The Receiving Vault by Obsessia

There have been Lindqvists at the gate of the Tamarack cemetery for as long as there has been a cemetery to keep, and Agnes was the last of them, and she knew it the way you know the weight of a coat you have worn every winter of your life.

The sexton's house stood just inside the lych-gate, a narrow clapboard thing of two storeys with a steep roof that shed the snow onto the path in long slumping falls through the night. Her great-grandfather Anders had built it in the autumn of 1898, out of the same green spruce he used for the town's first coffins, and it had never stopped settling. In the cold it spoke. The nails in the clapboards let go of the frost one by one with small sharp reports, so that lying awake under four quilts in the back bedroom Agnes could follow the cold walking around the outside of the house, nail by nail, the way you might follow a man's footsteps on a porch.

Her father had died in that bedroom on the third of January the winter before. He had died with his face turned to the window, which looked up the long white slope of the cemetery hill to the black mouth of the receiving vault cut into its northern face, and the last thing he said that was not about the pain was about the vault.

"Don't open it." He had her wrist. His grip had been a sexton's grip all his life, a grip that could hold a strap with four hundred pounds of oak and man on the end of it, and at the last it was still strong enough to leave marks she found the next morning, four grey ovals and one on the inside like a thumbprint in wax. "In the winter. You don't open it in the winter. Whatever you hear."

"What would I hear, Pappa?"

But he had gone somewhere behind his eyes by then, and he only said, "In order. Do them in order. Write it down," which was what he had said to her every working day of her life since she was eleven and first held the end of a lowering strap, and then he slept, and in the morning he was cold.

She had put him in the vault herself. There was no one else to do it. The Kowalchuk boy, who was forty-four and had been the Kowalchuk boy since he was nine, helped her carry the box up the hill on a toboggan, and they slid it onto Rack 1, lower, and she wrote him in the register in her square printing, LINDQVIST, Per Anders. 79. Sexton, and she locked the grille and walked down the hill and did not go back inside until April. In April she dug him a grave beside her mother's with the town's old Bucyrus backhoe and lowered him without opening the lid to look at him one last time, because you did not open the lids. A Lindqvist received the dead in winter and returned them to the ground in spring, in order, and wrote it down.

Now it was January again, the second, a Saturday, and the thermometer nailed to the toolshed door read forty-one below when Agnes came out of the house at dawn, and she no longer believed it could go any lower. The needle lay against the pin at the bottom of the dial like a dog that has given up.

The cold that morning had a texture. It was not an absence of warmth but a substance in its own right, a thing that came into the lungs like sand. The snow squealed under her boots. The sky over the hill was the green of old copper going to brass in the east, and against it the cemetery climbed in tiers, row on row of stones heaped with white, each one wearing a cap of snow the shape of a bishop's mitre. Nothing moved. There were no birds. At forty below the ravens went into the woods and did not come out, and the silence they left was so total that Agnes could hear, over the squeal of her own steps, the faint crackling hiss of her breath freezing as it left her mouth. Her father had called it the dead talking, and laughed, because a sexton has to laugh at something.

She went up every morning in January. There was nothing to do in the cemetery in January except clear the path to the vault and look at the padlock, and she did both, because the town paid her for twelve months and because her father had told her that a sexton who only works when the ground is soft is a gravedigger, and a gravedigger is a man with a shovel, and a man with a shovel is nothing.

The receiving vault was cut into the north face of the hill where the sun never reached it from October to March. Anders Lindqvist had built it in the first terrible winter of the town, when the influenza came up the river on the last steamer before freeze-up and killed forty-one people out of three hundred before Christmas, and the ground was iron, and the dead lay stacked in the church in their winding sheets until the smell was in the hymnals. He had blasted the hill with dynamite borrowed from the railway and faced the hole with granite blocks hauled by sledge from the quarry at Little Kettle and roofed it in slate. Over the plank door he had set an iron grille, so the air could move and the dead could keep. Above the grille, cut into the lintel in letters gone soft with a hundred and twenty-eight winters, was the only ornament he had allowed himself:

HERE THEY ARE KEPT

Not here they rest. Not here they sleep. Agnes had asked her father about it once, as a girl, and he had looked at the words for a while and said that Anders had been a plain man and had written a plain thing, and that was all, and she should not climb on the lintel.

Five caskets were inside it now. Edwin Moar, Lorraine Beaudry, Dale Kowalchuk, who was the Kowalchuk boy's father, Tyler Marchand, and Ruth Oskarson, the schoolteacher, who had come in last, on the twenty-ninth. They lay on the oak racks in the dark under the hill, waiting for April.

She saw it when she was ten metres from the door.

A small grey plume, about the size of a mitten, came through the bars of the grille, low down near the bottom of the lattice. It rose a hand's breadth into the copper light, and turned slowly over on itself, and thinned to nothing.

Agnes stood still.

Her own breath was going up in front of her face, and she held it. She held it until her chest ached and the edges of her sight began to sparkle, so that there would be no breath in the air but one.

The plume came again.

It came slowly, unhurried, the way breath comes from a sleeper. It hung, curled, and dissolved against the black iron. Then there was nothing, for a long time, so long that she began to tell herself it was a trick of the light, a scarf of ice crystals shaken loose from the slate. Then it came again.

