She foamed like that. She shook like that. They said it was fever. Odessa didn't say anything. Was it fever?
He whispered. Does fever do that? She knelt down beside him very slowly. No, she said. Fever doesn't do that.
Bishop died just after sunrise. Anel did not move until he was gone. Did not move for a while after. When he finally stood, Odessa was at the barn door, staring at something, a piece of paper, folded once, nailed to the wood with a horseshoe nail. He pulled it free, unfolded it.
Ink, letters slanted and sharp. And he stood there and stared at it and stared at it because the letters swam like fish in a creek like they always had, twisting and sliding, meaning nothing, saying, laughing at him. Read it. Read it, you big fool. It's right there.
It's just letters. It's just Anel. He did not look up. Anel, you've been holding that for a full minute. Heat crawled up his neck.
38 years old and his face burned like a school boy caught out. She understood. He saw her understand. Saw it land behind her eyes. She did not say anything about it.
She just held out her hand. He gave her the paper. She read it. Her face did not change except her jaw. Her jaw went tight.
Send her away, she read aloud. Like the others. The barn went silent. Like the others. The others.
Seven of them. Seven wagons. Seven women who looked at him and ran like the others. Something cold went down Anel's back. And then something else.
Something wild because Singa Lindquist had been holding something that last day. Clutched to her chest. White knuckles. A handkerchief or a scrap of paper. A scrap of paper.
The loft. he said. "What?" He was already climbing. The trunk was where he'd left it, in the dark corner. A year of dust on the lid.
He had never opened it. Never once, because he couldn't bear to see what she had brought, what she had hoped. He tore the lid off its hinges. Linens, a Bible, a wedding dress blue, folded so carefully it broke his heart all over again. and tucked into the Bible.
Between the pages, a piece of paper crumpled like it had been squeezed in a fist, then smoothed out again, then hidden. He carried it down the ladder, gave it to her, didn't even try this time. She unfolded it beside the first note, held them up side by side in the gray barn light. Her breath went out of her. "Same hand," she said.
"Same slant, same ink. Look at the way the S curls back on itself. Look at the paper. It's the same paper, Anel. What does it say?
She read it slowly, quietly. Leave tonight or you will not leave at all. Ask what happened to the others. Anel sat down on an overturned bucket. The bucket groaned.
He did not notice. Four years. Four years of the barber's laugh. The church whispers. The mothers pulling their children across the street.
Four years of lying awake in that big empty bed and wondering what was wrong with him. What terrible thing God had built into him that seven women could see and he couldn't except there was nothing. There was never anything. They weren't running from him. Somebody was running them off.
His hand closed on the edge of the stall and the wood cracked. A long split running from his fist all the way down to the floor. He let go fast, stared at his own hand like it belonged to somebody else. Odessa was watching him, not afraid. Watching who would do this, he said.
Who would? Why? What does anybody get? I've got a house, a barn, 40 head of cattle, a mountain nobody wants. What does anybody get out of me being alone?
I don't know, Odessa said. But somebody wanted it badly enough to kill your horse. Then why not just kill me? She didn't answer. Neither of them liked the silence that followed.
I want to ask her, he said at last. Singa, I want to know what happened that day. What they told her? Who do you know where she is? I own might.
Singa sent her a Christmas card last year from a boarding house in Miles City. Then we write to her. We I can't, he said, and it came out of him like a stone. I can't write. I can't read.
You saw. Leland does my letters. Has for years. Then don't ask Leland, Odessa said. Ask me.
She went and got paper and ink. Sat down on a hay bale with the paper on her knee. Tell me what to say. So he did slow, stumbling, every word dragged up from somewhere deep. He told Sy Lindquist he was sorry.
He told her he had found the note. He asked her who had given it to her and when and what they had said. And Odessa wrote it all down, every word, exactly as he said it, not fixing anything, not making it prettier. When it was done, she held it out for him to see. He looked at the marks on the page.
His words, his own words, not Leland's for the first time in his life. I'll give it to the conductor myself, he said on the morning train. I don't want the whole town talking about it before she even reads it. That's wise, is it? It's what I would do.
She blew on the ink to dry it because if somebody in that town wrote those notes, Anel, the last thing you want is for them to know you found them. The riders came the next afternoon. Three of them up the mountain road at a walk. Horses too fine for ranch work, coats too clean, guns worn low and loose, the way men wear them when they use them. Anel saw them from the high pasture where he was dragging a fallen pine off the fence line.