CHAPTER 2
Beck
◆
The wagon climbed in second gear, which is to say the lead mule took the grade in short slow strides and the wheel horse leaned into the breeching to slow the loaded box, and Tate, on the box with the lines in his right hand and the brake-rope easy in his left, said nothing at all because there was nothing to say.
I had ridden this road with him forty times.
I had nothing to teach the man about a switchback.
He had nothing to teach me about keeping my mouth shut.
I sat to his off-side with my coat folded across my thigh and Mrs. Greer to my right, and I did not look at her the way I had wanted to look at her on Hattie Doss's porch. I looked at the road instead.
I scratched the scarred palm of my left hand with the right thumbnail and put my hand back on my knee.
She had her gloves on her lap and the carpet-bag at her feet and the bone pin straight as a plumb-line in her hair.
I had set my mind for a young widow with a hard mouth, or a shop-girl with quick eyes and a worn coat.
I had not set my mind for a tailor's daughter who counted her own pulse beats at her wrist while Hattie was pouring the tea.
I had seen her do it twice. I had not understood it.
*
The boarding-house parlor I am thinking of is the back-east room of Hattie Doss's place, the one with the post-office wooden boxes against the wall and the bright kettle on the small range and the smell of mutton coming through the wall from the dining-room.
Hattie was in her apron and her braided coronet, and she sat Mrs. Greer at the trestle table and gave her the cup with the rose-blue pattern that has the chip at the rim, and Hattie said, Sit, child. Eat. Talk after.
Mrs. Greer drank her tea slow. She looked at Hattie, which was the right thing to look at, because Hattie was the woman in the room and I was a stranger come down out of the country.
She looked at Tate once, who inclined his head and looked back at the kettle.
She did not look at me until Hattie had cleared the cup. Then she did.
She had the eyes I had been raised against. River-water gray, the color my mother's eyes had been at the back of the kitchen on the morning my father came in from the night shift with the watch in his hand. Plain eyes. Not pretty. Plain.
She said, I am Willa Greer. I have a letter that says a wagon will come for me. I think the letter was written by three of you.
Tate did not move.
She did not ask. She set her cup down. Her thumb went to the inside of her wrist for one breath and came away.
It was the second time I had watched her thumb go to her wrist in twenty minutes, and the second time I had not yet understood. I thought, then, that she was steadying her hand. I had a man under a cable do that once at Mountjoy and I had thought the same.
Hattie cleared her throat. Well, then, Hattie said. Wagon's at four.
I lifted my hat to Mrs. Greer. I put it back on. I went out to the porch with Tate and stood with my hands on the rail and did not say a word to him because there was nothing to say. He knew what I had seen.
*
That was forty minutes ago. I have been on the wagon since.
We came over the Second Bridge with the planks loose at the east end the way they always are loose at the east end and Tate stood on the brake at the lip and the box settled and we went over with the wheel horse taking the slow weight.
I felt Mrs. Greer's shoulder shift a quarter-inch against my coat-sleeve, the kind of shift a person makes who has decided, after thinking about it for two breaths, that she will not gasp.
I measured her by that quarter-inch.
I measured her by the catch of her breath at the Devil's Hairpin a mile back, which had not come.
I had watched the outside wheel ride within six inches of the lip and I had heard her not breathe in.
A woman who has not been on a switchback before will breathe in at the Hairpin.
I have driven nine of them up this road.
Eight of them breathed in. The ninth was a freight-yard wife from Denver who had seen worse country.
Mrs. Greer was the tenth. She did not breathe in.
I sat with that.
I thought, in plain Pennsylvania English, oh. I thought, oh, hell.
I did not say it. The scar is fourteen years old. It does not hurt. I scratch it because my mother used to do it to her own thumbnail when she was making up her mind, and I got the habit from her without knowing where I had got it. I have not stopped doing it.
*
Levi was on the wagon-bed behind us with the trunk and the hat-box and the rooster-crate Tate had loaded under the porch — Old Brigham gone quiet for the climb the way roosters do when the box is moving.
Levi sat with his back against the trunk and his hat over his eyes, easy as a man at a creek.
