He didn't argue. The night was clear, full of stars. The kind of sky you only get in high country, the kind that makes you understand you're looking at something real, not decoration, just the actual size and shape of everything. They walked around to the back of the cabin, the two markers clear in the starlight. Snow mostly gone from around them now, just the wood and the earth and the cold air and the creek running somewhere in the dark.
Hadley crouched down in front of the smaller marker, the one with only the year. He looked at it for a moment. His breath came out steady, in out. He put the chisel to the wood. He'd carved Eleanor's name with hands that shook, he remembered the particular impossibility of it.
Having to make something permanent of something you weren't finished with. This time his hands were steady, four letters, just the name. He carved slowly, carefully, the way you do something that matters, the way you do something that's been waiting. W. I.
L. And then below it, in smaller letters, beloved son, December 1886. He sat back, looked at it, the name in the wood, out in the world, not locked inside him anymore, not just said once into a room and then nowhere. Here real, he felt something move through him, not grief or not only, something else, too, something that maybe grief becomes when you finally let it have its shapes, something like release. Nayeli was beside him.
She didn't say anything. She reached into her pocket and took out the small pine branch she'd been keeping. She'd kept it, he realized, kept it somewhere, brought it back out. She set it back on the marker, green against the carved letters. He looked at the branch.
He looked at the sky. He sat with it all for a long moment. Then he looked at Nayeli beside him. "Thank you," he said, a second time, for the same thing, which was not the same thing at all anymore. She nodded once.
They stayed a little longer. Then they went back inside. The snow started pulling back in earnest on a Wednesday in early March. Not dramatically, just incrementally less each morning. The south-facing slope of the yard showed brown grass at its edge, startling and bright looking against all the white.
The trickle of water from the north ridge started. That early spring sound, small and persistent, moving under ice and then around it. Hadley went out early and stood in the yard. And for the first time since October, he could smell earth. Actual earth underneath everything.
Coming back, he stood there a while. Breathing in something he hadn't smelled since October, earth. Coming back, that afternoon he started on the spring preparation. Things that needed doing before the ground fully softened. He went to the storage shed and began taking inventory.