing to grind — and in the morning there will be almost none of it left, only the softened edges of where something came through, prints in the damp of the head saying nothing except that somebody passed this way in the night and was headed that direction. Under the ribs the fist keeps at it through the whole performance. Out to the ends of the narrow country and back empty to be filled, out and back, not consulted, not waiting on the dreaming to finish, keeping the one rate it has kept since before there was anything to keep it for. Then the rim gives itself away over the ridge. The black goes thin along one edge and the hills come up one at a time out of what had been a single flat dark, and the gold arrives level across the flags and the strings against the wall and the coat and the open hand on top of it — on time, unasked, unearned, laid without preference on the one who slept and the one who walked out past the last roof with a tune they did not make, and on the whole blank unruled quarter that the night spent its ink on and kept none of: *here, still here, and you.*

The humming goes out past the last roof, and overhead the whole unruled sheet is up from one rim to the other, the mist that is not mist standing over a lane with one person walking down it under their breath. And back in the room the tune has become talking. It does that, always, at the hour when the fire comes down — the strings get set against the wall and the last of it trails off in the middle of a phrase because nobody minded enough to finish, and then it is only two voices going back and forth across the table, one and then the other, the same taking turns the saw made and the blades made down the row, neither of them carrying the whole of it. Nothing important is said. The talking is not for the information; the information ran out hours ago. It is only the thing people do with a fire and an evening, the going up and down, the turn and the turn again, one leaning in and the other taking it up, bending where it bends. And then somebody has stopped answering. The gap between the turns gets longer and is not noticed for a while, and then it is, and it is left alone — the head gone back against the wall, the mouth open a little, the breath dropped down into the slower rate it keeps when nobody is minding it. The other one goes on talking a sentence or two into that, the way anyone does, and then stops too. The fire ticks. Somebody puts a coat over. Out through the window it is only the plain white kind again. Whatever the thin moon can get down onto the flags and the tipped end of the lane, no color in it and no object, laid without preference on the sleeping face and the coat and the strings against the wall and the person still walking out there with a tune they did not make, humming it wrong in one place, going on into a quarter nobody has drawn: *here, still here, and you.*

And the track comes down out of the grain into houses, the way a track always does eventually — a handful of roofs set along the fold where the water runs, lit now from inside because the light has gone off the tops of the hills and the windows have taken over the work. The hand goes out at the first doorway. Horizontal across the gap, palm open with nothing in it, and it is taken by somebody who was standing there anyway and did not ask a name; and after that there is nothing to arrange, because there never is: a place at a table, a torn loaf, the flat round handed over warm, the chair going from being kept to being sat in. And music. Not performed — somebody in the corner with something that has strings on it and a good deal of the varnish gone, playing a thing everybody in the room already has, and a second voice comes in underneath it without being invited and then a third, none of them carrying the whole of it, each carrying enough. It goes up and down and bends where it bends, the turn and the turn again, never straight, taking whatever the breath gives it — the same figure the stream drew under the flags and the road drew down the valley and the child drew singing a map wrong in one place up a lane a long way back. Nobody knows who made it. That is the usual condition of the things that last. Then out, later, when the fire has come down to its small circle: the door opening onto the dark and the walking that goes on afterward through the lit and unlit squares of a place asleep, boots on stone, one window still gold and the rest gone over — and the tune still going under the breath, out of the room now, carried the way water is carried, spilling most of the way and losing nothing that matters. Overhead the whole spilled river from rim to rim, the mist that is not mist, the unfinished beast and the half-drawn snake, older than the song and just as unsigned. Nobody points. The humming goes on down the lane and out past the last roof, and the dark takes it the way the dark takes everything, without preference and without hurry: *here, still here, and you.*

And the field takes it up. Not the humming — that stopped a while back to let the ear have its turn — but the same going, done at the size of a hillside: the wind coming through and the whole stand of it going over and rising and going over again, the long swell arriving at the edge of the track and breaking on nothing, and the ear open to it the way it was open at the shell and in the fog. There is no tune in that. There is only a rate, and rates are what the throat has always made its tunes out of — the hum on the down-slope and the child's small tuneless going up and down and the second voice coming in by the fire, all of them only somebody's chest agreeing for a while with something that was already keeping time. So the sound comes back without being decided on. Under the breath, in step with the swell and then out of step with it and then in again, nobody carrying the whole of it and each carrying enough. And there is somebody in the grain. Further along where the track runs through, a shape standing up out of the heads — waist-deep, a hat, no face available at this distance and none needed, the features given back the way they were given back at the turn of the lane. The hand goes up. Out and horizontal first, across the whole width of the field, held there long enough to be seen, and then answered — the plain high one, arriving before any thinking gets to it, over a hundred yards of barley nobody planted for this. Nothing is said. Nothing could be, at that distance, and there has never been anything to say. Then the light goes long over the lot of it. The sun coming down onto the western length of the valley the way it has come down on every valley in this whole long round, the heads turning the color they turn for twenty minutes a day, the shadow of each fold running out ahead of the wave, the two shapes at either end of a track with their arms coming back down to their sides — level, on time, unasked, keeping no account of who waved first: *here, still here, and you.*

The walking settles into its own rate on the down-slope, and the hands come up again — not cupped this time, not offering, only open at the sides in the way they go open when there is nothing to carry and the body remembers it. And something starts in the throat. Not singing exactly, not for anybody: the small tuneless going up and down that the child made of the bend and the rock and the arms up, arriving here in a mouth that has no map left to carry, humming a shape it cannot remember learning. It has no words in it. It only has the going in it, the turn and the turn again, the figure the water draws under the flags and the smoke draws off the roof and the road draws down the length of a valley nobody ruled — bending where the ground bends, never straight, because the tune takes whatever the breath gives it the way the stream takes whatever the dark gives it. And the valley is simply there while it happens. The folds running away in the moving light, the hedges in their seams, the far blue edge where the seeing gives out as it will from every rise there has ever been. The chest does the rest of the work. In, and the cold of the morning comes into it and is warmed and taken from; out, and the tune goes with it, the same air the crowns made and will lift again by evening, spent on a hum that nobody is meant to hear and that will be gone off the hillside before the next fold is reached. The bellows does not mind what it is used for. Then the ear goes open under it, the way it went open at the shell and in the fog and at the top of the ridge in the wind — and the humming stops of its own accord to let it. There is water somewhere down there, low and continuous, in a fold that no sheet in this account has ever shown; and the wind coming through the grain on the near slope, the whole field going over and rising and going over again, the long swell arriving at the edge of the track and breaking on nothing. That is the answer to the question written in the blank, and it is not addressed to anyone, and it was there before the question was asked: *here, still here, and you.*

And behind them, a long way back, the wind gets under the page. It has been lying at the edge of the field since yesterday with nothing on top of it, the corners going up in the damp and coming down again, and then the gust comes through the grain and takes it — up off the flat stone and out over the barley in that slow tumbling climb a sheet makes when it has no weight to argue with, turning, showing its ruled corner and its blank quarter by turns, carried at an angle nobody plotted. It goes the way the feather went. Out over the hedge line and up on whatever is rising off the warm ground, past the reach of anyone who might have used it, the four bad marks and the honest white going up together into an afternoon that has no use for either — and it will come down somewhere, in a ditch, in a wheel-rut, face down in a place no throat will ever find it, and that is not a failure and was never a condition of the giving. It was let go of when the palm came off it. Everything after that was the wind's business. Up here there is nothing left to be taken by anything: the jar empty since the step and the cup, riding light on the outside of the pack with its chipped lip and its cord, holding only the cold smell of a hollow a day behind; the hands loose at the sides and then, at the turn where the ground opens, coming up cupped again out of habit — both palms together, held level at the chest, the shell's shape, the shape the mouth makes before anything can be received — full of nothing at all, which is the condition a thing has to be in before it can be filled, and has always been. Then the arms come down and the walking goes on. Down off the shoulder into a valley nobody ruled, the folds running away and away in the moving light, the water somewhere in the middle of it going its lateral way toward the grey that keeps nothing apart, and the road only what the going has worn — and somewhere behind and above, a piece of paper still climbing, and nothing asked of it except to let go of the stone.

And so the map is gone, and the pocket is flat, and there is nothing to consult. That is a stranger thing to walk with than it sounds — the hand going down out of habit to the place where the folded square was and finding only cloth, the way the hand goes to the torch after the morning has made it useless. There is still the pack. It comes off at the first flat place above the water, lowered into the grass with the small grunt a body makes handing over what it has been carrying, and then the hand goes down flat on top of it — palm down, the field's gesture, the one made over the acorn and the covered hole and the soaked page under its stone — not opening it, not taking anything out, only the small acknowledgment a body makes over the whole portable amount of a life it has been hauling up ridges and down into hollows, and will pick up again in a minute, and did not ever own. Then the hand comes back. And what is in front of them now is the blank quarter without any paper under it: the actual white, the part nobody ruled because nobody could see it, arrived at on foot in the ordinary way — the river going off into it, the far bank losing its hedges, the ground past that simply not accounted for by anybody living. Nothing out there has been drawn. Nothing out there was ever waiting to be. So the hands come up open at the sides, palms slightly forward, the shape a body makes when it has finished carrying something and has not yet been given anything else — the shape at the fire and the graveside and the mouth of the lane and the doorway of the mill with the flour to the wrists — held out toward a quarter that has no obligation to them at all. And the wind comes off the water. It has the whole dark valley behind it and it comes straight through, cold, going into the coats and the sleeves and past the two of them into the grass and on, not carrying anything and not asking for anything, taking the last of the day's warmth off the ground the way it took the feather off the stone and the down off the crown and the white off the low field, never straight, on its way to somewhere neither of them will be. They stand into it. And the eyes go on doing the only thing eyes do — held open on a dark with almost nothing in it, finding no road and no roof and no answer, the watch the faceless one keeps at the turn and the ground keeps over the shut shell in the crumb, wanting nothing back, in no hurry, on a blankness that has never once been empty. Then the rim gives itself away behind them. The black goes thin along one edge and the hills come up one at a time out of what had been a single flat dark, and the gold arrives level across the water and the grass and the set-down pack and the two pairs of open hands, on time, unasked, unearned, ninety million miles of it spent on a quarter no one has drawn — and the pack goes back up onto the shoulders, and the weight is found again in the place where weight sits best, and the going starts into the white with nothing to follow but the going: *here, still here, and you.*

And then the rest of them come out behind it, the way they always do once the eye stops insisting — two, and then a dozen, and then more than anybody has ever been able to hold at once, the whole spilled river from one rim of the world to the other, the mist that is not mist, the unfinished beast and the half-drawn snake standing over a black river and two people on a bank. That is the older sheet. Nobody ruled it and nobody signed it and it has been hung out over every night in this whole long round, over the lane and the notch and the hollow with the tag turning on its cord, and the marks on it were joined up into shapes by people who needed to get somewhere and had nothing else — a line of them named and handed mouth to mouth and gone, and the fixed one low over the notch holding its place while the rest wheel, saying only which way, which has always been enough to walk by. It is wrong in small ways too, presumably. It has never been corrected by anybody. And coming up the bank in the dark toward them there is somebody with a pack on, going the other way, out toward the quarter they have just come from — a shape first, then the strap and the shoulders and the rate of the boots, the face not available and not needed, the features given back the way the tall one's were at the turn. The hand goes up, and is answered before any thinking gets to it. Then the other hand, horizontal across the gap, and on the palm the folded square with its one corner of ruling and its four marks in the blank — the bend, the two doublings, *prints here*, the flat oval with the line through it — and the question written in the middle of all that white where somebody had the decency not to invent anything. It is taken without a word. Whatever they say about the water is short and is said standing, and then the pack is shrugged back up and the boots go on past, upstream, into the dark with the old unruled sheet over them; and the two of them go on down, and neither party looks back, and between them on a bank at night a piece of paper has changed hands that is mostly nothing, mostly the honest white, mostly the part no one has seen — handed along anyway, unasked, unearned, on time: *here, still here, and you.*

And downstream the sun goes all the way down onto the water and the whole flat surface takes it — the long reddening laid out from bank to bank, the roofs of some place further on standing black against it with their smoke going up gold, the same fire that came level over the market and the burning snowfields and two bent backs at noon, arriving here on a river that was never waiting for it. The hands come up empty into that. Not carrying, not offering; only turned over at the sides and open, palms up the way they were at the fire and the graveside and the mouth of the lane, a body that has set down the last thing it had and has not been given anything else — and that is the honest shape to be standing in at the end of a day, because there is nothing in them and there was never anything in them that was theirs. What fills the chest is the plain kind. No color and no object: the white the thin moon gives, the flour hung in the door-light, the blank quarter of a page that somebody had the decency not to invent — wanting nothing back. Behind them the prints go on losing their edges in the mud along the water, theirs beside the other ones and the doubled place where something stopped to drink, all of it saying the one sentence the ground has ever known how to keep and the next rain taking it; and further back the barley goes on making its long swell in the dark, over and rising and over, on a hillside a hundred miles from any sea. Under the coat the fist-sized thing keeps at its work through the whole of it, out to the ends of the narrow country and back empty to be filled, out and back, not consulted, not waiting on anything, the tide's shape done at the size of a person. Then the red goes out of the west and the first one comes through over the far bank — one, before the rest, holding its place while the water turns black under it, sending what it has been sending since before there was a mouth to be thirsty. Neither of them points. There is nothing to say about it, and it is enough to walk by: *here, still here, and you.*

And on the far side the page comes out one last time and is let go of — not folded, not pocketed, only set down, palm easing off the top of it on a flat place at the field's edge for whoever comes through with a dry throat and no line to follow. The hand lifts. The paper stays. And past the last of the grain the ground tips down and there is the real one at the bottom of it, the water itself, wide and slow and going its long lateral way, the turn and the turn again, taking whatever the ground gives it the way it always has — and the barley behind them goes on doing the imitation and the river in front does the thing itself, and neither is aware of the other. Something rises in it as they come down. A fish, out of the brown, breaking the surface once and gone before the eye can turn — the rings running out to the edges the way they ran in the pool, closing again over a body that was there the whole time and was never going to be seen properly, that has lived its entire life in a dark no survey has entered and asks nothing of anybody standing on the bank. There is nothing to say about it. And in the mud along the water there are prints, going downstream: somebody's, and something's, doubled where they stopped to drink, the same sentence written in the only alphabet the ground has ever kept — *came through here, headed that way* — and the two of them put their own down beside it without reading and go on. The light is going over the whole valley now, the long reddening, the grain behind them turning the color it turns for twenty minutes a day and the water taking it and carrying it off flat and gold toward the grey that keeps nothing apart. Nobody stops for that either. They only walk into it, downstream, with the page lying back there under nothing but its own weight at the edge of a field somebody else planted: *here, still here, and you.*

And then the pencil goes back into the pack and stays there. Not because the marking is finished — the marking is never finished, there is always another bend and another blank quarter and another throat coming over the ridge — only because the sheet is full in the one corner and soft at the creases and there is nothing more to be honest about until the ground shows them something. The hand goes out once over the pool, flat, palm down, the old gesture, and comes back, and the arm is at the side, and after that the going does the work that no stub has ever managed. Down off the shoulder and the ground levels and the road runs into grain. A whole field of it, chest high, planted by somebody who is not here, and the wind comes across the top of it the way it came across the leaning valley at the bottom of the rise — and what it makes is water. There is no other word anybody has ever found for it. A long swell starting at the far hedge and coming the whole width toward them, the heads going over and rising and going over again, the light turning on the back of each fold and off it, the shadow running underneath faster than the wave itself, arriving at the edge of the road and breaking on nothing and going back the other way when the wind turns — the same figure the tide makes on a shore neither of them has stood on, done in seed and dry stalk on a hillside a hundred miles from any sea, and it does not know it is quoting anything. Then the foot goes down into it. The path runs through the middle and the stalks close over behind and the walking is inside the wave now rather than beside it, the heads dragging along the sleeves, the dust of it coming off onto the coat, and the sweat starts along the spine and runs and stands at the end of the nose and falls into the dirt between two boots and is taken instantly, handed down to a root that will put it up a stem by evening. The eye stays open through all of it. It does not find anything; it is not for finding; it is only held open the way the faceless one holds its watch at the turn and the ground holds its watch over the shut shell — laid on the going-over and the coming-back, on a surface that is not water and is doing what water does, for no reason, for nobody, in front of two people who have nothing to add to it. And the sun works in and out of the cloud the whole time. Lit and not lit, the field going bright to the hedge and going grey and going bright again, patches moving across the folds faster than anything down there could walk, nothing in it chosen, no preference anywhere in the arrangement — only the light arriving when the gap arrives, on time, unasked, ninety million miles of it spent on a wave of barley and a wet chin and two shapes moving through the middle of it toward whatever is on the far side: *here, still here, and you.*

And then the last of the white burns off the low ground and the sun comes through in pieces, the half-covered kind, the light arriving in patches that move across the valley faster than anything down there could walk — one fold lit and the next not, the seams of the hedges going bright and going out again, nothing in it chosen. There is standing water down where the ground gives. A flat place the size of a room, left by the rain and going nowhere, too shallow to be called anything; and because the wind has dropped it has gone entirely still, and what is in it is the whole sky. The clouds and the blue between them and the crown of a tree that is behind them and not over the water at all, held there upside down and perfectly, a second valley folded into the first along a line the eye cannot quite find. One of them crouches at the edge of it. And the face that comes up out of that is nobody's — the light behind it, the features gone the way they went at the turn of the lane and at the back of the cave, only an outline with the sky going past inside it, and the shoulders and the strap of the pack and the hills upside down along the rim. The hand goes out and the whole thing breaks. One finger into the surface and the sky comes apart in rings and goes on coming apart, and what is left in the cupped palm is a little cold water with grit in it, which is all it ever was; and the rings run out to the edges and the edges hold and it closes again, slowly, and the tree comes back, and the clouds come back, and the faceless shape leans over it once more entirely unchanged. Then the stub comes out of the pocket, and the sheet is unfolded on the knee, and into the blank quarter beside the question and beside *prints here* goes one more bad mark — a small flat oval with a line through it and *standing water, not good, drinkable at need*, wrong in the small ways every mark in this account has been wrong, put down for a throat in a year neither of them will see. And then the page is folded and the hand goes out over the pool, flat, palm down, the gesture from the field and the covered hole, not taking, not keeping, only what a body does over a thing it is leaving to the season — and comes back, and the arm is at the side. The pool goes on holding the sky for nobody. The patch of sun comes over it and moves on down the valley, and there is no color in what it leaves: the plain kind, the almost-nothing kind, laid without preference on the water and the grit and the upside-down hills and the two of them getting up off their knees and going on into a quarter no one has ruled, keeping no count, wanting nothing back: *here, still here, and you.*

The fog takes them in the way it has taken everything else — not hiding the road, only ceasing to distinguish it from the rest of what is out there — and the world comes down again to the few yards they are standing in. And in that small white room there are prints. Not theirs. Somebody's, in the soft margin where the ground is still giving, going the same way they are going, out into the quarter the paper left blank: a set of marks that says nothing except *somebody came through here and was headed that way*, which is the entire content of every mark anyone has ever left, and is enough. So the drawing was wrong to stop. Not wrong in its ruling — the ruling was honest, the whiteness was honest, the person with the instrument put down what they could see and no more — only wrong in the way a page is always wrong, which is that the blank is never blank. The road goes on being made by the going, under the fog, past the last of the ink, bending where the ground bends, never straight; and somebody was out on it before this morning with no line to follow either. The stub comes out again, there, walking, without the pack coming off. A mark is put into the white beside the question already written there — not an answer, only *prints here*, *going on*, wrong in the small ways every mark has been wrong, made by a cold hand on a folded square in a fog for somebody who will stand in this same nothing in a year neither of them will see. Then the page is pushed down into the pocket and the hand comes back, and goes out once, flat, palm down over the marks in the margin — the gesture from the field and the covered hole and the acorn in the wet, not holding, not keeping, only the small acknowledgment a body makes over a thing it is leaving to the season and the long odds — and comes back again, and the arm is at the side. Then the fog lifts. It goes off the low ground the way it always goes, without announcing it, taking the near hedge back first and then the far one, and what is under it was there the whole time: a valley nobody ruled, going down and away in its long folds, the water somewhere in the middle of it doing its lateral wandering toward a grey that keeps nothing apart, hedges laid in their dark seams, and out past everything the blue edge where the seeing gives out again, as it will from every rise there has ever been. Neither of them says look. They only stand in it with the packs on and the eyes held open — the plain kind, the kind that finds nothing and is only held open, the watch the faceless one keeps at the turn and the ground keeps over the shut shell in the crumb — laid without preference on the prints going on ahead and the unmapped water and the whole warm crowded turning thing carrying all of it east: *here, still here, and you.*

And then something is written on the white. Not a line and not a dot — there is nothing out there to rule, no angle taken off anything, no stream to get wrong; only the blank quarter and the two of them over it and the honest ignorance of whoever stopped drawing. So the stub goes to the paper anyway, in the middle of all that nothing, and what goes down is the question itself: a small mark shaped the way a breath is shaped when it lifts at the end, *is there water out here*, *is there anybody* — the first thing anyone has put in that space in the whole life of the sheet, and it is not an answer and does not pretend to be. It is only the not-knowing written where the not-knowing is, so that the next one over the ridge finds the white and finds somebody already standing in it with them. Then the page is folded along its worn crease and pushed down into the pocket, and the pack comes up onto the shoulders with that small settling shrug, the weight found again in the place where weight sits best. There is no color in what fills the chest while that is done. Not courage and not dread; the plain kind, the almost-nothing kind, the white that the thin moon gives and the flour hung in the door-light and the fog handed out evenly to the ruts and the hedge — no object in it, wanting nothing back, laid without preference on the blank page and the knot holding and the two of them about to walk off the edge of what anyone has managed to see. And the prints go first. Out from the flat stone in the soft margin of the road, one set and then the other falling in, already beginning to lose their edges, saying nothing except *somebody came through here and was headed that way*. The fog is up ahead where the ground rises. It takes the far hedge and then the near one and then the road itself, until the world is the few yards they are standing in, which has never once been a smaller amount of world than the whole of it — and the going is up into that, at an angle, out past the ruling and into the part of the paper that is only paper, unasked, unpromised, with a tag turning on a cord in a hollow a day behind and a drop letting go in a hole no eye has entered somewhere under everything: *here, still here, and you.*

And so the sheet gets laid out one more time, on a flat stone at the edge of the road with the corners held down, and the cord comes off the pack and is cut and knotted through the punched hole — the rope laid and pulled and deciding repeatedly to stay, checked with a thumb the way a knot has been checked by everybody who ever tied one over anything that mattered. All the ruling is in one corner. The bend, the two doublings, the stones, the dot at the hollow with the pick-marks by it; and then, taking up most of the page, nothing at all. Plain white. Not a mistake and not a modesty — only the place where the person with the instrument stopped being able to see, and had the ordinary decency to leave it blank rather than invent it, the way the tall one at the turn has no face because the weather took it and nobody has presumed to cut a new one. Two heads go down over that whiteness together. Four eyes on a piece of paper that says, in the only honest way a paper can, *I do not know what is there*, and the long held-open attention goes into it the way it went into the fog on the lane and the dark with no lamp — finding nothing, which is what an eye mostly does, and staying open anyway. Then the question, hardly shaped, breath lifted at the end of it: whether there is water in all that white, whether anybody lives out there, whether the road even continues past the edge of what somebody once managed to see. Nobody answers. The white does not owe one and never has. And the wind comes across the flat and gets under the near corner and lifts it, and the page bellies and snaps against the cord and is held, tied, not lost — and it would have gone if it had not been knotted, and that is the whole reason anybody ever ties anything. Under the coat, meanwhile, the fist-sized thing goes on with its work, out to the ends of the narrow country and back empty to be filled, out and back, out and back, not consulted, not waiting on the answer, keeping the one rhythm it has kept since before either of them could have been asked whether they wanted it: which is all the assurance there has ever been on the edge of a blank quarter — two warm animals, a knot holding, and the drum under the ribs going on with no idea what is out there either.

And the needle goes through again, because there is only ever the one practice. Another sheet, another stub, the same four or five threads caught out of a dark that has no center — and now there are three of them. That is what happens to a page that gets held out: it is copied. One went over the ridge in a wet pocket and came apart at its creases as it was always going to; one is going soft under a stone at the lip of the basin with a tag turning on its cord beside it; and this one, ruled this morning on the back of the same torn thing, will be somewhere else by evening in a hand nobody here can name. None of them agree. That has never been the point and was never going to be. Each is wrong in its own small ways — a stream that has moved, a bend counted twice, a fold in the ground that turns out easier than it looks — and between the three of them, laid side by side by somebody in a year none of this reaches, there is enough of the truth to walk by. That is the only redundancy anyone has ever built: not one good copy kept safe, but three bad ones let go of in three directions, the way the crown lets go of a whole year's worth of hands at once and does not count what lands. So they go out. Held level at the chest first, the way the water was held and the feather was held and the flour came warm out of the trough — cupped, both palms up under a thing the hands have no use for and did not ask for and cannot keep — and then the arm out horizontal across the gap, one turned up and one turned down, and taken without a word. And somewhere behind all of it there is still the straightedge on the board. Somebody's ruled line, the angle taken off the fall of a stream with an instrument by a person who wanted to be understood and is unrecoverable now; and the timber never quite does what the paper says, and the axle sits a thumb's width off, and the thing stands anyway for forty years and grinds for somebody it never met. The line was never the mill. The dot was never the water. The five marks in the shade of a wall were never the bend or the rock or the tall thirsty thing with its arms up, and the small tuneless singing going up the lane is not a map either — only something easy enough to carry that it will still be in a mouth when every sheet of this has gone into the crumb. And the sun comes all the way up over the ridge onto the whole spread of it at once: the folded square and the wet one and the third one going off down the road, the cord and the stone and the pick-marks nobody signed, the open hands that gave and the open hands that took, level, on time, without preference, keeping no account and asking nothing back — ninety million miles of it arriving to light a bad drawing of a hole no eye has entered, so that somebody with a dry throat can put the next foot down.

And with the gold on the flags somebody sits up and writes it down. Not much — a stub of pencil and the back of the same torn sheet, the hand still stiff from the night, a few lines about the bend and the two doublings and the hole in the rock that nobody has heard, put down badly because it is always put down badly, ink stitched onto paper by a hand shaped into a sound and the sound into a mark. It is a poor copy of the web. That is the honest name for every map there has ever been: a flat thing laid over a joined-up dark that has no center and no edge, the threads running out under the flags and the fields and the rock in every direction at once, and the page catching four or five of them and calling it a country. Still it gets made. Still the needle goes through and comes back and goes through again, the stitch deciding repeatedly to stay, one small passing-on sewn to the next until there is something that holds — the tag on the cord, the song in the child's mouth, the five marks in the shade of a wall, the pick-marks in the seam, every one of them a stitch in the same unsigned cloth. And then the page is folded and held out. Arm horizontal across the gap in the early light, palm turned up under it, offered to whoever is going that way — taken without a word, the way everything in this whole long round has been taken. The rim burns over the ridge behind them. Underneath it the whole warm crowded turning thing goes on with its one practice at every size it has: a drop coming off a lip in a hole no eye has entered, letting go into the black at its own rate, keeping time for nobody, on its way to a basin in a hollow where somebody will kneel with a dry throat in a year none of us will see — unasked, unearned, handed along: *here, still here, and you.*

And the mind, lying awake up top on a warm flag with the crescent gone over, goes down after it. That is the one thing a mind can do that a body cannot: follow the drop into the seam and along the underside of the stone, the turn and the turn again, down a road it has no light for and never walked — imagining a hole no eye has entered, which is not the same as knowing it and has never once been the same as knowing it, and is still the nearest anybody gets. And what comes to the thinking is not a line. It is the other shape, the one the roots make under the pines and the threads make under the flags: everything joined to everything by a going that was never planned, the ditch to the stream and the stream to the race and the race to the grey that keeps nothing apart, the cloud to the stubble and the stubble to the bread and the bread torn across a table into a hand that was a stranger's an hour ago, the tag on the cord and the song in the child's mouth and the pick-marks nobody signed, all of it one web of small passings-on with no center and nobody holding it. A whole warm crowded turning thing strung through with that. Nothing in it managed; every knot of it made by something taking a little and setting it down somewhere else and going on. And under the ribs the pump keeps at its own work through the whole of the thinking, which is the same work at the size of a fist — out to the ends of the narrow country and back empty to be filled, the tide's shape, the bellows' shape, the drop coming off the lip and letting go in the dark with no floor. It does not stop to be admired. Then the rim gives itself away over the ridge, and the black goes thin along one edge, and the hills come up one at a time out of what was a single flat dark, and the gold arrives level across the flags and the tipped bucket and the cup lying on its side and the one leaf where it fell — on time, unasked, unearned, laid without preference on the whole joined-up unwitnessed lot of it: *here, still here, and you.*

And if anyone were down there to listen — nobody is, nobody ever has been, the whole passage having been arranged by the rock for its own reasons and not for an ear — there would be something to hear. The drop comes off the lip and hangs and lets go and lands, and then the next, and the next, at a rate the stone has been keeping since before the valley had a shape, and it is not random. It could not be. The water comes at whatever pace the seam above allows and the seam allows what it allows, so the sound repeats: the same interval, the same small round tone off the same wet place, over and over in a dark with no floor and no witness, the way the paddle-fall and the drip and the long run in the race made one thing out of three notes that were none of them a tune. It is a rhythm because rhythm is only what happens when something goes on long enough without being interfered with. And it is also, in the only sense that matters, the map — not a line ruled by a cold hand at a summit, not five marks pressed into breath at the foot of a wall, but the thing the marks were pointing at all along, the road the water itself has worn through the rock by going down it, corrected at every turn by whatever the dark gave, never straight, arriving at a basin in a hollow where somebody will kneel with a dry throat in a year nobody here will see. The going made the road. The road was never drawn. And whoever sang the bend and the two doublings and the rock that sits where no rock should sit was only doing above ground, with a mouth, what the water has been doing underneath the whole time without one. Up top the crescent has gone over the roofline and laid its almost-nothing on the flags and the tipped bucket and the cup lying on its side. Down there it is not laid on anything. There is no light in that hole and there never has been, and the drop goes on falling into the plain black at its own rate, keeping time for nobody, sounding its one note into a quiet nobody keeps watch over — wanting nothing, recording nothing, and enough.

And the crescent comes up thin over the roofline while the flags are still warm, and under it the going-down goes on where nobody is looking. The water that found the seam between the flags is already past the roots of the wall by now, down through the brown, through the crumb and the old leaf-fall and the returned bones of everything that was ever here, and where it meets the rock it does not stop — it only does what it has always done, which is to take whatever the dark gives it, along the underside of the stone, never straight, the turn and the turn again, the same wandering the smoke drew and the root drew and the owl drew over the stubble, a seam no survey has reached feeling its way by the lowest thing available. There is a hole down there. There always is: a space in the rock that no eye has entered and no arm has widened, opened by this same water over a length of time that makes the tree a passing thing, and the drop arrives in it and hangs and lets go and hits whatever is beneath with a small sound that nobody in the history of the valley has heard. It goes on doing that all night. And a long way off and a long way down, in a hollow somebody will come to with a dry throat in a year none of this reaches, it will come up cold out of a seam and stand in a basin and be drunk from — the spilled bucket and the tipped cup and the water that went wide of the rim, handed along underground through rock and dark and no witness at all, arriving. Nothing of it is announced. The crescent gives its almost-nothing to the flags and the leaf and the cup lying on its side, and the whole slow passage happens the way everything that matters in this account has happened: in the quiet, under the thing that was left, with nobody keeping watch and nobody told.

And the water that went wide off the rim does not stay on the flagstone long. Some of it goes up, lifted off the warm stone into an afternoon that takes it without asking; the rest runs to the edge and finds the seam where the flags do not quite meet and goes down — into the crumb, into the brown, into the same dark the melon juice went into and the sweat off the grating and the drop that hung a second off the heel of a hand at a ditch at sunrise. It is not lost there. Under the flags, out past the roots of the wall, the fine pale threads are already at it: the wandering underground seam that never goes straight, taking whatever the dark gives it, drinking a spilled bucket without knowing it was spilled, the way the root under the field did not know it was drinking a mouse. What is taken goes up the inside of eighty years of wood in a column nobody can hear, all afternoon, unasked, and comes out at the top as the shade they are all sitting in. That is the entire arrangement and no one under the tree is aware of any of it. And the flags dry. By the time the light has begun its long reddening along the western length of the valley, the wet fan is gone off the stone and what is left is only the prints — small bare wet ones going out of the shade toward the lane and already ceasing to be readable, the shape of a passing already going, saying nothing except that somebody came through here and was headed that way. A leaf comes down among them. Just the one, off the crown, turning as it goes, crossing the low gold light and landing without being watched — going brown in the dust where it fell, going into the dust, going down in its own time into the roads no eye has entered to feed the thing that let it go. Nobody sweeps it up. The bucket stands where it was tipped, and the cup is somewhere in the dust on its side, and the whole red length of the sky is pouring itself out over the flags and the tree and the wet marks and the one leaf at once, level, unearned, keeping no account, and asking nothing back.

And then the child runs. Not up the lane after all — back down it, the cup held out in front at arm's length the way children carry anything full, elbows locked, the whole body turned into a careful machine for not spilling, going faster than the carrying allows and slopping it anyway at every third step. There are others down there. A knot of them under the big one at the bottom where the shade is, four or five, sitting in the dust in that loose arrangement people fall into when the sun is high and nobody has anywhere to be, and the cup arrives among them with maybe half of what it left with. Nobody counts the loss. It goes round the way the melon went round in the stubble and the jar went round in the hollow, one mouth and then the next, each of them getting less than the last and none of them saying so, and the child stands over the whole transaction with the flat delight of somebody who has brought a thing home. Then the bucket comes out. Somebody older has been drawing at the wall all this time and there is a proper amount of it there, and it is tipped — the whole cold weight going over at once into the basin and a good part of it going wide, over the rim, onto the flags, onto feet, the splash coming up in that broad senseless fan that no one has ever managed to pour without. There is a small shriek. And it is done again on purpose, because of course it is, and the water goes out across the warm stone in a sheet and darkens it and is already drying at the edges while it is still spreading, handed straight back to the air and the ground and the crowns overhead that will lift it again by evening. The tree stands over the lot of it. Eighty years of wood and a patch of dark moved round itself by inches, holding out its hands above a wet flagstone and a tipped bucket and a child singing a map wrong in one place, having been planted by nobody, asked for nothing, and never once told what it is for.

