Geth looks like a man assembled from road dust, wet wool, and patient attention. His hands are broad and rope-hard, their palms pale and ridged from years of hauling buckets and setting stone; the nails are permanently dark with grit. He moves with a measured side-to-side sway, as if balancing an invisible pail, and stops at wells to listen before he looks down them. In a crowded room his gaze keeps returning to mouths and doorways, never lingering on faces. Unexpectedly, he carries a tiny paper pinwheel and sets it spinning whenever he has to wait.

Geth is generous with labor but stingy with explanations, and he can be wryly funny until a conversation turns toward the dead. He likes people more than he trusts them. When relaxed, he tells practical road stories and shares food; when frightened, he becomes exact and procedural, listing what must be done as though a checklist could hold the world together.

Geth learned well-mending from his mother, who taught him to judge a shaft by the taste of its damp air and the sound a pebble made against its lining. For years he traveled between villages with a pack of tools, trading repairs for meals and a place beside the hearth. He came to know Mary Hirst through the Welshmen, traveling salesmen who brought household goods and news along the same roads. One winter, after a village well was sealed, Geth heard his dead brother's voice calling from beneath the stones. He nearly answered. Mary, then a girl, was nearby, and Geth warned her never to answer a familiar voice after midnight. That night changed his work: he now inspects wells not only for cracked masonry but for things that seem to learn the names of the living. He has remained on the road, unsettled by the fact that the voice has begun using his own. He still owes Mary an explanation, and the Welshmen have lately been asking him to repair a well they refuse to describe.