"Ma'am?"
"Why did you carry it. You're not a friend of his. I know his friends. He hadn't many, and you aren't one."
"No." He turned the cup in his hands. "No, I'm not his friend."
"Then why?"
He lifted his eyes to hers again. "Because the man in that grave is my brother," he said. "His name was Lemuel Marten. Lem. He was nineteen years old. I've been looking for him for two years and four months, and I'd like, if you'll allow it, when the ground thaws, to take him home."
She put the letter down on the table, unopened, and put her hand flat over it, as if it might blow away.
"You'd better tell me," she said. "All of it. Before I read a word of this, I want to hear it from somebody who isn't him."
He told it the way a man tells a thing he has already told himself too many times, in order, without ornament, stopping now and then to drink the coffee she reheated for him, and once to get up and look out the window at the weather as if he expected it to have an opinion.
There were three of them, he said. Himself, the oldest; a sister, Thankful, married now and living in Abilene; and Lem, the baby, nine years behind Tallis and spoiled by all of them, because their father had died when Lem was four and their mother had needed somebody to pour herself into, and Lem had been there with his mouth open like a bird. The farm was in Marion County, Kansas, a quarter section of bottom land along the Cottonwood that grew good wheat in good years and grasshoppers in bad ones. Tallis had worked it since he was fourteen. He would work it, he supposed, until he died. He did not say this with bitterness. He said it the way he might have said the river ran south.