Asia found the moth on the kitchen windowsill behind a pot of parsley. Its fragile wings, the color of milk, were tinged pale gray at the tips. She cupped it in her hand and gently touched its furry body.
“It’s so beautiful!” she breathed, carrying it carefully to the pine table where Maddy was kneading bread.
Maddy stared at the moth. Her face turned as pale as the moth’s wings. She said quietly, “Put your other hand over it.
Don’t let it get away.”
Asia covered the moth. It fluttered in the warm pocket of her hands. Something in Maddy’s voice frightened her.
Maddy saw signs in everything. She had taught Asia to keep her eyes peeled for four-leaf clovers, to slice the bread from one end only and to tuck a lucky penny in her shoe at night.
“What’s wrong?” said Asia.
“I just don’t like it, that’s all.” Maddy opened the screen door and pushed Asia out with a floury hand. “Make sure you take it far away from the house before you let it go.” She closed the door firmly behind her.
Asia blinked in the bright sunshine. From the porch she gazed across the banks of Cold Creek, over the sloping meadows and pine-covered hills, all the way to the slate-gray peaks of the distant mountains. It was going to be another blazing hot day. Already the sky was a dark hard blue. Maddy’s sheep huddled in the shade of the trees beside the house, and the chickens had disappeared inside their shed.
On the other side of the creek, a man in faded brown coveralls and a wide-brimmed hat trudged across the meadow toward the log bridge. It was Ira, and he was carrying something in his arms. Something big and bulky. Asia frowned, trying to make out what it was.
The moth bumped against her fingers. She stepped off the porch and walked through the grass, holding her hands close to her chest. When she thought she was far enough from the house, she opened her fingers and the moth fluttered away like a ghost. She glanced back and saw Maddy at the window, watching her. Then she ran across the bridge to meet Ira.
His arms were full of yellow and brown fur. It was Dandy, the old dog who had been part of Cold Creek since before Asia came to live with Maddy and Ira. Dandy’s milky eyes stared dully at Asia.
“I found him over at the gopher hill,” said Ira. He carried Dandy the rest of the way to the house. Her heart pounding with fear, Asia ran ahead. “Maddy!” she yelled. “Maddy!
Come quickly!”
Maddy came outside, wiping her hands on her apron, the screen door banging behind her. She glanced at Ira’s face and then rested her hand on Dandy’s still body. The dog gave a sudden shudder and slumped even deeper into Ira’s arms.
“He’s gone,” said Maddy. She looked terribly sad, but not shocked. She stroked Dandy’s yellow ear, the one with the tear in it. “Good old fellow,” she murmured. “Good dog.”
Tears flooded Asia’s cheeks. Maddy drew her close, pressing Asia’s face into her apron. “Oh, my girl.”
Asia breathed in Maddy’s warm bread scent. “You knew,” she whispered. “How?”
“It was the moth.” Maddy held Asia tighter. “A white moth in a house is a messenger of death.”
“Dandy was old. He would’ve died, moth or no moth,” said Ira. “He was…let’s see, ninety-eight in people years.”
He and Asia were in the workshop, a log building with big windows that faced the creek. Ira was making a cross for Dandy’s grave.
He glanced sideways at Asia, who sat on a stool beside him, sifting sawdust between her fingers. “Sometimes our Maddy gets carried away with her superstitions.”
He smoothed the rough edges of the pine boards with a scrap of sandpaper. “You have to set your mind on all the good times in Dandy’s long life. Hunting gophers in the meadow, chewing stew bones, sleeping in his basket by the woodstove.”
“Going for walks along the creek. Chasing Maddy’s chickens, ” Asia added.
She felt drained. With a sigh she pushed the sawdust into a tidy pile and slid off the stool. She wandered around the workshop, looking at Ira’s handcrafted boxes.
The boxes, lined up on long shelves, were ready to be wrapped and mailed to customers, or taken to Cariboo Curios, the gift shop in town. They were all different sizes and had smooth polished sides and lids inlaid with delicate pieces of dark and light wood in the shapes of birds and animals.
What Asia loved best about the boxes were the secret compartments. Every box had one, tucked under a false bottom or behind a drawer or even in a lid. Asia knew all of Ira’s tricks. For as long as she could remember, she had watched him work. When she was little, while Ira measured and sawed and planed, she had sat on the floor and gathered handfuls of pale wood shavings and dropped them like snowflakes on her hair. Now that she was twelve, she helped Ira, sanding the boxes until they were satiny smooth and polishing the gleaming wood with a soft rag.
Ira finally put down his tools and held up the finished cross for her approval. “You take this back to the house and put some words on it. Something fitting for a fine dog. And then we’ll get Maddy and say a proper goodbye to Dandy.”
“The gopher hill was Dandy’s stomping ground,” said Maddy.
“It’s only right to bury him in the place he loved best.”
So Ira carried him back across the bridge and through the meadow, this time wrapped in the old wool blanket from his basket. Maddy brought a shovel and Asia carried the cross. She trailed behind, setting the cross down in the long grass from time to time to pick wild daisies and purple fireweed for a funeral bouquet.
The ground at the gopher hill was hard. Ira was sweating and rubbing his brow by the time he’d dug the hole. He laid Dandy’s body at the bottom and filled the hole in with dirt. Then he dug a smaller hole for the cross, on which Asia had carefully printed Dandy, August 14, 2005. He will be deeply missed.
Asia placed the flowers beside the cross. For a second, she had an odd prickly feeling that someone other than Maddy was standing beside her. A faint sound brushed her ear, and she heard a voice whisper death. She glanced around, astonished. A gentle breeze had picked up, rippling the long grass in the meadow. She frowned. There was no one else there except Ira and Maddy, and the only sound was the rustling of the aspen leaves by the creek.
They piled rocks on the grave to keep the coyotes from digging it up. Asia scrambled down the bank to the creek bed for one last look around. She couldn’t escape that peculiar feeling that someone had been standing beside the grave, someone who had said the word death.
“Come on, Asia,” called Maddy a few minutes later.
“We’re going back now.”
Asia tossed a flat stone in the water and then climbed up the bank. On the way home, Ira had to stop for a few minutes, his hands resting on his knees as he took in big breaths.
“It’s nothing,” he protested when Maddy hovered. “Quit your fussing, woman. I’m just a bit played out from all that digging.”
Asia gazed back across the meadow, her long black hair blowing away from her face. The tall grass shimmered in the heat. Dandy’s cross stood pale and new against the dark blue sky.