CHAPTER 17
Willa
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The drought was in its fourth week and the loft was hot at ten-thirty at night and I could not sleep.
I lay on the straw-tick pallet under the open south gable window and counted three pulse-beats at the inside of my own right wrist. One.
Two. Three. The count did not slow me. Tonight I was using it not for fear and not for grief but for the simpler thing of a body that had been with three men in five weeks and could not put any of the three of them down.
Beck on the kitchen table July fourth. The kettle had boiled.
Tate in his loft over the freight stable July twelfth, the spectacles in my own closed fist after, his tears at my hairline before.
Levi in the barn July twenty-third, the planks rough at the small of my back, the chestnut stallion's breath through the wood.
I had thought, lying on the linen in the hayloft the day I learned I wanted them all, that the wanting was the difficult thing.
I had been wrong. The wanting had been one afternoon and two fingers and a small soundless weep at the size of it.
What was harder, five weeks on, was the having had them.
The wanting had been one piece of cloth and three thread colors; the having was the cloth cut three ways, and a tailor's eye that could not yet say which piece was the bodice and which the sleeve.
I am married to three men. I thought it as plain as that. The basin was at sixty-eight degrees with no breath of breeze. The stars were the close hard stars of a dry country.
Beck's thumb at the corner of my mouth. The first piece of cloth.
Tate's hand on a coffee cup at the supper table. The second.
Levi's freckled forearm across a horse's neck. The third.
Three pieces of cloth and I could not yet see the garment.
I sat up. I drew the bone pin out of my hair and laid it on the small wooden box beside the pallet where I kept the certificate. The carved edelweiss-head touched the pine lid with the smallest tick.
I shrugged my mother's green wrapper over the thin cotton nightdress and tied it loose. The cabin was hot.
Eight rungs down the loft ladder. The pine was smooth at the hand-rests where Beck's palm had worn the wood pale. I came down barefoot into the front room and listened.
Beck was on the rocker by the cold parlor stove.
I could not see him, but I could hear him — the slow even breath of a foreman who had trained his body to wake at first light.
He had refused the loft pallet the night I offered it; he had said, not until the four-poster is in the cabin's bedroom and the bedroom belongs to all four of us, sweetheart; he had said it once and not said it again.
The rocker was his bargain with the asking. He kept the bargain.
Levi was in his lean-to off the east gable. Tate was in his loft over the freight stable, twenty paces across the dooryard, back at sundown.
I crossed the front-room floor with my bare feet making the smallest sound. Past the rocker, three paces clear of Beck. Into the kitchen. The range was cold. The kettle was full and cold. The scrubbed plank table was the long pale shape it was every night.
I lit the brass kerosene lamp.
The wick caught on the third match. The cracked chimney threw its thin ray up the east wall.
I sat at the long side of the table with the lamp at my right elbow.
I drew down a single sheet of cheap county paper — the rough rag-and-pulp the clerk used for everything; a paper a country pen would catch on if not held just so.
I drew down the small tin box: the wooden penholder, the Gillott No.
290 nib seated already from Tate's last freight invoice, the small bottle of iron-gall ink.
I uncapped the ink. The smell came up — iron and tannin and the dry sweet of the gum arabic. A smell I had not had at my own table in St. Louis since the night my father died with my hand in his and his English given out. The smell put the year in me at once. I did not weep. I had other work.
I dipped the pen.
I held it over the bottle to let the excess go back. What am I doing, I thought, plainly. I have not written a letter to anyone for a month — not since the second mending-arrangement note to Hattie Doss, and that was a list of prices and a count of linen.
I was writing a letter to a man I could not name yet.
I knew it as I dipped. I knew it before I wrote the word.
I wrote Dear.
The nib caught on the paper.
It was the small loud catch of a steel nib finding a rough fiber in cheap pulp — a one-syllable catch, no louder than a single thread parting in a seam; my father's pen had caught that same catch on the same kind of paper a thousand times in my hearing, the metronome of his evening books for twenty years.
The catch was the loudest sound in the cabin. The ink had not blotted.
The D and the e and the a and the r stood at the head of the page in my own small unjoined-letter hand, and there was a thin curve of room after the comma I had not yet written, and the room was the room for one name.
