CHAPTER 17 #2
I pressed up. I pressed in slow rocking circles, the wrapper open across my lap, the nightdress soft against the back of my own hand.
I bit my own forearm.
I lifted my left arm and bit at the soft place above the wrist at the inside of the elbow. I bit hard enough to make a mark I would see in the morning. I bit through the green wrapper and the cotton nightdress sleeve into my own skin. I did not break the skin.
I had bit the back of my own hand in the barn five days ago to keep from making a sound that would carry; tonight I set the marks higher, at the soft inside above the wrist where the pulse ran nearer the surface, and I bit there because there was no Levi at my throat to swallow the sound this time and there were three men under three roofs and I would not have any of them wake to my voice at the long pine table.
I thought of Beck's thumb at the corner of my mouth.
I thought of Tate's spectacles in my own closed fist after, my fingers cool around the thin wire, his sleeping breath against my breastbone.
I thought of Levi's palm splayed wide on my own belly with the chestnut stallion's heartbeat through the planks at our back.
The three pieces of cloth lay together at the long scrubbed kitchen table and I sat with the heel of my hand at my own folds and the slick between us and I pressed and rocked and I thought, all three, all three, all three, the small one-syllable beat of it under my forearm at my own teeth, and I came.
It came up slow at first — the slow build of the heel of the hand finding its angle, the small bright pull at the cleft of me, the climb.
Then quick. The quick of it was the small sharp crest at the end, the way the small sharp crest of a stitch finishes a seam — a single hard pull, a single bright tension, then the slack. I came once. I came hard.
I came against the heel of my own hand with my forearm at my own teeth and the small soft uh into the wool of the wrapper sleeve. The chair did not move. The lamp did not move. The folded letter did not move.
I rested my forehead on the cheap-paper folded letter.
I rested it a long count. The paper smelled of iron-gall. The paper smelled of my own breath. I felt my pulse at the inside of my own right wrist; I felt my pulse at my own throat where the wrapper had fallen open; I felt my pulse against the folded paper at my forehead. One. Two. Three.
I drew the hand out slow. I did not wipe it on the wrapper. I rested it on my own knee under the cotton and let it dry — without ceremony, with the heat of one's own body. My thighs were wet at the inside; my forearm was hot at the bite.
Christ. I want them all and I cannot tell them so.
I will not ask. The word came up plain. The asking was Beck's bargain and the bargain held for the man and not for the woman; I knew it; I would not ask.
I want them all, and the letter I cannot finish is the truest letter I have ever tried to write.
I thought of my mother's mein — only the first syllable, only the small soft word my father had said into the back of my hair at six years old when I had set my first clean bartack on a worsted men's coat — and the mein sat in my mouth and did not go further.
The whole phrase was for another mouth and another night.
I lifted my head from the folded letter.
I stood.
I tied the wrapper at the front. I closed the throat of the nightdress at the small bone button at my collarbone. I capped the nib in the wooden holder and laid the holder back into the tin box. I picked up the folded letter.
I walked the four paces to the wash-basin counter on the west wall.
The chipped lip of the white porcelain basin caught the lamp-light at its single high spot.
The carved birch dipper hung on the dipper-hook over the shelf — the six-inch birch handle whittled with the single grouse-feather pattern down its length.
The dipper was the cabin's small daily ceremony; the gold band on my fourth finger had clicked against the handle a hundred mornings now.
I lifted the dipper off the hook. I laid the folded letter on the shelf under where the dipper had hung and set the dipper back down over the letter so the bowl covered the folded paper to the corner. I lifted the dipper a half-inch and re-set it square. The letter did not show.
A country pen-nib would catch on the paper of a country letter a country woman had folded under a country dipper the way a country woman's body would catch on the heel of her own hand an hour earlier at the same chair. The nib catches. I thought it once. I would not need to think it again.
I went back to the table and blew out the lamp. The kitchen went black except for the thin quarter-moonlight at the west window.
I crossed the front-room floor with the smallest sound.
Past Beck on the rocker — three paces clear; his breath had not changed — to the loft ladder.
Eight rungs. I came up onto the pallet and drew the second-best quilt over my legs and laid my left arm across my belly with the bitten place turned up to the gable window's thin moonlight.
The mark of my own teeth was the shape of a small folded pair of brackets at the soft inside above my wrist.
It would be a pink half-moon by sunrise, a pale ring by the day after, gone by Saturday. My hair was still down; my hand was still warm.
I slept.
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I came up out of sleep the way a woman comes up out of a stitch she has set badly — not at the end of the seam, in the middle, the body finding its own error. I came up because a voice in the cabin under the loft had said something at first light.
I opened my eyes.
The gable window was the soft gray of dawn. The basin's stars had gone. Old Brigham had not yet crowed. The bite at the inside of my elbow ached small.
I lay still.
Beck's voice came through the floorboards under me. It came once. It came clear. A low voice, without anger, with one word at the end of it that I had heard from him on the porch the day I signed my name and on the kitchen table the night the kettle boiled.
We are going to talk.
I lay on the pallet and did not move.
I knew without having to think it that he had come down for water; that he had lifted the dipper; that he had seen the corner of the folded letter under the bowl; that he had not unfolded it.
I knew he had set the dipper back without moving the letter.
I knew he had crossed to the west window and looked out at the iron pump in the dooryard — the pump that squeaked like a question and went hoarse pulling air for two strokes before water in the deepest weeks of the drought — and said the words half to the pump's handle through the glass, once.
We are. I thought it back. I thought it plain.
I thought it at the bone pin on the wooden box at my elbow and at the bitten place at my forearm and at the three men under three roofs of a basin that had not had a measurable rain in four weeks; I thought it at the long pine table under me and at the carved birch dipper and at the folded paper under it and at the man on the rocker who had measured cost his whole life and had not unfolded what a woman had folded and hidden.
I thought it at the comma after Dear that I had left open. I thought it once.
We are.