Josu laid the axe on the kitchen table, beside the beads, and took his hand off it.
Nobody touched it. Wes and Dana came in from the yard to see why the house had gone quiet, and stopped inside the door. Hassan didn't trust his voice yet. He nodded at Adam, who had heard every page.
Adam told it badly and in the wrong order, and it didn't matter. A man called Yusuf, in a hut up the draw, in 1987. The town's people sleep in the graves by day. They're called ghuls. "You hit them once," Adam said. "Never twice. The second one brings them back. And he did the call to prayer every time, all five, every day, and they never came near him. Not once in the dark."
Wes was looking at Hassan. "That's true," he said.
Dana turned. "What is?"
"At camp. I had the watch both nights." Wes rubbed his thumb along the seam of his jeans. "He prays out loud at sundown, and then the later one. They never started while he was at it. Not one time. Ten, fifteen minutes after he quit, there they were. The second night I timed it." "I told Kurt. Kurt said I was making it up." He looked down at his boots, which he hadn't taken off since the camp.
"And after the late one?" Dana said. "Until morning?"
"Nothing," Hassan said. "No call until dawn. He sat at his door and recited."
He looked at Josu then, because the ledger had said one more thing, and he had promised himself in the meadow he would say it plainly.
"He wrote that the faces they wear belong to people they've eaten. My grandmother said the same. Only the dead." "I'm sorry, Josu. I think your son died in April, at the creek. I think what sits at their table is wearing him."
Josu's wife put her hand over her mouth. Josu didn't move for a long time.
"Then I bury him," he said. "Whatever is left. With a priest's words." He picked the axe up off the table. "And it doesn't walk in his face again."
Leah stood. She was still holding the beads.
"He asked us for men," she said. "At first light, he can have them. All of Iturri."
Later in the afternoon Hassan took his son up the slope behind Iturri, to a shelf of rock above the sheep pens. From there you could see the narrow valley, the ridge, and beyond the ridge the white glare of the playa.
They sat with their legs hanging over. Adam kept one hand pressed flat against his stomach.
"Are you sick?"
"No. It's cold. Here." He didn't take his hand away. "Since the cornbread."
Hassan had been thinking for two days about what he needed to say, and for twelve years before that. It wasn't any easier now.
"Your mother," he said, "went out to buy bread."
Adam looked at him.
"It was February. There was a ceasefire, they said. Three days. Everyone went out." "I was at the pharmacy. I'd been there two days without going home, because people kept coming and there was no insulin and I kept saying come back tomorrow. She called me. She said she was going to the bakery on Al-Hamra Street, did I want anything." He looked at the playa. "I said no. I said stay inside. I said it like you'd say it to someone you're going to see in six hours."
Adam was very still.
"The ceasefire stopped at eleven in the morning. Nobody told anybody. There was a line at the bakery. Forty people." "I found her at the hospital at four. You were three. You were asleep on the neighbor's sofa. When I came for you, you woke up and asked where Mama was, and I said she was sleeping. You remember?"
"No."
"Good," Hassan said. "I've never been gladder of anything."
Down below a dog barked once at the sheep, and the sheep moved.
"How do you still do it?" Adam said, without looking at him. "Pray. After He let that happen."
Hassan had rehearsed a hundred answers to that. He found he didn't want any of them.
"I'm angry," he said. "Twelve years. Some days I pray angry." He turned his hand over on the rock and looked at the palm. "But five times a day I stand up and face one direction. The same one, whatever I lost that day. While I'm facing it, I know where everything else is." "If I stopped, I'd be lost. Like out there." He nodded at the valley. "The trails would just keep bending."
Adam didn't answer. But he took his hand off his stomach.
Down in the yard the axes were already out. Hassan found Leah at the grindstone and said he wanted to try something before the bell. She looked at him for a while, and sent for Josu's radios.
Wes went first. He walked north up the creek alone, toward the notch in the high ridge, with a radio from Josu's truck. Peio sat on the tower with the other radio and the binoculars. Wes walked for forty minutes. He walked straight at the notch the whole way, he said afterward, and never took his eyes off it. At the forty-first minute Peio saw him come down the slope behind the sheep pens, from the south, walking north.
Wes stood in the yard, breathing hard, and looked up at the notch, exactly where it had been. He handed Hassan the radio without being asked.
"Okay," he said. "Okay. Your turn."
Hassan set the compass on the stone wall by the creek and turned the dial. The arrow for Mecca pointed at the notch.
"Walk with me," he said to Adam. "Don't look at anything but where we're going. If you hear your name, don't answer."
"What are you going to do?"
"Recite," said Hassan. "And listen."
They walked. North and a little east, up the creek and out of it, through the willows onto the open slope. Hassan recited the Throne Verse, then the last three short chapters of the Quran, the ones every child learns first, and then he started over. He didn't look at the trail. He didn't look for landmarks. He faced the notch the way he faced it in prayer, his whole body pointed at it, and he let the words keep his mouth busy. Under the words, in Yusuf's small pencil hand, ran the line from the ledger. It has no power over the one who knows which way he faces.
Halfway up, something began to call Adam's name from a stand of aspen. Hassan felt the boy's steps falter behind him, and slow, and start to drift right, toward the trees. He didn't stop reciting. He reached back without looking, found Adam's wrist and held it. Adam's breath came hard through his nose, his mouth shut tight. He didn't answer. After a while the aspens were behind them, and the voice was smaller, and then it was only wind.
An hour later they stood on the pass.
It was a narrow saddle of broken rock and wind. On the far side the land fell away into a different valley, wide and brown. A dirt road crossed it far below. On the road, very small and slow, a pickup pulled a stock trailer and raised a long tail of dust.
Hassan keyed the radio. "Peio. Where are we?"
The boy's voice came back thin and excited, in English with Basque at the edges. "On the top! I see you. You walked straight the whole time."
Adam made a sound that was half a laugh.
"It held," he said. "Dad. It held." "Why for us and not for Wes?"
Hassan looked back. The valley lay below them in the late light: the creek, the willows, the stone houses of Iturri like a handful of dice, and far to the south, the white of the playa.
"Because I knew which way I was facing," he said. "And I wasn't asking it for directions."
They stood in the wind. Then Hassan checked the sun and started back down. The bell would ring in two hours, and there were people in a cellar under a church.
"Dad." Adam hadn't moved. "The call. The one he gave at every prayer." "Teach me the words."
"Why?"
"Because I'm the one who answered."