She let her own breath go in a great white cloud and stood inside it, shaking.

It was not sea smoke, the steady fog that pours off the open fishing holes on Little Kettle. This came and stopped. It had a rhythm, slow and patient, and it was the rhythm of a thing with lungs.

Whatever you hear, her father said, in the back bedroom, with his fingers sunk in her wrist.

She had not heard anything. She had only seen.

She went up to the door.

The padlock was a brass Master the size of her palm, frosted over in the night like a thing made of sugar. The key was on a ring inside her chopper mitt, inside her wool liner glove, threaded on a bootlace around her wrist so that she could not drop it in the snow. Her father had kept it the same way.

She had to take the chopper off. The leather of it was stiff as a boot in the cold and she bit the cuff to pull her hand free, and the moment the mitt came away the cold went through the wool liner as if the liner were not there. It went into the webbing of her thumb and along the small bones of the back of her hand to the wrist, a clean deep pain, and then, almost at once, it went quiet, which was worse.

The key would not go in. Frost had grown in the keyway in a fine white fur. She breathed on it, which she knew better than to do, and the breath froze in the slot as a hard clear glaze. She put the whole lock against the side of her neck under her scarf and held it there with her cheek, and the brass burned her like a stove plate, a white searing pain, and she held it while she counted to sixty in Swedish ett, två, tre, and somewhere around fyrtio the burning stopped, and she did not know whether that was because the brass had warmed or because her neck had stopped feeling it.

When she tried the key again it turned a quarter and stuck. She leaned on it with the heel of her hand and then with her whole wrist and then with her shoulder behind her wrist, and something in the lock gave with a sound like a knuckle cracking, and the shackle fell open.

She stood with the lock in her hand and looked at the grille.

The breath came through the bars again, a foot from her face.

She could smell it now. In that cold, nothing smells; the air is scoured, it is as clean as the inside of a bell. But the breath had a smell. It was faint, and it was warm, and it was the smell of the inside of a mouth: of spit and old teeth and the sour sweetness of a tongue, and under that, very far under, something like turned earth, like the bottom of a grave when the spade goes through the last of the clay into whatever is beneath.

"Hello," Agnes said.

No one answered. The breath stopped. She waited for it to come again and it did not, and she understood with a slow sinking horror that it was waiting too. That whatever breathed in there had heard her voice, and had stopped breathing to listen, the way she had stopped breathing to watch.

The grille swung out on hinges that had not been greased since October and they screamed, a long iron shriek that went up the hill, and came back. Behind the grille the plank door was swollen in its frame. She put her shoulder into it twice, and the door came away from the frame with a crack of breaking ice and swung inward into the dark.

Inside the vault it was not dark, quite. The grey dawn came in through the door and lay on the floor in a long trapezoid, striped with the shadows of the bars. It was not warmer. People thought a vault would be warmer, like a root cellar. The granite had been drinking the cold since November and it gave it back now, all of it, and the air inside had the thick, motionless, mineral bite of the bottom of a freezer chest. Her eyelashes stuck together when she blinked. The fine hairs inside her nose had gone stiff on the walk up the hill, and now, in the stillness, she could hear them crackle when she breathed.

She stood in the doorway and let her eyes come round.

The vault was deeper than it was wide. Anders had cut it a full eight metres back into the hill and the ceiling was a barrel vault of fitted stone, black with a century of lamp soot, furred with hoarfrost in long white feathers that grew down from the joints like the gills of a mushroom. Along both walls ran the oak racks, three tiers high. At the very back, where the light did not reach, the floor stepped down once, and in the middle of that lower step there was an iron ring set into a square slab of granite, a ring as big around as a dinner plate. She had seen it all her life. She had never seen it lifted. Her father said it was the drain. A vault has to have a drain, Agnes, or the spring melt rots the racks. She had believed him. Standing now in the white breath of her own body, looking at the ring in the dark, she found that she did not know why she had believed him, only that she had wanted to.

The caskets lay where she had put them. Two on Rack 1, lower and upper. Two on Rack 2. One alone on Rack 3, lower, at the back, nearest the step and the ring.

She listened.

Nothing. The tick of the stone contracting in the cold. Her own heart, too fast, a soft wet thudding in her ears.

Then, very faint, from the back: not a breath. A clicking. Small and quick and uneven, like someone in a far room shaking two dice in a cupped hand and never throwing them.

The register hung on its nail just inside the door: a ledger bound in green buckram that her father had started in 1974 when the old one filled. She took it down because it was what her hands knew how to do. Five entries this winter in her own square printing, pencil, because ink froze.

Dec 9. MOAR, Edwin J. 67. Rack 1, lower. Dec 14. BEAUDRY, Lorraine M. 88. Rack 1, upper. Dec 21. KOWALCHUK, Dale P. 71. Rack 2, lower. Dec 23. MARCHAND, Tyler J. 19. Rack 2, upper. Dec 29. OSKARSON, Ruth E. 52. Rack 3, lower.

She did not go to the back first.

Afterward, in the years she had left, she would think about that more than about anything else she did in the vault that morning. That the clicking was at the back, at Rack 3, and she knew it was at the back, and she turned to her left and went to Rack 1, lower, to Edwin Moar, because he was first in the book, and she had been taught her whole life to do things in order.

