The Telegram Said His Mail Order Bride Died on the Way West — She Stepped Off the Train Alive

Chapter 16

She asked to be taken to Ruth’s grave the next Sunday.

She had not asked before. Nolan had wondered, in the months since her arrival, when she would — whether she would — and he had decided, in the way he decided all his difficult arithmetic, to let the moment come to him rather than to march it forward. The hill east of the house held two things now: the view he had written about in the fourth letter, and the grave of the woman he had buried in the summer of 1877.

Alice came down from the garden that Sunday morning with a bucket of water and a trowel she had taken from the barn, and she said, “I would like you to show me where Ruth is.”

He did not ask her why. He simply put on his hat, and they walked up the hill together in the Sunday light, past the point where the grass got deep, to the place where the world opened out — and there was the grave. Nolan had kept it clean for five years the way he kept everything: the stones set, the earth held, a wild sage that had seeded itself there years ago growing at the head, untended and exactly right.

Alice stood at the foot of the grave for a long time. She did not kneel. She stood with the bucket in one hand and the trowel in the other, and she looked at the marked earth the way she looked at everything: with full attention.

“She was twenty-six,” Nolan said, to the air, to no one. “We had been married three years. The fever took eleven days to do it, and I sat with her every one of them, and I have never once sat with anything since the way I sat with that.”

Alice nodded. She did not say she was sorry — she had learned from him, in the months of their married life, that the word got smaller the more it was used, and she had stopped using it for things that required bigger ones.

She set down the bucket. She went to work on the grave with the trowel — carefully, methodically, the way she approached every piece of work — pulling the weeds that had come up through the summer’s last rain, smoothing the earth, setting the stones back plumb. The wild sage she left where it grew.

Nolan watched her work without speaking. His hands were at his sides. There are some things a man cannot speak in the presence of, and this was one of them, and she did not require him to.

When the grave was clean, Alice stood back and surveyed it, the way she surveyed a finished seam, and then she looked at the view — the long grass slope, the house below, the country opening out to the horizon in the particular October light that the letter had promised her, the light that had already become the fixed point of her new life.

“She has the best view on the place,” Alice said.

“She has the best view,” Nolan said.

“You wrote to me about this hill,” Alice said. “You wrote to me about the light here at five o’clock, and the way the grass holds its color into November. You wrote to me about this hill that held your first wife’s grave, and you did not tell me that, because it was not in the answer to any question I had asked.”

Nolan said nothing.

“And I have been thinking about that all summer,” Alice said. “I have been thinking about what it means — that the most honest letter you ever wrote, the one you nearly did not send, was the letter about the grave-on-the-hill you did not know you were describing.”

“There was nothing to describe,” Nolan said. “You don’t put a wife’s grave in a letter to a stranger.”

“You put it in a letter to the woman you wanted to marry,” Alice said. “You just didn’t know you were doing it. The hill was the truest thing you had — the light, the grass, the grave — and you gave it to me in the letter because giving was what you had in you to do. And I have been loved, Nolan, and I am telling you something that I want you to hear all the way through: I came west for the truth, and I got the truth, and it was bigger than the letter.”

She knelt then, finally, at the foot of the grave, and she put her hand flat on the earth, and she said, quietly, to the grass: “I will keep your flowers, Ruth. And I will keep him. You can trust me with both.”

Nolan Reeves stood at the head of the grave with his hat in his hands and the October light coming down on the three of them — the wife under the ground and the wife above it and the man who had been loved by both of them, twice, in two different centuries of his own life — and he could not have spoken if the hill itself had asked him to.

It was Alice who broke the silence, standing up, brushing the earth from her hands, and she said, in her ordinary voice, the voice she used for the garden and the stove and the two-o’clock tea:

“In the spring, we plant the hill. Wildflowers. The kind that come back.”