It was warm inside and smelled of wood smoke and liniment. A girl in a Munising Mustangs sweatshirt was sitting at the kitchen table with her face in her hands, the Lahti girl from out the road, and an old black Labrador lay under the table and thumped its tail once at him and didn't get up. The girl pointed toward the front room without saying anything.
Hilma Rautio was in a hospital bed that somebody had set up by the window where the light was. She was very small. She had a white braid on the pillow, thin as a pencil, and a quilt pulled up to her chin, and her breath was coming slow and loud and far apart, the breathing Dale had heard once before in his life and never wanted to hear again.
Nora was sitting beside her in a kitchen chair. She was still in her coat. Her hair had come down completely and was wet with melted snow and hung down her back in dark ropes, and there was grease on her face, a long black smear down one cheek, and grease on her hands, and she had one of those hands wrapped around both of Hilma's. Her legs under her skirt were bare. Her shins were red and raw with cold.
She looked up when he came in. She didn't look surprised. She looked, he thought afterward, the way he must have looked to her that first night on M-28, when she'd been holding the jack upside down. Like somebody had come who knew how to do the thing.
"She keeps asking for a song," Nora said quietly. "In Finnish. I don't know it. I've been trying, but I don't know the words, and she gets upset. I think it's a Christmas one. She keeps saying maa. Maa."
Dale took his hat off. He came across the room and knelt down on the other side of the bed. The old woman's eyes were half open, pale blue, looking at nothing. Her lips were moving.
He knew the song. His grandmother had sung it, his father's mother, in the kitchen on Elm Street every December while she made the prune tarts, in a high thin voice that cracked on the top notes. He hadn't sung it in twenty years. He hadn't sung anything in church in nearly three. He didn't know if he could.
"Maa on niin kaunis," he sang, low, barely above the old woman's breathing. "Kirkas Luojan taivas."
Hilma Rautio's eyes moved. They found him. Her mouth went soft.
He didn't know all of it. He sang what he knew, and when he ran out of words he hummed, and after the first verse Nora found the tune, the alto under it, the way she'd sung going down the aisle at Bethany that first Sunday, not showy, just there. They sang it twice through. Then they sang it again. The storm hit the window. The old dog came in from the kitchen and lay down on Dale's feet.
Hilma Rautio died a little after four in the morning, with her pastor holding one hand and Dale Haapala holding the other, and the wind going down outside, and the first gray coming up behind the snow.
Nora didn't move for a long time. Then she leaned forward and kissed the old woman on the forehead, and said something too quiet for Dale to hear, and made the sign of the cross over her, and folded her small hands together on the quilt.
Then she put her own face in her hands, grease and all, and wept.