CHAPTER 21
Willa
◆
I woke before any of them on the morning of the twelfth of August in Tate's bed.
Beck's hand was on my belly. My own hand was inside his hand. Eliza's spectacles were inside my own hand. The steel had warmed against my palm in the small hours, and my fingers were closed around the bent right earpiece and the cool oval of the lenses.
Tate was behind me. His right arm was across my hip. Levi had shifted in the night and his forehead was at the back of my shoulder. Beck's collarbone was under my left ear.
I counted my own pulse with the spectacles closed in my fist. I counted three. I counted three again.
This is what I signed for, I thought. And more.
The kerosene lamp on the small two-shelf cupboard had burned almost out. The four-light window over the bed held the dark-blue lift of dawn against the south ridge.
I slid Beck's hand off my belly slow. I laid it on the brown-and-rust quilt.
He did not stir. Tate's arm I lifted careful at the wrist and set back across the curve of my hip's emptiness.
Levi's forehead I touched once with the pad of my own finger, on the small white scar through the right brow, and stepped over him at the foot of the bed.
I dressed in the dim. Chemise; gray work-dress; stockings; shoemaker boots laced loose.
I braided my hair quick with the leather lace from my pocket.
The bone pin was on the small carved box on Tate's cupboard where Tate had set it at four-thirty when he had taken it from my hair.
I left it there. The pin was for special days.
I opened the carved box. I laid the spectacles inside on the linen square folded at the bottom — the square of Eliza's nightgown linen they had lived in for two and a half years. I closed the box. I set the bone pin beside it.
I bent and kissed Tate's left temple at the silver-streak side.
I went down the outside stair.
---
The dooryard was cold for August. I crossed the dust to the cabin.
Beck woke as I came through the front-room door. The rocker creaked. He had come down from the loft after I had gone up to Tate's, waiting to be the one in the house when I came back.
"Beck."
"Sweetheart."
I put my hand on his chest. He put both hands on my upper arms, the scarred left palm warm through the gray wool.
"Are you well?"
"I am well."
"Eat something."
"I will."
He scratched his scarred palm with his right thumbnail once and let me go.
Levi was already at the kitchen door — he had come down by the front-room ladder while I was with Beck.
"Morning, love."
"Morning."
He put his hand on the small of my back as he went by me to the iron range. He lifted the kettle lid.
"Empty. I will draw."
He went out the back door.
---
The iron pump was six paces south of the cabin's front porch.
The pump-handle squeaked once on its pivot as I touched it.
The squeak was a question. Beck had oiled it with bear-grease twice in three weeks and the squeak came back.
The pump had been pulling air for two strokes before water for four days. Levi had gone past it to the springbox.
I lifted the carved birch dipper from the wire hook above the wooden bucket Tate had set under the porch eaves from the freight barrel. I dipped the dipper in. I lifted it.
The gold band on my left fourth finger clicked against the dipper-handle.
Small. Clear. A note like a small brass bell struck once.
I had heard the click three mornings in a row. This morning was the third time.
I am Mrs. Carrow now, I thought. And Mrs. Halloran now. And Mrs. Thorn now. And the dipper-handle knows it.
I drank from the dipper. The water tasted faintly of birchwood. I poured the rest back in the bucket for the kettle.
Levi came back with the freight-barrel water on his shoulder and set the barrel down at the porch step.
"What."
"Listen."
I dipped again. The band clicked against the wood once.
Levi went very still.
"Bloody hell, lass. How long has it been doing that?"
"Three days."
He came up the steps and took the dipper out of my hand and poured the water into the kettle himself. The band clicked once more as he set it back on the hook.
---
The days settled into themselves.
I baked. Biscuits at six, dinner at noon, supper at six-thirty. The dough-trough wore the print of my right hand on its east end; the wood was satin under my knuckles where it had been satin under Eliza's. I did not flinch. I had thought I would. I did not.
I mended. Levi's work-trouser knee on the thirteenth; Beck's collar on the fourteenth; Tate's freight-shirt cuff on the fifteenth before we drove down-pass.
Beck read aloud in the evenings from his King James.
He had been reading Ruth through the summer.
The evening of the fourteenth he opened to Genesis and said, "I have a different book in my hand tonight.
" He read Chapter 24 — the going-out-of-Rebekah; the servant at the well with the camels.
And the damsel was very fair to look upon, a virgin, neither had any man known her: and she went down to the well, and filled her pitcher, and came up.
