He did not say anything to that. After a while he got up and put more wood in the stove, and sat down again, and picked up the sock he had been darning and went on with it, and she understood that this was his answer, and that it was a kind one.
That night, when he had gone up, she took the letter out of the tin box and read it again.
I am asking you to let me stay dead.
It was, she thought, the most generous thing Eben had ever offered her, and it was also exactly like him. It cost him nothing he had not already decided to spend. He had wanted to vanish two years ago and he had vanished; he wanted now to go to Cañon City under a dead boy's name and he would go; and he had dressed the wish up as a gift to her, the way he had once brought her a bolt of blue calico from Leadville after a week she later learned he had spent at the faro bank. She did not doubt that he meant it. Eben had always meant things. The trouble was only that what he meant and what it cost other people had never sat in the same room together in his head.
And yet. She sat with the paper on her knee and made herself see it plainly. If she did as he asked, she kept everything. The cabin, the claim, the name of widow, which in Corbel was a kind of armor; the long quiet evenings; the bench in the morning with no one to ask where she was going. Tallis Marten could dig his brother up in April, quietly, with her leave, and Mr. Hurd could be persuaded to say the coffin had been found waterlogged and needed replacing, and the boy could go home to Kansas in a new box with nobody the wiser, and the stone in Corbel could go on saying Eben Hale, 1839 to 1879, Beloved Husband, over an empty hole. She would not even have to lie. She would only have to go on not saying, which she had been doing for two years and was good at.
She thought about that for a long time. It was a real thing, and she gave it its due.
Then she thought about the stone.
She thought about it saying Beloved Husband over nothing, every Sunday, while Ora Bettis put dried flowers on it out of kindness. She thought about Lem Marten's mother in Kansas being told that her son had been found and buried decently, and asking where, and Tallis having to tell her a lie, or a half-truth with the shape of a lie, because the real story could not be told without Sabra's. She thought of the boy going into the ground in Kansas under his own name with the truth of how he had died packed away in Tallis's chest like a stone in a boot. And she thought about Eben in Cañon City for five years, breaking rock under a name that was not his, for a horse he had never stolen, nursing his penance like a sore tooth, and being, in some way she could not quite put words to, pleased with himself.
That was the part that decided her, in the end. Not the boy, though the boy weighed most. It was the thought of Eben pleased with himself.