The Long Fasting

That autumn Dane Corso began to die, and refused to do it the ordinary way.

He stopped eating — not a hunger strike, Pearl was firm about the distinction, nothing performed, nothing announced. He simply stopped, the way a clock stops. He sat in the parlor with the ledgers he no longer needed and did not open them, and Amos Partlow, who had hated him with scriptural thoroughness for thirty years, took to standing in the doorway at mealtimes saying nothing, which from Amos was a eulogy.

He talked, some, in that last October, and Pearl was usually the only one in the house who would listen, which she did not do out of forgiveness. She did it the way you sit with any dying thing, she said, because the county was short on company and long on weather. He talked about the past only, and only about one stretch of it: the ridge, the eagles' nest, the fence rails, a girl standing with her arms out into the wind. He never once said Cass's name in those weeks. He said the girl, or her, or nothing at all, and once, looking at the north window: "She said I was lower than her by everything the county measured. The county's all dead now, Pearl. Every stick of it. I won."

Pearl said: and how is that going for you. And Dane Corso, with two months left in his body and the light of the whole world in the window behind him, laughed — the only time she ever heard it — and said, honestly, considering it: "It's going."

The window opened on its own twice that November, Amos swore to it. The second time there was snow on the sill inside, a neat line of it, though the pane had been latched, and Amos went through the house with his Bible and his contempt and pronounced the place unclean, and for once nobody argued with him, because everybody in the house had begun, quietly, to keep the same hours as the house — waking at two, listening at doors — and the story they all half-knew, the county's oldest story now, was that a woman had been asking at the windows of Windrow for twenty years to be let in, and that the only person who had ever answered her was currently starving in the parlor with his eyes on the dark.

Jonah Reyes came up from the cabin on the second of December because the lease needed signing, and found the house quieter than the outdoors. Pearl sat with him in the kitchen and told him the ending while it was still in progress, in the present tense, which he did not understand at first, and for the first time in his working life Jonah Reyes had closed his notebook and just listened. Upstairs, Milo's old room stood empty and aired out. On the drive up, Jonah had thought — for no reason he could name — of the dream from his first night: the child, the book he couldn't read, the sense of a house he had been dreaming before anyone told it to him. In the barn, Wren and Colt were repairing the damage of twenty years on the north pasture, arguing happily about fence posts, openly, in the way of people who have stopped caring who owns the watching.

And in the parlor, Dane Corso sat facing the window with the latch undone, and would not eat, and would not be moved to bed, and spoke less each day, and smiled at nothing, which was worse than the shouting of any living man Pearl had buried.

She found him on the fourth morning of December, on the window seat, with the sash up and the cold coming through, dead three hours by the look of him, soaked to the shoulder with snowmelt and smiling, and no footprints anywhere in the fresh snow of the yard, going or coming. Amos read over him the long passage about the man who built on sand and the man who built on rock, and then stood there a long time with the book shut, and finally said, in the general direction of the window, that it wasn't sand the fool had built on either, and that God could sort it.

They buried him on the ridge, as he'd asked, in the one letter he'd ever left, next to the grave of a girl whose headstone the county could read and whose name Dane Corso had not spoken in twenty years.