In the spring of 1867, the village of Fenomore Hollow sat in the fold of a mountain valley, a settlement of ninety-one souls who had, for nearly seventy years, buried every one of their dead with a life-sized wooden figure set into the grave beneath the coffin. The figure was called the sitter, carved from black walnut to the exact measurements of the deceased, dressed in a white shift with a wide-brimmed hat pulled low over its wooden face. It sat in a straight-backed chair at the head of the coffin for the three days of the wake, and when the coffin went down, the sitter went down first, and the earth closed over the two of them together. No one in the hollow had ever been buried any other way, and no one had ever asked why.
The practice was as old as the settlement itself. When the first families came down the wagon road in the summer of 1798, they found a shop already standing at the south end of the site—built by nobody, so far as anyone knew, of squared logs with a good shake roof and a swept stone hearth. A Halley cousin with a little joinery moved into it that October, and by December he had carved the first sitter for the first death, an infant six weeks old, because the older women of the party told him to, and told him the size, and the wood, and the dress, and the hat. They said this was how it was done in the place they had come from, and this was how it would be done here.
Where that place was, no one ever wrote down. The women who knew were buried with sitters under their own coffins, and their knowing went into the ground with them. By 1867, the hollow had a mill, a store, a smithy, a schoolhouse, and a chapel with a white steeple. There was a doll carver named Rundle Mint, an old man who had been carving sitters since he was fourteen, and whose father and grandfather had carved them before him.
When a person died, the carver came before the body was washed, took the measurements with a knotted cord, and went back to his shop to begin carving. The practice worked. The hollow had never lost anyone to what came next, and because the thing you know keeps working, it had become simply how it was done. Nobody could have told you what would happen if you stopped.
On the 12th of April, the village doctor, Josiah Cross, died of a lung sickness that had been eating him for weeks. His wife Emiline held his hand through the last morning and heard his last complete sentence: do not sit at me, sit by me. She moved her chair from the foot of the bed to the side of it, and he was gone before supper. The carver came within the hour, measured him, and by the evening of the wake the sitter stood at the head of the coffin.
On the morning of the sixteenth, it went into the ground beneath him, and the earth was closed over the two of them together. Emiline Cross had been raised in the hollow and had absorbed the practice the way you absorb the habits of the place you are born. But now that the sitter was under the ground with her own husband, she found herself thinking about it constantly, and she wrote in a diary she began that April that she believed it was between him and something. She did not yet know what.
Twenty-two days later, a young reverend named Otway Bland rode into the hollow on a bay mare. He was twenty-nine, recently ordained, sincere, and he genuinely believed the small settlements in the mountains needed plain gospel preaching. On his second morning he sat on the porch of the chapel elder, Silas Halley, and asked what the doll carver was for. Silas told him the truth plainly: when somebody died, the carver came and measured the dead and carved a life-sized figure, and the figure sat at the wake and went into the ground under the coffin, and the hollow had done this since 1798, and it was a comfort.
The reverend set down his coffee and asked whether that was a Christian practice. Silas said it was their practice. The reverend said that was not what he asked. On the first of May, Bland preached his first sermon at the chapel, and near the end he came gently to the point.
The practice of the sitter was not Christian. The dead in Christ needed no wooden figure. From that day forward, he would not preside at a burial where a sitter had been placed. He said it kindly, with warmth.
A hush went over the chapel, and the reverend took it for the hush of conviction. It was not. It was the hush of ninety-one people trying to think what to say to their reverend on his first Sunday. No one said anything, and he rode down to the Halley house for Sunday dinner in a good mood.
Two days later, on the third of May, a young woman named Prudence Halley, twenty-two, daughter of Silas and Loretta, collapsed in the yard with a fever at dawn and was dead by four in the afternoon. The doll carver did not come. Silas, who had been raised to believe that when the reverend gave a word from the pulpit it was the word to follow, had sent his son down to Rundle Mint’s shop with the message that there would be no sitter for Prudence. It was the first time in sixty-nine years that a person died in the hollow and the sitter was not carved.
The wake was held over three days with no straight-backed chair at the head of the coffin. Instead, at the reverend’s suggestion, there was a small table with a Bible, a candle, and a bunch of white violets. The mourners came, and each of them noticed the missing chair, and each of them said nothing. Emiline Cross came on the second day, took Loretta’s hands, and asked where the sitter was.
Loretta said the reverend said no. Emiline told her to have one carved anyway, to put it in the barn, to put it under the coffin at the burying—it did not matter what the reverend saw. Loretta pulled her hands away and said the reverend said no. Emiline understood there was nothing she could say.
She went home, sat down at her kitchen table, put her head in her hands, and said out loud to no one, to her dead husband, what am I supposed to do. Prudence was buried on the seventh of May, alone in the ground with no sitter beneath her. The reverend wrote to the presbytery that evening that the practice had been set aside and the good people had laid down an old custom without resistance, and that it had been easier than he had feared. The next morning, Loretta Halley, right-handed all her life, reached across the kitchen table for the sugar with her left hand.
