So Nils told him that, too. All of it, the stoneboat and Gudny's hand on his chest and the moss and the autumn after she died. He told it standing in his own yard with his hammer still in his hand and the lime dust in his hair, and he did not make it sound better than it was. When he was finished, Brisbin had taken off his hat and was turning it around in his hands, and the young man with the carbine was looking at his own boots.
Coker said nothing for a long while.
"My mother's buried in Lawrence County, Ohio," he said at last. "Up on a hill over the Little Scioto. I ain't been back in twenty-two years. Got a letter last winter from my sister says the railroad's going to put a cut through that hill." He gathered his reins. "Don't know why I'm telling you that."
He turned the sorrel and rode out of the yard, and after a moment the young man with the carbine followed him. Brisbin lingered. He put his hat back on.
"You need lime, for the new chimney," he said to Nils, not looking at Tukweyit, "I'll put it on account. Don't worry about the account till spring."
Then he went too.
Tukweyit watched the three of them dwindle down the road. "That was not what I expected," he said.
"Me neither."