Sect Year 6 · first month · night of day 10 · the fifty-sixth life: the Mott basin, his twelfth year
The cough settled into his father’s chest in the autumn Hollis turned twelve, and by the first frost it hadn’t left. It came in the mornings first, a dry bark that bent his father double over the bench. Then it came at night, and then it came on the path, so that his father stopped halfway up the slope and leaned on the wall with one hand flat against the stone until it passed. He didn’t complain of it. He didn’t complain of anything. But he could no longer carry the knife up the path without stopping for breath, and so Hollis carried it. On the morning the fall was due, he took the post’s first notch of the year by himself.
The knife was heavier in his hands than it had been the year before. He had grown, and the handle was bound now in a strip of old cord, wrapped tight by his grandfather and worn dark by his father’s palm. Hollis set the point below the last cut, as he had watched it done for as long as he could remember. Four short strokes, one after another, the bright scar opening in the grey wood. Then the long pull of the blade along the groove.
