CHAPTER 9
Willa
◆
The first morning of the week the kitchen was already mine.
I had taken it the way my father taught me to take a yard of broadcloth — by the thumb-width, by the grain, the work hidden in the seam.
Saturday night I had scrubbed the scrubbed plank table down to bare wood with sand sifted at the door-stoop and lye I had cut with hot water from the kettle, mixed in a tin bowl my father would have known the smell of.
He had taught me at nine to clean a worsted cutting-board the same way.
I had ended where the wood was, which was satin-pale, and so was I.
I had reordered the pantry on Sunday. Flour, cornmeal, sugar at hand-height.
Salt in a stone crock by itself with a wooden lid set tight, because salt will take a smell off lard the way wool will take a smell off pine.
Saleratus and tea in tins at the middle shelf.
The three Mason jars at the back — one empty, one of rendered lard, one of bee-balm tincture I now knew by smell without lifting the lid.
I have made a kitchen the way I would make a cuff, I thought, with seams that do not show.
I had baked three nights running. The first loaf the men had cut from in silence, the way men cut from a loaf when they do not yet know whether it is a gift or a test. The second Beck had taken the heel-end of without speaking.
The third Tate had named, low to his coffee cup — "It is a good bread, Mrs. Carrow" — and that was three sentences of his in one supper.
The crumb was even. The crust was tight. The men had eaten every slice.
This morning I had the dough in the trough again.
Old Brigham crowed at twenty past five from the chicken yard.
Beck came in from the assay shed at six, stood a half-step closer to the range than the range wanted, said "Good morning, Mrs. Carrow," and took the first biscuit out of the warming shelf and ate it standing at the door-frame.
I did not watch his mouth chew. I was aware that I was not watching it. He went out to the corral.
*
At midmorning I took the iron bucket out to the pump.
The dooryard was quiet. The corral was empty except for the second roan mare blinking in the shade of the run-in shed.
I worked the pump-handle three strokes. The squeak came in two notes — the rising and the falling — and the falling note was the same falling note it had been since the night I had come up the road.
I had pumped my wash-basin water at this pump the night Beck had pumped it for me and not snuffed the candle.
He had let it drip on the tin saucer for me. I found my thumb at the cleft between my eyebrows and lowered the hand and carried the bucket to the kitchen-garden by the kitchen door.
The turnip greens were three inches up. The carrot threads were visible. The water sank into the high-country soil the way milk sinks into bread.
*
The next morning I rode the wagon down-pass with Tate to Larkspur Bend.
He was going to the freight stable to true the off-front wheel; the rim had loosened in two spokes and he would not let it ride another run. I was going to the post office because I had a price to set.
Tate had the lines in his right hand. His left sat on his thigh, the burn-ridge from the Bear Fork night of '75 catching the noon sun in a long shiny line from elbow to wrist. The silver at his left temple under his felt brim caught the light at the switchbacks.
He drove without speaking for the first three miles.
At Old Granite Drift he said, "We will be back before dusk, Mrs. Carrow. " At Big Spruce, "There is rain weather building east of the divide, but it will not come over. " That was two of his three sentences for the morning. The third he saved.
I sat on the spring-seat and did not press for talk. I watched the angle of his jaw against the silver streak above his ear and I thought my widower the way I had thought it the first night, and I was not embarrassed at the thinking.
Hattie was at the boarding-house porch in her square brown apron, the iron-gray coronet braided round her head. She lifted both hands when she saw the wagon. "Sit, child. Eat. Talk after."
I sat. She brought a yellow bowl of beef-and-barley and a cup of black tea, and I ate because I had ridden two hours in the dust. When the bowl was half-down she set the cup at my elbow and said, low, "Are you eating, dear?"
I lifted my eyes to her. "I am eating, Hattie."
She nodded once and did not speak again until the bowl was empty. Then she sat across the trestle table with her own coffee in her own square hand and said, "You are here for the linens."
"I am. One-fifty the month," I said. "Paid to my hand at the post-office counter the first Monday.
I will collect the soiled the last Friday and return the clean by the first Monday.
Collars I will turn for nothing if there is a collar to turn.
