CHAPTER 23
Willa
◆
The wagon goes down the switchback at seven on the fifth of September. The smoke is twelve miles north by Tate's reckoning at the porch step before we left. The wind is light, north. I am on the spring-seat beside Beck with my left hand on the brake-iron a thumb-width from his.
I have my father's thread-glass in my right hip pocket — a small steel-rimmed pocket-lens hinged into a brass shell, sharp enough to count threads to the inch.
He gave it to me at eleven in the cutting-room over Soulard Street with a small dry word, die Lupe.
He weighed eastern paper every Friday afternoon with this glass on the lay-out table, and I know the weights of paper the way Beck knows the weight of his own ledger.
The Cottonwood Stand at mile six is dust-dry; the leaves clatter. I count three pulse beats at the inside of my left wrist.
At mile seven the road opens out and the creek-ford runs a foot wide at the stones.
Beyond it the smithy's hammer is at work, and the smell of hot iron comes across the dust. I know it from my father's shop.
The smell sits at the back of my throat the way a smell from childhood sits there when the adult is about to do an adult thing she did not know she was going to do.
---
The wagon turns onto Bear Fork Street. Hattie Doss is at her porch with the broom in her right hand.
She says, "Child."
I climb down. Beck hands the line to the freight-stable hand at the rail. Hattie takes my elbow with her big-knuckled right hand.
She says, low, "He has gone to the freight stable to look at a new horse. He says he means to buy. He gave me the portfolio at ten for safekeeping. I walked it across to Mahon myself. He will not be back until noon."
Beck has his hat in his left hand. "Mrs. Doss."
"Mr. Carrow."
She walks us up Bear Fork Street to the squared-log of Sheriff Mahon's office. I do not look at the upstairs windows of the boarding house as we go.
---
Mahon is at his plank desk at the front window, ginger beard going gray at the chin, blue eyes lifting from his own paper. The dovetailed pine writing-box is at his left elbow.
He says, "Mrs. Carrow. " He is at his feet a half-second after he speaks. Beck takes the chair at the left of the desk. I do not sit. Hattie stands at the threshold.
I say, "Sheriff Mahon. May I see the deed?"
"You may, ma'am."
He lifts the lid. The box holds three folded papers tied with cotton string and the deed at the top. He sets the deed on the green blotter.
I lift the deed at its corners. The paper is cream — heavier than the sheets at the clerk's window I watched Beck sign on the day of the marriage. My thumb knows it before my eye does.
I walk to the south window. I lift the deed to the light. The light comes through and shows the long-fiber linen-rag pulp the way my father showed me to see it against the cracked window of his cutting-room. In the upper left quarter, against the light, the watermark appears.
I let my breath out.
The watermark is Crane and Sons / Dalton, Massachusetts in a small oval medallion, and above the C there is a small crown — a five-point crown the size of a needle's eye in the paper, the tines drawn fine.
The crown is the 1878 mark.
I draw the pocket-glass from my hip pocket. I open the steel rim. I bring the lens up close. The crown comes up under the lens — small, exact, the fine tines clear in the rag.
I turn from the window.
I say — slow, because the saying is the work this morning — "Sheriff Mahon.
The watermark on this paper is Crane and Sons of Dalton, Massachusetts.
The design is the 1878 watermark. Crane and Sons changed their watermark in late 1877 to add a small crown above the C. That crown is present on this paper."
His pen is in his right hand. He has lifted a sheet of his own paper out of his desk-drawer. He does not write yet.
I let him come around the desk. He stoops at the window. I hand him the glass. He looks. He says, low, "I see it."
I say, "The deed is dated June 1, 1877. The paper was not made until at least eight months after the date on this deed. The deed is a forgery."
The room is quiet a full count.
Mahon picks up the pen. He writes one line, then another.
He says, "Mrs. Carrow. How do you know paper to that count?"
I say, "I am the daughter of a tailor in Saint Louis. I have weighed eastern paper since I was eleven."
He writes for a full minute. He blots the page.
He says, "I have written this morning to Marshal Quint Lawler of the federal land office at Granite Forks.
He will be down within a week. I will hold this finding in my logbook until he arrives.
I will not arrest Mr. Mosely until Lawler confirms. The territorial circuit will not honor a watermark finding alone.
Lawler will hold the candle to the deed himself. "
Beck nods.
Hattie says, from the door, "He had best ride faster, Sheriff. The wind is shifting."
