CHAPTER 26
Tate
◆
Five o'clock in the loft over the freight stable and the south window has gone gray at the sill, and the small smooth stone is in my coat pocket on the dresser six feet from the bed, and I lie a long minute with my eyes open at the rafters because I have lain a long minute with my eyes open at the rafters every dawn since the February the cold took my wife.
The night was the four of us in the cabin — Willa and me side-by-side on the second-best quilt in the big bedroom, fully clothed because the day before had been the fire-passed dooryard and the chickens in the crate; Beck on the rocker by the cold stove; Levi in his lean-to with the shotgun across the chair-back.
I closed my eyes for one beat longer than I should and she said into the dark, "Tate.
" I said, "Darlin'. " She said, "Sleep. We are at home.
" I slept; I came up out of sleep at the small hours; at four o'clock I rose and went barefoot across the kitchen plank, past Beck's rocker, out through the back kitchen door across the dust to the freight stable and up the outside stair to my own loft. I came up to ask her.
I sit on the edge of the bed under the south window.
The spectacles are on the dresser top because they came down from the windowsill the August night of the four of us in this loft.
The small smooth stone is in the inside breast-pocket of my coat, which is folded across the chair.
The stone has been in that coat-pocket since the morning of February four, 1877, when Eliza put it in my hand at the cabin door and said carry this for me until I can carry it again.
She did not carry it again. I have carried it every day for two years and seven months, and the stone is a small smooth river-thing the size of my thumb-print and the color of a hen's egg, and the weight is not a weight a man can lift off himself in a kitchen.
I stand. I go to the dresser.
I open the drawer.
The square of her nightgown linen is folded the way Hattie Doss folded it the morning of February five, 1877. I take it out.
I take the spectacles off the dresser top.
I take the small smooth stone out of the inside breast-pocket.
The stone is warm the way a thing carried at a man's ribs for two years and seven months is warm, and the warmth is the only warmth I have allowed myself to carry, and the carrying ends today, and I am asking her permission to set it down.
I wrap the spectacles and the stone in the linen.
I lay the package on the dresser top. The size of an apple.
I do not weep. I have wept all the weeping I had left in the August loft, and the not-weeping is the steadiness of a man who has been allowed to lay with another woman in the loft where he and his wife were married in body in the spring of 1873 and has not died of it.
I say it aloud, into the dawn dust of the loft.
"Eliza. Mo chridhe. I am coming to ask you."
I lace my boots.
---
The wind is southwest and light, and the smoke at the east edge of the sky is the only smoke left, and the divide has the rest. I cross the dooryard at six o'clock with the linen-wrapped package against the inside of my coat where the stone has lived.
I walk past the iron pump without working the handle.
I take the bay gelding out of the freight stable. I lay the lead-rope over his neck and walk him across the dooryard south to the lower freight gate and out of the basin's lip onto the long shoulder of the southeast lip.
The single tall lodgepole is up the lip a quarter-mile.
It survived the fire of 1874 and the fire of last week.
The painted board cross is at its foot — white, weathered to dove-gray at the edges, my own careful hand in the letters: ELIZA HALLORAN — JANUARY 11, 1850 — FEbrUARY 4, 1877 — BELOVED.
The dust on the cross-board is the dust of a basin that has been forty-five days without rain.
The dry-grass at the cross's foot is the dry-grass the basin has worn through August and September.
I tie the bay to the lodgepole. I sit at the foot of the cross.
I unwrap the linen.
The spectacles in my left palm. The small smooth stone in my right.
I hold them in both hands a long minute, and I say it, slow, the long sentence in grief that is the long sentence because grief lengthens a man's sentences when the man is honest with himself.
"Eliza, mo chridhe, I have been your husband for eleven years now — two and a half of them after your dying — and I have come up the lip this morning to lay your spectacles down with your stone in the ground beside the cross, and to say this aloud once in the dawn so you will hear me say it: I have laid with another woman in the loft where you and I were married in body in the spring of 1873, and I have laid with her in the company of two men who are my brothers of the claim, and I have not died of it, and I have not been disloyal to you in the laying — I have been loyal to the going-on of being alive that you would not have begrudged me; if you would have begrudged me anything you would have begrudged me the not-living-on of two and a half years, and I am sorry for the not-living-on; I am alive now; I am asking you to bless the going on. "
I stop.
