CHAPTER 7 #2
The cold-then-warm slide over my fourth finger was the only physical fact of the ceremony, and it was the whole ceremony.
I breathed.
Beck let go of my hand.
I did not weep.
*
The signing was the work of seven minutes.
Beck signed Beckett L. Carrow across the front at the line that read husband. The pen rasped on the rag-paper, lower than it had rasped on the cheap county paper. He handed me the pen.
I turned it once in my own fingers — the seamstress's instrument-check — and signed Mrs. Willa Carrow across the front at the line that read wife.
The C of Carrow came out a little tighter than the G of Greer would have come because I had had to think the shape of the letter before my hand made it.
I have signed my name fifty thousand times on linings of men's coats, I thought; this was the first time my own name was the work.
The Reverend turned the paper over.
Beck signed first on the reverse as principal claimant and household partner.
Tate signed Tate O. Halloran on the second line; his copperplate was as priestly and even as the Reverend's, the prettiest of the four hands in the parlor.
Levi signed Levi Thorn on the third line in the sprawling forward-running hand I had seen on the joint paper, the T of Thorn with a quick flourish at the cross-bar — the same flourish he gave a long line when he coiled it back onto his wrist. He laughed once into his collar.
Hattie signed Hattie M. Doss, Postmistress, Larkspur Bend in a square plain hand and pressed her small post-office stamp at the side in red ink — LARKSPUR BEND / BEAR FORK CO.
/ COL. TERR. / JUN 16 1879. Davie laid his slate on the empty chair and signed Davie Pell on the second witness-line in a careful printed boy's hand. He signed good once against his thigh.
The Reverend countersigned and pressed his small notary stamp in red wax dripped from a candle Hattie had lit, cooling green where the cold brass had touched it.
He folded the certificate in three. He gave the original to Beck and kept a folded copy in his book.
He laid a small folded square of his own copperplate at the desk — a record-of-rite for me to keep.
"Mrs. Carrow. So that you have your own record. "
I folded it into the drawstring purse pinned inside my bodice, beside the dollar fifty-five. It weighed nothing.
*
We took the cake at quarter past eleven at the dining-room table. Hattie had made a yellow cake with cream icing the day before — her cake is known in three counties. Pot roast first, with biscuit; coffee; then the cake.
Levi laughed once at the icing on his fork. "Hattie. I have a wife now and you are still the only woman in this country who can ice a yellow cake."
"You will keep your mouth on the cake, boy, and not on me."
Beck did the quarter-second softening at the line of his mouth. He ate the cake slow. Tate ate the cake slow too. Davie ate two slices. The Reverend ate one and left at twenty past noon. He laid a hand on my shoulder once at the parlor doorway. "Mrs. Carrow. The Lord keep you in the country."
"And you, sir."
I drank my tea standing because I could not sit anymore.
I laid my left hand on the table with the gold band catching the morning light through the east window.
The band was warm now, the outer rim catching the light in a thin yellow line where the bevel was.
I have a name now, I thought. I have three husbands. I have no idea what I have signed for.
Hattie laid a hand on my elbow and did not speak.
*
We took the wagon home at half past eleven. Beck climbed up to my right; Levi to the wagon-bed; Tate took the lines. Hattie came out with Davie at her elbow. She laid her square hand on my wrist. "Mrs. Carrow. You will write to me when you can. Tate brings the post up Mondays."
"Yes, ma'am."
"You go in honor. You came in honor. You will be kept in honor."
I did not weep at her. Davie signed good once more and grinned at me. I lifted my left hand so he could see the band. He grinned wider.
Tate clucked at the mules and the wagon turned in front of the porch.
*
The wagon climbed. The sky was still cloudless.
I fingered the gold band on my finger with my right thumb at the back of my left hand.
Cold. Then warm. Then cold again. Then warm again.
The metal at the outer rim was the cool of an air that had moved through it and the inner curve was the warm of skin that was holding still.
I turned the band three times. I turned it four.
Beck's left hand was on the wagon-bench rail beside my thigh, the scarred palm flat to the wood, the long pink crescent of the cable-burn turned away from me again the way it had been turned away all morning except at the eleven heartbeats of the ring.
I would not say anything about the scar.
I knew the men's silences the way I had known my father's silence at the cutting-table.
Tate had the lines in his right hand. The burn-mark on the inside of his right forearm — the long mottled scald from the mule-trace that had snapped in '76 — was inside the cuff of his Sunday shirt.
I had seen it once a week ago when he pushed his sleeve back at the bee-balm jar; he pulled it down a half-minute later and we had not spoken of it.
Levi had his hat over his eyes. I had never seen the cleft scar at his sternum, but I knew from the way his shirt buttons sat above the collarbone that it was there.
I had married, this morning, three scarred men.
Three men I have signed for, I thought. I have not yet kissed any of them. I do not know if I want to. I do not know if I do not want to.
I fingered the band again. Cold then warm. The bone pin in my hair was warm from the sun.
*
The wagon came through Crow's Bend at the fourth mile at twenty minutes past two.
A hawk turned over Lookout Rock above us — a red-tailed broad-winged hawk turning slow against the sky in the rising warm air off the south ridge slate. It made one long lazy circle above the rock and then another. It did not call out. It was at home in the basin's bowl.
I watched the hawk.
I did not weep.
I thought, in the small German shop-girl undertone that has been with me since I was four years old: Mein Liebling. Three of them.
I thought, in plain English: I am married to three men, and the iron pump in the dooryard above is asking a question I have not yet learned to answer.
I had heard the pump-handle's two-note squeak every morning since I came up the road eight days ago.
Beck had told me on the porch on the afternoon I said yes that he had heard it every morning for two years and had not yet answered it either.
I had not answered it at the parlor desk.
I had not answered it at Hattie's table. I would not answer it tonight.
I would answer it. I did not know when.
I lifted my left hand to my own knee under the green-and-cream wool and laid my palm flat on the knee, and I counted pulse beats at the inside of my wrist — one, two, three, four — with the cold-then-warm slide of the gold band on my fourth finger the rhythm under the count, and the bone pin at the back of my head warm from the sun, and Beck's scarred palm on the wagon-bench rail beside my thigh, and Tate's lines in his right hand, and Levi on the wagon-bed with the cleft scar at his sternum I had not seen but knew, and the hawk circling slow above Lookout Rock and not crying, and the basin's iron pump-handle asking its question in the dooryard somewhere up the climb above us, and I went on counting until we reached the dooryard.