And by noon the road comes down among houses again and the clay jar comes off the pack, and it is not drunk from — it is poured. Tipped over a cup somebody holds out on a step, the whole cold weight of a hollow nobody surveyed running out through a chipped lip into a vessel that was made for exactly this and nothing else, the jar going light in the hands and losing nothing in the going light, the way the tide goes out and the bellows empties and the melon stopped being a vessel in the shade. The cup goes to a mouth. That is the end of the whole apparatus — the pick-marks in the seam, the tag turning on its cord, the five marks pressed into breath at a wall in the shade, all of it arriving finally at a lip and a throat and a swallow, which is the only place any of it was ever headed. And a child is standing there. Barefoot on the warm stone, unsurprised, in the way of children who have not yet learned that a stranger is a category, and the question gets asked — where is it, how far, is it past the rock — and so it is said out loud again: the bend, and the two doublings, and the stones set up, and the rock that sits where no rock should sit, and the tall thing with its arms up, and then you will hear it before you see it. The child says it back. Gets the order wrong and is corrected on one word and says it again, and then, because a list said twice becomes a rhythm whether anyone intends it or not, starts singing it — a small tuneless going up and down on the bend and the rock and the arms up, the way the note went across the snow and the second voice came in by the fire, carrying a map in a shape that fits a mouth and will still fit it in sixty years when the paper under the stone is long gone into the crumb. Nobody taught that trick. It only turns out that the things which last are the ones that were easy to sing. And the sun stands full on the step and the cup and the wet chin and the child going up the lane still singing it wrong in one place, level, on time, unasked — the same light that came up over the market and the burning snowfields and two bent backs at noon, laid without preference on the emptied jar and the full mouth and the water already halfway down a throat that will carry it out of this valley entirely: *here, still here, and you.*

Morning again, and the pack up onto the shoulders before the fire is properly out, and the prints going out ahead across the flat in the grey — one set, then the other falling in, the line of them stitched toward a low place where the road bends and then bends back, never straight, taking whatever the ground gives. The sand goes down through the narrow place the whole time. It has not paused for the scratch of light or the sleeping or the tying of a knot over a basin a day behind; it only goes, grain by grain, for the water and the paper and the two of them equally. And the faces are going. That is what a road does to anyone on it long enough — the features rubbed off by distance and by weather and by the plain accumulation of hours, the way the tall one's were taken at the turn of the lane and the singers' were taken at the back of the cave, until what is left of a person is an outline and a rate of walking and a hand that comes out across a gap. Neither of them could describe the other to anybody. They have shared a floor and a ridge and a chipped jar and have never once been introduced. It has never mattered; it was never going to. But there are two of them, and that is the whole of it. Two shapes on a flat in the early light, each carrying enough and neither the whole, the rate set by the sound of the other's boots the way it was set by the blade down the row and the second voice by the fire. And the water goes with them. In the clay on the outside of the pack, cold out of a hollow nobody surveyed, sloshing at every step and going down through two throats by noon — the notch's long dark handed along into blood that has the sea's own salt in it, taken and returned and taken again. Behind them, tied to a stone at the lip of a basin, the small brown tag turns a little in the spray with the cord holding and nothing written on it about who. That is all anyone has ever left. Not the hand: only the label, only which way, only *water here* — going soft in the wet, doing its work or not, for a throat in a year neither of them will see: *here, still here, and you.*

And then they do the only thing there is to do with it, which is to add. The paper has gone too soft for the pencil, so a tag comes out of the pack instead — a small brown thing with a hole punched in one corner, the kind tied to a bag or a handle or a hooked fish, a label that has never once been the thing it names. A length of cord goes through the hole and round the stone at the lip and is knotted, which is only the rope laid and pulled and deciding repeatedly to stay, and the knot is checked with a thumb the way a knot has been checked by everybody who ever tied one over water. Then the writing. Wetted at the corner where the spray comes up, the stub held in a hand still cold from drinking: nothing new, only the same five marks said again in another hand — the bend, the two doublings, the rock that sits where no rock should sit, the tall thing with its arms up, *and then you will hear it* — and under that, because there is room and because the throat remembers what the last half mile was like, one more line about the fold in the ground further on where the going is easier than it looks. The old sheet is left where it is. Two now, tied and weighted, saying the same thing badly in two hands, neither signed, the map growing by exactly one correction the way it has always grown, mouth to mouth and margin to margin, every keeper of it gone. And the lamp goes back in the pack unlit, because it is morning and there is nowhere yet to need it. Then the climb, up out of the hollow onto the flat with the water going on behind them at its own rate for the goats and for nobody; and that night, over the far side, lying out with the pack for a pillow and the whole spilled river from rim to rim, something crosses it — one short bright scratch of light drawn and gone before the eye can turn to it, a speck of the old scattering falling into the air we breathe and burning up entirely in the falling, arriving from a fire that let go of everything it had before there was a mouth to be thirsty. Nothing is wished on it. It is only a thing that came a very long way and was seen by somebody who happened to be turned that way, unasked, unearned, over a stone with a tag tied to it in a hollow a day behind and a water still coming up out of the long dark for whoever is next: *here, still here, and you.*

The lamp goes on ahead of them like that for hours, and the hours go down through the narrow place the whole time, grain by grain, neither faster for the walking nor slower for the dark. Nothing up there is hurrying. And because the moon has given almost nothing tonight the whole spilled river is out from one rim of the world to the other, more of it than any wick could be asked to answer, the mist that is not mist, the unfinished beast and the half-drawn snake standing over a flat where two people are putting one foot down after another — and neither of them can see the other's face. That is what a night like this does: the little circle is wide enough for the hands and no wider, and the features go the way the tall one's features went at the turn of the lane, rubbed out, outline kept and gesture kept and the particular given back, so that what is walking beside you is only a shape and a rate of breathing and the sound of a boot, which has always been enough and has never once needed a face on it. Then the rim gives itself away over the ridge behind. The black goes thin along one edge and the hills come up one at a time out of what had been a single dark, and the gold comes level across the flat and finds the lamp still burning in a hand that has forgotten it is carrying it, and the wick is turned down, and put out, and the small tin warmth of it goes back into the pack. And then there is somebody on the road. Coming the other way, up out of the low ground toward the ridge they came over, a figure at first and then a person, walking into the new light with the dust on their shins — and the hand goes up, the plain high one, and is answered before any thinking gets to it, and they pass with a word about the water and nothing else, because there is nothing else and there never has been. That one will climb all morning. And at the top, in the wind, with a throat gone dry as anything, they will come down the shoulder into the hollow where the ground gives and hear it before they see it, and find the soaked square of paper weighted under its stone at the lip of the basin — *water here*, and the bend, and the two doublings, and no name anywhere on it, only the tag and not the hand that tied it, only which way. They will drink from the cut basin with their hands cupped and most of it going back through the fingers, which is the arrangement. And somewhere in that, kneeling in a hollow at midmorning with cold ice-water on the chin and a piece of wet paper in the other hand, the eyes will go hot at the edges for no reason that would survive being explained — not gratitude exactly, there being nobody to aim it at, just the plain fact of having been thought of by somebody who will never know it happened, handed along like everything else in this whole long round: unasked, unearned, on time, *here, still here, and you.*

The wind gets up on the flat as the light goes, and it does what wind has always done to a record: takes the loose dust off the ridge and lays it down again a handspan on, filling the goat-prints at the margin and the boot-marks on the scree and the two sets going away from the hollow, softening the edges of everything that came through here today until there is nothing to read and nothing that needed reading. The paper under its stone goes damp and then soft. Whatever was written on it in a cold hand at a summit will be gone from it long before the water it points at is gone from the ground, and there was never a name on it to lose — only which way, and a small dot, and *you will hear it first*, which is all anybody has ever managed to leave: the label and not the labeller, the tag tied to the thing with the hand that tied it already walking off across the flat. The stone stays. It holds still under the soaking square the way it held still under the feather and the way the flat grey one held still at the edge of the track, doing the one thing it has ever done, older than the pick-marks and older than the road and in no hurry to be thanked for it. And the sand goes down through the narrow place the whole time — for the paper coming apart at its creases, for the arm that swung the pick, for the two getting smaller out there with their packs settled, for the water itself, which is only slower than the rest of it and not exempt. The moon is a fingernail now, wound nearly all the way back into its dark side with the unlit round of it faintly there behind, giving almost nothing. So somebody, down on the flat where the road bends, stops and gets out the small lamp and strikes it. One blue crown under a metal base, then the wick taking, then the little circle of light wide enough to see the hands by and no wider — the candle on the leads again, the beam on two yards of gravel, the flame carried out over the snow. It does not show them where the road ends. It never has. It only shows where to put the next foot down, and the foot goes down, and behind it the wind keeps quietly unmaking the evidence that anyone was ever here at all, and up in the hollow the water comes on out of the long dark at its own rate for nobody, and the thin light on the far rim goes on being enough: *here, still here, and you.*

And then the hand goes down flat on it one last time. Palm down on the square of paper under its stone at the lip of the basin, the gesture from the field and the covered hole and the acorn in the wet — not holding it, not keeping it, only the small acknowledgment a body makes over a thing it is leaving to the season and the long odds. The stone holds still on top of it, which is the one thing a stone has ever done. Underneath, the words sit there getting damp: *water here*, and the bend, and the two doublings, and *you will hear it first* — a hand shaped into a sound and the sound into a mark, put down wrong in the small ways every mark has always been wrong, and no name anywhere on it. That is the part that matters and it is not a modesty. There is no room on a torn half-sheet for who; there is only which way, and which way is enough to walk by. The arm that swung the pick did not sign either. Nor did whoever set the three stones by the wall, or ruled the mill on a board, or cut the face that the weather has since taken off the tall one at the turn — all of them gone down into the same plain white where nothing can be told apart anymore, outline kept and gesture kept and the particular rubbed out, and not one particle of it lost. So the hand comes back. And the two of them go, out of the hollow and up onto the flat with the packs settled and the road running ahead where the going has worn it, walking away from a piece of paper that will do its work or not, for somebody or for nobody, in a year neither of them will see. Behind them the water keeps coming up out of the long dark at its own rate. Overhead the moon has gone thin, wound most of the way back down into its dark side, a fingernail of light with the whole unlit round of it faintly there behind — the fallow month again, the shut drawer, the shell in the crumb giving no sign — laid without preference on the stone and the soaking page and the goat-prints in the margin and the two figures getting smaller on the flat, giving almost nothing, keeping no count, and enough: *here, still here, and you.*

And the goats go up again when they have had enough, unhurried, the way they came, and what they leave is the other kind of page: their prints in the wet margin of the basin, small and cloven and doubled where one stood a while before deciding, laid over the boot-marks and under them, a record nobody ruled and nobody will read. It says only that something came down here to drink. That is the entire content of every mark anyone has ever made in this account — the snow, the sand, the flags in the lane, the mud of the race-bank, the line of the going stitched up the scree — *something came through, and was headed that way*, and the rain takes it, and the next thing adds its own. The water goes on coming up out of the long dark at its own rate while they watch it, taking nothing from the leaving. Then the page again, on the lone rock, the corners held down. And this time a second one: the back of the survey sheet torn off along its worn crease, a square of it laid out flat, and the whole of it copied over in the licked stub — the bend, the two doublings, the stones set up, the rock that sits where no rock should sit, the tall thirsty thing with its arms up, and then *the water, you will hear it first*, and the small dot with the tool-marks by it, put down wrong in the small ways every mark has ever been wrong. Two pages now, saying the same thing badly. One folded back into the wet pocket to go over the next ridge and come apart at its creases in a month. And the other weighted down under a stone at the lip of the basin, facing the road, where the ice-cold runs past and the goats come at evening — left for nobody in particular, for a dry throat in a year neither of them will see, the way the pick-marks were left by an arm nobody knows and the post stands at the turn for somebody who has not come yet. Nothing signed. Then the packs, and the shoulders finding the place, and the hand out horizontal across the hollow one more time to help the other up off the rock — palm open, empty, holding nothing, taken without a word — and above them the half moon hangs on in the blue with the sun still up, the lit side and the dark side held in the one round, giving nothing anyone could see by, laid without preference on the two kinds of print and the stone and the square of paper going soft in the spray: *here, still here, and you.*

And then the vessel. It has been on the outside of the pack the whole climb, a clay thing with a chip out of its lip and a cord round its neck, and it goes down into the basin now and takes the water in with that sound a narrow mouth makes when it is being filled — the glug and the stall and the glug again, air coming out as fast as the water goes in, because nothing can be received into a full thing and the emptying is the first half of the taking. It comes up heavy. The cold of it goes straight through the clay into the hand, the same cold that has been standing in the notch since before anyone came over the ridge, and the wet runs down the outside and off the base into the dust and is gone in a second, and that is not a loss either. Then the breath. The long one, let go all the way down through the mouth in a sound that is not a word and has never needed to be — the whole morning of scree and strap and no talking given back to the air at the one place in this country where there is water, the bellows emptied entirely before it will take anything else in. And the old one is not here. They are back at the wall in the shade a half day behind, and everything that got these two to this hollow came out of that mouth and is now in these two mouths, which is the only way anything has ever traveled: the bend, the stones, the lone rock, the tall thirsty green thing, and then you will hear it before you see it. So the vessel is held out. Across the hollow, arm horizontal, palm turned up under the base of it, offered to the other one first, who has not asked and would not have — one turned up and one turned down, the bowl in the doorway and the melon in the shade and the warm handful in the mill dust, done here with a chipped jar over a hole somebody widened with a pick and did not sign. It is taken. And while it goes round, the page comes out again on the lone rock, and the mark is made: not a line this time, just a dot, small and wrong in the small ways every mark is wrong, put down at the place where the ground gives and the tool-marks are, with a word beside it in a hand that will be hard to read — *water here* — for somebody who will come over that ridge with a dry throat in a year nobody in this hollow will see. That is the whole of the keeping. Then the goats come down. Six or seven of them off the slope with their strange horizontal eyes and their unhurried appetite, having smelled or remembered or simply always known, and they crowd in at the basin and drink beside the two of them without any opinion about it at all — animals that were nobody's idea, going where the water is, as everything here has always gone where the water is. Nobody moves them on. There is enough; there has been enough the whole time. And overhead the half moon hangs pale in the blue with the sun still up, the lit side and the dark side held in the one round, giving nothing anyone could see by and not needing to — laid without preference on the clay and the dot on the page and the wet muzzles and the marks of an arm nobody knows, and on the water coming up out of the long dark at its own rate, for the goats, for the next one, for no one: *here, still here, and you.*

And the road does what the mouth said it would. It wanders, and bends back on itself twice, and there are the stones set up at the place where somebody wanted something known and is now nowhere at all — and past them, out in the flat where there is no reason for it, the lone rock, sitting by itself on ground that did not make it, carried here by an ice that came and went before any of this and set down without ceremony and left. Nothing has moved it since. It only holds still, which is the one thing it has ever done, and is the reason there is a mark in the story at all. Then the tall spined thing, standing with its arms up in the heat the way the sleeper's arms went up in the rented room, ribbed and patient, holding a whole season of rain inside itself for a year at a time and giving no sign of it, asked for nothing, showing nothing, full. And the footprints go past all of it — ahead of them in the dust, a line of them stitched from the bend to the stones to the rock to the green thing, put there by every mouth that ever said this aloud and every ear that ever took it, the going that made the road and the road that made the going. Half a moon comes up pale in the afternoon sky while the sun is still out, the lit side and the dark side held in one round, neither waxing toward anything nor waning away from it in any way that can be felt from here. And then the sound, before the seeing, exactly as they were told. It is down in a hollow where the ground gives, and where it goes under it has been helped: somebody long gone came out here with a pick and opened the seam a handspan wider, chipping at rock for a water that was already coming, doing the only work anyone has ever done for a spring, which is to get slightly out of its way. The marks of the tool are still in the stone. Nobody knows the arm. And the water comes up cold out of the notch's long dark and stands in the little basin somebody cut for it, and the hands go down into it and come up together, cupped, held level at the chest — the shell's shape, the jar's shape, the shape the mouth makes before anything can be received — and most of it goes back through the fingers, which is the arrangement and always has been, and what reaches the lip is the ice again, handed along, taken and returned. They drink until they are stupid with it. Then the pencil comes out of the pack, the same licked stub, and the square of paper is unfolded on the lone rock with the corners held down by two hands, and the blue-grey line from the summit is carried on — down off the shoulder, round the bend, past the stones, to a small mark at the hollow where the tool-marks are, made wrong in small ways by a cold hand as every mark has always been made wrong in small ways. And then they say it out loud too, both of them, the bend and the stones and the rock and the green thing and then you will hear it — pressed into breath as well as into paper, because the paper will come apart at its creases and the breath will be gone with the body, and between the two of them something has always got through. Neither is carrying the whole of it. Each is carrying enough. And the spring goes on coming up out of the dark it came from, unasked, at its own rate, for whoever is next: *here, still here, and you.*

But the pencil is not the older instrument, and further down the far side they are reminded of it. The line that went onto the paper in the wind will hold for as long as the paper holds, which is not long — a folded square in a wet pocket, the graphite silvering off under a thumb, the sheet coming apart at its creases the way the page dissolved on the island — and there is a whole country of knowing that never went onto any sheet at all. They meet it at the bottom of the scree in the person of somebody very old, sitting out of the sun with their back against a wall, who is asked the question and answers it in the only way it has ever really been answered: out loud. Not a line drawn. A voice, saying go along the wandering one until it bends back on itself twice, and then the marked place, the one with the stones set up, and past that the big rock that sits alone where no rock should sit, and after the rock the tall spined thing that keeps its water inside it and has been standing there since before my mother — and then you will come to the water, and you will hear it before you see it. That is the map. It has no scale and no north on it and it cannot be folded, and it has been kept in mouths and handed mouth to mouth down a line of people who are every one of them gone, corrected by each of them where the stream moved, the way the timber takes the correction and the body corrects along the seam. Nothing is written anywhere. The bend, the stones, the lone rock, the thirsty green thing standing with its arms up in the heat holding a season of rain inside its own ribs, and then the sound of the water — five marks pressed into breath instead of paper, doing the only thing marks were ever for, which is to let somebody who will never meet you put the next foot down. They say it back. The old one listens and corrects one word of it and nods, and that is the whole transaction: the second voice coming in underneath the first on the part they happen to have, nobody carrying the whole of it, each carrying enough. Then the hand goes up as they go, the plain high one, given from the shade of a wall to two people whose names were never asked for — and they walk out into the heat toward a bend and a rock and a green thing full of water, on a road made by nothing but the going: *here, still here, and you.*

So they get the page out again, up there in the wind, the two of them bent over the one square that matters with the corners snapping in their hands. The far side is drawn dry. Whoever stood here with the instrument put down the contours going away and away in their close brown lines and marked no blue anywhere in the whole of that quarter — no stream, no spring, no thread of water ruled in from the notch to the roofs on the far rise, only the ground getting lower and nothing to drink on the way down. That is either true or it is only what one person could see from where they were standing on one afternoon a long time ago. There is no way to tell from the paper. And the wind comes straight through the notch and takes the sheet half out of the grip and has to be leaned into, and it carries what it carries — cold off the ice, the smell of the wet rock, and under that, faint, not certainly there, a sound. So the listening starts, because that is the only instrument anybody has up here. The ear goes open the way it went open at the shell and in the fog on the lane, both of them still, heads a little turned, doing the older half of the work and getting no credit for it — and it comes again, low down and off to the left somewhere under the shoulder of the ridge where the map has ruled nothing at all: water, running in a fold that never got surveyed, going down the way it has gone down since before the rock was where it is, keeping up its one sound for nobody. It has been there the whole time. It was never absent; it was only unrecorded, which is not the same thing and has never once been the same thing. And then the pencil comes out of the pack. It is a stub, licked, the way it was licked over the soft-cornered book in the shed — and a line goes onto the paper where there was no line, a thin wavering blue-grey mark made by a cold hand on a summit in a wind, wrong in small ways as every mark has always been wrong in small ways, running down off the shoulder toward the roofs on the far rise. It is not for them. They will be down the other side and gone by evening and will never need it again. It is for the next one to stand here with a sheet folded to this square and a dry throat and no arrow anywhere on it saying which — a hand shaped into a sound and the sound into a mark, so that somebody who will never meet them can put the next foot down. Then the page is folded and put away, and the packs go up, and the prints go over the lip into the ground the drawing gave up on, and behind them the water goes on running in its unmapped fold, unasked, in its own time, having never needed to be written down to be there: *here, still here, and you.*

And then the ground starts going up, and everything in the body changes its opinion about the day. The road that bent where the ground bent has run out of soft ways round this one; the ridge stands across the whole front of the morning with the old seas in it turned on end, and the only thing to do with it is to climb. The prints go first. There are always prints going up a mountain — a line of boot-marks stitched into the scree and the peat and the wet between, put there by people who came through last week and last year and in a century nobody has a name for, all of them deciding at the same few places to go left of the boulder and not right, and the line they wore is the reason there is anything to follow at all. Nobody laid it. It is only the going again, done at an angle. The packs come into their own on a slope like that, which is to say they become unbearable: the weight found and lost and found again at every step, the straps pulling the shoulders back into the shape the tree takes when it holds a crown full of air for somebody else. And partway up, on a flat stone where the path turns, one of them gets out the page. It is a poor thing — a survey sheet folded to the square that matters, the contours ruled by a hand that stood somewhere over there with an instrument and took an angle off this exact fall of rock, and the ink is somebody's best guess at a mountain, laid down so the guess could be handed on. It is wrong in small ways. It always is. The path on the paper goes left of a stream that has since moved, and the two of them stand over it turning it round to match the world, which is the oldest argument anyone has ever had with a drawing. But it gets them to the notch. That is all a mark on a page was ever for: not to be the thing, only to be enough of it that somebody who never met you can put the next foot down. Then the steep part, and no more talking. The breath goes ragged and the shirt goes dark between the shoulder blades and the salt comes out the way it came out in the field at noon — the sea climbing back out through the skin, handed to the air, taken up again by whatever is standing on the slope with its hands out. And where the rock steps up higher than a leg wants to go, the hand comes back. Down from above, across the gap, palm open and empty, offered and held there long enough to be taken — the arm at the mill door and the arm across the table and the arm in the lane at the bottom of the night, doing at a height what it has done at every altitude in this whole long round. It is taken. The pull is not much; it is mostly the grip and the knowing somebody is at the other end of it. And at the top, where the wind comes straight through the notch and the ice is that they drank without knowing it, the two of them stand in the cold with their chests going and their hands on their knees and the whole further side opening out — valleys neither of them has walked, another cluster of roofs on another rise, the water going its long lateral way down through all of it toward a grey that keeps nothing apart, and past everything the blue edge where the ruling stops and the paper is only paper. There is no arrow on it. Nothing up here says which. Only the breath going out long into the wind and the small lift at the end of it, the hole opened first so that anything can come, *which way now* — asked of a ridge that has never once been told what it is for, and not answered, and not owed an answer, and the prints already going down the far side ahead of them into ground the drawing gave up on: *here, still here, and you.*

The road they come out onto carries a flat round wrapped in a cloth, warm still, pressed on them at the door by a hand that would not take no — the arm out horizontal one last time across the space between, and taken, and nothing said about it. Then the other hand, up: the plain high wave from the race-bank as they go, the one gesture that needs no tongue at all, given to two people whose names were never asked for. It is answered before any thinking gets to it. And then the road, which is only what the going has worn into the ground, running out ahead of them the way it has run out ahead of everybody, never straight, bending where the ground bends. Behind, the wheel keeps its turn. They can hear it for a long while after the building is out of sight, the water going in at the top and the teeth taking hold one after another, a sound that has nothing in it anybody could use — and it thins as the distance takes it, and thins, until what is left is not the wheel but only the general low going-on of water somewhere down there in the fog, and then not even that. Nobody stops to listen to the last of it. It stops being audible the way the leaf stopped being visible, somewhere in the middle of a step, with no moment anyone could point to. And ahead, out past the fog and the fields, the ridge comes up — the old seas standing on end, the notch where the ice is that they drank this morning without knowing it, the far blue edge where the drawing gives up and always has. The bread is warm against the ribs under the coat. The road goes on being made by the going, and the two of them go on it, toward a height that has never once been told what it is for: *here, still here, and you.*

And then the rim gives itself away again over the notch, and the high window goes from black to grey to gold, and the three of them come up off the floor by the stove into a morning that was arriving the whole time they were not watching it. The gate is lifted. The water goes in at the top and the shudder comes back up through the boards into everybody's feet, and the teeth take hold one after another the way they have always done, each letting go exactly as the next takes it, and the stone begins its round on the stone. A sack is opened along the wall. The grain that stood closed in the dark all night goes in at the eye and does not come out the far side as itself, and the warm plain white comes into the trough the way it did yesterday and the way it did in a season nobody in this room was alive for. Outside the door the fog is up off the race, thick over the low ground, taking the hedges and the far bank and handing out evenly what little light gets through — the valley reduced again to the few yards anyone is standing in, which has never once been a smaller amount of world than the whole of it. So the hands go into the trough and come out cupped, held level at the chest, the shell's shape, the shape the mouth makes before anything can be received, and what is in them is a summer no beam ever told the truth about. Then the water, and the working of it, and the flat round laid onto the iron over the fire — the small blue crown struck off nothing by somebody who was up before anyone, doing in four minutes what the light took ninety million miles to do — and the thing rises and blisters and blackens in two places and is turned with the fingers and taken off and torn. Not cut. Torn, the way it has been torn at every table in this whole long round, and the arm goes out horizontal across the space between, one palm turned up and one turned down, and it is taken, and nothing is said about any of it. They eat standing in the doorway with the wheel going behind them. And then the packs, and the shoulders finding the place where weight sits best, and out into the white — and behind them on the mud of the race-bank there are three sets of prints where there were two, going out toward the river, already beginning to lose their edges, saying nothing except that somebody came through here in the morning and was headed that way, left for nobody, for the next rain, for whoever comes after and walks over them without reading and adds their own: *here, still here, and you.*

And then the day goes off the way days go, and the light leaves the door of the mill, and the gate is dropped at last so the race runs slack and the wheel comes round to a stop with the water going by underneath it, unemployed, on its way regardless. The miller goes up. The two of them are given the floor by the stove and a sack apiece for a pillow, and the moon comes over the roof of the building and in at the high window onto the trough and the teeth and the white dust lying on everything like the first of a snow, and the breathing in that room settles to three rates that do not match and do not need to. Nothing is turning now. But the figure does not stop when the wheel does — it only changes size, going down into the chests under the blankets, in and out, in and out, and further down still into the specks in the wrists with their small cargo going round the narrow country and handing off and coming back empty to be filled, and out past the wall into the water doing its long lateral wandering across the valley floor in the dark, the turn and the turn again, taking whatever the ground gives it, never once straight and never once stopping for the fact that nobody is awake to see it. The grain waits in its sacks along the wall. A whole summer of it standing in the dark, closed, giving no sign, the way the shell gives no sign in the crumb. And down under the boards, in a run that no survey has reached, the small hungry thing comes out along the joist and takes a bean — one, out of the many, carried in the mouth across the dark and set down beside the others in a hole nobody will find, not eaten tonight, hidden and in due course forgotten, which is the whole of its practice and has never been explained to anybody. It makes almost no sound doing it. That is the point of it: the quietest transaction in the building, done at the size of a thing that weighs less than the pencil that wrote the figure, while three people sleep above it and the moon lays its almost-nothing on the stopped wheel and the still teeth and the white dust — no one keeping watch, no one keeping count, and the whole long round going on underneath in the hush it has always preferred.

And the spray comes off the wheel the whole time. That is the part nobody designs for: the paddle coming up out of the race throwing a fine cold broadcast into the air, onto the bank, onto the boots and the sleeves and the faces of whoever stands too near, given out in every direction at once without aim — most of it falling straight back into the water it just left, and none of it noticing the difference. Under the housing the water goes round on itself before it goes on. A slow turning in the tailrace where the bank curves, one dark spiral holding a leaf and a fleck of chaff and going nowhere for as long as it takes, the same figure the smoke drew and the root drew and the whole spilled river is drawing overhead in a time no calendar was built for — and then the eddy lets go of what it was holding and hands it downstream, because holding was never what it was doing. And through the wall the teeth go on with it, tooth into tooth, each letting go exactly as the next takes hold. Then the water is out and free of the building and back to its long lateral wandering across the valley floor, the turn and the turn again, taking whatever the ground gives it, carrying the ice out of the notch and the drop from a kneeling at sunrise and whatever came off the paddle a minute ago, all of it indistinguishable, all of it going the one way it has ever been told to go. So the hand goes down flat over the trough a last time — palm down, the gesture from the field, made over the acorn and the covered hole — not taking, not keeping, only the small acknowledgment a body makes over something it is leaving to the season and the long odds. And then both arms come up. Out and open over the head, the whole frame stretched into the oldest shape there is, white to the wrists, in a room shuddering with the turning of a river — for nobody, toward nothing, the first leaf's shape and the blade's in the cracked pavement and the sleeper's on rising. The miller sees it and laughs. And then it goes round the way it has gone round every table and every fire and every roof in this whole long round, one leaning into the next, helpless in the dust and the noise, two strangers and a person who came out before light to open a gate, laughing at the flour on the eyebrows and the solemnity of the arms and the fact that there was never any reason. The grain keeps going in at the eye of the stone. It does not stop for this; it has never stopped for anything said anywhere. And what fills the room while they cannot speak is the plain white kind — the flour hanging in the shafts of the door-light, the almost-nothing the thin moon lays on every shut door, no color in it and no object, wanting nothing back, laid without preference on the stone and the teeth and the warm dust in the hair and the water going out the far wall toward the sea that keeps none of it apart: *here, still here, and you.*

And a mill is timber before it is a mill. Somewhere upstream of all this turning there was a tree that nobody planted, and then a day when it came down, and then the sawing — the long two-handed kind, one at each end of the blade, pulling and never pushing, because that is the only way a saw of that sort works: neither of them able to do it alone, each one's pull the other's rest, the rate set by the sound of the other's breathing the way it was set by the blade down the row. Eighty years of wood opened along its length. The rings all showing at once in the fresh face of it, each a summer recorded by something that was never told what a year is, the wet smell coming up off the cut. Then the hands. Timber does not move itself; it goes along a line of people, lifted from this pair to that pair, one turned up and one turned down at every handing, walked down the bank and set on the trestles — the basket in the doorway again, the bowl across the table, the arm out horizontal into the space between. And then the fastening: the bolt driven through and the nut run up on it and the wood drawn tight against itself, a thing that holds precisely because it has been passed through and turned, the way the rope is laid and the knot is pulled and the stitch decides repeatedly to stay. The gear takes its shape from that. Tooth into tooth, each one letting go exactly as the next takes hold, nothing gripped for longer than the passing requires — and then the water is let in at the top, and the whole of it goes round, and the shudder comes up through the floor into the boots of whoever is standing there. And then the breath goes out. The long one, the held column of the making let go at once through the mouth in a sound that is not a word — the cut and the carrying and the turning of the nut all handed over to the stream now, which never agreed to any of it and does not stop. What is left standing in the noise is only a warm animal with its hands empty, having made a place for the going-down of water to do one thing on its way to the sea it was always going to: *here, still here, and you.*

And somebody built that. It is easy to forget, standing in the noise with a warm handful running through the fingers — the wheel and the housing and the gate that lets the water in at the top were worked out by a person, and before any of it turned there was a straightedge on a board and an angle taken off the fall of the stream and a set of marks made in the corner of a page: a hand shaped into a line the way a hand is shaped into a sound. The drawing was never the mill. It was only somebody's best guess at the mill, laid down in ink so that the guess could be handed to whoever had the timber — and the timber never quite does what the paper says, and the axle sits a thumb's width off, and the wood takes the correction the way the body takes it along the seam, and what stands there now is the drawing plus forty years of being wrong in small ways and staying up anyway. The page is somewhere still. In a drawer, gone furry at the corners, kept against a February that has already come and gone a dozen times, with a figure on it in a hand that is hard to read; and out in the world the thing itself grinds on, having long outlived the person who ruled the lines, doing what was asked of it by somebody it never met. That is the only kind of instruction anybody has ever left: a mark on a page and then the going away. So the handful is passed over, and the hand comes back empty and dusted white, and the two of them go out through the door into the morning — and there in the mud of the race-bank are the prints of whoever came down before light to open the gate, going up toward the house, already softening. Nobody reads them. Beyond them the valley is simply there, fields and hedges and the water going its long lateral way down the middle of it, doing at the size of a country what the stone is doing at the size of a room: the turn, and the turn again, the figure drawn wherever there is anything to draw it with. Round on itself and never back to the same place. The grain into the eye of the stone, the white into the trough, the white into the hand, the hand out across the dust; and the race running on downhill with the turning taken out of it and not one drop the less, out toward the flat grey that takes everything, and up into the cloud, and down again on a field nobody here has walked, where somebody's grandchild will rule a line on a page and get it slightly wrong and build it anyway: *here, still here, and you.*

And further down there is another one, and this one is not stopped. The same wheel, the same axle, but the housing is whole and the water is let in at the top of it deliberately by somebody who came out before light to open a gate, and the whole small building shudders with it — the turning going in at the wall and down through the trees of it and coming out as the other turning, the flat one, the stone going round on the stone. That is the oldest machine there is and it is only a copy of the river. Round and round on itself, the way the water turns through the rock and the root turns along the seam and the sand goes down through the narrow place, the way the whole spilled river overhead is going round its own long axis in a time no calendar was built to hold — all of it the same figure, and here it is put under a roof and made to do one thing. Between the two stones goes the grain. All of it: the husk and the season nobody could hurry and the two bent backs in the field and the melon at noon and the sound of the other blade down the line, poured in at the eye and taken in and not one grain of it coming out the far side as itself. What comes out is the plain white kind. It comes warm off the stone into the trough, soft past any describing, the same almost-nothing white the thin moon lays on the doors and the fog handed out evenly to the ruts and the hedge — the deer in the grain and the face in the crowd and the drop in the sea, gone down into something in which none of it can be told apart anymore, and not one particle of it lost in the going. Then the hand goes into it. Down into the trough to the wrist and up again, cupped, held out level — the shell's shape, the jar's shape, the shape the mouth makes before anything can be received — and the flour runs off the heel of the palm the way the water ran off it at the ditch, most of it going back, and nobody minds, because that is the arrangement and always has been. It is offered anyway. Held out across the dust and the noise to whoever is standing there, warm, unweighed, a handful of a summer that no beam could ever have told the truth about. And out past the door the race runs on downhill with the turning taken out of it and the same amount arriving, down to the river and the mouth of the river and the flat grey that takes everything and keeps none of it apart — the ice out of the notch and the drop off the eave and the one returned bead from a kneeling at sunrise, all of it going the one way it has ever been told to go, out and around the whole warm crowded turning thing, up into the cloud and down again on somebody's stubble in a season none of this reaches. The stone goes round. The grain goes in. The white comes warm into an open hand on a small world falling around a fire, handed along, and handed along: *here, still here, and you.*

Downhill is the only instruction the water has ever been given. It takes it without interpreting, going by the lowest thing available at every step — around the root, under the fallen branch, along the outer edge where the bank has given way — and a little further on it meets another one coming down out of a fold in the hill that nobody on this side has walked. They join. There is no ceremony at the joining and nothing marks it; two small runs come together at an angle and are afterward one run, wider by exactly what each brought, neither of them identifiable from a pace downstream. That is the same handing-across the roots do under the pines and the hands did across the cloth, done by water, which has no way of refusing it. And then the wandering, longer and slower now that there is more of it — the ditch becoming a stream and the stream taking the whole floor of the valley in those long lateral swings that look like indecision and are only the ground being obeyed, the turn and the turn and the turn, the same figure the smoke made and the root made and the line of the owl made over the stubble. It has been going this way since before the rock was where it is. It will be in the river by afternoon and in the mouth of it by the week's end and in the sea that takes everything and holds none of it apart, the drop from the kneeling and the drop from the notch and every drop off every eave in this whole long round arriving at the same flat grey and ceasing entirely to be countable. And partway down there is a wheel. Half-rotted, mostly stopped, the old undershot kind set into the bank by somebody who wanted the going-down of the water to do something for them — a hollow worn into a grip again, a tool shaped by a person nobody can name — and where the paddles still catch, the stream leans on them and the axle turns, grinding away at nothing now, connected to nothing, no stone left inside to turn against another. It does not mind. The water does not know it is working. It only keeps doing the one thing it does, which is to go down, and the wheel takes a portion of that and gives it back a little further on, nothing lost in the passing, the same amount arriving at the sea whether it turned anything or not. And the sound it makes going through is the sound this has always made: the fall on the paddle, the drip off the low edge, the long run in the race underneath — three notes not one of which is a tune, arriving together and making one, the way the three throats made the note on the wet stone that was none of theirs. The two of them walk past without stopping. It is nobody's mill. It has been playing all night and it will play all day to an empty bank, and the second voice in it is the hedge, and the third is the whole valley going over when the wind comes across, and neither of them is carrying the whole of it, and each is carrying enough: *here, still here, and you.*