Prudence had been left-handed. Silas noticed, told himself he was tired and grieving, and said nothing. He thought about it for the rest of his life. That same morning, Loretta went out to feed the chickens, put on her shawl, walked the three-quarters of a mile to Rundle Mint’s shop, knocked on the door, and asked to see the girl.
Rundle Mint had carved Prudence’s sitter in secret during the wake, finished on the morning of the eighth, and he had set it in the back room and barred his door. He sat with his back to the door and did not answer. Loretta knocked twice more, and then she went away up the road with her head tilted a little to the left. Prudence had tilted her head that way all her life.
Loretta had never. On the ninth of May, Emiline wrote in her diary that Loretta had come to her door asking whether stewed apples had a smell she could get out of a cupboard. Loretta had never eaten a stewed apple in her life. Prudence had loved them.
Emiline wrote that something very wrong was happening, and that something was watching from where the sitter should have been. She walked down to Rundle Mint’s shop at first light the next morning. He was waiting for her. He barred the door and took from a locked chest a small book bound in dark hide.
It had been kept by every doll carver since 1798. The first page, written by Elen Halley, set down plainly what the practice was for. When a person dies, something comes to the wake to sit with the dead. It is not the dead.
It is older than the dead. It eats the shape of a person the way a moth eats the shape of a coat. If there is a sitter in the chair, it will sit with the sitter for three days, and go down into the earth with it, and be stopped up there. If there is no sitter, it will sit with the closest living kin, and the kin will not know they are being sat with, and within weeks they will begin to be less themselves and more a garment for the thing that has been sitting.
The change begins with small habits and ends with the whole of the person, and once it is complete, the person cannot be got back. The figure is a decoy. It is a garment for the thing to eat. The book was a ledger of every death in the hollow since 1798, one line per name, with a small mark beside each one confirming the sitter had been buried.
Nineteen names over the years had a different mark, a small circle with a dot, indicating a dead whose body was not recovered or for whom no sitter was possible. Emiline understood without being told what the circle meant. She said out loud, in her empty kitchen, God have mercy, they have started. She went up the ridge trail the long way around to see Granny Hester Soel, ninety-two years old, the last living granddaughter of one of the women who had brought the practice into the hollow in 1798.
Granny had been told the whole thing in the last summer of her grandmother’s life, and she had held it in her head for eighty-six years. She told Emiline the rules. Do not take the book into the burying ground. Do not speak the name of the dead to a changing person.
And if the change has started but is not finished, the sitter carved in secret can be brought to the house of the changing person and sat across from them for the full three days of the wake that should have been. At the end, the sitter is buried face down at the head of the grave. If it has been done right, the person comes back to themselves over the next year and remembers none of it. If it has been done wrong, or if it has been left too late, the sitter will crack in the night, and the person will scream once, and there will not be a person in that room anymore.
Granny laid out the plan. Emiline would go to the Halley house on the afternoon of the thirteenth, give Loretta a dose of laudanum in tea, sit her in the back parlor, and set the sitter across from her. Rundle would bring it in a covered wagon. The door would be barred from the outside, and Emiline would walk three miles up to Granny’s cabin and stay for three days.
The reverend’s circuit was not due back until the twenty-first. They had four days of margin. On Sunday the twelfth, Emiline went to chapel and watched every soul in the hollow file in. She watched hands.
Loretta was confirmed. Cassie Prime, nineteen years old, Prudence’s closest cousin, picked up the hymnbook with her left hand with her head tilted a little to the left, humming with her mouth closed. Two. Nell Boggas and Marjery Truit had not changed yet.
On the morning of the thirteenth, at seven, Emiline sat down at the kitchen table of Alsie Prime, Cassie’s mother, and put the sitter’s book on the table between them. Alsie said that her own mother had told her when she was seven that if she ever saw that book on her kitchen table, she was to hear whoever brought it and do what they said. She said tell me what needs doing, I will do it. At eleven, Rundle drove the wagon to the back porch of the Halley house, and Emiline made the tea.
Loretta drank it, said she felt very tired all of a sudden, and let herself be led into the back parlor. Emiline sat her in the wing chair, went out to the wagon, and carried the sitter in with Rundle and set it across from her, three feet away, wooden hands flat on its knees, hat low over its face. She pulled the door closed, and Rundle set an iron bar into the brackets on the outside. Emiline locked the outside door with the key from Loretta’s apron pocket.
In the afternoon, they set a paper sitter—a flat brown cut-out dressed in a scrap of Prudence’s shroud—on the windowsill of Cassie’s bedroom, and told Alsie to leave it untouched and to burn it as ash at the foot of the grave on the fiftieth day. Emiline walked up to Granny Soel’s cabin and slept for the first time in three days. On the dawn of the sixteenth, she walked down with a lantern she did not need. She listened at the barred door and heard nothing.
