CHAPTER 20
Tate
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The wagon was in the dooryard pointed down-pass and the iron pump-handle still squeaked dry under my right palm, and I stood at the pump at near on seven of the evening on the eleventh of August in the dry sixth week of the drought and counted what we had packed: four freight barrels of water roped to the off-side, two trunks at the rear, the Greer family Bible under canvas, the tin lockbox with the gold-dust pouches inside, the Mason jars three to a crate, the chickens in the freight crate lashed at the tail with Old Brigham at the top because Brigham would not abide a hen above him, and the wedding-ring quilt-square Willa had begun folded inside its own pillowcase between the trunks.
The wagon was pointed down-pass because the smoke had been at fourteen miles since noon. The basin would clear if the wind held east; would not clear if it backed at any hour of the night.
I worked the pump-handle a sixth time. The pump pulled air. I patted the outside right-hand pocket of my coat the way a man pats a pocket for a coin he knows is not there.
The stone was not in the pocket.
I had carried it from the windowsill to the pocket and back to the sill across two months and three days, and I had not settled the question of which place it belonged in.
Tonight I had walked from the loft at the late afternoon with it forgotten on the sill.
The pocket was empty. I felt the empty the way a man feels a hand let go of a rope.
The door of the cabin fell to.
She came across the dust with a tin lamp in her right hand.
The bone pin held the braid at her nape; the gold band caught the moon once.
Beck came out of the lean-to two paces behind her with the spare coffee tin in his scarred left hand, and Levi came down off the porch step from the other side, and the three of them were in the dooryard with me under a dry moon over the south ridge.
Willa walked to me. She held out her open left palm.
The small smooth river-stone was in her palm.
"I have noticed you patting your pocket all day," she said. Her voice was even. "It was on the loft windowsill. I brought it down."
I took the stone. I closed my hand around it. The hen's-egg size. The slate-color. The cold gone out of it from the heat of her palm.
I laughed once, low, and I said, Mrs. Carrow.
"Tate."
"Tonight."
"Tonight."
"Then yes," I said.
---
I went up the ladder first.
We had agreed in the kitchen at the supper that I would be in the loft alone for a moment to light the lamp and to ready myself, and the other two would follow.
Beck up second; Levi third; Willa last. The order had been mine to say and I had said it.
Willa had laid her hand flat on the back of mine and said, yes.
The loft was the eighteen-by-sixteen-foot room with the south-window over the basin.
The four-light window held the moon in its upper right pane.
The brown-and-rust wild-goose-chase quilt was on the wider three-quarter rope-bed under the south window.
The dresser was at the foot of the bed. The brass kerosene lamp with the cracked chimney sat on the small two-shelf cupboard by the head of the bed.
I lit the lamp.
The cracked chimney threw the thin ray across the south wall. The room came up around me out of the dark — the saddle-leather on the peg by the door, the tin of old Highland tea on the cupboard, the quilt squared at its corners the way Eliza had taught me to square it.
I went to the window.
Eliza's reading-spectacles were on the windowsill where I had set them back the morning of the dawn-cross.
The wire frame. The bent right earpiece.
The dust-rim. I had held them out in my open palm at the cross and I had not been able to lay them at its foot, and I had walked back to the loft and laid them on the sill, and they had been on the sill for the whole drought.
I picked them up.
I laid them on the dresser at the foot of the bed beside the small smooth river-stone I had set there at the door of the loft. The two of them lay on the wood now. The bent earpiece. The slate-color. Two things that were mine.
I said it aloud, to the empty room, low, the way a man says a thing he has decided to say even if no one is listening.
"Eliza. Mo chridhe. Tonight I am asking your blessing. I am the husband I am still alive enough to be."
I waited.
The loft did not answer the way a loft does not answer.
I heard Willa's foot on the ladder.
I turned.
---
I stood at the foot of the bed.
I said it as I had practiced it across the day, even and slow, with the three of them on the loft floor at the door's side.
"Willa. Beck. Levi. I have chosen this loft because Eliza died in this loft and Willa is the woman who can lay that ghost. If any of us is not sure, we go down the ladder."
Willa said, "I am sure."
Beck said, "I am sure."
Levi said, "I am sure."
I said, "Then yes. " I drew a breath. I looked at Beck. I looked at Levi. I said, "Brothers, we touch only her."
