The Harrow's Red Thread

Moira and Hank have been married for twenty-two years. They are at a wake in the old fire station, which stopped being a fire station before she was born and has been a community hall ever since. She is watching a moth drown. The hydrant at the curb has a slow leak, one drip every second or so, and the drip has made a puddle as wide as a dinner plate on the footpath. The moth keeps landing on the surface of that puddle, wetting itself, struggling back to the edge, and going back in. She does not know why it keeps going back. She counts four trips before she stops counting.

Inside the hall the wake is ending. Most of the chairs are already stacked. The caterer's boy, a man of about twenty-five with a stained shirt, has packed the urn and is hauling it out to a van. Somebody's cousin is sweeping rice off the linoleum. The dead man was old and mostly strangers to her, some relative of Hank's from the dairy side, and she has spent three hours saying the right things to people whose names she got wrong.

Hank comes to stand beside her in the doorway. He is forty-six, two years older, and he has been laid off from the pulp mill for eleven weeks now. He smells of the hall's soap from the men's room, which she has noticed is the pink kind from the dispenser, the kind that smells like artificial pears, and she has noticed because everything tonight she has noticed with an unusual sharpness, the way a person notices things on the last day of a holiday or the last day of a lease.

"Look at that moth," he says.

"It keeps going back."

"Yep." He does not offer to rescue it. Neither does she. It is not their moth. After a while he takes something out of his jacket pocket, wrapped in a handkerchief, and holds it flat in his palm like he is showing her a coin trick. It is a monocle. She has never seen one outside of a costume shop. The frame is silver, twisted, worked into a sort of rope pattern all the way around, and there is no glass in it. Just the empty ring.

"I bought that in March," he says. "Before the mill thing. There was a jeweller in Timaru who does silverwork, and I went in meaning to get you a bracelet and came out with this. It's made to hold a single lens. He said he could fit one for your prescription, and I kept meaning to take it back to him, and then I got laid off the same week and it seemed stupid to spend money on a lens when there were rates to pay."

She does not pick it up. She looks at the twisted silver and thinks about March, when they still had a life with a shape to it, and she does not say any of that.

"It's a strange gift," she says.

"It is. I know."

The last guests come out past them, two women in good coats who thank them both for coming like they were the hosts. Then it is just the sweeper, and then the sweeper puts the broom in a closet and leaves through the back, and then it is the two of them and the stacked chairs and the big broken harrow standing in the middle of the floor.

The harrow is the reason for the whole thing. It is a local custom she had never heard of until she married into this district. When a person is buried, somebody brings a broken farm implement to the wake, something that died in the fields the way the person died in the district, and everyone ties a length of red thread around it and says nothing in particular. The harrow in the middle of the hall is wound in red thread now, dozens and dozens of turns of it, around the tines and the frame and the broken drawbar, and it looks to Moira like a thing that has been bandaged. She walks over and puts her palm flat against the wound threads. They are rough and slightly waxy. The metal underneath is cold.

That is when she hears the click, and turns, and sees Hank holding the front door handle up and out of its latch, and the handle is not doing anything.

"The caretaker took the key when he went," he says. "He thought we'd left with the others. The handle locks itself from the outside. We're in here till he comes in the morning, or till I climb out a window, and the windows in this place are too small for me and I'd say for you too."

Moira looks at the windows and agrees silently. They are tall narrow things high in the wall, meant for light and not for people. She looks at the door. She looks at the harrow under her hand. Outside, faint through the wall, the hydrant keeps its drip. She finds she is not frightened. She has been locked in worse places than this, metaphorically, for three years.

Hank comes and stands beside her at the harrow. He puts his hand next to hers on the red thread, not touching her hand, just near it.

"I want to ask you something," he says, "and I want you to know you can say no and we'll sit in these stacked chairs all night and play games on our phones, and I'll never bring it up."

"Ask, then."

"I want tonight. The hours we're stuck here. I want you to let me take control. Of you. Of us. I want to be the one who decides things for a night, because I have decided nothing for eleven weeks and you have decided everything, and I miss being the man you gave that to." He says it steadily, which is not like him. He has been carrying his grief the way he carries everything, silently and heavily, and she has carried hers the same way, and the two silences have ground against each other for three years since the stillbirth, like badly meshed gears.

She thinks about the moth, which went back to the water four times on purpose, as far as she could tell, and she thinks about a safeword, and she says, "Harrow."

"What?"

"That's my word. If I say harrow, everything stops. Everything. No questions, no negotiating, we just sit down and stop."

He nods once. "Harrow. Understood. And you're saying yes otherwise?"

"I'm saying yes!"

He takes her hand then, properly, the first deliberate touch of the night, and she lets him. He leads her to the middle of the floor, to the bare stretch of linoleum in front of the harrow, and he says, "Kneel here. Face the harrow," and she goes down onto the cold floor, which is colder than she expected, the chill coming up through her dress immediately. The red threads are at eye level from down here. The tines point at her like a row of dull opinions. Behind her she hears him take off his jacket and