CHAPTER 27
LONG ENOUGH
Malick
Palla came off the step in the yard and put her head against my leg before I had said a word, and then would not come up the hill with us, because it was cold and she is old and she has her own sense of what a night is for.
So it was the two of us who went up to the common in the dark, and Matias came because he goes where I go now, and does not say why, and I do not ask him to.
There was no moon worth the name. The sky was the good black you only get up here, cold and high and full of the small stars a valley eats and a hill hands back.
The grass had the first of the real wet in it and it came through my boots by the third step, and behind us the house sat with the vault a darker shape against the dark, the sheet on the open half lifting and settling when the air moved, and I did not turn to check it, because I knew it stood.
A man knows the things he has propped the way he knows his own teeth with his tongue.
The planks were where I had left them. I lifted the near one and looked at the hand's depth of water lying flat and black on the putty, and the water was the lid the way it has always been the lid, and under it the lime had come through another season without a skin on it and without a crack, patient, keeping, and a faint warmth came up off it into the cold — the warmth a thing gives back slow when it has been alive under a stone.
I put a finger to the water and it was warmer than the night by a breath, and that was right, and I said so to no one, and Matias stood at my shoulder with his hands in his coat and looked at the water and did not know what he was looking at, which was correct, and said nothing, which was not like him at all.
I put the plank back.
Then I said the thing I had decided on the way up, in the dark, where a man can decide a thing and not have to watch his own face do the deciding.
"I want you," I said. "Here. Now."
He turned his head. In the star-dark I could see the shine of his eyes and the shape of his mouth and not much more, and his breath came out of him white and quick, and he said, "Yes.
" Just that. He is a man who fills every silence in the world and he gave me the one word and let the rest of the quiet stand, and that word going up white into the cold was the whole of it — the only paper I have ever needed off him.
I put my hand on his face. The lime has taken the tops off my hands; they are cracked at the knuckle and the nails will not come clean, and I have thought a hundred times that a man should not lay a hand like that on anything he means to keep.
I laid it on him anyway, on the side of his jaw where he had not shaved, and he leaned the weight of his head into it the way he leans into everything, easy, without deciding to.
The ease was all in his body and none of it in mine.
We went down onto the grass by the warm side of the pit, where the heat of it stood against the cold at our backs, and he came down easy, laughing low at the wet soaking up through his coat, and I did not laugh, because my throat had gone tight the way it does when I am carrying a load I have not set down yet.
He got his mouth on me first. He always does.
He is not shy in his body and he has never been, and he found me in the dark and had my belt open and his hand in and then his mouth, and I put a cracked hand in his hair and held on and let him, and looked up past the dark shape of his head at all those stars, and made a sound I had not planned to make.
His cock was hard against my leg where he lay half over me, and I got my hand round it, and he broke off what he was doing to breathe against my hip, one word, a name-shaped nothing, no name, and pushed himself into my fist and went still and let me have him for a moment the way he had been having me.
"Say what you want," I said, because I have to. Because a man like me does not get to be quiet about this and call the quiet a kindness. "Out loud. I need it out loud."
"You," he said. "Like this. However you want me." And then, quieter, his mouth against my skin: "I want you to fuck me."
So I turned him. Not hard — I have no wish in me to be hard with him, and there is enough in this valley that would be hard with him on my behalf.
I turned him onto the grass with his coat rucked under him and got him open, slow, wet off my own mouth, my flat cracked thumb working him careful, and he pushed back against my hand and told me faster in that quick American way he has slowed down for no one and slows down for me, and I did not go faster.
Not for the asking. Not with him under my hands in the wet grass and the whole cold night to do it in.
Then I was inside him, and he made a sound like the wet had got into him too, and I stopped — all the way in and stopped, my ruined hands spread flat on his back and the pit warm against my hip and the whole cold sky standing open over the both of us — and I held there until he said go. He said go. And I went.
He was tight around me and he stayed tight, the clutch of his hole not easing so much as taking me, and every push drew a small broken breath out of him that he let go up white into the dark.
I could see the side of his face turned down to the grass, his mouth open, his eyes shut then not shut, the star-shine coming and going in them each time he turned to find me over his shoulder.
He kept turning to find me. That is the thing I will keep out of the whole of it — not the heat and not the grip, but that in the dark, with his face in the wet grass, he kept looking back to be sure it was me.
I do not know what I look like doing this and the dark did not tell me.
I only know what I felt, which was him: the give and the grip of him, the one live line of warmth where we touched against a cold coming down off the entire black sky, my knees going into ground I have knelt to on this hill for another reason my whole working life, the shoulder that will not go past a certain point after a day overhead going past it now and paying for it and I did not care, my breath tearing loud in my own ears.
He got a hand back and found my hip and pulled me deeper, and I let him set the pace of it, because his body knows things about ease that mine has never once been let learn.
