CHAPTER 11
Willa
◆
The men ride out at half past eight.
I stand at the kitchen window with my hands on the sill and watch them go single file through the lower freight gate.
Beck on his bay, hat low. Tate on his bay, the silver at the left temple a small bright thing under the brim.
Levi on Pie, the long lead-rope coiled at the saddle skirt.
They have an axe and a two-man saw between Beck's saddle and Tate's.
The wind-fall pine across the high path was found yesterday by Tate at the second rein-turn; the path will not pass a freight string until the pine is off. Levi will come down by half three to bring Pie back; Beck and Tate will work the saw and come down at six.
I count their backs in the gate's frame. Three. They are out the gate and around the south shoulder of the cabin and gone.
I am alone in the basin for the first hour since the train.
I count my own pulse at the inside of my wrist. Three. One at the wrist, one at the throat, one at the floor of the chest. The bone pin is in my hair.
The kitchen smells of yeast. I have the second loaf rising on the warming shelf and the first in the cast-iron range. I lift the doubled hand-towel off the iron bar and turn the loaf a quarter; the smell that comes out is brown crust and honey. I shut the oven.
By half ten the second loaf is out and the first in the bread-safe. I wash the kitchen flagstones on hands and knees with the small stiff brush and the lye-and-water in a tin pan. The water turns gray. I dump it at the dooryard's east margin and walk to the iron pump to draw fresh.
The pump-handle squeaks once on the second stroke and then the water comes. I fill the bucket. The handle is iron and cool under my palm.
I scrub my own pallet sheet at the tin tub by the pump.
I wring it close. The line behind the lean-to is full of Beck's shirts; and I think a moment, the way a tailor's daughter thinks about a cut of fabric, and I decide I will carry the sheet to the hayloft of the freight stable.
The hayloft window faces south and catches the afternoon sun.
The loft heat will dry the linen in two hours where the lean-to line would take four.
I do not say the second half of that thought to myself in plain words. I think it and let it pass.
I lift the wet folded linen under my left arm and walk the eighty yards from the porch to the door of the freight stable. Old Brigham scratches behind the chicken-yard fence and does not look up.
I open the freight-stable door. The stable is dim. The bay geldings' stalls are empty; Pie's stall is empty; the second roan mare is in the back stall and she blows once and looks at me with her near eye.
The hayloft ladder is at the stable's east end, eight rungs of peeled lodgepole. I tuck the wet sheet under my arm and climb. Eight rungs. I count them.
The hayloft is dim at the corners and light at the middle.
The south window is an open square of afternoon.
The smell is pine resin from the cut-hay and warm grass of the June first-cutting Beck and Tate brought in last week.
The hay falls in a low loose pile at the loft's center under the south window.
The wash-line above the pile is the length of stout sash-cord Tate stretched between two roof-rafters.
The afternoon sun comes through the south window in a long fall of light across the line and the hay-pile beneath.
I lay the wet sheet over the line. I square the corners with my fingers — the seamstress's habit; even on a wash-line the seam should hang true.
The linen is cool in my hands. I work it across the cord until it hangs straight.
The sun comes through the linen and the linen is a clean white linen ceiling above the hay-pile.
I should turn and go down the ladder.
I do not.
I sit on the hay-pile beneath the line. The hay gives at my hip and the small of my back. The bone pin at the nape is hard against the hay where I lean back.
I lie down.
The clean linen is above me, a white linen ceiling against the rafters. The sun comes through it in a low even white-gold light. Old Brigham, in the chicken yard fifty feet east through the wall, scratches once and is still.
I think: eleven pulse beats. I think: Beck's thumb at the corner of my mouth, his other hand under my jaw, his hazel-green eyes on my mouth.
I think: Ardent. Levi's hand at my hip a moment at the saddle, the freckled forearm coming down across the second roan mare's neck, the word easy, love he said to the mare, and the word my own pulse heard.
I think: Tate's silver at his temple. The burn on the inside of his right forearm. The gray-blue look that has not yet met mine in any shape I have a word for.
I think: Lord. Lord above.
I lift my hands to the buttons of my bodice.
The buttons are bone, like the pin in my hair, six in a row down the front from the small soft hollow of the throat to the waist. I count them.