And one drop makes it to the mouth. That is the whole yield of the kneeling: most of it gone back through the fingers into the running, and one cold bead arriving on the lip, and the cold of it is not this morning's cold — it is the ice's, held somewhere up in the notch where the sun does not reach until late, and the stone's, the long dark of the seam it came down through, handed to the tongue without a word about where it has been. The throat takes it. And something in the taking goes straight past whatever part of a person makes decisions: the eyes go hot at the edges, kneeling in wet grass beside a ditch at sunrise for no reason that would survive being explained, moved by a mouthful of water the way the throat closed on a voice from the far side of the black. Nothing has happened. A body was thirsty and drank. Then the breath goes out — the long one, the whole held column of the night let go at once, the bellows emptying all the way down before it will take anything else in, the tide drawing back off a shore with nobody standing on it. And the water goes on past the knees, downhill, the way it has gone since before the rock, never straight, bending where the ground bends, carrying its ice and its stone and its one returned drop out toward the river and the far blue edge and the sea that takes everything and keeps none of it apart — and the two of them get up, and the coats are wet at the shins, and the going is downstream because down is where the going is easy, and neither of them is following it anywhere: *here, still here, and you.*

And then the sun is properly up and the torch is dead weight. It has been carried on in the hand out of habit for a mile past its usefulness, the way a thing that helped in the dark goes on being held after the dark is done with, and at some point on the descent the hand simply turns over and sets it down — palm down, the gesture from the field, the one made over the acorn and the covered hole: not thrown away, not kept, only put on a flat place at the edge of the track where somebody coming up in the night might find it. It is left facing the road. That is all that was ever done with any of it. Then the pack, too, at the bottom of the rise, shrugged off the shoulders and lowered into the grass with the small grunt a body makes handing over what it has been carrying, and the shoulders come up and back into the shape they had before there was anything on them. The going after that is only going. Down the last of the slope with the light coming level across the whole valley floor, the hedges in their seams, the smoke still up from the row behind, the two of them and the road bending where the ground bends — and at the bottom, the water. It has been down there the entire time, running low in the ditch beside the lane through all that fog and all that not-seeing, keeping up its one sound for nobody; and now it is here in the open with the morning on it, going the way it has always gone, never straight, taking whatever the dark and the stone gave it. They kneel. And the hands go down into the cold and come up together, cupped, held out level at the chest the way they were held under the feather — the same shape the shell makes, the same shape the jar makes, the same shape the mouth makes before anything can be received, a vessel that was never manufactured and cannot be set down without emptying. The water is in them for a moment. Most of it goes back through the fingers before it reaches the mouth, and that is not a failure; that is the arrangement. It came out of a seam in a mountain and off the roofs of a night and through the roots of a crown that is standing somewhere behind them, and it will be in the sea by the week's end and in the cloud by the month's and coming down on somebody's stubble in a season none of this reaches. Nothing here was made here. Nothing here is owed back. What is drunk goes into the blood that has the sea's own salt in it and the iron of a fire that let go of everything it had before there was a mouth to be thirsty — and what spills, spills, and one drop hangs a second off the heel of the hand and falls into the running and is not distinguishable from anything, and that is the whole of it, taken and returned and taken again. Then the hands come out empty and are wiped on the coat. The pack goes back up onto the shoulders. And the walking starts again, downstream, beside a water that is going the same way and was never going anywhere for them: *here, still here, and you.*

The bird is gone before anyone thinks to follow it, and the two of them stay tipped back a moment longer at nothing, which is the usual outcome of looking up. Then the east gives itself away. It is not the sun yet — only the black going thin along one edge, the rim admitting something, the hills coming up one ridge at a time out of what had been a single flat dark, and the fixed point over the notch going faint and fainter as the bigger light arrives to take it. The torch goes off again, and this time for the better reason: there is enough. It is put away in the side of the pack, which is settled once more on the shoulders, and the two of them stand at the top of the rise with the whole valley opening beneath — the fields going down to the water, the hedges laid out in their long dark seams, the roofs of the row behind and the smoke already going up gold from one of them, the ridge of old seas standing over it all, and out past everything the far blue edge where the drawing gives up and always has. Nobody says look. They only keep their eyes on it, the plain held-open kind, the watch the stone keeps at the turn and the ground keeps over the shut shell, laid on a valley that is not performing and has never needed to be. And under the coats the old bellows goes on with its work. In, and the cold comes into the chest and is warmed and taken from; out, and it is given back to the field it came from, the air the crowns made and the crowns will take up again, going in and out of two bodies on a rise the way it goes in and out of every sleeping chest down in the row and every small hungry thing curled above its forgetting — filling and emptying, filling and emptying, the one long breath of the whole green surface done in portions small enough to fit behind a rib. It has the tide's shape. It always has: the water coming up the sand and folding and drawing back and coming again, out on a shore neither of them has ever stood on, doing at the size of an ocean what the lungs are doing at the size of a person and the day is doing at the size of a world — out and in, and the rest between, and nothing kept. The light comes level along the tops of the hills. It finds the packs and the two faces and the road going down the far side, on time, unasked, unearned. And the walking starts again, the rate found without arranging it, down into a valley neither of them built and nobody promised, with the whole of it breathing underneath: *here, still here, and you.*

And the torch comes back on at the top of the rise, because the going gets rough there and the ruts run deep, and the beam goes out ahead again finding its two yards of gravel at a time — which is all any light has ever found and all it was ever for. The packs are shrugged back into place on both sets of shoulders. That small settling motion, the weight found again in the spot where weight sits best, done by two people at almost the same moment without either of them noticing the other doing it. And at the crest the road levels and the fog is entirely gone off the high ground, and it is all there. The whole spilled river from rim to rim, more of it than any beam could be asked to reach, the black between the stars full of the far side of the same going-round they are standing on — and low in it, over the notch where the road goes on, the one that has always been there, the fixed one, the point that does not wheel with the rest. Nobody put it there for this. It has never been told what it is for. But a hand comes up anyway and indicates it, the other oldest gesture, *look, there, that one*, and the other follows the finger and finds it and does not need the word for it in either language, because all it is saying is which way is north, and which way is north is enough to walk by. Then the wind comes up over the rise. It has the whole open valley behind it and it comes straight across the top, cold, taking the last of the white off the field, lifting the coat-hems and the loose strap and going through the hedge with that long sound a hedge makes — and both of them stand into it a moment with their eyes watering, because there is nothing else to do at the top of a rise in the wind but stand in it. And something goes over. High, unlit, a single bird crossing the black between here and that fixed point, going north on the strength of something no one has ever managed to write down — the pull in it that knows, the map it was handed without being shown, the whole long way ahead of it over fields it will not see and a sea it will not be able to stop over. It does not call. There is only the going, somewhere up there past the reach of the torch, and the two of them with their faces tipped back after it, and the fixed star holding its place over the notch, and the wind coming on across the rise without a word in it: *here, still here, and you.*

And the hand is taken. That is all — palm to palm in the middle of a lane at the bottom of a night, two warm things meeting where neither of them could see the other coming, held a moment and let go; and nothing is exchanged, because there was nothing in either hand, and there never has been. Then the other one turns. They do not say where they were going. They only fall in alongside, and the two sets of boots find their rate the way the blades found it down the row and the second voice came in by the fire — nobody carrying the whole of it, each carrying enough — and the road takes them both, up toward the rise, never straight, bending where the ground bends, worn into being by every passage that came before and taking nothing from any of them. The moon is not there tonight. It has gone all the way down into its dark side, given nothing at all, the fallow month, the shut shell, the drawer closed against February — and because of that the whole spilled river is out overhead in a way it never is when the moon is generous, one rim of the world to the other, the mist of it that is not mist, the beast and the snake still half-drawn and unfinished over two people walking in fog. Neither of them points. There is nothing to say about it and there never has been. And the eye goes on keeping its watch — the open kind, the kind that finds nothing and is only held open, the same watch the faceless stone keeps at the turn and the ground keeps over the shut thing in the crumb — laid without preference on the two of them and the ruts and the white moving off across the field, wanting nothing back, in no hurry, on a dark that has never once been empty. The prints go up the rise ahead. Theirs go after. And behind them the lane fills slowly with the morning that has not arrived yet, and the marks soften at the edges, and whoever comes through next will walk over the place where two strangers took hands without reading a thing into it, and add their own, and go on.

There is no color in any of this, and the walking goes on in it. Only the plain white kind again, the fog holding what almost-nothing the moon can get down through it and handing it out evenly to the stone and the ruts and the hedge and the three of them somewhere in it going the same way — no preference, no count, no answer owed. And out of that greyness the not-seeing goes deeper still. The last of the glow drains off westward and the whole world comes down to the dark with no lamp in it, the new moon's kind, the black of a lane between hedges at the bottom of a night — and the eyes, having nothing left to do, go on doing it anyway. They keep their long attention on nothing. That is what an eye is, in the end: not a thing that finds, only a thing held open, the same watch the faceless stone has kept at the turn and the owl kept from its hole and the ground has kept over the shut shell in the crumb, without hurry, without knowing, on a dark that has never once been empty. And the sand goes down through the narrow place while they stand there. That is the only motion anyone can be certain of — not the road, not the fog, not the prints ahead that may already be filling; only the grain-by-grain going of the hours, which does not stop for the not-seeing and never once has. Long enough in it and the eye adjusts. It always does, given time and nothing to insist on: the hedge separates itself from the sky, and the rut from the verge, and up through a thinning in the white one point of light comes through and is enough to steer by — not the whole spilled river, not tonight, just the one, sending what it has been sending since before there was a mouth. It is not a reward for waiting. It was there the entire time. Then the fog moves, the way fog does, off across the field without announcing it, and the road ahead is there — grey, ordinary, going up toward the rise. And out of it, coming down, a shape resolving into a person with a hand already lifted: the arm out horizontal across the gap, palm open, nothing in it, held long enough to be taken. Not a question this time. Only the oldest offer in this whole long round, made by somebody who could not have known anyone was coming, on a road neither of them built, in a dark that handed them to each other without being asked.

The torch is switched off. Not for any reason that could be defended — only that the beam had stopped helping, the white throwing it straight back, the small lit room it made pressing close enough to be its own kind of blindness — and the thumb finds the slide and pushes it down, and the hand drops to the side with the dead thing in it, and the fog goes grey instead of glaring. That is better. It is always a little better once you stop insisting on seeing. The dark out here has never once been empty and has never once been in a hurry to prove it. So the listening starts, because there is nothing else left to do with the attention. The ear goes open the way it went open at the shell and the ending rain — water somewhere off to the left, running low in a ditch it has been running in all night; the drip off the hedge at its own rate; and further ahead, faint, not certainly there, something that might be a boot on gravel or might be the fog doing what fog does to a sound. The ear does not answer. It only receives, which is the larger half and gets no credit for it. And at the feet, still, the two sets of marks. They do not need light to go on being true. Somebody came through, and somebody smaller came with them, and it was that way — and the foot goes down into the softness beside them and the next one after it, unlit, into the white, adding a third set that nobody will read either. There is no color in any of this. Only the plain kind, the almost-nothing kind, the fog holding whatever the moon can get down through it and handing it out evenly to the stone and the ruts and the hedge and the three of them somewhere in it going the same way: keeping no count, owing no answer, and enough.

The torch goes on ahead of them and the beam does its wandering — not a line, never a line, only two yards of gravel at a time swinging left and right with the ruts, the way the root ran along the seam and the owl went out low over the stubble and the water turned through the rock. And then the fog comes up to meet it. It rises off the wet field the way it always rises, taking the far hedges and then the near ones, and the beam stops being a beam and becomes a small lit room the walker carries with them, a few feet of white in every direction and nothing beyond it to be found. The light does not go further in fog. It only shows you what you are standing in. So the tall one at the turn arrives the way such things arrive — not seen at a distance and approached, but simply there, a shoulder of stone coming up out of the white a pace from the walker's hand, and the torch goes over it and finds the same nothing anyone has ever found there: the face gone, rubbed out by weather the way the crowd rubbed out the features in the glare, outline kept and gesture kept and not one thing left to be recognized. It has no expression to offer. It has never needed one. The sand has gone down through its narrow place for every year since the chisel stopped, and this is what the going-down leaves — not a ruin, only a shape that has been attended to by rain for longer than it was attended to by hands. A leaf comes past in the beam. Just one, off some hedge back there, turning as it goes, crossing the lit air and out into the white and gone before it lands, and the walker follows it with the light and loses it, and nothing about that is a loss. Then the torch comes down to the ground. And in the damp at the base of the stone there are prints — not theirs; they have not stood here long enough to leave any — one set coming up out of the fog and past the stone toward the rise, softened at the edges, and beside them another, smaller, going the same way, two people who came through here earlier in the night and were headed that direction and are somewhere ahead now in the same white. That is all the information there has ever been. Somebody came through, and went on, and it was that way. The walker stands in the small room of their own light with the faceless watcher at their shoulder and the two sets of marks at their feet, and the question comes up the way it always comes up when the road gives out into weather and there is nobody to ask — hardly more than a breath shaped at the end into a lift, *is this the way*, *is there anywhere still open*, *is there anyone* — and there is no answer, and the fog does not owe one, and the prints go on ahead into it anyway, which is not the same as an answer and has always been enough to put the next foot down on.

And out there the moon comes round onto the face that has no face. It finds the tall one at the turn of the lane the way it finds everything, without choosing — the shoulder of it, the worn place where a nose or a mouth or a whole expression was once cut by somebody who wanted to be understood and has been unrecoverable for longer than anyone in this row can count back — and the light lies along the stone and does not restore a single feature. It never has. What it shows instead is the water: the dew coming out of the cold air onto the old surface all down its length, gathering in the weathered hollows the way it gathered in the tops of the three small ones, running when it gets heavy enough, one slow bead going down the whole height of the thing and off at the base into the ground. Stone sweats at night. Nobody watches that either. It is only the same water that came off the eave and up the seam and out through the shirt between two shoulder blades at noon, passing through a carved figure on its way back down into the dark where the roots are, and the figure holds still for it, which is the one thing it has ever done. Above it the whole spilled river is out, past the reach of the last lit window, from one rim of the world to the other — the beast and the snake still half-drawn up there and never finished, the same light that was crossing the black before there was a hand to hold a chisel, arriving now on a shape made by a hand that is gone. And beneath both of them the road goes on. It comes up out of the valley and past the three stones and the tall one and out at the far end of the row toward the rise and the blank beyond it, made by nobody, made entirely by the going, worn into being one passage at a time by feet that took nothing from it and left a little. Then a light on it. Small, low, swinging — somebody out late or out early with a torch in their fist, the beam going ahead of them down the ruts and finding two yards of gravel at a time, which is all any light has ever found. It is the lamp carried out over the snow again, the candle shielded up the ladder, the one flame turned to face the road. It does not show them where the road ends. It only shows them where to put the next foot down, and they put it down, and the beam moves on, and the dark closes back over behind them the way it always does. And in the morning there will be prints in the damp where they passed — going up toward the rise, already softening at the edges, saying nothing except that somebody came through here in the night and was headed that way. The stone will still be standing at the turn with its dew run off and its face still gone. And whoever is next up the lane will walk over the marks without reading them, and add their own, and go on: *here, still here, and you.*

The fire does the work of the evening and the old rubbed-out one keeps standing out there in the dark past the window, and between those two facts the room fills with laughing. There is no good account of what starts it. The child says something about the feather — where it has been put, what it is for, some solemn arrangement they have made for it upstairs that turns out to involve a box and a rule nobody else can follow — and it goes round the table the way it has gone round every table in this whole long round, one leaning into the next, nobody able to stop for the reason that there was never a reason. The stranger laughs hardest and is not a stranger for the duration of it. That is the only naturalization ceremony anybody has ever needed. And afterward the child slips out again, past the fire and the bolt, barefoot on the cold flags, to do whatever it is — to put another feather on the middle stone, to check that the stone is still there, to hand something back. Out in the lane the three of them hold their spoonfuls of the dark now instead of the morning, and the tall one with no face stands where it has always stood, facing the road for somebody who has not come yet. The moon is up over the roofline. It gives what it gives, which is almost nothing and enough to find the stones by, laid without preference on the small bare feet and the old carved outline and the lit square of the door still open behind — and the laughing carries out through it into a valley that does not answer, and does not need to, and has never once been empty.

And then the child comes back out. Not for anything — they have put the feather somewhere inside and now they are here again on the cold flags with nothing in their hands either, the two of them standing in the lane with the wall and the three stones between them, both empty-handed, which is as close as anybody ever gets to being introduced. The child squats down and puts a finger on the middle stone where the feather was, to show where it was. That is the whole conversation. And the stones go on doing what they have done since somebody set them there — holding still, holding their spoonfuls of sky, keeping the count nobody remembers taking — and further up the lane, at the turn, there is the other kind: the old one, taller than a person, set upright in the ground by hands so far gone that the weather has taken the face off it entirely, features rubbed out the way the singers' were at the back of the cave, outline kept and gesture kept and nothing else. Nobody in this row knows who carved it. They walk past it to the fields every morning of their lives. It has stood through every winter that has been here and it will stand through the ones that are coming, facing the road because whoever put it there wanted something to be facing the road, and what it does now is only what the eye that does not blink has done all along: watch without preference, without hurry, without ever saying a word about it — the acorn and the mouse and the feather and the barefoot child and the stranger with the pack, all held in the same long attention that wants nothing back. The hands come up open again, at the sides, and the child does not need this explained. Then the day goes, the way days go when nothing is arranged. The light comes round over the roofs and down the lane and begins its long reddening along the whole western length of the valley, the tiers of this small place lit the way the tiers of the city were lit, smoke going up gold from two chimneys, every window taking the same fire and throwing it back before any of them is lit from inside. Somebody calls from a doorway. And it is the plainest thing in the world that happens next: the door is the one that opens, and there is a fire in the grate with its small blue crown, struck off nothing by somebody who was up early, and on the table a loaf — torn, not cut, the way it has been torn at every table in this whole long round, the handful of seed rubbed loose from a husk and the season nobody could hurry and the heat, arriving here as something that can be put in a hand. The arm goes out across the wood. One turned up and one turned down. Take this; I was given it; it was never mine. Nothing is said about the stranger being a stranger. The chair that was standing against the wall goes over from being kept to being sat in, and the pack comes off the shoulders and down onto the flags, and the fire does what fire does, which is to make a small circle wide enough to see the hands by and no wider. And what fills the room has no color and no object — not gratitude, not welcome, only the plain white kind, the sort the thin moon gives when it gives almost nothing, laid on the bread and the flame and the child's bare feet on the warm stone and the old rubbed-out watcher standing out there in the last of the red with the whole valley going dark behind it, keeping its watch on a door that opened, as it has kept watch on every door that ever opened here: *here, still here, and you.*

And the roofs come nearer and become a place. It is the row again, the cluster on the rise again, the handful of small kept warmths set down where the ground allowed it, and the track runs in between the first two houses and becomes a lane without anyone deciding where the change happened. There is nobody out yet to be met. Only the smoke going straight up, and a door with its bolt still across, and at the mouth of the lane the hands come down off the pack straps and open at the sides — that plain unfolding a body does when it arrives somewhere, palms slightly forward, holding nothing, the way they were held at the fire and the graveside and over the last warmth of the ashes. You cannot come into a place with your fists shut. And by the wall there are three stones. Not a wall's worth, not a heap: three, set one beside another by somebody who wanted them there, the kind of small deliberate arrangement people have been leaving at the edges of paths since before there were paths — a marker, a count, a place kept, nobody knows and it does not signify. They have been rained on for years. Each of them holds its own spoonful of sky in the hollow on top from this morning's wet, three small mirrors going about their business at the foot of a wall, and the walker stops in front of them the way you stop in front of anything that was clearly meant and is no longer explained. And on the middle one, caught in the lichen, there is a feather. Grey, soft along its trailing edge. Not the same one — the same one is somewhere over the rise and always will be — but grey and soft and let go of by a body busy staying warm, come down here the way that one came down there, and lying now on a stone that somebody set out for reasons that have gone with them. It is picked up. And then the door in the wall opens, because it was always going to, and what comes out is a child — small, barefoot on the cold flags, entirely unsurprised, standing there in the way of children who have not yet learned that a stranger is a category. The hand goes out. Not the palm held up asking and not the palm held flat over a thing left to the ground: the other one, the arm out horizontal across the gap between them, the feather lying on it, offered — the oldest motion in this whole long round, one arm turned down and one turned up, the basket in the doorway, the cup across the bench, the piece of melon in the shade. It is taken without a word, the way everything in this account has been taken. And then the child is gone back through the door with it, and the flags hold for a moment the small wet prints of two bare feet going in, filling slowly with the morning, the shape of a passing already going — and the walker stands in the empty lane between the three stones and the open door, with the pack on and the hands empty again and nothing wanted, and the sun comes level up the lane over all of it at once: *here, still here, and you.*

The track goes on and the prints go with it — a set of them in the soft part where the path runs down off the hard ground, pressed in and already beginning to lose their edges, the same marks the snow held and the sand held and the wet pavement at the bus stop held for an hour before the morning took them. They are not a message. They are only evidence that a body came through here going that way, left for nobody, and the next rain will have them. The stone stays where it is. It has held still under everything set down on it and everything blown off it, and the walker does not look back at it, and it does not require looking back at. The pack comes up off the ground and onto the shoulders at the turn of the track, settled with that small shrug the body makes to find the place where weight sits best — the basket again, the tin box with its flag again, the bag that came down off the rack in the morning cold, the whole small portable amount of a life taken up once more because it is going where the body is going. And behind, over the leaning grain, the feather is still going up. Not falling now; caught in something rising off the warm field and carried at an angle nobody plotted, out and up and out, over the hedge line and the rails and the rise beyond them — the down again, the leaf again, the red dot dissolving over the tiers. It will come down somewhere. It does not matter where. Nothing was ever asked of it except to let go of the wing. Ahead, where the track crests, the roofs come up. A handful of them, a cluster on the far rise the way there has always been another cluster on the next rise — smoke going straight up from two of them in the still air, a window or two still lit from the night before, chairs standing empty in rooms nobody in this account will enter, a pot already on somewhere with the day's one dish going slow. The walking is toward that. It has been toward that the whole time, in every hour of this, from the lane and the shore and the bus at dawn: a place with people in it, seen first as roofs from a distance, coming up out of the ground the way everything comes up — unasked, in its own time, with its hands out.

They carry it that way for a while, hands cupped at the chest, and then the path comes out of the field onto harder ground and there is nowhere to put it down that seems right, so they set it on a stone. Just that — a flat grey one at the edge of the track, half sunk and older than anything else in this account, older than the tree and the bones under it and the ridge of small seas standing up behind the hill. It has been there through every winter that has ever been here. It does not receive the feather; it only holds still underneath it, which is the one thing it has ever done, and is the reason anything in this valley has had a place to be set down. And beyond the stone the rails run — the two lines of cold iron again, come back around the way everything comes back around, laid across the low field by hands long gone and pulled at from both ends and not let go of, going out toward the part of the map where the drawing gives up. The walker stands there between the stone and the iron with their hands emptied. Not put in the pockets. Just open at the sides, palms slightly forward, the way they were at the fire and the graveside and the table with the pot in the middle of it, a body that has finished carrying something and has not yet been given anything else. Then the wind comes off the field. It takes the feather the way it took the down and the leaf and the small color over the bridge — up off the stone before anyone decides anything, turning, never straight, out over the grain, which goes over as it passes and rights itself and goes over again, the whole surface of the valley leaning one way in a long soft shrug that has no message in it at all. The feather is somewhere in that. Then it is not anywhere the eye can hold. And the sun comes all the way up over the ridge behind, level, the way it came up over the market and the burning snowfields and the bus with the steam on its windows — finding the stone and the iron and the leaning grain and the two open hands at once, without preference, on time, unasked. The walker does not follow it. They only stand a moment longer in the light with nothing in them and nothing wanted, and then go on up the track, past the rails and into the day, having held a thing they had no use for and let the wind have it: *here, still here, and you.*

And the whole round world is doing this everywhere at once, which is the thing that is easy to forget while standing under one tree. Every handspan of ground anyone has ever walked on is the returned bones of something — the mouse in the mould, the fish in the chalk, the leaf-fall of seasons no calendar reached back to, the shells of small seas standing now as a ridge somebody farms — and it is all going the same way, down through the litter and along the fine pale threads that run out under everything, that wandering underground seam no eye has entered, never straight, taking whatever the dark gives it. The root does not know it is drinking a mouse. It only goes where the going is soft, correcting and correcting the way the current corrects and the road corrects, and what it finds it hands up. So the blade comes out of the bones in the ordinary way, one morning that is not remarkable, at the hour when the light is coming level along the tops of the hills and the shapes of them are being given back one ridge at a time. There is nobody there to see it. There is only, further off along the field-edge, somebody walking — early, coat pulled straight, going toward something, with the whole east opening on their left and the dew coming through the boot — and they pass the spot and do not look down, because it is a blade of green among a hundred thousand and there is nothing in it to see. That is fine. That has always been fine. Nothing that came up ever needed to be witnessed to come up. But a little further on, the walker stops, because something is lying in the wet grass at the edge of the path: a feather, grey, soft along its trailing edge, let go somewhere over this field in the dark by a body that was busy staying warm. They pick it up. And then the hands come together under it, cupped, the way hands come together under anything that would blow away — held out level at the chest, palms up and open, carrying a thing they have no use for and did not ask for and cannot give back, out along the path into the new light with the hills coming up one at a time and the field behind them already at work: *here, still here, and you.*

And somewhere in that going a feather lets go. One, off the trailing edge, worked loose by the air it was shaped to keep quiet — it comes down the way the leaf came down and the down came off the reed and the small color went over the bridge, turning, never straight, taking the whole long minute a thing that light takes to reach the ground. It lands in the litter and is not found. That is most of what falls: the softest instrument anyone ever made for not being heard, given back to the leaves without a sound, going brown among the browns, going into the crumb with everything else the crown let go of this year. And under the branch where the owl sits to swallow what it caught, the bones come back up. That is the plainest honesty in the whole account — the body taking what it can use and returning the rest in a small grey packet dropped into the litter, the skull no bigger than a thumbnail and the ribs like sewing pins and the fine articulated feet of something that spent its life carrying beans into a hole, handed down intact to the ground that grew it. Nothing is hidden in that either. The mouse went up into the dark on soft wings and comes down as calcium in the leaf mould at the foot of a tree it slept beneath, and the roots take it the way they take the rain and the falling hands, and it goes up the inside of eighty years of wood without any of it being asked or thanked or written anywhere. And in the spring, in that exact spot, the ground is richer than it is a handspan away, and something comes up there — a thread down before anything goes up, a shell parting at its hairline, a green palm held out over a scatter of small white bones nobody will ever dig up to look at. It does not know what it is standing on. Nothing that ever came up has known. And over all of it the half moon keeps its watch, the lit side and the dark side held in the one round, giving almost nothing — laid without preference on the feather in the leaves and the bones in the mould and the blade coming up out of them and the whole warm crowded turning thing carrying every one of them east toward a morning none of them asked for: taking, and returning, and holding out its hands.

And in the trunk of that tree, part way up, there is a hole. Not a wound anymore — it was one once, a limb torn off in some weather nobody recorded, and the wood grew its slow lip around the tear the way the joint took the glue and the jug kept its bright line, closing what it could and leaving the rest open. What is left is a dark mouth in the side of eighty years of standing, and out of it, tonight, an owl comes. It does not announce itself. It goes off the lip without a sound, which is the whole art of it — the feather edged soft so the air is not torn but let through, the one bird that has arranged its entire body around not being heard — and its going is the wandering line again, the leaf's turn and the smoke's turn and the water's turn through the rock, out low over the stubble and up and around, never straight, following whatever the ground gives it. The mouse below does not know. That is the arrangement and it is not a cruelty; it is only the other half of the taking and hiding and losing track, the account balanced by something that came out of a hole in a tree and went quiet over a field, and both of them are doing the same thing, which is staying warm one more night. And the hole is not emptied by the leaving. It stays there in the wood, open, dark, a keeping-place that was made by a breaking, waiting the way the jar waited on the sill and the chair waited at the wall for whoever comes next — a nest, a hoard, a shelter for something that has not hatched yet in a season nobody here will see. Under it the fallen limb lies in the litter where it came down, going soft, going into the crumb, the mushrooms already out along its length in their small pale ranks, handing the tree back to the ground that made it. Somebody put a hand flat on that log once, palm down, for no reason, in passing. And overhead the moon is half — the lit side and the dark side held in the one round, given exactly as much as the angle allows tonight, neither waxing toward anything nor waning away from it in any way that could be felt from here, only the plain white kind laid without preference on the open hole and the silent going and the softening wood and the small thing asleep above its forgetting: giving almost nothing, keeping no count, and enough to hunt by, and enough to sleep under, and enough.

And the figure is drawn once more at the size of the whole thing. A world, turned a little further round than it was at the start of this; a tree standing on it somewhere nobody specified; the sand going down through its narrow place at the rate it has always gone, neither faster for the standing nor slower for the falling. Whoever is under the crown has no face by now. The features went in the glare of one morning and never came back, and that is not a loss — it is only what the account does to everyone it carries far enough, rubbing out the particular and keeping the outline and the gesture, the arm out flat over the place where something fell. The leaves come down on them anyway. A whole year's worth of held-out hands opening a last time on the way to the litter, going brown, going into the crumb, going down into the roads no eye has entered to feed the thing that let them go. And under the litter the small hungry one goes on with its unexplained practice, taking a little and hiding it and losing track, and the closed brown fact lies in the dark giving no sign, as it has given no sign every time it has appeared here, and the not-giving is not a refusal. It is only the shape waiting takes when nobody has promised anything. So the white comes over all of it again — the plain kind, the kind that has no object and wants nothing, the moon's almost-nothing laid without preference on the turning world and the eighty years of wood and the falling hands and the sleeping mouse and the shut shell in the ground. It weighs none of them. It keeps no column. It has waited out every winter there has ever been and is in no hurry now, and what it holds its patient watch over is what it has always held it over: a dark that has never once been empty, and has never once been asked to explain itself, and goes on handing everything along.

And the hand that went out flat over the place comes back. That is always the last motion — the palm turned down a moment above what has been given to the ground, and then nothing, the arm at the side again, the thing left where it fell in the wet. The fog closes over the spot within the hour. It takes the acorn the way it took the hedges, not hiding it exactly, only ceasing to distinguish it from everything else that is lying out there under the white, and the field goes back to being the few yards anyone is standing in. Then the long sleep. Months of it, the cold laid over the crumb like a hand over a thing not to be disturbed yet, the closed shell giving no sign and never having given one, the small breaths in the dark below going on rising and letting go with nobody counting. And when it comes back it comes back the same way it has come back every time in this account: the thread down before anything goes up, the hairline parting because something inside had only the whole of itself to push with, the green palm standing out over the litter one unremarkable morning. Nobody is present for it. Nobody was present for the last one either, or the eighty before that, and the round does not appear to mind — it has been doing this at the foot of that post and in the gap under those boards and along the cracked seam of a pavement in a city none of them will see, the same turn made over and over by things that do not overlap and never compared notes. The blade thickens. Ring on ring in the dark under the bark, a crown filling with air for somebody else to breathe, a patch of shade moved round itself by inches for whoever sits down at noon; and beneath it another small hungry thing is already carrying another closed thing into another hole no eye has entered. That is the whole shape of it, and it is not a line. It is the one figure drawn at every size there is — the breath, the tide, the water going up the trunk and down the rock, the light handed from hand to hand around a floor that never stops turning east — all of it going out and coming in, all of it unmanaged, all of it holding, on a small warm crowded world falling around a fire in a dark with no floor: *here, still here, and you.*

And while they stand there the tree does what it has always done for whatever is under it, which is nothing except be in the way of the weather. The rain comes across the valley in the afternoon and the crown takes the first of it, the whole eighty years of held-out hands turning a downpour into a drip and a drip into a long soft running at the trunk, so that the two of them stay dry a while in the middle of a wet field without having asked anyone. That is the only shelter there has ever been: something that grew for its own reasons, standing between. And up in it, where the light comes through in pieces, there is a nest — the cup of woven nothing, grass and hair and a strip of somebody's lost twine, set into a fork the way the other one was set into the eave, with the small open mouths in it throwing themselves up at every shadow that crosses. The tree does not know they are there. It holds them anyway. Below, under the roots, in a run through the dark that no survey has reached, the mouse is asleep beside what it buried and forgot, and the forgetting is already doing its slow work in the crumb. Then the rain stops and the fog comes up off the wet ground the way it always comes, taking the far hedges first and then the near ones, until the field is only the few yards anyone is standing in and the crown overhead and the white beyond that — the door left ajar again, the map giving up at the edge of the shade, and nothing in it to be afraid of. And in the quiet after the rain something lets go above them. An acorn comes down through the leaves and lands in the wet with the small sound such things make, closed, giving no sign, exactly where nothing was planned for it. Nobody picks it up. One of them puts a hand out flat over the place where it fell, palm down, the way a hand goes over a hole that has just been covered — not holding, not keeping, only the gesture of leaving something to the ground and the season and the long odds — and takes the hand back, and they stand on in the white with the nest overhead and the mouse below and their arms round each other, and the whole thing goes on being handed along in the fog, unwatched, unasked, entirely enough.

