"I'd have said yes."
"You don't know that."
"I know it now," she'd said, "so I'd have known it then. Don't you tell me what I'd have done, Eli Tolliver."
They had come to Cuervo Springs in the spring of 1879 because the work was here. They had bought the Archuleta place because a man who was secretly hunting a gang needed to look like a man with no particular reason to be anywhere, a man drifting a little toward the bad, a freighter who'd lost his wagons in a dice game in Trinidad and wanted to raise horses. The first months he had done just that, and drunk a little more than he needed to in the Gold Cross, and let it be seen that he was short of money and sore about it. By midsummer Pruitt's men had found him, exactly as he and John Sherwin had hoped they would.
After that the town had watched it happen. That was how they would have told it, afterward, around the stove at Ostrander's: how they had watched Eli Tolliver go bad. How he started riding out at odd hours and coming back with a different horse. How he stopped coming to church. How the money began to show on him in small ways, a new saddle, a sack of oranges from Las Vegas for his wife, a dress length of blue merino. How twice, when the Cerro Blanco payroll was taken off the coach, he was nowhere to be found for a week before and was back in the Gold Cross a week after, buying. How a guard named Pettibone, who survived the April holdup at Burro Gap with a ball through his shoulder, swore that one of the masked men had stood back from the others and had held his rifle on the passengers and had not fired, and had a long East Texas way of saying "Y'all get down."
People stopped buying her candles that summer. The Reverend Lyle came out to the house in July to tell her, very kindly, that the altar committee had decided to use tallow from now on, for economy's sake. She had stood in the doorway with her arms folded and said, "Economy," and he had colored to his collar and gone away.
She had not told anybody. Not Pearl Ostrander, when Pearl took her aside behind the church and asked whether Eli was mistreating her. Not Mrs. Bedell, the sheriff's wife, who was dying of a cancer that spring and to whom Nora brought honey every week until the sheriff met her at his gate and told her not to come anymore. Not even old Tomás Baca, who had once stopped her in the road and said, looking at the hills and not at her, "Your husband is a good man, I think. I think there is something he is not saying." She had only shaken her head.
The secret was not hers to give away. It was the only thing between Eli and a bullet. She had carried it the way she carried the full honey crocks up from the bee yard, close against her body, with both arms, minding every step.
* * *
The last time she saw him alive was the night of the twenty-seventh of September.
He came in late, after midnight, walking, having left his horse in the cottonwoods along the creek so that the dog would not bark. He came in without a lamp and she woke to his hand on her shoulder and knew him by the smell of him, horse and woodsmoke and the piñon resin that got into everything up in those hills, and for a minute she held onto his wrist with both her hands and did not say anything.
He didn't light the lamp. They sat on the edge of the bed in the dark with the shutters closed and talked in whispers, the way they had learned to.