Six. I do them backwards from the top. One.
Two. Three. The chemise underneath is the cream linen with the small tatted edging Sissel made the winter I turned eighteen.
Four. Five. Six. The bodice opens. The cool air of the loft slips inside ahead of my own hand.
I slide my hand under the chemise. My skin is warm.
My nipples have gone hard already — at the cool air or at the linen above me; I do not bother sorting it.
I think of Beck's left hand — the scarred palm, the four-inch silver web — and I pinch myself between two fingers at the nipple and the breath catches at my teeth.
I do not make a sound. I learned that in the boarding-house in St. Louis at twenty.
I work my hand to the other breast and do the same. My hips lift a quarter-inch off the hay without my asking them to. I let them.
I slide my hand lower. I lift the hem of my skirt with my left hand. I slide my right hand under the drawers' waist-tie. The skin of my own belly is hot. The hair at my mound is damp.
The cotton at the seat of the drawers is wet through.
I have been carrying it all day. I had felt the heat of myself at the porch step and thought it was the porch step. I had felt it at the pump and thought it was the pump-handle. I had felt it climbing the ladder and thought it was the climb.
I think: Lord. I am wet for them.
The pronoun is plural. I do not edit it. I think: yes. Plural.
I slip my hand inside the drawers.
Two fingers. The middle and the ring. I find the slick at my folds first. There is more than I have ever met at my own hand. I draw my fingers up to the clit. The pad of my middle finger finds it. I work it in small slow circles to start and the breath catches at my teeth.
I let my ring finger slip just inside my own entrance.
The give of my own body around the finger is the smallest bright fact of the afternoon.
The finger goes in to the second knuckle, an inch and a half, and stops; I am full at that depth.
I draw the finger back the half-inch and slide it in again, the pad of the middle finger keeping its slow circle at the clit.
I think of Beck saying Mrs. Carrow at the supper table — the low Welsh-Pennsylvania English at the back of the throat, the Mrs. set down clean, the Carrow set down cleaner — and I think of him saying it at my ear instead of across a table.
I think of Levi saying love at my ear the way he said it to the mare. The soft cascading English-stable register, the word that fell out of him before he could have stopped it.
I think of Tate's gray-blue look meeting mine in heat. The quarter-inch turn-of-head. The eyes closing one beat longer than they should.
I think of all three of them at once.
The three voices are in my head together — Beck's Mrs. Carrow, Levi's love, Tate's silver look — and I am shocked that I want all three, and I do not stop.
I am a tailor's daughter and I am twenty-three and past the age of pretending to myself in a hayloft.
I work the pad of the middle finger faster.
The ring finger goes a half-inch deeper into my own channel.
The first one comes quick.
Three passes and the clit goes bright under the fingertip and my hips lift a clean inch off the hay and I bite my own forearm at the elbow to keep quiet — the boarding-house habit, trained, the muffling that has not left my body in three years.
The teeth find the soft inner skin at the bend of the elbow and bite down and the cry that wants to come out of me does not.
The clit pulses three times against the pad of the middle finger and the channel pulses three times around the ring finger and then four and then it goes still. My hips set down on the hay.
I lie a moment.
The bone pin is in my hair. The bodice is open.
The drawers are wet. The clean linen sheet hangs above me on the line, the sun coming through the weave at a low gold angle.
I taste the salt of my own forearm at my own mouth where my teeth have been.
I let the teeth release slow. The mark will fade by tomorrow.
I think: damn.
I think it plain, the way Sissel might have said it in our own kitchen on Cherokee Street when a thing she had not foreseen had come into her own day.
I think: I want all three of them.
The thought is plain in my own head. It is not embarrassed. It sits in the middle of my head the way a measured cut of cloth sits in the middle of my father's cutting-table. It is the size it is. I do not argue with the size.
I bring the hand back to the clit.
The second one is slower.
I close my eyes. I keep the ring finger inside a little deeper this time; an inch and three quarters; the give is the give again, the slick heavier from the first, the channel more open.
The pad of the middle finger does not hurry.
I think of Tate's hand finding my wrist the way Beck's did on the morning at the pump — the burn-shiny inside of his right forearm to the inside of my own wrist, his pulse to mine — and I think of him not letting it go.