Hassan wrapped both hands in the bell rope above his son's knot and held on.
All night the thing on the steps talked. It was Mae, and then it was Rania, and then it was a man Adam didn't know, who said he was Adam's coach from school and that the bus was outside. It was Kurt. It was a girl Adam's age who laughed at him in English. It never raised its voice. It didn't need to.
Adam didn't answer any of it. He recited the one short chapter he remembered from when he was five, and when he ran out he started it again, and when that wore thin he said the lines of the call that he had learned on the rock above the pens. Allah is greatest. I bear witness that there is no god but Allah. He said them as if he were holding them up in front of his face.
Three times in the night his feet began to walk. Each time the rope went taut through Hassan's hands, the bell spoke once high in the steeple, and Adam stopped, and shook, and went on reciting. He never stopped his mouth. Wes sat against the door with his back to the planks. Dana sat beside Marit on a pew and held her hand. Nobody slept.
At twenty past six the voice on the other side of the door stopped in the middle of a word.
Hassan climbed into the steeple and looked out through the slats. A thin white line lay flat along the eastern hills.
He opened his mouth to give the dawn call, and nothing came out but air.
Adam was on the ladder below him. He climbed up, still roped, the bell rope trailing behind him, and stood at the slats beside his father. He looked at Hassan once. Hassan nodded.
Adam raised his hands to his ears. His voice cracked on the first word.
"Allah is greatest. Allah is greatest."
Below in the street the gray shapes turned from the church. They ran, low and fast and clumsy in the first light, back to the cemetery, and went down into the holes one after another, all of them, like water going into a drain.
"Prayer is better than sleep," said Adam, a beat late, because he had almost forgotten it.
The trucks came over the ridge at sunrise. Four of them, old ones, loaded with men in sheepskin coats from the summer camps up the creek, and Iturri behind them on foot with spades. Leah rode in the cab of the first. Josu's wife walked beside it with a mattock on her shoulder and her face the same stone it had been in the cellar.
They didn't talk much. The men from the camps went straight up the slope to the old ditch with picks and bars. Hassan watched them from the church steps. They knocked the headgate out of its slot, and then they went at the ditch bank below it, and the bank was old and dry and gave all at once.
The creek came down the hill in a brown sheet.
It hit the cemetery fence and went through it. It filled the open graves and the graves that had fallen in, and went down into them with a sound like a bath emptying, and kept going down. The ground of the cemetery began to sag and darken. Somewhere under the street, a long way off, something screamed.
"One at each hole," Hassan said. It came out in a whisper, and Leah said it after him in Basque and English so everybody heard. "One person. One blow. Whatever comes up beside you is not yours. You let it go."
They stood one to a grave mouth around the cemetery in the sun, twenty-six of them, old men and young men and Josu's wife and Wes with an Iturri axe because the rifle was in the cellar under Kurt. Dana took a spade. Hale the deputy held a pick handle in hands that shook. Hassan stood at the last mouth by the church wall with his hatchet and kept Adam at his back, and Adam held on to the back of his coat the way he had on the slope.
They came up through the mud one at a time.
Slow. The sun was full on the cemetery and they came up blinking and slick and stupid with it, dragging their long gray bodies out of the water, eyeless heads swinging. The first came up in front of an old herder who hit it once with a pick, and it fell back, and screamed at him in his dead wife's voice, and he stood over it with his pick raised and his face working and did nothing at all.
It threw itself sideways along the ground at the man to his left.
That man stepped back. He didn't strike. He let it lie at his feet and beg, with his eyes shut and his lips moving, and after four minutes it went dark from inside and smoked and was still.
After that it was work. Something would come up. The person at that mouth struck once. It would fling itself at a neighbor and the neighbor would step back. It would plead, and goad, and call names, and burn. Once two came up at the same mouth, and the second didn't go for the man at all. It turned on the first one where it lay and raised its long hand over it. The man struck the second instead, once, and they lay side by side in the mud and burned side by side. Wes counted out loud in a flat voice that didn't change. At eleven a gray thing came up in front of Dana, and she hit it with the spade so hard the handle cracked, and it lay at her feet and said, in Theo's voice, "Boss, it hurts, please," and Dana stood over it and wept and didn't move until it burned.
It was not Theo. Hassan thought she knew that. She stood there anyway.
Mae came up last.
She came out of the hole beside the church wall, the one nobody was standing at because it was Hassan's and he had turned to look at Dana. She came fast. Faster than any of them, the sun on her and not slowing her, still wearing her own round tired face, her apron black with mud. She went past Hassan as if he were a post.
She went for Adam.
Hassan turned and saw it happen in pieces. Her hands. Adam's face. The hatchet coming up in his own hand, too late.
Leah had been at the next mouth over. She was seventy-eight years old, and she didn't run. She stepped into Mae's path with the lambing knife low and struck once, under the ribs, and stepped back.
Mae went down in the mud at Adam's feet.
Her face slid. As it went, it was Rania's. It looked up at Hassan with Rania's dark eyes, with the mole on the wrong side of the mouth.
"My darling," it said, in his wife's voice. "Again. It hurts. Please. Again. You can't leave me like this."
Hassan's hatchet was in his hand. He could feel how easy it would be.
"My mother didn't teach me that," he said in Arabic, in the last of his voice, the way the man in Teta's story had said it.
Then he took his son by the arm and walked him away, and did not look back until Wes said, quietly, that it was done.
They counted the husks at noon with Yusuf's map spread on a headstone. Leah touched each square with her finger.
One grave had nothing in it.
It was the grave where Dana had found the gray hoodie folded on the mound the morning before. The hoodie was gone. The water had filled the hole and drained, and in the mud on its far side were hoofprints, deep and spaced long, going out of it and over the back fence and away into the sage toward the hills.
Dana stood looking at them for a long time.
And the water hadn't gone everywhere. It had run down the slope of the old warren under the cemetery and the church, and stopped. The street on the far side was dry. The diner sat in the noon sun with its blinds down.
Adam had let go of his father's coat. He was standing in the middle of the street, facing the diner, with his hand flat on his stomach.
"Dad," he said. "It's still pulling."
Under the diner's back step, down in the dry dark under the boards, something knocked three times.