She lifted the bar and opened the door. Loretta was asleep in the wing chair, hands in her lap, chest moving. The sitter had shifted. Its left hand had curled in on itself.
Its head was tilted a little to the left. There was a hairline crack running from the corner of its wooden mouth up along the jaw. The wood had given, but it had held. Loretta woke in the yard and said, in her own voice, that she was so tired.
She slept for a day and did not remember anything except a bad dream. At nine, Rundle came up the lane without being sent. They wrapped the sitter in linen and carried it to the burying ground. Emiline dug at the head of Prudence’s grave, Rundle laid the sitter face down in the hole, and she filled it in and packed the dirt down flat.
They learned at the creek that Absalom Truit had died at dawn. The reverend had come back from his circuit a day early because his horse had thrown a shoe, and he had already said the burying would be Sunday, and that the wake would be sat by the living, and that no other thing would be brought into the room. That night, sitting in the Truit front room with the empty chair at the head of the coffin, Emiline saw Foster Truit’s hair parted on the wrong side. She saw Marjery Truit reach for the back of a chair with her left hand—the hand that had been crushed under a wagon wheel in 1848 and had never held anything since.
When Marjery said her both hands felt warm, which was queer, Emiline told her to go home and bar her door. At two in the morning on the nineteenth, the reverend came to the Truit house with a lantern and put his ear to the shutter of the bedroom where Rundle had set a new sitter across from Foster Truit. He heard a low buzzing hum, and then a dry clicking, and then a voice he knew—his mother’s voice, dead of consumption in 1864—that said his name and asked him to come in and pray because she was so cold. Emiline came up the lane at a dead run in her night dress with the sitter’s book under her arm and shouted for him to step back, not to answer what was in that room, that it was not his mother.
The reverend took his hand off the shutter, sat down in the wet grass, and said that it had said his name. She told him it learns. He asked how long it had been in the hollow. She said longer than the hollow.
He sat in the grass a long time, and then he said he could not stay, and he was not built for it, and he rode out at dawn and never came back. He resigned his ministry, preached no sermon in any pulpit in any state, and died of a fever in Ohio in 1874. Foster woke on the twenty-first with his hair parted on the right, and the sitter across from him had cracked and its left hand had come off at the wrist. They buried it at the head of Absalom’s grave.
The paper sitters sat on the windowsills for forty-nine days and were burned to ash at dawn and buried under the sod at the head of the graves. Cassie woke right-handed again and asked her mother what was for breakfast, and Alsie sat down on the floor and cried. Cassie lived to be eighty-one and never knew. Loretta lived another thirty-five years.
The small habits went. She reached with her right hand for the sugar. But for the rest of her life she paused a beat before she answered when anyone spoke her name, as though she were listening for a second voice to answer first. Rundle Mint carved four more sitters before his death in 1889, and his apprentice carried the practice on through the 1890s, and the last sitter was carved in 1938 for an old Halley cousin.
After that, the village had eleven souls, then four, then none, and the roofs began to go in, and the hollow closed itself up the way a hand closes over a coin. Emiline Cross moved to Bellfonte, taught school for twenty-one years, and never remarried. In every kitchen, in every parlor, she kept an empty straight-backed chair set at the head of every table. When her nine-year-old grandniece asked her why, she said it was for the sitter, the one who watches the door for her.
In the summer of 1901, her young cousin Bailey Cross came to supper and stood up on the porch and began, absent-mindedly, to whistle. It was a tuneless scale, up four notes and down five. Josiah Cross had whistled that scale every evening after supper for the sixteen years she had known him, and she had not heard it in the mouth of any other living soul since he died. She asked Bailey when he had started whistling it.
He stopped, could not remember what he had been whistling, and laughed at himself. She wrote to the doll carver in the hollow and asked for a paper sitter, cut small and dressed in a scrap. It came by post. She set it on the sill of the north window in the back bedroom, and Bailey slept there, and he never whistled it again, not that Sunday nor any Sunday after.
On the fiftieth day she burned the paper thing in a clean fire in a tin bucket, took the ash on the noon train back to the hollow, walked the four miles in the summer heat, went to Josiah’s grave for the first time in eleven years, scraped a small hole in the sod with a table knife, poured the ash in, and covered it. She said out loud, in the summer sun, thank you for lending me the whistle, take it back now, I have brought it home. She never went to the hollow again. Emiline Cross died on the eleventh of November 1903, at seventy, in her sleep.
In the room where she died, a straight-backed chair had been set three feet from the foot of the bed, its seat empty, its face toward the door. She had asked for the door to be left open and the lamp burning low in the hall. She said quietly, before she closed her eyes for the last time, if it comes for me tonight, do not answer it in my name. Let the sitter answer.
She died at three in the morning. The chair, the woman who sat with her said, did not move.