"Dear Miss Rudd. I have to tell you a thing and I am ashamed of it. I cannot write. I can sign my name and read print if it is big and I go slow. Every letter you have had from me has been wrote down by Keziah Eskew who is twelve years old and the daughter of our cook that died. I said what I wanted and she put it in better words. Some of it is more hers than mine. The part about Rebecca in the book is all hers. I want you to know that so if you come you will know who you are talking to. I am a plain man and do not talk much. You would be marrying me and not the letters and I would not blame you for not wanting to. If you still want to come I would be glad. If you come there is Keziah too. I promised her mother. I will not marry anybody who will not have her. I think you would. But you should say so yourself and not have it decided for you. That is the most I have ever said at one time and Keziah says it is not very well put but I told her to leave it alone. Yours honestly, Caleb Morgan."
Underneath, in a hand that was not the schoolroom hand but a thick, sprawling, left-handed scrawl, as if the pen had been held in a fist, there was a signature. Linnet could see it from across the table. It looked, as Nehemiah had said, like a man killing snakes.
Nehemiah set the letter down on the table. He put his palm flat on it, the way you put your hand on a horse's neck to quiet it.
"He signed it," he said.
"He signed them all," Keziah said. "Every one. Before. Afterward I did it." She looked at Linnet. "I practiced it. Out of the old ranch book. I'm sorry. You must have thought his hand was very bad for such a careful writer."
"I thought he had hurt it," Linnet said. "I thought it was the rope burn."
"Yes," Keziah said. "I counted on that."
And there it was, Linnet thought: the thing she would have to decide what to do with. Not grief. Not even the loss of the man she had come to marry, who had been, it turned out, only about a third of the man she had been writing to, though perhaps the best third. It was this: that a child had sat in this kitchen with a dead man's letter in her mother's room and his grave in the window, and had looked at an envelope from Reading, Pennsylvania, and thought, I can make this come out. And had practiced a dead man's signature out of a ranch ledger, carefully, until it would pass.
"Why didn't you send it?" Linnet asked. "After. Why didn't you send his letter, and then a letter of your own, telling me what had happened?"