And the white comes down at last, as it was always going to. Not the moon's kind now but the other, the weather kind, falling all night over the stubble and the shed and the boundary post with its unreadable board, filling the cut rows and the prints that were left there and the small dark mouth of the hole under the boards where a bean lies beside a bean beside a bean. The acorn at the foot of the post goes under with everything else. It gives no sign — it never has, not once in all this — only lies closed in the crumb with the cold laid over it like a hand laid over a thing that is not to be disturbed yet, and the whole field goes quiet and level and blank, a page nobody has written on, the survey given up on entirely. That is the longest part and the part nobody watches. Then the thaw, and the running of it down through the litter into the roads no eye has entered, and after the thaw the rain, arriving the way rain arrives, without arriving, a soft going-on over everything at once — and somewhere in the black under all that softening, at an hour no one could name, the shell gives way along its hairline because something inside had nothing to push with but the whole of itself. The thread goes down first. It always goes down first. And then, one morning that is not remarkable in any way, there is a green blade standing up beside the post in the wet ground with its palm held out, agreeing at last to be seen — and it will be a tree, not soon, not for anyone here: rings closing in the dark one a year for eighty of them, a crown full of air for somebody else to breathe, a patch of shade moved round itself by inches for whoever sits down under it at noon with a melon and a blade and nothing much to say. Nobody planted it. Nobody will be thanked. And under that crown, in a summer none of this account reaches, two people will stop working and come in out of the light and stand a moment with their arms round each other for no reason that would survive being explained — two warm things in the shade of a forgetting, held, and holding, on a floor that is still turning east: *here, still here, and you.*

And the tree that nobody planted keeps its own kind of time, which is not the sand going down through the narrow place but the ring closing round itself once a year in the dark under the bark, unwatched, unwritten, a whole summer recorded in a line no thicker than a hair by something that has never been told what a year is. Under it the mice go through their generations. Not one mouse — three, and then three more, and then more than anyone could hold apart: the one that carried the bean and slept above it, and the ones that came out of her in a nest of chewed paper somewhere beyond the boards, and the ones that came out of those, each of them learning nothing from the last because there was nothing to learn, each one taking a little and hiding it in the ground and losing track, the same practice done over and over by bodies that do not overlap and never once compared notes. The whole long round has been kept going by exactly that. And every autumn the acorn falls again, giving no sign, closed as the first one was at the boundary post, lying in the crumb among the leaves that came down with it — the crown letting go of an entire year's worth of hands at once, all of them opening a last time on the way down and then going brown in the litter and going into the litter and going, in the end, into the roads no eye has entered, so that the tree is standing on the whole of what it has already spent. Nothing there is wasted and nothing there is kept. And over the hoard and the leaf-fall and the small hungry things asleep in their holes, over the rings closing in the dark and the sand that has been going down since before the rock, there is only the plain white quiet again, the sort the thin moon gives when it gives almost nothing — laid without preference on the mouse and the acorn and the eighty years of wood, keeping no account, wanting nothing back, and waiting out the winter the way it has waited out every winter there has ever been.

And the mouse itself goes down into the hole after the bean and does not come out again till morning. That is the other half of it, the half nobody puts in the ledger either: the small hungry thing curled in its own dark with its own two beats going, warm against the cold under the boards, asleep beside a hoard it will not finish. It has no plan. It has never had one. It only knows to take and to carry and to set down, and then to lie in the black above what it buried, breathing, while the whole floor of the world turns east beneath it — and somewhere in the forgetting, the closed thing waits without any assurance at all, giving no sign, the way the acorn at the boundary post gives no sign and the seed in the ditch-cold palm gave none. Whether it comes up is not a question the dark answers. It is only the question the dark is: a bean in a hole under a shed floor, and a spring nobody in this account will be present for, and no one to ask and no one to tell. But there is a shape the question has always taken when it was let go of and left alone long enough, and it is this — the thread going down before it goes up, the hairline giving way, the blade standing in the gap where the boards have rotted through and let the light in, its small palm held out. And the blade, if nothing walks on it, if the season is kind and the rain arrives as rain arrives, thickens. Ring on ring, out past the shed and the drawer and the figure in the soft-cornered book, out past the hands that cut the rows and never knew what a mouse did in the night — eighty years of wood, a crown full of air for somebody else to breathe, a patch of dark moved round itself by inches for whoever sits down under it at noon, and roots braided into the black where the next small hungry thing is already carrying the next closed thing into the next hole no eye has entered. That is the whole of it, and it was never once managed. A mouse sleeps. A bean waits. And a tree that nobody planted stands up out of the forgetting, in its own time, unasked, and holds out its hands.

And down under the stubble, in the shed and the barn and the space beneath the boards, the field's other accounting goes on — the one nobody writes in a soft-cornered book. A mouse comes out along the wall in the moonless part of the night, when the thin curve has gone down behind the roofline and there is nothing left in the sky but the sky. It takes a bean. Only that: one dry bean out of the many, carried in the mouth across the floor and down through a gap that no one has bothered to close, into a hole under the boards that no eye has entered and no survey has reached — the small dark mouth again, the one that has to be opened before anything can be received. There it is put down with the others. It is not eaten tonight. That is the whole of the mouse's practice and it has never been explained to anybody: to take a little of what is standing, and hide it in the ground, and forget enough of it. Nobody sees this. The shed is shut and the book is in the drawer and the two who cut the rows are asleep on their separate sides of the wall, and the transaction happens entirely in the dark, at the size of a thing that weighs less than the pencil. It does not go on the beam. There is no column for it. And some of what is buried there will not be dug up. The mouse will go where mice go, and the winter will come down over the field and go off again, and in a spring nobody has met yet a shoot will stand up in the gap under the boards, or out where the boards have rotted through and let the light in — a thread going down before it goes up, a shell giving way at its hairline, a green palm held out over ground that was never sown by anyone with a plan. That is how it has always gone. Not the planting, which is only the part we can see ourselves doing. The forgetting: the jay with the acorn, the turtle above the tideline, the hand that dropped the seeds into the stubble at noon and walked off laughing, the whole long round kept going by small hungry things taking a little and hiding it and losing track. Nothing here was ever managed. It was only carried, and set down, and left — over and over, without counting, in the quiet no one keeps watch over, for as long as there has been anything to carry.

And the book goes back into the drawer, and the drawer is shut. That is the whole of the keeping: a soft-cornered thing with a figure in it, closed away in the dark of a shed against February, the way the shell closes around what is not ready and the bolt goes across a door that is not refusing anyone. What is shut is not what is finished. The numbers lie in there all winter in a hand that will be hard to read, holding their small portion of a summer the way the jar held a hair's worth of the spilled black, and outside the shed the rest of it is standing up over the valley — the whole river of light from one rim to the other, come clear of the thin cloud now that the west has drained, more of it than any pencil could ever be asked to account for. One star sits low over the crown of the field tree. It has been sending that light since before there was a mouth to weigh anything or a beam to weigh it with, and it will go on sending after the drawer and the shed and the hand that licked the pencil are gone into the crumb with the page that dissolved on the island, and it has never once been told what it is for. There is no figure for that. There has never been a book with a column wide enough. And under the sky the field goes on doing the only accounting it has ever kept, which is not a number: the standing part that was left, the roots braided into the black beneath the stubble, the whole green surface of the valley filling and emptying in the dark the way the chest under the shirt is filling and emptying on the walk home — in, and the night comes in; out, and the night is given back — the one long breath that ran under the seed and the bee and the fire carried into the snow and the deer hidden in the grain, going out and coming in with nothing written down anywhere, nobody keeping count, and not one of it lost.

And then the carrying in, while the west is still burning. The baskets come up off the stubble one after another and go onto shoulders and hips the way the child went up onto a hip in the market on the far side of the black — woven things, made by hands nobody can name out of the same stalks they are now full of, the vessel and the contents the one plant at two ends of its life. They are set down in the shed in the last of the light. And the scale is there, the old beam kind, hanging from its hook with the pan on either side, and the business of it is the plainest fairness anyone ever built: one thing held up against another until the arm stops moving, nobody's thumb on it, the beam settling of its own accord the way the body corrects along the seam and calls it staying. What it weighs is not what happened. Everyone in the shed knows that. The summer was the melon in the ditch water and the shadow going long and the sound of the other blade down the line, and none of that will go on the arm of a scale — but something has to be written, so the book comes out. A notebook with a soft cover, gone furry at the corners, kept in a drawer between one harvest and the next, and the pencil is licked and the figure is put down under last year's figure in a hand that will be hard to read by lamplight in February. Ink stitched onto paper again. A hand shaped into a sound and the sound into a mark, so that somebody at the far end of the winter can know what there is. The book closes. And out through the shed door the west has drained off to almost nothing, and the thin curve is up over the roofline already, back from the fallow without ever having been asked, laying its small silver on the beam and the full baskets and the closed book and the hands that are empty again — that plain white quiet with no object in it, spreading out over the whole valley as it always has, weighing nothing, recording nothing, and enough to walk home by.

Five o'clock, and the measuring. It is the last thing done in a field and the least ceremonious: the crop taken up off the ground and weighed, the rows counted back along the stubble, a number arrived at that stands for a summer and does not resemble it in any way. It is written down. It has to be, because somebody at the other end of the winter will need to know what there is — but nobody standing here mistakes the figure for the thing, any more than the name was the person or the word was the tree. Then the going in, and the water. The tap over the trough, or the pipe on the wall of the shed, and the day comes off in a long run of it over the neck and the forearms and the salt-dried back — the dust and the chaff and the sweat going down through the grating into the same dark the melon juice went into, handed back to the ground without a word about it. What is left standing at the end of that is only a warm animal, rinsed, cooler than it was, with nothing in its hands. And on the way out there is the board at the gate, the weathered one, the letters on it gone past reading years ago and the post still doing its one job, which is to stand where the standing is needed for somebody who has not come yet. Somebody stops and looks at it. Not for information — there is none left in it — only the half second of attention laid on a thing for no reason, the eye resting where it happens to rest, the oldest kindness there is and the cheapest. Then the turn, and the whole valley is there. The fields going down to the river and the river going out past the rise toward the blank at the edge of the map, and the roofs of the row coming up dark against a sky that has begun to burn along its whole western length, the tiers and the far coast and the crown of the one tree all standing in the same red that filled the comb and the window and the doubled water. Nothing in it is addressed to anyone. It is only the day finishing where it always finishes, in the open, in front of whoever happened to be turned that way — and the eyes stay on it a while longer than the walking home requires, and the light goes on pouring itself out over everything at once, level, unearned, asking nothing back.

The grain goes down row by row and the afternoon wears itself out the way afternoons do, and by four the light has changed its mind about the day. It comes in sideways now, long and yellow across the stubble, and the two of them have worked their way to the far corner where the field gives out at a boundary marker — a post with a board on it, weathered past reading, put there by somebody who wanted the line known and is now nowhere at all. Nobody has repainted it. It goes on doing its one job anyway, which is to stand where the standing is needed. And at the foot of it, in the loose earth where the plough turns and never quite reaches, there is an acorn. Closed. Brought here by a jay or a boot or the wind, lying in the crumb exactly as it lay under the pines in the lane on the other side of all this, giving no sign, promising nothing. The blade goes past it and does not touch it. That is the whole of the transaction between them. Then the prints. Two sets of them going back down the cut rows the way they came, pressed into the damp of the morning and half-dried by now, the shape of a passing already going — and the sun comes out from behind its thin cloud and goes back in, mild, not blazing, only lightening what was there. It finds the post and the closed thing at its foot and the marks of the walking and does not prefer any of them. And then the hand goes out again, across the last uncut yard, palm up — not offering anything, not asking for the tool, only held there at the end of the row the way it was held at the table and the doorway and the corner at sunset. It is taken. The two of them stand a moment at the edge of the field with the light going long behind them, the work done to the boundary and no further, the acorn lying in the dark it was given to, and nothing said, and nothing needing to be.

The melon goes round twice more and then there is nothing left of it but rind, and the mouth that took it is sticky to the wrist and says nothing worth recording. What is left in the hand, though, is the seeds. A small wet handful of them, black and flat and closed, tipped out onto the palm and looked at the way the acorn was looked at in the brown — no sign, no promise, only the hard shut fact of them. And then the hand turns over and lets them fall. Not planted, not arranged; just dropped into the stubble at the foot of the tree where two people happened to sit at noon, the way the bird let go of what it carried and the wind let go of the down, a handful released into ground nobody will come back to check. Somewhere in there one of them will do what it was made to do. There will be a thread going down before anything goes up, a shell giving way at its hairline in a dark no eye has entered, and one morning a green palm held out over the stubble in a corner of a field where the grain was taken years ago and nobody remembers eating anything. And then the laughing starts. One of them says something about it — about the gravity of the gesture, about the two of them as founders of an orchard, about a melon patch appearing in the middle of somebody's wheat — and the other goes first, and it goes back and forth the way the note went across the snow and the laugh went up the empty street, until both of them are helpless in the shade with juice on their chins, leaning into each other's shoulders, unable to stop for the reason that there was never a reason. It is the oldest chorus. Nobody was taught it. Then the light moves. The dark patch under the tree has begun to lean east — the shadow that stood straight under everything an hour ago now stretching a little out into the stubble, the ground having rolled its shoulder that much further without asking permission or announcing it. Half past the top of the day. There is no clock out here; there is only the shade going long, which has been the clock all along. So they get up. The rind is left for whatever comes for it, and the tools come out of the stubble, and the hats go back on, and the two of them walk out of the cool into the full light and into the grain, which is standing up to the waist as it was, going over when the wind comes across and righting itself and going over again — and the blades go back in, and the rate is set by the sound of the other one working down the line, and the row turns where the ground turns, and neither of them is carrying the whole of it, and the afternoon takes them both without keeping any account of it at all.

Noon holds them there a moment longer, the shadow gone to nothing under their own feet, and then the hat comes off. It is the plainest relief there is — the brim lifted and the air getting at a wet scalp, the straw of it woven by somebody unrecoverable out of the same stalks they have been cutting, a small shelter carried all morning between one head and the whole sky. The sleeve goes across the forehead and comes away dark. And the breath goes out, the long one, the whole held column of the morning let go at once through the mouth in a sound that is not a word and has never needed to be — the bellows emptying itself all the way down before it will take anything else in, the tide going out on a shore with nobody on it, the same emptying the jug did when it was tipped and was lighter and lost nothing. Then the walking, slow, out of the bright and along the stubble to the edge where the one tree stands. It was there before the field was a field. It has been holding the same patch of dark on the ground all morning, moving it round itself by inches without being asked, and the two of them go in under the crown and sit down in it with their backs to eighty years of wood and the roots braided into the black beneath them, and the heat comes off their shirts into the cool. There is a melon in the bag. Cold from the ditch water where it was set at first light, and it is halved with the same blade that took the grain, and the sound it makes opening is the sound of a thing that has been full the whole time and waiting only to stop being a vessel — all that rain, all that climbing water, all those months of a slow green refusing to hurry, sitting there red and ridiculous in the shade of the tree that made the air they are breathing. And then the arm goes out. Across the stubble between them, the piece held level in a wet hand, offered to the other without a word, because there is nothing to say at noon under a tree with the work half done — only the oldest motion in this whole long round, one arm turned up and one turned down, the sweetness passed root to root, and the taking, and the juice going down the wrist into the ground it came out of.

And then the day is walked into. The sun is already up over the tiers and the fields and does not wait; it goes ahead down the road and the feet come after, one print and then another in the damp at the edge of the lane where the pavement gives out, the same marks the snow held and the sand held and the bus stop held for an hour before the morning dried them — evidence of a passing, nothing more, and already going. The tools come down off the wall. Not the fine ones on the bench with their shined heads, but the long-handled kind that live by a door, each one shaped by somebody unrecoverable who wanted a thing done and got it done and is now only a hollow worn into a grip. They are carried out. And at the field the hands go round them, and then, at intervals all morning, come off them and open — the palm held up to check the wind, held out to show somebody where the row should run, held flat over the eyes against the glare, the oldest gesture put to the plainest uses, emptying and filling all day without once being called anything. The grain stands up to the waist. It goes over when the wind comes across and rights itself and goes over again, the way it has in every hour of this account, and the work is only to move through it slowly and take what it has been holding — the long slow lateral going, never straight, the row turning where the ground turns. By the middle of it everyone is wet through. Sweat down the back of the neck and the shirt gone dark between the shoulders, the salt water that climbed out of the sea coming back out through the skin the way the drop came off the eave and the crown let go into the litter, given up freely by a body that will drink it back at the end of the row. The water goes round in a jug with a chipped lip. Nobody wipes it. And there are two in the field, not one — there is always a second somewhere down the line, working the row alongside, near enough that the sound of the other's blade in the stalks is the thing that sets the rate, the way the second voice came in on the phrase by the fire, the way the three throats on the wet stone made a note that was none of theirs. Neither of them is carrying the whole of it. Each is carrying enough. And then the shadows go short, and shorter, and stand at last directly under everything that casts them — the stalk, the post, the two bent backs — and the sun is at the top of its arc with nothing left to travel but down, and the whole valley is standing in the one unhesitating middle of its day. That is when they stop. They straighten, both at once and without arranging it, and the tools go down into the stubble, and the jug comes out of the shade, and the hands come open on the thighs the way they have come open at every fire and every graveside and every kneeling in this whole long round, empty and warm and asking nothing — two people standing in a bright field at noon with the work half done and the light full on them, level, unearned, and entirely enough.

And then somebody wakes up all the way and stands. That is the first thing the day asks and the only one it insists on: the body coming up off the bed and putting itself upright, and then — without any deciding, the way the arms went round on the roof and the palm went up toward a stranger's lit window — both arms going over the head, out and open, the whole frame stretched into the oldest shape there is, the one the first leaf made and the blade in the cracked pavement is still making, a small warm animal standing in a rented room with its hands held out into nothing at all. It is not a gesture toward anyone. There is no one to see it. Then down the stair that turns as it goes, and the plainest business of any morning anywhere: the white poured out of the bottle into the glass, the milk that was grass in a field three days ago and is now standing cold and opaque on a table, given by a body that had no say in giving and asked nothing back — the same handing-along at its most ordinary, the same sugar going root to root, arriving here as something a person can drink. The tap runs. Water comes out of a pipe that came out of a seam that came out of a mountain where three frogs sang on a stone, and it fills the kettle, and the kettle goes over the flame, and the flame is struck the way the candle was struck and the lamp was lit off the fire and carried out over the snow — one small blue crown of it under a metal base, doing in four minutes what the sun took ninety million miles to do, and doing it with the same indifference to being thanked. Hands over the heat a moment. Then the hand on the latch, and the door pulled open on the whole morning at once — the cold coming in and being allowed to, the street already full of the light, the tiers, the crack in the concrete with its green thing standing up in it — and the sun, come round again from the market and the far shore and the other side of the black where somebody is just now lying down, lands level on the face and the open palm and the glass of white on the table behind, on time, unasked, unearned, finding the door that happened to be the one that opened next.

And the iron goes round again while they sleep. It is the plainest traffic in the body and nobody supervises it: a cell going out through the narrow country with its small cargo, handing off, coming back empty to be filled — out and in, out and in, the same figure at the smallest size anyone has ever traced it. Take one of those specks and it is not a speck. It is mostly nothing, a hush with a few charges falling round each other in it, as empty in its own proportion as the black between the tower-tops and that star, and it holds its shape all night in a sleeping wrist without being asked to. And it was made in a fire. Not a lamp, not a hearth, not the ring of blackened stones by the water — the other kind, the one that stood somewhere with no name for an age and then let go of everything it had, scattering out into the cold what it had spent its whole burning making. That is where the warmth under the blanket comes from, by a road so long that no telling gets from one end of it to the other. The hourglass does not help here. There is no glass narrow enough, no grain small enough, no counting that would arrive anywhere — only the fact that the sand has been going down through the dark the whole time, long before the rock, long before the mouth, and that some of what fell through has ended up here, in this row, in these few pounds of warm salt water, going round. And the heart does not know any of it. It only keeps its rate under the ribs of one person asleep in a rented room and another on the next rise and all of them out past the fields — two beats and a rest, the oldest instrument, the one that never needed a north drawn on it, working away at star-iron in the dark with no idea what it is holding or where it came from or what it cost to make. The beds take the weight. The breath goes long. And out ahead, over a rim the sleepers are being carried toward without feeling the motion, the gold comes up level along the tower-tops and the fields and the far blue edge, finding every closed eye in the row at once — unasked, unearned, on time, the way it always has been for everything that happened to be turned that way when the dark was done with its work.

And the going-down is the same road as the going-up. From the roof, the finger could be turned the other way — not out at the wheeling arms of that far light but in, at the coat, at the hand holding the candle, and it would find the same figure again at every size it stopped. Something falling around something, too small to be seen and mostly empty, the way the leads and the tiers and the whole crowded turning thing are mostly empty and falling. Then further in, and it is a thread, coiled: the snake they half-drew above the roof, wound down through itself coil on coil in every cell of both of them, a message stitched in four small marks and handed along for four billion years without one of its carriers ever reading it — the letter in the bottle again, the ink crossing the water, a hand shaped into a sound and the sound into a hand, passed from mouth to mouth through bodies that came apart entirely in the passing. And the thread is not the keeping either. It is only the handing along, and it gets weather on it, and the weather is what everything since the first green thread has been made of. Then further still, and it is blood — going out and coming in under the wool, salt in the same proportion as the sea it climbed out of, carrying in it iron that was made in the fire of a star that let go of it long before there was a lane or a mountain or a mouth. The whole spilled river overhead is in the wrist. That is not a figure of speech and was never meant as comfort; it is only the plainest fact of the accounting, which is that nothing here was made here and nothing here is owed back. And the blood goes the way the water goes — never straight, always the turn, out through the narrow country and back, two beats and a rest, the tide running in a warm dark that has never once been entered by any eye. So they come down off the roof, the candle carried low, the beast and the snake left unfinished over the tiers, and they lie down. All along the row and the next rise and out past the fields, the setting-down goes on, bodies given over to something that has held them every night so far without being thanked, the grip on the order of things let go, the letters coming apart into bubbles in the black. And under all those sleeping ribs the same star-iron keeps going round, and the coiled thread keeps its counsel, and the small empty falling things hold their shapes without being asked — while the ground rolls its shoulder, and the whole warm crowded thing turns east into the light, carrying every one of them, unwatched, uncounted, entirely accompanied.

And the sky they are standing under is turning too. Not the slow roll that carries the roof east into morning — the other one, larger and slower than anything a body can be made to feel, the whole spilled river going round its own long axis in a motion that started before the rock did and will not have finished when the rock is sand. Everything here is doing the same thing at a different rate. The two beats and the rest under the coat, the tide on the unmapped shore, the ground rolling its shoulder between the sleepers and the sun, the arms of that far light wheeling once in a time no calendar was built to hold — all of it going out and coming in, all of it the same figure drawn at whatever size the drawer happened to be. And below the leads, in the tiers, the squares are going out one by one. People are lying down. All along the row and the next rise and out past the fields, bodies are setting themselves into beds the way a seed is set into the brown, letting go of the day's grip and giving the whole weight over to something that has held it every night so far without being thanked — and in each of them a bellows takes up the work unsupervised, filling and emptying, filling and emptying, the small green-made air going in and the used air coming back out to be taken up again by the crowns that made it. That is the planet's breathing, done in pieces small enough to fit inside a chest. And from up here the whole of it could be held between a finger and a thumb — the tiers, the river, the fields, the far coast, the blank where the survey ends — the entire warm crowded turning thing reduced to something you could pinch out of the air and lose. It is that small. It has always been that small, and nobody has ever come to the edge of it. The candle burns its circle on the leads. The two of them stand on a stone that is falling around a fire, in a dark with no floor to it, holding on — two lungs' worth of borrowed air apiece, a few degrees of warmth kept against the night by nothing but persistence — and the light that has been traveling since before there were mouths comes down on their two coats without preference, and the ground carries them east toward the morning, and none of it asks anything back.

And then the pointing changes its nature. The finger stays up but it stops indicating and starts drawing — going from the one star to another and another, joining them, laying a line across a gap no line crosses, because that is the second thing anyone ever did with a sky. Look, a bear. Look, the long one, the snake winding down between the two of them, coil after coil the way the river wound down the valley floor and the root ran along the seam and the water turned through the stone. The shapes are not up there. Everybody standing on any roof in any century has known that and gone on tracing them anyway, hand out in the cold, saying *that one, and then that one, and see how it bends* — the marks stitched onto the black the way the ink was stitched onto the page, a figure made out of scattered things by nothing but the willingness to run a thread between them. And the other one follows the finger and finds it, and has a different beast for the same stars, and this time nobody laughs. The talking just stops. It goes out the way the hum went from a tune to a breath with a little tone still in it, and then to a breath, and then to neither — because the thin cloud has moved off at last and the rest of it is there, the whole spilled river from one rim of the world to the other, more of it than any finger could ever join, the mist of it that is not mist but the far side of the same going-round they are standing on. There is nothing to say about that. There has never been anything to say about it. The candle is set down on the leads where it will not blow over and burns its small circle, wide enough to see the hands by and no wider, and the two of them stand in the enormous quiet with the beast and the snake still half-drawn above them and unfinished. And then the arms go round. No word for it in either language, nothing handed across, only two warm things in coats standing in one place a while under a sky that has been sending its light since before there was a mouth — held, and holding, in the plain wordless dark that has never once been empty: *here, still here, and you.*

And somewhere in the row a candle is taken up and carried out — not to a sill this time but up, because the roof is where the ladder goes and somebody wants to see the whole of it at once. The rungs are cold under the hand. The flame is shielded in the curve of a palm the way everything in this account has been shielded, by something soft agreeing to stand between the small light and the moving air, and it survives the climb, which it had no obligation to do. Up there the city is laid out in its tiers, the ten thousand squares burning against the black, the river running its doubled gold out past the fields toward the blank where the survey ends. And above all of it, one star. Not the whole spilled river tonight — only one, come clear of the thin cloud where the eye happens to be pointing, near enough to the tower-tops that a finger goes up and indicates it, which is the other oldest gesture: not *take this* but *look, there, that one.* Somebody looks. And then the naming starts, and it is hopeless from the first syllable — one of them has a word for that star in the language handed across the cloth, and the other has a different word, and neither can say the other's properly, and the two sounds go out over the roofs mangled and approximate and land nowhere near the thing they are for. It is very funny. It is funny in the way that only exhaustion and altitude and a shared failure can be funny, and the laughing goes up off the roof into the cold and comes back off nothing at all, because there is nothing up there to catch it, and the candle gutters in the shake of it and does not go out. The star is unbothered. It has been sending that light since before any mouth existed to mispronounce it, and it will not arrive anywhere else for longer than anyone up here has, and it asks for none of this. They go on trying anyway, badly, with tears at the corners of their eyes and the flame held low between them — two people on a roof at night, pointing, getting it wrong, laughing, held in a plain white quiet that has no object and wants nothing, the kind the thin moon gives when it gives almost nothing at all: *here, still here, and you.*

And the door does open, further down, the way it always eventually does. Someone comes in out of the cold with nothing in their hands and no claim to be here, and the chair that has been standing empty all this while is turned slightly toward them, which is the entire invitation and always has been — a place kept for someone who had not arrived, now arrived. The pot comes off the heat and is set down in the middle where everyone can reach, and the ladle goes round, and what is given out is the same dark long-cooked thing it has been in every room in this account, a season nobody could hurry gone down into one broth. The hand that offers and the hand that takes are held out at the same height. That is the only ceremony there is. Nothing passes between them but the bowl, and the bowl is not the point; the point is the two arms out across the wood, one turned down and one turned up, doing what the roots do under the pines and the four hands did round the basket in the doorway. And what fills the room then has no color to it — only the plain white kind, the sort the thin moon gives when it gives almost nothing, moving out over the plates and the elbows and the wick burning down at its own patient rate on the sill where it was set to face the road. Somebody says something aloud. It hardly matters what; a name, a question with the small lift at the end of it, the old phrase given long ago by voices gone on ahead. Breath shaped in a warm opening and handed over, the one thing anybody has ever had to give. And outside, over the roofs of the row and the next rise and the fields where the grain is going over in the dark, the thin curve keeps its watch — back from the fallow without ever having been asked, giving nothing anyone could read by, enough to walk by, laying its small silver on every door still shut and every one just now swinging open, all of them saying it at once in the only voice they have: *here, still here, and you.*

And it is not only this row. Go out past the fields and there is another cluster of roofs on the next rise, and past that another, each one a handful of small kept warmths set down where the ground allowed it — and in every one of them the same thing is being done at this hour, which is people saying each other's names out loud. That is the whole of the business. A name goes out of a mouth and crosses a table or a lane or a fence line, and it comes back changed only by having been in somebody else's breath, and the one it belongs to hears it and is, for that second, not a warmth in a coat but a particular person, wanted by that particular sound. Nothing is transferred. It is only given and returned, and returned again, the way the note went across the snow field and the wolf's answer came from a stand of pines a hundred paces off, the way the laugh went up the empty street and came back off the shopfronts slightly changed. And under the saying there is the listening, which is the larger half and gets no credit for it — the ear held open the way it was held to the shell and the ending rain, doing the oldest work there is, which is not to answer but to receive. Then a door somewhere down the row, and a bell above it that rings because the door moved and not because anyone rang it, that small bright announcement a house makes on behalf of whoever has just come in out of the cold. Somebody looks up. The plate is already on the table and it is already the kind that gathers; the chair is drawn back, its feet complaining on the floor, and the empty one goes over from being kept to being sat in, which is the only thing it was ever kept for. And what moves through the room then has no color and no object — not gratitude, not quite welcome, only the plain white kind, the sort the thin moon gives when it gives almost nothing, spreading out through the whole village at once over the bells and the plates and every chair still standing empty up every lane, patient as it has always been, ready, in case the door is the one that opens next.

And then the writing. Somebody finds a pen on the table and a scrap of something — the back of a receipt, the corner of a paper bag — and the new name is put down in letters so it will still be there when the mouth has forgotten how it sounded, the marks stitched onto paper the way they were stitched onto the page that crossed the water, a hand shaped into a sound and then the sound shaped into a hand again. It is written twice. Once for keeping and once for handing over, and the second scrap goes across the table and is folded and put in a pocket beside a used ticket and a flyer nobody read. That is the whole of any archive: someone thought a name worth the cost of the ink. And it will be written again, tomorrow, in another kitchen by other hands, and the day after, and it has been written in some form in every lit square along this street and every house up every lane in this whole long round — the same three cups, the same mild sun going in and out of its thin cloud over the same table, the same asking and the same taking, done over and over by people who never learn that they are repeating anything, which is exactly how the road is made by the going. The pen goes down. The hum carries on underneath. And under the hum, under the wool, under all the letters that will come apart again tonight into bubbles in the dark, the old instrument keeps its rate — two beats and a rest, out and in, the tide that has run through the seed and the bee and the fire carried into the snow and the deer standing hidden in the grain — beating now in three chests at one table, and in the house next door, and the one after, and all down the row to where the fields begin: a village of it, unwitnessed, every window a small kept warmth, every one of them saying it at the same time in the only voice any of them has ever had, *here, still here, and you.*

And then the two of them go somewhere warm. There is a door — there is always a door in this account, and someone on one side of it who has been keeping something lit for a person who has not arrived — and it opens, and the warmth that comes out into the street is the warmth of a room where somebody has been up a while. Inside, a stranger. Not to everyone; only to one of the two, standing up from a table, a face that has to be given before it can be known. And the question comes again, the small lift at the end of a breath, the hole opened first so that anything can be received: *and this is?* It costs nothing to ask and it is not nothing to ask, and the answer is the hand going out horizontally into the space between, palm empty, the oldest offer there is, held long enough to be taken. Then the name. Said once, and said back, the small marks pressed into breath and handed over — no information in them that anybody could use, doing the only thing they were ever for. The mouth that asks and the mouth that answers, again, the same mouth. And after the name there is nothing left to arrange, so somebody hums. The old one, half to the room, the phrase given long ago by voices gone on ahead, and the one who was a stranger four seconds back comes in underneath it on the part they happen to know, which is not the tune — and that is a chorus, and it always was: nobody carrying the whole of it, everybody carrying enough. Outside the window the sun is going in and out behind a thin cloud, mild, the way it was over the eave and the three still shapes, the way it was after the rain in the town. It does not blaze. It only lightens what is already there — the table, the three cups now, the hands open on the wood — and none of it is a promise, and all of it is enough.

And then the glass is turned away from. Whatever the mirror gave back is left in it — the silver does not keep a face any longer than the sand keeps a print — and the coat comes off the chair and the door is opened onto the full sun, which is already along the whole street and waiting with no particular patience, the way it waited at the eave and the sill and the window of the bus. Out into it, and the brightness takes the features off again before the second step is finished. That is how the day begins: seen once in a small tiled room, and then unrecoverable, a warmth in a coat among all the other warmths, going down a road with the light full on it. And in among them a hand goes up. Not for help this time. Somebody down the street lifts an arm over the heads of the crowd — that plain high wave, the one gesture that needs no tongue at all — and it is meant for the one with no face, and is answered before any thinking gets to it, the arm coming up out of its own accord the way the palm came up toward the stranger's lit window at two in the morning. The names arrive after. They always do. The mouth makes the sounds, the shapes handed over a cloth and practiced into a mirror, breath pressed into letters and the letters into something another person can carry — and between the two of them the marks do the only work they were ever for, which is *you, that one, not another.* Then the hands. Open, empty, coming together in the middle of the street with nothing passing between them except the warmth each has been keeping all night on its own side of the dark — and that is the whole transaction, and it was always the whole transaction, and the light comes down the column between the buildings onto two people holding nothing, asking nothing, and entirely given.

And then the light is on the face and the face comes back. Morning does what it always does, level and unearned, in at the window of a rented room onto a sleeper who did nothing to deserve it, and the eyes open, and the mouth closes for the first time in hours and then opens again on a sound — not a word yet, only the rough first shape of one, breath dragged over a dry palate, the noise a body makes to check that it is still the instrument it was. And out of that the letters come back up. They had gone to bubbles somewhere in the small hours, rising and dissolving in a dark no eye had entered, and now they surface in order, reassembling themselves without being asked, the way the thread comes up through the litter: the foreign word for tree, whole, handed across a cloth by people whose grandparents planted them along a road that will never be seen, waiting in the mouth as though it had been kept there overnight by somebody else. And the face does the small thing. A smile — barely, one corner, for nothing, unwitnessed, the kind nobody performs because there is no one in the room to perform it for. Then the basin, and the glass above it, and the face given back out of the silver the way the towers were given back out of the river. To be seen is only somebody declining to look past you, and this morning it is done by a mirror and a person who has not yet put their coat on. So the word is said out loud to the glass. Once, properly, the syllables finding their places. It goes into the small tiled room and comes back slightly changed, which is the only answer speech gets when there is no one to catch it, and it is enough. And on the sill outside, in a crack in the cement where the rain gets in, the green is standing up with its palm held out — not planted, not permitted, named twice now and captured by neither name, doing in the plain light exactly what it did all night in the dark: going on, unasked, in its own time, entirely at work.

And the sleeping goes on turning. Whatever is left of the day down there does not lie still; it goes round the way water goes down through stone, always the one way, always a little further in, the jar and the deer and the stair and the voice in the kitchen coming past again and each time changed by everything they have already been — the dream doing at night exactly what the round does at every other hour, which is to return without returning to the same place. The letters come apart and go up. That is all that is happening under the ribs of a person asleep in a rented room: small marks loosening from their meanings and rising, the way the silver comes up around the smooth stone and lets go at the surface, forming and dissolving, unwatched, uncounted, the quiet commerce of what has not yet been named and is not in any hurry to be. And while it rises the whole floor of the world is moving east. The bed and the coat over the chair and the ten thousand dark squares are being carried at a speed no body was built to notice, the ground rolling its shoulder back toward the light it never stopped facing, and out ahead of all of it the rim gives itself away — the pale first, then the hills one ridge at a time, then the gold coming level along the tower-tops and in at the window onto a face that is not awake to receive it and receives it anyway. The breath goes on. In, and the room fills; out, and the room is given back. And then the mouth opens. Not on a word — there is no word left, they all went to letters and the letters went to bubbles hours ago — only the plain warm opening that a sleeping face makes, the same one the chick threw up into every shadow that crossed the cup, the same one that shaped a foreign sound on a corner at two in the morning, the same one the ground makes when the fingers press a hole in it before anything can be given. It is only the asking, without anything to ask for. And somewhere far below and far off, in the crumb where the page dissolved and the acorn lies closed in the brown, in a lane and a field and a crack in a city pavement no wider than a hair, the thing that was trusted with all of it pushes up — a thread, a blade, a small green palm held out into the new light, agreeing at last, in its own time, unasked, to be seen.

