CHAPTER 16 #3
She does not correct me.
She says, after a long count of the chestnut's slow heartbeat through the wall, "Ours."
She lets the word stand.
I kiss the cleft of her neck. I pull out, slow. I lower her to her side on the folded blanket. I lower myself beside her. I help her into the chemise. She helps me into the trousers. We are both dust-streaked. The bone pin is on the dust by the wall where it fell.
I pick it up. I hand it to her. "I am sorry I could not wait for you to set it down."
She closes her hand around it. She does not put it back in her hair.
---
We sit against the planks of the wall.
She is in my shirt. I am in my trousers.
The chestnut is in the next stall and silent now.
I lay my palm flat on the planks where her shoulder was at the wall-act an hour back.
The plank is warm. Through the planks I hear Ardent breathe — long, low, slow — and I lay my own ear at the wood and I hear his heart, and I lay my own palm at my own sternum where the cleft scar is and the bone-and-rawhide charm of Tiller hangs against it, and my own heart is at the same beat.
Hers is at the same beat. Her hand comes and lays itself flat on the planks beside mine.
Three palms on the wood. Three hearts in the same time signature.
"I hear it too," she says.
I laugh once.
"Love," I say. I say it to her face. I have said love to her in the dust and love into her throat and love into the back of her shoulder and love over the chestnut's wither for nine weeks; I have not said it to her face without slipping; I say it to her face now, and I mean it, and the small foolish stop in my own chest is the small foolish stop of a man who has just understood that the word he has put at the foreheads of nine horses is the word he was keeping for one woman. "Love."
She lowers her forehead to my shoulder.
We sit a long minute against the planks.
The chestnut breathes. The basin warms outside.
The hot dry south-west wind is beginning at the haymow window and the dust is lifting in small gold ropes in the long bar of light at our feet, and the kettle on the kitchen range a hundred and fifty yards off has not been lit since dawn, and the dough-trough has yesterday's biscuit-leavings; the iron pump in the dooryard is dry — sixteen days dry — and we know it; we are all of us sixteen days dry; the basin is at its driest week in the year, and there is a woman in my shirt at my shoulder against the planks of a barn wall and through the wood I hear the heartbeat of a sixteen-hand stallion who has been ridden for the first time at dawn this morning and who, through the planks and through the time signature, is the only witness I am going to call.
---
She helps me dress. I help her dress.
She goes back up to the cabin to start the dinner.
I sit a long minute on the folded saddle-blanket on the floor.
I look at my own hands. The dust on the knuckles.
The pale paste of pine resin from the rail-mending I did with Tate two days past — I had not noticed I still had it on the back of the right hand — and I think, in my own head, low, Christ's teeth.
I have done it. I have broken the stallion.
I have lain with the wife. I have not been the coward today on either count, both at once.
I stand. I go to the planks. I lay my hand where her shoulder was. The plank is warm. Through the wood I hear Ardent breathe — long, low, the long willing thing — and I hear his heart at the same beat as mine.
I say it aloud — to the empty barn, to the chestnut in the next stall, to myself, to the woman walking up the path to the cabin with the bone pin in her closed fist —
"Christ's teeth."
---
I go back to the lean-to. There is a half-cup of fresh water in the spare basin Tate brought up with the freight wagon Monday for each of us; Beck has used his, Tate has used his, mine is in the basin under the cot.
I wash my face. I wash the dust off my hands.
I wash the resin off the right knuckles.
I wash my own throat where her mouth was.
I lay the wet cloth at the cleft scar at my sternum a long count, and I think: love. Love. I told her love. I said ours. She let it stand.
I sit on the cot a long minute. I do not laugh.
I do not have to. The basin is warm now and the wind is up and the chestnut is in the next stall and the kettle is cold and the dough-trough is yesterday's biscuit-leavings and there is a woman at the kitchen with a bone pin closed in her own right hand who has told me by the morning of my twenty-eighth year and the second month of my twenty-ninth that the word I had been keeping for her is hers, and there is no door at the front of the joke this morning, and there is no hurt, and I sit on the cot a long minute and I let the small foolish stop in my own chest be a thing I do not laugh at.
I rub the cleft scar with two fingers. I lower the hand. I go back to the corral. The chestnut is at the rail watching me come.