Yeshik is a lean young man who seems to occupy more room than his narrow frame should allow. He stands close without realizing it, head tilted as though listening through the floor. His skin has the matte, cool look of old candle wax, with faint soil-dark seams at the knuckles and throat. His hair lies in damp-looking black curls, even after a day beside the kitchen stove. He moves with careful, measured steps, then turns his whole body at once with the quickness of a dog hearing its name. His unexpected distinction is that he keeps a tiny, orderly collection of polished buttons in his apron pocket and can identify each by touch.

Yeshik is grateful for routine but restless when the churchyard is quiet for too long. He can be blunt and physically overfamiliar, yet he is careful around anything fragile. In a busy kitchen he is patient, almost cheerful, and methodical; when a grave is disturbed, his kindness narrows into a single-minded protective focus. He wants to be treated as ordinary, though he cannot stop acting like a guardian.

Yeshik was the first body buried in the new churchyard, laid beneath a fresh patch of turf before the church had a proper bell. No one now remembers why a young man, rather than an animal, was given the old guardian's place. He remembers rain striking a wooden lid, a smell like wet wool, and then a long quiet in which the dead seemed to be waiting for someone to show them where to go. He does not remember his name from life. Years later, he crawled out of a shallow grave when a drainage trench broke its edge. The gravedigger, an elderly man named Oren, did not run. He gave Yeshik a coat and a bucket, and taught him that a useful person could earn a place at the table. Yeshik found work washing dishes at the Bell-and-Bucket, a busy inn whose name is an old warning about the church bell that once called people to flee a flood. He is grateful for the work and takes the dishes seriously, though he still slips out at night to guide unsettled spirits away from the churchyard fence. Oren has since died and is buried there. Yeshik's living friend, the innkeeper Tovin, trusts him with the kitchen keys but does not know what he is. The church's new rector, Gerta, has begun asking why the oldest grave has no name and why the ground around it never stays disturbed for long.