Mahon folds the deed back along its first crease, lays it in the box, closes the lid. He gives it back to Hattie. She takes it and steps off the threshold into the dust. "It will be in the parlor before he is back. He will not know."
I close the lens against the steel rim and put it back in my hip pocket. I press my right thumb to the cleft between my eyebrows once.
Mahon stands. "Mrs. Carrow. I am obliged."
I say, "Sheriff. We are."
---
By half past one we are on the wagon-box again with the up-pass road in front of us. Beck does not speak for the first two miles. I do not. The brake-iron is cool under his thumb and mine.
At the bend below the Burned Snag I let myself think it.
I have done something today. I have placed paper in front of a lawman and named what is wrong with it. Christ.
The word is a country word in my own mouth and a foreign word at the same time. I close my hand on the lens through the cloth of my pocket.
I think of my father at the lay-out table on a Friday afternoon, the small brass scales at his elbow and the thread-glass in his palm. He was Bohemian-careful at the count.
I think, half-heard, in the voice that has lived behind my teeth since I was four — mein Liebling, ich habe Papier gemessen.
I do not say the German aloud. The phrase lives in my mouth as my father's voice and not as mine.
Beck looks at me once at the Crow's Bend. He does not ask. He scratches the scarred palm.
The mules pull.
---
At three the wagon comes up the last switchback and over the lip of the basin, and the wind has shifted.
The light is wrong.
The sun at three o'clock in early September should still be a hard yellow over the south ridge — and the light is not.
The light is rust at the back of Beck's hand.
The wind off the upper pasture carries the resin-bitter note we have been smelling at twelve miles north for two weeks. The note is here.
The sky over the south ridge has gone copper. The sun is a copper coin.
I stop my breath for a count.
Coin.
The word is in my mouth before I have set it there.
Coin is a word for a thing that buys a length of black thread or a coffin-nail for a six-month-old brother put down at the back of a Bohemian-Lutheran chapel-yard in February.
I do not let the word stay. Coin sounds like death in the throat of a tailor's daughter. I close my mouth on it.
The wagon comes down into the dooryard.
Tate has the freight canvas down off the Studebaker and stretched on a pole-frame against the south porch and the cabin's east wall — four lodgepole poles peeled and lashed at the top with rawhide; the canvas tied at the brass grommets along the porch beams and at the posts.
Twelve by sixteen feet of heavy oiled duck.
The canvas slows spark-fall — embers travel on the wind sometimes ahead of the fire-front by miles, and the canvas catches them before the porch boards or the shake-roof catch them.
Tate has his coat off. His shirt-sleeves are rolled to the elbow; the burn-scar inside his right forearm shows at the cuff. He is at a nail at the eave with the hammer in his right hand. He looks up.
He says, "Darlin'. You are back."
Levi is at the corral. Ardent is at the round-pen rail with his head over Levi's left shoulder. The lead-mare Pie stands saddled at the gate with the bridles on three of the others, ready to drive them to the upper pasture if the wind shifts further. Levi raises a hand and goes back to the gate.
Beck climbs off the wagon-box and steps to the porch and lifts the crates. Tate takes the second.
The smoke thickens in the time it takes to unload. I watch the south ridge. The sun does not lift. The sun holds. The word coin is in my mouth a second time and I close my mouth on it a second time.
---
By four o'clock Tate is done at the canvas. He has his coat back on against the wind. He stands at the porch step with the hammer in his left hand.
He says, "Darlin'. Walk down with me to the creek."
I say, "All right."
I take my shawl off the porch peg. I step off the porch in his shadow.
We walk down the spring-trail. The gravel is loose. The willows along the bank are yellow at every tip; the aspen above the creek-line clatter dry-paper.
A hundred yards below the cabin the gravel runs out into the alkali.
It is the same lip Beck stepped on in the first week of July.
The alkali is deeper now; the crust is the dust-pale of an old bone and the cracks across it are wider, finger-wide in places.
Underfoot the crust gives a sound: small, dry, sharp at the heel, the sound of fired glass and dust. I do not say it into the air.
I hold it in my own head and let it sit there once and not again.
Tate stops at the lip of the bank. He turns to me. The sun is at his left shoulder.
The sun is a copper coin again over the south ridge, the coin of the bank, the coin of the kiss — and I do not let the word stay. I hold his eyes. His eyes are gray-blue and the gray has come up under the blue the way the gray comes up in him when grief is at his shoulder, and I do not look away.