I dipped again.
I wrote Beck.
Dear Beck. The two words sat at the head of a letter I would not finish and would not send and would not be able to read aloud to him in the morning.
I drew two clean steady strokes through Beck.
Not scribbled. Not crossed in a temper. One stroke up from the lower right of the word to the upper left, one stroke down from the upper right to the lower left.
The cross was the way my father had crossed a mis-set bartack on a worsted men's coat — neat, plain, done.
Beck's name went under the cross. Crossed is not blotted out. I knew it. I went on.
I wrote Dear on the next line. I dipped. I wrote Levi. The L came easier than the B had. Levi had only been mine for a week.
Dear Levi. I drew the two clean strokes.
I wrote Dear a third time. I dipped. I wrote Tate.
The T was the slowest letter I wrote. I had taken Tate's name into my own mouth for the first time in the dark of his loft on the night he came inside me.
I had said his name three times that night — Tate, you can; Tate, I am here; Tate, stay.
I wrote the four letters of him at the head of the third Dear and sat a long count with the pen above the page.
Dear Tate. He would never see it written so. I would not let him.
I drew the two clean strokes.
I sat back.
The three crossed names stood in the column at the head of the page like the three names on the verso of the marriage certificate folded in the wooden box on my pallet upstairs.
Dear Beck. Dear Levi. Dear Tate. I could not pick.
I could not lift one of the three names out of the column and let it stand alone.
I dipped.
I will not pick. I cannot pick. I am married to three men, and there is no word in my mother's German and there is no word in my father's Bohemian that says what I am to them.
I wrote Dear husbands.
I drew the two clean strokes through it before the second reading had finished in my head. The word was not the wrong word; it was the word the Reverend had written on the verso of the certificate. It was not the word for what I would have said to them if I could finish the letter.
I wrote Dear, one last time, and I added nothing.
The comma after Dear was the smallest comma I had ever set; the tail of it lifted a thread-width from the paper the way a thread lifts at the end of a basted seam before the bartack closes it.
I laid the pen down across the chipped lip of the white china inkwell.
Three crossed Dears. One open. The open Dear was the truest line I had ever written.
I folded the paper.
I folded it in three the way I would fold a letter I meant to send — once at the third from the top, once at the third from the bottom, the fold-creases set with my thumb the way my father set a fold-crease with his. I folded it small.
I sat with the folded letter under my hand a long count.
The wrapper had come loose at the front.
My nightdress was open at the throat. The kitchen at midnight was hot from the day's heat held under the cabin's roof.
I had been sweating at the inside of my elbows since I had sat down.
I had been wet at the inside of my thighs since I had set the pen to the paper.
I had not known. I had known it before I knew I had known it.
The slick was the slow warm bright thing of a body that had been waiting all day under a thin cotton nightdress for the woman walking around in it to notice. I shifted on the chair the smallest shift. My folds were hot and slid. The pulse of me was at the inside of my thighs.
I did not weep. I had other work.
I slid my right hand from the table down into my lap, under the wrapper, under the hem of the nightdress at my own knee.
The cotton was thin enough that I felt my own skin through it on the back of my own hand.
I slid my hand up the inside of my right thigh to the soft seam where my thigh met my belly.
I shifted the chair an inch back from the table so the angle would set.
I set the heel of my hand against the small hot place where the slick was.
The pen-nib had caught once at the D and once at the comma where the paper-grain ran rougher.
I felt the catch in my own hand at the heel-press, slow, the same shape.
The nib catching on the paper of a letter I will not send.
The thought came at me sideways — not in words, in shape: the small loud one-syllable catch of metal at a rough fiber, and the small loud one-syllable catch of the heel of my hand at the slick at my own folds.
I pressed.
I was wet enough that the heel of my hand slid clean.
I found my clit with the heel of my hand — not two fingers, not the slow shaped two-finger work of the hayloft afternoon when I had had four hours and clean linen and the cabin to myself; this was the rougher way, the way a woman brings herself off in a hurry in a kitchen at midnight when there are three men asleep within fifty yards of her chair.