wrapped up in a wool blanket before a fire that barely penetrated his cold flesh, he considered sneaking into the cemetary and bringing her home,

 

he went so far as to buy a pick and shovel from alessandro, the stony faced squint eyed storekeeper who crossed himself as mr santiago left his shop and sent his son to warn mr. santiago's mother in law that her daughter was in danger of being exhumed by 'that madman'

 

late that night, three of her sons exhumed the body themselves and buried it in another part of the graveyard

 

it was a particularly fierce and moving morning mass during which the padre extolled the virtues of the spirit over the flesh,

 

 mr santiago decided on a new course of action, to take matters into his own hands and recapture the spirit of his wife

 

he would catch her by painting red spirals on rocks and leaving them out on his best porcelin.

 in the biting cold of the morning he would harvest her like dew and bundle her into  a leather bag woven with bear hair and splashed with holy water stolen from the font of our lady of the perpetual sorrow

 

the spirit would be attracted to the plate like a  fly to sugar, be caught up in the spiral, wandering the lines until it came to heart of the spiral where it would stand trapped, for it is well known that spirits can move forward but not backward and thus, drawn on by their insatiable curiousity they would remain, until mr santiago had come home from little clay church on the hill and begun harvesting the ghosts as carefully and predictably as a beekeeper taking honeycombs from a hive

 

and so it began, in his painstaking scrawl he would write a label for each bag, the day, the date and the time of the moon and in this way, amassed a great heap of spirits, so much so that he wondered if the lord of the dead had began to notice his people were going missing and was becoming concerened

 

to be safe he bought a juniper wood cradle and moved the heap of bags from the cellar to a special compartment under the bed board, knowing that should the lord of the dead come searching, he would be nosing through the mold and the rotten vegetables rather than the sweet young wood of the cradle which symbolised mans entry into life rather than his exit