How Edith Died

Sylvie tells how Edith died:

Sylvie knew an old woman named Edith who came to her rest crossing the mountains in a boxcar, in December. She was wearing, besides her rubbers and her hunting jacket, two dresses and seven flannel shirts, not to keep off the cold, Sylvie said, but to show herself a woman of substance. She sailed feet first and as solemn as Lincoln from Butte to Wenatchee, where she was buried at public expense. It was such a winter, Sylvie said, so cold, that the snow was as light as chaff. Any wind would blow a hill bare and send the snow drifting as placeless as smoke. In the face of such hard weather the old woman had grown formal and acquiescent. She had crept off to the freight yard one night in the dark, leaving no word but a pearl ring which had never before been known to leave her hand. The pearl ring was brown as a horse’s tooth and very small. Sylvie kept the ring in a little box with her hairpins.

Edith found her boxcar and composed herself in it, while the trainmen went about the jamming and conjoining of cold metal parts. In such weather one steps on fossils. The snow is too slight to conceal the ribs and welts, the hollows and sockets of the earth, fixed in its last extreme. But in the mountains the earth is most ceremoniously buried, with all its relics, against its next rising, in hillock and tumulus. In Butte the old woman had lain on her back and laced her fingers, and her breath had stood above her. When she arrived in Wenatchee, the ghost was gone, the exorcism accomplished.

Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping 88

(paperback ed. 1981)