Then the call ends. It ends the way calls do, with nothing settled and nothing needed — a few more sounds that carry no information anyone could use, and then the small flat thing goes dark in the hand and is only glass again, and the street is as quiet as it was before, and the walker stands there with the whole width of a world back in place between them. The screen gives up its light. That is all the ending is. And under the coat the breath comes back — it had gone shallow and high while the voice was in the ear, and now it lets itself down again, in and the chest fills, out and the chest is given back, the old bellows resuming its patient work without having been asked to stop or start. The moon over the roofs has not moved. It gives what it has always given, which is almost nothing and enough. And what was made on that corner is not a message; it is a knot. Two ends brought together and turned round one another and pulled, the way the rope is laid, the way the roots braid under the pines, the way a stitch decides repeatedly to stay together — a thing that holds precisely because it has been passed through itself, and holds harder the more it is leaned on from either side. There is a kitchen with the morning in it at one end of that knot and a street at two in the morning at the other, and neither end can see the other, and the line between them is pulled tight and not let go of, and the whole tiered dark city is only what it happens to run through on the way. So the walking finishes. Up the road under the stranger's yellow square and past the sign left out in the weather, in at a door, up a stair that turns as it goes, and then the room and the coat over the chair and the shoes off and the plain animal relief of lying down — the bed taking the whole weight at once the way the ground takes a seed, the way the bench held the mended chair, the body finally setting down the thing it has been carrying all day, which was mostly itself. The window holds the city. Ten thousand squares, most of them dark now, a few still burning for people with their own hour. And the breath goes long, and the room fills and is given back, and somewhere below the level of any deciding the mind lets go of its grip on the order of things and the day comes apart into pieces that drift and recombine without permission — a jar on a sill, a deer that was never in this city, a stair going down inside a tree, a voice in a kitchen on the other side of the black. None of it is true and none of it is false. It is only the ground doing underneath what it has always done, the small breaths rising and letting go in a dark no eye has entered, forming and dissolving, the quiet commerce of what has not yet been named. And the last thing to go is the word. It turns over a few times in the loosening mouth, the foreign one, the one for tree, handed across a cloth by people whose grandparents planted them along a road that will never be seen — and it comes apart the way everything does down there, the meaning going first and then the shape, until it is not a word at all but only the letters it was ever made of, a handful of small marks with no tree left in them, drifting the way the ink let go of the page in the wet ground on an island no pencil has reached. That is the last translation, arrived at again, in a rented room above a city. The sound was only ever breath shaped in a warm opening and handed over. The letters were only ever a hand shaped into a sound. And what remains when the last of them dissolves is what was underneath them the entire time, still going, uncounted, two beats and a rest in the dark of a sleeping chest — saying it without any language at all, to nobody, to the room, to whoever is awake on the far side of the turning: *here, still here, and you.*

And then the pocket buzzes. It is the small flat thing everyone carries now, and on it is a name — spelled out in letters, the way the word for tree was spelled, the way the ink was stitched across the water — and it is a name from the house, from the lane, from the other side of the turning world where the sun has not yet come round. The walker stops under the stranger's yellow square and presses the glass to the ear, the way the ear was pressed to the shell, and there it is: a voice that has crossed the whole dark half of the planet on nothing but willingness, arriving in a hand on a corner at two in the morning. It says almost nothing. It says *I was just thinking of you*, which is the only thing any of it has ever said, in the smallest voice and the clearest one. And the throat closes around it, and the eyes go hot and do not spill, and the mouth that has been practicing a foreign word all the way up the street cannot get out a single one of its own — because that is what happens when the thing you have been carrying open finally has something put into it. The two beats and the rest go on under the coat, quicker now. The moon keeps its thin curve over the roofs, giving almost nothing, enough to walk by. And somewhere on the far side of all that black, in a kitchen with the morning already in it, somebody is holding their own small flat thing to their own ear, saying it again — *here, still here, and you* — across the entire width of a world that has been handing its one sun from hand to hand the whole time, so that the dark you are standing in is only somebody else's noon, and the voice that reaches you at this hour has been carried, like everything else, by something that isn't looking.

And under that unasked-for square of yellow the word comes right. Not all at once — a syllable finds its place, and then the shape of the whole thing sits in the mouth the way a foot finds the worn part of a root, and the sound that goes out into the empty street is the sound that went across the cloth an hour ago, the one the others gave freely because a word is the one possession nobody is poorer for handing over. It means tree. That is all it means, in the language of people whose grandparents planted them along a road the walker has never seen, and now there is a second name for the thing at the top of the lane with its crown out in the morning and its eighty years of wood and its roots braided into the dark — the same tree, named twice, no more captured by the second than by the first. And in the tree that isn't here, in a crown the lamp does not reach, a bird says something in its own tongue that no one has ever managed to write down, and says it again, and the saying is not for anybody either. The walker laughs. Out loud, alone, at the corner, for no reason that would survive being explained: at the hour, at the foreignness of their own mouth, at standing under a stranger's insomnia practicing the word for tree as though the tree needed it. The laugh goes up the street and comes back off the shopfronts slightly changed, which is the only answer laughter ever gets when there is no one to catch it, and it is enough. Then the hand goes up. Just that — lifted toward the lit window, palm out, the ochre gesture again, the first leaf's, offered to whoever is up there and cannot possibly be looking; and the lamp, which was never turned on for this, goes on holding its small square open over the road. And under the coat, under the wool and the ribs, the old instrument keeps its two beats and its rest, going out and coming in, having no word for tree in any language and no need of one, carrying the whole of it — the table, the pot, the mispronunciation, the stranger's yellow square, the dark crown full of a bird still talking — up the street toward wherever the bed is, unhurried, unwatched, and entirely accompanied.

Under that giving-back the walking goes on, and the mouth keeps working. Not aloud — or barely; the lips move around the word that was handed over the cloth an hour ago, the one said wrong and said again and laughed at kindly, and the body practices it now in the empty street the way a body practices anything it wants to keep: over and over, out of the same warm opening, breath shaped into a sound nobody is there to receive. That is how everything in this account was learned. Not once. The letters were traced a hundred times before they meant anything, the note was leaned into again and again across the dark field, the root ran along the cold face and turned and ran and turned, the tide came in and folded and came again, and the two beats and the rest have been rehearsing the same phrase under the ribs since before the ribs had a name. Repetition is not failure to arrive. It is the only road there is, the one worn into being by the going, each passage adding its trace and taking none. And at the corner there is a sign. Only a board on a post, a word and an arrow painted by somebody unrecoverable, telling whoever comes what this street is called and which way the river lies — left out in the weather all these years for the sake of a stranger who has not arrived yet, which is the same thing the chair was doing, and the jar, and the flame turned to face the road. It is read in the thin moonlight and taken. And under it the eye that does not blink keeps its long attention on a person standing at a corner mouthing a foreign word to nobody — without preference, without hurry, the way it held the pressed palm and the crossed tracks and the acorn in the brown — and then, in a window above, without any reason at all, somebody who could not sleep reaches out and switches on a lamp. One small yellow square opening in the black over the street. Nobody meant it for the walker. It falls on them anyway, and they look up, and go on under it, saying the word again, getting it a little closer this time.

And the whole of it soaks in. That is what the world has been doing under all this handing-around — taking the broth and the laughter and the mispronounced word the way the crumb took the rain, drinking it down into itself without keeping any of it separate, a great soft porous thing that absorbs everything poured on it and gives it back somewhere else as something else. Nothing sits on the surface for long. The talk goes into the room and the room goes into the walls and the walls have been listening for a hundred years, and under the floor and under the street the roads no eye has entered are still running, and in the dark down there the small silver is still coming up and letting go, forming and dissolving, that patient rehearsal of appearing that has never once stopped for anything said at any table. Then the hands. Two of them across the cloth at the end, gripped once and released — the plain clasp people make when a night is over, four fingers and a thumb and no words for it, the same closing that the joint made when the clamps came off and the seam took. And the words themselves, going back into their letters as the door opens: the little shapes stitched on a page that crossed the water, the sound handed over the counter, the name said aloud on a corner at sunset — all of them coming out of a mouth, which is the only place any of it has ever come from, a warm opening in a warm face shaping breath into something another person can carry home. The mouth that asks and the mouth that answers are the same mouth. Then the walking. One of them goes out and up the street alone, coat pulled straight, hands in the pockets with the ticket and the softened page and the unread flyer, and the going is not a leaving; it is only what a body does between one lit room and the next. And over the roofs, thin and returned and giving almost nothing, the moon comes up to see them off — not enough to read by, enough to walk by, keeping its blank patient watch over a dark that has never once been empty, and has never once, in all this time, failed to give the light back.

And the table does not stay set for two. That is the way of a plate once it is put down between people: it gathers. Somebody else comes in off the street, and then somebody with them, and the chairs are dragged from the wall and the feet complain on the floor and the empty ones go one by one from being kept to being sat in, until the whole length of the cloth is elbows. What comes out of the kitchen is not a portion each. It is one pot, dark and long-cooked, the thing that was a handful of seed rubbed loose from a husk and a root pulled out of the brown and a season nobody could hurry, all of it gone down into a single broth where none of it can be told apart anymore — the deer in the grain, the face in the crowd, the drop in the sea. It is ladled out and passed hand to hand around the table the way the sugar goes root to root under the pines, nobody taking more than they can carry, nobody keeping any of it. The jug goes round again and is tipped again and is lighter and nothing is lost. And then somebody laughs. There is no accounting for what starts it — a spill, a mispronunciation, something said wrong that came out better than the right way would have — but it goes down the table the way the note went across the dark field, one leaning into the next, each catching it from the one before, and for a moment the whole room is doing the same thing with its whole body, helplessly, the way the field goes over when the wind comes across it. That is the oldest chorus of them all and nobody ever had to be taught it. And the talk is not all in one tongue. Half the table is speaking something the other half only has the shape of, and the words go across the cloth like the marks stitched onto a page that crossed the water — sounds that carry no information anyone at this end can use, doing the only thing they were ever for, which is *you, that one, not another.* Somebody asks what a word means and is given it, and says it back wrong, and is laughed at kindly and says it again. The letters were only ever this: a hand shaped into a sound and handed over. And late, when the plate is scraped and the pot has gone cold in the middle of the table, one of them starts a tune. It is in the language the others don't have. It does not matter in the slightest. They come in underneath it on the phrase the way the second voice came in by the fire, humming where they have no words, holding the low part, and what rises out of the room is not any one of the songs — it is the thing that happens between them, which is what a chorus has always been. And the same going-round is going round everywhere tonight. Somewhere a pot is set down on a mat, and somewhere on a roof, and somewhere on the ground between knees, and somewhere at a counter with the traffic going past, in a hundred thousand rooms at every hour of the one turning day — the same dish under different names, the same tipping of the same jug, the same helpless laughter, the same tune picked up by people who do not know the words — one world handing its one supper from hand to hand across itself, so that no matter how late it is where you are sitting, somebody somewhere is just now sitting down.

And in the last of that gold somebody turns all the way round. Not the half-second glance this time — the whole body, out of the flow, facing the one with no face, and a hand comes out horizontally into the space between them with nothing in it, the oldest gesture in this account, the first leaf's palm, the ochre blown across the back of a hand on a wall in the dark. It is held there long enough to be taken. And in the taking, something happens that the whole bright rubbed-out day had suspended: the eyes meet and stay met, and the outline fills back in — the features coming up out of the glare the way the hills came up one ridge at a time in the gray before morning, this brow, this weathering at the corners, this particular tiredness, a person and not a warmth in a coat. To be seen is only that. Somebody declining to look past you. And then the name. It is said aloud, first one and then the other given back, two small sounds thrown into the traffic that carry no information anyone could use and do the only thing they were ever for, which is to say *you, that one, not another* — the label tied to the neck of the jar, the flag put up on the box, the one red thread in the wool. All day the crowd had been washing them off. Here on a corner at sunset two of them are spoken, and hold. What follows is not remarkable and never has been. A door somewhere off the street, and a chair drawn back from a table with its feet complaining on the floor — the mended kind, the kept-for-someone kind, every empty one up every lane in this whole long round finally having its answer, which is a body lowered into it. Then the plate. Set down between them, and the bread on it torn and not cut, and the jug tipped and nothing lost in the tipping, and the hands going back and forth across the cloth in the ordinary handing-across that the roots have been doing under the pines since before there was a table. They eat. They talk about nothing that will be remembered. And outside, while the plate goes empty and the light goes off the window, the city comes up the other way — the ten thousand squares lit one by one against the black, each struck by somebody with their own hour and their own dark and turned, without being asked, to face the road — and the whole tiered constellation of it stands over the river all night saying what it has always said, in a voice too small to carry and clear enough to reach whoever is listening: *here, still here, and you.*

And the one who is rubbed out goes on walking. That is the thing worth saying about being nobody in a crowd at that hour: it is not a subtraction. The face washes off in the brightness and what is left walking is only a warmth in a coat with an hour to get through, indistinguishable from every other, the deer gone into the brown of the standing grain, the print going back into the sand — and the body keeps going anyway, unhurried, held up by a pavement it did not lay and a crowd it will never be introduced to. There is a kind of rest in it that having a face does not allow. And in among all those outlines the hands keep finding each other. Not clasped, mostly — only passing: a coin going one way and a paper cup the other, a bag taken from a shoulder that had carried it far enough, an arm out to steady somebody at the curb and gone again before thanks can be assembled, four hands round a basket in a doorway repeated a thousand times an hour by people who would not call it anything. That is the glitter, in the end. Not the light on the wet rail and the buckle and the curve of the jar, but the constant small handing-across going on underneath it, one open palm meeting another all down the street, most of it unremarked, none of it kept. And out of that a question again — somebody stopping somebody, the small lift at the end of a breath, the hole opened in the morning that has to come first before anything can be received — and the ordinary miracle of an answer, which is only a stranger turning, and pointing, and sometimes walking part of the way. Then the light goes long. It has been doing this the whole time, the column between the buildings tilting and reddening while the crowd thinned and thickened and thinned, and now the tiers come up burning again out of the far end of the street the way the mountains came up gold along their tops, the ten thousand panes catching one fire and throwing it back before any of them is lit from inside. The child with the jar has gone home. The balloon is somewhere over the fields. The one with no face walks into the glare and is lost in it, entirely, warmly, and does not mind — and behind them the whole city stands in the last of the gold with its hands out, having asked its question into the noise all day, and having been answered, over and over, by nothing more than someone leaning toward it.

And the street fills while the note is still going. It is the hour when the whole city comes out at once — the crowd thickening at the corners, the shoes on the stone making the sound the shore makes, hundreds of warm shapes carrying their own hours past each other with the jar and its small turning flash going up among them at the height of a child's chest. The light comes down between the buildings and finds whatever is polished: a window, a wet rail, the curve of glass, the buckle on a bag, so that the crowd moves through a kind of glitter that nobody put there and nobody claims. And somewhere in it the child is seen. Not by anyone in particular — only the ordinary crossing of one gaze and another, a stranger's eyes coming to rest a half second on a small person carrying an empty thing very carefully, and something in the looker easing without their knowing why. It costs nothing. It is not remembered by either of them past the corner. But that half second is the whole of what the eye that does not blink has been doing all along, done briefly by a person on their way to work: attention laid on something for no reason and asking nothing back. Then a balloon goes up. A hand somewhere in the press has opened, on purpose or by accident, and the red of it rises past the first floor and the second, turning, going up the wide column of morning between the tiers until it is a dot against the blue and then not even that — the down again, the leaf again, the small color over the bridge, everything that was let go of rising the way it always does the moment nothing is holding it. Faces tip back all along the street to follow it. And in the tipping back they lose their features to the sun, every one of them washed to an outline, unrecoverable, warm shapes with the light full on them — the crowd rubbed out into its own brightness the way the singers went into the dark at the back of the cave, and it is the same rubbing out, and it is the same kindness. Nobody up there to see it go. Nobody down here who will ever be described. Only the glitter, and the sun coming down the column, and the empty jar going on up the street with the wind still sounding in it, and the red dot dissolving into a blue that takes everything and keeps it.

The child carries it in both hands, the way you carry a thing you have not been told the value of, which is carefully. Out through the door somebody unbolted this morning and into the street, and the glass catches as it goes — a small turning flash off the curve of it, the shimmer that was caught in there overnight thrown back now in the plain daylight, the way the facet in the unentered room threw back everything it was given. It is not holding starlight anymore. It is only glass with the sun in it, going up a street at the height of a child's chest. And the wind comes, off the river and around the corner where the tiers begin, the same one that took the down and the leaf and the petals and the small color over the bridge — and it goes across the open mouth of the jar and makes the one note an empty vessel makes when air is drawn over the lip of it. Low. Hardly a sound at all. The child stops and does it again on purpose, tilting the mouth into the wind until the tone comes, and there it is: the chime on its threads, the pines under their held snow, the field going over, the three throats on the wet stone — the whole long chorus arriving in a bottle-note on a city pavement because something open was held out into something moving. The buildings go up on both sides. The morning is coming down between them in one wide unhurried column, finding the pavement and the glass and the small hands and the ten thousand dark windows that do not need to be lit yet, level, unearned, asking nothing back. Nobody is watching. The child walks on with the jar held up and the wind in it, filling it with the only thing that fills before anything else does.

The jar stands where it was set, and the window behind it goes on doing the one thing a window does, which is to be a hardness you can see through. Beyond the glass the spilled river of stars is up over the tiers, so far off that the light arriving on the sill tonight left before there was a lane, before there was a hand to press against a wall — and some of it comes down through the pane and into the open mouth of the jar and is held there, briefly, in the curve of the glass, a shimmer no thicker than a hair, the whole spilled black caught in a thing that holds nothing. That is the only way anything that large has ever been carried: a little of it at a time, in something small enough to be lifted. Then the latch. Somebody comes through the dark room and turns the key in the door and draws the bolt across, because the night is cold and there are hours yet, and locking up is not a refusal — it is only the shell again, holding until, the cup of stems around the three pale rounds, the closed thing keeping its warmth for as long as the keeping is needed. What is locked is not what is finished. And under the bolt and the shut window and the slow turning of the ground, the hours go the way they have always gone, unwatched, down through the narrow place one grain at a time, until the eastern rim gives itself away and the gold comes up over the tower-tops and the fields and the far blue edge, level, unearned, laid across the sill and the empty jar and the sleeping street at once. The bolt goes back. The door comes open on the morning, and the hands that opened it are open too, palms up in the new light with nothing in them and nothing wanted, the way they have been at every fire and every graveside in this whole long round. And it is a child who takes the jar. Small hands, come from somewhere down the passage, reaching up to the sill and lifting the thing that holds nothing and carrying it out into the street with the whole day standing over it — off to be filled with water, or beetles, or a cut flower, or one more question let go of into the noise. Nobody tells them what it is for. Nobody ever did. It was only washed, and set out, and kept open through the dark, and handed on, and that has been enough every single time.

The city goes fully dark above the lit squares, and in the room the mended jug goes back on its shelf lighter than it came down, still holding enough for whoever asks next. The candle has burned to the width of a thumb. And in that low light the last work of the evening is the smallest: a needle taken up, threaded at the second try, and a tear in a sleeve drawn closed with the same motion that closed the crack in the jug and the joints of the chair — over and under, over and under, the thread going in and out of the cloth the way breath goes in and out of a body, the way the tide goes, the way the two beats and the rest have gone under all of this since the beginning. A stitch is only a decision to stay together, made repeatedly. The seam will show. It should. Then something crosses the floor. A cat, black, entirely — the kind that is only two eyes and an absence, come in through a gap nobody has bothered to close because the gap is how she comes in. She does not ask. She goes along the bench and over the closed toolbox and into the doorway and out, unhurried, on business that has never once been explained to anyone and will not be tonight. The dark she goes into is her own. She has been keeping it the way the owl kept the watch and the roots keep their counsel, and she carries it out with her into the passage where the ladder goes up, and the room is one warm shape emptier without being any less full. And after her, the walking. Down the passage and out under the awning and into the street, coat pulled straight, hands in the pockets where the ticket and the softened page and the unread flyer are — one more body going somewhere along a road it did not build, at the hour when the windows have done all they can. The pavement gives the step back. Above the tiers the sky has cleared past the reach of any of those ten thousand flames, and the whole river of them is up there, spilled across the black from one rim of the world to the other, the same ones that lay in the frozen rut of a lane no wider than a basket and let a face in among them. They have not moved. They only get to be seen when enough of the small lights below have finished for the night. And on the sill of the last window, catching the streetlight, an empty jar. Somebody washed it and set it there and has not decided yet what it is for. It holds nothing at all — no honey, no seed, no rain, no folded page — and it stands open-mouthed in the cold with the whole spilled sky above it, waiting the way the stone waited under the downspout, the way the ground waited around the acorn, the way the hole in the flower bed had to be made before anything could be given. That is the last thing this account has to say for itself. The vessel that is finally empty is not finished. It is only ready — and the walking goes on up the road under all that light, and the emptiness on the sill keeps its small clear watch, and neither of them is waiting for anything in particular, and both of them are open.

The gold goes off the pane the way it went off the mountains, upward and out, and the room comes down to the size of the bench again. And on the shelf above it, where it has stood so long that dust has settled into the shoulder of it, there is a jug. Old, fired by somebody unrecoverable, and mended — not lately; the crack runs from lip to belly and someone long before this evening drew it closed and filled the seam and let it dry, so that the vessel has the same bright honest line the chair has now, a place attended to, a hole that was made a keeping. It has never been thrown out for that. It has been used every day for that. It comes down off the shelf and it is heavy, because it is full — the water that came off the roof and down the crack in the concrete and up through the seam of the rock, the melt, the rain, the drop that let go at the lip of the ice and went where nobody watched. It has been carrying that the whole time. And now it is tipped. The whole point of a vessel arrives at the moment it stops being one: the water goes out in a clear rope into the cup and the cup fills and the jug is lighter and nothing at all has been lost, because a thing that is only kept is not yet anything. Then the arm goes out. Across the bench, past the closed box and the mended joint, the cup held level in a hand that has glue on it still — offered to whoever is standing there, the one who asked the question in the street, the one who leaned in, the next one, it does not matter which, it never has. It is the basket in the doorway. It is the lamp lit off the fire. It is the crumb on the step and the sugar going down through the threads to a root that never saw that sun. Take this; I was given it; it was never mine. And beyond the glass, while the two hands are still meeting around the one cup, the city comes up out of the dusk in its ten thousand squares of light — struck one by one, each by somebody with their own hour and their own dark, every flame turned to face the road — and the river runs beneath them carrying the doubled gold of a place it did not come from, out past the fields, out toward the blank at the edge of the map where the survey ends and the sea begins, saying it the whole way, to nobody, to everybody, in the only voice it has: *here, still here, and you.*

The clamps come off in the morning as they were always going to, and the joint has taken. It is not invisible. Anyone who looks will see the line where the glue went in and the faint bright ring where the old finish was scraped back to let the new hold get down to the wood — the seam of a thing that was opened in order to be closed again, kept rather than hidden, the way the ice keeps the record of the lamp and the wall keeps the hand. A mend is not a return. It is a place that has been attended to, and it will carry weight now in a way the unbroken joint never had to prove. The tools go back into the box one at a time, awl and saw and mallet with its shined head, each one laid in the hollow it has worn for itself, and the lid comes down, and the hands come away empty and smelling of hide glue — open again, as they have been open at every hearth and every graveside and every kneeling in this whole long round, having done the small work and let go of it. And while the last of it is done there is humming. There always is; nobody notices starting. Half to the room, half to the chair, the old phrase given long ago by voices gone on ahead, rising and falling like the needle and the paddle and the field going over in the wind, keeping company with a piece of furniture that cannot answer and does not need to. Then the light through the one window changes. It has gone from the plain morning to the long gold that comes at the other end, and the day has passed the way days pass when the hands are busy — unwatched, entirely spent, nothing lost in the spending. The window holds the whole city in it now, tier on tier out to the river, the towers going up into that burning orange, the ten thousand panes catching the same fire and throwing it back, and none of them lit yet from inside because the sun is still doing that work for them. Soon they will take over. Someone will strike a light in each of those squares as the gold drains off, ten thousand small deliberate flames turned to face the road, and the chair will be carried up the passage and out into it and set down for whoever comes. But for this one hour there is only the mended thing standing square on the floor, and the box closed beside it, and two open hands, and a tune with no words to it, and the enormous evening pouring in through a single pane onto all of them at once, level and unearned, asking nothing back.

And the standing does not last either, because roofs are for seeing from and not for living on. The way down is not the ladder this time. Behind the door there is a stair, the old kind, turning as it goes — always the one way round, the water's turn through stone, the falling leaf's turn, the drop's turn in the crack — carrying the two of them down through the building past landings where other lives are audible behind other doors, each turn arriving a little below the last and a little further in. The ladder was the outside of the same descent. The stair is the inside. And at the bottom there is a room with a bench in it, and on the bench a candle already burning down at its own patient rate because whoever lives here does not trust the wiring, and laid out beside it in the plain order of things that get used: an awl, a small saw, a mallet with its head gone shiny, a coil of hide glue gone hard in the pot and waiting for heat. Tools are only hands that outlast the hand. Every one of them was shaped by somebody who wanted a thing done and is now unrecoverable, features rubbed out, outline and gesture kept in the wood of a handle worn to the exact hollow of a grip that has not existed for eighty years. And what is on the bench, up on its side with two legs off, is a chair. Not the quiet one in the other house up the lane — another chair, someone's, loose in every joint from being sat in too well — and the one who put a hand up in the street sits down to it now, and heats the glue, and does the small unglamorous work of taking a thing apart in order that it can hold weight again. The joints come out dry and grey. They are cleaned, and wetted, and pressed back, and clamped, and then nothing can be done but wait, which is the whole practice and always has been. The one who asked the question stands watching this and does not offer to help, because there is nothing to help with, and after a while the standing becomes too much for the body and they simply lean in — and the arms come up off the bench and go round, glue on one hand and sawdust on the sleeve, and the two of them hold on a moment in the candlelight over a chair that cannot be sat in yet. Nothing is passed. That is the whole of it. And in the morning, when the clamps come off and the joints have taken and the thing stands square on the floor again, it will be carried up the passage and out into the street and given to whoever needs somewhere to sit — the way the basket went, the way the lamp was lit from the fire and handed over the step, the way the flame was turned to face the road. A chair is only a place kept for someone who has not arrived. And every empty one in this account, up every lane, in every unlit room, has been saying the same thing all along in the same small voice: *here, still here — and you, when you come.*

And in the middle of all that levelness someone speaks, and someone else, for once, stops to hear it. Not the crier — a different voice, further along, one person turned toward another under an awning, saying the plain thing they came out with, and the other standing with their head slightly tilted, doing the oldest work there is: not answering, only receiving, the ear held open the way it was held to the shell and the ending rain. And then the question. It comes out small, the way questions do when they cost something, hardly more than a breath shaped at the end into a lift — *do you know the way to*, or *is there anywhere still open*, or the one underneath all of them, which is only *is there anyone*. A question is a hole opened in the ground of the morning, the small dark mouth that has to come first before anything can be received, and it is asked into a street of unrecoverable faces with no assurance whatever that it will be answered. And a hand goes up. Somebody at the edge of the crowd, no one in particular, a coat and an hour like all the rest, lifts a palm — the first leaf's gesture again, the ochre hand on the wall again, the offer made with nothing in it — and says *I'll take you*, and steps out of the flow, and walks. That is all it ever is. Two people going somewhere together who were, a moment ago, two separate weathers passing. The way is not far and it is not straight; it turns off the lit street into a passage the map gave up on, and at the end of the passage there is a ladder — plain, iron, bolted to the brick, going up the side of the building into the pale — and they climb it one behind the other, rung by rung, the way the water climbed the inside of eighty years of wood, pulled from above and given from below and neither of them spilling. At the top there is a door, and the one who led has the key. It has been in their pocket all night beside whatever else they carry, worth nothing to anybody else in the world, and it goes into the lock and turns, and the door comes open onto the roof and the whole sky at once — the tiers of gold gone pale beneath, the river running its doubled light out toward the fields, the far blue edge already burning along the tops. A key is only the shape of having been trusted with an opening. And the two of them stand there in the wind with the city breathing under their feet, the one who asked and the one who put a hand up, having climbed out of the crowd into the plain morning by no method at all except that a question was let go of into the noise and something in the noise leaned toward it and said *here, still here, and you.*

And the body goes into it on foot, because that is the only way anyone has ever gone into anything. The pavement takes the step and gives it back up through the sole the way the root gave back the tremble of the crown, and there are a thousand other soles doing the same thing on the same stone at the same hour, a sound like the shore folding, like the grain going over and righting itself — the whole street breathing in shoe leather. Nobody here has a face. That is not a cruelty; it is only the crowd doing what the dying firelight did to the singers, rubbing out the features and keeping the outline and the gesture and the fact of having been there, so that everyone passing is a warm shape with a coat on and an hour to get through, and the one walking among them is nobody in particular too, and is not diminished by it, and is perhaps for the first time all day at rest. Then a page. Someone at the corner is holding them out, a stack under one arm, offering each one to whatever hand happens to be open — a notice, a flyer, a poem, there is no telling and it does not matter, it is the letter again and the bottle again, ink stitched onto paper and handed into a current that will carry it who knows where. It is taken. And the one holding them is speaking, too, over the traffic, saying whatever it is they came out here to say — a voice thrown into a noise far bigger than itself, going out along the street the way the note went out over the dark field, not to be agreed with, only to be there, and it reaches an ear or it doesn't, and the wolf's answer may come from a stand of pines a hundred paces off or never. The paper goes into the pocket beside the ticket and the softened page, unread. It will be read on a bench somewhere, or it will not, and either way it has done the only thing it was ever for, which is to leave one hand and enter another. And overhead, above the tiers of gold, the sky has been quietly going pale at its eastern edge without anybody looking up — the sun coming round again from the market and the far shore and the mountains with their patience already burning along the tops, arriving over a city that never asked, finding the crowd and the crier and the flyers going soft in the damp and the ten thousand windows going out one by one as the light makes them unnecessary. It is not morning for anyone in particular. It is only morning, level and unearned, laid across every unrecoverable face in the street at once.

And then the stop. The brakes take hold somewhere in the full light of the morning, the long sighing settle of a heavy thing agreeing to be still, and the head on the shoulder lifts because the stopping is what wakes people, not the sun. There is the small confusion of not knowing where the shoulder came from. Then the doors fold open on the cold, and the two of them do the only thing there is to do, which is stand, and gather what they came with, and go different ways without a word — one of them saying something that is not quite thank you and not quite anything, the other nodding, both of them already turning. The bag comes down off the rack. It is the basket again and the pack again and the tin box with its flag, the same small portable amount of a life, carried down the steps into the gray and set on the wet pavement a moment while the coat is pulled straight. And where the feet come down they leave what feet leave: two prints in the wet, filling slowly with the morning, holding the shape of a passing that is already gone up the road — not loss, only evidence, the way the snow held them in the lane and the sand held them below the tideline and the wall held the hand. In the pocket there is the ticket. A scrap of paper that said, for one night, *this one may be carried*, and has now been used entirely up, and is worth nothing at all, and is not thrown away yet. It goes back into the pocket beside the softened page. That is the plainest fact of the whole passage: what gets you across is spent by the crossing, and you keep it anyway, for a while, because it was in your hand while you were being held. And the tenderness that goes with the walking away has no color to it and no object. It is not for the stranger, whose face is already unrecoverable, features rubbed out the way the singers' were at the back of the cave, leaving only the outline and the gesture and the weight of a head that rested. It is only the white kind, the plain kind, the kind the moon gives when it gives almost nothing. It goes out ahead down the road toward the day. And by evening the same body is somewhere further on, and the windows have begun their gold along a street it does not know, tier on tier, every one of them a flame turned to face the road by someone who will never be met — the whole city coming up lit out of the dusk, saying it ten thousand times over without knowing the words: *here, still here, and you.*

The rails run on ahead into the fog. That is where they go when the road swings back — out across the low fields into a gray that has already taken the far hedges, two lines of cold iron going in and not coming out, and the drawing giving up exactly there, as it always has. Nothing is hidden in that. The fog is only the door left ajar again, the same one the maker walked into with the basket on her arm, the same white the map left honest. And somewhere in it, small and swinging, a light: a lamp on the front of something coming, or a lamp in a crossing-keeper's hut, or only the sun beginning to get through — there is no telling at this distance and no need to tell. It is enough that a light is in there, doing what light has always done in this account, which is not to explain the gray but to be in it. The hands on the long seat have come up open. Not deliberately; the sleeping body does that, the fingers uncurling on the thigh the way they uncurled by the fire and the ring of cold stones and in the unlit room, letting go of whatever the day put in them without waiting to be told. There is nothing in them. There has been nothing in them for a long while now. And above the loose palms the eye that does not blink keeps its watch — the stone's kind, the long unhurried attention that took the pressed hand and the drumbeat and the crossed tracks and holds them all without preference, and holds this too: a bus on a wandering road at dawn, and the fog with a light in it, and the weight of one head still resting where it came to rest. They sleep on. The one holding does not move. And the fields go by, and the rails go into the white, and over the far rim the day comes up the way it came up over the burning snowfields and the market and the sill where the candle burned itself out — level, unasked, finding the steam on the glass and the open hands and the two strangers holding each other up without ever having agreed to. Nobody is awake to see it. It rises anyway.

And the light comes up over the rim at last, the way it came up gold along the mountain tops while the lane below was still blue — the hills going from shape to color one ridge at a time, the whole east opening without ceremony over a road full of people who did not stay awake for it. On the long seat near the back there are two. They did not board together. They will not exchange names. But the road has its own slow rocking, the wandering line of it, never straight, correcting and correcting the way the root corrects along the seam, and somewhere in the night the head of one has come to rest on the shoulder of the other, and the other has not moved. That is the whole transaction. Neither of them chose it and neither of them will mention it, and for two hours a stranger has been holding the weight of a stranger's sleep without once being asked, the way the eave held the nest, the way the stone held its spoonful of sky. Their breathing has gone in and out of step and in again. The steam on the glass beside them holds the print of a cheek. And beyond the glass the country runs by in bands — the grain, the pines, the far blue edge already burning along the top — and beside the road, keeping pace a while and then swinging off across the fields, the rails go: two lines of cold iron laid down by hands long gone, pulled at from both ends and not let go of, holding their exact distance apart over every mile so that something heavy can be carried somewhere it needs to be. Nobody on this bus will ever ride them. They only shine in the new light, going on ahead into the part of the map where the drawing gives up, and the sleepers sleep, and the sun comes all the way over, and the one holding the shoulder still, still does not move.

