Miles stood at the wet cliff lip, the staff loose in his hand, and looked down at the stone before he put any weight on it.
The lip was black with wet. Water ran over it in a sheet too thin to hear, found the hollows, and filled them, and every hollow shone like poured glass. Beyond the edge the rock face dropped away into gray, and the gray had no bottom in it that his eyes could find.
He set the tip of the staff against the stone at the length of his arm and leaned his weight into it by degrees. The tip held, and then it did not. It skated sideways off the skin of water and fetched up with a small hard tick, and the shock of the stop came up the smoothed grain into his palm.
He tried again, closer to the edge, where he would set his foot if he were going on. There the stone was worse. The water ran faster over the rounding of the lip, and the tip slid the moment it took weight, slid and kept sliding, and he let it run so that it was the staff that traveled and not his boot.
He drew the staff back and set it against the ground where he stood and pressed, and it held. He marked that. No stone on the mountain was dry this morning, but there was a difference between wet and slick, and his palm had learned the difference even where his eyes could not see it.
He was eighty-two, and his balance was an old man's balance, a thing negotiated rather than assumed. The staff had become the terms of that negotiation.
Below the lip the rock face ran down out of sight. The mist worked against it in slow folds and showed him nothing: no shelf, no seam, no place where the mountain relented. He did not need to see the bottom to know the kind of fall it was. Some drops a man judges with his eyes. This one he judged in his knees, which had gone careful on their own, and in the small of his back, which had drawn him a half step off the edge without asking leave.
Behind him the homestead path waited in the wet. It would keep. He did not turn to it yet.
He worked the lip with the tip of the staff, out and back, the way a man reads a letter he does not trust, word by word. Here the stone held. Here it slid. Here the water ran black and quick over the rounding, and nothing under it would take a point or a sole. He set the map of it down in memory, the holds and the betrayals together, because a man of eighty-two does not get to be wrong about stone.
The rain fell on. Below the rock face the gray deepened and showed nothing and hid the rest. Miles stood at the wet cliff lip with the staff planted where the stone would hold it, the map of the lip carried in his palm, the holds and the betrayals both. He had tested the stone, and the stone had answered, and the answer was not yet a decision.
The decision came the way his decisions came now, without ceremony. The lip would keep its wet and its mist, he would take the homestead path back, and the morning would go on being a morning. He had the map of the stone in his palm. He only had to turn and walk it backward, hold by hold, out of the rain.
He set his weight to turn.
That was all. There was no lurch in it, no misstep that could have been pointed to afterward and named the cause. He turned the way he had turned ten thousand mornings, weight off the forward foot, the staff taking what the knee would not. His sole came down on stone he had read an hour's care into, stone he had marked as one that held.
Water had moved across it since. That was the whole of the difference. The stone had not changed. The film of rain on it had, and the rounding under the film, and his sole found the rounding beneath the water and not the stone beneath the rounding, and went.
His knee buckled. He did what eighty-two years had taught him, which was to give the fall to the staff. The staff took his weight gladly, as it had taken it on the pine path and at the lip, and the tip held for the length of a breath, and then the wet stone refused it too. The point skated off the rounding with a small sound, almost polite, and the terms of the negotiation were void.
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He went over the lip without a cry. There was no one to hear one. That had been the arrangement for a long time, and it held at the end exactly as arranged.
The mist took him. The gray folds closed over the lip, and the lip was gone. There was a single instant in which the rain was on every side of him at once and the mountain was nowhere under him, and the old body did what it had always done and reached for ground, and there was no ground.
The rock face gave him none, and then it gave him all of it at once.
It was instant. That was the one mercy the mountain had left, and it gave it without knowing it gave anything. There was no time for pain to arrive, no time for the life to pass in review again, no time for a name to rise to his lips. He died there, at the foot of the wet stone, and the long negotiation between an old man and his balance ended the way all such negotiations end, on the mountain's terms, in less time than it took the rain to fall the same distance.
The rain fell the same distance. It fell on the wet cliff lip, where the black quick water ran on over the rounding. It fell on the pine path and the homestead path beyond it, which waited and would keep. It fell on the rock face below the lip, where Miles Coultier lay dead at the foot of the stone he had read so carefully and had not been wrong about until the one time it mattered.
The staff lay near him where the fall had thrown it, tip toward the mountain, as if still pointing out the holds.
No one came. There was no one to come. The mist worked its slow folds against the rock face and showed nothing and hid the rest, and the rain went on falling on the wet stone and on the stillness beneath it, and the morning finished being a morning without him.
Night did not hurry. It came down through the mist the way the mist came down through the trees, slowly, without any one moment a man could have pointed to and called the end of the day. The rain went on through the dark. It ticked on the pine path and whispered in the needles and ran off the wet cliff lip in threads that found the rock face below, and all night the mountain held its new stillness at the foot of the stone, and the dark held the mountain.
The second morning arrived gray and nameless, and there was no one to name it. The light came up behind the rain the color of dishwater, and the mist thinned and thickened and thinned again, and the cliff stood in it like something that had always been there and intended to remain.
The pine path stayed empty. From the trees to the wet cliff lip there was no print in the sodden needles that had not been washed soft by midnight. The homestead path waited at the far end of it, patient as a held breath, and no step came up it, and no voice, and the rain, which was no one's messenger, carried no word in either direction.
At the foot of the rock face, Miles Coultier lay where the stone had left him, eighty-two years ended on his own land, and the rain fell on him the way it fell on everything else, without distinction and without malice. It beaded on his sleeve. It found the lines of his face and ran them like a reading of all those years at once. It pooled in the open cuff and spilled over, and his hand did not close against the cold, and the cold did not ask it to.
The staff lay near him, tip toward the mountain, and the rain worked at it through the night and the day, darkening the wood, while the worn grip kept the shape of a hand that no longer needed holding. Needles came down the runoff and caught against the shaft, one, then two, then a small raft of them, the mountain already beginning the slow work of covering what it had no opinion about.
Alone had been his choosing, long practiced and long kept, and the rain did not argue with it now. The estrangement that had outlasted the war and the shame and all the years between outlasted him too. There would be no final walk back down the homestead path, no last word set down in a shaky hand. Whatever he had meant to say would stay unsaid. Whatever had been meant for him would go on waiting, and waiting, and then stop waiting.
By the gray noon of the second day the water had cut a small dark seam along the base of the rock face and was carrying it, grain by grain, down the mountain. The lip went on rounding under the quick black water. The path went on shining under the sky. Along its edges the first new green had begun to show under the black needles, indifferent, feeding on the same rain. The cliff kept its counsel, and the mist opened on the empty path and closed again.
The rain fell on the living mountain and on the dead man both, and the spring went forward, and it was as though nothing had ended. It was as though everything were only beginning.