She told herself it was so that she would miss no one. She told herself many things.

The caskets were the cheap ones the town kept in the basement of the Legion hall, pressed steel painted with a wood-grain transfer to look like walnut, with a seam all the way around where the lid met the shell and six screws along each side. Not bolts. Screws. The lids were sealed with a rubber gasket so the boxes would keep through a winter in the vault, and the gasket was frozen to the steel the way a child's tongue freezes to a pump handle.

She had a ratchet screwdriver in the truck at the bottom of the hill. She did not go back for it. She would not walk away down the hill and leave the clicking alone in the dark. She had a multitool in the breast pocket of her parka and she knelt on the stone beside Edwin Moar with the multitool in her fist.

Through her long johns and her canvas work pants the floor was a plate of iron. The cold came up into her kneecaps and settled in the joint, a deep, wet, wrongful cold, as if the bones themselves had been replaced with something colder than bone.

The first screw turned. It turned a quarter, stuck, and turned again with a squeal of zinc on steel, and came out, and dropped from her fingers onto the floor and bounced away into the dark under the rack with a little silver chime. The second rounded out at once; the bit skated off the cross and took a bright curl of transfer paint off the lid. She tried to hold the head of the screw steady with the thumb of her other hand and could not tell whether she was touching it. She looked at her thumb to see where it was. She knew without looking that the tip of it under the wool would be white, and she looked anyway. She pulled the liner glove off with her teeth to see.

It was white. The bloodless white of a candle, from the tip to the first joint. She pressed it to the lid of the casket to brace the bit, and the bare skin stuck to the steel at once. When she pulled it away, a disc of skin the size of a fingernail stayed behind on the painted walnut, thin and translucent as the skin on hot milk. There was no blood. The flesh beneath was pink and shining and she could not feel it at all.

She put the glove back on. She put the chopper back on over it. And it was then, kneeling with her ruined thumb pressed into her armpit, that she heard the second sound.

It came from across the narrow aisle, from Rack 2, lower. It was under the clicking, and much quieter, and it was wet. A slow catching rasp, a pause, a rasp. Like a man breathing in his sleep through a mouth stuffed with cloth.

Rack 2, lower, was Dale Kowalchuk.

Agnes looked at the steel side of his casket in the grey light. She looked at the register on its nail. She heard her father's voice as clearly as if he were kneeling beside her: In order. Do them in order. And she told herself that it was the oak of the racks taking the cold, that old wood groans and sighs in a hard frost, that she had heard the racks do it every winter of her life. She told herself that so firmly she almost heard the wood in the sound. Then she bent her head and went back to Edwin's screws.

She worked the rest of them by sight, which is to say by no feeling whatever: by watching her hand at the end of her arm and telling it what to do, as if it were someone else's hand, as if she were the sexton and it were the Kowalchuk boy, slow and willing and a little stupid. Push. Turn. Again. Turn. Eleven screws came out. She put them in her parka pocket one by one, because a Lindqvist did not leave screws on the floor.

The gasket did not let go.

She stood, and her knees did not want to straighten and then straightened all at once with a pain like a hinge breaking, and she put the flat blade of the multitool into the seam at the head of the casket and leaned on it. Nothing. She leaned harder. The blade bent. She put both hands on the handle and her whole weight behind it, and the lid came up a finger's width with a long tearing sigh.

And something inside the casket sighed with it.

She nearly let go. She nearly ran. She stood with her weight on the bent blade and her heart going in her throat like a moth in a jar, and she understood, slowly, that the sigh was the satin: that the quilted satin lining on the underside of the lid had frozen fast to the steel and to something else beneath it, and as the lid rose, the satin was tearing. She got her fingers into the gap, chopper and liner and all, and lifted.

Edwin Moar had gone through the ice on Little Kettle Lake on the eighth of December, checking his net in the dark with a lantern, and had been under the ice for forty minutes before the men from the Legion found the hole by the light still burning on the bottom and got a pike pole into his collar. When they laid him in the box on the Legion kitchen table, his big chapped hands folded on his good Sunday shirt and his white hair combed wet across his scalp, he had looked like a man asleep in church. Agnes had stood beside the table with her toque in her hands. She had thought: he is at peace.

His hands were not folded.

They were raised above his face, flat, palms up, pressed to where the underside of the lid had been. As she lifted, they came up with it a little, an inch, two inches, frozen fast to the shreds of satin, so that it seemed for a moment that he was reaching after the lid as it went away from him, reaching for the light. Then the satin tore free of his fingers with a sound like a page ripping and his arms stayed where they were, up, rigid, held in the air by nothing but the cold.

The satin hung from his fingers in long pale strips. The pillow under his head had been split open and the cotton batting had come out of it and lay around his face in grey clots, like the stuffing of a dead bird. His face was turned up and a little to one side, and his mouth was shut, and his eyes were shut, and his white hair was full of frost.

His knuckles were open to the bone.

Not cut. Worn. Worn the way the toe of a child's boot wears through on a kickboard, a little more every day, until there is a hole. The skin had gone first, then the thin pad beneath, and then the white knobs of the knuckles had come through. They had been ground against something for a long time, and the something was the lid, and then the cold had come for them and frozen them in the shape they had been worn into, so that his hands looked carved, like the hands of a wooden saint whose paint has flaked away from the joints.

