CHAPTER 12
Beck
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I had asked her three mornings running, at the iron pump, in the half-light before the basin was awake.
The first morning she had said yes with her hand on the bucket-handle and the pump-squeak gone hoarse behind her.
The second she had said yes with the bone pin in her teeth and her braid half-undone in her hands.
The third she had said yes and then she had said, "Beck.
I am not waiting on the question. I am waiting on the day. " That had been yesterday.
This was the day.
I had been keeping the slow way for two weeks.
Two weeks since the kettle beat at the threshold and her eleven pulse beats at the inside of her wrist and my thumb at the corner of her mouth and the I will not touch you again until you ask me to I had said to her the Sunday afternoon of June twenty-third.
I had kept it. I had not touched her once.
I had stood a half-step closer to the range than the range wanted; I had let her see I was there. The asking at the pump was not the touching. The touching was today.
It was one o'clock in the afternoon of the Fourth of July.
Levi had gone up the north ridge at dawn with the cattle.
A calf had gone off in the night — the bull calf of the upper, eight weeks old; the heifer had lost him at the lower water-line at evening and the calf had not come down.
Levi had ridden up on the slow piebald with cold biscuit and the bone-and-rawhide horse-charm at his sternum, and he had said at the gate, "Beck, mate, I will be back at dusk if I am back at all.
" I had said, "Take the long lead-rope and the spare oilcloth.
The weather's standing east of the divide.
" He had laughed once short into his collar, and gone.
Tate had gone to the freight stable in town an hour before.
The off-front wheel had a loose bearing he would not let ride another loaded run.
He had ridden down on his bay with the sandwiches Willa had wrapped for him and said at the porch, "Mrs. Carrow, I'll walk the bay back if the rain comes off the divide.
Don't wait supper. " He had inclined his head.
He had not looked at me. Tate had not looked at me much for ten days.
The basin was empty of the other two.
I stood at the kitchen threshold with the heat of the cast-iron range at my left shoulder.
The basin held ninety-two degrees at noon.
The sky over the south ridge was a flat brass; the sky over the divide was beginning to bruise a small green-gray.
The country was going to break weather. I knew the sound from two summers in — the low roll from the slate-band, the wind going still, the air iron at the back of the throat.
I had not yet stood in this kitchen at the first thunder with a woman in the basin.
Willa was at the cast-iron range.
She had the kettle on the low boil at the back.
She had the wooden dough-trough on the scrubbed plank table at the south end.
The dough was set. She had her sleeves rolled to the inside of her elbows and the gray work-skirt and the bone pin in her hair at the nape.
The ringed left hand was on the wooden lid of the salt-crock.
She had not turned when I came to the threshold.
She was at the dough as a woman is at her work when the work is not the work she is doing.
I said, "Willa."
It was the first time I had said her given name to her face.
I had thought it in my head for eight weeks; I had said Mrs. Carrow to her face fifty thousand times and Willa to her face never.
The name in my mouth was a thing I had been keeping in my chest under the watch and against the scarred palm.
She turned the way she had turned at the kettle on the morning of the eleven pulse beats — by the wrist first, the shoulder second, the gray eyes coming round last. She wiped her palms once at the apron — the seamstress's instrument-check — and she said, low, "Beck — yes."
She had answered the question before I asked it.
I crossed the kitchen. I took the kettle off the back of the stove with my bare left hand — the scarred palm flat against the iron rim, the cable-burn pink-white under the heat, the heat barely reading because I had done the same lift a thousand times since the No.
4 patch. I set the kettle on the iron trivet at the table's near edge.
I scratched the scarred palm once with the right thumbnail — the tell — and I said, "I want you to be sure. Yes or no, Willa."
She said, "Yes. Yes, please."
I said, "Walk to the table."
She walked. Three steps, the gray skirt at her ankle, the bone pin still in her hair. The scrubbed plank table was satin-pale under her hand.
I took my coat off the peg by the kitchen door.
It was the brown wool, the collar Willa had been mending across the past week with a small hand-stitched lap at the inside.