Beck said, "Aye."
Levi said, "Aye."
Beck and Levi exchanged a look across my shoulder — across the loft, in the lamp-thin light, the brother's nod of two men who had ridden a hundred and forty miles of switchback for a wagon-bond in the spring of '76 — do not break her — and they looked at her only after that and not at each other and not at me.
I went to her.
I took the bone pin out of her braid myself.
The braid loosened in my left hand and the bone of the pin came out clean in my right and I did not say this stays clean, because Beck had said that on the night of the fifth at the dresser of the big bedroom and the line was his.
I said instead, low, Darlin'. Let me. She nodded.
I laid the pin on the dresser beside the spectacles and the stone.
The three things on the wood. The bone pin. The wire frame. The river-stone.
We undressed.
Levi unbuttoned his work-shirt left-handed and laid it on the chair-back by the door.
The cleft scar at his sternum caught the lamplight.
Beck unbuttoned his shirt the slow careful way he did everything that mattered; the scarred left palm caught the lamplight as he laid the shirt on the chair; the starburst scar on his right side at the third rib showed pale against the ochre at his throat.
I unbuttoned my own and the burn-mark on the inside of my right forearm caught the lamp-thin light, and I laid the shirt across the chair and finished with the trousers and stood naked in the lamp-light at the foot of the bed.
I unbuttoned Willa's bodice myself, the eight buttons, slow, the way I had on the night of the twelfth two months past.
She finished the cuffs herself.
The gray work-dress came down off her shoulders.
The chemise. The drawers. The braid loosened the rest of the way as she stepped out of the linen, and the dark blonde of it lay against the lamp-light at her back like the line of a wheat-field at evening.
She turned to me, naked in the lamp-thin light, and her gray eyes did not pity me and did not weigh me — they took my measure the way a tailor's daughter takes the measure of a wool against the give of a hand — and she stepped to the rope-bed and laid her right hand at the quilt at the corner and looked at me again.
I lay down on my back.
She climbed above me.
I was hard for her. She lowered herself onto me slow.
The warm water of the tin pitcher's basin was still on her belly and her own slick was on the folds at the entrance, and she took me and settled the rest of the way down with her hands on my chest at the sternum-side and her thighs spread to the width of mine, and she breathed out, even, and looked down at my face.
Christ, I said, low, under her, the breath in her name, and the lamplight caught the gold band on her fourth finger against the burn-scar at my right forearm where her right hand rested. She began to ride me slow.
Levi came to the side of the bed at her mouth.
He went down on one knee on the boards, then both.
His thighs against the side-rail. He held his cock at her lips.
She turned her face a quarter-inch and took him into her mouth, slow, and her left hand came up off my chest to the back of his thigh, and Levi laid his right hand at her cheek and the freckles on the knuckles caught the lamplight, and his sea-blue eyes were on her face.
Beck went down on his knees on the floor at the foot of the bed.
The rope-bed was at the low frame. He was tall enough kneeling on the floor that his face came to her hips at her knees, and he laid his scarred left palm at the small of her back and his right hand at the inside of her right thigh, slow, and he tipped his face under her thigh to where I was inside her — to her clit, underneath where she was joined to me — and he laid his open mouth at her there.
I felt the warm breath of him against the underside of my own cock where I was inside her. He did not look at me; I could not have seen him from where I lay; he could not have seen me from where he knelt. He licked her clit. He used his thumb at the side of the hood. He used the flat of his tongue.
She gasped. Her hand tightened on Levi's thigh.
She rode me slow at the same beat as she took Levi at her mouth and Beck's tongue at her clit.
---
The kerosene-lamp light pooled on three foreheads bowed close — Beck's forehead at the inside of her thigh, Levi's forehead at the line of her jaw, my own forehead lifted to the angle of her throat above me — three foreheads bowed to her at the same moment.
I wept once.
A single tear at the inside of her throat where my mouth was. Not the breakdown of the night of the twelfth. A single accepted tear, given. I lifted my mouth a hair off her throat and said, low, into the line of her collarbone, Darlin'.
Levi laughed once, soft, into her ear.
He said, against her ear, low, Love. Christ's teeth.
Beck spoke once from underneath, against the inside of her thigh, low, I have you.