She held the lid up on her forearms and made herself look at the inside of it. The quilted satin was scored in long tracks, parallel, four and four and four, raking from the head end toward the middle and stopping, and starting again. Hundreds of them. They overlapped and crossed until the satin was not quilted any more but combed, carded, worked into a nap like the felt on a billiard table. At the head end, where the lining met the bare steel of the lid, there were small dark marks pressed into the frost. Ten of them, in two arcs. They looked like the footprints of a sparrow in snow.

She did not understand them. She looked at them, and at his raised hands, and back at them. And then she understood, and counted his fingernails to be sure, and there were not ten.

She let the lid down slowly, so slowly, the way you would close a door on a sleeping child. It settled on its warped seam with a soft steel tock. She stood up straight and the vault tipped sideways and the floor came up and struck her in the hip and the shoulder, because she could not feel her feet.

She lay on the stone with her cheek against the floor, and the cold of it burned like a slap. From where she lay she could see under the racks, all the way to the back of the vault, to the lower step and the slab and the ring.

The clicking had stopped.

In its place, very slow, very deep, so low she felt it in her cheekbone where it lay on the granite more than she heard it, the hill drew a breath.

She did not know how long she lay there. Long enough for the breath to go out of the hill again, a long settling exhalation that she felt in her ribs, in the roots of her teeth. Long enough for the clicking to begin again. Long enough that when she tried to get up, the cheek she had lain on had stuck to the stone, and she had to lift her head slowly, slowly, feeling the skin pull and stretch and finally let go, and put her mitten to her face and bring it away with a smear of something pink on the leather.

She got her knees under her. She got up by climbing Rack 1 like a ladder, hand over hand, and she stood with her forehead against the cold oak and breathed.

In order. Do them in order. Write it down.

She took the pencil out of the spine of the register. It was a carpenter's pencil, flat, sharpened with a knife, and she held it in her fist like a child holding a crayon because her fingers would not close around it any other way. On the page, under Edwin's line, she wrote:

Moar. Hands raised. Lid satin torn. Knuckles to bone. Nails gone (10).

The letters were huge and wandering. The pencil kept turning in her fist and she kept turning it back. When she was done she looked at what she had written and it did not look like her handwriting at all. It looked like a dead man's hand.

She hung the register back on its nail and turned to Rack 1, upper. Behind her, across the aisle, the wet rasp from Rack 2 came and went. It was slower now, with longer gaps between. She did not turn around.

Lorraine Beaudry had been found on the fourteenth of December sitting at her own kitchen table on Water Street with the furnace out and the woodstove cold and the cat gone, wearing her quilted housecoat and her good pearl earrings, her hands folded on an open hymnal, as though she had stopped in the middle of a verse to think about the next line. She was eighty-eight. She had taught Agnes the piano for six years in the front parlour of that same house, and had smacked her wrists with a pencil when they sagged, and said, A lady's hands are the last thing about her to grow old, Agnes, and the first thing people look at. She had worn her white hair in a bun all her life, pinned with long old-fashioned steel hairpins, and Agnes had pinned it for her one last time on the Legion table, because there was no one else to do it, and put the pins in exactly as Lorraine had worn them, seven pins, in a crown.

The upper rack came to the level of Agnes's chest. She could not kneel to it. She stood on the edge of the lower rack beside Edwin's casket, one boot on the oak and one on the steel of his lid, and she felt him under her boot, felt the lid give a fraction on its broken seal, and tried not to think about his hands just beneath the sole, raised, reaching.

The screws on Lorraine's casket were easier. Or else Agnes had learned already how to do the thing with no hands at all. She worked the multitool with her fist and her forearm and her shoulder, and counted aloud as she went, ett, två, tre, and the screws came out and went into her pocket and chinked against Edwin's.

The gasket gave at once. The lid came up light and loose, as though it had been waiting.

Lorraine had used her hairpins.

That was what Agnes saw before anything else. Not the old woman's face, not her hands. The pins. All seven of them, the long dull steel pins from her bun, bent into hooks. Someone had bent them, slowly, in the dark, against something hard, with fingers that were eighty-eight years old and had played Chopin in the Legion hall at Christmas every year since the war. They were jammed into the seam where the lid met the casket, from the inside, one beside the next, in a careful row along the right-hand side of the box at the level of her shoulder. They had frozen there. They stuck out of the gasket like the tines of a broken comb.

Around each pin, the satin had been worked loose. Not torn. Unpicked. Patiently, in a small neat oval, the way you would unpick a hem with a seam ripper, the thread drawn out stitch by stitch, so that the old woman could get at the steel behind it with her hook. The paint inside the shell was scratched through to grey metal in seven bright little craters, each one a perfect record of a few hours' work.

Her nails had split. Every one, lengthwise, down the middle, to the quick and past it, so that each fingertip ended in two separate horny points like the hoof of a deer. Two of them had come away entirely. Agnes found them stuck in the frozen rubber of the gasket, translucent and yellowish, like flakes of mica in a stone.

Her mouth was open. The small muscles that hold the jaw had let go at some point after the end, and it hung, and her dentures had come loose and lay crosswise on her tongue, upper and lower together, grinning sideways out of the dark of her throat with their perfect pink gums.

