CHAPTER 10 #2
I rub the cleft scar at my sternum with two fingers at the corral rail and rub it again at the upper-pasture lip and a third time at the porch step at dusk when she comes out with a folded sheet over her arm.
Three is the count, I think, and I leave the scar alone after that.
Do not crowd her. She has just been near Beck in some quiet way — I can see it on her shoulders. Do not crowd her.
I go in to supper at half past six. Willa serves my plate with the same hand she serves Beck's.
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The twenty-eighth she comes down.
I am at the corral in the middle of the morning with Ardent in the round-pen and the saddle on the rail and the blanket folded over my own forearm. She comes down off the porch step without sound. She stands at the gate.
She does not knock. She does not call out. She stands with one hand on the top rail.
I say it before I have decided to say it.
"Come down and meet him, love."
The word goes out of my mouth into the basin and I hear it as I say it and I cannot pull it back.
I have been giving the word to Ardent for three days.
I have been giving it to Pie for five years.
I have been giving it to every horse I have ever stood close to and I have not given it to her face yet, and now I have, and the basin is the basin and she has heard it.
She does not move. She does not flinch. She lifts her hand off the rail and she comes in through the gate.
She closes the gate behind her with the seamstress's careful hand and walks the slow three paces to where I am standing.
I put her at the gate post.
"Stand at the post. He will read you. He will not come close yet. Do not move."
She stands. The bone pin holds. Her hands are at her own waist, light. She is not afraid.
Ardent stands in the middle of the round-pen.
He turns his head a quarter inch. The white star is on her. He walks toward her at the slow angle a stallion walks when he is making the count of a thing, the four steps of an introduction in horseman's English, and he stops at six feet.
He exhales.
The exhale is the long silver thing — animal-grass-sweet, the warm grass under the cinch, the cool of the morning air going through, the willing — and it comes between him and her and Willa does not move.
She does not throw her hands at him. She does not back from the post. She stands.
The exhale is the answer.
He does not come closer. He does not shy. He does not throw her.
She says, low and careful, "Hello, Ardent."
His nose lifts.
I think Christ's teeth. Christ's teeth, Christ's teeth, Christ's teeth, and I do not say a word, and I stand four feet behind her at the gate post with my hand at my own hip, and I do not move, and Ardent does not move, and Willa does not move, and the basin holds.
After a long count he turns. He walks back to the middle of the pen and stops. The reading is over.
I let out the breath I have been holding.
"Mrs. Carrow," I say, soft. "He has had a thought about you and he has put the thought down for the day. That is more than I had at the same age, and I do not mind saying so."
She does not smile but the line of her mouth softens.
She walks to the gate.
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I walk her back toward the cabin porch.
At the porch step the toe of her boot catches the raised plank.
She has been in the green-and-cream travel dress all day — the dress she came west in, with the mended collar — and the hem is long and the green-and-cream falls forward and her boot toe catches and she pitches a half-inch off her line.
I reach.
My hand finds her hip.
It is the lightest contact, the open palm at the crest of her hip-bone through the green-and-cream wool, the way a man steadies a woman who has caught her toe on a porch board, and she does not move, and I realize my hand is on her hip, and I do not move it.
She does not move.
I count one. I count two. I count three. The pulse at her hip-bone is at the count my own is at, which is a fast count, and on the fourth count I remove my hand, slow, careful, the palm sliding back to my own side without any flourish at all.
I say, "Mrs. Carrow."
She says, "Mr. Thorn."
Our breath is held for one beat.
She turns. She goes up the porch step into the cabin. I stand on the porch a second with the hand at my own side and the bone-and-rawhide charm in my hip pocket, and I do not rub the cleft scar. I let the hand keep still. The keeping-still is the new thing.
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At supper Beck is back at the table and Tate has come up the freight road in the wagon at five.
The four of us eat. Willa serves my plate with the same hand she serves Beck's. The kettle is on. Tate tells about a blow-down at mile four; Beck listens. I do not say much. I watch her.
After supper she goes out to the porch with a thin shawl over her shoulders to look at the stars. The June moon is a thin moon and the basin is dim. I go with her. The two of us go out — only the two of us — and the men stay at the table with the coffee.
The stallion is in the corral. I can hear him breathing from the porch step. The silver exhale comes once on the cool air from the round-pen and goes up.
We stand at the porch rail.
I do not put my hand on her. I keep it at my own side.
I say it.
"If I am to live with a woman, I would like her to be you, Mrs. Carrow."
She does not answer immediately.
She looks at me. The gray river is on me. The bone pin holds the braid at the nape.
She says, "I would like you to live with me, Mr. Thorn."
She goes inside.
I stand on the porch with the cleft scar under my shirt and my hand still warm where her hip was, and I do not say anything aloud, and the basin holds, and Ardent at the round-pen breathes once more, the long silver animal-grass-sweet exhale into the June dark, and I close my hand around the bone-and-rawhide charm in my hip pocket and I do not say her name and I do not say his name and I do not say my own, and I stand on the porch a long time.