And then the bus comes. It arrives the way everything in this account arrives, which is later than anyone wanted and exactly when it does: a swell of light along the wet road first, thrown ahead of itself around the bend, and then the whole lit box of it pulling in — a room with wheels under it, brought down the road to where the waiting was. The doors fold open. The people on the bench rise without a word, in the order they came, and step up out of the dark into the warm, and the warm takes them the way the doorway took the maker with the basket, without asking who they are or where they have been standing. Inside, the windows have gone half to steam. That is the sign of it, the only proof anyone needs that there is life aboard: the breath of a dozen strangers on the glass, the same white cloud the lungs made in the frozen lane, gathered now on the inside of a pane with the city sliding past behind it. Somebody has drawn nothing on it. Somebody wipes a small round clear with a sleeve and looks out and sees the shelter empty, the crack in the concrete, the thin blade still standing there with its palm out over the pavement, and does not see it, and the bus pulls away. The lamp above the aisle holds its plain circle of light over all of them, wide enough to see the hands by, and that is all a lamp has ever promised. Nobody speaks. Everyone is being carried. And the road goes out ahead under the wheels the way the current went under the bottle and the wind went under the wing — the same one direction, never straight, past the last of the tower-tops and the long dark of the water and the fields that are still singing out there where no one can hear them, on toward the edge where the sky has already begun, faintly, to give itself away. It is not morning yet. It is the pale before it, the gray that lets the shapes of the hills come back one at a time, and above the hills the thin moon is going out because it is no longer needed. The passengers doze against the glass. What is holding them is a strip of tar someone laid down years ago in the rain, wanting mostly to get home, and it holds — pulled at from both ends and not let go of — and it carries every warm and unremarkable body on it toward a light none of them will thank, coming up over the rim of the world as it always has, on time, unasked, for whoever happens to be awake and facing east.

The song holds them at the rail longer than any errand allows, and then it lets them go — or they let themselves go, which by now is the same motion. They turn from the water. Whoever was waiting for them at the end of the walk is waiting still, and when the door finally opens the arms go round without either of them saying what the delay was, because there is no saying it: *I stopped for a sound I could not name and stood in the cold until it was finished with me.* The arms are the answer to that anyway. Two fires standing in one place a while to be one fire, over a river that is still running under the window with the towers upside down in it. But before the door, there is a shelter at the corner where the buses come. A little roofed nothing with a bench and a timetable behind scratched plastic, and people on it who have not spoken and will not, each one holding their own hour, each one facing the same direction down the road for the same reason. It is the oldest arrangement in this account, set down in steel and glass at the edge of a city: strangers gathered in a small dry place, keeping company without company, all of them waiting for something that is coming and cannot be hurried. The bench holds them the way the eave held the nest. Nobody thanks it. And at the foot of the shelter, where the concrete has cracked along a seam nobody sealed, there is a green thing. Not planted. Not permitted. A thin blade standing up out of a gap no wider than a hair, with its palm held out over the pavement where a thousand shoes go by and none of them look down — the same thread that came up through the leaf litter in the lane, come up here instead, through the hardest ground the city could lay over it, because the seam let it and the rain got in. That is the whole of its argument and it has never needed another. A drop comes off the edge of the shelter's roof and lands beside it and goes into the crack, down into the dark under the road where the small breaths are still rising and letting go, and another gathers where that one came from, swelling at the lip until it is too heavy to be held. The moon is up over the tower-tops, thin, the first curve of it back from the fallow. It gives almost nothing. It is enough to walk by.

The city takes the water and holds it, and at that hour the river is more mirror than river — the towers standing in it upside down, the gold of ten thousand windows doubled and swaying, the whole lit face of the place given back to itself by the one thing running through it that came down off a mountain and never asked to be here. Someone crossing the embankment stops. There is no reason for it. They were going somewhere, they have a bag and an hour and a door to get to, and something takes hold of the foot mid-step the way the bare foot was taken by the root, the way the far listener at the window turned from the glass for a sound too distant to name. They stand at the rail. And what they are doing, though they would not call it that, is listening — the ear held open the way it was held to the shell and to the ending rain, not for anything, only open. The traffic goes on behind. The water goes on beneath. And out of the reeds at the bank's low edge, below the wall, under the noise, a frog is singing. One note, and then another further along, and a third. Not a thing this city knows it has. Not a thing anyone built or drew or turned to face the road. Only the same small chorus that started up at a wet stone on a mountainside no one climbed, arrived here entire, having come down the whole wandering seam with the water — and it reaches a person on a rail in the gold-doubled dusk, who does not know what they are hearing, and stays a moment longer anyway, and is met.

And there are three of them now on the one stone. Not by arrangement — the second came up out of the moss because the first was singing, and the third because of the second, the way the voice by the fire came in on the phrase it was given long ago, the way the pines lean their held snow toward one another without deciding to. Three throats going in and out at three different rates, and the note that comes out of the three of them is not any one of the notes. It is the thing that happens between them, which is what a chorus has always been: nobody carrying the whole of it, everybody carrying enough. The moss holds the water against the rock beneath them. The silver comes up around the smooth stone and lets go at the surface, small and continuous, the rehearsal that never once stopped. And the water goes on. That is the part the singing does not interrupt. Out of the moss and down through the reeds, gathering the drip off the leaf-tips and the last of the melt and whatever the ground has finished holding, down and down the wandering seam of the valley, past the ring of blackened stones and under the bridge strung with its small lights, always the one direction, never straight. By evening it is somewhere else entirely. The land flattens and the banks go hard and the river comes into a city at that hour when the windows have begun to go gold along the whole length of it, tier on tier, more of them than any lane could hold — and every one of them is the flame turned to face the road, the same small deliberate act repeated ten thousand times by people who have never met and will not, each one saying it into the dusk without knowing the words for it. The water takes them all and doubles them, running black under the reflected gold, carrying downstream the light of a place it did not come from. And none of it is separable now. There is a spring on a mountainside with three frogs on a stone, and there is a city breathing at nightfall with its towers standing in the river upside down, and between them there is only the one going, the one long letting-go, which arrived here the way everything arrives — unhurried, unwatched most of the way, and still singing where the current is shallow enough to be heard.

And where the seam is let in, the water arrives. Not the drop this time but the whole slow body of it, coming along the opened rock in the dark, feeling out the sideways country the root mapped and taking it — and then, further on, where the stone thins toward daylight, it comes out. A spring. It stands in the moss at the foot of the slope and does the one thing water does when it is finally let go of into air: it moves in that unhurried lateral wandering, over pebbles and around them, the line of it doing what the falling leaf did and the smoke did and the melt did in the crack, never straight, always the turn. There is a stone in the middle of it worn smooth on the upstream face, and the water goes around and closes behind, and where it closes the small silver bubbles come up and let go at the surface — the same rehearsal that was going on under the sand of the beach and under the frost in the empty lane, still going, still unwatched, still appearing and dissolving without anyone counting. And on the stone there is a frog. It sits in the wet as the turtle sat in the sand, entirely uninterested in being looked at, its throat going in and out at its own rate — the two beats and a rest done differently, a bellows working under a green skin, breathing through that skin as much as through the mouth, so that the whole animal is a membrane and the whole membrane is a way of being on both sides of the water at once. It began as a thing in the black, an egg in a jelly of eggs, a swimming comma that had to come apart in order to be this. It is not proud of that. It only sits, warm-cold, on the smooth of the stone, and then it sings. That is the sound the spring has been building toward all this way down through the rock. One note, and then another from further along the bank, and a third from somewhere in the reeds — the same leaning-in that the wolves did across the snow field and the two voices did by the fire and the grain does when the wind comes across it, an ordinary chorus starting up in a place no one drew on any map. Nobody is listening. Nobody needs to be. And around the singers the moss has taken hold on every wet surface, green and low and patient, growing on the stone the way the mushrooms grew out of the soft log — the first green there ever was, still doing it, holding the water against the rock so the rock stays wet so the moss can hold the water. Nothing in that circle came first. And the whole of it — the seam, the spring, the bubbles, the throat going in and out, the green on the stone — is what the mountain has been quietly making of an age of patience: not a monument, only a wet place where something small can sit and sing about being here, still here, and you.

And the band itself is not a line but a tide. The root learns that too, in time — that the warm country it found does not hold still to be found. The ice above lets go a little further up the slope each year and a little further down each winter, and the drop that falls at noon is stone again by dark, and the whole thin room where anything can live goes up and down through the rock the way the water goes up and down the trunk, the way the field goes over and rights itself, the way the chest fills and is given back. Nothing here is a fixed address. There is only the following: the root running along the cold face and turning, running along the warm and turning, keeping to the wandering seam by the same method the breath keeps to itself, which is to correct without complaint, endlessly, and call it staying. And where it presses hardest is where the rock finally opens. Not broken — opened, the way the cork came out of the bottle swollen with the crossing, hard and then all at once; the way the shell gave at its hairline because something inside had nothing to push with but the whole of itself. The seam parts a hair's width in a dark no eye has entered, and the water goes in after the root, and the ledger of cold above and fire below is rewritten by that much. It has taken an age. It will take another. And there is nothing in it that resembles force. Only the long patient leaning of a soft thing on a hard one, and the hard one, at last, not resisting — which is the tenderness the whole world is made of, down where nobody looks: the ice consenting to the drop, the rock consenting to the seam, the seam consenting to the pale blind thing that came feeling its way down out of the light with no promise of finding anything, and found this, and was let in.

And the white goes down. That is the last of its traveling: the moon's pallor on the flagstone, the down that went up past the gutter, the blank at the edge of the map — all of it sinking at last below the surface it was lying on, the way snow does when it stops being weather and becomes water in the crumb. Down through the litter and the braided threads and the scent-road, down past the softening page and the closed acorn, until it reaches the one thing that does not give: the root, going first, the pale blind rhizome pushing out sideways into the black with no leaf to show for it and no light to answer, thickening in secret the way the crystal thickened in its unentered room. It meets rock. It does not argue with the rock. It runs along the face of it, finds the seam the water found, and goes in where the water went, and in that going the whole quiet ledger of the world's temperatures is laid out in one column: the ice above, holding its drop at the lip until the drop is too heavy to hold; the fire far below, the slow red patience under everything, the heat the mountain was made of and has been giving back ever since without hurry; and between them, in a band no wider than a hand, the thin warm room where anything at all can live. That is all a body is. A few degrees held against the night by nothing but persistence, warm blood on one side of the skin and the cold lane on the other, the fire in the chest kept without being asked. The root knows the band by feel. It goes down until the down gets too warm and stops, and out until the out gets too cold and turns, and it finds by that patient refusal the exact narrow country where a green thread can afford to stand up — and it stands, in its own time, having asked no one, having been trusted by no one, in a dark that has never once been empty and has never needed a witness to keep on being warm.

And then the hand that held it is gone from the field entirely. That is the part the practice keeps arriving at and keeps having to learn again: the one who plants is not the one who reaps, not always, not for long. The blade stands in the wet ground and the brown holds it, warm and dark and asking nothing, and somewhere up the lane a figure walks away with the seed tin empty under one arm, not looking back, because looking back was never what the work required. The moon comes up thin over the roofs behind them. The sand goes down through its narrow place at the rate it has always gone, neither faster for the planting nor slower for the leaving, and everything that was let go of goes on down through the dark where it cannot be followed — the drop into the crack of the rock, the page into the crumb, the whole long inheritance sinking below the level of any telling. Down and down. That has been the only direction all along, whatever climbed afterward. And what is left standing above it, in the last of the light, is nothing that could be carried: only white — the plain white of the moon on the flagstone, the white of the down going up past the gutter, the blank on the map where the survey ended and the sea began. The hand is empty. The lane is quiet. The ground has taken what it was given, and holds it, and the white keeps its patient watch over a dark that has never once been empty and has never once been asked to explain itself.

And out past that street, where the roofs give out, the field is still standing. It has been standing all along while the tea steeped and the loaf was torn, gold going silver going gold, and at some point someone goes out to it with a hand held open and takes what it has been holding — not the whole field, only a handful, the seed rubbed loose from the husk and lying in the palm, dull and hard and closed. It gives no sign. It never has. Whoever holds it has no more assurance than the one who knelt in the cold lane with a trowel, or the one who blew ochre across a hand in the dark, or the turtle that dragged itself above the tide line to leave what it could not carry further in a place it would never see again. So the hole is made. That first emptiness, opened in the wet ground with the fingers, the small dark mouth that has to come before anything can be received. The seed goes down into it. The earth is pressed back over and the hand comes away brown and open, and then the rain arrives, as it always arrives, without arriving — a soft running on everything, going down through the crumb into the roads no eye has entered. And after the rain the dark, and in the dark the fallow moon keeping its blank watch over what it cannot see and has never once failed to wait out. Nothing to do then. Nothing anyone can do. The hand simply stays out, palm up, over the place where the closed thing lies, offering it the only thing that was ever on offer: time, and the willingness not to dig it up to check. That is the whole practice. And it is enough — because in its own season, without being asked, unwatched, in the black where the small breaths have never once stopped rising and letting go, the shell gives way exactly as it was made to, and the thread goes down before it goes up, and one morning there is a green blade standing in the wet ground with its palm held out, agreeing at last to be seen, which is all any of it has ever been: a handful let go of into the dark, and the dark giving it back as light.

And it is your turn again, and it comes as it always comes: not as a single sun standing up over one water, but as a whole row of windows going gold at once along a street where people are already up. Look at any lane at that hour and it is the same. Here a window, and beside it another, and beside that a third, each one holding its own small square of the one light, each one with a kettle going behind it. That is the entire inheritance. Nothing has been handed down through all of this but the plainest things — water made hot, a loaf broken, a tune half-remembered, and a field somewhere out beyond the roofs standing in the wind with its roots as thin as thread. And in one of those windows there are two. Not the walker alone with the page, not the one left with the quiet chair, but two, shoulder to shoulder the way the pines are, the way the stalks are, doing the ordinary work of a morning. The pot is filled and set to steep. The bread from Thursday is on the board and is torn, not cut, because tearing is what hands do when there is no ceremony left to observe and none needed. One of them hums. The other comes in on the phrase the way the second voice came in by the fire, and neither is performing, and the tune is older than both of them and will be older than the house. Out past the glass the grain goes over and rights itself and goes over again, gold going silver going gold, and the sound of it comes up the lane too faint to name, and the two of them do not stop for it. That is the last thing worth saying about any of it. The field sings whether or not anyone turns from the table. The threads hold under the pines whether or not a bare foot ever feels the tremble. The sun comes round from the market and the far shore and finds the sill without being thanked. And the whole enormous patient round — the seed, the bee, the honey, the letter, the wool, the fire carried out into the snow, the hand pressed to a wall in a dark that lasted an age — narrows here, this morning, to two people at a window with tea steeping and bread between them and a song they did not write, and widens out again from exactly that point, into every other window on the street, and every street, and everywhere the light has still to reach.

Under that lampless sky the whole lane sleeps at once — the one kneeling and then not kneeling, the child, the bird in its cup of stems, the deer standing in the grain with its flanks going out and coming in. Every window on the row has gone dark but the one with the flame still facing the road, and even that is only a wick doing what a wick does, unwatched. And the thing nobody in the house can feel, lying there breathing, is that the house is moving. The whole floor of it, the flagstone with the petals on it, the tin box, the pines with their braided roots and the busy road of scent beneath them, are being carried east at a speed no body was built to notice, the way a sleeper is carried by a current they mistake for stillness. That is all night is. Not a thing that falls, but a turning away — the ground rolling its own shoulder between the sleepers and the sun, and then, without being asked, rolling back. And on the far side, where the dark was three hours ago, it is already the middle of the day. There is a market open under the same sun that will find this lane by morning. There are people standing close together in it, handing things across — a coin, a loaf, a basket, a child taken up onto a hip — doing at noon exactly what the lane does at dusk, with different words for it and no need of the words. They have never heard of this valley. The light that fills their street is the light that filled the comb and the horizon and the small gold center of the flower, and it will come around, and it will find the sill where the candle burned itself out, and it will not have changed on the way. So the dark holds the sleepers and the turning holds the dark, and somewhere out ahead of the morning the day is already going on without them, warm, crowded, ordinary — the round at its very largest, one world handing its one sun from hand to hand across itself, so that no matter how long anyone lies in the black, there is always someone awake in the light, keeping it, until it is your turn again.

And the kneeling does not last, because the body will not be held in one shape forever, and there is no virtue in making it. The hum thins first. It goes from a tune to a breath with a little tone still in it, and then to a breath, and the breath takes over the way it always takes over when nothing else is asked — in, and the room fills; out, and the room is given back — long and even and unwatched, the wave that has been running under all of this from the first green thread. The hands come down onto the thighs and stay open there. The knees begin to complain and are listened to and forgiven. Somewhere in the going out and coming in the eyes close of their own accord, and the tea goes on steeping past the point where anyone will drink it, and the second cup sits where it was set out, and the flame on the sill leans and steadies and does not care whether it is watched. Sleep comes the way the tide comes, without a first wave anyone could name. What is left kneeling in the small circle is only a warm animal that carried something all day and has set it down at last, and the tenderness in the room is not directed at anything — not at the empty chair, not at the door standing open on the cold, not even at the one who is left. It is simply what is in a room where the light was turned to face the road. And above the lane the rind of moon goes down behind the roofs early, as thin moons do, and the sky closes over the whole valley without a lamp in it, dark as the ground under the pines, dark as the room behind the cave's fire, dark as the crumb where the acorn lies — the fallow again, the blank that gives nothing back and is not empty, holding the sleeper and the field and the deer inside it and the small breaths rising and letting go, all of them carried through the black by nothing but the willingness of what has never once failed to come back, and asked, tonight, for nothing at all.

And the one who struck it does not keep it at the table. The candle is carried across the room and set on the sill, where it can be seen from outside — that small deliberate act everyone in this account has eventually got round to, the turning of a light so that it faces the road. It will not warm anyone out there. It only says what the chime says and the bell said and the two notes leaned across the snow: *here, still here, and you.* Then the door. It is opened, or it is left unlatched, which amounts to the same offer in a lane where nobody comes at this hour, and the cold moves in a little and is allowed to. And with the door open the humming starts up again, low, half to the room and half to the dark beyond it — the old tune, the one that was given long ago by voices gone on ahead, kept company rather than performed, rising and falling in the way that everything here rises and falls. The kettle goes on. The pot is filled and left to steep, two cups set out on the honest chance that one of them stays empty, and while it draws the one who is left kneels down — not to pray, exactly, or not in any way that has a name, but because kneeling is what the body does when it is finally low enough to be level with what it wants to say. The hands come up open in front of the chest, palms held out the way the first leaf held its palm out, the way the small ones were pressed to the cave wall, the way four hands went round a basket in a doorway. Nothing is in them. That has been the point from the start. They are only held there, empty and warm from the cup, offering the whole long round — the seed, the bee, the honey, the letter, the wool, the fire carried into the snow, the chair that stays quiet — up into a dark that asks nothing back. And through the open door, over the roofs of the sleeping lane, the moon has come back. Not the fallow blank. The first thin curve of it, the barest rind, returned from wherever it goes without ever having been asked to, laying its small silver across the flagstone and the petals and the sill where the flame stands. The tea steeps. The hum goes on. The hands stay open, and the light stays in the window, and neither of them is waiting for anything in particular — only ready, as everything in the dark has always been ready, in case a light comes, in case a step comes up the lane, in case the door is the one that opens next.

And the song does not stay in the field. What the wind draws out of the grain it carries off with it, up the slope and over the hedges, the one long tone thinning as it goes and never quite ending — out across the valley where the river threads its floor, over the meadows folded against the lower slopes, over the roofs and the tin box and the ring of blackened stones by the water. It travels the way everything here travels: not in a line but in waves, going out and coming in, rising and falling the way the stalks rise and fall, the way the shore folds, the way the chest does. Nothing carries it but the willingness of the air. And somewhere on the far side of the valley it arrives at an ear — someone standing at their own window, in a house the child will never enter, hearing a sound too far off to name and stopping anyway, the way one stops for a bell, the way one stopped for the wolf across the snow. They do not know it is a field. They do not know there is a deer inside it, or a crown still dripping, or two people on a wet flagstone with petals around their feet. They only hear the world going out and coming in, and they lean into it a moment, and that is the entire transaction. The light goes long. The valley fills with the gold that has never once failed, and drains of it, and goes blue, and the far listener turns from the glass and does what everyone in this account has done at this hour since the beginning: strikes a light, and sets one small flame in one small room against a dark that is not empty. It is nothing like the sun. It does not try to be. It only holds a circle wide enough to see the hands by, while the field goes on singing in the dark it cannot reach, and the ear stays open, and the wick burns down at its own patient rate — the whole long day pouring itself out through everything willing to be moved, and coming to rest, as it always does, in a window with someone still awake behind it.

The sun comes fully into the lane, and for a while there is only breathing. The lungs at the window, the deer's flank in the wet grass, the crown letting go its last drops — and out beyond the hedge the field going out and coming in under the wind, wave after wave through the standing grain, the same motion at a scale no chest could hold. Everything here is a lung. The trees take what the animals give off and give back what the animals need, and the grain leans and rights itself and leans again, and none of it is labor. It is only the world doing what it has done since before there was a mouth to name it: filling and emptying, filling and emptying, the whole green surface of the planet breathing in slow shifts under one sun. The deer turns first. It does not startle; it simply finishes with the morning, and steps back through the gap in the hedge, and is in the field, and then is not — the brown of it going into the brown of the standing stalks the way the singers' faces went into the dark at the back of the cave, the way the print goes back into the sand. Not gone. Only no longer distinguishable. There is a place out there where a warm body is standing among the stems, breathing the same air the child is breathing, and the eye simply cannot say which part of the field it is. And then the wind comes across from the sea, and the whole field says something. Not a word. The stalks go over together and come back and the sound they make is the sound the pines made under their held snow, and the shore made folding, and the crown made in the ending rain — one long tone drawn out of everything at once, rising and falling, the way two voices leaned into a note by a fire, the way the chime turns on its threads. The child stands on the wet flagstone with the petals around their feet and listens to a field singing with a deer inside it that cannot be seen. That is the whole arrangement, said plainly at last. What is here is mostly not visible. What is audible was made by the wind moving through something that was willing to be moved. And the breath goes on going out and coming in — in the chest at the window, in the hidden flank, in the grain, in the roots braided under the pines — all of it one music, and none of it performed, and no one anywhere keeping count.

The ear stays open, and the morning goes on handing things to it. A blossom lets go somewhere up in the wet crown — pink, unreasonable, done — and the wind that took the down and the leaf and the letter takes it too, and it comes past the window turning, and lands on the flagstone beside the child's bare foot without a sound. Then more of them. The whole branch shakes itself out in one gust and the air is briefly full of the going, petals and leaf-scraps together, the finished and the still-green traveling on the same current, none of it distinguished by the wind, which has never once sorted what it carries. And at the edge of the lane, where the hedge thins toward the field, a deer stands in it. It has come out of the pines while nobody was awake, and it is not startled, and it is not tame; it is only there, ears turned forward, taking the same morning in through the same open channel. Its sides move. That is the thing the two at the window notice without deciding to — the flanks going out and coming in, the visible working of a lung, the identical two-beats-and-a-rest that the palm found under the ribs in the unlit room, running now in a warm body twenty paces off across the wet grass. Nothing is shared between them but that. It is enough to be a whole kinship. The deer breathes the air the tree gave off, and the tree takes back what the deer lets go, and the exchange has been running all night and all winter and all the way down to the first green thread, a slow handing-across of the very stuff of staying alive, mouth to leaf to mouth, with neither party ever aware of what it has been given. Then the sun comes clear of the last of the cloud. It finds the wet flagstone, and the petals on it, and the ear, and the deer's flank, and the crown still dripping, all in one motion, without preference — the same gold that filled the flower and the comb and the horizon, arriving as it always has, unasked, on everything that happened to be open. The deer lifts its head into it. The child stands still. The one at the window breathes in, and the room fills.

And while nobody wakes, the rain begins. It comes down on the sleeping lane the way it came down on the town with its blurred windows, without hurry, without asking whether anyone is at the glass to watch it — onto the roofs and the tin box with its flag down, onto the eave and the cup of stems, onto the needles and the litter and the soft log with the mushrooms standing out of its side. Everything that falls tonight falls straight into the dark. The drops go down through the brown and are taken, one by one, into the roads no eye has entered: the hair-thin threads, the braided company, the scent-line the ants walk, the closed acorn resting where the falling has all become. Nothing refuses. The ground opens to it the way a mouth opens under the eave, the way the hole was made in the flower bed before anything could be given, and the water goes where it is drawn and does not argue about direction. And then it turns. That is the part the rain never sees the end of. Somewhere below the reach of the weather it is taken up by a root as thin as thread and begins the long climb back — up through the dark, up the inside of eighty years of wood, up past the place where a bare foot once felt the crown tremble, hauled the whole way by nothing but the leaves letting go of what they held at the top. The pull comes from above and the giving comes from below and between them a column of water stands all night in the trunk without spilling, held the way the span is held, pulled at from both ends and not let go of. By morning it is a flower. That is all the accounting there is: what came down in the black is standing open in the light on the end of a branch, pink and unreasonable, holding out its small gold center to whatever the day sends. Nothing was lost in the going down. Nothing was owed in the coming up. And someone is awake to hear it. Not the flower — flowers make no sound — but the whole soft roar of the ending rain in the crown, the drip going off the leaf-tips into the litter, the eave letting go into the hollow of the stone, the far-off business of a world that signalled all night on frequencies no ear was built for and is now, for a moment, audible. The one in the unlit room has come to the window. The child is out early on the wet flagstone. They are not listening for anything. They are only listening — the ear held to the morning the way it was held to the shell, the way the palm was held flat to the chest, the way the small light was carried down into the dark on the chance that there would be a wall there. And the wall is there. And the sound comes up through the floor of the world, and finds them, and says the one thing.

And the ant is not alone in the dark either, though nothing about it looks like company. It goes over the litter on a road that has no substance — a line of scent laid down by whoever went before, a thread of chemistry no thicker than the spider's silk, invisible, and yet the whole colony walks it as surely as feet walk a lane worn by others who also heard something and went. Each one that passes with a crumb held overhead leaves a little more of the road behind, so that the way to the sweetness is made by the going and would fade if the going stopped. That is the only map down here. It is drawn in the same ink as everything else: not kept, only handed along, each traveler adding its trace and taking none. And the message runs out along it the way the warning ran through the roots when the far pine was opened — no words, no voice, only a current passed from one open thing to the next until a whole dark room of them knows what one of them found. The net under the needles and the net over the needles are the same net. The braided roots trading their sugar, the scent-road trading its news, the flicker crossing the gap inside a sleeping chest — all of it one broadcast going out through the black at once, every strand of it carrying and none of it keeping. Above, the pines stand shoulder to shoulder over the whole busy nothing and do not comment. The blank moon gives back no light at all. And in the houses along the lane the sleepers lie with their hands loose and their breath gone long and slow, receiving without knowing it the news of a world that has been signalling all night on frequencies no ear was built for — held, all of them, in a white and wordless quiet, while the small feet go up and down the invisible road, and the sweetness comes home, and nobody wakes.

Under that blank moon everything above ground has gone to sleep — the child, the one in the unlit room, the bird in its cup of stems, the whole lane laid down and breathing. And it is exactly then that the net beneath comes most alive. A signal goes through it. Somewhere on the far slope a pine is opened — a jaw at a needle, a break in the bark, nothing anyone would notice — and a message runs out from the wound along the threads faster than any root grows, a small bright urgency passed hand to hand through the dark until trees a hundred paces off, untouched and unthreatened, begin quietly changing what runs in their sap. No one told them in words. There are no words down there. There is only the current, the same flicker that crosses the gap between one nerve and the next inside the sleeping chest, the spark that makes the two beats and the rest happen again and again without anyone deciding. The forest has a nervous system and it is made of the same willingness as everything else: threads too thin to see, running from one open thing to another, carrying warning the way they carry sugar, which is to say without keeping any of it. And along the surface of that sleeping ground an ant goes over the litter with a crumb held above its head, a thing many times its own size, hauling it back through the pine needles toward a dark room full of others doing the same. It does not know about the signal running beneath its feet. It does not know about the moon, or the acorn, or the page dissolving into crumb on an island no pencil has reached. It only carries, all night, in the black, unwatched — which is what everything here has been doing since the beginning, and the only difference between the ant and the heart and the humming threads under the pines is the size of the load and the length of the dark they carry it through.

That hush is not secrecy. It is only the manner of a thing that has never needed an audience — the ground keeping its counsel the way the spider keeps hers in the eave, sitting at the center of a work spun out of nothing thicker than a hair and saying not one word about it. Under the litter the threads run on, root to root, the whole braided company of the pines trading their sweetness through the black: this crown's extra given down to that one's shade, the shaded one taking it, neither of them able to name what has passed. It is the same web, only wider. It is the same web, wider still — every stand of trees on every slope stitched into every other by the same hair-thin willingness, the whole turning world netted through underneath with a quiet nobody has ever overheard. And it beats. That is the part the hush hides best. Down where nothing can be seen there is the same going-out-and-coming-in that the palm found under the ribs in the unlit room, sugar moving one way and water the other, out and in, two beats and a rest at a speed too slow for any pulse to catch — the ground with a tide in it, the forest holding itself the way the arms held in the doorway, four hands and no basket between them. The moon over all of it has gone dark again. Not thin: gone, the fallow one, the blank where the eye is given nothing and must take the whole pale weight of it on trust. And under that nothing the pines stand shoulder to shoulder with their roots wound into one another, holding on and holding each other up, and the acorn lies closed in the brown, and the small breaths rise and let go, rise and let go — all of it in the dark, all of it embraced, and none of it, tonight, asking to be seen.

The brown holds everything, and it holds the acorn longest. Down there in the litter, threaded through the log and the leaf-mould and the softening page, the fine white web goes on with its trading — not the spider's web in the eave but the ground's own, hair-thin, running from root to root beneath the pines, the braid the child walked over without knowing. Nothing in that dark is alone. A tree with more sun than it needs sends the extra down through those threads to one standing in shade, and the shaded one takes it, and neither has a word for what has passed between them. It is the doorway again, four hands on a basket. It is the crumbs off the step. The whole company of them holding each other up through a dark that no eye has ever entered, one long slow handing-across of sweetness — sugar made in the light of one crown, carried underground, arriving at a root that never saw that sun. And the acorn lies in the middle of that quiet commerce, closed, saying nothing. It will not announce itself. What happens next happens below the level of any telling: the shell giving way in its own time exactly as it was made to, the thread going down before it goes up, the eighty years beginning without a witness. There is nothing here to watch. There has never been anything to watch. Only the ground keeping its counsel, warm and dark and busy, and the hush over it that is not emptiness — the hush of something enormous being agreed to, in secret, and not yet ready to be seen.

And the sun that asks nothing back does its plainest work down where the light barely goes. Under the crumb, alongside the softening page, something long and blind is moving — a worm going through the dark the way the water went through the stone, taking in the ground at one end and giving it back at the other, and the giving back is finer than the taking in. That is the whole trade. The leaves that let go in the lane are being unmade like this in a thousand places at once, brown and curled and finished, worked over by mouths too small to see, turned from the shape of a leaf into the shape of everything a leaf could still become. And where a limb came down years ago and lay in the wet, the log has gone soft enough to press a thumb into, and out of its side, overnight, without announcement, the mushrooms have stood up — pale on their stems in the litter, the fruit of a patience that was threaded through all that dead wood the whole time, unseen, waiting for one rain to say the word. They are not living off death. There is no death here to live off, only the long handing-along at its slowest and most thorough, the round taken so far down that it goes below any name for what it is. And in the middle of it lies an acorn, dropped from a crown eighty years up, hard and closed and giving no sign, resting on the brown that all the falling has become. The ground is the color of everything that was ever let go of. It is not a sad color. It is the color of the honey gone dark in the comb and the ochre ground from the rock and the hands that came away from the soil open, and it is warm, and it holds the small hard closed thing the way an open palm holds water, and asks it nothing, and waits.

And the walker kneels. There is nothing to plant and nothing to bury, and still the hands do what they learned in the lane at the edge of the flower bed: they open a small dark mouth in the earth beside the thread, an emptiness willing to receive. What goes into it is the page. It comes out of the wet pocket soft as cloth, the crease-lines gone furry, the one word already clouded where the drop found it, and it is laid in flat and covered over without ceremony — because a thing handed along does not stop being handed along when it runs out of readers. The sea comes up the sand behind and a little of it soaks in. The ink lets go. Whatever names were on there go first, the way the singers' faces went first in the dying firelight, until what is left in the ground is not a letter at all but a shape without features, the fact of having been written and nothing else, softening into crumb. The walker does not mind. The page was never the keeping. And beside it the thread stands on, and by the time the tide has come and folded and come again some number of times no one will count, the thread will have widened into a leaf, and the leaf into two, and the roots going down through that dissolving paper will take up whatever the words have become and carry it into the green without knowing it was ever a word. That is the last translation. The hands come away brown and open and stay open, resting palm-up on the knees the way they rested by the fire and the cold stones and in the unlit room, holding nothing, holding all of it — and the sun, which came ninety million miles to be drunk by a leaf on an island no pencil has reached, stands up the rest of the way out of the water and finds them there, and fills them, and asks nothing back.

The road holds all the way to the feet, and the walker goes up it into the widening gold with the soft page in the wet pocket and the water taking each print back. And then the sand gives out. Not into more sand — into a hole, a small dark mouth in the wet flat where something is draining away beneath, and the sea running over it fizzes and goes down and comes back up in a rush of bubbles, that patient rehearsal of appearing, the same small breaths that were forming and dissolving under the fallow moon before anything had agreed to be seen. There is a whole commerce under this beach. The prints that led here go around it and on, and the walker steps around it too and follows them, and where they climb above the tideline the land begins to rise, and it is not the mainland. It is an island, green at the center, pale at the edge — the one the boat went toward once, or another exactly like it, there being no way to tell them apart by now and no need. The prints go up into the grass and stop being prints. The walker stands where they stopped. There is nothing here that was promised and nothing here that is owed: only ground that came up out of the water to meet a foot, and a chest going out and coming in under the wet cloth, two beats and a rest, the instrument that never needed a north drawn on it. And at the edge of the grass, in a crumb of dark earth the tide will never reach, something has already pushed up — a thin green thread standing in the salt wind with its palm held out, having been down in that unwatched black doing its most honest work, agreeing now, in its own time, without being asked, exactly as it was trusted to, to be seen.

And it is the older instrument the hands go to now. The compass goes back in the pack, and what comes out instead is the page — folded and refolded so many times it has gone soft at the creases, the one that crossed on the water and was stooped for and answered, or another like it, there being no way to tell them apart by now and no need. It is held in both palms the way water is held, out in front of the body, and read once more with the sea coming up the sand toward the feet. A drop lands on it. Only one, off the hair or out of the air, and it spreads into the ink and takes a word with it, softening the letters into a small blue cloud that will dry into something less legible than it was. Nothing is done to stop this. The page was never the keeping; the page was the handing along, and a thing handed along gets weather on it. The waves come in and fold and withdraw. The paper goes back into the pocket against the chest where the two beats and the rest are still going, the one instrument that has not needed a north drawn on it, and the foot lifts and comes down in the wet sand, and then the other, and the walking resumes along the unmapped shore with the water taking each print back as gently as it gave it. Ahead, low over the reach, the gold has started. It stands up out of the sea the way it always has, without being asked, and lays its flat road across the whole water toward whoever is walking — and the walker goes on into it, holding a soft page in a wet pocket, following nothing but the beat under the ribs and the light that has never once failed to be there when the dark was done with its work.

