I have been Lem Marten for two years. I went to Kokomo and worked in the Little Ella and the Robert E. Lee under his name because it was the only name I had papers for, and because I thought, God help me, that it was a kind of keeping my promise to him, to keep his name alive somewhere. I know how that sounds. I did not write to his brother. I told myself I would every week and I did not, because to write to his brother I would have had to tell him where Lem was, and to tell him that would have been to tell everything. I have thought of that woman in Kansas sitting up with the lamp. I have thought of it every night. That is the thing I cannot get past, more than the rest, more than you even. I am sorry to say it to you but it is true.
When the deputy came for me in September on the Park County paper I was glad. I will take the five years. It is Lem's sentence but it is my crime, the other one, and it seems to me about right that I should do the time on his name. The judge comes in January.
Here is what I am asking you, and then I will stop, because I have no right to ask you for anything and I know it.
I am asking you to let me stay dead.
Tallis Marten has a right to his brother and I will not stand in it. If he wants the grave opened I will tell any judge in Colorado what I have told you. But if there is a way for him to take the boy home quietly, with your leave, and for Eben Hale to stay where you put him, then I am asking you to find it. You have been a widow two years. You have done well. I hear things even in Kokomo. I heard you kept the claim, and worked it, and paid Bettis out in the first summer, and I was prouder of you than I have any right to be. You are free of me. I would like to leave you free. If the county learns I am alive you will be a married woman again with a husband in Cañon City, and every soul in Corbel will know why, and you will have to go to law to be rid of me, and I would spare you that if I could. It is the only thing left I could give you.
Do what you think best. You always did, and you were mostly right, and I was mostly wrong, and I used to hate you a little for it, which is the last true thing I have to tell you.
E.
She read it twice. The second time she read it more slowly, and stopped at certain lines, and went back. Then she folded it in thirds again along the old creases and laid it on the table and sat looking at the lamp.
She did not cry. She had wondered, in the minutes before she opened it, whether she would, and had braced for it the way she braced for a mule to kick, and it did not come. What came instead was a kind of cold clarity, very still, like the air on the bench on the morning after a storm when the sky was scraped clean and you could see the separate needles on the spruce across the creek. She sat in it and let it hold her. And in that stillness she made herself look at the thing she had not looked at for two years.