On the inside of her right wrist, the soft white place where a nurse would take a pulse, there was a ring of small bruised dents. Agnes looked at them for a long time. They were regular. They were clean. They were exactly the size and shape of the dentures on Lorraine's tongue. She had taken her teeth in her fist, in the dark, and bitten herself with them. To stay awake. Or to stop herself screaming, in that box, with the lid an inch from her nose. Or because there was nothing else in the box to bite.

And there was one more thing, and Agnes did not see it until she had begun to lower the lid, and the light from the door fell slantwise across the satin on the underside.

Lorraine had written on it.

With the point of a hairpin, in the soft quilting of the lid above her face, she had scratched letters. The satin had pulled and puckered around each stroke so that they stood up from the surface in little ridges, like the letters on a gravestone after a century of weather. The writing was large and wild, but it was a lady's hand still. You could see the piano teacher in the loops.

IT IS UNDER US

And below that, smaller, the letters sliding downhill into the corner of the lid as though the hand writing them had been very tired:

it breathes when we do

Agnes held the lid open on her forearms and read it four times. Then she lowered it slowly and set it on the casket crooked, a gap along one side you could have put two fingers into, because her hands would no longer do anything as fine as setting a lid square.

From the back of the vault, at the bottom of the step, the iron ring in the floor gave a single small chiming tap, like a spoon against a cup.

She wrote in the register. Her father had told her that if a thing happened in the vault it went in the book, and the pencil kept falling out of her mitten, and she kept picking it up off the floor, and on the third time she bent for it she saw her own breath go down past her face toward the stone and saw it bend, as it fell, toward the back of the vault. Drawn. The way smoke bends toward a flue.

Beaudry. Hairpins in seam (7). Nails split. Bit wrist with own teeth. Wrote IT IS UNDER US.

She stood and looked at that line for a while. Then she listened for the rasp from Rack 2, and it came, after a long time, very faint. She went to it.

Dale Kowalchuk was seventy-one, and the father of the Kowalchuk boy, and had walked home from the Legion on the night of the twenty-first after the Christmas meat draw with a frozen turkey under each arm, and had been found the next morning in the ditch on Mission Road, curled on his side around the turkeys, his parka open to the wind and his shirt unbuttoned to the waist. Dr. Amundsen said that was common. At the very end of freezing the blood rushes back to the skin, he said, and they feel themselves burning, and they undress. Paradoxical undressing, it was called.

The Kowalchuk boy had asked her to put his father's teeth in the pocket of his good jacket. "He hated wearing them," he said. "Hurt his gums. He'd want them with him but he wouldn't want them in." So Agnes had wrapped the full set, upper and lower, in a clean handkerchief, and put them in the left breast pocket of Dale's brown Sunday jacket and buttoned the flap over them, and Dale had gone into the box with his mouth soft and fallen in around the gums, like an old man's mouth, which it was.

His screws took her a long time. Her fingers had gone past white now into a kind of waxen grey, and when she bent them they bent all together, like a hand made of one piece. She had to hold the multitool in both fists and turn her whole body from the hips. Each screw was a quarter turn, a rest, a quarter turn. She tried to hurry now and her hands would not hurry. Through the steel, under her fists, the rasp went on: in, a long wait, out. Each wait was longer than the last. She counted the screws. She lost count. She began again.

When the lid came up, the first thing she smelled was the turkey.

Not turkey. Meat. Raw cold meat and old blood, the smell of the back of the Co-op where the butcher hung the deer in November. It came up out of the box on a breath of air that was, very faintly, less cold than the vault.

Dale's eyes were open, and they moved.

They rolled in their sockets, slow and stiff, like the eyes of a doll tipped back, and found her face in the grey light from the door. They were bloodshot to the rims. Frost had grown on the lashes in tiny white thorns. His lips moved. He had no teeth to shape anything with and no breath to spare, and what came out of him was not a word but the wet soft ghost of one, two syllables, the first one open and the second one hissed.

Ag-nes.

A breath came out after it, a small grey plume, and rose past her face toward the black ceiling of the vault. Agnes waited for the next one, bent over the box with her wooden hands on the steel. She waited a long time. She pulled off her liner and put her bare wrist to his forehead, and it was not warm. But it was less cold than the steel, less cold than the stone, less cold than her own skin, and while she held it there she felt it go, the way you feel the last heat leave a stove lid in the night, until he was the same as everything else in the vault.

The eyes stayed on her. They did not blink again.

He had been alive when she knelt beside Edwin. He had been alive when she was reading Lorraine's lid four times. He had been saying her name, she understood, for a long time, through the steel, and she had heard it, and called it the oak.

Then she made herself look at the rest of him.

Dale had chewed through his pillow. The batting was in his beard and his eyebrows and on his tongue, and his soft toothless mouth was full of it. He had got his left arm up beside his face in the narrow space, crooked at the elbow, and the sleeve of his good brown jacket was gone from the wrist to the elbow, and the shirt sleeve under it, and much of what was under the shirt sleeve.

He had been bitten.

Not once. Over and over, all along the inside of the forearm, a long ragged trench of it from the wrist to the crook of the elbow, as if something had been trying to reach something underneath the skin and had worked at it, and worked at it, and found it. The edges of the wound were frozen hard and black. Down in the trench Agnes could see the two long bones of the arm, side by side, pale grey, scored with fine marks like the marks a rasp leaves on a hoof.

