In the autumn of 1888, a stretch of eastern Tennessee known as Crowark Hollow was home to roughly forty families. The Hardwick cabin sat halfway up the eastern slope, a short walk from the cemetery and a long one from any neighbor. Silas Hardwick, 34, was a farmer and occasional carpenter.
His wife, Verly, 29, had come down from the Carolina line years earlier to marry a Hardwick cousin who died of a fever three months later. Silas took her in to keep her from being sent back, and they became husband and wife in earnest. They had been together six years by the time of the story.
The autumn was wet. A hard frost in October took the late beans, and by November the Hardwicks had settled into the winter shape of their days. The first strange night was the 11th of November.
Silas woke at three in the morning. The fire was down to coals, and the dog, a yellow hound named Pard, had his head up. Verly was sitting up in bed, speaking quietly to someone who was not there.
Her voice was not quite hers. She said, “I told you it would be the husband. He is the one who will grieve when it comes to the grieving.”
Silas said her name. She turned and looked at him as if she had never seen him before. Then she blinked, and her face came back.
She remembered nothing of it in the morning.
A week passed, then two. By the end of November, Silas had decided it was a fever dream. Then one afternoon, Verly stopped at the stove while pouring water from the kettle.
Her hand stayed in the air. The water spilled across the iron and smoked. She did not react when he took the kettle from her or turned her by the shoulders.
When she came back, it was with a gasp, and she cried for a long time, holding his hand and saying, “I do not know, Silas. I do not know.”
After that, he started watching her. She would lift her head when nothing had made a sound. She would stand at a window after dark.
She would set the table for three, then look at the third plate as if she did not remember putting it there. The dog stopped coming into the cabin. Pard had slept by the fire every winter night since he was a pup.
Now he refused to cross the threshold. If Silas carried him in, he would shake by the door until he was let out.
The third time was the worst before things got truly bad. On a Sunday evening, Verly lifted her head from her knitting and said plainly, “Cousin Tabitha is gone. She just went three breaths in and the last one did not come back out.”
She did not know who Tabitha was when he asked. Four days later, a letter came down through the hollow from Madison County, North Carolina. A woman named Tabitha Yarrow, a second cousin of Verly’s by way of her mother’s sister, had passed away on the evening of the 2nd of December of a stopped heart.
Verly read the letter and said, “Poor thing.” She did not remember saying anything about her.
That was when Silas went to see Ephraim Crowley, the pastor at the little Baptist meeting house at the foot of the hollow. Crowley was a tall, thin man of about 52, not given to easy alarm. He listened without interrupting.
Then he said he would come up Friday. “Do not tell her I am coming,” he said. “If it is nothing, we will have spent an hour together.
If it is something, I would rather it not be ready for me.”
He came up Friday. Verly smiled, made coffee, mended a shirt. There was nothing wrong.
After an hour, Crowley stood to leave. At the door, he put his hand lightly on her head and said a small blessing. She thanked him kindly.
When they were out of earshot, Crowley said in a different voice, “Do not leave her alone after dark.” Silas asked what he had seen. Crowley said, “I never see anything.
But she did not blink when I prayed over her. There is somebody behind those eyes, Silas, who was watching me through them.”
That night, Silas did what Crowley told him. He bolted the door from the inside and put the key under his pillow. The next two weeks were quiet, but not normal.
She had no episodes. The dog came to her in the dooryard and let her scratch his ears. For a little while, Silas let himself hope.
What broke it was the doctor’s visit. Crowley had sent a letter to a man named Dr. Greer, a country physician of long standing who traveled with two bags.
Greer came up the second week of January. He examined Verly on the matter of headaches, which she did not have. He listened to her heart, looked into her eyes, had her walk across the room.
He asked if she had been dreaming. She said she did not dream much anymore, though she remembered a stairway from girlhood that went up into the dark and never finished.
