CHAPTER 14
Tate
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I had not slept the night of the tenth and I had not slept the night of the eleventh and at eleven of the night on the twelfth I sat on the edge of the rope-bed in the loft over the freight stable with Eliza's reading-spectacles in my right hand and I was holding them the way a man holds a thing he has not yet decided how to put down.
The wick of the brass lamp on the floor by the bed was burned to a thumbnail.
More light would have asked things of me.
A thumbnail was the size of flame the dust on the spectacles' wire frame could bear, and I was looking at the dust the way a man looks at a wound he had decided to leave alone for two years and three days and was now, against his will and against his hope, considering.
The drought was in its sixth day. The wagon had come up the switchback that afternoon under a copper-bright sky with no give in it, and I had set the two barrels at the cabin and taken the wagon down to the stable and watered the team slow at the trough because the basin's water was a thing now to be measured by ounce.
The hens were quiet under the porch. Old Brigham had not crowed since the long dusk.
I held the spectacles in my hand and I thought.
I thought, I held a woman in the kitchen at the wash-basin five evenings past. Not held — saw held.
Beck's coat over the table edge, Willa with her hair down on the back of her own neck and Beck with his bay-rum on the side of his jaw, and the rain that did not come came at the window anyway, and I stood on the wrong side of the kitchen window and did not come in, and I have not spoken to him a private word since, and she has not spoken to me, and the country is dry.
I thought, Eliza, mo chridhe, what would you do.
I had thought the question once a day for two years and three days and had had no answer. Tonight the silence at the back of the question had a different quality. It was not the silence of being un-answered. It was the silence of being asked back.
The spectacles were still in my hand.
I took the small smooth river-stone out of the breast-pocket of the coat I had not yet taken off and laid it on the windowsill.
Carry this for me until I can carry it again.
Eliza had said it to me on the morning of February the fourth in the high-country cabin and I had carried it since, and I set it down now because the hand that held the spectacles had no room for the stone tonight.
The slate went pale on the wood beside the wire frame.
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The knock came on the bottom rail of the ladder.
It was the soft pad of a fist on a pine rung, the careful way a person knocks who has decided not to startle anyone.
"Aye?" I called, low.
"Mr. Halloran. " Willa's voice came up the ladder-well. "I have warmed milk for you."
I sat with the spectacles in my hand.
"Come up, Mrs. Carrow."
I heard her boot on the first rung, the careful one-hand-one-foot of a woman climbing in a long skirt. The clerestory moon at the gable was thin and yellow; she had not brought a candle. The moon was enough.
She came up the last two rungs and stepped onto the loft floor.
She had a tin cup in her left hand. Her hair was pinned at the nape with the bone pin and the bone of the pin showed through the dark blonde at the back of her head.
She had on the green-and-cream travel dress with the mended collar, the one she had come west in, the one I had seen Beck's hand under five evenings past.
She walked to the foot of the rope-bed and sat on the foot of it, careful, the tin cup held in two hands now.
"Hattie sent a jar with the barrel today," she said. "I used the last of the kettle's water to warm it."
She held it out.
I took it. The tin was warm against my palm. I drank a swallow and gave it back. She set it on the windowsill beside the stone and the spectacles. The three things lay on the wood now, two of them mine and one of them hers.
She looked at me.
She did not look at me with pity. She did not look at me with curiosity. She looked at me the way a tailor's daughter measures the give of a wool against the give of a hand, the way a woman who has been ten years at a cutting-table measures cloth before she makes the cut.
I had not been measured like that since.
I said, low, "Darlin'."
It came out of me before I had decided to give it to her.
She did not answer. She did not move. She let the word lie between us on the floor of the loft the way Hattie had let me set down hard sentences in her parlor in '77 — by letting the air carry the weight and not the answerer.
And then the thing that had been kept came up.
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I wept against her shoulder.
I did not lower myself to it gently. I did not have that grace in me.