I weep once. A quarter-minute. Not the breakdown of the August loft and not the dry of the long first year — a quiet weeping at first light. The tears go off my cheekbones onto the back of my left hand on the spectacles. I wipe them with my thumb.
I set the spectacles on the linen at the cross's foot.
I set the small smooth stone on the spectacles.
I take the bone-handled knife out of the sheath at my right calf and dig a small hole at the side of the cross — half a foot deep, the dry-grass earth coming up dark below the surface where the moisture has held against the drought.
I lay the linen package in the hole. I cover it with the dry-grass dirt. I pat the dirt flat. I sit a long minute with my hand on the patted dirt.
I stand.
"Mo chridhe. The stone is with you now. The spectacles are with you now. The square is with you now."
The bay gelding shifts a hoof at the lodgepole.
I turn.
I walk the bay back down the long shoulder of the lip into the basin. I do not work the iron pump on the way across.
---
It is half past seven o'clock when I come up onto the cabin porch. The brass kerosene lamp through the north window is unlit because the morning light is enough. The cabin smells of woodsmoke, the lanolin of new wool, coffee, the faint ghost of bee-balm at the window-sill cup.
She is at the kitchen table with Beck's coat in her lap and the small steel scissors and the needle and the dark thread, mending the collar at the underside where Beck's neck wears it. The bone pin is in her braided coil at the nape. The gold band is on her left fourth finger.
I stand at the door.
She looks up.
Her gray eyes meet mine — the cold gray of river water under cloud — and she sees what I am bringing in, and she does not speak first.
I say, soft, "Darlin'."
She says, "Tate."
I close the door behind me. I cross the plank floor to the table. I do not sit yet. I stand at the table edge with my hand on the back of the chair.
I have heard her hum it twice in my hearing at the iron pump — the small German phrase her mother sang her, the phrase her father Karl Greer would have said into the back of a small girl's neck in a tailor's-shop room in St. Louis on a winter night.
Mein Liebling. Once the dawn after the August night in this loft; once the morning after the fire skirted, with the ash still on the men's mouths.
She did not say it aloud. She hummed it through her teeth at the back of her throat, and the German lived in her mouth the way Scots Gaelic lives in mine — her mother's voice, not hers; not yet.
I have practiced it twice in my own head this week.
I say it.
"Mein Liebling."
She stops with the needle at the cloth.
She looks at me.
She does not breathe for the length of two heartbeats.
I count it because I am the freight pilot who counts a thing that matters.
Her gray eyes do not leave mine. Her thumb does not go to the cleft of her brows.
She holds the needle still at the seam, and the brass thimble of her mother's is on her thumb.
She says, soft, "Mein Liebling."
The German in her mouth is her mother's German. I hear the Bohemian-Saxon undertone her father carried out of Pilsen into a Soulard Street tailor's shop in 1842. She has not said the phrase to a man in her life. I am the first.
Her eyes water.
She does not cry.
I sit across from her at the table.
I put both hands flat on the scrubbed plank. The wood is silken under my palms — three years of soft-soap have worn the grain to the smoothness of a thing the cabin has touched a thousand times.
I say, "I have set her down."
She lays the coat down.
She says, "I am glad."
I say, "The spectacles. The stone. The linen. In the ground beside the cross. I have asked her blessing. I will not visit the grave again every week — I will go once a month from now on."
She lays her right hand across the table to me — palm up, the brass thimble bright at her thumb — and waits.
I lay my right hand on hers. The warmth of her palm is the warmth of a hand at the cloth at half past seven. The warmth of mine is the warmth of a hand at the dry-grass dirt at the cross's foot at six.
The back door opens.
Beck comes in from the assay shed. He has the small leather pouch of the morning's dust in his right hand.
He has not yet washed his hands at the iron pump and the ore-dust is at the cuffs of his shirt.
He sees us at the table. He sees the coat in Willa's lap and the needle and the thread.
He sees my hand on hers. He sees what I have brought in.
He nods at me. He nods at her.
He goes to the dry-sink for the tin cup. He pours himself coffee from the pot on the warming shelf — slow, the silence finishing the sentence — and he sits at the head of the table. He sets the pouch on the table beside the lamp. He does not speak.