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Through the door to the bedroom he could make out the body in the box Lije Evans had built. The box rested on two trestles that Summers had used in his carpenter work.
   "After you take a look, you come and eat," Mrs. Evans said in her strong voice. "Everybody's et, and you got to eat, regardless." She walked into the bedroom with him, a hefty, bigbosomed woman who stepped light for all her weight. In one hand she carried a slut. The weak light of it made moving shadows in the room. She held it close to the box so that he could see.
   They had scrubbed Mattie and combed her hair and laid her out with her arms crossed on her chest, and she looked like death-by-fever, as Summers had known she would. For a long minute he looked down at her, hearing Mrs. Evans breathe by his side and feeling the women waiting for his words. He saw the new dress they'd bought and saw the hands worn and ingrained with dirt in spite of scrubbing and the color of old fever on the brow and cheeks. The hair, now that he came to look at it, was whiter than he remembered. He wouldn't see her any more, dyeing homespun with bark or copperas or indigo, or sewing, or making candles, or mashing flint corn for starch, or looking at the sun mark on the kitchen floor to tell what time it was. All that was left was the still, shrunk body, and come morning it would be gone, too, and it would be like Mattie never lived except as he remembered her.
   She had been his woman. She had shared his bed and kept his house and done her full share and more of the work and been a good if not exciting wife in all ways, and he ought not to be wanting to get away from what was left of her, from the yellowed skin and sunken eyes and the sober-sided look she always wore.
  He waited another minute, not touching her and not wanting to, and then he turned around, nodding slow. "I'm obliged, a heap obliged," he said to the women as he stepped back into the kitchen. "Don't see how anyone could do it nicer."
   "She does look natural, don't she?" Mrs. Evans said. "We been saying how natural she looks. You come and eat now."
   Lije Evans poked his head inside. "That there preacher dropped by, Dick, and Tadlock, too. You want to talk to the preacher?"
   "No need for talk, I reckon," Summers said, but while he was saying it the preacher stepped in. He was tall and old and lean-looking, and hollow at the temples, and his face showed weather and worry over sinning. He had slicked himself up and put on a black coat that didn't go with the faded jeans cloth of his breeches. He held his hand out. His voice was old, too, and cracked -cracked maybe, Summers thought, from calling on sinners to come to Jesus.
   "The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away."
   Summers took the hand without speaking.
   "My name is Weatherby, Joseph Weatherby, Brother Summers. I come from Indiany."
   "That's all right."
   The cracked voice said, "I feel that the Lord has guided me here, to this house of grief."
   The words rolled out of his mouth, full-shaped and extra-ripe, as if being offered to the Lord. "Do not grieve. God works in mysterious ways."
   At another time, Summers would have had to smile to himself. Preachers and medicine men -they were cut from the same cloth. They made out to know what nobody could. Companyeros to the Great Spirit. But he didn't smile now. He just looked into the faded blue eyes and the old face, and knew it for a fact that Weatherby believed what he said.
   "Brother Tucker tells me you would like for me to conduct the service."
   "That's neighborly."
   "Do you have a favorite psalm or text? Or did she?"
   "Not as I remember."
   "I will read from Ephesians then."
   "You pick it out."
   The bony head bobbed, then lifted to say, "They tell me you may pilot a party to Oregon?"
   "Might be."
   "I want to go. I feel the Lord is calling me to the new land, perhaps to bring His blessings to the heathen."