Then she said, in the same conversational voice, “How is Cordy these days, Morty? Tell her I send my respects.”
The doctor went very still. His wife was called Cordelia by everybody they knew. She had been called Cordy only by her own mother, who passed in 1871.
Nobody had called her Cordy in seventeen years. And nobody outside his own mother had ever called him Morty. His mother had been buried in Green County since 1863.
Verly’s smile folded inward. She said she did not know why she said that. She excused herself and went into the bedroom and shut the door.
The doctor told Silas plainly that whatever was wrong with his wife was not a thing he treated. “I have nothing in either of my bags for this,” he said. At the door, he added, “I do not put much faith in things I cannot weigh and measure.
But there are things in these hollows I have seen in twenty years of practice that I cannot weigh and measure. Do not be alone with her at night. Send for Pastor Crowley and ask him to send for whoever he wants to send for.”
That night, Verly told Silas the truth as she understood it. “I do not always know when I am myself,” she said. “There are days I wake up and I know my hands and I know your face.
And then there are days when I wake up and I feel like I am a long way off, and somebody is doing my work in my body. I can see what they are doing, but I cannot reach them. There is somebody else in here, and I am very, very far away.”
She cried then, the way people cry when they are already tired of crying.
Crowley came up the next morning with another man. His name was Obadiah Renshaw, a preacher from two valleys over. He was a small, wiry man with very black eyes and a hand-carved walking stick.
He sat down at the table without taking off his coat and looked at Verly for a long time. Then he asked, “When did you first start hearing the other one?”
Verly did not pretend. “October, maybe the end of September. I thought it was me at first.
Then I noticed I was not doing the thinking. The thinking was being done at me.”
Renshaw asked if the other one had a name. Verly said she had told her one once, but she did not want to say it. Renshaw said that was wise.
He took a worn black Bible from his coat and set it on the table. He told her he was not going to drive the other one out. “I do not know how to drive her out.
What I know how to do is to tell her that this is not her house and this is not her body, and the road home is a road she has to take herself.”
He prayed over her for about twenty minutes. When it was done, he asked, “Did you hear me, ma'am?” Verly said yes.
Then she said, “She heard you. She does not want to go. She says it is warm here in this body.
She says she has been cold a long time.”
Renshaw told Verly to speak back to the other one when she spoke. “Not loud, not angry. Tell her she is welcome to listen, but the door is yours, and the body is yours, and the road home is hers.
Do not argue with her. Just keep telling her.”
At the door, Renshaw told Silas, “She is a strong woman. She has been holding the door a long time. I saw two women in that chair, Mr.
Hardwick. One of them is your wife. The other one is the one who is tired of being cold.”
For three days, things seemed to hold. Verly talked to the unseen presence in the kitchen, her voice steady, not pleading. Then the storm came on Saturday night.
Snow and ice came down the ridge from the north. By midnight the trees were creaking under the weight. Silas banked the fire, checked the door, bolted it from inside, and put the key under his pillow.
He woke at some hour he could not name. Verly was not beside him. The door was open.
The wind was coming through it, and the snow was already on the threshold. The bolt was hanging on its post. The key was still in his hand under the pillow.
There were tracks in the snow, one set, leading up the slope toward the ridge. She was barefoot.
He pulled on his boots without lacing them, took the lantern, and followed. The tracks went through the broken pasture, through the gap in the snake rail fence, into the woods. He came out at the top of the ridge.
The wind had dropped. In the quiet, he heard her voice. It was coming from the old place, a burned-out cabin that had been there before the war.
Three walls still stood. The roof was gone. People in the hollow did not go up there.
He had never told Verly about it.
She was sitting on the floor of the cabin in the snow in her nightclothes. Her hair was down. She was talking to a person who was not there.
He heard fragments: “I told you. I told you the husband. No, you cannot.
It is not yours. It was never yours. You have to go.”
