Eduardo's Arc

Chapter 41 of 60

Eduardo worked the porch until noon, then set the pry bar down. Saying his cousin's lie out loud had lifted a stone from his own chest. But the lie still lived in town. Men at the feed store still watched him sideways. Women crossed the road when he passed. His cousin had told the story for eight years, and Eduardo had never once said it wasn't true. He washed his hands and put on a clean shirt. If he wanted the record fixed, he had to fix it himself. He walked to town and stopped first at the tea house. The white-haired woman was wiping the counter. He told her plain: his cousin had lied about Kiersten years back, and Eduardo had let the lie stand. He asked her to write it in her book, under his name, in her own hand. She looked at him a long moment. Then she took her pen and wrote what he said, and signed it. "I'll say it if anyone asks," she said. "I won't hunt an audience for you." He said that was fair. He went to the feed store next and told the old man the same thing. The old man nodded once and wrote it under Eduardo's ledger line. "Long time to carry that," he said. Eduardo said yes. Then he walked to the pale house with the cross and told the angel woman. She did not write it. She said, "Tell it where the lie was told." He knew the places. The saloon porch. The market. The road outside his cousin's house. He spent the afternoon walking those places. He spoke to the men his cousin drank with. He spoke to two women at the market who had once been Kiersten's friends. He did not soften it. He said his cousin had lied. He said he had used the lie to be cruel. He said Kiersten had done nothing wrong. Some men laughed. One spat in the dirt. One woman set down her basket and cried and would not look at him. He kept going until the sun went low. At dusk he climbed the ridge to the tarot lighthouse. He had heard the watcher up there did not lie and did not flatter. Light Sol stood on the platform, her long hair moving in the high wind. She did not turn when he came up. "Say it," she said. "My cousin told a lie about a woman named Kiersten. I let it stand eight years. I'm telling everyone I can find." "Who have you told." He named them. The tea house. The feed store. The angel woman. The market. The saloon porch. "That's the town," she said. "Word moves from here." Her hair shifted west. "It's already moving." He walked down in the dark. The lie was out of his mouth and into the air. What the town did with it was no longer his to hold.