CHAPTER 20 #2
Her name came up from us three almost at the same beat — Willa — Beck's at the thigh, Levi's at the ear, mine at the throat — three throats saying her name in the same breath, and she shook on me once at her hips, and I felt the clench of her cunt around me at the head of me where I was inside her, and Beck's tongue did not stop, and Willa took Levi out of her mouth with a wet sound to gasp, and she said —
"Yes. Yes. Yes."
She finished. Once, quick. Around me, with Beck's tongue at her clit and Levi's hand at her cheek and her own hand at the back of Levi's thigh.
She did not have a count to take. Beck did not stop.
He kept his tongue at her clit, his thumb at the hood, the scarred palm at the small of her back.
Levi went back to her mouth as she came down from the first, and she took him again, slow, and rode me again, slow, and she came a second time at a count of half a minute, quick, smaller than the first, a tremor at her hips that I felt the length of me.
She took Levi out of her mouth a second time and said —
"All of you."
She said it twice. All of you. All of you.
She held us up between her three points and the three of us held her — I at her hips, Beck at her back, Levi at her cheek — and I felt the slow long climb of her come up under my hands. I knew it before she did. I felt the held quality of it at her thighs against my thighs.
Beck's tongue did not stop.
Levi pulled out of her mouth.
He pulled out of her mouth to watch her face, and Willa's right hand came up off my chest and closed around his cock and held him, and she did not look down — she looked up, at Levi — and her left hand left his thigh and went to the back of Beck's neck. The nearest neck. The rooting gesture.
Her hand at Beck's nape with Beck's scarred left palm at her back and Beck's tongue at her clit and Levi's cock in her right hand, and she said it then, low, even, the order of it the chronological order, the order she had come to each of us in heat —
"Tate. Levi. Beck."
She said each name once. She came the third time.
The long one. She held for a quarter-minute in the suspension that is the long one, the cunt around me tight and then loose and tight again at her own pulse, and I felt the slick of her down to where I was joined to her, and she made a sound that was not anyone's name and was at the same time all three of our names, and she finished long.
The held quarter-minute. The slow unwind.
The three orgasm count was hers.
---
She said, "Yes."
I came inside her. Long, slow, sustained.
I held her at the hips with my hands open at the bone.
I said, low, into her throat, Darlin'. Willa.
Christ. Mo chridhe. I held. I did not move.
I felt the answering pulse of her cunt around me and the slow drop of myself into her, and the long breath that came out of me was the breath I had been holding since the morning of the fifth of February in the year of my twenty-eighth year. I let it out.
Levi was at his peak in her hand.
She held him; her thumb at the slit of him; her hand closed around the length.
He laid his right hand at the back of hers and he said, soft, into the angle of her shoulder, Love, and he came on her hand and her belly with a long shaking breath.
The strand of him across her belly above her navel.
The wet at the back of her wrist. He had chosen the hand and the belly; she was full of me.
He lifted her hand to his mouth and kissed the open palm where he had finished, and she did not move her hand from his mouth.
Beck pulled back from her clit.
He was hard at her thigh from the kneel on the boards.
He laid his lips at the inside of her right knee, and he said, low, Sweetheart, and he came on the inside of her right thigh with a long groan into the back of her knee — half-spoken, half-breath.
The wet of him on the inside of her thigh, the smear of it under his palm where he steadied at her hip.
He lowered his forehead to her thigh and held it there a long beat, and his scarred left palm did not lift from the small of her back.
The three of us had finished with her. Each in our place. Each in the way we had agreed in the kitchen at six and a half of the morning across the day.
---
We bathed her between us.
Beck poured warm water against the side of her hip, slow, and I held her at the small of her back across my forearm and washed her belly with new white linen Willa had hemmed in the spring before she had come west — not Eliza's nightgown linen, which would have been the natural cloth to my hand and was not the cloth tonight.
Levi dried her. The kerosene-lamp light pooled on three foreheads bowed close again as we washed her, and I did not say it aloud; I noted it.
We laid her in the rope-bed between Beck and Levi.
Levi against the south side of her. Beck against the north.
I was behind her, my arm across her hip; her right hand in Beck's right hand at her belly; her left hand on Levi's chest at the cleft scar at his sternum.
The wild-goose-chase quilt over the four of us.
The lamp at low yellow. The moon shifted a hand's-width west on the upper right pane.
I laid my face in the back of her hair.
I wept once more. Soft. With my eyes closed.
The dam I had carried for two years and three days had been set down, and what came out at the end of the setting-down was the quiet a man has when he has done the work he had not been sure he was alive enough to do.
I said it, into the back of her hair, low, the line that came up out of me unbidden.
Mo chridhe. The both of you. The three of you.
I had crossed a line in my head. The loft was reconsecrated. Eliza had been laid down.
I lay behind Willa a long count.
I heard Beck breathe. I heard Levi breathe. I heard Willa's breath even out into the first sleep of a woman who had been held up between three points and was held now by three sets of hands.
I lifted my head off her hair.
I reached across her shoulder.
---
I leaned across her and picked the wire frame of the spectacles up off the dresser. The bent right earpiece. The dust-rim worn down a hair from where I had held them across the drought. They were warm from having sat by the lamp through the act.
I brought them to her open palm.
I lifted her left hand off the quilt — the hand that had held the stone in the dooryard at seven — and I laid the spectacles in her open palm and closed her fingers around them.
Beck's eyes opened and met mine across her shoulder for a half-second — the half-second of thank you — and closed again. Levi did not stir.
I said it, low, into her ear.
These are not for the windowsill anymore. They are for your dresser if you will keep them.
Willa did not put them back.
She held them. Her fingers closed around the wire frame; the dust-rim under her thumb; the bent right earpiece against the heel of her hand. She breathed out, even, and her hand stayed closed.
Beck moved his right hand a half-inch and took her hand — the hand with the spectacles in it — and laid it on her own belly under the wild-goose-chase quilt, and he covered the closed fist with his own scarred left palm.
Levi shifted; the freckled hand came across her hip from the south side; Levi's right hand at the line of her thigh under the quilt.
I lay behind her, the arm across her shoulder, my mouth at the back of her hair.
The lamp held the thin ray. The kerosene-lamp light pooled on three foreheads bowed close in its last full burn — Beck's, Levi's, mine, all bowed to her in the long count before sleep — and I closed my eyes.
I thought, low, in my own head:
I have lain with a woman in this loft and the woman is not Eliza and I did not die. I am alive. We are alive. Eliza, mo chridhe, I have done what I could. The basin is dry. The smoke is at fourteen miles. We are in this loft.
The lamp burned down to its low yellow. The wagon was in the dooryard pointed down-pass.
The chickens were on the crate. Old Brigham was silent.
The four of us were in the bed Eliza had died in two and a half years ago, and Willa's closed left hand was on her own belly under the quilt with the spectacles inside her fingers, and Beck's scarred left palm was over her closed hand, and Levi's freckled right hand was at her hip, and my arm was across her shoulder.
The lamp burned almost out.
I closed my eyes for one beat longer than I should have. I did not open them.