"She didn't get a chance."
Ketti was quiet. Then she said, "We could put them back."
"I don't know which ones they were, Ketti. Not all of them. And I don't know how they went. Your mother knew how they went. I didn't watch." He rubbed his face. "And if we pull the stones out, the chimney comes down, and we have no chimney going into winter. And I don't even know whose grave it was. Or if it was."
"Ipnaxa would know."
"Ipnaxa," he said, "is somewhere in Montana with the Army chasing her, if she is alive at all."
He had not meant to say it so hard. Ketti's face went still, and she got up and went out to the chickens, and he sat alone at the table with the knowledge of what he had done and what he could not undo, and the chimney behind him drawing the smoke up through the stones of somebody's dead.
So that was how the two years went. He did not tear down the chimney. He told himself every autumn that he would do it in the spring, when he did not need the fire, and every spring there was plowing and planting and then there was harvest and then it was autumn again. He did, in the first spring, cut a ring of sod around the bare place on the slope and lay a border of fresh field stones around it, rough ones from his own plowing, so that at least nobody would run a plow through it or picket a horse there. And when the camas bloomed in May, and nobody came to dig it, both years, he went down to the draw and stood at the edge of all that blue and felt the silence of it like a reproach.
Ketti went down too. She went more often than he did. Sometimes in the evening he would see her small figure walking along the edge of the field toward the draw with Ivanhoe under her arm, and he would know that she was going to sit on the ledge by the spring and read until the light went, and that she would come back with her face closed and not say what she had been thinking about. He did not ask her. He thought perhaps she was doing what he should have been doing, which was keeping someone company.