CHAPTER 12 #2
Slow strokes. Full withdrawal to the head, full re-entry to the seat.
My scarred left palm flat against the table-grain at her hip; my right hand at her left thigh holding her open.
I counted her pulse at her throat as I moved.
Fourteen at first. Sixteen by the third.
Twenty by the seventh. Twenty-six by the tenth. Her pulse climbed the way mine did.
I said, "Look at me, Mrs. Carrow."
She looked.
I said, "You are doing well."
She said, "Beck."
I said, "Stay with me."
She said, "I am here, Beck. I am here."
I kept slow until her hand came up at my back and gripped the linen of my shirt at the shoulder-blade — the same seamstress's grip she had laid at my hair five minutes ago.
Then I let myself faster. Not fast; faster.
The way a slow boil goes to a medium. I brought my right thumb down to her clit, slick from her own and from my mouth, and held the thumb there. I let her move on the thumb against me.
She came once around my cock with my thumb at her clit and her gray eyes shut because she could not hold the open eyes and the apex both. She said, "Beck. Beck. Beck. " Three times. The third Beck was around me. I felt the give of her inner muscle in the third syllable.
I came inside her.
The low groan came up from my chest at the seventh stroke after her apex and I drove it into the bend of her throat and her shoulder so the basin would not hear; and I said her name once at the apex, low against her skin — "Willa," the one syllable in the one mouth that had a right to say it.
I held inside her. She held around me. We breathed.
The first thunder came.
A low long roll from the south ridge — the slate-band rumble I had known from two summers; the sound that began as a shake at the back of the throat of the basin and rolled north toward the divide for ten long seconds and then was gone.
The wind that had been still all afternoon did not stir. The kettle steamed.
The coat under her hips smelled of pine smoke and saddle leather and my cock was inside her and the woman was at the bottom of me at the kitchen table I had eaten cornbread off the morning of June tenth before the wagon went down to fetch her.
I withdrew slow. By inches the way I had gone in.
I lifted her in my arms off the table. She put her head in the bend of my neck. I carried her three short strides across the kitchen to the white porcelain wash-basin with the chipped lip in the northwest corner. I set her on the small pine stool.
I poured warm water from the kettle into the basin. I took a clean linen washcloth from the stack she had hand-stitched and laid on the iron towel-bar through the past month.
I rinsed her at the cleft of her thighs.
I knelt with the basin between us. The warm water at the cloth at my right hand; my left scarred palm flat against the inside of her right thigh to hold her steady; her slick mixed with mine on the cloth.
The cloth came away wet at the first pass; I rinsed it in the basin and wrung it out and did the second pass slower.
The cloth came away pink at the third — the smallest pink, the bright thin shock of a woman whose body has opened for the first time. She had been a maiden. She had not told me. She had not needed to.
I wrung the cloth out.
I said, then — for the first time in this kitchen, for the first time at her face, for the first time in any kitchen of mine — "Sweetheart."
The word came up out of my chest the way a man's mother's word comes up out of a chest he has been keeping it in since he was four. I had said it never. I said it now.
"Sweetheart. I have got you."
She said, "Yes, Beck."
I bent. I laid my mouth at her temple — not at her own mouth; I had not kissed her mouth yet; this was the slow way and the slow way said I would have her body before her mouth — and I kissed her once at the hairline above the small soft place where the bone pin had been.
The rain began.
It began at the kitchen window first — the small first ticks of water at the pane. I lifted my eyes once from her face to the window.
I saw Tate.
He was in the dooryard. He had walked back from the freight stable; he had walked back, as he had said at the porch, because the rain was beginning to come off the divide and he would not let the bay take the slick at the switchback.
He had walked the eight miles in his felt hat low against the first rain.
The rain at his shoulders was already soaking the wool of his coat.
He had come up to the porch step and he had stopped at the kitchen window and he had looked through.
He saw me. He saw Willa. He saw the wash-basin between us and the kettle steaming at the stove and my coat — the brown wool, the collar she had mended, the smell of pine smoke and saddle leather still on it — draped over the back of the kitchen chair at the head of the table where I had folded it.
He stood a long moment.
He did not come in.
He stood with the rain at his shoulders and his felt hat low and the small Highland stone — I knew the stone; he carried it — in the pocket of the coat the rain was wetting.
He stood for the time it took the rain to begin to fall steady at the dooryard.
Then he turned. He walked off the porch step.
He walked the path back down to the freight stable in the rain.
I watched him go.
I did not call. I did not say his name. I did not stand from my knee at the basin. I did not move my left palm off Willa's thigh.
Christ Almighty, I thought, in my own head. We will need to talk soon.
Willa had not seen. The kitchen window was at my back at the angle; she would have had to lean forward to see past my shoulder and she had not leaned. The day was today and the day was mine. The day after was for Tate.
I went back to the cloth.
I rinsed her once more, gentle. I dried her at the inside of her thighs with a clean towel from the iron towel-bar.
I helped her into her drawers — I tied them at the waist with the small careful tie a seamstress would have tied for herself; she watched me tie them; she did not laugh at my untrained hand — and I helped her button her bodice, six buttons, the same six she had been carrying since June.
I folded my coat off the table. I laid it across the back of the kitchen chair at the head of the table. The smell of pine smoke and saddle leather was still on it, and the new smell of her on it, and the smell would be on the coat for a week.
I carried her to the rocker in the front room.
I set her in the rocker by the cold stove. I knelt on the rag-rug at her feet — the rag-rug she had been piecing in green-and-cream calico across the past six weeks, the wedding-ring pattern from her Pilsen grandmother of 1840. I sat at her feet on her own work.
I scratched the scarred palm of my left hand once with the right thumbnail.
The tell. The decision was made; the decision was holding.
I pulled out the pocket-watch from my vest. The brass case, the dial dirty, the hands stopped at four-eleven.
I held it open in my palm for the time of one slow breath.
The small painted ivory of my mother inside the case-lid. I closed the watch. I put it back.
I said, "Sweetheart. The slow way. The slow way always."
She said, "We were married in the spring. It is summer."
I said, "Aye."
She put her hand at the back of my neck.
I sat at her feet with my forehead at her knee.
The rain was coming small and steady at the south window.
The basin smelled of wet sage and warm pine and wet dust. Old Brigham crowed once in the chicken yard — a confused afternoon crow at the thunder — and I did not laugh.
I thought:
The first thunder broke and a man and his wife of paper became a man and his wife. The rain holds. Tate has gone back to the stable. Levi will be back by dusk. I do not know yet what the four of us will need to find. I know this: she said my name three times around me and I am hers.
I held still.
The rain held. Tate did not come in.