She had known.
Not in the way Tallis Marten meant. Not in a way that would have stood up in front of a judge. But in the icehouse behind the Bettis store, on the second day of January, in a cold so deep it hurt her teeth, she had gone in alone after Mr. Hurd had finished his work and gone home, because she wanted to see her husband one last time without anyone watching, and she had lifted back the canvas from the box. Mr. Hurd had wrapped the hands in muslin, because of the burns. She had unwrapped the left one. She did not know why. She thought afterward it was because she wanted to hold his hand, which she had not done in a long time, and she had wanted to do it once more while there was still a hand to hold.
The little finger was whole.
Eben had lost the top joint of his left little finger in a sluice gate in the first summer on Silverthread. She had been there. She had wrapped it in a strip of her own petticoat and held his wrist while he swore, and afterward the stump had healed pink and shiny and he had a habit of rubbing it with his thumb when he was thinking. She had seen him do it ten thousand times. The hand in the box had five whole fingers, long and narrow and young, with a callus across the palm where reins had worn it, and the nails bitten short.
She had stood there with that hand in hers for a long time. She remembered the cold of it, and the smell of the icehouse, sawdust and old river ice and something under it. And she remembered thinking, quite clearly: this is not Eben. And then thinking, just as clearly, and with a feeling that she had never put a name to and did not want to name now: then where is he?
And then she had wrapped the hand again, carefully, in Mr. Hurd's muslin, and tucked the ends under as he had done them, and laid the canvas back, and gone out, and shut the door.
She had told no one. Not Mr. Hurd, not Reverend Sedgwick, not Ora Bettis, who had held her arm at the cemetery and said what a mercy it was she'd had the watch to know him by. In April, when they put the box in the ground, she had stood at the edge of the hole and said nothing. She had told herself, in the months after, that she had been mistaken, that the burns had done it, that grief made people see things. She had told herself that he was dead regardless, somewhere, in some drift, and that it did not matter which body lay under which stone. She had told herself a great many things. But she had not told herself the true one, which was this: she had said nothing because the hand in the box had felt, for one moment in the icehouse, like a door opening. And she had been afraid that if she said anything at all, someone would close it.
She had been glad.
Not glad he was dead. She would not let herself say that, even now, alone at her own table with the lamp hissing and the wind going over the roof. But glad, God forgive her, to be done. Glad of the quiet. Glad of the cabin that was hers to keep the way she liked it, and the claim that she worked better than he ever had, and the evenings with no one coming in late smelling of the Corbel saloons and sitting down heavily across from her with that look on his face, that look of a man adding up what he owed and finding her somewhere in the column. Glad of the morning she had first walked out on the bench in the snow and understood that nobody was going to ask her where she was going.