CHAPTER 10
Levi
◆
I have decided I must speak to her.
I have decided it in the lean-to at four in the morning of the twenty-fifth with the bone-and-rawhide charm in my right hand, and I have decided it again at five when Old Brigham crows from the chicken yard, and there is no question of what I will do today.
I have been working the chestnut in small ways since the wrist sprain two weeks back.
Saddle blanket on the rail one morning, off again, on, off.
Long line passes at the round-pen rail without the saddle, only the rope swinging easy in the dust at the angle he can read.
He has begun to allow it, has begun to come to the wither-touch with his ears forward and his weight settled on his off hind, and I have begun, against my own better judgment and against the eleven years between me and Tiller, to think of him in the daytime hours as if he is something that lives at the end of the long line.
This morning is the saddle.
The saddle is a light pony-saddle, the lightest I own, the seat-leather thin as a Sunday glove and the cinch a soft braided cotton that has carried no animal in a year.
I lay it on a sawhorse outside the round-pen and go in without it.
He lets me put the halter on. He lets me run the soft brush down the off shoulder.
He lets me lay the folded saddle-blanket on his wither and slide it back along the line of the spine to the place where the saddle will sit, and he stands.
He does not throw it.
I rub the cleft scar at my sternum with two fingers without meaning to and stop my own hand and lower it.
"Easy, love. Easy now. We are not going to put it on you today. We are going to set it on the rail where you can see it, and you and I are going to think about the rail together."
I go out of the pen, slow, lift the pony-saddle off the sawhorse, come back in, lay the saddle along the top rail at the south side of the pen where the morning sun will hit it.
The saddle is six feet from him. He is in the middle of the pen.
He turns his head a quarter inch. He looks at the saddle. He looks at me. He looks at the saddle.
The exhale comes out of him.
It is a long thing — the wild stallion's exhale — silver, animal-grass-sweet, half-vapor in the cold morning air, the smell of him going up off his shoulder and into my own nose where I stand not five feet off, the smell of him and of the basin in June and of every horse I have ever loved in a life that has had eight or nine.
I laugh once.
It is short and small and goes out of me without my consent, and the chestnut hears it and his ears come forward, and we stand in the round-pen for the count of a full minute in the cold blue light, and I think I am going to call you something soon.
I am going to call you something a man does not give back.
I do not say it.
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By mid-morning the sun has come over the east ridge and the basin is warm at the south fence. I am out at the rail working the long line in soft figures with a four-year-old gelding from the working string while the chestnut watches from the round-pen because the chestnut watches whatever I do now.
Up at the porch step Willa is on the step.
She has a tin cup in her right hand — mint tea from the sprigs she found on the dry-goods shelf and has been drying at the kitchen window.
She does not come down to the corral. She sits with the cup at her knee in the gray work-dress with the bone pin in her hair, and the rim of the cup goes to the line of her teeth, and she watches me work.
I cannot help looking up to find her at the corner of my own eye.
The four-year-old in the line knows it before I do; he gives me a small sidelong head-toss because my hand has gone slack at the wrong beat.
I correct the hand. I correct the line. I do not let myself look at the porch for a count of forty.
At forty-one I look. She is not looking at me.
She is looking at the chestnut as if he is a man at a kitchen table whose name she has not yet been told.
I think — if I am to live with a woman, I would like her to be you, lass, with the bone pin in your hair and the cup at your teeth. But I do not yet say "love" to your face. I will earn the word. Or I will not.
I go back to the chestnut.
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The morning of the twenty-sixth I have the saddle blanket on his back.
It is the third time I have laid it across the spine and it is the third time he has stood and the third time he has exhaled — silver, animal-grass-sweet, the long willing thing he has begun to give me when the cinch is not there to be a question — and the third time he has shrugged the blanket off with a single long ripple of the shoulder muscle that runs down to the stifle like a wave going across a still pond.
I lay it back.
He exhales.
I lay it back.
He stands.
He does not shrug.
I let the count get to thirty, slow, my hand flat on his neck, my right full of the wither, my left soft at the long line.
I say it aloud, low, because when something matters I speak low.
