CHAPTER 15
Willa
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I cut the wormwood at nine in the morning.
The south slope of the basin runs up off the lower freight gate in a long open shoulder of sun-burned grass and granite scree, and the wormwood grows wild there in three loose clumps along the higher edge where the lodgepole begins — silver-green leaves at the tops, woodier stems below, the kind of plant that takes the dry country and gives back the bitterness the dry country owes.
I have my seamstress's scissors in my apron pocket — the small steel shears with the brass screws my father gave me in Soulard Street the spring I turned twelve, after I had cut my first coat-pocket clean.
The blades are three inches and the screws are tight and they have not been a tailor's tool in two months.
A shear is a shear; it remembers the hand.
I bend at the south slope and take a small bundle — five stems, no more — and the scissors close clean and the smell comes up at me at the first cut and I know the smell before I have named it.
Bitter. Green. The back of the throat. It is the smell of the kitchen on Soulard Street when Sissel had the grippe and my father stood at the stove and stirred a quart of it down with a spoon and made her drink it and she swore at him in her Saxon and then she slept.
It is the smell of medicine. It is the smell of a thing that does not lie about what it is.
I lay the cut stems across my left forearm. I walk back down the basin. The smell is on the apron by the lower freight gate. By the dooryard, it is on my hands.
The basin is dry. The wind is the dry southwest wind it has been for ten days running.
Old Brigham is at the iron pump in the dooryard, lifting one foot and then the other and looking at the dry stone trough as if waiting for the trough to apologize.
I have learned, in twelve days of drought, that the question the pump used to ask is a question it does not ask anymore.
The dooryard at noon is a dooryard with a silent pump in it, and Old Brigham has not adjusted.
I step around the rooster. I go up the porch.
I lay the wormwood on the scrubbed plank table. The smell rises off the wood at the heat of my hand and I press my own palm to my own breastbone, once, because I had not known I would do that and I do it before I think about it. I lay the scissors beside the bundle. I do not put them away.
I go to the dry-goods shelf.
There are three Mason jars on the shelf.
The largest holds the bee-balm tincture I made the third week — amber, cloudy, settled.
The middle one is empty. The smallest is empty as well, the zinc lid loose, the rubber ring still on the cabinet shelf from May.
I take the smallest jar down. I take the small flask of grain alcohol from behind the coffee tin — Hattie's, sent up the second of June by the freight wagon for bites and burns; I have not used a drop of it.
I rinse the rubber ring and fit it to the jar mouth.
I trim the wormwood leaves.
I take the silver-green leaves from the woody stem-bottoms and let the stem-pieces fall to the table.
The leaves are bitter-fragrant in the hand.
I stuff them into the Mason jar until it is two-thirds full and the leaves are bruised at the edges from the stuffing.
I pour the grain alcohol over them. The leaves go bright wet under the spirit; the smell goes ten times stronger; my eyes water at the table and I do not look away.
I screw the lid on tight. I take the jar to the dry-goods shelf and set it in the lit corner where the south window throws an hour of sun on the second shelf at midmorning. The tincture will draw for two weeks. That is the time the bitter takes.
I stand at the shelf with the jar in front of me and I think — and the thinking is the first time I let it be plain in my head — two weeks is the time I have given myself.
I do not remember a moment when I sat at the table and counted the days from the morning after Tate's loft and drew a line at the end of them.
The line was drawn by the wormwood. The wormwood says: two weeks.
I have signed for three men. I have been with two.
I have not been with the third. Two weeks, I think, and I will not be a coward at the end of it.
I press my thumb to the cleft between my eyebrows and I leave it there until the pink half-moon stings, and then I lift it away.
I walk past the corral on my way to the chicken yard.
Levi has the chestnut stallion on a long lead-rope at the round-pen.
He is not breaking him. He is standing with him — his left hand loose on the rope at twelve feet, his right hand open at his side.
The stallion is at the far rail of the round-pen, head up, the single white star between his eyes catching the sun once when he turns. Ardent.
