CHAPTER 16
Levi
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Half past four. The lean-to is cold for July and that is the drought talking, the basin pulling its night-air down off the north ridge and not giving any of it back; I have not slept above an hour at any stretch since I went up to my cot at ten, and the hour I had was the kind where a man dreams the same thing twice — a porch step, a woman in a gray dress, a sentence I cannot now repeat to myself without the small foolish stop in my own chest.
I have not been with you because I do not know how to ask.
And the small foolish stop after that, which is mine.
I do not know how to be asked. Christ's teeth.
I lie on the saddle-blanket on my cot with my left arm across my own eyes and the bone-and-rawhide charm of Tiller on my own sternum and I rub the cleft scar with two fingers, once, twice, the way a man does in private when he is afraid and has no one in the lean-to to tell, and the scar is warmer than the air around it and the basin is the color of new lead through the gap of the door-flap, and I think I am going to break the stallion today and I am going to make a wife — in the only sense of the word that counts after this country gets done with us all — of a woman who told me last night on the porch step that she does not know how to ask.
I am going to do both. I am going to do both today, or I am going to be the kind of man who did neither.
I sit up. I lace my boots. I tie my hair at the nape with the rawhide strip from the wrist. I take the bone-and-rawhide charm off the peg and put it in my trouser-pocket. I rub the cleft scar one more time. That is two, I think, and lower my hand, and go out.
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Old Brigham crows at five-and-a-quarter from the chicken yard and I am at the round-pen rail already with the long line coiled left-handed at my elbow and the saddle and the bridle on the rail beside me, the navy-wool blanket folded twice on the bridle's brow-band.
The dooryard is gray. The basin is gray.
The wind that will be a hot dry south-west devil by noon is not yet up; the air at the round-pen is the still cold air a man has fifteen minutes of before the sun finds the basin.
Ardent is at the far rail. Ardent is at the far rail because Ardent has spent the night standing because Ardent knows the day before a man knows it; the chestnut has the white star steady between the eyes and the ears forward and the off hind weighted, and he watches me come up to the gate, and he does not move.
"All right, love," I say, low. "All right. We do this today. You and I. You first. The rest after. Easy now. Easy."
I take the gate. I take it slow. I lay the blanket folded on the top rail at the south side of the pen where the sun will come and I leave the saddle on the rail beside it. I go in with nothing.
He walks to me.
Three steps. Three steps and he stops. The white star is between the eyes and the eyes are at me and the off hind is weighted and he stops at four feet, and I do the only thing I know how to do, which is to stand and to breathe and to not laugh, because laughing now would be the small hurt door I have stood in all my life and the chestnut is offering me a thing that does not want a door.
I let the long line go slack at my elbow. I put my left hand at his wither. He does not shrug.
"Easy, love. Easy."
"That is one," I tell him. "That is the first of three.
There is no surprise here. You and I are going to do two more passes and then I am going to be on your back and you are going to walk for me in a circle of this pen and we are going to be done with the thing we have been at for nine weeks. Easy, love. Easy."
He stands.
I take the bridle. I take it slow. He has taken a halter every day for a fortnight and a hackamore for the past five mornings and he has taken the bit twice already at the long line; he takes it now.
The bit comes against the teeth and he opens for it.
His ears do not pin. His head does not come up.
I slide the brow-band into place and I buckle the throat-latch at the second hole and I step back, and I run my left hand once down the line of his neck from poll to wither, and the heat of him under my palm is the heat of a creature who has just made a private decision he is going to honor.
I rub the cleft scar at my sternum without meaning to and lower the hand. That is three.
The third pass is the mounting. I take the long line at the bridle in my left hand.
I put my left foot in the stirrup. I bring my weight up slow — slow, the way a man steps up onto a porch he is not certain of — and the chestnut goes tight under me a long second; the muscles of his shoulder gather; the off hind settles deeper; he goes tight the way a man's whole back goes tight when he has decided not to do the thing his body would have done a year ago.
