When Hassan lifted his forehead from the stone and sat back on his heels, a boy was watching him from the willows.
He was eight or nine, in a red knit cap, with a stick. Josu's grandson, Peio. He had been on the tower with the binoculars that morning. Now he crouched at the edge of the creek and studied Hassan the way boys study a lizard on a wall.
Hassan turned his head to the right and the left, for the greetings of peace. The boy's eyes followed him.
"The Arab did that," the boy said. "With his head on the ground."
"Which Arab?"
"The one in the hut. Up the north draw." He pointed with the stick, up the creek, past the last sheep fold. "We're not allowed. It's still his hut. If you go in, he. . ."
"Peio."
Leah stood on the path above the creek with a bucket in each hand. She said something in Basque, short and flat. The boy dropped the stick and ran up to the houses without looking back.
"A story," she said. "The children scare each other. It's an old herder's hut, half fallen in. Leave it alone."
She went on up the path. She walked as if the buckets were heavier than they were.
He took Adam with him, because he wasn't going to leave him anywhere now.
The draw ran north of Iturri for half an hour, through willow and then pines, with an old trail in the bottom that nobody had walked in years. Adam walked behind him with his hands in his sleeves. He didn't ask where they were going.
The hut stood where the draw opened into a small meadow with a spring. Dry stone. One room, built into the slope. A tin roof gone the color of dried blood. The door hung from its top hinge. Nailed to the lintel was a board painted green, and on it, in white Arabic letters, someone had written with great care: In the name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful.
Hassan read it twice. He hadn't seen his own alphabet on a wall since Jordan.
"What's it say?"
"What you say before you eat," Hassan said. "Before you do anything."
Inside it smelled of mice and old smoke. A cot with a rotted mattress. A stove made from an oil drum. A tin water barrel on its side, rusted through. In the back wall someone had chipped a shallow arch into the stone, chest high. Hassan opened Rania's compass and turned the dial. The arrow for Mecca pointed into the arch. Not a degree off.
Under the cot was a tin trunk with a hasp and no lock. Inside, wrapped in oilcloth that had kept out thirty-nine winters, lay a Quran in a green cloth cover, a pencil stub, a hand-drawn map and a ledger with a cracked brown spine. The map was of the cemetery in Sweetwater. Every grave was a small square with a number in it.
The ledger was in Arabic. The first page said: Yusuf Nasser, of Zahle in Lebanon, who herded sheep in California. Under it: I have come to finish what my grandmother only warned me about.
He read it on the doorstep in the sun, translating for Adam as he went.
Yusuf had heard of the valley in a sheep camp outside Bakersfield, from a Basque herder who wouldn't say the town's name after dark. The herder had a word for them, and Hassan read it twice: shedim. He had come up the north draw on the seventh of October 1987 with a mule, a spade and his father's prayer beads. He had watched the town from the ridge while he built.
"The twelfth," Hassan read. "At noon there is no smoke in the town and no one in the street, and the graves are raked shut. They sleep in the ground by day, like the dead they pretend to be. They have eaten men so long that they have become flesh, and what is flesh can die. One blow. Never two. The second gives back everything the first one took. It will beg for it. Let it beg."
He stopped reading.
He was nine, on the flat roof of Teta's house at the edge of the steppe, in the summer dark. His cousins were asleep around him, and Teta was still talking because he wasn't. A man walking home at night met a woman by a well. She had a face like his own mother's and feet like a donkey's. He struck her once with his staff and she fell, and she lay in the dust and begged him: again, strike me again, finish it. The man leaned on his staff. "My mother didn't teach me that." Teta always gave that line slowly, in the Arabic of her village, and every time the children laughed. Then the man walked home and didn't look back, and in the morning there was only a black mark in the dust.
A black mark. Like the husk at Iturri's gate at first light.
Leah had a word for the things at the stones. Hassan had been calling them jinn for a week because it was the nearest he had. Teta had used another one.
"Ghul," he said.
Adam looked at him.
"That's what they are. A kind of jinn. The kind in my grandmother's stories that eats people." He turned the page, and there it was in Yusuf's own hand, two days later. "The herders say there is nothing in this valley but coyotes and bad luck. They don't know they are quoting the Prophet, peace be upon him: there is no contagion, no evil omen, and no ghul. Some scholars read it their way. The ghul is a story, stop fearing the desert. The sheikh who taught me in Zahle read it the other way. The Arabs believed the ghul could turn a man off his road and change what Allah had written for him, and the Prophet said no. It may exist. It may call, and wear faces, and frighten. It has no power over the one who knows which way he faces."
Adam had sat down on the step beside him. "And if you don't know which way?"
Hassan ran his finger down the page. Yusuf had answered that too. "Then you are lost, and it can lead you anywhere it likes."
The later pages were different. The hand was smaller and faster.
"The nineteenth. I give the call from this door at every prayer, five times every day. Since I came I have not missed one, and I have not once seen one of them in the dark. Nothing from the town has crossed the spring. Then who took my bread last night, and tipped my barrel?
20 October. In the draw below the spring I found what is left of a herder's ewe and, under the stones, a man. Old bones, picked white. The skull is whole and yet the thin bone behind the nose is broken through, from inside. My grandmother said they take the face first and the mind after it, and leave the head light."
Adam was very still.
"The twenty-first. A print in the mud by the barrel. A boot, with nails in the heel. No hoof." "The twenty-fourth. Two of them stood outside the door tonight, after the night prayer, and said nothing. They smell of sheep and tobacco."
"The twenty-fifth. A bell rings in the herders' village at dawn, noon and dusk, and the town has never touched them. I thought Allah kept them for it. Now I wonder. Either that village is the town's own, in boots. Or it is men who serve the town because they are afraid of it."
He looked down the draw toward Iturri. You couldn't see it from here. You could hear the sheep.
"The twenty-sixth. After the dawn prayer I will go down and ask them for men. I will know them by their feet, and then by their faces."
He turned the page. It was blank. So was the next one, and all the rest.
Leah was alone at her kitchen table when he came in. She looked at the ledger in his hand and then at the window. She had been waiting since the creek.
He didn't sit. He lifted the string of olive-wood beads with the green tassel off the nail by the door and laid it beside the ledger.
"He wrote about these," he said. "His father's beads. He counted on them every night."
Leah put out one finger and touched the tassel.
"The shedim came to the stones that October," she said. "The woman from the diner. She said the man in the north draw called his prayers from his door, and her people couldn't go near him. He was ours to take care of. If he was still there at the first snow, the agreement was finished. They would take one of our children every winter until it was settled."
Josu was in the doorway. His wife stood behind him, holding Peio back by the collar.
"A child every winter," Leah said. "We had nine children then. So Mikel went up at night with two of the men, to frighten him off. They took his bread. They stood at his door. We thought a man alone would go." She closed her hand around the beads. "He came down the draw at sunrise to ask us for men with spades, to dig them up by day. Mikel thought he was mad. Or not mad, and he would bring the whole town down on our children." "They met him on the path. He had stopped on the trail for the dawn prayer. He didn't turn round."
"Who struck him," Josu said.
Leah looked at her son.
"Your father. Once, from behind. He was proud of that, that it was once." "He buried him under the floor of the hut, facing the way he prayed. He kept the beads. He never told the priest." "I have known for thirty-nine years. I have said the Angelus every one of them."
The stove ticked. Nobody spoke.
"With what," Josu said.
Leah didn't answer. She was looking at the axe in his hand.