He had a name. He'd chosen one in the hour after, in that terrible quiet hour when Eleanor slept, and he sat with the small wrapped form that hadn't cried and wouldn't now, and he said the name out loud into the empty room just once. William. He'd never said it again. Not to the doctor who came too late.
Not to to neighbors who came with food and careful condolences. Not to the preacher who said the Lord gives and the Lord takes in a way that made Hadley want to say something impolite in a church. Not to anyone, just that once. In that quiet, terrible hour, just to give it somewhere to land. He stood in the cold looking at the blank marker.
Then he went back inside to start the fire. The days developed a shape, which surprised him, though he supposed it shouldn't have. People are adaptive creatures. You put any combination of people in a small space long enough and they build routines, the way water finds channels. It's not a decision.
It just happens. Hadley out first. Fire built up, water heated, Nayeli and Tsula down from the loft. Tsula's ankle making the ladder a careful operation. Nayeli always a step behind her, hands ready.
Breakfast, divided evenly. No one said who got what. Then the work of the day. Hadley hadn't expected them to work. They were recovering.
They were guests. Strange to use that word, but what else? He expected them to rest, to sit by the fire, to do the things you do when your body has been to the edge of what it can take. Instead, Nayeli picked up a broom on the second morning and swept the floor without asking. Tsula organized the supply shelf, jars she couldn't read the labels on, arranged into a system that turned out to be by size and color, which was at least as logical as anything Hadley had been doing.
He came back in from the barn to find the table cleared, the floor swept, a damp rag working across the shelves. He stood in the doorway. "You don't have to." "We know." Nayeli said brisk.
Moving. He stood there for another moment, then he went back to the barn. On the sixth evening, something shifted, small, almost imperceptible, but there. Tsula was finishing a section of her wall drawing. She'd added more figures, a different scene now, something with mountains and what appeared to be a river.
When she made a sound, a short breath. Almost a laugh. Hadley looked up from the harness he was mending. "What?" "This line." she said, pointing at a curve in her drawing.
"I made it wrong." "The mountain looks like a sleeping dog." He looked at it. It did look slightly like a sleeping dog. "The mountain or the dog?"