Sect Year 2 · third month · night of day 6 · the twentieth life: the high road milestone, Halde’s forty-third year
Halde grew up at the stone.
He grew up the way the milestone grew old, a little each season, without anyone quite seeing it happen. The cloth wore thin and was replaced. The steps went soft at the middle and were cut again by his own hands. His father’s back bent further each winter, until one autumn the mule came up the road alone. Halde walked down to the bend to meet it and found his father sitting in the cart with a blanket over his knees and his eyes shut. He didn’t wake in the valley. Halde buried him beside the grandmother, and climbed back up the same afternoon, because the stone had been waiting all day and the light was going.
He courted a carter’s daughter who brought bread up the steps each week, in a basket with a cloth tied over it. She rarely asked him questions. She set the basket down beside the stone, sat on the top step with her shawl pulled round her, and watched the dead man’s hands for as long as the bread took to cool. The first time she did it, she said nothing at all. The second time, she said, “You can tell me when you know.”
