CHAPTER 13
Willa
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I went out for the morning water at half past five and the pump did not give it to me.
The dooryard was cold in the gray hour before the sun came over the east ridge.
I laid my left hand on the iron handle the way I had laid it every morning for three weeks.
The gold band on my fourth finger was colder than the iron for the count of two before the iron pulled the cold out of the gold and held it.
I set my right hand under the spout. I worked the handle.
The squeak came, the two notes I had known since the first dusk of my life in this basin, the rising and the falling, the falling-note question at the end. The water did not.
I worked the handle three strokes. The iron pulled air through itself like a man pulling at a thing that was not there.
I stopped my hand. The handle held a quarter inch above the up-stroke and settled.
Lord.
I did not say it. I thought it the way my mother would have said it in a winter alley in Saint Louis when the gas had gone off and she had a fire of broken crate-wood at her feet and a brick in the coals to boil tea on. I turned and walked back to the cabin.
Beck was at the kitchen doorway.
He had heard me. He had heard the wrong note in his own house and was at the doorway before he had decided to be. His scarred left palm was at the door-frame. He looked once at me, once at the dooryard, and his thumbnail went to the scar at his left palm and worked there once and stopped.
He said, low, "The springbox."
I said, "Yes."
I went past him into the kitchen. I poured what was in last night's kettle into two cups and laid out the bread and the salt and a small dish of bee-balm tincture in case any of them had a burn at the wrist I had not yet seen.
Tate was at the boot-bench. Levi was at the porch step with the bone-and-rawhide charm in his hand the way he held it before any ride.
The four of us came to the scrubbed plank table at six-thirty with one cup short of water at the cup-line and the cornbread cold.
Beck spoke first. He said, "The springbox. Levi. Tate."
Tate nodded once.
Levi said, "I will go up after."
Tate said, "Three weeks if it holds."
Beck said, "Two if it does not."
They had had this in their heads since the early-summer dry.
I had known they had it in their heads. I had not known it would arrive the morning after the handle went mute, and I sat at my place with my left hand at the rim of my cup and I did not eat.
I counted at the inside of my own wrist. Four months to the thirty-first of August. Five barrels of water.
Three Mason jars on the dry-goods shelf.
The kettle on the stove. One tin tub. One wash-basin. Eleven hens, twelve cattle, eight saddle horses, one stallion in the round-pen, four people at this table. The count was long. My mouth was dry at the count. I did not let the dry show at my mouth.
I poured the coffee. It was strong because I had used too much grounds for the water and not enough water for the grounds.
None of the three said so. Beck drank his black.
Tate drank his black. Levi put a spoon of the cone-sugar in his and did not stir it, which was the way he drank it when he was thinking.
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The basin was dry in a way I had not yet learned to read.
The sage at the rim of the dooryard had gone the color of an old shilling.
The lodgepole at the south-ridge slope had a thready dust at every needle.
I walked up the spring-trail beside Beck with my left hand at his right elbow because the trail-stones were loose and my shoe had less heel than was wise for the climb.
The creek beside us was a string of stagnant pools, dark and still.
The gravel between them was the color of an old bone.
At the lower margin of the bed, a hundred yards below the cabin, the gravel ran out into a band of pale crust at the lip, and the crust had a thin white veil over it where the sun had drawn the last of the wet out of the salts in the dirt.
Beck stepped to the lip.
He set the heel of his right boot down on the crust.
The crust cracked under his heel.
The sound was small and bright and exact, the sound of a thing that had been a fluid in the night and was a solid at dawn and was a fluid no longer at the place where the heel had laid down.
It was the sound of fired glass at the lay-out table of my father's shop, a glass thimble dropped from one inch above onto the smooth iron of a flat-iron's bottom.
A sound a tailor's daughter knew at her ear at six years old.
I heard it once and a second time as Beck's heel rocked half an inch and laid down a second crack at the edge of the first.
I said, low, "Damn."
It was the first time I had said the word aloud in this basin.
