CHAPTER 1 #2
I had three faces and three names. I did not yet know which face went with which name except that the driver was Tate.
Beck was off the spring-seat before the brake had finished its arc. Hazel-green eyes that held the late-afternoon sun. He took off his hat and held it at his side and did not move closer than the porch rail.
"You're early, Miss Greer."
"I came on the morning pike-coach."
"I had not thought of that."
"Mrs. Doss had thought of it."
Hattie was watching the crate at the back of the wagon-bed, not any of us.
Beck said, "I wrote one of the letters. The other two are Levi's and Tate's. We did not lie to you. We only signed one name to it. We will tell you which of us signed which line, if you ask."
"Beckett Carrow," I said.
"Yes."
"Mr. Halloran. " I inclined my head to the driver. He inclined his back — gray-blue eyes that looked past my shoulder a quarter-inch before he answered, and his answer was a small dip of the chin and not a word.
"Mr. Thorn. " I inclined to the long lean one. He grinned again, broader, and his hat came clean off his head and crushed against his chest in one motion.
"Lass," he said.
"Mr. Thorn."
"Yes, ma'am."
I counted my pulse at the inside of my left wrist with the gloved fingers of my right. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Lord, I thought. Lord, I am a long way from Saint Louis. The bone pin pressed at the back of my neck. I pressed my thumb to the cleft between my eyebrows and took it down again.
"Gentlemen. " (The line came out drier than I had meant it; my father's flat declarative landed on it before I could soften the corner.) "I have a letter.
I have one trunk on this porch and one on the roof of the coach.
I have come four days on the Kansas Pacific.
I have a dollar and sixty-five cents in my purse.
The return fare east is nine dollars. I will not be the kind of woman who weeps on a porch about it. I am ready to go up."
The three of them looked at one another.
It was the look of three men for whom a problem had just become more interesting than they had planned for.
Hattie said, "Let her up the bench, gentlemen. Beck, hand her up. Levi, mind that crate. The basin's two hours yet."
The crate. The slat-sided pine box at the back of the bed was four feet long and two wide, with rope handles fore and aft, and inside it was a rooster the size of a small cat: red barred-rock, white frostbite at the comb-tip, a round black eye that did not blink.
He cocked his head at me through the slats.
"Old Brigham," Levi said, jumping down off the bed and coming round to the porch step.
He took my carpet-bag and the cream-and-pink quilt and handed them across to Beck.
Tate had already lifted my trunk one-handed off the boards and walked it back to the wagon-bed without speaking.
"He is going up to the chicken yard. We've had hens for a year and our own rooster died of fox last month; Hattie has been finishing this one off in the back lot since May for our account.
He will crow at half-past five tomorrow, lass.
Like a Mormon evangelist in full pulpit. I named him so myself."
"I see."
"You will hear him."
"I expect I will."
The grin sobered.
Beck handed me up. His palm was bare; my glove was wool.
The contact was a quarter-second, a width of two stitches.
He took his hand back at once. I sat on the spring-seat in the middle.
Beck swung up at my right; Tate took the driver's place at my left; Levi went over the tail-board and settled on the bed with his back against my trunk and one long leg out along the canvas.
The chicken-crate stood at my feet at the front of the bed, against the spring-seat back, where Levi could keep a hand on a slat.
Hattie raised a hand. Tate clucked at the team and the wagon rolled.
The street ran north past the smithy and crossed Bear Fork Creek at the shallow ford. The light was going gold; the dust came up gold with it and lay at the level of the wagon-seat. The road climbed west through cottonwoods that clattered dry against one another in the small wind.
The bone pin held my hair at the nape.
No one spoke the first mile. The men had agreed without speaking that it was to be silent.
I sat between them with my gloved hands flat on my knees and listened — the iron rim on stone, the team's breath, the small shudder of the canvas folded at the back, Old Brigham's silent eye at the slat-shadow at my feet.
I lifted my collar to my nose. Coal-soot. Lavender. My mother's hand last March. Mein Liebling, she had said, biting off the thread. Komm her. I had not said Komm her back. I had said I will write to you. I would write tonight from wherever in this country I would lay my head.
Beck cleared his throat at my right.
"There's a statute, Miss Greer."
His voice was Welsh-Pennsylvania at the consonants. He did not turn his head.
"Territorial statute from '77. The Homestead and Mineral Patent Act.
It permits a joint mining claim with two years' continuous occupancy to apply for an upgrade — federal patent on the surface and the mineral both.
The federal patent is the thing a man with eastern paper cannot displace at a county window.
The application has three eligibilities.
We have the years. We have the productive improvement.
We do not have the third. The third is a wife of record on the patent. "
"I see."
"The window closes the last day of August. We are courteous men, Miss Greer.
We are not eastern men. We meant no fraud by signing one name.
The marriage of record needs your signature on the certificate.
The marriage of body — if there is to be one — needs your word twice, separately, freely, after.
We will not press for the second word. " He paused.
"If the basin does not suit you, the next stage out of Larkspur Bend is Thursday afternoon. We will pay your fare. We will pay your widow's-share of the spring dust. We will not contest your going."
I listened because he had said it in the order I would have said it.
"Thank you, Mr. Carrow."
"Beck."
"Beck. I will hear the rest at the kitchen table."
Tate clucked at the team. The road took the first switchback.
Tate said low — the first thing he had said to me since the porch — "There's the basin, Miss Greer."
I turned my head.
The road had brought us round the toe of a granite shoulder, and the basin opened below us — a shallow southwest-facing bowl scooped between two timbered ridges, a dooryard pale at the bottom of it the size of my own palm at this distance, the long roof of a cabin and the smaller line of a stable, a thread of silver where the creek went east through the meadow.
A drop fell away from the wagon's outside wheel into pine timber forty feet below.
The cold air rose off the drop the way cold air rises off a well.
I did not yet have a word for what I saw.
Old Brigham crowed at my feet — once, full-throated, indignant, an evangelist in full pulpit indeed — and the crow rang once and came back at me a half-second later off the timbered ridge to the west, and Levi laughed in his throat behind me and said, "Bloody hell, mate. Welcome to your country."
I put my gloved hand into the pocket of my traveling-coat.
My fingers found the spare bone pin — the small straight one with no carving, my mother had given me at the depot in Saint Louis with the words für die Reise, mein Liebling, and I had pinned it inside the pocket-lining at Kansas City and forgotten it.
It was there now. I closed my hand around it.
The bone was cold from the wind and warmed in my palm.
I did not pray.
I counted the buttons on my own coat — six down the front, four on each cuff, two at the inside collar where the velvet trim turned, one inside the pocket-lining over the small spare pin — and I said the count in my head twice in the German my father had used at the cutting-table: sechs, vier, vier, zwei, zwei, eins.
The wagon turned the second switchback. Beck did not turn his head from the road. Tate did not speak.
Levi did not laugh again. The basin below kept its silence, held in its bowl like a held breath at the bottom of the world; coal-soot and lavender, and a basin like a held breath at the bottom of the world, and three men in a wagon I did not yet know how to name.
Old Brigham crowed a second time.
The light went out of the gold.
The wagon went on.