There was very little blood. Agnes would think about that for a long time, on the nights when she could not sleep. Very little blood. Because there had been very little left in him that was warm enough to move. Or because something had taken it.

She thought: he did it to himself. Like Lorraine. In the dark. To stay awake. She thought it fiercely, the way you hold a door shut.

Then she reached into the box, past the ruined arm, with her grey wooden hand, and fumbled at the left breast pocket of his jacket. She could not feel the button. She tore the flap off. Inside, wrapped in a clean handkerchief, exactly where she had buttoned them, were Dale Kowalchuk's teeth.

She took them out and unwrapped them and held them in her palm. Upper and lower. Pink gums, yellow-white teeth, a little chip off the left eye tooth where he'd bitten a bottle cap at a wedding in 1981. Dry. Clean. Untouched.

She looked at his mouth, soft and toothless around the wad of batting. She looked at his arm.

The bite marks were in two arcs, like Lorraine's on her wrist, like the marks of Edwin's nails in the frost. But there were too many of them in each arc. Far too many, and too close, and too small, a fine dense crescent of punctures like the marks a staple gun leaves, and the arcs did not meet at the sides the way a human bite does. They went around. They made a ring. Ring after overlapping ring along the inside of his arm, each one the size of the mouth of a teacup, each one a perfect circle of tiny pits.

Agnes had grown up at the edge of Little Kettle Lake. She knew that mark. Every summer the lake trout came up in the nets with those rings on their flanks, livid and perfect, and in the middle of some of them, still fastened, still pulsing, the grey eyeless length of the thing that had made them.

She put Dale's teeth back in the handkerchief and put the handkerchief back in his pocket and closed the lid on him, and as it came down she saw, for the first time, that the bottom of his casket, under his hips, was not flat. The steel floor of the box bowed downward into a shallow dish. And in the very centre of the dish, under the small of his back, there was a hole the size of a teacup, its edges curled downward and inward, the zinc-plated steel worn bright and smooth around the rim, as smooth as the inside of a well-used pot.

Not punched. Not cut. Worn through. From below.

She knelt and looked under Rack 2, lower, at the oak slats that held up the box. There was a hole in the slat directly under it, a round hole, the edges of the oak chewed into soft pale fibre. Below that was the floor of the vault. And in the floor, in the joint between two granite flags, there was a black seam, an inch wide, that ran away toward the back of the vault, toward the step, toward the iron ring.

The seam breathed. She felt it on her face. A long, slow, faintly warm exhalation, smelling of mouths and old blood and the bottom of a grave.

She wrote Kowalchuk in the book, and then she could not think of anything else to write. She stood there with the pencil in her fist for a long time. Finally she wrote Bitten, and underlined it twice, and the second line went off the edge of the page.

She should have gone then. She should have gone down the hill and telephoned the OPP detachment at Moosonee, and Dr. Amundsen, and the Kowalchuk boy, anyone, everyone. She stood with the green register hanging from her mitten and her breath drifting away from her toward the back of the vault, and she did not go, because she was remembering.

Last January. The three weeks after her father went into the vault, when she had come up the hill every morning, as she always did, to clear the path and look at the padlock. She had heard a clicking then too. Small and quick, through the grille, low down. She had stood with her mitten on the brass lock and told herself it was the slate on the roof contracting in the cold, and she had believed it, because a Lindqvist did not open the vault in winter. Whatever you hear.

On the ninth morning, or the tenth, there had been something else under the clicking. A sound so faint she could have been making it up out of the hiss of her own breath. Two syllables. The first one open, the second one hissed.

She had stood there a long time with her hand on the lock. Then she had cleared the path, in order, from the door down to the gate, and gone home and made coffee, and the next morning the sound had stopped, and she had been relieved. She remembered that most of all. She had been relieved.

Behind her, at the back of the vault, the clicking went on. One casket still stood between her and it.

Tyler Marchand had been nineteen. His snowmobile had rolled on him on the night of the twenty-second in the slough behind his parents' place on the Albany road, and he had lain under it all night with the engine block across his thighs and the snow coming down, and in the morning his father had come out with the tractor and found him by his red helmet. He had cut her grass for two summers and been paid in cash and rhubarb pie.

His casket was on the upper tier of Rack 2, and his screws, when she climbed up onto Dale's lid with her boot on the steel above Dale's ruined arm, were already loose.

All twelve. Backed out a quarter turn, a half turn, a full turn, so that their pan heads stood up proud of the lid. She could turn them with her fist without the tool. As if someone inside had been working at them, very patiently, from the wrong side, with nothing but the pressure of a body against the lid, pushing, and pushing, until the threads gave.

She could not get the lid all the way open. He had kicked the footboard out of true. The steel at the foot of the box was bowed outward in two round bulges like the bottoms of bottles, side by side, the size of a young man's heels, and the bulge had jammed the lid on the warped seam. She got it up eight inches and looked in sideways, with her cheek against the edge of the steel, with the grey light from the door behind her.

