For a while she simply looked at it: the frayed cuffs she had turned twice, the button that didn't quite match, the two holes in the back, which she made herself look at longest. Then she turned the coat over and opened it and found the place on the inside of the left breast where the flannel had been tacked down over a square of oilcloth in small, close, even stitches. Her stitches. She took her scissors from the sewing basket and snipped four of them, and worked her finger in, and drew it out.
It lay in her palm and caught the window light and threw it back at her. A five-pointed star inside a ring, made of gold, real gold, heavy for its size, with the letters raised and polished on the face:
DEPUTY
U.S. MARSHAL
She did not turn it over. She knew what was on the back. She had read it by lamplight the night she sewed it in, two years ago, with Eli sitting on the edge of the bed in his undershirt watching her face while she read, and she had not wept then and she did not weep now. She closed her hand on it until the points bit.
The night she sewed it in had been in October too. October of 1879. She remembered the cold coming through the shutters and the lamp smoking because she had not trimmed the wick, and Eli coming in from the corral with frost on his mustache, and sitting down across this same table, and putting the star down in front of her like a man laying down the last card of a hand he couldn't win.
"I want you to keep this for me," he'd said.
"What is it?"
"It's what I am," he'd said. "Under the rest."
She had sat looking at it and at him, and it had seemed to her that the room tilted slowly, the way the deck of the river packet had tilted when she was a girl going down to St. Louis, so that the cups slid on the table and nobody else seemed to notice.
"You told me you were a freighter."
"I was a freighter."