A widowed mother showed up at a reclusive old woman’s gate with two children and nowhere to sleep—then told her, “You need someone to care for you as much as we need a home.”

Chapter 8

The first Sunday in October, they went to the cemetery.

Nora saddled the donkey with two folded blankets, and it took her twenty minutes to get Elsie up — and the old woman complained about everything, that she was being held wrong, that the donkey was too thin, that she’d make a fool of herself, that the whole town would talk.

“Let them talk,” Nora said. “They haven’t talked about you in eighteen years. It’s their turn.”

Elsie fell silent. And then she let out a laugh — a single, startled bark that sent the yard chickens into a panic.

They walked out through the gate, and Elsie did not look back. She was up on the donkey, stiff as an old queen, with a hat Nora had tied under her chin. Ruby walked alongside, clutching the one-eyed doll under her arm. Archie rode in the shawl. The journey took an hour and a half, and in that hour and a half Elsie saw things she had forgotten existed. The new bridge over the creek. The Dewhurst family’s cornfield gone to gold. The great gum tree on the bend, cut down at last. A woman washing clothes in the creek who looked up, stared with her mouth open, and shouted:

“Old Elsie! Old Elsie Hartley’s alive!”

“Still am, Dot,” Elsie answered without turning. And she said it without a shred of pride — but Nora laughed so hard she had to stop and hold her ribs.

The Reston cemetery was a piece of hillside held in by a low stone wall — forty crosses leaning every way the wind had ever blown. Three of them were hers. She knew it before she saw them, in the far corner, under an ironbark tree whose roots had lifted the ground.

Nora stopped the donkey and helped her down, then brought the walker around and offered her elbow. Elsie waved her off.

“These twenty paces, I do myself.”

And she did them. It took her eight minutes. No one rushed her.

The crosses stood waist-high in grass. The names were barely legible. THOMAS HARTLEY, aged seventeen. EDITH HARTLEY, aged twenty-four. ALBERT HARTLEY, aged sixty-three.

Elsie stood before them for a long time. The wind moved through the ironbark above her. Then, very clearly, like a woman filing a report, she said:

“Bert. I’ve brought visitors.”

Her voice broke on the last syllable.

Nora knelt in the grass and began to pull the weeds out with her bare hands, without a word. And Ruby knelt beside her and began to pull them too — no one told her to. She worked with that tremendous, terrible seriousness children have when they understand that a thing matters, even if they cannot say why.

Elsie stood and watched them cleaning the graves of her dead, and she thought, with a clarity that hurt her: if I had died a year ago, no one would have come to pull the weeds off mine. And then she thought something else — something far more dangerous.

On the way home, almost back to the gate, Elsie spoke from the top of the donkey.

“Nora.”

“Yes.”

“How long are you going to stay?”

Nora kept walking, leading the rope. She did not turn around.

“As long as you say.”

“That’s not what I asked you.”

“No. But I don’t know how to answer anything else. I have nowhere to go. If tomorrow you tell me to leave, I’ll take my children and go, and I’ll thank you until the last day of my life. But I won’t leave of my own accord.”

Elsie nodded slowly. “Good,” she said. And she said nothing else the whole way back.

But that night, after supper, she went into the pantry and came out with a bottle of dark spirit that had sat unopened at the back of a shelf for eighteen years. She set it on the table with two small earthenware cups, and poured.

“It’s Bert’s,” she said. “He was saving it for the day Edie got married.”

Nora looked at the cup. “Elsie — I don’t drink.”

“Neither do I. Haven’t had a drop in eighteen years.” Elsie raised her cup. “But today I went to the cemetery on a donkey, and a woman shouted out that I was alive. Something’s worth celebrating.”

They clinked their cups. They each took a mouthful, and they both made the same appalled face, and they coughed, and they laughed — and the laughter was terrible and rusty and real, two women bent over a kitchen table in the lamplight, while in the shed out back a child slept with a one-eyed doll held tight under her chin.