The Second Sentence

In a valley where the river ran close to the fields, there was a weaver who had not spoken to his son in twenty years. The quarrel that separated them had dissolved in memory long before the silence did. Now there was only the silence, and the weaver had grown accustomed to its weight.

Each winter, when the cold quieted his loom, he would take out a small square of undyed cloth and begin to write. He knew the first sentence by heart: I have thought of you every season. He had written it so many times the words had worn into the cloth like a path worn into stone.

He never wrote the second sentence.

His neighbors thought him patient, a man gathering himself before difficult words. His wife said nothing. She had long understood what the cloth was for.

To send the letter was to learn what his son would say. If the son answered coldly, the weaver would have to carry that. If the son did not answer at all, there would be nothing left to tend. But as long as the cloth stayed folded, the silence could be called anything — grief, or love, or waiting, which is the softest word for neither.

So he kept it. The way some men keep a wound, visiting it each winter to confirm it was still there, still warm, still his.

He died in the cold month, the cloth beside him, the first sentence worn through at the fold.

His wife did not weep for the letter. She wept because the second sentence had always been ready. It had been ready for twenty years.

She burned the cloth that evening.

Three days later, a rider came from the coast. He carried no letter, only himself. He had been waiting, he said, for a long time. He had not known for what.