I had grieved. I had wept for a night and a dayover my loss, ripped the cloth I was married infrom my breasts, howled, shrieked, clawedat the burial stones till my hands bled, retchedhis name over and over again, dead, dead.Gone home. Gutted the place. Slept in a single cot,widow, one empty glove, white femurin the dust, half. Stuffed dark suitsinto black bags, shuffled in a dead man’s shoes,noosed the double knot of a tie round my bare neck,gaunt nun in the mirror, touching herself. I learntthe Stations of Bereavement, the icon of my facein each bleak frame; but all those monthshe was going away from me, dwindlingto the shrunk size of a snapshot, going,going. Till his name was no longer a certain spellfor his face. The last hair on his headfloated out from a book. His scent went from the house.The will was read. See, he was vanishingto the small zero held by the gold of my ring.Then he was gone. Then he was legend, language;my arm on the arm of the schoolteacher — the shockof a man’s strength under the sleeve of his coat —along the hedgerows. But I was faithfulfor as long as it took. Until he was memory.So I could stand that evening in the fieldin a shawl of fine air, healed, ableto watch the edge of the moon occur to the skyand a hare thump from a hedge; then noticethe village men running towards me, shouting,behind them the women and children, barking dogs,and I knew. I knew by the sly lighton the blacksmith’s face, the shrill eyesof the barmaid, the sudden hands bearing meinto the hot tang of the crowd parting before me.He lived. I saw the horror on his face.I heard his mother’s crazy song. I breathedhis stench; my bridegroom in his rotting shroud,moist and dishevelled from the grave’s slack chew,croaking his cuckold name, disinherited, out of his time.