I had said it once before in my life, in the upper rooms of Mrs. Pugh's boarding house in Saint Louis at the news of the closing of my father's shop, into a folded towel against my own mouth.
I said it now into the dry air at the lip of the dry creek with my husband's boot on the alkali and the sound of fired glass still at my ear.
Beck did not say anything. He scratched the scar at his left palm with the thumbnail of his right, slow, two strokes, the long way along the silver web. He looked at the crust. He looked up the bed at the springbox.
He said, "Half the flow."
I said, "Show me."
We walked up to the box. Beck lifted the lid.
The water inside the cedar crib was cold and dark and clean.
It came in at the north corner from the seep at the rate of a single small thread the width of a milliner's needle.
It went out at the south corner along the trough at the same width and was lost by the trough's lower end into dry gravel.
Beck said, "It will hold at half. The seep does not stop above this kind of dry."
I said, "And if half is not enough."
He said, "We haul from down-pass."
He let the lid down. He looked at me. He had his hat in his right hand. His hair at the crown was darker than the hair at his temple in the morning shade.
He said, "Sweetheart."
I did not say anything for the count of two.
I said, "Beck."
He laid his hand at the back of my neck for the count of two beats and took it away. We walked back down to the cabin.
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We came in at half past nine.
I sat at the long side of the scrubbed plank table with the steel-nibbed pen Tate had handed me and a sheet of cheap county paper from the writing-table drawer.
Tate had come up from the freight stable.
Levi had come down from the corral. Beck stood at the head of the table with his hat in his hands.
The four of us were at the table the way the four of us had been at the table on June fourteenth when the paper marriage had been set out on the same plank between us, and the table-grain was the same hand-drawn map under my left palm as it had been then.
Beck said, "Five barrels."
He laid the count on the air with his right hand the way a foreman laid timbers at the front of a drift.
Four freight barrels at Tate's stable. The rain barrel in the dooryard half-full from the Fourth of July storm.
The half-full was the only rain at the basin since the third week of June.
Three weeks of stored water if no rain came. After that, hauling.
Tate down the pass to Larkspur Bend's town spring, two barrels per trip on the wagon-bed, four trips a week, at a dollar-fifty per trip against our own household pact.
The dollar-fifty was income for Tate he had not asked for.
It was a line we had not had to write before.
Tate did not speak when Beck said it. Beck did not look at Tate.
I wrote Tate / down-pass / 2 brl / Tu Fri / $1.
50 in my unjoined-letter hand in the first column.
Beck went on. Levi to the upper pasture with the eight saddle horses and Ardent, where the snowmelt seeps at the timber-line still held.
The seeps would hold six weeks. Levi nodded once.
I wrote Levi / upper pasture / horses + A in the second column.
Beck himself to the upper pasture's lower edge with the cattle, at the lower seep where the long grass still held the wet at the root. I wrote Beck / lower seep / cattle.
The chickens to remain in the dooryard with reduced rations and a wet sack laid over the cabin's north wall behind the coop for the heat.
The garden — and here Beck's eyes moved a quarter inch to my hand — the kitchen garden of beans and onions and turnips I had planted by the south wall on the seventh of June, watered every dawn and every dusk from a hand-bucket, the green of it the last green in the dooryard — if the freight trips became more than four a week, the garden was to be let go.
I wrote Willa / chickens, towels, kettle, garden until 4-trip threshold in the fourth column.
I did not look up. I wrote the assay shed wet down once a day from the kettle's spent water under Beck's name at his word.
I wrote the bee-balm tincture, the Greer Bible, the marriage certificate, the bone pin, the dust-tally, into the tin lockbox at first smell of smoke along the bottom margin.
I drew a line under it. I turned the sheet around to Beck.
He took the pen and wrote at the bottom in his slow careful pencil: Settled.
B. C. He passed the pen to Tate. Tate signed in copperplate. He passed the pen to Levi. Levi signed in his sprawling hand. The pen came back to me. I signed Willa Carrow under the three of them.
I folded the sheet and put it in the small wooden box where I kept the marriage certificate and my mother's bone pin on the loft pallet.