Setting the Extra Place
Every year the plate at the end of the table gets a little fuller, and every year I understand a little better why we do this.
The dumb supper is the strangest thing the Hearth does, and I say that as someone who has stood in a field at four in the morning singing to a sunrise that was in no hurry. You cook a meal. You set the table. You set one more place than there are living people coming. You serve that place first, and you serve it properly, a real portion, not a token. Then you eat the whole meal in silence.
The first year we did it, there were six of us and I thought I would laugh. I am a laugher in silences; church was difficult for me as a child and funerals are worse. I was sure that somewhere around the second course someone would catch my eye and that would be the end of it. Instead, around the second course, I realised I had been looking at the empty chair for ten minutes and that my face was wet. Nobody caught my eye. Everyone was looking at the chair.
Who sits there
In the Irish tradition the place is for the family dead, who come back on this one night to the house they knew. In practice, at a hearth where none of us are related, the chair holds everyone. My grandmother, who taught me to make soda bread and would have been appalled by all of this and secretly delighted. Wren's brother. Ash's first teacher, who died before we met Ash and whom we feel we know. The witch whose library came to us in boxes with her annotations still in the margins. Doreen, whom none of us met and all of us read. And this year, for the first time, one of us: Hazel, who was a Hearthkeeper for four years and died in June, and whose Brighid's cross is still above the door of the hall because none of us can bear to take it down before Imbolc.
The plate for the dead, this year, had her shepherd's pie on it. She made it for every Samhain supper and complained every year that nobody else ever cooked. Wren made it from her recipe, which was in the library books, written on the inside cover of a Cunningham in biro. It was not as good as hers. We all agreed, silently, by looking at each other, that it was not as good as hers, and that this was correct.
What the silence does
I have thought about this a great deal, because I am a person who needs to understand why a thing works before I trust it, which is a bad quality in a witch and a good one in a Hearthkeeper. Here is what I have come to.
Talking is how the living hold each other at arm's length. We fill the air so that we do not have to feel what is in the room. The dumb supper takes the air away. You cannot say "she would have loved this." You cannot say "do you remember when." You can only sit with the person who is not there, and eat, and notice that you are still eating, that your body is going on doing the thing bodies do, and that theirs is not. It is the plainest possible statement of what death is. And then, because you are sitting in a room with five other people who are also doing this, and because the candles are lit, and because the plate at the end of the table is full and nobody is pretending it is not, it becomes bearable. Not less sad. Bearable. Those are different and I did not know that before.
The names
After the meal, still in silence, we clear the table, all but the one place, and go into circle. And then, finally, we speak, but only names. Each of us says the names of our dead, this year's and all the years', and after each name the circle says: What is remembered, lives. It takes a long time. It takes longer every year. Nobody has ever suggested we shorten it.
Hazel's name was said six times, once by each of us, which is against the custom, since you only say your own dead. Nobody minded. She would have said it was inefficient and then said it again herself.
Afterwards
The plate goes outside, under the rowan, for whoever comes in the night. In the morning it is always empty. I know about foxes. I am a grown woman and I know about foxes. I also know that I have never once gone to collect that plate without saying thank you, and that the saying of it is the whole of what I believe about the dead, and that it is enough.
We set the extra place because they are coming. We set the extra place because they are not, and we need somewhere to put that. Both are true. Samhain is the night both are true at once, and the plate is full, and the fire is lit, and the door is open. Come in. There is shepherd's pie. It is not as good as yours.
Rowan has been a Hearthkeeper since the covenant was written and holds the eleventh night of the flame.