"Ardent."
The word comes out of me into the air at the round-pen and the chestnut's ears go forward and stay forward, and I have to say it again because the first time was the saying and the second time is the naming.
"You are ardent as the devil and as proud as the lot of us. Ardent."
He does not move. He stands with the blanket across the spine. His ears are forward. The white star between the eyes is steady. I rub the cleft scar at my sternum with two fingers and lower the hand.
I laugh once.
I am alone in the round-pen with a sixteen-hand stallion who has been at me for three weeks, and the word came up out of me as if it had been there since the second week, which it had, and the only thing I can do with the fact of it is laugh, because the laugh is the door I have always opened first.
I think I have given a name to a horse and it is the truest thing I have done this summer.
I do not say that aloud. I keep that for the basin.
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The afternoon of the twenty-sixth I walk up to the cabin porch with the navy saddle blanket folded once over my forearm.
Willa is on the porch step mending a sock. The sock is gray wool and is mine; the heel has gone thin. Her needle is so small from the corral fence I cannot see it. The bone pin holds the braid.
I sit beside her.
I sit three feet from her and four feet from the corral, because four feet is what I keep from a horse and I keep less from no woman in this country if a woman is to be sat near, and Ardent is at the round-pen rail twenty paces off watching, and the geometry of my sitting is the geometry of my own life.
She does not look up from the heel.
She says, "You have named him."
I say, "I have."
She says, "Ardent."
She tries the word in her mouth. The vowels go round in the Saint Louis way, careful, the r soft, the d sharp at the back of the teeth, and the word comes out of her with the same precision she gives the linen knot at a man's wrist, and I think I am a fool for the way she says it, and I do not say so.
I take the bone-and-rawhide charm out of my hip pocket.
I have carried it in the hip pocket since dawn instead of the trouser pocket where it lives, because I have known I was going to set it down somewhere today and I have not known where. I lay it on the porch step between us.
She does not touch it.
She looks at it. She finishes the row of the heel and the needle goes into the cushion in her sewing-pouch and the sock goes onto her knee. She looks at the charm.
She says, "May I ask the name of the horse it is from?"
I take a breath.
The breath goes in the way a man's breath goes when he has been keeping a name in his own teeth since 1862 and has told it only to the wood of barns and the empty air over Wyoming and Montana, and has not told it to the living face of a person in fourteen years.
I say it.
"Tiller."
She does not move her face.
She says, "Tiller. Thank you."
The crack in my voice is in the word bone.
I laugh once to cover it. The laugh is small. It is not the corral-fence laugh and it is not the supper-table laugh; it is the small one I have got to use when I want a thing to be all right that has not been all right in fourteen years.
Willa does not laugh.
She does not touch the charm. She looks at it. She says, "She is well-kept."
I say, "She is."
She picks up the sock. The needle comes out of the pouch and goes back into the gray wool at the heel and the bone pin holds the braid and the charm lies on the porch step between us and Ardent at the round-pen rail blows once, the long silver exhale going up at our backs.
I do not move the charm.
She does not move it either.
I leave it on the porch step when I get up to go back to the corral, and when I come up to the porch for supper at half past six the charm is gone, and Willa is at the range with the cornbread out and the kettle on, and on the supper table at my own place at the east edge by the dough-trough is the charm, laid down quiet, no fuss.
I put it in my hip pocket without saying anything. I sit. The men come in.
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The twenty-seventh is the day that rests on her at the periphery of the work.
Beck is at the assay shed with the small balance.
Tate is down-pass with the freight wagon.
I am at the corral with Ardent in the morning and at the upper pasture in the afternoon with the working string, and Willa is in the dooryard between his work and hers — at the iron pump with the wash-pail, at the chicken yard with the small wooden bowl for the eggs, at the smokehouse with a tin cup for the bee-balm tincture.
I do not speak to her more than four sentences all day.
I say at the porch step at noon, "There is a wind coming up from the south at three. " She says, "I will bring in the wash. " I say at the corral fence at four, "Old Brigham is at your ankle again, lass. " She says, "He and I have an understanding."
That is four. I do not push past the four.