It smelled of pine smoke off the cookstove and of saddle leather from the corral and the faint iron-sweet of the harness file in the pocket.
The smell came up off the wool at my face.
I laid the coat across the head of the table.
I said, "Up."
She sat on the edge of the table. I spread the coat open under her hips — the wool flat against the wood-grain, the collar she had mended folded under at the foot, the smell of pine smoke and saddle leather coming up between us as if a man had laid a fire and a saddle both at her thighs.
I knelt at the foot of the table.
The kettle was steaming at the trivet at my left shoulder. The south ridge sky was the green-gray of a bruise an hour old. The old kicked-mule break in my right shin ached as it always ached when I knelt. I did not feel it now.
I lifted her skirt to her hips. The gray cotton, the cream of the petticoat, the white cotton of the drawers. The drawers were split-front. The slit at the front opened with the smallest touch of my left hand at the inside of her thigh.
I had not seen a woman in two and a half years. The last had been a brief practical encounter at a livery in Pottsville the winter before I came west — a woman who had not been my wife. This was not that. This was the woman at the kitchen table in the cabin I had built with two men.
Her cunt was wet already. I could see the slick at the inside of her folds. She had carried it through the slow way for eleven days.
I said, "Look at me, Mrs. Carrow."
I gave her the married name on purpose. The sweet name was for the aftermath. I would not let it out until I had been inside her and she had been around me and we had stood at the basin together.
She looked at me. She lifted up onto her elbows on the table — the coat under her hips shifting once — and she watched me. I brought my mouth to her clit.
I licked slow.
I had been a coal-patch boy and a foreman and I had never had to hurry at this.
I licked the way I would have run a finger along the line of a thing I was making, slow and careful, end to end, with the flat of the tongue and not the tip.
I held her thighs apart with my bare hands — the scarred left palm at her right thigh, the burn-scar white-pink against her olive-cream skin; the right hand at her left thigh.
She made a small sound. Not yet a name. The breath of a sound a woman makes when her own body has surprised her and she is not sorry for it. I licked slower. I gave her the slowness a man gives a kettle on a low boil.
She put her hand in my hair. The small careful pressure of her seamstress's fingers at the back of my skull. She was not pulling. She was holding.
I counted. Eight strokes. Ten. Twelve. The slick at her cunt was at my mouth and at my chin. I tasted her — the salt at the back of the tongue, the small bright clean under the salt.
She lifted her hips once off my coat. She said, "Beck — yes — Beck — yes. " The first Beck was a question still; the second was an answer. She came against my mouth.
I drank her slick.
Christ Almighty, I thought, in the back of my head.
I rested my forehead against the inside of her thigh — the palm-sized tea-burn scar from when she was fourteen, faded to a pale pink coin against the cream — and I held still.
The smell of pine smoke and saddle leather rose from the coat under her hips at my temple.
I stood.
I unbuckled my belt. The brass tongue clinked once against the table edge. I unbuttoned the front of my trousers. The thin linen drawers under were tented at the front from my cock. I pulled the linen open at the slit and laid my cock between her folds.
She was wet enough from her own slick and my mouth's wet that I did not need anything else. I laid the head of my cock at her entrance. I looked at her face.
She was on her elbows still. The cotton bodice rumpled at the waist. The bone pin in her hair, a quarter-inch askew because she had moved on the coat. The gray eyes on mine.
I said, "Are you sure?"
She said, "I am sure."
I said, "All of me?"
She said, "All."
I filled her by inches, asking each one.
I pushed in to the head. I asked, "Yes?" She said, "Yes.
" I pushed another inch — slow, the give of her inner muscle around me a small bright shock at my own sternum — and I asked, "Still yes?
" She said, "Yes please. " I pushed another inch.
We were half-deep. I asked, "All of me?" She said, "All.
" I pushed the last and bottomed at the seat.
I held there. I asked, "Are you with me? " She said, "I am here."
I breathed through my teeth — the small involuntary intake of a man seated to the hilt at a body he has been seated nowhere near in two and a half years. I held. I breathed.
I moved.