She started to cry. He became aware that he was crying, too. She led him to a chair and she shut the door.
She did not tell him directly, for of course she supposed he knew. It was only by her elaborations of grief that he found out. On the night of the storm which wrecked the harvest, Silky had been lingering by the apple tree in the field behind the school. When lightning had struck the tree, it had struck Silky also. Silky was dead. She had been dead for more than a month.
The grandmother brewed a herbal tea, which once the three of them had drunk. Nobody could drink it now. She patently wanted to keep Parl with her. He had been so often with Silky that now he seemed to conjure the girl for the old woman. Then the grandmother went to a chest and brought out something mysteriously. Drawing near to him, she showed him a cloth packet and opened it to reveal a clot of shining threads.
“All I’ve got left of her,” she said.
She had trimmed Silky’s silken hair the very morning before she died. The lightning had left nothing much, stripping flesh and sweetness, as it had stripped the tree. But these fringes of hair the grandmother had, by sheer luck, retained. Now, with a supreme effort of sacrifice, she offered the packet to Parl.
The instant he saw the hair, he felt very sick. Truths that he would learn and reason for himself in later years, came to him now merely instinctively. He felt but did not know what the shorn hair represented, and what its power must be. He had not guessed yet what that power signified.
Even so, instinct ordered him. Though he almost cringed with revulsion, he took the packet of hair.
He sat, with the packet lying by him, most of the day, in Silky’s grandmother’s house. All that time they said hardly anything to each other. She did not think to ask him if he should be anywhere else. She had forgotten real life. And Parl, though he understood the world went on, the landowner and his fields and his anger, they were only dimly perceived, dimly remembered, events outside the bubble which enclosed him and the blasted apple tree and the dead girl and her shorn hair.
When the day began to drain away, he rose and politely said good-bye to the old woman.
As he was going to the field, he met three of his former fellow students from the school. They clustered around him, eager to commiserate, or, as it seemed to him then, to enjoy his pain. Finally, one said, “So-and-so told me the priests went to bless the ground where she was killed. So-and-so said she might not lie quiet.” One of the others cuffed him, growing aware of sheer bad taste at last. They went away.
Bats fizzled over the field and dissolved in the darkness. The sky was overcast, and rain fell. The struck tree glowed strangely in the wet with a hard vitreous sheen.
After an hour, Silky came walking softly through the rain toward him.
She was strong. She looked very near mortal this time. Before, she had been mostly transparent. He felt the weird drawing, the drag of energy going out of himself to her. He had wanted her to be there, and the sense that he fed her existence was almost pleasant. But then again, somewhere inside himself, he shied from this pleasure, was revolted by it. When she stood close to him and put her hand on his arm, he grew cold, colder than he had ever been in his life. He could not actually feel any pressure of her fingers.
There was no mark on her of the lightning. There rarely ever was, as he would come to know, evidence of the positive wounds or bodily spasms of death upon a living ghost. Its whole revenance was a masquerade of life; it tended to be amnesiac about the instant of annihilation, even in the degree of camouflage.