Elias Little signed the quitclaim in the hotel dining room, because the courthouse was shut for the holiday week and Father Anselmo's hand was steadier than the deputy's. The priest read the instrument aloud, both pages, in his unhurried way, and Sheriff Beckett and Levi witnessed where the marks were pointed out, and Elias wrote his name at the bottom in a good storekeeper's hand — the hand of a man who had written ten thousand receipts and never once supposed a signature could be a kind of theft until a clerk in this county taught him otherwise.
"There," Elias said. "Whatever was Sam's is Kaya's and Lucy's, in paper as it always was in truth. If any Little in Kansas says different, they can write to me, and I will write back." He sanded the signature and looked at it a moment. "My brother would have horsewhipped me for needing a document to get here."
"Your brother wrote you letters for eight years," Father Anselmo said gently. "A man cannot read what was never sent. The fault was not all on your side of the creek, Elias."
They rode out to the Little place together in the late morning, Levi and Elias side by side, neither saying much, the way men ride when the important things have already been said in worse places. Kaya met them at the door with Lucy half behind her skirt, and Nashona in her chair by the fire, taking Elias's measure the way she took everyone's — once, completely, and without comment.
Elias did not sit until he was told to. Then he took from his coat the thing he had kept out of Sam's tin box the night he read the letters, and he held it out to Lucy on his open palm: a man's pocket watch, silver gone soft at the edges, its chain braided through with a lock of dark hair that Levi knew, suddenly and entirely, was Kaya's.
"It was your papa's," Elias said. "He carried it driving stage, and after. When the box came to me I took it out before I knew — I thought a keepsake was owed to Kansas." His voice went rough. "It isn't. It's owed to you. Your uncle in Topeka who writes the family Bible down has got Sam's name and dates already. This part of him stays here."
Lucy took it in both hands, grave as a judge. "Does it go?"
"It goes. Wind it gentle, mornings, the way he did." Elias looked up at Kaya then, and stood to do it, which Levi noticed and marked down in the man's favor. "Ma'am. Kaya. I ask leave to write to her. Not to interfere — I have interfered enough on paper for one lifetime. Just — a letter at Christmas, and her birthday, if she'll write back her name. A child ought to know her father's people know her name."
Kaya considered him with the whole of her attention, and the room waited.
"You may write," she said. "Lucy will answer if she chooses. She generally chooses kindness when it's honestly offered, Mr. Little. She gets that from her father."
There was one more errand, and Elias named it himself, standing in Kaya's yard with his hat in his hands and the stage three hours off. "I would like to see where he is laid," he said. "If someone would ride with me. I do not know the ground."
It was Levi who took him, because Kaya had a dinner to get and because, of the two of them, he was the one who had dug the grave. They rode up to the little burying ground on the bench above the creek, where the valley kept its dead in no order but affection, and Elias stood a long time before the plain board marker — SAMUEL LITTLE, 1841–1883 — and under it, in Kaya's hand, cut deep so the weather would take years at it: BELOVED.
"Kansas would have put him in the family plot," Elias said at last. "Next to our mother. It would have been the wrong ground, and I would have insisted on it a month ago." He took off his hat, which he had already taken off twice. "He chose his ground. She cut that word herself, I suppose."
"She did," Levi said. "With his knife."
"Then he is where he belongs, and so is the watch." Elias put his hat back on with the air of a man closing a ledger he does not intend to reopen. "Ride me back, friend. I have a stage to catch, and for the first time in my life I am sorry to be leaving a place I came to rob."
At the stage office that afternoon, with his valise at his feet and the horses stamping in the cold, Elias turned to Levi and put out his hand and then, awkwardly, did not seem to know what to do with the words that came with it.
"I came down here to take a house from my brother's widow," he said. "I believed a land agent's letters over a woman I'd never met, and I near did a thief's errand with a clean conscience. You stood in a courtroom and let a lawyer call you sweet on her, in front of the whole county, rather than let the paper stand." He shook his head. "I don't know what Sam did to deserve a friend like you. I know he knew it, reading those letters. He said you were the brother the war gave him." He gripped Levi's hand hard. "Tell her — no. I'll write it to the child. You tell her I said the place looks kept. That's a storekeeper's highest praise, and she'd know it for one."
The stage rolled out in the blue dusk with Elias looking back once from the window. Levi stood until the lanterns were out of sight around the bend, thinking that the valley had gained and lost a brother in the same week, and that Sam, who had been dead since July, had somehow done most of the work of it himself.