There is a woman in the dark asking the dead to answer her, and she is not even afraid.
We do this too, God knows. I have knelt at my mother's grave and spoken to her as though the clay might warm. But I did it in daylight, quick, with a prayer to hurry the words along, and I did not linger, for the dead have their rest and it is not for us to trouble them. This one troubles them on purpose. She calls, she waits, she calls again, and the others round the table hold hands like frightened children and stare at a little board as though it were an altar.
They want the dead to knock. To rap once for yes. Lord above, I have buried three of my own, and never once did I wish them to knock. Let them lie still. Let them be past the mud and the cold and the ache in the back that never leaves. That is the only mercy a poor man is promised, that death is the end of the labor.
But these have no labor. That is the sickness of it. Their hands are soft, their bellies are full, and so they go hunting sorrow where none is needed, sitting in the dark to beg for grief like it were bread. A man who has truly wept does not summon it back for sport.
The candle gutters. They gasp. They think it is a soul.
It is a draft. The good Lord sends winter to the idle same as to the rest of us, and they have not the wit to feel it.