In the corner where she was looking, he saw what looked for a moment like the shape of a person standing where there was no person. Not a clear shape. More like the air had grown thicker in one place, like heat coming off a stove, but cold.
Then the lantern flickered, and there was nothing.
He knelt beside her. She turned her face to him slowly. It was her face.
“Silas,” she said. “She does not want to go.” He said he knew.
“She says she will go if I will sit here with her a little while longer.”
He saw the snow on her shoulders, the snow in her hair, the white skin of her bare feet. He understood somewhere far inside himself that he was looking at a woman who might not be able to walk home. He picked her up.
She did not fight him. She put her face against his neck and said, “Thank you.” He did not know which of them was thanking him.
Halfway down the ridge, he met Crowley coming up. The pastor had seen the lantern light from his own porch a half mile away. Between them, they got her home.
They wrapped her in every blanket in the house and built the fire up until it was roaring. She slept through the rest of the night and most of the next day.
When she woke, it was the middle of Sunday afternoon. The storm had passed. The sky was clear and very pale blue.
She sat up and said, “Did I dream?” He told her she had walked up to the old place. She said she did not remember.
“I remember being cold. I remember somebody telling me to sit. I remember thinking she was going to go.”
He asked if she did. Verly was quiet a long moment. Then she said, “I do not hear her right now.
In this minute, I do not hear her. It is very quiet. It has not been this quiet in a long while.”
For weeks after that night, Verly was herself. She was tired in ways she had never been tired before. She slept more.
She lost weight. But the voice did not come back, and the staring fits did not come back, and the names she had no business knowing did not come out of her mouth anymore. Then small things returned.
She would stop in the middle of a sentence and have to ask what she had been saying. She would wake at three in the morning and lie awake looking at the ceiling. When Silas asked what was wrong, she said only, “Nothing.
It is quiet. I am just listening to the quiet.”
The dog never came back into the cabin. Pard lived another four years and slept on the porch every night of it. When he died in 1892, Silas buried him by the cemetery fence.
He did not get another dog.
Pastor Crowley moved to Knoxville in the spring of 1890. He never said why. Renshaw stayed at Salow Branch until his own death in 1895.
Silas Hardwick lived until 1911, 67 years old, though he looked older for the last ten years of it. Verly outlived him by three years. She lived alone in the cabin, kept the garden, kept the chickens, walked down to the meeting house every Sunday until the year she died.
She did not remarry. She did not, as far as anybody knew, ever speak again of the woman who had once been in her body. She is buried next to her husband at the cemetery at the foot of the slope.
The stone says her name and her dates and nothing else.
There is one more part. In the autumn of 1941, a hunter from over in the next county came through Crowark Hollow. He stopped at the old store and asked about a woman he had seen up on the ridge near the burned-out cabin.
It had been just before dusk. She was slight of build, with copper brown hair pinned tight at the nape, wearing a brown dress. She had been looking down into the hollow as if waiting for someone to come up the slope to fetch her.
He called out to her. She turned to look at him. Then she was not there anymore.
He walked up to the doorway. There were no tracks in the snow. Not his, not hers, not anybody's.
The man behind the counter looked at him a long time before he answered. Then he said, “Friend, you go on home. You forget you came up this way.
Do not go up that ridge again. That woman has been let alone these last six years, and that is the way she will stay.”
The hunter went home. He never came back through the hollow. But years later, when he was an old man, he told the story to his grandson, who told it to his nephew, who told it to a man who much later told it to me.
I cannot tell you who the woman on the ridge was. I cannot tell you whether she was Verly Hardwick, come back to the place where she had once held the door, or whether she was the other one, the one who had finally gotten the body she had been waiting for, even if it was only for a few minutes at dusk in front of a stranger from the next county. I can only tell you that the people of the hollow, while they lived, did not go up there.
And the burned-out cabin, the last time anyone went looking for it, was still there. Three walls, the chimney at the north end, the snow lying flat where nobody had walked.