Chapter 3 — The Bruise
It happened on the seventh morning, over nothing.
June was reaching for the flour bin on the high shelf, standing on tiptoe, and her sleeve fell back to the elbow. Elias was pouring coffee with his back half-turned, and he saw it out of the corner of his eye the way you see a flicker of movement in the trees: a bracelet of yellow-green bruises around her wrist, old, and above it, half-hidden by the sleeve, the unmistakable outline of fingers pressed hard into flesh.
She saw him see. She yanked the sleeve down so fast she knocked the flour bin sideways. White dust burst across the floorboards like a small, silent explosion.
For a long moment the only sound was the clock he had carved from pine, ticking on the mantel.
"June," he said carefully. "Who did this to you?"
She didn’t answer. She knelt and began sweeping the flour with her hands, gathering it into piles, her movements quick and frantic.
"June."
"He’s dead." Her voice was flat. "My husband is dead. It doesn’t matter now."
"It matters if you’re still wearing his hands on your wrists."
She stopped sweeping. Her shoulders rose. For a terrible moment he thought she might bolt for the door, out into the snow in her apron.
Instead she sat back on her heels, flour on her hands and her dress, and looked at him — really looked at him, for the first time since the stage had brought her up the mountain.
"He went through the ice," she said. "On the Yellowstone. Last March. His horse came home without him. They never found the body."
"I’m sorry."
"Don’t be." The words came out sharp, and then her face crumpled, and she pressed her flour-white hands over her eyes. "Don’t be sorry. You don’t know what he was."
Elias set down his coffee. He knelt on the floor beside her — slowly, telegraphing every movement — and began helping her gather the flour, handful by handful, back into the bin.
"Then tell me," he said, "what he was."
Outside, the wind had stopped. In the sudden quiet, the ticking of the pine clock sounded very loud.
June lowered her hands. Flour streaked her cheeks like war paint.
"His name was Harlan Voss," she said. "And everybody in Powder River country thought he was a king."