He does not throw me. He does not buck. He stands.
I let the weight settle into the seat. I do not snug the rein.
I let the line lie loose at his neck. The saddle-horn is at the cleft scar at my sternum, two fingers higher than I had reckoned, and the leather of it is warm already from my palm; I almost laugh.
"All right, love. All right. Walk on."
He walks.
He walks the first quarter of the pen slow.
He walks the second quarter slower because his off hind has decided to walk in a four-beat his front feet have not yet matched.
He walks the third quarter even. He walks the fourth quarter clean, the four beats of a saddle horse a man has known all his life, and I bring him round to the gate and I bring him round again and we go three circles of the round-pen at the long willing walk, and I do not snug the rein and I do not cluck and I do not ask and he does not buck, and the cleanness of it goes up my own spine like a thing I have been afraid of for fourteen years because cleanness is a thing I have been afraid of for fourteen years; I have laughed first all my life because if a man stands in the door of the joke he stands ahead of the hurt, and the chestnut has just walked four clean beats under me and there is no door in this round-pen this morning and there is no hurt, and I am shaking.
I bring him to the gate. I step down. The shake at the back of my knees is in my hands too; I undo the cinch one hole, then the second, then off; I slide the saddle off; I lay it on the rail; I take the blanket off; I lay it folded on top of the saddle.
I put my forehead against his neck a long second.
I rub the cleft scar one more time. That is four, I think, and I have lost count.
The chestnut blows once into my collarbone, soft, a damper opening, and I laugh once because the laugh is the door, and I say into his wither, low, because when something matters I speak low, "Love. Christ's teeth. You did it. You did it, mate. You did it."
I turn from him.
She is at the barn door.
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I walk to her.
I stop three feet from her. Three feet, because four is what I keep from a horse and I keep less than that from no woman in this country if a woman is to be near me, and Ardent is in the round-pen behind me at the rail watching the way he watches all the small business of my life, and I stop three feet from her and I am shaking and I say it before I have decided to say it.
"Love. I told you tonight."
She says, "It is morning."
I laugh once.
The laugh comes up out of me with no door at all in front of it, surprised, sad, and goes off into the dust between us in the basin's first warm light, and I lower my head and I lower it because the saying is the saying and there is no joke at the front of it.
"I will be quick," I tell her. "I will be too quick. I'm sorry. I am sorry already."
She steps closer.
She comes the three feet across the dust and she lays her right hand flat on the inside of my left wrist where the linen has not been for nine weeks.
Her hand is cool. The skin of her wrist is dry from the heat.
The smell on her fingers is wormwood she cut a week ago and has washed three times and the smell will not leave, and the smell of her, underneath, is lavender and beeswax and pin-steel and the small sweet salt of a woman who has been awake all night.
"Be exactly as quick as you need," she says. "Then do it again slow."
I laugh once.
It is not the same laugh. The second laugh is shorter and steadier and it is the laugh of a man who has been alone too long and is, this morning, not alone, and I take her by the wrist — the wrist she has laid on mine — and I pull her into the barn.
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The barn is the empty stall next to Ardent's.
The planks of the wall between the two stalls are aspen, peeled and rough, the small ridges of the wood the size of a man's thumb-nail.
The tack-room is at the east. The hay-pile is by the door.
The light comes through the haymow window in a long bar that lays itself across the dust at our feet, and Ardent is on the other side of the plank wall — six feet off, the next stall, the chestnut just-saddled and just-broke who has come in of his own accord while my back was turned at the barn door because the chestnut comes to me now — and I hear him through the wall already; the long blow-and-breathe of him; the soft drag of a fore-hoof on the straw; the high singing heartbeat of a stallion that has just been ridden for the first time in his life and is winding down.
I push her against the inside of the barn wall.
The rough planks of the wall against her shoulder blades — I hear the small catch of her breath at the press of the wood — and I bring my mouth to her mouth.
I kiss her.