Epilogue: Coda | Watched Long Enough

She came home over the wet fell on the Thursday, and the town took her back as the town now took her, which was with a complaint about the ale and a message about a fence, and by suppertime the house on the lane was loud to the rafters and the lamp in its window was one lamp among the street's many, which is the whole of what a homecoming is for. After supper she walked down to the stream. The town saw her go and did not follow, the town having learned, over three years and two walls of a verse, when a Busterson is on parish business and when she is not. She went down Ford Street with her hands empty and stood on the bridge a while in the last light, and then went down the bank to the water, to the flat stone at the foot of the temple steps where the urns stood in their row, and Mother Vess was there. Of course she was there. She was small and round and gray on the bottom step, with her shawl gathered and her hands folded, and she did not get up, and she did not speak. In three books of that town's history there was no record of Mother Vess in company and silent, and the stream ran on past the both of them in the dark, talking to itself over the stones it had spent three years relearning, and Genna stood at the edge of the water and waited, without knowing entirely what she was waiting for, which made her the only one at that stream who didn't. The water stilled. Not slowed. Stilled, bank to bank, the whole reach of it through the town, the way a room stills, and in the quiet…