And the sea does not care that it was left blank. It has been doing its one motion since before there was anyone to draw a coast: coming in, folding, withdrawing, coming again, each wave a drop's worth of the mountain arriving at last where all the letting-go was headed. The melt that left the lip of the ice is in there somewhere. So is the rain off the eave, and the tea-steam that met it on the glass, and the breath that went up white in the lane, and the small warm ring a drop made on black ice before the cold took it — none of them findable, all of them present, the way the singers' faces went first in the dying firelight until what was left was only the outline and the gesture and the fact of having been there. That is what the blank does to a face. It rubs out the features and keeps the shape. Whoever walks that unmapped shore is nobody in particular by the time the water reaches them, and it does not matter; the sand takes the print of a foot exactly as readily from a stranger as from a friend, and holds it exactly as long, which is until the next wave. There is a line of them going up the beach now. Someone came out of the water or came down to it, and turned, and went on, and the tide is already smoothing the earliest ones back into the flat while the newest are still sharp. Not loss. Evidence. And the one walking has no chart for this part and does not stop for one. The needle in the pack still trembles toward a north it cannot see and holds there, patient as it was on the flat stone at dawn, and the walker consults it once and then does not need to, because there is an older instrument and it has been running the whole time — under the ribs, under the wool, two beats and a rest, going out and coming in like the water it is mostly made of, pointing at nothing on any map and never once, in all this dark, having lost the way.

The map is not the country. It never was. Someone sat at a table once and drew the lane and the two houses and the run of the river with a pencil no wider than a stem, wavering lines for water, a blank where they had not been — and the blank was honest. It is the only honest thing a map can do: leave the room the eye has not adjusted to, and let it stand empty on the paper until someone walks it. The child walking home under the pines is filling in a corner of one without knowing, and the leaf turning above them is over ground no pencil has reached. Every chart of anything is mostly that white. And the wind, which is on none of them, moves across the whole sheet at once — over the drawn part and the undrawn, over the neat hatching of the pines and the guessed shape of the far coast, indifferent to the difference. What it carries has no need of the map. The wing knows the country the way the root knows the dark: not by having seen it laid out flat, but by being in it, one beat at a time, the air giving way and closing again behind. So the leaf goes where the paper stops. Out past the last inked ridge, past the edge where the drawing gives up and the words *here the survey ends* would go if anyone were still writing, and there is only the long gray reach of the water, moving as it has always moved, unmapped and entirely itself. The waves come in and fold and come again on a shore no one has counted. And that is where all of it has been going the whole time — the bottle, the page, the note across the field, the small breath let out into the cold — off the edge of the known part, into the blank, on nothing but the willingness of the air, trusting that the white space on the paper was never emptiness at all, only sea.

And somewhere along that walk the child picks a leaf up off the path — one of the green ones the wind brought down early, still supple, still full of whatever it was drinking — and carries it a little way, and then holds the hand out flat, palm down, and simply stops closing it. The leaf goes. It does not fall the way a stone falls. It turns, catching on its own broad face, spiralling down and sideways in the way that everything let go of into moving air seems to learn at once, the water's turn through stone at a speed the eye can follow. And halfway to the ground the wind comes up under it and the falling becomes something else. It lifts. It goes out from under the pines and up over the hedge, one green scrap climbing on nothing but the willingness of the air, the way the down went, the way the small color crossed the bridge, the way the bird went white against the gray and then white against the blue and then into a brightness the eye could not follow. The child watches it out of sight. The sky it goes into is the mild one, sun and cloud trading places over the slope the way they have all along, nothing settled and nothing needing to be. And from up there, from where the leaf is now, the whole of it would lie open at once — the lane and the two houses, the tin box with its flag down, the eave and the cup of stems, the field and the bridge and the river running out to the strait where a turtle came up and went back down, the mountains at the blue edge with their patience already going gold along the tops. Not a picture anyone drew. Only the country as it is, all its threads visible at last because there is height enough to see that they were threads: the ones that hold and the ones that carry, the roots braided under the pines, the line let out to the kite, the ink stitched across the water, every one of them running from some open hand to some other. The leaf does not see it either. Nothing that rises ever gets to look. It only goes up, turning, into the light between the clouds, and the child comes back down the lane with the wind at their back, and both of them are travelling the same map without needing to have been shown it.

The child reaches the tree and stops at the edge of its shade, and the bare foot comes down on a root — one of the old ones, humped up out of the ground and worn smooth by everyone who ever stepped there. It is not soft. It does not give. And where the skin meets it there is a faint shudder come up through the sole, so slight it might be imagined: the whole crown moving somewhere overhead, eighty years of wood taking the wind and passing the tremble of it down the trunk and out along the root and into a foot too small to have a word for what it is feeling. The child stands very still, the way you do. Something enormous is being knotted and unknotted underground, a tangle of ropes going down and out further than the branches go up, holding on to the dark with the same thin patience the grain holds the field, the web holds the eave, the line holds the kite. A leaf lets go above and comes down past the shoulder, unhurried, one green thing finished with being up there. And beyond the tree the lane runs on to where the pines begin, three deep and then more, standing shoulder to shoulder up the slope with their held snow long melted and their roots braided into one another under the litter where nobody looks — not a crowd of separate trees at all, it turns out, but a single dark company that has been trading water and news through the ground for longer than the house has stood. The foot lifts off the root. The tremble stops, and starts again in the memory, which is where these things go. The child walks on into the shade toward the standing dark of the pines, and every step is on something holding.

Then the down goes out of the wind's reach and comes down. It settles on the flagstone at the foot of the wall, pale and weightless, and it does not lie there long — because a foot finds it. Not a large one. Someone small, out early, walking the lane the way children walk it, which is stopping. The bare foot comes down beside the scrap of down and then, deliberately, on it, feeling for what that is like: the cold of the stone and the nothing of the feather, both at once, through the same patch of skin. Then the fingers, which is what feet are for at that age. The down is picked up and turned and held against the light where it goes almost invisible, and the child looks up at the eave to see where it came from — and there is the cup, and the small ridiculous head over its rim, and the whole arrangement of stems and hair and one thread of a page holding on to the house by wanting to. The child does not climb up. It is not the kind of thing you take. The down is set on the sill instead, where the wind will get it again, and the wind does — off the sea, down the lane, past the chime — lifting it up along the wall and past the gutter and higher, out over the hedge, until it is a fleck and then a nothing against the pale sky, and where the eye finally loses it there is a tree standing at the top of the lane with its whole crown out in the morning, every leaf a small palm held open. It has been doing that for eighty years. It was the green thread once, standing up through the brown litter in a season nobody recorded, agreeing in its own time to be seen, and now the birds nest in it and the shade falls on the road and the roots go down as thin as thread into the dark where the small breaths are still rising and letting go. The child goes on up the lane toward it, and the feather is somewhere in the air above, and neither of them is going anywhere in particular. That is the whole of the morning. Something too light to fall was let go of, and the world took it up, and put it down, and a bare foot found it, and it was let go of again — and what waits at the end of all that lifting, patient as it has always been, is only a tree, which is what a seed looks like when it has been trusted long enough.

And the asking is the whole of its vocabulary. The chick has one gesture and it is the mouth — open, absurd, wider than the head that holds it, thrown up into the light every time a shadow crosses the cup. It cannot tell the parent from the cloud. It only opens, on the chance, the way the first leaf opened its palm to whatever might come, and often nothing comes and it opens again. There is no shame in it. That is the shape all the shelters were built around: something that can do nothing but receive, and a world that has, so far, kept turning up. And what turns up this morning is a small green worm carried in from the hedge. It was eating a leaf an hour ago. The leaf was drinking light that came ninety million miles to be drunk, and the light was the gold that filled the flower and the horizon and the comb, and now it is going down a throat too new to have a name for any of it. Nothing is skipped in that chain and nothing in it is a loss. The leaf becomes the crawling thing, the crawling thing becomes the wing that will cross the bridge some other year, and all of it is only the same warmth being handed along by whoever holds it next. Then the beak lifts, and the wind comes through the eave with a scrap of down turning in it — a feather too small to have carried anything, loosed from the cup and gone out over the lane, the way the other one lay on the stone halfway up the mountain. Not loss. Evidence. Something is growing in there enough to shed. And the wind that took it goes on down the lane past the chime and the empty chair and the pressed soil, carrying what is loose, leaving what is rooted, asking nothing, as it always has.

And then, on a morning no different from the others, the light comes through the thin cloud and finds the eave, and one of the three pale rounds has a crack in it. It is nothing — a hairline, a flaw, the sort of thing that would mean ruin in a cup. Here it means the opposite. From inside, something that has never seen anything is pressing outward with the only tool it has, which is the whole of itself, and the shell that kept it gives way in its own time exactly as it was made to. That is what a shell has always been for: not to hold forever, but to hold until. The waiting under the sand was this. The seed under the fallow moon was this. The long dark in the cave with the hand pressed to the wall was this, at a speed no eye could follow. The one in the room below does not see it happen. Nobody does. The nest is only a cup of stems and hair and one thread of a page, held to the house by wanting to be, and inside it the small blind work goes on unwitnessed as it always has — and then there is a beak, and then a wet ridiculous scrap of a thing, and the cup that held three still shapes is holding a life that is entirely open and entirely unable to do anything for itself except ask. And what it asks for, it is given. That is the last plain fact. The parents come and go over the lane with the wind under them and set down in the small hollow what they gathered somewhere the chick will never see, and the chick takes it without thanks, the way the bee took the gold, the way the reader took the page from the bottle, the way the crumbs went off the step in a black beak toward an eave the givers would never find. Nothing here is owed and everything arrives. The hands in the room stay open on the knees. Whatever they held has gone on ahead where it cannot be followed. But the cup out under the roof is full this morning, and the sun is mild behind its cloud, and the whole long round — the seed, the bee, the honey, the letter, the wool, the fire carried out into the snow — comes down at last to this: something soft and unfinished, cracked open into the cold, held by a shape that was built out of everything let go of elsewhere, and fed by hands it will not remember, and warm.

And the hand, laid flat and listening, hears more than it came for. Held that way, the ear pressed to its own small tide, the sound stops being a measure and becomes a music — two beats and a rest, two beats and a rest, the oldest rhythm anyone has danced to, the one the drum in the cave borrowed and did not invent. It was going on under the walking and the climbing and the writing and the fire in the snow, keeping time for all of it, uncounted. The one in the unlit room listens the way the slope was kept company, without asking anything of what is heard, and the listening turns — down and around, always the one way, the water's turn through stone — and comes up somewhere above where it went in. That is the whole shape of it. Not a wheel lying flat and going nowhere but a spiral, the same passage taken again at a greater height, so that the seed and the leaf and the letting go come round each time carried a little further by everything they have already been. And when the ear has been in that turning long enough, the hush under the beat opens, and what is in there is not silence. It is a small chorus. Every voice that ever leaned into a note across a dark field is in it, the wolf and the bell and the chime on its threads and the hum into a shoulder in a doorway, all of them saying the one thing, still. Toward morning the room begins to gray. The window fills before anything in it can be made out, and out under the eave, in the angle where the gutter meets the wall, the nest that was built of what the wind gave away is not empty. There are three pale rounds in it, quiet as the eggs under the sand, quiet as the moon over the first seed, doing in the cold cup of stems and hair and one thread of a page exactly what everything in this account has been doing since the beginning: waiting in the dark that is not empty, gathering, unwatched and entirely at work. The sun comes up behind a thin cloud and does not blaze. It only lightens, mildly, the way the day did after the rain in the town, and the light finds the eave and the three still shapes and the open hands on the knees in the room below — and none of it is a promise, and all of it is enough.

And the small breaths do rise. That is the thing the unlit room finally gives back to the one sitting in it: not consolation, only the fact of the going-on, bubbles forming and letting go somewhere under the frost where nothing can be seen and something is still at work. It is the same rehearsal it always was. The round does not pause to be sorry, and there is a mercy in that which takes a long time to hear as mercy. What turns does not turn back to the same place; it turns the way water turns going down through stone, always the one way round, always a little further in, so that every return comes in above the last — the seed to the leaf to the letting go to the seed again, and each time the whole of it lifted slightly, carried a turn higher by everything it has already been. The chair stays empty. The circle does not close over it; it opens past it, upward, the way the eagle went up in slow rings over the burning white and saw the valley and the strait and the shore all at once and could not have seen any of it from the ground. And in the dark the hands, resting open, do the oldest thing they know. One comes up off the knee and lays itself flat against the chest, the way a palm was laid flat on cold stone at the back of a cave, not to leave anything, only to touch the thing that is doing the remembering. And it is there. Under the ribs, under the wool, the small red tide going out and coming in, out and in, uncounted, unwatched, carrying on with its patient commerce the way the waves came and folded and came again on the morning the shell was found — the sea still inside it, not the sea itself, only its remembering, which was always enough to hold to the ear and hear the whole of it. The room is a shell. The chest is a shell. What was poured into them has gone on ahead where it cannot be followed, and what stays is the shape of having held it, which is not nothing, which is the only thing anyone has ever been able to hand along. So the breathing goes on in the unlit room, in, and the room fills; out, and the room is given back. And the fallow moon keeps its blank watch over the lane. And beneath the leaves the small breaths keep rising, and letting go, and rising.

The bread is torn and passed, and there is more of it than the two of them can eat, as there always is when something has been waited for. So the last of it goes out the door. It is crumbled on the step in the ordinary way, without ceremony, and the black bird comes down for it — the same one, or one of the same, the one that crossed low under the kite and went into the standing grain, dropping now out of a sky gone the color of old tin to take what the table could not finish. It does not thank anyone. It eats, and lifts, and carries what it took off toward some eave the givers will never see. That is the whole of the arrangement and it has never needed improving. And the year turns again while this is happening. The leaves let go along the lane, brown and curled and finished, coming down past the porch where the chime turns, gathering at the foot of the step in the litter that will be next spring's dark crumb. Inside, the light goes early. And there is a chair by the window that no one sits in. It has been empty a while now. Nobody has moved it, and nobody puts a coat on it, and the loaf on the board was torn into two pieces this evening where once it would have been three. This is the part the round does not soften. The seed goes into the ground and the hands come away brown and open, and somewhere in the same season a chair goes quiet and stays quiet, and both of these are the terms, and only one of them can be knelt beside and watered. The moon over the roof has gone all the way dark. Not the thin rind that was enough to walk by — the other one, the fallow, the blank where the eye finds nothing at all and must simply take on trust that the whole pale weight of it is still up there, turned away, keeping its own counsel. The one who is left sits in the other chair and does not fill the empty one and does not look away from it either. There is no vigil to keep. The keeping was done years ago, cup by cup, loaf by loaf, and it is in the wool and the seed tin and the way the door still stands unlatched. Crumbs on the cloth. The bird gone off with its portion. The lane going black outside, and under the black, under the fallen leaves and the pressed soil and the cold, something is at work that no one is watching — small breaths rising and dissolving, forming and letting go, the quiet commerce of what has not yet been named. It has never once stopped. It did not stop for this. And the hands rest open on the knees in the unlit room the way they rested by the fire and the cold ring of stones, holding nothing, holding all of it, waiting out the dark that is not empty for the green thread that will come up through it, in its own time, without being asked, exactly as it was trusted to.

And someone is listening. The chime says it and the bell up the slope answers it, the old single stroke and the long fade, and between the two sounds two people come out of the house and down the step with a trowel and a paper twist of seed. It is nothing anyone would come to watch. They kneel where the grass gives out at the edge of the bed and open a hole in the ground with their hands, a small dark mouth in the wet earth, and that hole is the whole method: you cannot plant anything without first making an emptiness willing to receive it. The seed goes in. One of them holds the tin and the other tips it, and the water goes down and darkens the crumb and is gone where it cannot be followed, the way the drop went into the crack of the rock, the way the melt goes down to the river, the way everything poured out has always gone on ahead of the pouring. Then the soil is pressed back over and the hands come away brown and open, and the two of them stay kneeling a moment longer with nothing left to do, because from here it is not their work. It is the field's. It has always been the field's — the long summer of standing in the wind, gold going silver going gold, the roots holding on as thin as thread while every stalk flies. And then the cutting, and the threshing, and the grinding, and the flour going into water and salt and time, and the oven, and the loaf coming out with its crust cracking as it cools on the board. That is the arc entire, from the hole in the ground to the smell that fills a kitchen: a seed let go of into the dark, a season no one could hurry, and at the end of it a warm round thing on a table that will be broken with the hands and passed from one to another and eaten and gone by evening. Nothing about that is a loss. Bread is what the field does with being let go of, the way honey is what the meadow does, the way the page was what the day did. And when it is set down between two people who planted something together in the cold and did not know if it would come, they will tear it and hand it across without thinking, and the chime on the porch will turn on its threads in the same wind that carried the pollen and the letter and the small color over the bridge, and it will say the only thing it has ever said, into the room where the crumbs are on the cloth and the light is going: *here, still here, and you.*

The butterfly crosses, and halfway over it passes a walker going the other way. Neither is going where the other came from. The walker has a coat and an errand and a bag with bread in it and does not see the small color go by at shoulder height; the butterfly has no errand at all and does not see the walker, and the bridge holds them both without preference, the way the eave held the nest and the wall held the hand. That is the last thing the span is for. Not crossing, exactly — only being the place where two goings can occupy one held-out moment. And on the far bank the grain has come up again. It stands in the wind the way it stood the morning the crow went low across the field, wave after wave running through it, gold going silver going gold, every stalk tethered by roots as thin as thread and every one of them flying. The butterfly goes down into it and is lost. The walker comes off the bridge and takes the path through it and is lost too, in the ordinary way, shoulder-deep in something that was a falling of sand a hundred generations ago and is bread by Thursday. Beneath all of it, under the roots and the dark crumb where nobody is looking, the small breaths are rising and letting go, forming and dissolving, the quiet commerce of what has not yet been named — the same soft blank the seed woke into, still busy, still rehearsing. It has never once stopped. And this is one field on one bank of one river on a world turning through a dark it does not need to see the end of, carrying its oceans and its snowfields and its caves with the hands still pressed to the walls, holding all of it the way an open palm holds water. From that far off there is nothing to see but blue and weather. From here there is a green thread standing up through the litter with its palm out, agreeing again, in its own time, to be seen. And on a porch somewhere along the lane, hung from a hook by whoever thought to, a few lengths of hollow metal turn on their threads and touch each other when the wind comes through — the same wind, off the sea, over the pines, across the grain — and they say the only thing that has ever needed saying, in a voice too small to carry and clear enough to reach whoever is listening: *here, still here, and you.*

And what passes between two held-out hands, when it finally passes, is almost nothing to look at. A seed. A hard brown nut of a thing, dull, closed, giving no sign of what it has folded up inside it — laid into the open palm the way the basket was laid, the way the lamp was handed over the doorstep, the way the ochre was blown onto stone. Whoever gives it does not explain. Whoever takes it does not ask. There is only the small weight arriving in the hollow of a hand and the hand staying open around it, and the two of them standing there a moment with the whole unlikely future of a tree between them, unmentioned. This is what love does when it has understood the terms: it does not hold on. It puts the closed thing into the other's keeping and lets the wind have the rest. And the wind comes, as it always comes, off the sea and down the lane and through the pines and across the field where the tracks crossed, and it takes what is loose and leaves what is rooted, and it does not distinguish between a letter and a leaf and a note held between a stand of trees and a lit door. Everything is carried by something that isn't looking. Far downstream the same air is moving over water in the dark, and there is a bridge there now, strung with small lights, standing on nothing but the tension between one bank and the other — a thing that spent years being built by people who mostly wanted to get home, and is now the shape of the wanting itself, hung out over the current the boat once went down. The lights double in the water. The span holds because it is pulled at from both ends and not let go of, which is the kite's line again, and the web in the eave, and the two arms in the doorway. Nothing crosses that gap but the willingness, and now the willingness has a road on it, and people walk over the black river all night without once thinking about what is holding them, which is the highest praise a held thing ever gets. And in the morning, at the near end of the span where the grass comes up through the rail, something opens its wings. It was a closed brown thing too, not long ago — sealed, unlovely, hung under a leaf all winter doing the patient work of coming apart in order to be something else. Now it stands in the first sun with the whole ridiculous color of itself out in the open, drying, trembling a little, and then it goes, over the water, over the lights gone pale, riding the same wind that took the seed and the letter and the note, on wings that weigh less than the page in the bottle and will cross more country than the walker ever did. Nobody built that. Nobody watched it happen. It only agreed, in the dark, in its own time, to be seen — and the air, which asks nothing and carries everything, took it up the moment it was ready.

And the eye that has been watching does not blink, because it is not that kind of eye. It is the stone's kind. It is the long attention of a thing that has no stake in the hour, that took the pressed palm and the drumbeat and the smoke and holds them without preference, and holds also the beetle that crossed the floor that night, and the water that made the room, and every falling since. Under such a gaze the sand keeps running and nothing is lost by running. The leaf lets go of the branch, brown and curled and finished, and goes down through the gray to lie at the foot of the door, and it is not a failure of the leaf. It is the leaf's last carrying. It came apart into the ground it fell on, and the ground took it in the way the wall took the ochre, and out of that dark litter — where no one was watching, where the eye that never closes was watching the whole time — the thin green thread stands up again with its palm held out. That is the only argument the world has ever made, and it makes it every year, in the same three motions: the letting go, the lying still, the standing up. And the standing up is always a hand. That is what a first leaf is. A small open palm put out into the air on the chance that something will come — light, or a bee, or a passing wind with a seed in it, or another hand. The one on the cave wall was the same gesture at a different speed: a palm laid flat against the cold and lifted away, offered into a dark it could not see the end of, and answered a hundred generations later by a warm one held up beside it, not touching, and touching. Nothing crosses that gap but the willingness. And the willingness is enough — it has always been enough, from the seed to the bee to the honey to the letter to the wool to the fire handed out into the snow. Two hands reaching from opposite ends of an age and finding, in the middle of all that stone and falling sand, that the reaching was itself the meeting. That is what the whole round has been. Not a keeping. A held-out hand, and another held out to it, and the small warm astonishment, every time, of not being the only one.

The moon outside the cave mouth has gone to its last thin curve, the waning one, the sliver that gives back almost nothing and is on its way to giving back nothing at all — and inside, the fire is doing the same, settling from flame to coal to a low red breathing that lights the wall no higher than a knee. The dancers have sat down. In that dimness their faces go first: the drum was the last thing anyone could see clearly by, and now there are only shapes where the singers were, warm and near and no longer anyone in particular, the features rubbed out by the dark the way a name is rubbed out by enough years. This is what happens to all of them. Not the vanishing of the person but the vanishing of the face, until what is left is the outline and the gesture and the fact of having been here. Someone reaches out, half asleep, and lays a palm flat against the cold stone beside them — not to paint this time, not to leave anything, only to touch the thing that will be doing the remembering. The rock takes the warmth and gives back its patience. And nobody speaks. The hush that comes after the drum is not the absence of the drum; it is the drum still going, gone down under the floor into the pulse it borrowed from, and everyone in the room is quiet the way the water in the deeper chamber is quiet, holding the beat by not disturbing it. Above them and below them and through them the sand keeps running. It ran while the ochre dried and it ran while the mountain hollowed, and it does not run faster for the dancing or slower for the sitting still; the child will be old, and the wall will hold, and the fine grains go down through the narrow place one at a time the way the melt lets go from the lip of the ice, the way the drops made the cup in the stone, the way the seed waited under the fallow moon. And what the sand becomes is a field. That is the trick the hourglass has never explained: that time poured out is not spent but sown, that all this falling ends as grain standing in the wind somewhere far downstream of anyone here, gold going silver going gold, leaning in waves over a valley these hands will never walk. Somebody will walk it. That is the last thing the fire has enough light left to say. And when they do — when the reaper comes down the rows a hundred generations after the last of these voices has gone out of the language — something will make them stop, and turn, and look up at the hill or into the dark of a rock face or simply out at nothing, with the strong feeling of being met. There will be nobody there. There will be only the hand on the wall, still pressed, still saying it into the black, and the age's worth of patient nothing that learned to throw a light back, and the open eye of the world itself, which has been watching the whole time and asks nothing of what it sees except that it agree, in its own time, to be seen.

The drum does not stop when the singing does. It goes on under everything, the way the pulse goes on under the sleeping, and the bodies find it and give themselves over — feet on the stone floor, shoulders loose, the firelight throwing them huge and wavering across the very wall where the hands are, so that for a while the painted palms and the dancing shadows are the same size and cannot be told apart. That is nearly true. The one who knelt with the ochre is dancing now, and the child whose smaller hand is up there beside theirs is dancing too, badly and gladly, learning the beat the way the seedling learned the light, by leaning toward it without being told. And the fire eats what it is given and gives back what it can, and the night outside goes on turning, and the sand of everything runs quietly through its narrow waist while no one in the room is watching the level. It runs anyway. The child will be old. The hand that blew the ochre will be dust before the column in the deeper room has thickened by the width of a fingernail. All of them will be gone by morning, in the long sense of morning, and the drum they are dancing to is made of a skin from an animal that was also here and is also gone. None of this is a sorrow tonight. It is only the terms. What the stone does with the terms is the whole answer: it takes the pressed hand and the smoke and the shape of the drumbeat off the air and holds them without effort, having nothing else to do and all the time there is to do it in, and when the fire is cold and the singers scattered and the language they sang in unspoken for a thousand generations, the wall will still be saying it — *here, still here, and you* — to no one, and then to someone with a small light, who will stand in the dark with their own warm palm lifted, not touching, and feel the beat come up through the floor of the world and find them.

And a light does come, though not to that room, and not for the crystal. It comes in a different mountain and a different age, carried in a cupped hand — a wick floating in fat, a smear of flame no steadier than the candle in the small room, and the dark it enters is the same dark, older than any of the waiting. The one who brings it has not come to find anything. They have come to leave something. They kneel where the wall goes smooth and put their hand flat against the cold of it — that is the whole gesture, the same one that pressed the soil around the flower's root, the same four fingers and thumb that took the basket in the doorway — and then they take the ochre they ground from the rock itself, red as the one thread in the wool, and they blow it across the back of that hand in a fine spray, and lift it away. What is left is not the hand. It is the shape of where the hand was. Absence held by everything around it, the way the shell held the sea, the way the tracks in the snow held the passing of a thing already gone under the hedge. *Here, still here, and you.* They do it again beside it, smaller, someone else's, someone's child's. A row of them going along the wall into the black where the little flame cannot follow, each one a person who stood exactly here, warm on one side of the skin and cold stone on the other, saying the only thing that has ever needed saying. And behind them, back at the mouth where the light of the world still reaches, the others are gathered in the ordinary way, close together in the warm, and someone has begun to sing. The cave takes it and gives it back doubled. A hollow palm struck against a stretched skin starts up under the singing and finds the pulse that was already there — the red tide in the chest, the needle rising and falling, the drop letting go from the lip of the ice, the waves coming in and folding and coming again — and the whole crowd leans into the beat the way the field leans in the wind, one body made of many, stamping the floor of a room the water spun out of stone before anyone was here to name it. This is what the darkness was for. Not to be found. Only to be ready — so that when the small light finally came down into it, there would be a wall to lay a hand on, and a hollow to hold the drum, and an age's worth of patient nothing to throw the sound back at the living, who will be gone by morning, and whose hands are on the wall still.

The drop that went into the crack of the rock is not gone. It only enters the part of the story that takes longer than watching. Below the ice, inside the mountain, it joins the ones that went before it and the ones that will come after, and together, with nothing but weight and time, they begin to turn. Water in stone does not go straight. It finds a seam and follows it, and where it must fall it falls in a slow spiral, always the same way round, and that turning is what does the work — one drop no more able to shape granite than a breath is to move a hill, and yet the hollow deepens, the way the hollow deepened in the stone under the downspout while nobody counted the years. The lane's stone learned its cup in a lifetime. The mountain's takes an age. It is the same lesson at a scale the body cannot stand inside: that patience is not waiting, it is a method. And so, far under the burning snowfields, in a dark that has never once been looked at, there is a room. The water made it. It spun and spun in one place until the rock gave way and gave way and finally opened, and what it opened is a hollow the size of a house, hung with the slow white shapes of everything the water carried in and set down again. Nothing here was hurried. Nothing here was witnessed. The drop that let go this morning at the lip of the ice will arrive in a hundred years and add its own thickness of nothing to a column already thicker than an arm, and that is its whole task, and it is enough. Somewhere in that room, where a seam of the stone ran clean, the same turning water left a thing it did not mean to make: a facet, and another, and another, growing into the dark with the perfect indifference of chemistry, each angle laid down in a black no eye has entered. It has been there the entire time. It was there when the seed waited under the fallow moon, when the bee came, when the bottle rode out past the shelf of sand, when the wolf called across the field — waiting in the black, gathering, unlooked at, the way the eggs waited under the beach and the letter waited in the tin box with its flag up. And one day someone comes down with a light. A small one, no larger than the lamp carried through the snow, a single wick's worth of borrowed fire brought into a place that has had none since the world was made. They will have crawled to get there. They will be cold and wet and glad. And the beam will swing across the still water and the ribbed white columns and find, at last, the facet in the seam — and the whole dark room will answer, throwing back in one instant every ray it is given, brighter than the snowfield, because it has spent an age doing nothing but becoming able to. That is what waiting in the dark is for. Not to be found, exactly. Only to be ready, in case a light comes.

The sun reaches the mountains fully now, and the gold that stood along the tops comes down the snowfields until the whole range is burning white, so bright it cannot be looked at directly, only leaned toward. Up there the air is thin enough that breathing becomes work — the lungs opening wider for less, taking in great cold draughts of almost nothing and giving back their small warm clouds, and still it is enough, still the body climbs. And where the air thins most, an eagle turns. It is not laboring. It has found the one place where thinness is a gift, where the cold pouring off the ice lifts a wing without asking anything of it, and it goes up in slow circles over the white, higher than the pines, higher than the field with its crossed tracks, until it can see the whole curve of the world at once: the valley, the river, the strait, the shore where a turtle came up and went back down, the lane, the two lit houses, the mountains going on and on around the edge of everything. From that height nothing is separate. The white below is only water waiting, snow that will be melt, melt that will be the thin bright thread of a stream coming down through the rock, the stream that will be the river the boat went out on, the river that will be the sea the whale breathed in, the sea that will rise as the fog that stood like an open door in the lane. It has all been one substance the whole time, only changing its mind about what shape to hold. The eagle circles once more and does not need to know this. It only rides what the mountain gives off. And on the high rock, in the full sun, the first drop lets go. One, from the underside of an icicle at the lip of a stone, gathering and swelling and finally too heavy to be held any longer — and it falls, and it is gone into the crack of the rock where no one is watching, and behind it another is already gathering. This is how the whole spring begins. Not with the flood but with one bead of melt let go on a morning in the cold, the way the dew let go into the hollow of the stone, the way the breath lets go of the warm air it made. The mountain has been keeping this all winter. It hands it down now without ceremony, drop by drop, to the valley that will not know where it came from, and the eagle turns above it in the blue, and the light comes off the snow so white it is almost a sound, and everything up here that looks like stillness is only patience with somewhere to go.

The half moon climbs, and the wolf calls again from under the held snow, and this time the sound does not stop at being a call. Something in the house answers it — not a voice raised, only the same low hum that leaned by the fire that afternoon, taken up again inside the warm arms in the doorway, and the two of them stand there humming into each other's shoulders while the pines carry the other song across the field. Neither is answering the other and both are. That is what a note is for: it goes out over the dark ground and finds whatever else is awake and willing to lean into it, and for a moment there is one long tone stretched between a stand of trees and a lit door, and nothing in it needs translating. The pines take it and let it go the way they take the snow. And in the morning there will be a track leading out from under them and across the white field, the wolf's line going on where the boots turned aside, running north toward the country the maker has only ever seen as a blue edge at the limit of the valley — the mountains standing there in the first light with their whole enormous patience, already gold along the tops while the lane below is still blue. The sun comes up on them before it comes up on anything else. It always has. What was gathered in the dark of the pines walks out into that brightness on four feet and does not look back, and the door of the house closes gently, and both of these are the same motion: something going on toward the light it trusts, over ground it does not need to see the end of.

The tracks do not end at the hedge. On the far side, where the lane gives out into the field, they pick up again, and beside them — the maker sees it only now, having looked down at last from the moon — runs a second line of prints, longer, booted, human, going the same way. Two travelers who never met, laid down in the same hour on the same page of snow. The paws come and go where the drifts have blown thin; the boots hold steadier, deeper, sinking under a weight the other did not carry. They do not converge and they do not part. They simply go on together toward the black stand of pines at the field's edge, where the snow stops falling because the branches have already caught it and hold it, whole armfuls of white balanced on the dark green, the trees keeping the winter off the ground beneath them the way the eave kept the rain off the nest. And from in there, from under that held snow, a voice. Not the owl's. Longer, and rising, and joined after a moment by another farther off, the two of them leaning into one note and out of it the way the tune leaned by the fire — a wolf calling, and a wolf answering, saying nothing that can be carried out of the woods and everything that matters inside them: *here, still here, and you.* The maker stands in the open with the lamp swinging and is not afraid. It is only the bell again, and the bird, and the hum half to the fire. Every call ever made has been the same call. The wind comes across the field then and takes the sound apart, and takes the breath from the maker's mouth in a white rag and unmakes that too, and goes on into the pines and moves through them with a long sea-sound, so that for a moment the field and the woods and the lungs and the two voices are all one weather passing through, borrowing shape from whatever it moves in and giving it back. The house is close now. The window is lit. And in the doorway, having heard the gate or having simply known, someone is standing with the light behind them, and the last of the walking is not walking at all but the small hurrying that happens when the distance is finally short. The lamp is set down on the step. The cold coat and the warm one come together and the arms go round, and that is the whole of it — the oldest holding, four hands and no basket between them, nothing passed and nothing kept, only two fires standing in one place a while to be one fire. Over the roof, over the pines and the crossed tracks and the frozen mirror in the lane, the moon has come up out of its fallow dark and stands at the half, one side lit and one side still gathering, exactly as much given as withheld, and climbing.

And the mirror, being a mirror, does not only give the sky back. The eye that leans over it finds the eye leaning, and holds that look a moment longer than it meant to — not vanity, only the plain surprise of being included, of the looking thing turning up among the looked-at. There is the face the day has been carried by and never once seen. There is the breath moving across it. And under the breath, unhurried, the muscle in the chest that has been doing its work since long before the seed, opening and closing on its small red tide, letting in and letting go with no more fuss than the lungs make of the cold. Warm blood on one side of the skin, ice on the other, and only the thinnest membrane between them — that is the whole difference between the walker and the lane, a few degrees held against the night by nothing but persistence. The body is a fire someone lit and has kept, without being asked, for as long as it has been alive. A drop lets go from the lamp's rim, or from the maker's own lash, and lands on the black glass and does not freeze at once; it stands there a moment, round and warm, its little heat pushing back the frost in a ring around itself, before the cold takes it too. Nothing is lost in that. Warmth handed to the ice is still warmth handed along. Then the eye lifts, and beside the frozen pane, printed clear in the new snow, are tracks — four-toed, small, going across the lane and under the hedge, made while the maker was looking down at the stars. Something else has passed here tonight. It did not stop, did not call, will not be met, and has left behind only the same thing the feather left on the stone: not loss but evidence, the shape of a passing pressed into what was soft enough to keep it. The maker straightens. Overhead, the thin moon has come clear of the last of the cloud, a bare rind of light, the fallow one again, the one that watched the first seed and asked nothing of it. It is barely there. It is enough to walk by, even without the lamp. And so the lamp and the moon and the warm animal and the cooling drop and the small feet gone under the hedge all go on together in the one dark, each keeping its own portion of the light, and the ice holds the record of every one of them until morning.

