"I try to be," said Ambrose Whitcomb, and he went back up the steps of his bank and into the cool dark behind the iron shutters, and she stood with the mule's lead in her hand and felt something go cold and still in her, the way water goes still in a bucket just before it freezes.
Eight hundred dollars, and a ticket out, and anything with names in it.
She drove home by the long road along the creek, so that nobody would see her face.
* * *
She had met him in Las Vegas in the spring of 1878, when the railroad was still a rumor coming down out of Raton Pass and the town was all mud and freight wagons and men who had come to be ahead of it.
She was twenty-three that year, an orphan, hired companion to an old lady from Kansas City who had come out to the Hot Springs for her lungs. The old lady died in April, and her son wired forty dollars for Nora's fare home and nothing else, and Nora had stood on the gallery of the Exchange Hotel with the wire in her hand and the whole bright, raw, enormous country in front of her and thought: I don't want to go home. I don't have one.
She took a job instead in the kitchen of the Exchange, peeling potatoes for a German cook who swore at her in three languages and paid her nine dollars a month and board. And one afternoon in May a freighter came in out of the rain with the water running off his hat brim and sat at the end of the long table in the dining room, and when she brought out his plate of beans and fried steak he said, "I don't suppose there's pie," and she said, "There's always pie, there's just not always pie for freighters," and he had looked up at her and laughed.
He had a good laugh. It was the first thing about him she had liked. It went all the way down.
He was twenty-eight then, rangy and quiet, with a sunburned face and pale eyebrows and big careful hands, an East Texas man who had driven freight between Trinidad and Santa Fe for five years and knew every water hole between. He was not a talker. When he did talk it was usually to say something so dry that it took her a second to understand she had been made fun of, and by then he would be looking out the window with an innocent face.
He came to the Exchange every time his wagons came through, and brought her things: a horned toad in a cigar box that she made him let go, a little book of Tennyson he admitted he could not get through. In August he asked whether she would walk out with him on Sunday to see the hot springs, and she said yes, and they walked up the canyon and sat on a rock above the steaming water and he didn't say anything for nearly an hour, and then he said, "Nora, I'm a slow man, but I'm not a dull one, and I've known since the pie."
They were married in November in the parish church on the Old Town plaza by a French priest who didn't care that neither of them was Catholic, because, he said, the Lord had not set up a fence around the sacraments to keep good people out. Two of Eli's teamsters stood up with them, and the German cook, who wept. That was the year before the star. That was the year of the plain gold ring and the rented room over a harness shop and the snow coming down on the plaza at night and Eli reading to her from the Tennyson in a terrible slow voice until she laughed so hard she cried.
"I was sworn to it before I met you," he'd said. "And I thought I'd be done with it before I married you. That was my mistake. I thought it'd be done by Christmas. I thought I'd listen on the roads awhile and give Sherwin a name and go back to hauling flour." He'd turned the brim of his hat in his hands. "I'd have told you if I'd known how long it'd be. I'd have given you the chance to say no."