Called From Labor: Not Discharged

Malcolm Crisp, the Worshipful Master of a small Masonic Lodge in Randolph County, West Virginia, is dead before page one. He maintained four interconnected systems that no one else knew were one system: the beehives as a communication channel between the living and the dead, the crows as surveillance from the far side of that threshold, a dead cedar hung with blue bottles as containment for what came back uninvited, and the Lodge ritual as the formal transmission protocol that gave the bees' messages their authority. He kept this for forty years. He never passed it on. All four systems are now running without their operator.

For readers of The Bog Wife by Kay Chronister and Smothermoss by Alisa Alering