Levi has been saying the name to himself for three weeks; I heard him say it through the lean-to wall on a Sunday evening at the end of June, soft, as if to a thing that had not yet agreed to it. I have not said the name aloud. I am not the one who names a horse.
Levi looks up at me across the dooryard.
He does not smile. He does not look away. His sea-blue eyes are direct under the long copper-red of his fringe. I nod to him. He does not nod back. He does not need to. The looking is the nod.
I go to the iron pump and put my hand on the handle.
I lift it once and let it down once. The handle moves.
The water does not. There is the small dry click of the lever in its iron joint and there is no squeak.
I do not pull a second time. I remember the squeak the way I remember the first night in the dooryard — in a place inside my head that does not require the present to confirm it.
I walk back to the kitchen with empty hands.
The wormwood on my fingers is still bitter.
Old Brigham is at the iron pump again in the afternoon.
He has not adjusted. I am in the chicken yard at three gathering eggs — seven today, two of them small; the drought has slowed the hens.
I set them in the willow basket on the pantry shelf.
The wormwood smell is still on my hands; the eggshells take a little of it. I think of Levi at the corral.
I think — and I let myself think it plainly, since I have given myself two weeks — I have been with Beck and I have been with Tate and I have not been with Levi.
He has not asked me. I have not asked him.
We are both polite. The country is dry. The thought lays itself out in my head like a row of pins on the cutting-table.
There is nothing in it I can move without moving the rest.
Three days pass.
On the evening of the nineteenth I make supper for the four of us.
Beck has been at the assay shed all day wetting it down — the iron door, the floor, the small assayer's furnace, the powder-flask shelf — carrying water from the springbox in two buckets at a time because the south ridge slate has been hot to the hand for a week and he does not trust the air.
He comes up at five with his sleeves wet to the elbow.
Tate came back yesterday at noon from the second freight run, his bay tied behind the wagon, the dust still on the spokes. Levi has been at the corral with Ardent all afternoon. The stallion is at twenty hands now and Levi has not closed the distance.
I put a stew on the stove at four — beans and salt-pork and the dried apples for sweetness and an onion the size of my fist that has been in the dry-goods pantry since May — and at six the four of us sit down at the long table.
Levi does not look up at me until the second bowl of stew.
When he comes up for it he looks at me once and the look is straight and there is nothing in it I can name and he looks back down.
He says, low, "It is good, Mrs. Carrow. " He has not called me Mrs. Carrow in eleven days.
Beck looks up at the formality and does not say anything; Tate does not lift his head, but the muscle at his jaw moves once.
Tate has been a freight pilot for eleven years and he hears the country the way other men hear weather.
I think, with my hands flat on the table at either side of my bowl: I have not done what I need to do. I have been a coward.
Two more days pass.
On the evening of the twenty-first I go out to the porch.
It is past nine, the basin dim, the moon a thin paring above the east ridge, the iron pump in the dooryard a dim iron shape that does not move.
Old Brigham is in the coop already; the hens are silent.
The kitchen behind me holds the brass kerosene lamp on the table with the wick down low.
The wormwood on my hands has dried to a faint clean bitter that the lye-soap did not quite take.
Levi is on the porch step.
He is rubbing the cleft scar at his sternum with two fingers — the right hand, the steady one, the one I have watched at the corral rail through twelve evenings of summer.
The shirt at his collarbone is open one button.
He has been there long enough that the porch boards under his boots have taken his shape.
I sit down beside him.
I sit at three feet at first. I do not look at his face.
I look at the dim iron pump and the chicken-yard wire and the dark line of the lodgepole on the south slope where the wormwood was at dawn.
Then I move closer — not a long shift; a foot, no more.
Two feet between us. He does not move away.
He does not move toward me either. He says, after a moment, without turning his head: "Mrs. Carrow. "
I say, "Levi."
I have not said his given name to his face, not once, in fifteen days. The word in my own mouth is plain and small and the syllables fall against the dim dooryard the way a coin falls onto wood.
He looks at me. His sea-blue eyes are dark in the porch shadow.
He says, "Have I done something?"
I say, "No, Levi. You have done nothing."