He read through to where Rebekah came down off the camel and asked, What man is this that walketh in the field to meet us? and the servant said, It is my master.
He closed the Bible.
"I read it slow."
"I heard every word."
Tate said, low, "I had not heard that one read in a year."
Levi said, "Read me the camels again."
Beck read the verse with the camels again.
The lamp's thin ray held across his right cuff. I darned.
---
Levi braided my hair in the dooryard on the afternoon of the fourteenth while Beck mended an axle at the freight stable and Tate was up at the upper pasture.
He had begun to do this when he came back from the corral at noon.
He would lean his shotgun against the porch step, wash his hands at the pump, sit behind me with his legs on either side of mine.
He took the leather lace from the end of my braid and brushed my hair out with my mother's small flat brush and braided it again with his horse-breaker's hands — gentle but firm.
Three plait. He had learned the three plait off a horse's tail at eleven.
The aspen along the creek were clattering paper-dry above the springbox. His knuckles were soft on the back of my neck.
He said, low, into the back of my head, "Love."
I closed my eyes. I thought love back at him.
He tied the lace and kissed the place where it tied and stood up and put his hand on my shoulder once and went back to the corral.
Beck looked up from the axle. Beck nodded once at Levi. Levi nodded back. Brothers of the claim. Brothers of the woman they had each had and would each have again, by her word and theirs.
---
I brought Beck cold tea in a tin cup at three o'clock under the freight wagon.
He came out and sat up on the dust. He took the cup in his right hand because the left was black to the wrist with axle-grease.
"Sweetheart."
"Drink."
He drank all of it in three swallows. He scratched his scarred left palm with his right thumbnail. The axle-grease made a small black mark in the pink crescent of the scar.
"I am glad of you."
"Drink another."
He laughed once — the smallest laugh I had heard from him. "When I come in for supper. I will."
---
Tate taught me to read a freight wagon's brake on the afternoon of the seventeenth.
We sat on the wagon-bench of the heavy Studebaker in the shade of the freight stable's south wall. He had the brake-lever in his right hand — a long iron rod that came up at the driver's right hip with a wooden grip worn smooth as a paddle by his thumb.
"Darlin'."
"I am listening."
"There are seven switchbacks down-pass. Six a freight wagon brakes through. The third one down — the Devil's Hairpin — is the one that will kill a man."
He took my right hand and put it on the wood under his own.
"Loose. The wheels turn."
He drew my hand back. "Half-back. The shoe is touching the rim. You hear it singing."
He drew farther. "Three-quarters back. The shoe is hard. You hold this on a switchback only as long as the switchback."
He pulled the lever to his hip. "Full back. The wheel is locked. Ride a locked wheel on the Hairpin and the wagon will go over the outside lip. The mules will follow because the breeching will not let go."
"Yes."
"Mind the third."
He let the brake forward.
"If I am hurt, darlin', or shot, or dead at the off-lead, you will hold three-quarters through the Hairpin and count to twelve in your head and let the brake forward to half and come out the other side alive."
"I will."
"Count it for me."
I counted to twelve in my schoolroom German — eins, zwei, drei, vier, fünf, sechs, sieben, acht, neun, zehn, elf, zw?lf — because that is how I count in my head, and he closed his eyes the half-second longer than he should have and opened them with his gray-blue gone full blue.
"Mein Liebling, that is the prettiest twelve I have ever heard."
I pressed my thumb to the cleft between my eyebrows once and refused to weep.
He saw it. He did not speak. He put my hand on his chest at the sternum and held it there three breaths.
---
I went down-pass with Tate on the morning of the eighteenth for the August mending run.
We came down through the Hairpin and Tate held the brake at three-quarters and counted eins, zwei, drei under his breath where I could hear him, and the shoe sang, and the wagon came out alive.
"There."
"There."
We came into Larkspur Bend at half past ten.
Hattie Doss was on the porch in her iron-gray coronet, sleeves rolled. She set down her pail. She came down the two steps.
"Child."
"Mrs. Doss."
She looked at me a slow long second and the second held my gold band openly in the open dust, and she did not say a word about it.
"Bring the linens in."
She had set boiled chicken and brown bread in the back parlor on a small pine table. The pigeon-holes stood against the south wall. Number eleven said Carrow / Halloran / Thorn — Last Claim in Hattie's own square Cornish hand.
She poured tea. She sat down across from me.
"You are eating, dear."
"I am eating, Hattie."