Sect Year 1 · third month · night of day 12 · the fourth life: the bell-hall on the Cold Tooth, his eighty-first year
By the winter he was eighty-one, Tesh could no longer manage the climb from the bench to the rope. He had tried in the autumn and found that his legs would not hold him past the third step. So he dragged a stool to the bell-frame and sat on it, and rang from there, leaning out with his right arm while the left lay across his knee and did not feel like his. His breath came in short pulls. Each time he drew on the rope, his chest made a sound like a saw that had caught in green wood, and he waited for the sound to stop before he let go.
A boy from the lower fold had come up in the autumn with a sack of turf on his back. He had stood in the doorway with the sack dripping, and asked whether Tesh meant to die on the stool. Tesh had said he didn’t know. The boy had nodded as though that were a sensible answer and said his grandmother had died sitting up in bed, with her shoes still on, because she had wanted to be ready for the morning. Then he had stacked the turf by the stove and gone down the trail without waiting to be paid.
