CHAPTER 11 #2
I think of Beck behind me at the pump while Tate is at my wrist, the scarred left palm at the small of my back, the right hand at my jaw.
I think of Levi standing in the kitchen doorway watching them, freckled and laughing in the soft voice he uses when something matters, saying love to me at last instead of to the mare.
The clit goes bright again, slower this time, and the channel pulses around the finger longer than it did the first time, and the bright lasts maybe twelve seconds — I count, I am a counter — and I gasp once into the bend of my elbow, and I shake at my thighs once, and then it goes still.
I lie under the linen.
The sun has shifted by an inch since I lay down. The linen above me is dry now. The line goes slack a hair's breadth and the sheet hangs loose and the sun comes through it the same gold but a fraction more transparent. The afternoon is at half three.
I weep once.
The tear comes from the outer corner of my right eye and slides into the hair at my temple. One. There is a second — at the outer corner of the left eye — and that is the second. There is not a third. The tears are not sorrow. The tears are the size of the thing.
I have signed for three men. I have sat at the supper table across from them for nineteen evenings.
I have washed their shirts and pumped water and counted the squeak.
I have not yet been with one of them. And I want all three.
I want them in a way Sissel did not tell me a woman could want, because Sissel did not know.
The world is larger than my mother told me and my mother did not know.
I press my thumb to the cleft of my own eyebrows. I do not weep a third time.
I laugh once.
A short laugh, surprised at myself, into the bend of the elbow where I had bit.
The laugh is dry and clean. I think: Lord above.
I have just done that in a hayloft on a Tuesday afternoon.
(I know it is Friday. I think the joke anyway.
Hattie Doss said it once of a kind of foolishness in the boarding-house dining-room and the joke does not need the actual day to do its work.) The laugh goes once and is done.
I sit up.
I take the hand out of the drawers. I wipe the two fingers on a corner of the linen sheet above me — the corner that is dry and unstained — and I think, with the seamstress's matter-of-fact, I will scrub this corner over again at the pump tomorrow.
I close the bodice. Six buttons. Up from the waist. One.
Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. The bone buttons go into the bone-edged holes. The skirt comes down over my ankles.
The drawers I cannot help; they are wet through and they will dry against me on the walk back to the kitchen. I straighten the cotton at the waist. I press my thumb to the cleft of my brow once more.
I lift the linen sheet off the line. It is warm against my own cheek as I gather it. The smell now is lanolin and clean-soap-and-hay and my own salt and my own want. I fold it once and once again and lay it over my left forearm.
I climb down the eight rungs. I count them.
Old Brigham is at the chicken-yard fence and he gives me the slow blink of an old rooster who has not been fooled by a thing in his life.
I walk past him with the warm linen at my left arm and take the porch step at the small soft heel-and-toe of a woman who has been climbing back down into her own kitchen for thirty seconds and is making a good first attempt at it.
I put the linen sheet in the pantry on the top shelf.
I wash my hands at the kitchen wash-basin.
I re-set the bone pin because the loft has loosened the coil at the nape.
It will be a quarter-inch askew tonight no matter what I do; I will not re-braid before supper.
I will not pretend I did not lie under a sheet in a hayloft.
I will sit at the supper table and look every one of them in the face.
I lift down the small Mason jar of dried apple Hattie Doss sent up in the May parcel.
I have been saving it. I had thought the occasion would be the first thunder of the summer, or the day Levi brought Ardent into the corral, or the day Tate said his wife's name aloud at the table.
I had not thought the occasion would be the afternoon I lay on a clean linen sheet in a hayloft and discovered I wanted three men at once. The occasion is the occasion.
I roll the crust. I work the fat in cold.
I prick the top with my fork in my own particular pattern — a herringbone, the small angled stitches of my father's hand on a wool lapel set into pastry instead of cloth, the way I have made every pie since I was eleven and Sissel told me to put my own mark on the work.
I slide the pie into the range. The clock is at three.
I think of the kettle. I think of Beck. I think of Levi. I think of Tate. I do not think of anything else for the half-hour the pie bakes. I sit at the kitchen table with my elbows on the wood. I am not embarrassed. I am alive.
The pie comes out at half three. The herringbone has held. I set it on the porch rail to cool.
At four I hear Pie at the dooryard's east margin.
Levi has come down. He does not come into the kitchen.
He goes to the corral. I watch him from the kitchen window.
He swings down off Pie at the rail and walks the gelding to the back fence where Ardent stands watching for him.
He puts his hand at the chestnut stallion's muzzle and says something I cannot hear; the stallion blows once and lowers his head.
Levi turns Pie into the working paddock and stands at the back fence with one hand on Ardent's withers.
The freckled forearm is bare to the elbow. He does not look at the cabin. I think he knows I am at the window. I think he chooses to leave me there.
At six Beck and Tate come down leading the bays, the pine sawed and stacked at the high path, the cattle count on Tate's slate. They wash at the iron pump in the dooryard.
I am at the range with supper laid out — cornbread, salt-pork, the bee-balm-stewed turnip I learned from Hattie, the pie cooling on the porch rail. I have set the brass lamp on the table though the sun is still up. The four plates are at the four places.
Tate comes in first. He inclines his head. Mrs. Carrow. He notices nothing different about me. He notices the lamp. It's still light, Mrs. Carrow. I say, The kitchen is hot. He nods and goes to the lean-to.
Levi comes in second. His shirt has the soft mare-smell of the back paddock at the cuff.
His sea-blue eyes go from my hair to the line of my mouth and back to my hair and stop at the pin a quarter-inch askew.
He does not say anything. He sees something he does not yet have a word for and leaves the word in the room and goes to wash.
Beck comes in third. He stops at the threshold and looks across the room at me.
The hazel-green eyes catch mine and hold.
He sees. He does not know what he sees. He sees that I am not the same woman I was at half eight this morning.
The line of his mouth softens a hair's breadth.
He scratches the scarred left palm with the right thumbnail once.
He says, Mrs. Carrow, the way he always says it.
I bring the pie to the table. The herringbone has held.
Levi laughs once — gentle, surprised. Bloody hell, lass.
He does not finish the sentence. Beck says, Mrs. Carrow.
He puts his hand on the back of his chair.
Tate looks at the pie and looks at me and the gray-blue eyes do the quarter-inch turn-of-head and meet the line of my mouth and stop. He says, Aye. One word. He sits.
I cut the pie. Beck's slice first. Tate's second. Levi's third. My own fourth.
They eat.
I stand a moment at the kitchen door with the empty pie tin in my hand.
Beck takes the first bite slow, the way he takes everything; Tate takes the second slower; Levi has finished his half-slice by the time the other two are at the first. Levi looks up at me.
Beck looks up at me. Tate looks at Beck looking at me and at Levi looking at me, and then Tate looks up at me himself.
I think, plain in my own head, in the order the country gave them to me:
Beck. Levi. Tate.
I have not said their first names to their faces. I have called them Mr. Carrow and Mr. Thorn and Mr. Halloran for nineteen evenings now. The first names are mine in my own head this evening at the kitchen door.
I think — interior, plain, the way a tailor's daughter sets a seam by it:
I am the gravity of this house.
I cross to the table. I sit at my place. I lift the fork. The herringbone breaks under the tine. The apple is sweet. The men eat. The lamp burns clean. The bone pin sits a quarter-inch askew at the back of my hair.
I take another bite. The men are watching me. I let them.