He had not said a word since the Second Bridge.
He had said three words at Hattie's porch when I came out with her, the three words being mind the step.
I knew Levi's quiet the way you know a horse's breathing.
He was not napping. He had laughed once on the porch at Hattie's when he had first seen her, a short laugh into his own collar, and then he had gone for her trunk.
He was in trouble. I had been in trouble for forty minutes longer than he had, and I was the foreman, and I had no business telling him not to be in trouble.
I looked at the road.
*
Lookout Rock came up at our left and Tate slowed the team for the slow bend below it.
From Lookout Rock you can see the whole basin if you climb the eight feet up to the flat top and stand.
I have climbed it twice in two years — the first night Levi came up the road with us in '77, and the morning after my father's letter came up the freight road in '75 to tell me he had died. I have not climbed it since.
I felt Mrs. Greer turn her head a half-inch to look at the granite slab and turn it back.
She did not ask. She had asked one question on this road, three miles back: the lower gate is the bottom or the top, and I had said the top — the road climbs to the lower gate, and she had said thank you, Mr. Carrow. She had not asked another question.
A wife who would tolerate us. That was the standard I had set three months ago when I let Tate write the ad.
I had thought a wife who would tolerate us would be a woman with thick shoulders and a flat eye, a woman who had buried a first husband and gone west because there was nothing left of him to keep at home — a woman I would respect, the way I respect Hattie, and would not look at.
The slip of a thing in the mended gray coat to my right was not what I had set my standard for.
I scratched the scarred palm again.
*
We came through the lower freight gate at the last of the light. The basin opened.
The basin opens, in that hour, the way a person opens a hand.
There is the south ridge with the slate band dark at its foot.
There is the north ridge gentler against the sky.
There is the dooryard pale in the middle.
There is the cabin's south face and the lean-to roof and the iron pump-handle in the dooryard like the small black hand of a clock at four-eleven.
Mrs. Greer did not say anything. She had the carpet-bag in her lap and her hands at the carpet-bag's handles. I felt her not say anything. I have felt people not say things all my life. I know the weight of it.
Tate halted the team at the dooryard. He set the brake. He looked at me once. I climbed down on the off-side. I came around to her side. I offered her my hand.
She took it. She was wearing the wool glove and I had a bare palm and the contact was a quarter-second, the way I had calculated it would be.
I felt the contact in my sternum and I felt it in the scarred palm of my left hand and I felt it in the floor of my mouth, and I let it go before she could pull it away.
I stepped back so she could come down on her own boots.
She came down. She stood in the dooryard. She looked at the iron pump first. Then the cabin. Then the porch. Then the rocker through the open porch door. Then the lean-to. Then up at the limber pine on the north shoulder, which Tate calls the Watcher. Then back at the pump.
I said, I will draw your wash-water.
She said, Thank you, Mr. Carrow.
I went to the iron pump.
*
The iron pump-handle squeaks. I have oiled the pivot twice in two years with bear-grease, and the squeak goes for a week and it comes back.
It is a question. I have decided so because of how the squeak rises and then falls on the down-stroke, and the down-stroke is the note that does not have an answer.
I have come down to the pump in the dark a thousand times and I have heard the question and I have not answered it.
I pumped three strokes for her wash-water and the squeak came on each one — rising, falling, rising, falling — and on the fourth stroke the cold spit of water hit the inside of the bucket and the squeak hit again and went off into the basin's quiet.
I thought, Christ Almighty. I thought, she is standing six feet from me and the question has been asked for two years, and tonight, if I am honest, the question has been answered — and I do not yet know if the answer is yes or no.
I lifted the bucket. I carried it inside.
*
I poured the wash-water into the white porcelain basin on the kitchen counter.
She had come in behind me, quiet on the planked floor.
She set the carpet-bag by the table. She lifted her gloves off one finger at a time and laid them across the corner of the table and put her thumb to the chipped lip of the basin and looked at the chip for one breath.
She did not say anything about the chip.
It is Tate's chip; he set a hot skillet down on the lip in '76 the third week he had the basin and the porcelain went out in a wedge. She did not ask. She washed her face.