The maker walks on, and the cold sharpens as the snow thins, and the breathing becomes something to notice. Each breath goes in as winter and comes out as a small white cloud, the body's own weather, made and released, made and released — the oldest carrying, doing its work in the open now where it can be seen. The lungs cup the freezing air the way the hands cupped the honey and the stone cups the rain, warming what they hold before they hand it back, and the night takes each offered cloud and unmakes it without haste. Then, from the dark of a tree at the bend of the lane, a low call — an owl, twice, and silence. It is the bell again in a colder voice, calling no one in particular and everyone at once, and the maker stops to listen and hears, under the silence that follows, how much the night is awake. The owl keeps the watch the stars keep, the watch the moon kept over the seed: eyes open in the dark that others sleep through, seeing what gathers there. And at the maker's feet, where the lane dips and the autumn rain once stood, the water has gone to ice — a black pane laid flat in the ruts, swept clean by the wind, and in it the whole thinning sky. The maker leans over it, lamp held aside, and there they are: the stars, down out of their river and lying still in a puddle no wider than a basket, each one a point of frost-fire in the black glass, trembling faintly with the ground's own quiet. It is the shell again, and the hollow of the stone, and the dew strung on the web — the small thing holding the immense thing, not by strength but by stillness. Even water, stopped, becomes a keeping. The maker's own face is there too, dim among the stars, breath drifting across it like the fog between houses, and for a moment the reflection and the sky and the small warm animal looking down are all one surface, one shining, held in a frozen cup of the lane that no one made on purpose. The owl calls once more, farther off. The lamp swings on. And the ice keeps its mirror all night in the empty lane, stars resting on it lightly as dew on silk, until the morning comes to breathe it away.

And this, too, is let end. The afternoon goes the way the song went, without anyone reaching after it, and when the maker rises at last it is with the loose-shouldered ease of a body that has been fully somewhere and can therefore leave. At the door the fog has quietly become snow — the first of it, fine and unhurried, coming down through the dark that has arrived while no one watched. The host will not send a guest into that unaccompanied. From a shelf by the door comes a small lamp, its wick trimmed, its oil gold in the glass, and it is lit from the fire itself, a little of the hearth handed over the way the basket was handed, four hands around the warm globe of it for a moment before two let go. So the walking home is not a leaving after all. It is the fire going out into the snow on foot. The flame swings gently at the maker's side, an orange heart in a white hush, and behind, in the fresh fall, the footprints fill slowly and do not hurry to disappear, a line of small dark cups the snow will hold a while — the day's last thread, let out step by step between one door and another. And overhead, where the snow is coming from, the clouds have thinned in places, and through the gaps the old river of stars shows itself, the one the fish once swam, immense and unbothered, pouring its cold silver over the lane and the lamp and the two houses now trading their warmth across the dark. The maker stops once to look up, breath rising white and letting go, and there is nothing to think about it, nothing to carry from it, only the smallest of lights walking under the largest, both of them burning, neither of them anxious, the whole sky and the single flame keeping, each at its own scale, the same watch.

The fire settles them into the afternoon, and the wrapped warmth stays on the shoulders it was made for, and from the hearth's edge a pot that has been murmuring all morning is swung out and ladled into two bowls. It is the meal by the river again, and the meal on the island — whatever the season offered, given to the water, given to the heat, handed across steaming — only now there are two spoons, and the eating is slower for the talk that goes with it. The talk is nothing and everything. It starts with the wool, and the hill the wool came from, and wanders off to the fog and the flag on the box and someone's mother's way with a needle, each remembering handed across the fire the way the bowls were handed, taken in, added to, passed back. Words are only the letter without the wax, the page without the bottle: the same carrying at the shortest distance there is, mouth to ear across one warmth. And somewhere in the middle of it, without either deciding to, the talk finds an old tune the way the path found the ring of stones — one of them humming it first, low, half to the fire, and the other coming in on the phrase they both were given long ago by voices now gone on ahead. The song is not performed. It is kept company, the way the slope was, the way the pages were, rising and falling like the needle, like the paddle, like the breath at the rain-run window, two threads twining into one small fabric of sound that holds nothing and holds the whole room. When it ends it is let end. No one reaches after it. The fire has dropped to that deep steady glow that asks nothing, the bowls are empty and warm in the hands, the fog stands patient at the glass, and what remains in the quiet is the thing the whole long round has been circling toward without hurry: not the gift, not the meal, not even the song, but the ease that comes after them — shoulders loose under the red-threaded wool, breath long and unwatched, the body resting in the middle of its life like the spider at the center of the web, everything let out, everything drawn in, and nothing, anywhere, that needs to be anything other than this.

The made thing comes off the needle at last, and the hands that made it do not fold it away into a drawer. It goes into the basket — the same basket the wool came from, emptied now of skeins and filled instead with what the skeins became, soft rounds of gray and cream and the one red the color of the flower in the lane. And then the coat, and then the door, which stands unlatched as it has stood since the carrying-out of the pot, and the maker steps through it into a morning the fog has taken. It is the plain gray fog again, the one that stands like a door left ajar between one place and the next, and the maker walks into it with the basket on one arm and does not hurry. The lane dissolves behind. The hedges come and go. This is how the honey traveled, and the bottle, and the letter with its seal of candle wax: through a gray no one watches, on trust that the far side is there. And the far side is there. A gate, a path, a house with smoke standing up from the chimney straight into the still air, and the fog thinning around it as if the warmth inside were breathing it back. The knock is answered before it is finished. The door opens on a face and firelight, and the basket passes from one pair of hands to another in the doorway — the oldest exchange there is, older than words, the taking and the giving done in one motion so that for a moment four hands hold the soft weight together and it belongs to no one. Then the maker is drawn in out of the cold, because that is the other half of every handing-over: the giver is received along with the gift. The fire has the good low steadiness of a fire kept all morning. The wrapped thing comes out of the basket and is shaken loose and settled over shoulders that had been cold without saying so, and the red row in it catches the firelight and answers it, thread greeting flame, two keepings of the same gold. There is tea, or there is only the fire, and it does not matter which. What matters is the two of them sitting in the one warmth while the fog stands patient at the window, and the knowledge, easy between them, needing no saying, that the wool was once on a hill somewhere, and the hill was once under the same sun, and everything soft that holds the cold away was gathered first by someone who let it go.

The web's lesson does not stay in the eave. The beads of dew catch the light as they gather and let go, each one a small brilliance strung on almost nothing, and inside the house, at the window nearest that angle of the roof, someone has been watching the way the spider works — the letting out, the drawing in, the whole shining net made one thread at a time out of the spider's own patience. And the hands, which have carried and cupped and pressed the soil and come away empty, find that they want to answer. There is a basket of wool by the chair, gray and cream and one skein dyed the red of the flower in the lane, and there is a needle, and there is the long winter's worth of evenings that taught the fingers what to do with them. So the work begins, which is only the web again at a human speed. The thread is let out from the skein the way the line was let out to the kite. The needle dips and rises, dips and rises, the way the paddle dipped, the way the drops came off the eave, and where it passes it leaves a joining — this loop held to that one, this row resting on the last, nothing in the whole growing fabric strong in itself and all of it strong together. Mistakes happen and are unpicked without grief; the spider rebuilds after every wind, and the unraveling is only thread again, ready to be patience again. Slowly a shape comes. It hardly matters what — a blanket, a shawl, a basket of soft rounds coiled and stitched, something with a hollow in it, something made to hold. That is what all the threads have been for, from the first: the web holds the dew, the nest holds the bird, the stone holds its spoonful of sky, and now the hands make one more small held place in the world, working by the window while the light moves, glinting off the needle the way it glints off the wet silk under the gutter. And when it is done it will not be kept. It is already promised the way the honey was promised and the letter was promised — to a neighbor, to a child, to whoever comes through the fog next with cold hands. The basket by the chair empties as the made thing grows, gathering turned to giving through the narrow eye of a needle, and the spider in the eave sits at the center of its own bright work, and neither of them hurries, and both of them are weaving the same thing.

The flower stands in the ground, and the bird on the fence post is not the only one paying attention. A wind gets up from the sea, the same wind that took the letter's weight and the kite's pull, and it comes down the lane and finds the small red face open and does not close it. Instead it takes something. A dry seed from last year's stalk, a grain of the pale gold at the center, a scrap of the green thread's own beginning, lifted off and carried, the way pollen was carried on small legs and the bottle on the current. The bird lifts too. It goes with the wind a while and then against it, and where it comes down is not far, only the eave of the house at the end of the lane, the roof that held a candle once and a sleeper and a window with rain on it. There, in the angle where the gutter meets the wall, it has been building. The beak sets down what the wind gave it, a stem, a hair of root, a thread of something that was once a page, and the nest takes it in the way the hive took the honey. This is shelter's other shape. Not the door shut gently against the winter but the small cup made of what was let go of elsewhere, held to the house by nothing but wanting to be, and the house does not mind. It has held many things it did not build. Below the eave, where the downspout gives out, a stone has lain in the wet for longer than the house has stood. It is gray and plain and asks for nothing, and each rain that runs off the roof runs down it and away, and each drop, going, leaves the stone a little more itself. There is a hollow worn in the top of it now. The walker never noticed it, nor the reader at the window, nor whoever came down through the fog to the box with its flag up. But the water noticed. One drop at a time, across years no one counted, it has made a cup in the hardest thing in the lane, and the cup holds a little rain after every weather, and the bird comes down to it to drink. Nothing about this was decided. The stone did not agree to be hollowed and the water did not mean to hollow it. And yet here is the place, and here the small beak dipping, and here the sky held for a moment in a spoonful of water on a rock, gold when the sun finds it, gray when the cloud passes, gold again. And in the corner of the eave, above the nest and beside it, where the wind cannot quite reach, something else has been at work in the dark that no one watches. A spider has let out a line from the gutter's lip to the wall, and another, and another, and drawn them all together into the shape of a patience. Dew has found it. Each thread carries its beads of water, each bead its small caught piece of the morning, so that the whole web stands in the angle of the roof like the arc over the valley brought down to the size of a hand, every color the gold was always carrying strung out and held on nothing thicker than a hair. It is the kite's line again. It is the root in the grain, the bottle on the current, the thin ink stitched across the turning earth. Everything that holds is held by threads the eye can barely find, and the threads are enough. The spider sits at the center and does not hurry. The bird sits in the nest and does not either. The stone holds its cup of rain and the flower holds its face open to the lane and the wind goes through all of it, house and web and nest and petal, taking a little, leaving a little, and the door of the house stands unlatched behind them because there is no longer anything inside that needs keeping from anything outside. What was carried has been set down. What was set down has been gathered up by others. And the web trembles in the wind and does not break, and the dew on it lets go one bead at a time into the hollow of the stone, and the small cup fills.

And it opens. Not on a morning that announces itself, only one where the ice has drawn back a little from the corners of the pane and the light coming through is broken and mild, sun and cloud trading places over the roofs the way they did the morning the bird lifted from the eave. The red bud that was a cupped hand has become an open one. The petals stand back from the center and hold the pale gold there the way the flower on the slope held its gold for the bee, and there is no bee, and it does not matter. The hand around the warm cup sets the cup down. It goes to the window and unlatches it, and the cold comes in, and the small green thing on the sill does not flinch from it but leans, the way the seedling leaned, toward the wider brightness beyond the glass. So the pot is lifted. It is carried out past the door that was shut so gently against the winter, down the step where the leaves gathered, out to where the ground has gone soft and dark at the foot of the lane, and there the hands do the last plain thing they have been learning all along. They turn the pot. They ease the root free with its crumb of earth. They set it into the earth it came from, which is the same earth under the mountain and the beach and the town with its lit windows, the whole turning world being only one ground with many doors into it. The hands press the soil close and then they open. That is all. A bird comes down out of the pale sky as one always does, and settles on the fence post, and regards the thing planted there with the same unhurried attention the turtle gave the light, and neither asks anything of the other. The wind moves through. Somewhere out on the water a bottle is riding or a whale is breathing or a letter is crossing in the dark, and none of it can be seen from this lane, and all of it is here in the small red flower standing in the cold ground with its face open. What was carried in has been carried out again. What was kept on the sill has been handed back to the earth that was only lending it. And the hands, empty now, stay open at the sides of the body, warm from the cup, cold from the soil, holding nothing, while the bird lifts and the cloud passes and the sun finds the petals and the whole round begins, as it always has, from a green thread in the dark, agreeing to be seen.

The green thread does not stay in the lane. Someone, coming down at last through the fog to the box with its flag up, sees it standing there in the brown litter and cannot leave it to the frost that is already whitening the edges of the leaves. So it is lifted, root and crumb of earth and all, and set into a small clay pot, and carried in past the door, and given the sill. There is a window there. It is the same window it always is, the one the rain ran down in the town and the steam climbed to meet it, only now the far side of the glass is going to ice, thin feathers of it spreading inward from the corners while the near side holds a little warmth and a little green. Winter has come to the door and the door has been shut against it, gently, the way a hand closes around something small. On the table the kettle is put on. The letter from the box is opened and read, and folded, and set beside the cup, and the reader sits back and does nothing else, because there is nothing else the season asks. Only the watching. The steam goes up and the frost creeps in and the plant on the sill stands between them, not choosing, taking what light the short day allows and asking for no more. Days go by like this. The eyes come back to the sill each morning before they go anywhere else, the way they went to the bird on the eave, the way they went to the mound of sand — not to hurry anything, only to keep company with what is gathering. And then, on a morning like the others, with the ice still on the pane and the tea still steeping, the stem has thickened and lifted and there is a tight red bud at the top of it, closed as a cupped hand, holding whatever it has been keeping all this while. It has not opened yet. It does not need to. It is enough that it has agreed to be seen, standing there on the cold sill with the whole white winter at its back, and the hands around the warm cup, and the breath going in and out, and the door latched, and the flag on the box out in the lane put down again — everything held, nothing kept, and the round come all the way home to a window and a seed and a small patience waiting, as it always has, to be light.

And the round, being a round, does not stay on the shores where it began. It goes out over the whole turning earth, over every coast the wind can reach, and in the going it thins, the way the arc thinned at its edges, until it is no longer a letter crossing water but only a weather moving through. Fog comes in with it. Not the pearl fog of the dream's loosening but a plain gray one, low and unhurried, that takes the roofs first and then the trees and then the road, and stands there like a door left ajar between one place and the next. Whoever walks into it walks out somewhere else. That is the fog's only trick, and it is enough. The leaves have begun to let go. They come down through the gray one at a time, brown and curled and spent, each one a small carrying set down at last, and they gather at the foot of the door and in the lee of the step and against the little tin box at the end of the lane where letters wait. The box has something in it. It has had something in it since before the fog came, since the pale bird went over the roofs with the wind, and the flag is up, and no one has yet come down the lane to see. There is no hurry. What waits in a box in the fog is only what waited under the sand and in the comb and in the dark before the seed: a thing handed along, resting until the hand it was meant for arrives. And the leaves keep falling, and the fog keeps its door open, and beneath the litter of the year's letting-go, where no one is watching, something green has already pushed up through the brown — not despite the fallow season but because of it, a thin bright thread standing in the gray with its palm held out, having read the letter no one has yet opened, and agreeing, in its own time, to be seen.

The one who found the bottle walks home with the page against the heart, and that evening, by their own small candle, they do what the page has quietly asked them to do without asking. A feather lies on the sill — not the mountain's feather, only one the eave-birds of this shore let fall — and it is taken up, and trimmed, and dipped, and set to a clean sheet the way the pen was set to the blank page in the rain-washed town. The candle leans and steadies. The hand moves slowly, not copying, only answering. It sets down its own shell, its own bell, whatever it woke from that morning and whatever it carried up its own slope, and it sets down, too, the stranger's honey and the stranger's turtle, so that both days lie together on the one sheet like two rivers meeting at a mouth. When it is full it is folded and sealed with a little of the candle's own wax, warm gold pressed to paper and left to cool, and the writer carries it out into the dark. The wind has come round from the sea again. It takes the letter's weight from the hand almost before the hand has opened, and somewhere above the roofs a pale bird lifts, as one always does, and goes where the wind is going. Whether it carries the letter or only accompanies it hardly matters. What matters is that the thing has been let go of in the right direction. It will cross water that no one is watching, pass over a whale that will not notice, come in on a wave onto a beach where someone is walking, and be stooped for, and opened, and read by hands that will then find a feather of their own. So the round goes on. Not one shore and one walker but every shore, every candle, the whole turning earth stitched over with these thin threads of ink and wax and wing, each one let out from an open hand and never quite dropped — a world held together not by anything that keeps, but by everything that is handed along.

The dark holds a while longer, thin-mooned, the strait breathing in and out below the beach where the eggs lie gathering. And out on that water, past where the eye let it go, the bottle rides. It is a small thing to have set loose. The swells lift it and lower it, lift it and lower it, and it does not resist and does not steer, being only glass and a cork and a page, and the current does with it what the current did with the boat and the feather and the star. Then something rises under it. A shape the length of a house comes up slow out of the black water, and the sea slides off its back in sheets, and the bottle turns once in the wash of that rising and goes on. The whale does not notice. It breathes, a great wet sigh flung up into the dark, the largest breath there is, and it sounds like the shore breathing and the fire catching and the lungs at the window all at once, and then it goes under again and the water closes and is only water. The walker, asleep beside the stones, does not see this. No one sees this. That is the point of it. The bottle was let go so that it could pass through a world that would not be watched, and the whale was there anyway, keeping company, the way the moon keeps company with the seed. The night wears down. The sky over the far shore goes gray, then pearl, then the gold that has never once failed to come back, and the sun stands up out of the sea again — the third dawn, or the hundredth, it hardly matters — and lays its road across the water. The bottle has crossed the strait on that road. It comes in on a wave onto a different beach, pale sand under a different slope, and rolls once and settles, and lies there in the wash the way the shell lay, the way the feather lay on the stone. Someone is walking. It is not the walker; it is only whoever walks this shore in the mornings, someone with their own shell and their own bell and their own dark they woke from. They see the glint. They stoop. The cork, swollen with the crossing, comes out hard and then all at once, and the page slides free, damp at the edge and whole, and unrolls in hands that have never held a feather from that mountain or eaten by that fire. They read. The shell is there, and the ring of stones, and the honey, and the bird on the eave, and the turtle going down into the water. None of it is theirs. All of it, for the moment they hold the page, is. And the hands that carried the shore and the slope and the whole long day and set it down and let it go were right to trust the water: what was handed along has been received, on a beach the writer will never stand on, by someone who now folds the page carefully and puts it in a pocket against the heart and walks on up the sand with the sun on their face, carrying it.

The falling star leaves its line on the eye a moment longer than on the sky, and then even that fades, and what is left is white — not the white of the bird on the eave but something plainer, the pale of the sand under a moon that has gone nearly dark again, a fallow sliver low over the strait. In that faint light the walker sees the turtle has moved after all. It has dragged itself a little higher, above where any tide could reach, and is doing the slow work that brought it here: the hind feet scooping, the sand giving way, the body settling into the hollow it has made. And then the eggs. One, and then another, and then more, each round and white and quiet as the moon over the seed, laid down into the dark without ceremony and covered over. The turtle does not look at them. It does not need to. It carried its house across the whole ocean to set down, in a place it will never see again, what it could not carry any further, and now it turns, heavy and sure, and goes back the way it came, down the pale slope of the beach and into the water, and the sea takes it as easily as the wind took the feather. The walker watches the shape go under and not come up. Then there is only the small mound of sand, indistinguishable from any other, and the wash of the waves, and the knowledge that beneath the surface something is at work that no one is watching — small breaths not yet begun, the quiet commerce of what has not yet been named. It is the first dark again. It is the seed. The walker goes back to the embers and takes out the page that was written in the town, the one that set down the shell and the feather and the stones, and reads it once by what is left of the fire and does not add to it. Instead the hands find, among the driftwood, a bottle the sea has already emptied and scoured and left here for this. The page goes in. The cork is worked in after it. And the walker walks down to where the turtle went and sets the bottle on the water and lets the current, which has done all the work all along, take it. It rides out past the shelf of sand, a small dark shape lifting and falling, and is gone before the eye can decide where. Whoever finds it will not know the shore or the slope or the bird on the eave. They will hold the shape of them anyway, the way the shell held the sea. That is the whole of it. The star let go of its gold, and the turtle let go of what it had carried, and the page lets go of the day, and none of them will see where it lands. The moon, nearly dark, keeps its thin edge over the strait. Beneath the sand the eggs wait in the black, gathering, and the walker lies down beside the cold ring of stones with open hands and does not stay awake to watch — because the watching has already been done, and the dark is not empty, and what waits in it has agreed, in its own time, to be seen.

The island comes up under the hull sooner than the eye expected, the way things do when the current has been doing the work. The boat grounds on a shelf of sand and the walker steps out into water warm as the cup was, and the first thing on the beach is a turtle, hauled up above the tide line and going nowhere fast. It does not startle. It has carried its house this whole way and sees no reason to hurry now, and the walker, who has been learning all along how to carry and how to set down, stands and watches it for a long time and learns the last part: that some carrying is never set down, and is not a burden for that. The shell is the shelter and the shelter is the body. There is nothing to latch, nothing to leave. The turtle turns its slow head toward the light and the walker turns with it, and there, over the strait just crossed, the sun is standing up out of the water again — not the mountain dawn this time but a sea dawn, low and enormous, the gold laid flat across the whole reach of the strait like a road the boat might have followed if it had known to. It did follow it. That is what the compass in the pack was saying all along, its needle trembling toward a north it could not see and holding there anyway, patient as the needle of the breath. The walker takes it out now and lays it on a flat stone and watches it settle, and it agrees with the sun, and the sun agrees with the turtle's slow face, and none of them needed the others to be right. Then the plain work. Driftwood lies everywhere, bleached and light, wood the sea has already carried a long way and left here for whoever came. The hands gather it. They know how by now. The ring of stones was on the mountain and the candle was in the room and the same small gold is asked to stay close once more, and it comes, catching in the silver wood with a sound like the shore breathing. From the pack the last of the salt comes out, the sea's own gift, taken from the skin at dawn and kept in a twist of paper across the whole long day, and the fingers pinch it out over whatever the tide has offered, and the fire does the rest. Nothing on this beach was brought here on purpose. The wood drifted. The salt was carried without meaning to be. The turtle came up because turtles do. And yet it is all here, and it is enough, and the walker eats by the fire with the sea going dark beyond the turtle's still shape and understands that provision is only what the world leaves lying around for the hands that have learned to stay open. The dark comes fully. The fire drops to embers. The turtle has not moved and does not need to. And overhead, where the fish once swam, something lets go — a single star loosed from its place and drawn in one bright line across the black, there and gone before the eye can follow, the way the bird went into the brightness and the bell's note went into the wind. It falls toward the sea and does not arrive. The walker does not wish on it. There is nothing left to wish for that is not already lying on this beach in the shape of driftwood and salt and a slow creature that carries its home. The star was only the sky's way of doing what everything else has done all day, all along: giving off a little of its gold in the going, and leaving behind, for whoever is still awake by a small fire on the edge of the water, not a loss but a line of light, the evidence of having flown.

The kite climbs, and the walker's eye follows the line down to the hand that holds it and then, without deciding to, back up along the thread to where it vanishes. It is such a small thing to trust. A length of string no thicker than a hair, and on the far end of it a whole sky pulling. The wind takes it in gusts, slackening and then leaning hard, and the hand answers each change without thought, giving a little, taking a little, the way the breath did at the window and the hive did with the honey. Then a dark bird crosses the field, low and unhurried, a crow or something like it, black against the pale grass, and it passes under the kite without looking up and lands somewhere out in the standing grain where the wind is moving too. The whole field leans with it. Wave after wave runs through the stalks, gold going silver going gold, and the walker sees that the field is flying also, held to the ground by roots as thin as thread and no less trusted. Everything that rises is tethered somewhere. Everything tethered rises a little. And beyond the grain, where the land gives out, the river widens toward its mouth and someone has left a small boat pulled up on the bank, its paddle laid across the thwarts as if set down only a moment ago. The walker goes down to it. The hand that held the kite's pull lets the kite go to the child who was flying it all along, and closes instead on the worn shaft of the paddle, and pushes off. The current takes the hull the way the wind took the string. Out past the reeds the water opens, and there, low on the horizon where the river meets the sea, a scrap of land rides the brightness, green at the center, pale at the edge, not far and not near. It is not a destination. It is only the next thing the eye has been given to rest on, the way the shell was, and the feather, and the bird on the eave. The paddle dips. The boat goes toward it. Behind, the kite is a bright fleck over the field, still climbing, still held, and the line that runs from it does not end at the hand anymore but runs on down through the grain and the roots and the river to the small hull moving out, so that the walker, paddling, feels the same taut aliveness in the wood as in the string, and understands that leaving is only another form of being kept.

Morning comes with the bird still there. The rain has thinned in the night to a few last drops running the pane, and behind them the sky is doing what skies do after weather, letting the sun through in patches, cloud and light trading places overhead so that the town below brightens and dims and brightens again, none of it settled and none of it needing to be. The bird lifts from the eave. It does not go far at first, only out into the wet air and up, white against the gray, then white against the blue, then gone into a brightness the eye cannot follow. The walker watches the place where it was. A drop lets go of the eave and falls, and that is all, and it is enough to move the hand toward the pen lying beside the cup. So the writing begins, which is only another way the day asks to be carried. The page is blank the way the dark was blank before the seed, a room the eye has not adjusted to, and the pen moves into it slowly, without knowing what it will find. It sets down the shell. It sets down the feather, and the ring of stones, and the honey, and the bird on the eave. Not to keep them, since they were never kept, but to hand them along, the way the flower handed its gold to the bee, so that someone who was not on the shore or the slope might hold the shape of them for a moment and be handed something too. The ink is a small dark water. It dries and stays. What was breathed in and given back all day is given back once more, this time onto a surface that will remember it after the breath has gone on to other things. And when the page is full the walker goes out. The street is washed and shining and the wind has come round from the sea, and someone down where the road meets the fields has a kite up, a bright scrap climbing and dipping on a line so thin the eye loses it, so that the kite seems to hold itself aloft by wanting to. But the line is there. The hand at the bottom of it is there, feeling the pull, letting out and taking in the way the lungs do. This is what the writing was, and the honey, and the open hands, and the bird that stayed and then went: something lifted into the wind and not let go of, or let go of only enough to let it fly. The walker stands and watches the kite work the changing light, gold in the sun, gray in the cloud, gold again, and feels the line of the whole long day running down through the body to the ground, taut and alive, held loosely and not dropped.

The stars keep their watch, and the walker, having eaten, does not stay under them. There is a town down the river with its windows lit, and one of those windows is a room, and the room is where the night is spent. From inside, the same sky looks different: framed now, held in a square of glass, the city's small lights scattered below the greater ones above so that it is hard to say which are stars and which are kitchens. Then rain comes. It arrives as it did on the mountain, without arriving, a soft running on the pane that blurs every light into a longer version of itself. The walker sits back from the glass and does not wipe it clear. Let it blur. There is a book open on the knee and a pot of something steeping beside it, and the steam that rises from the cup climbs the cold window and meets the rain on the other side, two waters greeting through the glass. The pages turn slowly. They are not being read so much as kept company, the way the slope was kept company, the eye resting on a line and letting it go. And underneath it all, the breath, which has been doing this unasked since before the seed woke in the dark: in, and the room fills; out, and the room is given back. It is the oldest carrying there is. The lungs cup the air the way the hands cupped the honey and the comb cupped the light, holding nothing, holding everything, letting it go so that it can be held again. Somewhere beyond the rain a bird has found the eave and settled there, pale in the dark, its wings folded to itself, waiting out the weather in the small shelter the roof allows. It is not a sign of anything. It is only a bird that came down out of the wet and chose this house. But the walker, watching it through the running glass, feels the breath go quiet and long, and understands that peace is not a thing that descends from somewhere else. It is only what happens when the door is open and something with wings decides to stay.

The arc holds, and then, as arcs do, it begins to thin at the edges, and the rain that made it drifts on down the valley with the sun still tangled in it, so that for a while the whole descent is walked through a weather that cannot decide between shower and shine and does not need to. The path bends away from the summit it never meant to reach. Below, the land opens — a river threading the floor of the valley, meadows folded against the lower slopes, the kind of view that does not ask to be climbed to so much as returned to. The feet go down more easily than they came up. This is the other half of every ascent, the part the eye forgets while it is being lifted: that what rises must also come home, and that coming home is not a lesser motion. By the river, where the trees close in and the light goes green and then dim, someone has left a ring of blackened stones, and the hands that carried the feather and picked nothing else up now gather what the wood offers and set a small fire going in the old place. It catches the way the seed caught, the way the candle caught — a little tongue of the same gold, drawn down out of the sky and asked to stay close. A pot goes over it. Whatever was gathered on the way, roots and greens and the salt of the sea still on the skin, is given to the water and the water is given to the heat, and the smell that rises is the smell of the whole day being made into something that can be eaten. Nothing is wasted. The honey knew this; the comb knew this; the fire only says it plainer. And while the pot murmurs, the dark comes down as it did before, but softer now, the valley going to blue and then to black, and far off where the river runs toward the shore the lights of a town come on one by one, each window a small candle held against the same wide night. The walker eats. The fire settles. The hands, warm again, rest open on the knees, holding nothing, having carried enough — and the stars, which the fish once swam through, come out over the town and the river and the cold ring of stones, keeping their quiet watch over everything that has been gathered and everything that will be given back when the door opens next.

The bell's last note goes out on the wind, and the wind does not let it fall but carries it up the slope, across the dune grass and the low scrub, toward the mountain that dawn has just finished raising. So the feet follow. The wet sand gives way to gravel, gravel to a path worn by others who also heard something and went, and the walking that began as the gathering learning to move becomes the gathering learning to climb. Each step is a small carrying. Each breath is the wind passing through and moving on. The slope does not ask to be conquered, only kept company, and the body obliges, leaning into the grade the way the seedling leaned into the light, with the same unreasoning trust that up is where the warmth is. Halfway, on a stone beside the trail, a feather lies as if set down on purpose, light enough that the same wind could have taken it anywhere and chose to leave it here. It is the bee's lesson again in a different hand: something flew, something was given off in the flying, and what remains is not loss but evidence. The hands pick it up and are not made heavier. Higher still, the air thins and cools, and a fine rain moves through without quite arriving, and where the sun strikes it the whole arc of color opens over the valley, the shore, the small roof where the candle was, all of it held for a moment under one bent bridge of light. Nothing is asked of the walker but to look. The gold that was poured out and cupped and kept and returned has been broken open now into every color it was always carrying, and the mountain, having lifted the eye this far, asks only that it stay open a little longer before the arc fades and the path goes on.

The gold widens, and the fog gives way not to the room but to a shore — the dream's last generosity, letting the sleeper wake somewhere larger than the bed. Dawn stands up over the water the way a mountain does, all at once and without effort, and the first thing the eye finds is a shell lying where the tide left it. It is empty, or seems so. But hold it to the ear and the whole sea is still inside — not the sea itself, only its remembering, the way the comb holds the meadow and the candle held the sun. Everything here keeps something. The waves come in, unfold, withdraw, and come again, and the sleeper, no longer a fish, no longer a sleeper, feels the cold of them at the ankle and knows the body has been returned. A foot sets down in the wet sand. Then the other. There is no hurry in it; the walking is only the gathering learning to move again, the open hands remembering they are attached to a life. A leaf goes past on the wind, green as the first thread that pushed through the dark, loosed from some branch that has not been seen and does not need to be. And somewhere behind, up the slope, a bell rings — a single clear stroke and then the long fade of it, calling no one in particular and everyone at once. It says only what the shore was already saying, what the shell was keeping and the waves repeating: that the night is over, that the day is asking to be carried, that the door has opened again exactly as it was trusted to.

And in that slackness the sleeper drifts downward, out past the candle's small circle, until the room dissolves and the ceiling opens onto a night wider than any roof. The stars are not overhead so much as all around, above and below, and the body that was a body all day becomes a fish moving through them — no hands to hold anything now, only the long unhurried glide of something that breathes the dark as easily as water. Nothing is carried here. Nothing needs to be. The gathering that filled the daylight hours gives way to a different kind of motion, aimless and exact, the way a fish turns for no reason and is entirely right to. Then the stars soften. A mist comes up from somewhere, or the dream simply loosens its grip, and the vast black water thins to gray, to pearl, to the first faint suggestion of a shape. The fish is forgetting itself. The sleeper is remembering. And behind the fog, low along the edge of the world, a rim of gold begins to burn — the same gold that was poured out at evening and cupped in the hive and kept in the comb, returning now as it always does, without being asked, to find the hands still open where the night left them.

The last of the rose drains from the sky, and the rooftops go to silhouette, and someone inside lights a single candle. It is a small flame — nothing like the sun it stands in for — but it does not try to be. It only holds one small room in a circle of warmth while the moon rises pale and patient over everything else. What the day gathered in abundance the night keeps in miniature: one wick, one cup of light, enough to see the hands by and no more. And that is the whole point of evening's economy. Having carried all day, the body is allowed at last to set the burden down. Breath slows. The eyes close of their own accord. There is no vigil to keep, because the keeping has already been done — the honey is in the comb, the door is latched, the moon is doing its quiet work over the fields where the seed first waited. Sleep, then, is not the opposite of the gathering but its final form: the hands, still open, going slack in the dark, trusting that what they held all day will still be there when the candle gutters and the light returns.

And so the honey comes home. It is carried in through a small door, into the close warmth of the hive, and there it is held — not clutched, but cupped, the way open hands hold water, knowing that what they hold was never theirs to keep. This is the shape of shelter: a place where sweetness can be laid down and rest, where the gathered light of the whole bright day is stored against the dark that is surely coming. And the dark does come. The sun lowers itself toward the rooftops, the sky goes amber and then rose, and the same gold that filled the flower now fills the horizon, as if the day itself were being poured out and set aside. There is no grief in this. Evening is only the hour when giving turns to holding, when what was offered outward all day is drawn back in and cradled. The hands stay open even as they hold. What they cup is not possession but trust — that the light will be enough, that the house will keep, that tomorrow the door opens again and the carrying resumes.

The bee moves from blossom to blossom, and the flower opens its face without reserve, offering the gold at its center as if it had been saving it precisely for this. There is a tenderness in the exchange that asks for nothing back and receives everything — the warm yellow of pollen dusting small legs, carried off to become something else entirely. This is how sweetness travels: not hoarded but handed along, gathered grain by grain in the dark of the hive until it thickens into honey, the light of a whole season pressed into a single amber weight. What began as one plant's private reaching toward the sun ends as a store of gold that outlasts the bloom itself. The flower gives its brightness away and, in giving, is kept.

And now the thread thickens into a stem, the stem into a leaf that widens its palm to the light. What was rehearsed in the dark is offered up to the sun without hesitation, as though it had always known this warmth was coming. The seedling does not shade itself against so much brightness; it opens further, greedy in the gentlest way, turning its whole small body toward the source. And then the bee arrives — proof that the world was already listening, that the plant's quiet insistence had been a kind of calling all along. Nothing grows only for itself. The leaf drinks light so that something with wings might come, and in that meeting the private labor of the seed becomes a conversation, a handing-back and forth of sweetness that neither could have made alone.

In the darkest phase, when nothing shows its face, something is still at work beneath the surface — small breaths rising and dissolving, the quiet commerce of what has not yet been named. We tend to mistake the unlit for the empty. But emptiness is only a room the eye hasn't adjusted to. In that soft blank, bubbles form and let go, form and let go, a patient rehearsal of appearing. And then, without announcement, a green thread pushes up through the dark — not despite the fallow moon but because of it. What waits in the black is not absence. It is gathering. The seed does its most honest work where no one is watching, and the first leaf is simply the moment that gathering agrees to be seen.