I don't know. Yes, you do. You've seen it 50 times. Sound it out. Odessa.
Sound it out. T H E and D. Good. Next one. And that was how it started.
One word, then a sentence, then a page. slow halting his big finger following the lines like a plow following a furrow. He was bad at it. Truly bad. He mixed up his B's and D's he read was a saw.
And there was one word he got wrong every single time. Ren, she said, pointing w. Why is there a W? There just is. Nobody says the W.
It's silent. Then why is it there? Anel. It's a perfectly good word without it. R N Ren.
That's not how it's spelled. It should be. She threw up her hands. You are the most stubborn man in Montana, second most. You haven't met my cattle.
And every time he wrote it on the slate, every single time he left the W off, Ren. And every time she corrected it, and every time he did it again, it became a joke between them. Their joke, nobody else's. The next week, she found a little wooden bird on her window sill, tiny, no bigger than her thumb. Every feather carved, its beak open like it was about to sing.
There was a scrap of paper under it, one word in his big, careful, crooked letters. Ren. She laughed until she cried, and she never moved it from that windowsill. Not once. Down in Copper Hollow, in the back room of the post office, Leland Ashcom sat at his desk and sorted the mail.
Letters for the mercantile, letters for the church, letters for the bank, and one letter in a woman's hand. Postmarked Miles City, addressed to Mr. Anel Branick. He turned it over in his fingers, held it up to the lamp. Then he opened the bottom drawer of his desk, set the letter inside, and locked the drawer, and went back to sorting the mail. Jubel Varnum did not leave town.
He took a room at the Gilded Pick and waited for his papers from Ohio. And every day he found a reason to be wherever Odessa was, at the mercantile, outside the church, on the road, just watching, smiling, touching his hat. Ohio's coming for you, sister. Go away, Jubel. Any day now.
Go away. Then you'll hang. And that big ox will be alone again like he's supposed to be. She never told Anel because she knew what he would do. And then on the last Saturday in January, Jubel stopped waiting.
Anel was up in the high pasture, breaking ice on the troughs, too far away to hear, except he did hear a scream thin and sharp coming from the barn. He ran. snow to his knees, lungs burning down the hill faster than a man his size had any right to move. And all the while his mind went, "No, no, no, no, not her. Not her.
Please, God, not her." He hit the barn door so hard it came off one hinge. Jubel Varnum had her pinned against the stall. One hand clamped over her mouth, the other twisting her arm up behind her back, and there was blood on her lip. Her blood should have stayed in Ohio's sister. Jubel was hissing.
Should have. He never finished because Anel's hand closed on the back of his collar and lifted him clean off the ground. Jubel flew across the barn into the hay rack. Wood splintered. He hit the floor and rolled and came up clawing for the pistol on his hip.
Anel was already there. One hand on the gun wrist twisting. The pistol dropped. One hand on the throat and he lifted Jubel Varnum up against the barn wall. feet kicking, face going purple, eyes bulging, and Anel felt it.
The thing he'd been afraid of his whole life, the thing everybody whispered about, the rage rising up through his arms like fire through dry grass. One squeeze, that's all it would take. One squeeze and this man would never touch her again. Do it. Do it.
He hurt her. He made her bleed. Do it. Do it. Do it.
A strong man has to choose it. His mother's voice clear as a bell. Anel's hand opened. Jubel dropped to the floor, gasping, choking, crawling backward through the straw like a crab. "Get off my land," Anel said.
His voice was very, very quiet. "Get off my land, and if you ever touch her again, I won't stop." "Do you understand me?" "I won't stop." Jubel scrambled to his feet and ran. He ran straight past the three people standing in the barn doorway. Walt Dunore with half a deer over his shoulder. Abel Lund on his crutch and Leland Ashcom who had ridden up with them to check on his friend.
They had seen all of it, the lift, the throw, the throat, and and the hand that opened. Walt Dunore let out a long slow breath. "Lord Almighty," he said. "I thought you were going to kill him." "So did I," Anel said. "But you didn't know." Abelon looked up at him, eyes wide.
"Why not?" Anel turned, looked at the boy, looked at Odessa, wiping the blood from her lips, staring at him like she had never seen him before. "Because my mother wouldn't have liked it," he said. Behind them, Leland Ashcom was very still. And for one second, just one, there was a look on his face, not relief, not admiration, disappointment. Then it was gone, and he was all concern, all warmth, hurrying forward to take Odessa's arm.
But Anel had seen it, and he did not know why it made his skin crawl. That night, he could not sleep. He kept seeing that look, that flicker, and underneath it, something else, something that kept scratching at the back of his mind like a mouse in the wall. Leland never said. At the depot the very first day, Leland read the letter twice.