The boy was born on the ninth of May, 1882, with Juana come up from Las Vegas to see to it and Pearl Ostrander boiling water and getting under everybody's feet, and the Reverend Lyle and Cal Bedell sitting nine hours on the bench under the ramada, not talking, like a pair of fools. He was long and red and furious, with pale eyebrows and big hands, and when Juana laid him on Nora's chest he stopped yelling at once and looked at her with an expression of grave, dry patience, as if he had been waiting to be introduced. She named him John Eli. She meant to call him Eli. Everybody else in Cuervo Springs called him Johnny inside a week, and she gave it up.
By the end of May she could walk up the hill.
She went up on a Sunday evening when the light was long and gold across the valley and the stamps of the Cerro Blanco thumped steadily up the canyon. The bee boxes had wintered well, all eleven, and she had split two of them in April, and the bees were working hard in the wild plum along the creek and the first of the clover the Ostranders had sown behind the church. Half a dozen of them followed her up the hill, the way they sometimes did, out of curiosity or for the salt on her skin, and hung around her bonnet humming. The gate stood open. Somebody, she did not know who, had planted a rose by the stone, a little yellow one from Missouri, the kind her mother had grown, and it had three buds on it.
She sat down on the grass with the boy in her arms. She had wrapped him in the gray flannel she had cut out of the lining of the brown duck coat, washed and turned and bound at the edges, because it was soft and because it was Eli's and because she could not think what else to do with it. The coat itself hung on the nail by the door at home. She had mended the two holes in the back with the smallest stitches she knew how to make.
Down in the town somebody was ringing the church bell, Ambrose Whitcomb's bell, for the evening service, and it sounded no different than it ever had. She thought about that. A bell was only a bell. It rang the same for whoever pulled the rope.
From the pocket of her apron she took the star.
The boy's eyes found it at once, the way a baby's eyes find anything that shines. He reached for it with both his fists, frowning with effort. She held it just out of his reach and turned it, so the light ran around the ring and along the five points and caught on the raised letters, and then she turned it over and laid it on the flannel over his small hard chest, where it rose and fell.
"That's your father," she said. "Under all the rest."
He took hold of one of the points and held on.
"You can't read yet," she told him. "But someday you'll read the back. And I'll tell you all of it. Every word. And you'll know what he was, Johnny, without anybody having to dig him up to find out."
The bell stopped. The bees went home down the hill in the long light. Nora sat with her husband's son a while longer in the grass inside the fence, and then she put the star back in her apron pocket, where it would go wherever she went now, and got up, and went down to the town, where people she had once thought she would never forgive called her name from their doorways as she passed, and she answered them.