CHAPTER 19 #2
I count pulse-beats at my wrist at nine.
The southwest wind has gone; the northwest is up; the basin's dusk is dry.
Old Brigham has gone to roost. The hens are silent.
I sit at the porch with the collar laid across my apron and I do not see the small stitches I am pushing into the line; my hands push them anyway because my hands have been doing the small thing while my eyes did other things for fifteen years.
Beck comes out of the assay shed at half past nine. He comes up the porch step and sits beside me. He does not say sweetheart tonight. He does not say my name. He sets his hand flat on the porch boards between us, scarred palm up. The pink crescent is in the lamp-spill from the open door.
I put my right hand on his left hand.
I count three pulse-beats at the inside of his wrist with my thumb. They are steady. They are the pulse of a thirty-two-year-old foreman whose first thirty-two years have taught him to be steady in a dooryard at any kind of light.
He says, low, "He is fine. He is in town with the wagon. He will be back tonight."
I say, "Yes."
I count three more. The whistle is in the east wall. I do not lift my thumb.
---
The bell comes at midnight.
I have not slept. I have been at the kitchen table with the brass lamp at its lowest yellow for an hour and the unfinished collar across my lap, Beck at the rocker in the front room and Levi at the freight-stable door waiting since the wind shifted.
The first thing the basin holds is the small bell on the lead mule's harness, the brass bell flat-hammered by Tate's father, the bell Tate uses only on the down-pass.
The bell comes up at the south-ridge shoulder and the basin holds it; then the wagon-creak; then the long pull of the four mules at the slow last switchback below the lower gate; then the gate opens.
I stand at the porch.
The wagon comes into the dooryard. The wagon-bed is empty.
The canvas-top is rolled and tied. Tate is on the bench, and he is the man who sold the load fast and came back faster and did not stop to clean.
The smoke is on him. The smoke is on his hat and on his coat and in his hair at the silver streak at his left temple, the streak gone gray-darker in the lamp-light from the open kitchen door.
The bay-gelding tied at the wagon's tail is sweat-streaked at the flank. The smoke on the air around the dooryard is the smell I have been listening for all day at the back of my throat: pine-needle and dry grass and sage, the smell of a wildfire still many miles off, but it is on him.
He climbs down.
He walks past Levi at the freight-stable door.
He walks past Beck on the porch step. He does not speak.
He comes up the porch and into the cabin and stands a moment at the kitchen door with his hat in his right hand and the smoke on the brim, and he looks at me, and his gray-blue eyes are the full gray side of his eyes that mean a thing has hurt.
I go to the stove.
The cast-iron kettle is on the warming shelf.
The water in it is two quarts where it was four in June.
I lift the kettle with the doubled hand-towel at the loop-handle, and the warmth comes through the cotton at my palm the way it has come every day for ninety days.
I pour into a tin cup from the dry-sink shelf. I carry it to him.
He takes it. He drinks.
Beck comes up the porch behind him and stands at the kitchen door.
Levi comes up the porch behind Beck and stands at the freight-stable door.
Tate is at the table with the tin cup; I am at the stove with the kettle in my left hand; Beck is at the kitchen door; Levi is at the freight-stable door, and the cabin holds us a long minute and nobody speaks.
I set the kettle down. I pour three more tin cups. I set them on the table. The lamp throws the cracked chimney's thin ray across the table, and the four of us come to it and sit.
---
Tate sets the empty cup down.
He says, low, "The smoke is at fourteen miles north of Granite Forks tonight.
The wind has held northwest. Sheriff Mahon says the wind will turn north tomorrow night, if the pattern holds the last three years.
He says the fire is small. A sage fire. Not a timber fire yet.
He says if it climbs the divide it will be in the basin in five days.
He says pack the freight wagon for evacuation tomorrow, in case. "
Beck says, "Aye."
Levi says, "Aye."
Tate looks at me.
The gray-blue is steady. There is dust at his eyelashes and smoke at the silver streak at his left temple and the burn-scar at the inside of his right forearm is white at the edges where the soot did not take.
He is the man who has not slept and has driven and has driven and has driven and has come back to a cabin where the night before last his wife by paper lay on his foreman's narrow rope-bed with his foreman and his horse-breaker and not with him.
He says, low, in front of Beck and in front of Levi:
"Willa. I have been driving and not thinking and driving. I have not slept. The two of you have been at the bedroom these two nights and I have not been there. I would like to be asked."
I look at Beck at the kitchen door.
I look at Levi at the freight-stable door.
I look at Tate at the table.
I say, and the word is plain and small and the syllables fall against the lamp-lit kitchen the way a coin falls onto wood:
"I am asking."
I do not say more.
The basin behind me is the basin at midnight in the deepest drought of the summer of '79 with the smoke at fourteen miles north and the freight wagon ready to be packed at dawn for the running we have not yet decided we will do, and I think, with the word at the back of my throat and not at the front of my mouth, Christ. I am asking.
The smoke is at fourteen miles. The wind is northwest. I am asking.
Tate looks at the table.
He sets the tin cup down a second time, careful, the way a man sets a thing he does not yet trust his own hand to hold.
He says, "Tomorrow night. After the wagon is packed. I will sleep tonight in the loft and tomorrow night I will be at the cabin."
Beck nods.
Levi nods.
I nod.
---
We go to our beds at one.
Tate goes up the outside stair of the freight-stable to his own loft.
He does not stop to wash. The bay-gelding goes into the wagon-bay with the others.
Beck goes to the rocker in the front room where he has slept the rocker-back since the night before last because the big bedroom has held me alone since Tate left.
He says at the rocker, "Goodnight, sweetheart," and he means it.
Levi goes to his lean-to and closes the leather flap at the door.
I go up the loft ladder eight rungs in my stocking-feet because the big bedroom is the room where the bay-rum and the green resin were on my throat at once two nights ago, and I do not yet have the language to sleep alone in it tonight.
I lie on the pallet.
Tomorrow, I let myself think plainly, since the word is already in my mouth.