CHAPTER 14 #2
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She undressed me by the lamp-light.
She lit the brass lamp's wick all the way up and the cracked chimney threw a thin half-shadow on the wall, and the loft went small and gold, and Willa Greer unbuttoned my shirt.
There were eight buttons. She counted them with the small careful press of her thumb at each, the way a tailor's daughter counts because counting is the work.
She lifted the linen off my shoulders and set the shirt on the chair.
She looked at my chest the way she had looked at my hands at the pump — the burn on the inside of the right forearm, the sparse near-black chest hair, the line of my sternum where the breath was coming back.
I had not been looked at like that since.
She rose. She put her hands at her own collar and undid the bodice of the green-and-cream dress.
Eight buttons there. I watched her thumb count them.
She slid the bodice off her shoulders and laid it over the chair-arm.
She undid the laces of the soft summer corset and set the corset on the floor.
She slid the cotton drawers down her hips and stepped out of them.
She lifted the chemise off over her head.
The bone pin stayed in her braid. The gold band stayed on her left hand.
She stood at the side of the bed naked in the lamp's gold light with the bone pin in her hair and the gold band on her hand.
I had not looked at a woman like this since the third of February in '77.
"Christ," I said. "Christ. Darlin'."
The word came out broken. The second one came out softer than the first.
She came to the bed. She lay on her back under the south window. The sheets were the plain wool I slept on. The moon at the clerestory was on the bone of her shoulder. She held her hand out for mine.
I came onto the bed above her. Eye to eye. Mouth at her temple.
I went into her slow.
I did not press in by inches. I did not have the language to ask each inch tonight. I went in once, slow, the slick of her around me, the give of her opening to me, the long single passage of my length into her until I was at the hilt, and I stopped, and I breathed.
I said it against her temple.
"I did not know I could want again."
She said, against my hairline, "You can."
I wept once into her temple. Three or four tears. They went down the side of her face into the bone pin at her braid. She held me. She did not move under me. She held the back of my neck in one hand and the small of my back in the other and she did not move until I asked her to.
I moved slow, at the count of my own breath. I had not had a count to move to since '77 and tonight the count was the count of a man returning to a country he had thought he had left for good.
She came once. Slow. Long. The pull of her around me at the inside was the give of a body that had decided to open.
Her hand at the back of my neck stayed where it had been set.
She held my eyes and she came with her thumb pressed to the cleft between her own eyebrows the way she did when she refused to weep, except tonight the gesture was not refusal.
It was the press of a hand that had found its work.
I came inside her with a sound under my breath that was not a curse and was not a name. It was a sob held under the breath of a man, and the sob had been mine for two years and three days, and I gave it up into her temple.
I lay on her chest after. I had not the words to do anything but lie there. She ran her fingers through my hair at the silver streak at the left temple. She said, "Tate."
She said, "Sleep."
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I slept.
I had not slept in two nights. I slept the way a freight pilot sleeps coming down the last switchback at the end of a hard run — without preamble, the body taking the sleep because the body has nothing left to take.
I woke once at the small hours.
She was not under me. She was at the windowsill. She was naked. The bone pin held the braid at the nape. She had the spectacles in her hand.
She held them. She turned them once in her palm. She did not put them back on the sill. She walked back across the loft to the rope-bed and looked at me.
I had not opened my eyes all the way. I watched her under my lashes.
She lifted the wool blanket off my hip. She laid Eliza's reading-spectacles, careful, on my chest at the sternum, over the bone, where the breath was.
She covered me again with the wool. She kissed my temple.
She gathered the green-and-cream dress and her drawers and her chemise off the floor and dressed at the chair by the window, slow, careful.
The gold band caught the moon once as she did up the bodice's eight buttons.
She went down the ladder.
I heard the door of the freight stable fall to.
I heard her boots on the dust of the dooryard.
I heard the basin keep its silence.
I lay with the spectacles on my chest and the warmth of her on the inside of me and I did not move for a long count.
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I rose at the first gray of the east.
The spectacles were on my chest. I did not have to ask who had set them there.
I sat up. I picked them up. I held them in my open palm. The dust-rim was still the dust-rim. The bent right earpiece was still bent.
I dressed — trousers, shirt, coat. I slid the spectacles into the inside breast-pocket where Eliza's stone had ridden for two years and three days.
I picked up the stone from the windowsill and put it in the outside right-hand pocket.
The stone in one pocket. The spectacles in the other.
The coat was even now in the shoulders for the first time in a long count.
I went down the ladder.
The dooryard was the color of pewter. The iron pump was silent. The basin held the dry. The cabin's windows held no light yet. I crossed the dooryard at the slow walk of a man who had work to do and had decided to do it before the country woke.
I walked east along the southeast lip.
I stood at the cross.
I took the spectacles out of the inside breast-pocket. I held them in my open palm.
I held them out to the cross.
"Eliza," I said.
"Mo chridhe."
I did not lay them down.
I held them out, in my open palm, in the gray light, with the dust-rim still on them and the bent earpiece still bent, and I held them out to the cross-bar at a height between my heart and Eliza's name carved in my own hand, and I stood there in the cold dawn with the spectacles in my hand and I asked.