Part 2
The curl of hair was still there.
It was gray now, or nearly. Faded. The thread had gone brown. But it was tucked in exactly where she had put it, in the back of the case, on a frosty morning in the spring of 1880.
Effie sat down.
"Where did you get this?" she said.
The stranger looked at the stove. Water dripped from his beard onto the floor.
"Leadville," he said. "We worked the same shaft, him and me. The Morning Bell, in '81. There was a fire underground." He touched the patch over his eye. "I got out. He didn't. Before he went down that last morning, he gave me the watch and said, if anything happens, take it to Effie. Musselshell valley. She'll have a lamp lit." He drew a long breath. "It took me some years to get here. I'm sorry, ma'am."
Effie held the watch in both hands.
Five years, she thought. Dead five years, and I lit the lamp every Christmas for a dead man. The preacher was right. Danny was right. Everyone was right.
She closed the back of the case. Her thumb found the stem.
The stranger was holding his hands to the stove. They had begun to come back, red and swollen, and he flexed them slowly, wincing.
"May I?" he said, and nodded at the watch.
She gave it to him without thinking.
He held it close to his one eye in the firelight. Then, with his stiff red fingers, he wound it. Three turns. Exactly three. And he tapped the lid twice with his fingernail.
As if to wake it up.
Effie stopped breathing.
She looked at him. Really looked, for the first time, at the man under the ice and the beard and the patch and the seven years. At the way he sat, with one shoulder lower than the other. At the bench he had chosen without being asked, the one nearest the woodbox, where Will had always sat.
And at the doorway into the kitchen, with its lintel a hand too short. He had gone through it in a blizzard, half dead, at midnight, in a house he had never been in. And he had ducked.
Every stranger in seven years had cracked his head on that beam.
"Will," she said.
The man on the bench did not move.
Then he put his face down in his swollen hands, and his shoulders began to shake.
"I couldn't," he said into his hands. "Effie, I couldn't. I went for silver and I came out of that fire with one eye and nothing in my pockets. I owed money to half of Leadville. I was in the county hospital eight months. When I could walk, I couldn't write. I'd start a letter and tear it up. Every year I didn't write, it got harder to." He raised his ruined face. "I thought you'd be better off with a dead man than with this. I thought you'd have married again. Sold the place. I only came to see."
"To see what?"
"Whether the lamp was lit." His voice broke. "A freighter in Billings told me. Said there was a woman up the Musselshell who'd lit a lamp in her window every Christmas Eve for years, and everybody thought she was touched in the head. I knew it was you. I didn't believe it. I came anyway." He looked at the window. "I nearly turned back at the road. Then I saw it."
Effie got up out of her chair.
She was fifty-seven years old and she had been alone for seven winters, and for a moment she did not know what to do with her hands.
Then she knew.
She went to him and knelt down on the floor in front of the bench, the way she had knelt to cut the rags off his frozen hands, and she put her arms around him, ice and beard and all. He smelled of snow and horse and wood smoke and seven years. He was so thin she could feel every rib through his coat.
"You old fool," she said into his shoulder. "You old, old fool. You told me a lie with your own watch in your hand."
"I know it."
"You'd have let me think you were dead."
"I know it."
"Danny's going to knock you down."
Will Larkin laughed. It came out cracked and rusty, like something that had not been used in a long time, and it was the most beautiful sound Effie had ever heard.
The storm blew itself out a little before dawn.
Effie sat in the rocking chair by the stove with a quilt around her shoulders. Will slept on the bench beside her, under every blanket in the house, with his bandaged hands on his chest and his mouth open, snoring exactly as he always had.
In the window, the brass lamp had burned down to the last of its oil. The flame was very small and blue.
Effie got up quietly and went to it. The sun was coming up over the white valley, pink and gold on the snow, and far off she could see the road where a man had nearly turned back.
She did not blow the lamp out. She let it burn down on its own, all the way.
Then she went to the stove and put the coffee on, for two.