He had one shoe off. He had kicked it off, she supposed, to get more purchase on the footboard, and the sock had come away with it, and the bare foot was black to the instep. The toes were gone. Not lost to the frost the way toes go, blackening and shrinking and falling. Gone. There were neat round sockets where they had been, five, one for each, and around each socket the skin was pocked with the same fine ring of punctures she had seen on Dale's arm.

His face was turned up toward the gap she had made. His mouth was wide. And on the underside of the lid, at the height of his mouth, the satin was gone, and the plywood stiffener behind it was gnawed. Not scratched. Gnawed, in a ragged oval as big as a hand, the wood chewed into pale soft splinters that stood up in the frost like the bristles of a brush. Two of his front teeth were not in his mouth any more. They were in the plywood. Agnes could see them, white chips driven deep into the grain. He had bitten the lid of his own coffin until his teeth broke. He had been trying to get away from what was coming up through the bottom of the box.

She looked under his head. The steel floor of his casket was dished, like Dale's. In the middle of the dish there was no hole.

There was the start of one. A circle of bright worn metal, scored and polished, the paint gone, thin as foil in the middle. Unfinished. As though whatever had been working at it from below had heard something better, and turned away.

The clicking at the back of the vault went on, quick and light and ceaseless. And beneath it, under it, holding it up like a hand under a cup, the long slow breath of the hill came and went.

Agnes slid down off the rack and stood on the floor of the vault with her back to the door, and for the first time she let herself look at Rack 3.

Ruth Oskarson had taught grade four. She had been found on the twenty-ninth in her Corolla in the snowbank at the bottom of the school hill, the engine dead and the tank empty, slumped against the wheel with her hands in her armpits. Dr. Amundsen had flown in from Moosonee on the mail plane and looked at her for a quarter of an hour on the Legion table and signed. She had no pulse. She had no breath to fog the mirror he held to her lips. She was as cold as the steel counter she lay on.

Her casket sat alone on the bottom tier at the back, a foot from the edge of the step, and the iron ring in the slab below the step was turned up on its hinge, standing on edge, as if a hand had lifted it to knock.

The clicking came from inside the box. Kneeling beside it, Agnes knew what it was at last.

Teeth. Small hard teeth chattering together, very fast and very light, the way a child's teeth go coming out of the lake in June.

From the seam of the lid by the head, a thin grey thread of breath came out, rose, and drifted toward the grille. And from the seam in the floor behind her, under the step, another breath came up, slow and enormous and warm, and the two met in the air above the casket and mingled, and went up together.

It breathes when we do.

"Ruth," Agnes said. Her voice was cracked and very small. "It's Agnes. Hang on."

She could not do the screws. She knew it before she tried. Her fingers were a bundle of wooden pegs she could swing from the wrist. She tried anyway. She held the multitool in her fist like a dagger and drove the bit into the first screw and turned her whole forearm and shoulder, and it went a half turn, and she did it again, and again, counting aloud, because counting was order and order was all she had left. Twelve screws. She dropped the tool twice and found it by sight in the dark under the rack, where the black seam in the floor ran straight under Ruth's box, and the oak slat above it was chewed through. She pulled her chopper off to grip better and could not get it back on and left it lying on the stone.

At the eighth screw she heard herself crying. At the eleventh she saw that the liner on her right hand had gone dark at the fingertips, and then wet, and then stiff, and that she had split two of her own nails on the screw heads and not felt it. She looked at the blood soaking up through the wool and thought very clearly: so this is how it happens. You just don't feel it.

The twelfth screw would not turn. She put the flat blade into the seam and leaned her whole body on it, and the lid came up with the long tearing sigh she knew now. The breath came out of the gap all at once in a warm grey cloud, warm against her face, and it smelled of the inside of a person.

Ruth's eyes were open.

The satin over her was torn in one long slit from chest to chin, done slowly by one hand, and the hand had stopped there with its fingers hooked in the tear. Her nails were split and black. There was frost in her eyebrows and on the lashes of the open eyes, and her jaw was going and going, the teeth knocking together in that tiny, tireless rhythm. In the gap they made each time, there was a breath, shallow as a bird's.

The breath was not coming out of her. It was going in.

Under her, the floor of the casket was gone. A round hole was worn through the steel beneath her back, and through the oak slat beneath that, down into the black seam in the stone. Agnes could not see what was in it. She could see only that the hole was not empty. Something filled it, pressed close against Ruth's back between the shoulder blades, darker than the dark around it, and it moved. Not much. A slow swelling, and a slow subsiding. Each time it swelled, a long warm draught came up through the hole and through the body lying over it, and Ruth's chest rose a hair, and the breath that came out of the seam in the floor was drawn in between her chattering teeth.

It was breathing for her. It was keeping her warm, the way you bank a fire for the night so there will be coals in the morning. So that she would last.

Ruth's eyes did not move to Agnes. They were fixed on the lid. They had been fixed on the lid, Agnes understood, for four days.

She did not remember most of getting her out. She remembered getting her arms under Ruth's shoulders and pulling, and Ruth not coming. Something was holding her from beneath. Agnes pulled with her whole body, her heels skidding on the frost, and she felt it pull back: not hard, not angrily, but with the patient, almost tender pull of a mouth that does not want to let go of what it is drinking. Ruth's body bent between them like a bow. Then there was a sound Agnes would hear for the rest of her life at the edge of sleep, in the suck of her boots in spring mud, in the pop of a cork, in the noise a calf makes taking its mouth from the teat: a long wet sucking, and a soft release. Ruth came free into her arms. From the hole in the bottom of the box a gust of air came up, hot as breath on a winter window, and something in the dark beneath the floor sighed.

