Post by Nan Truesdale

The first page: the Saturday sack

Friday, 21 August

Three weeks out

Three weeks to Somebody Else's Ashes. Here is the first page, and one note on it. The book opens on Hattie working. Not on the town, not on the weather, not on anybody's feelings. On a woman with her hands in a sack of things the railroad found, doing the sacks in order because that is the rule. I wanted the first thing you learned about her to be that she has a procedure, and the second thing to be that she has a rule about the procedure, and the third thing to be that the rule is not the reason. The urn is brass. She checks. Nine inches, squared shoulders, the plain kind, the kind that gets ordered when somebody has asked for something that will not look like anything. The letters on the plate are cut, not etched, with the little burr on the inside of the curves that you can feel with a fingertip. That is one sentence, and it took longer than the chapter around it, and I do not regret it. That is provenance. It is the whole of how Hattie sees the world, and it is the whole of how she solves things. Everything arrives with a history and a claimant. Even an urn. What is the heaviest thing you ever found at the bottom of a bag? From Somebody Else's Ashes, chapter one: The thing at the bottom of the Saturday sack came up heavy and wrong, and Hattie Pell had it in both hands before she knew what it was, which almost never happened to her. It was an urn. Brass, or brass-plated over something cheaper. She scratched the base with a thumbnail and it stayed brass, so brass. Nine inches, squared shoulders, the plain kind, the kind that got ordered when somebody had asked for something that would not look like anything. A screw-down lid with a bead of clear sealant run round the seam, neatly, by somebody who had done it before. On the front, a plate. Engraved, not etched: cut letters, the sort a shop did on a pantograph, with the little burr on the inside of the curves that you could feel with a fingertip.