When they came home in July, the first thing he did, before he looked at the oats or the broken window, was walk down to the draw. The place on the slope above the spring was nothing now but a shallow rectangle of bare soil where the sod had healed over in two summers, a little sunken, a little greener than the ground around it. Bitterroot was growing in it.
He stood there for a long time. Then he walked back up to the cabin and put his hand on the chimney, on the flat gray stones about shoulder height that had come from that place, and he could not have said what he felt, except that it was something like the feeling of reaching into a pocket for a coin and finding a hole instead.
He told Ketti. He had promised himself he would always tell her the truth.
She listened the way she always did, with her chin on her fist. When he was finished she said, "Was it a grave?"
"I think so. I don't know."
"Mama knew."
"I think so."
"She said she was going to tell you."