She did not look into the hole. She would never be able to say whether that was courage or the opposite of it.

She remembered pulling off her parka and throwing it over Ruth, and the cold hitting her through her sweater like water. She remembered dragging Ruth across the floor on the lid of Lorraine's casket because it was the loose one, and saying sorry to Lorraine, over and over. She remembered that all the way to the door, something came behind them in the dark. She never heard it touch the floor. She heard only its breath, slow and warm and close at the back of her neck, in time with her own. When she stopped to get a better grip, it stopped. When she gasped, it gasped. At the line where the grey light fell across the stone it halted, and stayed there, breathing, while she dragged Ruth out through the shrieking grille into the white enormous morning. Behind her the iron ring fell back on its slab with a clang that rang through the whole hill.

She remembered Ruth's teeth, the whole way down the hill, chattering against her collarbone through her sweater and into the bone. Like something small, knocking to be let in.

The doctor said afterward that it was known. Nobody is dead until they're warm and dead, he said, as though he were quoting, and Agnes understood that he was, and that he had known the line when he looked at Ruth on the Legion table and signed anyway, because the mail plane was waiting on the ice and he had seen a great many cold people and every one of them had been dead. He did not ask about the wound on her back, the perfect ring of tiny punctures the size of a dinner plate. He wrote pressure ulcer, and did not look at Agnes when he wrote it.

That was the coldest winter in Tamarack since 1923. Three people froze in their beds in the second week of January, in houses with the stove still lit. Agnes did not go up the hill again until March.

Ruth lost both hands at the wrist and most of both feet. For a long time she did not speak, and when she did, she spoke about the vault only once. Agnes visited her in the hospital at Timmins, and Ruth looked at her across the bed with eyes that never seemed to blink enough, and then down at Agnes's own hands. The fingers had come back to her, mostly, though two of the nails grew in ridged and yellow like horn.

"They were all awake," Ruth said. "All of us. In the dark. We could hear each other. Lorraine sang, at first." Her jaw trembled, and Agnes heard the faint dry click of her teeth. "It went to the others first, because I was the newest and the warmest. It was saving me."

She looked at Agnes for a long time.

"Dale heard you come in," she said. "He said your name. He kept saying it the whole time you were at Edwin."

Agnes did not answer. There was nothing in the world to answer it with.

In April the frost went out of the hill a foot at a time, and Agnes dug. She dug four graves, one a day, in the order the dead had come in, and lowered Edwin and Lorraine and Dale and Tyler with the Kowalchuk boy on the other strap. Nobody but she knew what was in the boxes. She had screwed every lid back down herself, with her new yellow nails. On the fifth day she went to her father's grave beside her mother's with the Bucyrus, and dug him up.

She opened him alone, in the April dusk, kneeling in the wet clay with the lantern beside her.

The satin was torn. His nails were in it. And on the underside of the steel lid, scratched deep and square with the pin of his tie clip, in the printing he had taught her in this same cemetery when she was eleven, were the words he had not been able to tell her in the back bedroom.

AGNES. I HEARD YOU AT THE GRILLE EVERY MORNING. IT IS ALWAYS AWAKE. WE FEED IT THE WINTER DEAD OR IT COMES DOWN THE HILL FOR THE LIVING. YOU DID NOT OPEN IT. GOOD GIRL.

Under his back there was a hole the size of a teacup, worn smooth.

She put the lid back. She filled the grave. Then she went to the toolshed and sat with the green register on her knees and turned the pages back: her father's hand, the brown copperplate ledger beneath it, the schoolmaster's script beneath that. Received. Rack 1, lower. Rack 2, upper. And every April, in the margin, Interred, a date and a tick. Eleven hundred and twelve ticks since 1898. She counted them, and it took the whole afternoon. Not one of those boxes had ever been opened. You did things in order.

At the bottom of the last page, in letters as steady as she could make them, she wrote:

Dec 29. OSKARSON, Ruth E. 52. Rack 3, lower. Released Jan 2. Breathing.

That night was the first warm night of the year. The snow went off the roof in long soft slides, and water ran in the eaves, and the old house, which had cracked and muttered all winter like a man in a fever, lay quiet at last. Agnes lay in the back bedroom under one quilt instead of four, in the bed where her father had died with his face to the window, and listened to the quiet. Anders had built the house out of the same green spruce he used for the town's first coffins. He had built it inside the gate, at the foot of the hill, on the ground the hill came down to.

She was nearly asleep when she heard it.

Under the floorboards. Under the bed. Slow and deep and unhurried: a breath going in, a long wait, a breath going out.

Agnes held her breath.

Under the floor, the breath stopped.

She lay rigid in the dark with her lungs burning and the edges of her sight beginning to spark, and listened to the silence listen back. When she could not bear it any longer she let her breath out, as quietly as she could, between her teeth.

Beneath her, softly, patiently, something let its breath out too.

And through the mattress, through the boards, against the small of her back, Agnes felt the floor of the old house begin, very gently, to grow warm.