Two years. And all that time, in a grave in Corbel, there had been a boy of nineteen with a whole left hand and a mother sitting up in Kansas with the door unbarred. And Sabra Hale had known, and had kept her mouth shut, because it suited her.
She thought: I am not so different from him.
She sat with that until the lamp began to gutter. Then she got up and trimmed the wick and banked the stove, carefully, with the damper half closed, and she went to bed in her clothes, and lay with her eyes open listening to the wind and to the man breathing in the loft above her, and did not sleep.
The storm held for three days.
It was the kind that came down off the Divide two or three times a winter, not violent so much as patient, a gray, steady, ceaseless fall that filled the world to the eaves and then went on filling it, and the wind behind it piled drift against the north wall until the cabin was half buried and the light through the south window turned blue. There was no going down in it. There was no going anywhere. Sabra had lived through a dozen such storms alone, and she knew the shape of them: you kept the stove fed and the path to the shed dug and the water bucket full from the snow-melt kettle, and you did not look out the window too often, because the window would only tell you what you already knew.
She had never lived through one with a stranger in the loft.
He was no trouble. That surprised her, a little. She had expected a man in her house to take up room the way Eben had, to fill the corners with his boots and his tobacco and his silences, but Tallis Marten seemed to understand that he was a guest in a place with its own order, and he fitted himself to it. He got up when she got up. He kept the shed path dug, which was an hour's work twice a day in that weather, and he fed the mules and his own bay and did it without being told how. He mended the hinge on the shed door that had been sagging since October. He split kindling. In the evenings he sat by the stove with a piece of harness or a sock to darn, because he said he could not sit with his hands empty, his mother had broken him of it, and she found herself watching his hands as he worked and thinking that they were a farmer's hands, square and scarred and patient, and that they did not look anything like Eben's.
They did not speak of the letter the first day. She had folded it and put it in the tin box on the shelf where she kept the claim papers and the Bettis receipts, and it sat there, and they both knew it sat there.
On the second day, in the afternoon, when the light had gone blue and they were sitting at the table over coffee because there was nothing else to do, she told him about the hand.