"They're only rock."
"Put them back. Exactly where they were. I'll show you."
He had put them back. She had stood over him while he did it and told him which one went where, because she had been watching from the spring and remembered. When he was finished she had knelt down and pressed the moss back into place around the edges with her fingers. He had asked her what it was, and she had said that she would tell him later, when she was sure she had it right. And then the harvest had come, and the winter, and Ketti's first teeth, and he had forgotten to ask again. And then she had been sick, and he had not thought to ask about anything.
She died in March of 1875, of a fever that came on her after a chill, in four days. He buried her on the rise behind the cabin, under a cottonwood he had planted the first spring, and he made the cross himself from a plank of seasoned fir.
The next September, the chimney he had built of draw rock in the first year cracked from the heat. He had laid it badly; he knew it even when he was laying it. The mortar was poor and the flue was too narrow and the whole thing had begun to lean outward from the wall like a drunk against a doorpost. He tore it down to the hearth and rebuilt it over two weeks with Ketti handing him the small stones. He needed more rock than he had. He took the stoneboat to the draw.
He did not think about the heap of stones on the slope. That was the truth, and it was the truth that would bother him later more than anything else: he did not think about it at all. He did not decide to take it. He was a man of thirty-four, a year a widower, with a seven-year-old daughter and a crop in the field and winter coming, and he went down to the draw and saw a pile of good flat rock already picked and stacked, and he loaded it onto the stoneboat without a single thought in his head, and hauled it up the rise, and laid it into his chimney.
He did not remember that he had done it until the night the old man leaned down from the saddle and said that Gudny's stones were still there.
He did not understand, that night. He understood perhaps a week later, lying awake on the ground at the Mount Idaho fort, with the walls going up around him and Ketti breathing against his side. He came awake all at once with the memory sitting on his chest like a cat: Gudny's hand flat against him, and the moss, and her fingers pressing it down.