Odessa set two broken fingers for a livery hand who did not have money to pay. He paid in eggs. She took them without comment and made the best use of a hotel kitchen that Anel had ever witnessed in his life. On their last morning there, before the westbound train, Anel sat on the hotel steps in the early light, still just sitting, his big hands loose on his knees, eyes on the street where Miles City was waking up around him, ordinary and unhurried, as though men had not been hanged, and houses had not burned, and 25 years of careful cruelty had not just come apart on a freight train. He had the tin box in his coat pocket.
He had not taken it out since the ashes. He took it out now. It sat in his palm. The same weight it had always been. The same dents.
The same thin places where the metal had worn smooth from 25 years of his thumbs running across it in the dark. The old crust of rust and pine pitch that had buried the letters on the lid was gone, burned off in the fire that took his house. The metal beneath was clean, bright. He could read it. He knew that.
He had known it since the freight car. He had taken the box out twice in the hotel room and looked at it and put it away again because knowing and doing are different things and there are some doors you can only walk through once and he needed to be sure he was ready for what was on the other side. The hotel door opened behind him. Odessa came out and sat beside him on the step. She had coffee, two cups, black too strong the way she always made it.
She handed him one and wrapped both hands around her own and did not say anything. He turned the tin over, looked at the lid. I've been carrying this for 25 years, he said. I know. I used to think if I could just read what it said.
Someday if I could just read it. He stopped. Now I can. And I'm sitting here like a coward. You broke out of jail last night.
She said, "You fought four men on a train platform. You escaped through a minehaft that was too small for you." She sipped her coffee. You're allowed to sit for a minute. He looked at her. I'm afraid of what it says.
I know. What if it says something I can't put back? Then we'll sit with it together, she said. That's all. We'll just sit with it.
He looked down at the tin and he read it out loud in his own voice. The low, careful rumble that had once made men step back in the street, reading the five words stamped into the lid of a battered tin box that had been in his pocket for 25 years. Ashcom mercantile, medicinal tea. Five words. He sat with them.
The street went on around him. A wagon. A dog. Somebody opening a shop. The ordinary machinery of a morning.
He put his head down. Not weeping. Not yet. Just down. Just quiet.
Odessa set her coffee cup on the step beside her. She put her hand over his both her small chapped hands over one of his enormous ones, and she did not say anything at all because there was nothing to say that would help, and she was smart enough to know it. and she just sat there beside him in the April light, which was, he thought, after a while, exactly enough. The westbound train came in at 10:00. They came home to a town that did not know what to do with itself, which was fair, because it had done a bad thing, and it knew it had done a bad thing, and the man it had done the bad thing to was now stepping off a train in its depot, alive, with his wife beside him, and rope burns on his neck that everyone could see.
Ione Mulgrew did not give it time to figure out an approach. She was on the platform when the train pulled in. Sunday coat, hat slightly a skew, and behind her 30 people from the valley and the town, the Dunore with baby Ruth, Abel Lund on his crutch, grinning so wide his missing tooth was the first thing you saw. The Peralta brothers, Mrs. Krauss, the school teacher, the hardware man, half the valley in their good coats on a Tuesday because Ione had sent word. And when I sent word, you came and on a cart beside her, covered with a cloth, something enormous.
Ione pulled the cloth off. A cake, five tiers, listing significantly to one side, like a snowbank 2 days past its structural limit. The top tier had slid approximately 40° from where it had started. The icing had cracked in three places. One of the decorative sugar flowers had apparently given up and fallen into the cart.
It was without question the most beautiful thing Anel Branick had ever seen in his life. I baked it while you were gone. Ione said figured one of two things was happening and either way we were going to need a cake. Anel stared at it for a long moment. It's got five tiers.
He said you're a big man I own. Don't start with me, Branick. It's falling over. It's leaning. There's a difference.
The inside is fine. The top tier has rotated about 40. Do you want the cake or not? He looked at her, this near 70 woman who had run her dining room since 1867 and never once been afraid of him, and wept into a dish towel at his wedding, and pulled a shotgun out from under her coat at his hanging. This woman, who had, in her own way, and on her own terms, and without ever once saying it directly, refused for years to let the town's fear become the whole story of who he was.