"Did he ever tell you to tell me?" she asked. "That someone else was writing?"
And Keziah began to cry.
She did it the way Linnet suspected she did most things, without noise, with her face set and the tears simply running down it as if they belonged to someone else. Nehemiah half rose from his chair and then sat down again, and Linnet saw that he did not know whether he was allowed to comfort her.
"Yes," Keziah said. "In April. The week before. He said, Kez, this has gone far enough. She's going to come out here and find out I can't write my own name hardly and she'll think I made a fool of her. He said we had to tell you. He said it had to be in a letter, so you'd have time to think about it, and not have it sprung on you on the platform." She wiped her face with the back of her wrist. "He told me what to put. He sat right there and said it, the whole thing, and it was the longest he ever said anything. And I wrote it down. And then it was branding and nobody went to town for a week. And then he went to look at the creek."
The room was very quiet. The stove ticked as it cooled.
"You have it," Linnet said. "The letter. You never sent it."
Keziah got up. She went back into her mother's room, and this time she was gone longer, and when she came back she had a single folded sheet in her hand, much handled, soft at the folds as cloth. She did not give it to Linnet. She held it out to Nehemiah.
"You should read it," she said. "It's his. It's the most his of any of them."
Nehemiah took it. He unfolded it slowly, as if it might come apart, and bent his head over it, and his lips moved. He read it through once, and Linnet watched his face and saw it come undone, very quietly, from the inside, the way ice goes on a creek. Then he cleared his throat and read it aloud, haltingly, stumbling where the words were long, in a voice she would not have known for his.