The new snow helps them get the body down.

They’ve wrapped the quilt around her, tied it in place with rope. He’s rigged a harness by which they can lower her before them, letting her slide down the hill.

She makes an awkward package, arms and legs akimbo, but there is nothing they can do about that.

The wind has died. The night is still, clear, cold. They walk side by side. They go slowly down the path, the beam of the flashlight flitting across trees, rocks, flashing blue as it crosses the dark bundle.

They don’t speak, except those small words of caution and encouragement that people use when undertaking a difficult task together.

They stop where path widens to road. He takes off a glove, and puts the palm of his hand to Faith’s face. Unties her scarf and reties it. Then they begin the last leg of their journey, pulling the bundle behind them now.

When they reach the quarry, its walls are as black as velvet curtains, receding into space around a stage lit by starlight. The snow is undisturbed until they step onto it, pulling her behind them.

Marguerite lies there on the ice, waiting, while they make a small fire to give them light. Then they begin the real work.

The sheriff stays in the shadows, watching. In the flickering light he sees them moving back and forth, building the pyre from downed wood. They pull the branches over the ice, strewing leaves and twigs on the white surface. It takes them a long time. Motionless, the sheriff feels the cold seeping into him, into his lungs and extremities, and envies them the work that keeps them warm. But he won’t join them; he won’t intrude. That is not his place.

Smoke is the soul of the tree, and fire sets it free. Tante told James that. The soul feels, she said, but not what the body feels. Something is gone now, something is gone. What’s left is no more feeling than a piece of wood. Does wood feel the fire? No, it can’t. And I won’t either. She told him that, too. Yet something leaves the wood when it burns, and something leaves the body when it dies. What’s left? Not sight or sound or taste or smell or touch. Not life. What color will her soul be, rising into the night? Let me be with him, she said. Let me join him in the sweet hereafter.

A voice singing him to sleep: A trip to the moon, on gossamer wings . . . The moist continuity of breathing. The softness of a baby’s neck.

The warmth of a fire. Love. A love so hot as to incinerate all doubt.

It’s a struggle to get the body on the pyre. He can’t tell exactly how they accomplish it. But then all is still and they are lost in the shadows. And he hears the fire before he sees it. Crackling and popping, splitting the silence into fragments. And then he sees them, silhouetted against it, holding each other. He doesn’t see their faces; he doesn’t want to. He won’t testify. But he can witness, and does.

As if nine-tenths of her weight is soul, Marguerite bursts into flame and rises from the fire. Yellow, orange, purple, red: in the colors of her flowers, Marguerite burns, and her soul rises white to the stars.

She stepped out into the frozen night, placing her feet where James had placed his, then stepping finally out of the house’s glow and into the moonless dark, the snow slippery under her flat soles. She ought to have brought a walking stick, ought to have worn boots; the slippers slowed her, made it harder than it had to be. And it was hard.

But she kept on. And soon the night was not frozen at all, but warm as spring, and she was a girl, going to help with the lambing. It was warm as a New Orleans evening, and she was a woman, entering a moonlit courtyard. It was warm as summer, and she was Tante, breathing air filled with the scent of sweet alyssum, walking through a flower garden blooming more profusely than any she had ever grown. It was easy now to follow the path. Nothing hindered her, nothing held her back. She was leaving, she knew that; she was leaving something behind. But this time it did not hold her back.

When she was tired, she lay down on a bed of leaves. It was only then that she started to feel the cold, wished she had someone with her. So when the little bird came, she welcomed its company. So smart, the little bird, its sharp tongue digging. She lived the truth then, her body cooling with it until she felt nothing, heard nothing but the distant tapping of the little bird. Saw nothing but the bowl of colorful petals, and the small boy raising them to his mouth. Oh, he said. Oh. They are a little sweet, he said. And some bitter, like pepper. But I like them. And the boy ate.