He read to their grandchildren, who climbed into his lap and fell asleep against his chest, while he worked his way through pages that had once been closed to him and were not anymore. And every single time he came to the word ren in anything, in any book, in any letter, in the territorial newspaper that came up the mountain twice a week, he paused and looked up and waited. She never corrected him, not once in 40 years. She just looked back at him with that corner of the mouth smile and let him have it. The wrong spelling and the private joke and the memory of a winter night when a man who could not read tried to carve an apology and a declaration and a proposal all into one small wooden bird and spelled the name of it wrong.
They had two children. A boy who grew tall, taller even than his father, and who grew up in a house where being large and being gentle were not opposites, and so never had to learn the difference the hard way. and a girl who had her mother's hands and her father's stubbornness and her mother's precision and her father's particular way of making people feel steadier just by being in the room and who in 1892 boarded a train east to a medical college that had only recently started admitting women and came back 3 years later a doctor the first woman doctor the territory had seen one of the first Apache women to hold a medical degree in the country a fact her mother noted once quietly ly and then went back to work because noting it once was enough and there was still a waiting room full of people. Leland Ashcom was tried in Helena. He did not hang for Ruth Branick.
The law of 1888 was what it was, and 25-year-old crimes with no witnesses were difficult things to prosecute, even when a man confessed them on a moving train in front of two witnesses. because lawyers are expensive and judges owe favors and the machinery of justice has always moved on its own schedule. But he hanged for Jubel Varnum and for the fraud and the railroad paid fair market value for the right of way across the Branick Pass, which turned out to be considerably more than Ashcom had planned for. Because by the time the courts were done with the deed and the contract and the maps, Anel had a lawyer in Helena who could read every word of every document and had opinions about all of them. Tull went to prison.
Kemp resigned in disgrace. The railroad built its line and every spring for 30 years the Branick collected a right-of-way payment that arrived in an envelope from a company office in St. Paul in which Anel opened himself at the kitchen table and read aloud to Odessa while she drank her coffee too fast. Ione Mulgrew lived to 91. She died in her own bed in the room above the dining room of the Gilded Pick on a Tuesday night in March. And the whole valley came to her funeral because the whole valley owed her something, most of them several things, and she would have had something to say about the flowers and the hymn choice and the crying, if she had been in a position to say it.
at her funeral on her casket was a wreath, not cut flowers, a carving wood, a climbing rose, every petal worked by hand. Every leaf and thorn in detail, the whole thing roughly the size of a cartwheel, and so heavy it took two men to carry it. There was no card. There did not need to be. Every person in that church knew who had made it.
Every person knew what it meant, which was, "I know what you did. I know what it cost you to do it, and I will not forget." On their wedding anniversary every year for 40 years, Anel Branick got down on one knee in the yard, in the mud, in the snow, whatever was available, whatever the season offered, he got down on one knee in it and looked at her. Because at 6'7, one knee put him almost level with her. And he had learned a long time ago that if you wanted to look at someone straight, really straight, you had to be willing to get low. To make yourself as small as the moment required, not out of shame, out of love, out of the understanding that looking at someone straight is a gift you give them, not a concession you make.
Every year she told him to get up before he ruined his trousers. Every year he said, "Not yet." And every year he said the same thing in his low rumbling voice, looking at her straight, still the best day. And every year she laughed, the real laugh, the tired and free and unguarded laugh that he had first heard on a porch step after a 12-year-old boy stopped screaming long enough to find his bad singing funny. The laugh he had spent 40 years being grateful for. The laugh that was his, not because he owned it, but because she chose to give it to him.
The last time he knelt was the spring he turned 79. His knee gave way on the way down. Not gradually, all at once, the way things give way when they have been reliable for a very long time, and then aren't. He went sideways into the mud with a sound that was dignified, even by the standards of a man who had once escaped a mine shaft by breathing all the air out of his body. He could not get back up.
He tried, got one hand under him, and pushed, and his knee said, "Absolutely not." and he stayed where he was, half on his side in the April mud, looking up at the sky. And Odessa laughed. Not the small private smile, not the corner of the mouth thing. She laughed the way you laugh when something is funny all the way down to the bone. When the laughter comes up from somewhere so deep it makes your eyes water and you have to sit down.