Your mother was dying, Ashcom said. Say the rest of it. She was very ill already. The fever had her. It was only a matter of Say the rest of it, Leland.
Ashcom looked at him for a long time. The gun did not waver, but something behind it did. Something that had been carrying the weight of a particular secret for 25 years, and had perhaps in the way of heavy things carried too long begun to want to be set down. He had beaten Anel for 25 years. He had beaten him at every turn.
The deed, the letters, the brides. He had managed this big, gentle, illiterate man, the way you manage an asset, carefully from a distance, keeping him alone and dependent and grateful for the crumbs of human warmth Ashcom chose to provide. And Anel had learned to read in one winter beside a fire one word at a time. And now he was standing here unchained on a moving train having survived a gallows by brute force asking Leland Ashcom to say out loud the thing Ashcom had never once said out loud in 25 years. There is a particular kind of man who when he finally loses wants the winner to know the full measure of what they won.
who needs at the end to be acknowledged. Not for the winning, for the intelligence of it, for the patience of it, for the 25 years of careful, invisible work that nobody had ever appreciated, because nobody had ever known. Ashcom was that kind of man. She found the deed. He said, "She came to me.
She was dying. Yes, and she knew it. But Ruth Branick was going to spend the last weeks of her life fighting me in territorial court on behalf of a 14-year-old boy who didn't know what he had. And she would have won. She was that kind of woman.
She was. Anel said, "The hemlock was already in the valley. It grows by the creek above your pasture. It always has. The symptoms are similar enough to certain fevers if you don't know what you're looking at." He paused.
Your mother knew what she was looking at. Right up until the end, she knew. She looked at me and she knew. The train swayed. Anel did not move, did not speak, did not take his eyes off the man in front of him.
I told myself it was business. Ashcom said, "The railroad, the pass. 25 years of waiting for that mountain to be worth what I knew it was worth. I told myself she was going to die anyway, and I was only managing the timing." His voice was completely flat now, empty. The voice of a man reading words off a page.
I have told myself that for 25 years. It gets easier and then it gets harder again and then you just stop thinking about it. The house. Anel said my house. Ashcom did not hesitate.
I sent two men up the ridge after Tull took you back before the trial. I needed you to have nothing left. A man with nothing left stops fighting. He looked at his own hands. I thought it would work.
It always worked before. It almost did. Anel said. Yes. Ashcom said almost.
Her name was Ruth, Anel said. I know her name. Say it. Ashcom looked at him. Her name was Ruth Branick, he said.
And I killed her. The gun hand dropped. Not all the way, not to his side. Just a few inches. The small unconscious loosening of a grip that has been held too long.
Anel crossed the freight car in three strides. His hand closed on Ashcom's wrist. Not crushing, not twisting, just closing. The way you close a gate, the way you end a thing. Ashcom pulled the trigger.
The shot went into the floor of the freight car, 6 in to the left of Anel's boot, and the sound of it in that enclosed space was enormous, and Anel felt it in his back teeth. He took the gun, and he held Leland Ashcom against the freight car wall by the lapels of his fine wool coat. This man who had read him his letters, who had written his name in a neat hand on envelopes, addressed to women who would never meet him, who had stood on porch with and said, "I'm on your side." And meant it in the same way a man with a hook means it when he says, "This will only take a moment. I trusted you." Anel said, "Not an accusation, not a question, just the truth. The plainest truth he had ever spoken.
the one that hurt more than the knife wound and more than the rope and more than standing in the ashes of his house believing the woman he loved had left him. Ashcom said nothing. His shoulders dropped the rigid composure of 25 years going out of him like air out of a bellows. What was left was just a tired old man in a dirty coat on a moving train. I know, he said, and that was his all.
Ans let go of his lapels. He crossed the freight car to Odessa. She looked up at him, both eyes steady, bruise coming up, purple on her temple and blood on her lip, and her hair half down and her hands still bound behind her. And she looked at him exactly the way she had looked at him on the platform in the rain on a day that felt like a hundred years ago, like he was the most ordinary thing in the world, like he was exactly what she had been expecting. He untied her hands.