He fucked himself back onto me as much as I fucked into him, and he came first, on the grass and over my cracked hand when I reached round for him, shaking, saying yes, saying it and saying it, the one word he trusted himself with in the cold.
And I came into him with my face pressed to the back of his neck and my eyes shut, and something came loose in my chest that I had built myself, season on season, to make sure would never come loose again.
After, we lay. The sweat went cold on us fast up there and neither of us moved to mend it.
The warmth off the pit reached us at the back and the cold came for us everywhere else, and that is a fair account of most of what I have, if a man wanted one.
He had my hand held against his chest, the bad one, the cracked one, and he had his thumb working the lime-scar on the inside of my forearm the way a man worries a coin in his pocket without knowing he is doing it.
I let him. I have let no one do that. There is nothing to feel in that scar — the skin there stopped reporting to me years ago — and I could not have told you the moment his thumb crossed it and the moment it did not, and I lay there anyway and watched the sky and let a man touch a part of me I cannot feel.
"You're quiet," he said. "You're never quiet after."
I did not answer that. The stars had gone over a hand's width. Some dog down the hill that was not ours said one thing to the dark and thought better of it.
"I chalk it every morning," he said then, out of nothing, in the small flat voice he only has up here, the American gone out of it.
"The number. You know I'm the one who does it, before you're even up.
" He turned his face against the grass toward me.
"I worked it out the first morning — how many days I had before I'd have to go.
And I thought it was a nice thing to do.
To count down to something. Like a man counts down to something good coming.
" His breath went out slow. "It's the day I lose it.
That's what I've been chalking on my own door, in front of your whole village, cheerful as anything, every single morning.
The number of days left before I get put out of a house I paid cash for. "
I felt nothing generous about it. He had bought the roof I stood under and the wall my father built and the pit I lay warm against, all of it in one afternoon, with money, and now he lay on the cold common grieving the losing of it, and I did not reach over to make it smaller.
There was nothing in me that wanted to. He did not need me to.
And a man is allowed to lie a while inside the thing he did and feel the weather come off it.
"You'll go," I said. It came out level. "Or you won't."
He made a small sound that was not a laugh. "That's it. That's all I get."
"That's all there is." And it was. I had no softer thing to lay over it, and I had given up, years back, on keeping softer things by me for a night like this one.
He was quiet a while, his thumb going on the scar, and then he asked me sideways, the way he has learned to ask me things — because he has learned that if he asks me straight I answer him the weather.
"What are you scared of," he said. "You've been scared since the bottom of the hill. I can feel it in your hand."
So I told him about lime.
I told him what unslaked lime does to a man who rushes it.
How it looks finished long before it is finished — a white, easy putty a fool would carry up a ladder that same morning.
How it holds a heat in it the eye cannot find.
How, if you put it up green, before it has taken every last hour it wants under the water, it goes on cooking behind the render for weeks after the wall looks done, and swells, and blows, and pops the whole face off the work you were so proud of, and there is no mending it then.
There is only cutting it out, back to the stone, and standing there admitting to yourself that you did not wait.
The words came out of me long and clean the way they only come when I am telling how a thing is made.
"So you wait," he said, when I was done.
"You wait," I said. "As long as it wants. Not as long as you can stand — those are two different lengths, and knowing the difference is the whole of the trade. A man who waits as long as he can stand loses the wall every time."
"How long," he said. He had turned onto his side so I could see his face close now, the star-shine in it, his mouth doing nothing, waiting.
He had done the arithmetic after all. He had been carrying it since a hole in the ground made him laugh back in the heat of August, and he was going to make me be the one to say it out loud, and he was right to.
The two words caught in my mouth. I have said them a hundred times to this valley.
I say them to the boy, to my mother, to any man who asks how long the putty has been down, and the village finds them funny, and I have always let it, because it is an easier thing to be a man with a joke than a man with a reason. They had never once caught before.
I had dug that pit alone. I had barrowed the stone up the common in the dark, before a season I will not put a name to because I do not count myself against a calendar, and slaked it with my own hands, and boarded it, and laid the water over it for a lid — for a house that was not mine, that I had told no living soul I meant to make mine, because I did not need one living soul to make it true.
I had never in my life been waiting for anybody.
I had built the whole of myself so that I would never have to.
A man who waits for no one cannot be left, and I had made myself that man on purpose, course by course, plumb, the way you make anything that is meant to stand a long time without leaning on the thing beside it.
And now I lay on a wet hill with the American's thumb moving on the burn on my arm, and the thing I had spent so long building was down in the grass with the rest of me, and I was waiting. On him. For him. Against every last thing I know about what the waiting costs a man when it goes wrong.
"Long enough," I said. "Eighteen months." And then I said the rest of it.