CHAPTER 15 #2
He looks back at the dooryard. The two fingers at his sternum move a half-inch and stop. He says, low, "I would not have you think I did not want to."
I count my own pulse — once at the inside of my wrist, three beats coming under my thumb in the small steady way they have come since the porch step at sundown the night I arrived.
The wormwood on my hand brushes my own skin and the smell is faint and clean and it is the smell of the medicine the chapter has been making in me for six days.
I press my thumb into the cleft between my eyebrows once. I take it away.
I say, "I have not been with you because I do not know how to ask."
He laughs once — surprised, sad; a sound that goes out of him before he can catch it; the kind of laugh a man makes when a child has handed him a thing he has been afraid to want. He says, "I do not know how to be asked."
I say, "Then we are even."
He looks at me a long moment. He says, "Christ's teeth, lass."
He looks back out at the dooryard.
We sit a long minute. The cricket-and-grasshopper drone is thin in the dry grass past the chicken yard.
The basin is wide and dim. The lodgepole on the south slope is a black saw against the sky.
Somewhere upcreek a magpie says one note and is still.
Levi's right hand at his sternum stops moving and lies flat against his own chest the way a man's hand lies flat when he is feeling his own breathing because he is not sure of his own breathing yet.
He says, low, "Tomorrow I am breaking Ardent."
He says, "I have been a coward to do it."
He says, "I will not be a coward tomorrow."
I say, "Levi."
He says, "Tomorrow morning at first light. I will be at the corral."
I say, "I will be at the barn door."
He says, "Aye."
He starts to say something more — I see the word at his mouth, the shape of it on his lower lip, the one syllable he has used for the bay gelding and for the chestnut mare and for the wild stallion himself — and he does not say it.
He shuts his mouth on it. He puts his right hand back to his sternum and rubs the cleft once and lays the hand flat. Love, he does not say.
The word stays in the porch shadow where he kept it. He has not given it to me yet. He will give it to me in the morning. I know that the way a tailor's daughter knows how a seam will hang under the load.
He rises after a minute. He does not touch my hand. He nods once. He goes down the steps and across the dooryard toward the corral and the small lamp by Ardent's stall.
I sit a moment longer. Then I go inside.
I make a second small jar of tincture.
I do not need to. The first one is on the dry-goods shelf.
But my hands need something and the wormwood is on the table still and there is a little of the grain alcohol left in the bottom of the flask, and the middle Mason jar is empty, and I stand at the scrubbed plank table at ten o'clock and I trim the leaves from the last three woody stems and I stuff them into the middle jar and I pour the rest of the alcohol over them and I screw the zinc lid down and I set the second jar beside the first on the dry-goods shelf.
The wormwood smell is heavy on my fingers now.
I have not washed my hands in three hours.
I lift the smallest jar back into the lamp's reach to look at it once — two weeks, I think — and as I lift it, the lamp throws my face onto the bottom of the cast-iron kettle on the stove.
I have been buffing the kettle all summer with a soft rag and a little ash and a little soap.
It is darker than a mirror but it is enough at the right angle, and the angle is right now.
The hammered iron has gone smooth at the bottom where I have worked at it through July.
My face shows in it dim and small and the lamp picks up my own gray eyes in the iron.
There is a smear of wormwood-green at my left cheekbone where I touched my own face an hour ago without thinking. There is the bone pin in my hair, the small ivory edge of it catching the kerosene at the back of my coiled braid.
I stand at the stove with the second jar in my hand and I look at the small dim woman in the bottom of the kettle and I say, half to myself and half to her — "Christ. I have made the wormwood tincture only because I needed to do something with my hands."
The word in my own mouth is plain. I have not said it before.
Christ. My father did not say it; my mother did not say it; the boarding-house in St. Louis would not have permitted it.
I have said Lord and I have said damn, and I have said Lord under my breath at the iron pump at sundown and I have said damn into my own hand at the kitchen table when the bread did not rise.
I have not said Christ. I say it now in my own kitchen with the lamp at the table and the wormwood on my fingers and my own gray face in the iron of the kettle, and I am surprised by the word in my own mouth, and I do not take it back.
I set the second jar on the shelf. I turn the lamp down. I climb the ladder to the loft.
The bone pin is still in my hair. I do not take it out.
I lie down on the pallet. The straw-tick is warm from the day; the wool blanket is folded at my feet; the window in the south gable is open one finger-width.
I lie on my back and I count my own pulse beats at the inside of my wrist where I count them every night.
Seventy. Eighty. Ninety. The wormwood is faint on the pulse hand against my throat.
The dim moon is at the bottom edge of the window and the bottom edge of the window is dark.
Somewhere past midnight I hear the stallion at the corral.
It is one blowing snort, sharp, through the planks of the lean-to and across the dooryard and through the small open window of the loft — Ardent in the dark, his breath at the rail, the planks creak.
The sound is alive in the basin in the way nothing else has been alive in twelve days of drought.
I sit up on the pallet, very slowly, and I listen for the second sound.
There is none. The stallion has put his breath against the night-air and put it down again.
I lie back down.
I think: tomorrow.
I think: I am the gravity of this house.
I had thought it once before — at the kitchen door, in early July, watching the three of them eat the bread I had set in front of them, the loaf cooling on the porch rail, the men with their plates and their grateful spoons.
I had thought it then and put it away in the careful drawer where I keep the thoughts about myself I do not yet trust.
I think it again tonight, alone on the loft pallet with the third man's hour come and the wormwood on my hands and Christ still in the kitchen air down the ladder, and the thought is harder now.
I am the gravity of this house. The phrase is plain.
The phrase is true. It has been true since the morning of June tenth at the iron pump in the dooryard and it has been true at the kettle on the Fourth of July and it was true in Tate's loft on the eleventh and it will be true at the barn door at first light.
The gravity is not a thing I asked to be.
The gravity is a thing I have been since I stepped down off the wagon.
I do not sleep. I lie on the pallet with the bone pin pricking the back of my coiled hair and the wormwood faint on my fingers and the dim moon at the bottom edge of the window and I listen for the stallion once more.
He does not give the sound again.
I think: tomorrow.