I will not take a widow's price; I will take a fair price. "
Hattie's mouth softened at the corner. "You have done this before, child."
"I have done piecework for milliners on Olive Street for eight months."
"One-fifty the month," she said, and put her hand out across the trestle table, and I laid mine in hers, and her square palm closed once and let me go. "Done."
She poured my tea to the rim. We were friends now. I drank it slow.
I bought a yard of plain muslin at Bayle's and was back at the wagon by half past three.
Tate boosted me up to the spring-seat, put his hand at my elbow once, removed it.
At the Two-Stone Switchback he said his third sentence of the day: "You did well at Hattie's, Mrs. Carrow.
She is a square dealer and you set a square price. "
I said, "Thank you, Tate."
His left thumb went once at the burn-ridge on the inside of his forearm and stayed there a half-second, the way another man's thumb might have gone at a watch-fob. He did not look at me. He drove the team.
*
The next day I baked.
In the afternoon I worked the quilt-square.
I had begun it the second week in green-and-cream calico — a wedding-ring pattern, two arcs joined at the small lozenge at the center, the pattern my grandmother had stitched in the Pilsen winter of 1840 from a green christening-gown.
I had not named what I was making. Four squares lay face-down on the loft pallet under Hattie's cream-and-pink quilt.
I would name it when there were enough squares to be named.
The cabin was quiet. It was not the quiet of a stranger.
It was the quiet of a household waiting to settle.
I thought of the southwest bedroom where Beck slept on the rope-bed with his mother's indigo-and-cream quilt, and of how I had slept in his bed the first night and how he had not slept in it himself for fear of where the sleeping might lead.
I thought my foreman and went on stitching.
*
The fourth day was the day.
The morning came warm at the porch step.
The basin held 81 degrees at ten and the southwest wind began to lift at half past noon — the basin's bad habit, Beck called it, the hot dry sheet that came up off the south ridge slate and raked the dooryard.
Tate and Levi had ridden up to the upper pasture at one with the lunch I had wrapped in a square of clean linen.
They would not be back until dusk. The basin's bowl was empty of them.
Beck came in at half past two with a drawstring bag of gold dust in his right hand and went through the kitchen without breaking stride into the southwest bedroom for the length of two breaths.
I heard the floorboard at the foot of the bed lift and settle — the third board from the wall, that lifted on its own pegs into the tin lockbox beneath, where he kept the watch and the marriage certificate, and now the dust.
The board went back. He washed his hands at the basin and dried them on the iron towel-bar where the hand-towel sat folded twice, and was gone out the kitchen door.
I had put the kettle on at two. By two forty-five it was at full boil.
I lifted the kettle from the warming shelf with the hand-towel folded twice in my right palm.
I had folded the towel twice not for show but because the rivet at the handle's iron base had gone loose in the spring and the iron heat came through a singled towel; I had measured the heat through one fold and through two; I had folded the towel twice.
I knew what I knew about the towel and the kettle.
The iron heat came through the doubled cotton against my palm, held off from a burn by twice the thickness of plain hemmed cloth and no more. I walked the kettle from the stove toward the wash-basin to pour into the smaller twin for tea.
Beck stepped into my path at the pantry corner.
He had come back in through the kitchen door.
I had not heard him at the threshold. His scarred left palm was on the door-frame at his shoulder.
His right hand was at his side. He had been there a half-minute.
The light from the west window was on the side of his face and the rust at the edge of his hazel-green eyes caught at the iris-rim.
I did not put the kettle down. I held it in my right hand with the hand-towel folded twice, and the iron heat came through the cotton against my palm, and I stopped one pace from him with the kettle steaming at my hip between us.
He took my left wrist in his left hand.
He took it the way he had taken my hand off the wagon eight weeks ago — careful, with the pad of his thumb laid at the inside of my wrist where the pulse runs.
He did not pull. He did not press. He held.
His thumb was at the soft place where I had set my own two fingers a thousand times to count my own pulse.
I did not pull away. I did not put the kettle down.
The kettle's iron heat through the doubled cotton was at my right palm. His thumb was at my left wrist. The steam from the spout rose between us.