Nora looked at him. She looked at him long enough that he put his hat back on.
"I'll remember, Mr. Whitcomb," she said. "I have a good memory."
She turned back to the grave. She had no book. She had thought about what to say all night and every version of it had broken somewhere in the middle, so at last she said only the thing she was sure of.
"Eli Tolliver," she said, "you kept every promise you ever made to me. I'll keep mine."
Then she picked up a handful of the red clay and dropped it in, and Tomás began to fill the hole.
Over her arm, folded, she carried Eli's coat. Kettering had given it back to her in a flour sack along with his boots and his hat and the forty cents found in his pockets. It was a brown duck coat with a corduroy collar, lined in gray flannel, and there were two holes in the back of it, low down, with the flannel stiff and black around them. She had not let them bury him in it. She had dressed him herself, in Kettering's back room, in his good white shirt, while Kettering stood in the doorway and pretended to be busy with a ledger. She had kept the coat.
Through the folded cloth, against the inside of her wrist, she could feel the small, hard, flat weight that was sewn into the lining under the left breast. It was no bigger than a silver dollar. It was the heaviest thing she had ever carried up a hill.
* * *
The house sat a mile north of town where the creek bent around a low bluff, an adobe of two rooms with a pole-and-brush ramada along the front and a corral made of cedar pickets that Eli had set himself, post by post, the summer they came. It had belonged to a widow named Archuleta who had gone to live with her daughter in Taos, and they had paid her for it in gold, and she had kissed Nora on both cheeks and told her the walls were blessed. Behind the house, in a fenced square against the bluff where the morning sun hit first and the afternoon wind did not reach, stood eleven bee boxes painted white.
The bees had been Nora's idea. Her father had kept them in Missouri, in the old straw skeps, and she had grown up with the smell of smoke and wax in her hair. The first two colonies she had brought from Las Vegas in a wagon, wrapped in wet sacking, through three days of August heat, and Eli had laughed at her the whole way and then sat up the last night with a lantern making sure the sacking stayed damp. That first spring the Cuervo Springs women bought her honey and her wax, and the Reverend Lyle burned her candles on the altar every Sunday, and nobody said anything about who her husband rode with.
Nobody had known then. That was before Eli went away into the hills for the first time and came back with a new horse and money he didn't explain and a look on his face like a man carrying water in his cupped hands.
She came home from the burial and put the kettle on and then didn't drink anything. The light came in low through the deep window and lay across the table. She spread the coat on the table in the light.