One of them had a traveling kit with needle and thread and had spent 20 minutes on the torn shoulder seam of the dress and it would not have passed inspection in a seamstress's shop, but it held. And Nora wore it without complaint. The ceremony was in the late afternoon when the clouds that had been building since noon finally turned the light from gold to silver. And the chapel's oil lamps came on and made the interior warm against the early October dark coming in through the windows. The cottonwoods along the Pecos were showing gold.
And the wind had come up and inside the chapel it smelled of lamp oil and beeswax. And the particular smell of a place where a community has been gathering itself for years. Greist kept the ceremony honest and brief, which is the best kind. He spoke about two people choosing each other in a country where choosing was not always easy. He said something about water in the dry land, which was probably intended metaphorically and landed differently than he planned.
And a few people in the pews laughed. And then he laughed, too. And the ceremony was better for it. When he got to the rings, Caleb reached into his coat pocket, not for the surveying instruments, which he had left with the horse and which would keep. For the ring, the plain silver band worn smooth, that had been in his pocket all morning through everything that had happened.
Through the ride down the ridge and the yard and the forgery and Voss and Felix and the withdrawal of the lean, sitting quiet in its place the whole time. Waiting. He held it up for a moment in the lamplight. Nora looked at it. He placed it on her finger.
She looked at it for a long moment. She looked at him. She said quietly, so only he could fully hear it, "Where did that come from?" He said, "It was my mother's. I rode to Cimarron this morning to get it from the neighbor who was keeping it." She was quiet for a beat. Outside the wind moved the cottonwoods.
She said, "You could have told me." He said, "Wouldn't have been a surprise." She looked at the ring. She looked at the man in front of her. The man she had shared rolled oats with at the mercantile 2 years ago. The man who had helped shear her father's sheep without being asked. The man who carried his past in a coat pocket without ever asking her to carry it with him.