I leaned forward with the spectacles still in my hand and my forehead came to her collar and her hand came to the back of my neck and she did not flinch and she did not pull back and the first sob came up out of me with the noise of a man clearing a chimney that had not been clean in two years and three days, and then the second came after it, and then I was weeping with all of myself against the green-and-cream wool of the dress she had come west in and the lavender her mother had pressed into the lining and the warmth of her shoulder under it, and Willa Greer, who had measured me at the dawn pump, held me.
She did not interrupt.
She did not shush me. She did not run her hand on the back of my neck.
She set her hand at the back of my neck and let it stay where it was set.
Her other hand came up at some point and found my right hand where it had the spectacles in it, and she did not take the spectacles out of my hand; she laid her palm over my knuckles and held my fist closed around them.
I wept the kind of weeping I had not done with another human creature since the morning of February the fifth in '77 with Hattie Doss at Eliza's left wrist and me at Eliza's right hand, when Hattie had reached across the bed and put her square hand on my arm and the weeping had come out, and then had gone back in, and had stayed in.
It came out now.
I told her the story between the sobs. I did not tell it cleanly. I told it in the long sentences a Scots-Irish-widower tells a thing in when he has held the thing in his sternum for two years and three days and the holding has come off.
I told her that Eliza had been near-sighted and that the small print of my freight contracts she had not been able to read without help, and that I had bought her the spectacles from a man at Granite Forks the December before the babe came, and that she had laughed at the wire rims and said she looked like her own mother and I had said I like the look of your own mother on you, darlin' and she had hit me with a flat hand on the breastbone and put the spectacles on.
I told her that she had pressed her lips together when she read because the closing of the lip was how she set the tension on a sentence the way a seamstress sets the tension on a stitch.
I told her she had used the spectacles for half a year before the babe came, and that the babe had come on the morning of February the fourth in '77 in a cold the basin had not seen in eleven years, and Hattie Doss had come up-pass herself on the freight team because Hattie was the laying-in woman of Larkspur Bend and there was no woman closer who could lay-in a labor that had started five weeks early.
I told her Hattie had loved Eliza. I told her the labor had been long, twenty-two hours from the first water to the last push, and the daughter had been born blue and had not breathed and Eliza had bled and the bleeding had not stopped, and Hattie had put her square hand against Eliza's belly and had said, low, Tate, we will pack her and we will sit with her and we will pray; and we had packed her, and we had sat, and we had prayed.
I told her Eliza had died in my arms at twenty past two in the afternoon of February the fourth, and the daughter had died in the same blanket within the hour.
I told her I had buried them in the same grave because I could not bring myself to give a daughter a date for a life she had never had, and the board cross I had cut from a peeled rail of Levi's at the corral the spring after, and the carving on the cross had been my own hand, and the daughter had no name on the wood because she had not lived the eight hours of the law I had been raised in.
I told her Hattie had bathed Eliza's body herself, and I had stood in the door of the high-country cabin with the stone Eliza had given me in my hand and had not been able to step inside.
I told her this against her shoulder, with the dress under my mouth gone wet at the collar.
I wept the better part of a quarter-hour.
I do not remember the order of the wept-out part.
I remember only that her hand was at the back of my neck and that her other hand was closed around my fist that held the spectacles, and that when I came up off her shoulder at the end of it she did not move her hand from my neck for a long count.
She said, "Tate."
She had not said my first name to me before tonight.
She said it the way the bone pin holds a braid — without flourish, with full weight.
I did not yet have the breath to answer.
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I sat back on the rope-bed.
I looked at her.
The lamp's small light was on her at the side of her face and her eyes were the cold gray of dawn-river under cloud and her mouth was the line she had at the dooryard the first evening.
I said, low, "I have not lain with a woman since."
She did not look away.
She said, low, "You can."
I said, "Mrs. Carrow."
She said, "Willa."
I said, "Willa."
I said, "Darlin'."
She said, "Tate."
The four words crossed the floor of the loft once and stayed crossed.
She set the spectacles, gently, in my open palm. She closed my fingers around them. She lifted the closed fist of my hand and laid it on the windowsill beside the stone and the empty cup, and she let go.