His mother had done it for her mother, so he did it for his mother: a bowl of stove ash, sifted through a cloth, spread with the side of his hand across the boards from the doorway to the foot of her bed. It took a long time to get it even. He kept finding places where the layer was too thin to hold anything.
He left the lamp burning and the door unbarred, as instructed, and slept at his sister's on the other side of the village. Neither of them slept much. Around two she made tea and they sat with it going cold, not talking about it.
He came back at first light. The lamp had burned down to nothing. The door was as he had left it.
There were footprints in the ash.
They came in from the threshold and crossed to the bed and stopped there, which is where they should have stopped. He crouched over them for a long time with his hands on his knees. They were not small. His mother had been a small woman with small feet, and these were not that; these were a working man's tread, forty-three at least, the heel biting deeper than the toe the way a heavy person walks.
He measured one against his hand, then against the sole of the shoe he was holding, having taken it off to keep from spoiling the ash.
It matched. It went on matching however long he knelt there, and however many times he set his shoe down beside it and picked it up again.